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Q: These courses were courses taken in your first year at Harvard?
Ross: These were my first year courses. There was another distinguished gentleman who taught biochemistry named Otto Folin, Scandinavian who didn't have much use for doctors because he had had an operation on his ear and it had given him a facial paralysis so that half his face was paralyzed. He was a very precise technician. He established the basic levels of concentration of many different items in the blood stream and developed techniques for analyzing these, which were the real basis for and forerunners of clinical chemistry.
He was sort of a colorful old guy. He'd come around and look at you when you were working in the laboratory. We had to do Kjeldahl analyses for nitrogen, and if you don't do it just right, the damn thing would suck everything back into the flask and ruin the experiment. He was looking over the shoulder of one of my classmates, David Weir, one day and he said, "You better be careful. It's going to suck back." And my classmate says, "Sure, you old fool, if you keep blowing on it like that!" I saw Dave Weir last week. He's still kind of a curmudgeon in the same way!
But these were very great teachers, very great inspiration to students. Also, there was a wonderful lecture series that was sponsored by the university, not just for freshman medical students, but for everybody. There was a very distinguished gentleman named Loewi, who I believe was either a Viennese or German. He had determined some of the mechanisms of the transmission of the nerve impulse. He gave a lecture which even a first year medical students could comprehend. These lectures inspired interest in students in research and how research related to the practice of medicine.
Q: You've remarked that when you first came to Harvard there was--if I have quote right--"remarkable difference in the ambience, culture and philosophy," comparing Harvard and Stanford. Would you expand on that a bit?
Ross: It was a completely new world. Here I was, a boy from the rural, agricultural area of California who'd been to Stanford, a school that was referred to as "the farm." There were still people at Stanford when I was there who paid no tuition, who wore sombreros, hob nail boots and wore cords [corduroy trousers] that they never washed. If they took them off the "cords" would stand up in the corner without support. And there were only five hundred women in the whole university and their absence didn't provide any particular stimulus for good grooming or much of anything else in the way of good manners. It was a pretty natural place and emphasis was placed on physical prowess as well as intellectual prowess. Things were extremely informal.
To be transferred from that to one of the oldest universities and medical schools in the United States with traditions going back for three hundred years--[I remember the three hundredth anniversary of the university occurred while I was a freshman]. I guess it also was the hundred and fiftieth of the medical school. The people who were on the Harvard faculty were much different, much more reserved, much more observant of propriety than the faculty I'd encountered at Stanford. This had a great impact on me as did the Boston climate. When I ran into the first blizzard--I thought I was ready to go back to California. It took me two years to learn to tolerate the Massachusetts climate and four years before I began to like it, and then I enjoyed it very much. But it was sort of a rude shock at first!
Also, it was a challenge to be suddenly interjected into a community of students who derive literally from all over the United States. Harvard made an attempt, I believe, to have some geographic distribution in their selection of students, and some geographic distribution of the schools from which they derived. These different students had different attributes. The boys from Princeton were gentlemen. They usually had a great big automobile and they purported to be more superior than anybody else. The Harvard students were more relaxed, but, nonetheless, they had a special accent that was quite different from the rest of us and they were sort of a coherent group. And the boys who came from Yale again were different. They wore white shoes and high water pants. This was something quite surprising to a boy from California to be among all these different people. But in the course of four years, they were all melded together. It's amazing how uniform they seem now when I went to my fiftieth medical school graduation anniversary.
They've all been through the same mill, they have the same philosophies, they have major respect for the same things. They more or less attire themselves in the same fashion.
But for me in 1932 it was a very different culture and again it led to great studiousness and it put a great premium on accomplishing intellectually and academically. Although this had to some extent been true at Stanford, I don't think it was as greatly emphasized as it was at Harvard Medical School. The fact that at Harvard, all the people that lived in the medical school dormitory were all going to be physicians, and, interestingly enough, many faculty who also lived in the medical school dormitory, this had a very stimulating effect on students and it convinced them of the humanity of some of these professors who otherwise would have seemed to be somewhat crusty, remote gentlemen. That was all a very marked change in ambience from what I had encountered at Stanford.
[end of side one; beginning of side two of tape one]
Ross: I've just recalled the name of the professor who invited me to wake up from the long winter nap. His name was Hans Zinsser a very distinguished microbiologist who had devoted a great deal of effort to learning about typhus and its relationship to ticks. He had wrote a book called titled Rats, Lice and History. He also wrote other magnificent books, one of which As I Remember Him, by RS, [which stood for Romantic Self] is his recollection of his life as he was dying. He developed leukemia from which he died. This is one of my favorite books. He was a very colorful gentleman. He wore bright neckties and usually had a flamboyant red handkerchief in his jacket pocket. He paced around and around and around the front table, and how anybody really could go to sleep on a fellow like that I've never been able to understand. He was a superb teacher. This was a course in microbiology, which stimulated a great deal of continuing interest in that discipline. What more would you like me to talk about?
Q: There's one question, perhaps, that you could comment on in terms of the difference in philosophy between Stanford and Harvard is this: there's a debate among historians of biology which suggests that there either was or was not a transformation from earlier emphasis on natural history to experimental biology. In other words, some historians of biology say that a basic shift took place--especially by 1920--which established experimental biology, and it displaced an earlier emphasis on natural history and morphology. There are others who continue to say that both disciplines and approaches existed side by side. So I was wondering if the change from Stanford to Harvard could be placed in that light also. Stanford seems to have placed more emphasis--at least in your courses--on the morphological and natural historical side of biology, whereas at Harvard, you have a heavy dose of quantitative and experimental approaches, such as Walter Cannon, Folin and others.
Ross: Yes, you may know that the first president of Stanford University was a gentleman named David Starr Jordan. He was an ichthyologist. He was interested in morphology and classification. I think that sort of set the pattern at Stanford. These were the things that we primarily learned, the--if you wish--morphological, the classical categorical approach to science, not only biology but also, I would say in chemistry and the other sciences to which I was exposed. That really was quite different from Harvard. At Harvard, although they were anatomists, the gentlemen, Bremmer and Duffy Lewis, that I told you about, they really were morphologists. On the other hand, Wislocki, his particular interest was in regard to reproductive biology. He had done experiments, which he described to the class--which at the time seemed absolutely amazing to us--about experiments relating to gestation, to the menstrual cycle in women, and how they could be correlated with endocrine changes, and hormonal changes in the blood. This was so different from the structural, classical approach to which I had been exposed as a college student. As a medical student at Harvard we learned of the experimental attempt to look forward to find out what made things work in addition to the morphological approach.
Otto Folin, as I told you, was a categorizer and an analytical person. He was succeeded by a man named H. Baird Hastings, a professor of biochemistry, who had a completely different approach. I also was privileged to have a lot of contact with Baird Hastings, who incidentally is still alive in La Jolla. Harvard is taking him back to Cambridge a special celebration this autumn in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of the university and the development of the medical school. Baird Hastings was a perfectly wonderful gentleman who was at the forefront trying to look for and analyze the mechanics and the dynamic aspects of biochemistry as it related to human behavior. Professor Cannon in physiology also certainly was an experimentalist, who was not satisfied just to repeat what had been taught, but he did wonderful experiments in terms of the alarm reaction in animals that also prevail in mankind and he explained it endocrinologically and hormonally.
There was another very fine gentleman in physiology named Phillip Bard who became professor of physiology at Johns Hopkins. As a freshman medical student, he invited some of us to participate in tutorial discussion sessions and to participate with professors in experimental endeavors. There was one of the members of the physiology department named "Curly" Brooks. He was called Curly because he was absolutely bald. He was interested in the location of brain functions which he studied by operating on the brains of cats. I remember one vacation period he invited me to help him do some of these brain operations. The dormitory dining room where I worked wasn't open at that time so I didn't eat very much. This was my first exposure to an operation, ether, and standing still holding a retractor and I fainted, to my everlasting embarrassment! He was very kind and I lay down for a while and got up and finished helping him with his operation.
Also, as a student at Harvard, I was a tutorial student in physiology in my senior year. I worked for Professor Arturo Rosenblueth, who became head of the cardiologic institution in Mexico City. We developed a plan. I was interested in what would be affected in pregnancy by a removal or modification of the sympathetic nervous system. My project was to obtain cats that were female, that one subsequently could get impregnated, and to remove certain portions of the sympathetic nervous system. I performed a complete unilateral hemi-sympathectomy on some of them, and on others I took out the sympathetic nervous system on both sides of the abdomen below the diaphragm, and on others removed the sympathetic nervous system above the diaphragm. Then I succeeded in getting the cats pregnant and observed what happened to the breast development under the stimulus of pregnancy. It was a sort of novel, probably inconsequential experiment, but it was interesting to me. Amazingly the breasts did not develop where the sympathetic nervous system had been removed. I reported this in a paper which I wrote during my senior year and published in the American Journal of Physiology with documentation, both histological and physiologically.
By the time the paper got finished, I had graduated and gone into a pathology residence. The gentleman who stimulated me to finish it was named Simeone, who became a professor of surgery, in Cleveland. It was a great association!
There really was a great emphasis at Harvard on looking at mechanisms and to what's going to happen in the future, trying to find out about what's going to happen in medicine, and trying to move it forward. So that was really quite different from my experience at Stanford. But I think one must remember that at Stanford I was an undergraduate college student and at Harvard I was a medical student and it may be that the environment for medical students at Stanford was different. I don't really think so because my friends who went to Stanford Medical School, to the best of my recollection, did not have the stimulus to look forward to the dynamic aspects of biology and medicine and what would happen in terms of how you might approach such studies. Most of the people who were my college classmates who went to Stanford Medical School became rich surgeons or rich practitioners and none of my immediate colleagues at Stanford became any kind of an investigator. Some of them became professors, but again, it was classical medicine, not forward looking and dynamic approaches to medicine.
That's at least my interpretation. Other people might disagree. I don't know. It was very different, really. That continued all the way through medical school. The emphasis in the clinical years also was "look into the future. Don't just accept all these categories about this and that and the other, but question them. See if it's right. Check it out. Look at something else. See what you can find out." Again, it was very stimulating. I was blessed to have very stimulating clinical professors.
Do you want me to talk about that?
Q: Okay, I was going to ask you about your first year experience with Dr. William Murphy who was a Nobel laureate.
Ross: That was very interesting. I was a poor boy at Harvard and I learned that you could earn money by serving as a blood donor. Medical school had just opened and there was an opportunity to give blood at the Beth Israel hospital, which I did, and they were kind enough to let me watch the operation on the subject that I was to give the blood for. That also was quite stimulating, and then I gave blood and got fifty dollars for it. Fifty dollars in that time was worth much more than fifty dollars is now. The increase in the consumer price index since then find out what the inflation has been, but God, it must be the indicates that in 1986 fifty dollars was equivalent to four hundred dollars, about eight fold increase in purchasing power.
And then I became a so-called walking donor for Professor William Murphy, a professor of internal medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He had worked with George Minot in studying the possible treatment of pernicious anemia. This was, I think, stimulated to some extent by George Whipple, who was studying hemorrhagic anemia in dogs. I subsequently went to work at Dr. Whipple's department in Rochester, New York. In regards to Dr. Murphy: he had a whole "stable" of people with anemia up in Vermont and New Hampshire. He used to pay periodic visits to these people to give them transfusions. I think this really was just at the beginning of the liver extract era of therapy for pernicious anemia, and it had not yet really become greatly accepted. But Professor Murphy would take me along as the donor. That was wonderful. He was a very fine gentleman and very kind to me, and I'd ride with him in his car and he'd talk about his research in hematology. Then I'd give my blood and he'd take me to lunch and we'd come home. I'd get fifty dollars plus a good lunch and a nice time with Dr. Murphy.
He told me about the way that they were assessing whether or not a compound was really effective in trying to treat pernicious anemia. He pointed out one way to tell about this was to follow the reticulocyte. I believe that it was he who made the contribution of using the reticulocyte response to see if a therapeutic agent truly was effective in the treatment of pernicious anemia. He told me how if the medication or the substance being given was effective, there would be a sudden burst of reticulocytes in the patient's blood. That was very interesting. This was really the way in which Minot and Murphy were able at an early time to identify liver as the material which was effective in the treatment of pernicious anemia.
He also told me lots else about hematology and how it was a quantitative science and there weren't many areas in clinical medicine at that particular time that really were very quantitative. Clinical chemistry was just coming into being, but hematology rapidly became pretty much a quantitative, clinical discipline. So that was a great privilege and also it was very formative in my decision ultimately to become a hematologist.
Q: Could you talk more about the relationship between Murphy and Minot?
Ross: Dr. Minot, at the time that he did these studies, was at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital as was Dr. Murphy. Dr. Murphy continued working at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, but Dr. Minot moved to become the director of the Thorndyke Memorial Laboratory at Boston City Hospital. I believe they cooperated and worked very closely together, but actually I didn't know either of these gentlemen well enough to know just what role each played. They both had relationships to the Huntington Memorial Hospital, which was the Harvard Cancer Commission Hospital in which I later became a student house officer in my third year of medical school. Many important publications were published with the imprimature of the Huntington Hospital. I have those reprints and I esteem them very highly. But I think Minot and Murphy cooperated very well. Whether there was friction or whether they disagreed, I just don't know. It would be nice to know, but I believe they're both dead. Maybe Dr. Bill Castle, professor of medicine Emeritus at Harvard, could tell you about that. He worked for Dr. Minot subsequently at the Thorndyke, but I don't think he worked for him when he was at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. You might ask him about that. That would be very interesting to know.
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