John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 26, 2012
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Description
Major Topics Covered:
- Personal and educational background
- Overview of research career
- Administration and institution building at UCSD and Memorial Sloan Kettering
- The MD Anderson presidents
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20120926
Publication Date
9-26-2012
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Topics Covered
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas System. M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute at Houston, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD, "John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 26, 2012" (2012). Interview Sessions. 254.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewsessions/254
Conditions Governing Access
Open
About the Interview
Interview Profile: John Mendelsohn, M.D.
Submitted by: Tacey A. Rosolowski, Ph.D.
Date revised: 27 June 2014
This interview of Dr. John Mendelsohn (b. 31 August 1936, Cincinnati, Ohio), was conducted during September/October of 2012 as follow up to an interview conducted in 2005 by Dr. James Olsen. From 1996 to 2011, Dr. Mendelsohn served as MD Anderson’s third full-time president. He continues to serve the institution as a professor of experimental therapeutics and as Director of the recently created Institute for Personalized Care. The interview sessions take place in a conference room at the Institute for Personal Care in the John Mendelsohn Faculty Center on the main campus of MD Anderson. Tacey A. Rosolowski is the interviewer. The interview, in three sessions, has a total duration of about six hours.
Dr. Mendelsohn earned his B.S. in biochemical sciences from Harvard College in 1958. In 1963, after spending a year in Glasgow, Scotland, on a Fulbright Scholarship, he was awarded his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He served as a Research Associate at the National Institutes of Health (’65 –’67) and completed a Fellowship in Hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (’68 – 70). In 1970, Dr. Mendelsohn joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego where he established a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, which he directed from 1976 to 1985. While there, his team initiated research on epidermal growth factor reception inhibition and produced a monoclonal antibody, cetuximab, that blocked tumor growth. In 1985 Dr. Mendelsohn moved to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to chair, reorganize and expand the Department of Medicine. He held the Winthrop Rockefeller Chair in Medical Oncology and co-headed the Program in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics for five years. He has authored over 250 scientific papers and book chapters. Dr. Mendelsohn assumed the presidency of MD Anderson in 1996. During his fifteen-year tenure the institution grew at an unprecedented pace: the research budget quadrupled, the physical facilities tripled, the number of patients doubled, and the level of philanthropy grew tenfold. The institution was named the nation’s number one cancer hospital during eight of the last ten years of his presidency and the institution began to award graduate degrees in biomedical sciences and bachelor’s degrees allied health professions. Among Dr. Mendelsohn’s numerous awards are the 2006 Dan David Prize, the 2005 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, the 2008 Dorothy P. Landon-AACR Prize for Translational Cancer Research, the 2009 Lifetime achievement Award from the 10th International Workshop on Molecular Targeted Therapy of Cancer, the 2011 American Cancer Society Medical Honor for Clinical Research, and the 2012 Sixth Annual AACR Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research. He has also been selected for the Research America 2013 Builders of Science Award.
In these interview sessions, Dr. Mendelsohn traces the evolution of his collaborative leadership style and discusses in detail his strategies for planning the growth of MD Anderson in the areas of research, education, patient care, prevention and philanthropy. He gives significant insight into how MD Anderson’s administration was transformed to take advantage of business principles and has thereby successfully navigated through difficult financial times. He also discusses his research and his lifelong commitment to bench-to-bedside translation of science, an interest that he continues to pursue in current role as Director of MD Anderson’s Institution for Personalized Care.