Chapter 02: Career at MD Anderson – From Developmental Therapeutics to Medical Specialties
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Description
This chapter focuses on the various positions Dr. Bodey held at the institution throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Dr. Bodey began his career working with Dr. Freireich to establish a service for adult acute leukemia. The clinic’s expansion necessitated increasing the hospital’s bed count, culminating in the move to the Lutheran Pavilion in 1977. While in Developmental Therapeutics, he took over Investigational Chemotherapy, focusing on combination chemotherapy. Dr. Bodey was also the first director of Protocol Research. Before his retirement in 1995, he served as the head of the Department of Medical Specialties, focusing on infectious diseases.
Identifier
BodeyG_01_20030303_C02
Publication Date
3-3-2003
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD , Oral History Interview, March 03, 2003
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Professional Path; The Researcher; The Clinician; The Administrator; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change; Obstacles, Challenges; Controversies; Evolution of Career
Transcript
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
So, that’s how I began. I actually came down here to work with Dr. Freireich on establishing an adult acute leukemia service. That’s what I did for the first, I don't know, six years, I guess. I was working with him there. In the very beginning, I had spent about ten months of the year as the attending physician on the leukemia service although it wasn’t very large at that time, and we gradually built it up. So that was my first position here. Maybe for sake of organization, I’ll just go through my positions, and we can go back and talk about some of the research and other things that I did.
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
Okay. That’s fine.
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
They we were getting more and more patients and exceeded our capacity at the old hospital, so it was decided—
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
The old hospital?
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
The original MD Anderson hospital. So then it was decided that we needed to start a ward somewhere else. At that time the center pavilion was over here in the corner of Braeswood and Holcombe. It was originally constructed as an apartment house, but McGregor Clinic had taken over a floor of the house for a hospital unit. So we decided to rent a portion of that facility and establish a unit for MD Anderson. We had about a 40-bed unit over there, which I ran until the Lutheran Pavilion was opened in 1977. That started roughly about 1971 and ran through ’77. At that time, then, I was—or at some point along then, I—it’s probably on my CV somewhere—I took over the investigational chemotherapy part of the Department of Developmental Therapeutics. I was involved in all the new agent chemotherapy, new combination chemotherapy, and so on. I did that up until the early 1980s. So then what happened was that there was a big to-do with—The Washington Post had run a series of articles. I don't remember the year, but it was in the mid-1970s, I guess. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you what I—I have my CV in front of me. I can give you some of the specific dates that some of these things happened. At any rate, they ran a series of articles that were very critical of the investigational chemotherapy program for the National Cancer Institute for the new drug. This started out on the front page of The Washington Post one Sunday morning, and then it went along from there for something like a week. Of course then, this caught the attention of the federal government, and there was an investigative committee, you know, the Senate, and—
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
Is this ’81? Are you thinking it’s the seventies?
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
Let me see. Yeah. It was 1981. Since we and other institutions were involved in the phase I program, the FDA elected to do a four-cause investigation on these different institutions. So they came down here. I had some FDA investigator in my office for two weeks going through all these files and everything. They were satisfied that we were doing everything appropriately, but as a consequence of all that, Dr. [Charles] LeMaistre was of course concerned about this. He decided we needed to have some kind of an office that was supervised and protocols and so on. I ended up volunteering to take on that responsibility. So I became the first director of the office of political research.
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
Was that ’81 or later?
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
October of 1981. We started out with one secretary, and my administrative assistant, and myself, and we ran the office of political research. I did that for about two years. Then at that point, Dr. LeMaistre decided that we needed to have an infectious disease program for the hospital. I was doing the infectious disease for the Department of Developmental Therapeutics, so I also volunteered to do that. I felt that was really important because I’d really been doing a lot of work with the new antibiotics and so on. So when Dr. [Irwin] Krakoff came, there was a major reorganization of the whole medical program here. I had given up my chemotherapy activities in 1983 to just do the infectious disease, so I was moved over into what became the Department of Medicine and ultimately Medical Specialties. Eventually Dr. Krakoff came to me and asked me if I would take over as the chairman of the department, which I ultimately agreed to do.
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
What year?
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
That was in 1987 when I took over that position.
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
Now that’s Medical Specialties under the Division of Medicine?
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
At that time, there was a single division of medicine, so it was just a department. I was also the head of the section of Infectious Diseases and served unofficially in that capacity before there was actually a section. There was this old section in the Department of Developmental Therapeutics, and the section was transferred over into the Department of Medical Specialties. And so then I ended up being the head of the department until I retired in 1995. So, that was my background in terms of my academic activities. I also served at one point as the medical director of the Cancer Clinical Research Center—
Lesley Williams Brunet, CA:
What year was—
Gerald P. Bodey, Sr, MD :
—and that was for a period of four years in 1977 to 1981. So I had a variety of roles over the period of my career at this institution. Now I’m sort of semi-retired. I work three days a week. I developed a very strong interest in acute leukemia and its treatment, and then I also got interested in infectious disease, infections as they related to the leukemic population.
Recommended Citation
Bodey, Gerald P. MD and Brunet, Lesley W., "Chapter 02: Career at MD Anderson – From Developmental Therapeutics to Medical Specialties" (2003). Interview Chapters. 977.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/977
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