Chapter 13: About Anne Mendelsohn; Recollections of Being Recruited for the Presidency; MD Anderson in Houston’s Emerging Biotech Community
Files
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20050103_C13
Publication Date
1-3-2005
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, January 03, 2005
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Beyond the Institution; MD Anderson and Government; MD Anderson in the Future; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change; Obstacles, Challenges; The Business of MD Anderson; The Institution and Finances; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Leadership
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
James Olson:
: We haven’t talked about – I had wanted to talk about how you met your wife and a little bit about you if we could.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: She’s fabulous. Exceptionally fabulous. I met her at a party in Harvard Yard on a very snowy night where there was no transportation except the underground working in Boston and Cambridge. So it was a big deal to get to this party, the both of us. It was very improbable that we would meet.
James Olson:
: What was the date and month and year.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: It was early February in 1961. We got married in 1962. I just – I was ready, I guess, and met a woman I really thought was fabulous, and she’s a chemist. She majored in chemistry with a minor in math at Mt. Holyoke. Interested in science, but also, like me, interested in people.
James Olson:
: Why was she up at Harvard Yard?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: She worked at Polaroid. She was a chemist at Polaroid. She holds some patents on Polaroid color film. When the black and white film was ready to come out, you needed a squeegee. But when the color film was ready to come out and you needed a squeegee, and Land said, we’re going to add some things to the emulsion so you don’t need a squeegee. She was put on that project, and her laboratory was moved, so she was next to Land’s office. He would come in on weekends and work and then hand her the laboratory notebooks on Monday and she would continue the work. She had a wonderful time at Polaroid. So she had a friend at Polaroid who was getting engaged who I knew and the man she was getting engaged to was also one of my best friend’s from Cincinnati. This engagement party involved two people I knew and one person she knew, so that was why she was at the party.
James Olson:
: So she went to Holyoke.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: She grew up in Canada.
James Olson:
: What province?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Ontario. In London, Ontario. Her dad went up there on business deal that was a supposed to last a year and lived there 18 years, and she was born there and raised in Canada but was always an American. They have a summer place in the Poconos, which is a wonderful – it’s a camp for families. A boys’ camp for families. It’s on a lake kind of like the Adirondack. In my marriage vows is love, honor, obey, and go to Poconos every summer. Our kids … Now, we’ve lived in California, we live in Texas, and we lived in New York in between, but our kids have been going to Poconos every year since they were born. Family reunions in the Poconos. They can meet their friends, and their friends’ kids, and their friends’ parents and grandparents, and so it’s a wonderful part of the deal. But the main thing is that Anne has moved with me. We married in Boston/Cambridge. We moved to Washington. We moved back for a year for one year of residency at Peter M. Brigham. We moved to St. Louis for two years of training. We moved to California. She helped me start the UCSD Cancer Center. She helped me brainstorm on how to organize the community. The first capital fund campaign at UCSD was our Cancer Center Campaign. She had a lot to do with that. She moved with me to New York. Each time, until we moved here, she’s found occupation. She did public television. Land, unfortunately, didn’t have a branch anywhere else. So when we left Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is where we were living, she had to give up her chemistry job.
James Olson:
: Was that hard for her?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: That was very hard for her, but she is also just amazing because she’s in this in-between phase. Women a lot older than she, they just raised families. Women ten years younger were just in professions. So she was in this in between. She did photography, taking care – taking pictures of kids. She kept herself busy. I built five darkrooms as we moved around the country for her. She got into public television. We went to New York, and she did public television there. She went to Columbia and she did public television there where she did off-campus learning. She was teaching people there. She was teaching at AT&T and IBM. Columbia gave master’s degrees in engineering to people who never attended courses at Columbia. This is not a brush up course. This is a real Columbia diploma, which is common now. This is before they had the Internet. She used T lines. I don’t know anything about computers, but she had to use essentially telephone lines to do this work. She’s found wonderful things to do and she did public television in New York and in San Diego and Anderson got two people for the price of one, because she’s very strong in helping us make friends and helping us in our relationships to raising funds.
James Olson:
: I was going to ask you that, about the spouse of a director of a major cancer center, what role she plays.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: And also she’s a fabulous mother and we’ve got three kids who are great. You can meet them someday if you want. Her role here is – she’s probably my chief advisor in the areas that don’t deal directly with the four mission areas and the management of MD Anderson. She reads the Chronicle of Education. She’s up to date on the philanthropy going on. She’s up to date on what’s going on in business in the United States than most people who work in the business world and is very aware of who might be a potential contributor and if they’ve given to something else. She will prompt me more than anyone, more than our development office will. And they always want her opinion. When we came here, we found out there weren’t many gatherings, so we hold an annual Christmas party to which we invite the whole faculty. Only about one quarter come every one year, but everybody knows that Sunday afternoon from 1 to 5, it will be open house at the Mendelsohn’s and it will be good weather, because we’re just very lucky and it’s only been one year where we had to put up plastic shielding and had heaters. The rest of the time, it’s outdoors or in our house. So she’s very participatory in the role of a president as a gatherer-together of people, and the spirit of the institution, and the development part of the institution. And she’s a scientist so she’s very interested in the research going on and often comes up with ideas, but that isn’t key. That’s just fun. She’s been very active in the community. Everywhere we moved, we joined the community. We made a deal that we would join the community. She’s just retired as the chairman of the board of the Museum of Natural History here, which is the fourth busiest museum in the United States. She was very active on the Alley [Theater] Board and has been and continues as an advisor. She worked in Hermann Park. The Buffalo Bayou Community that’s upgrading that. She’s worked on a lot of these things.
James Olson:
: Does she have a CV sort of summarizing these things? Can I get one of those?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah. I’m going to give you her e-mail. It’s mine, except it’s amendelsohn instead of jmendelsohn and you ask for the CV. I like the idea of (inaudible). That someone writing a history of Anderson to ask for her CV would be nice. How about an interview? Because she can compare Anderson and the milieu here with what was – UCSD is a great little cancer center for research and Sloan-Kettering and then here. I mean, she has a viewpoint. She’s very articulate.
James Olson:
: Do you think she would be willing or anxious to visit with us on it?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah. I think she would be real glad to visit with you.
Lesley Brunet:
: I always like to ask how people feel about moving to Houston.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Oh yeah. That was a problem. A challenge. But you know, when we moved, I had spent 11 years in Boston and Cambridge getting educated with two years we stopped in St. Louis. Basically, when we moved to the west coast, we were told we were leaving academic medicine by my friends at Harvard. And going to La Jolla, I was going to be crazy. But when we were at La Jolla, for the job at Sloan-Kettering, and Anne was not that excited about moving to California. Her parents had moved to LA, so that helped. We were living in La Jolla, and we got a job offer in New York. There was no interest initially in moving our family to New York City. But she’s game. We talked to some friends, and two of our very good friends said, ‘we know you guys and you would love New York’. So we looked into the job. I think I went back for five or six interviews, each time with Anne there. We decided to move to New York and we loved New York. We got a job offer here, and the people in New York said, ‘you’re crazy for thinking about moving to Houston’. Each time we’ve moved, Anne and I have had to come to grips with it. It’s been a joint decision. We came down to visit MD Anderson and her first view of MD Anderson was the day I was interviewed for the job with the final group of four. We walked through here and she said, ‘is this Oz?’ Literally. She saw the resources here, and heard a lot about it from me, and knew the opportunity. That day the offer came and I was told I had to make up my mind immediately, because there was going to be a press conference. Cunningham was a good recruiter. We negotiated my salary on an envelope, and we decided to move here, because of the opportunity, and because the people we met were fabulous. We talked to the provost, because she had known him at Columbia and he said, ‘it’s great in Houston’. Wonderful people. She loves Houston now. I don’t think you could get her out of New York. It was hard to get her out of California. It was hard to get her out of the East Coast. So, she’s a woman who shares with me an interest in exploring. When we look back on it – when I retire someday, I will have lived in Cincinnati more than 17 years. I will have lived in Cincinnati more than 10 years growing up. In Cambridge and Boston getting educated. In California, in La Jolla, in New York City with a home in Manhattan, and now in Houston. I don’t regret any of those moves. I think Anne feels the same way, but you will have to hear it from her.
James Olson:
: I’ve heard that old story about somebody coming into town, and he asks a local what kind of town is this, and the local asks, ‘well, what kind of town did you come from’. And if you came from a nice town, then this will be a nice town for you too. If you came from a terrible town, then this will be a terrible town for you too. Who were the other candidates with you? Of the four –
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: [Charles] Balch [oral history interview] was a candidate. [Baleshboch]. And the fourth was a surgeon [Edward Copeland, MD; Division of Surgery interview] whose name has slipped my mind. He was at Florida. Maybe we can get that information for you. There were five finalists and one canceled after the announcement of the five finalists. And we all came down here the same day for interviews. That was interesting. The Board of Regents –
James Olson:
: Did your paths cross at all during the day?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah. We were all at the same hotel. It was interesting. Because they had to shoe us around so we didn’t bump into each other. We all knew each other and I was the first interview. I was planning to fly back that day. This was Anne’s first trip to Houston. So we had lunch. A friend of ours set up a lunch with a guy named Ryan. He was a quarterback at Rice and an all-star, and he was a quarterback for the Cleveland Browns when they won the championship. I’m blocking on the first name. I didn’t know a soul in Houston and he took us to lunch and we said, ‘how do you like Houston and why are you here” and he said – Anne said she liked what she had heard about Houston. In the afternoon – they had said, ‘stay in Houston, don’t fly back because we’re going to make a decision and then you are going to have to decide’. And in the afternoon, I was called back in and offered the job. It was interesting. That morning, we each had one-hour interviews. 45 minutes with me and 15 minutes with Anne. So the Regents interviewed Anne. She was great. That was part of the interview process.
James Olson:
: Was it a search committee or the Board of Regents? [2039]
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: The Board of Regents is the search committee. Three of the members of the Board of Regents and some other people from here had been the formal search committee and I had spent two days here along with, I think, ten other candidates for the initial interviews, and I got to meet everybody. I met the minority faculty group. I met the clinical group. I met the administrators. I met the researchers. I got grilled. It was a very thorough review process. But I was the only unknown outsider among the four. I’ll think of the name of the fourth guy or we can look it up. The man from Florida had been here and then Balch and Baleshboch had been here. So I was the only unknown in the interview process. And the paper the next morning said in a surprise move, the Regents have chosen an outsider to run MD Anderson. That’s what the Houston Chronicle said.
Lesley Brunet:
: It was probably time.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: How long have you been here?
Lesley Brunet:
: I’ve only been here four and a half years, but I know enough of the history to know that it was probably time to bring in an outsider.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: I think they did the right thing, regardless of whether it was me, to bring an outsider in. It was necessary. It’s true. So Anne was a big deal about that too. You can get her opinions.
James Olson:
: I’ve heard it done that way at a number of other institutions, and I know other searches work that way, where they bring the wife in and have the candidates in at the same place and announce it that day.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: I think it’s more common in business than in academia. But it works. They haven’t changed it.
James Olson:
: When they made the selection, and they were choosing you and choosing Anne, was there a – do you think there was a sense in it, too, that the kind of research you had done was the next stage in oncology? That you represented for want of a better term kind of this paradigm shift in the way things were going. Was that part of it?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: I’m told that was part of it. Of course, I wasn’t part of the deliberations, but I’m told that was part of it. I was told that my background in having run a department of medicine at Sloan-Kettering and my background – of course we didn’t know that Erbitux was going to be approved then, but that I had done research that was targeting gene products that were causing cancer. And that that contributed. I was told that.
James Olson:
: Anything I haven’t asked that I should I think.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Let me look at this list I made up four months ago. I hope you emphasize how exciting it is that we are ranked number one in the US, and it is four of the past five years. Many people here felt we were number one, but you have to get those credentials.
James Olson:
: Is there any contention about that? At Memorial or at –
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: My friends at Memorial – of course I spent more time there than here – but my friends at Memorial thought it was a fluke and when I talk to them now – Memorial is a great place, but in this era of clinical trials and patient care and taking science to the patient, we are doing this more aggressively and more completely than they are right now. Memorial over the past 20 years has had a stronger commitment to building up that basic science and getting into the fundamental questions of what causes cancer. They’re both great institutions. Let’s see. I think one other thing I brought – I think this is more of a national institution than when I came. I think it was a great Texas institution with a national reputation, but I had lived in California, and I had lived in New York, and I knew people in California and in New York and in Washington, and we changed our Board of Visitors and brought in external people. People from New York. People from California. People from Washington. We made a decision to try to influence opportunities for MD Anderson to be more of a participant in the national media. I had been quoted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal working at Sloan-Kettering. We got busy and said they should be calling us for advice, and not just calling their buddies down at Sloan-Kettering. I think we have a bigger media presence and a bigger recognition nationally, which is important. If you’re great and nobody knows you’re great, you don’t have the same opportunities to express your greatness and attract faculty and raise funds. I mean, the average funds raised per year in 1990 were I think $25 million a year and now they’re between $80 and $100 million a year. So creating more of a national recognition for Anderson was important. A lot of money we’re raising comes from outside the state. That’s what’s interesting to me. The patients were coming from all over the country, and that ratio hasn’t changed. About one-third are from greater Houston and the rest are from Texas and over one third are from the rest of the country and the world. That hasn’t changed, but I think the recognition has changed. That was partly a conscious effort.
James Olson:
: Can I have you elaborate on just one point there. Over the years, as I have kind of pick up a document here or there, or kind of this east coast/west coast bias against sort of a Texas institution. I remember reading LBJ talking once about how much he hated New Englanders making fun of his accent. Is that gone do you think?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: I think it’s worse. The east coast and west coast think the whole middle of the country is nuts. They agree with the London newspaper that said how can 56 million people be wrong. There is a tremendous antagonism at some levels. If you read the New York Times, you see it, in my opinion. So the east coast and the west coast are --especially the large cities, because New York State was red except for New York City and Rochester. There still is healthy competition for resources and fame and glory. Not just Texas, though. This is the whole middle of the United States. Texas is a bigger target the last few years because most people in the left and right coasts happen to be blue and don’t want George Bush to be president. Texas gets dissed all the time in the newspapers. There was one Sunday in the New York Times where there was a terrible article dissing Dallas and then two weeks later a terrible article dissing Houston. It was a coincidence, I think, that those two articles came up before the election. [Break in recording]
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: It affects notoriety. It affects membership in the National Academy. It affects resource allocation in subtle ways. I think it does. I think there is a lot of good research going in the middle of the country, but if the people in the peer review groups who are voting – I mean, let’s face it. There are a lot of good universities. The good news is that California has four of the 10 best universities in the United States. And three of them are public. New York and Boston and Philadelphia have great universities. So there is some merit in saying we have fine stuff going on. If you’re picking peer review communities, they are likely to be well represented, so there is some merit in their feeling that they are very good. I would – having lived in California and having lived in New York – I would say they are very good. But I don’t think Texas and Illinois and Missouri and Colorado and big cities in those places --they have some awfully fine research going on that I don’t think is quite as open a playing field at getting resources. I don’t know a better system. We distribute resources more equitably in this country than any I know of. So the answer to your question is yes but no. I wouldn’t change the system. Let’s see. Technology transfer. Have you gotten into that at all? It’s big. And I’ve spent a lot of time on that. I’m one of the founding members of the Houston Technology Center. I’m one of the founding members of BioHouston. Both of them were formed to try to bring together science and commercial enterprises and service industries and government to encourage the development of industry in Houston. The idea being that Houston is great if you want to do oil or energy, and it’s great if you want to do NASA, and some of the petrol chemical areas. But Houston has a huge research program. Texas Medical Center is the biggest medical center in the world, and there’s over $1 billion research going on in the biomedical areas in the Greater Houston area. That’s Dallas and Galveston up through the west suburbs, and almost all of it is in public institutions. And why can’t we be like California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, develop strong technology and biotechnology? Initially we thought the Houston Technology Center would be the focus for this, but McKinsey had done a study and came back with another study and said biotechnology needs to be pulled out and worked on separately. So we formed BioHouston, and I’m the vice chairman of BioHouston, and I go to a lot of meetings trying to encourage the development of technology and biotechnology. We started a biotechnology research park where all of these buildings are going up for the express purpose of taking University of Texas land and trying to attract pharmaceutical companies and device companies to come here. So far, we’ve gotten over $150 million investment in that park, from Hitachi and GE. We’ve not gotten major investments yet from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, but I’m hoping that will come along. I think it’s very important for Houston’s economy and I think it’s very important for MD Anderson to be in a place where biotechnology is being developed, because it helps recruit and helps retain good faculty and gives them good opportunities.
James Olson:
: Are you worried about the politics of stem cell research and the big California bond issue.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Well, California’s bond issue is – well, yes, I’m very concerned about it because they set up a big program in regenerative medicine, which includes not just stem cells. They’re going to pump $3 billion of taxpayer money into strengthening biomedical research. This isn’t just about stem cells. This is about modern research, which includes stem cell. I’m certainly an advocate of using stem cells and never trying to clone a human being, but to use them to produce cells to – so I believe that it is going to be harder to recruit. It isn’t just California, though. Wisconsin is putting up $250 million dollars. New Jersey is putting up money. New York will put up money. In Boston, they don’t really need to, anymore. The Cambridge – if you go between Harvard and MIT and Cambridge, now – when my wife worked at Polaroid, at night it wasn’t safe for her to go to her car. Now it’s all biotech companies. There are all kinds of young technical people roaming the streets and going to the restaurants and it’s safe again. So this will be very important. It’s the biggest symbol – and I think the state is waking up to this. I think the federal and state government people from Texas are working very hard to promote the development of biotechnology in Texas. It’s going to be critical for Houston in my opinion. So I hope you get into the biotechnology. When I started working on this, people asked me why I was spending so much time working on this, and I think there is a general acceptance of why – of patenting things and making discoveries and turning them into products is part of our mission. We spend a lot of time talking about that. That’s most of it.
James Olson:
: Good. Thank you for being so generous with your time. And I will contact Mrs. Mendelsohn and –
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah. I’m going to ask them to give you a copy of my CV and my speech and you will contact Mrs. Mendelsohn and I will show you this –
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD, "Chapter 13: About Anne Mendelsohn; Recollections of Being Recruited for the Presidency; MD Anderson in Houston’s Emerging Biotech Community" (2005). Interview Chapters. 1455.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1455
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