Reflections of a Member of the Bicentennial Class on the Bicentennial Symposium

Abstract

This perspective piece explores what it means to be a first-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine during its bicentennial year. At first, it seemed like a hefty burden to bear. However, upon listening to Dr. Eric Kandel speak at the Bicentennial Symposium at Yale on April 28, 2011, it became clear what it means to be a part of the future of science and medicine at Yale.

It was August 19, 2010. After years of struggling through challenging science courses, spending hours volunteering in the community, and shadowing medical professionals, I was finally becoming a doctor: that is, symbolically. The speaker called “Jessica Gold,” and I crossed the stage to shake hands with the dean and receive my white coat. I could see my parents smiling and my classmates applauding. I felt a strong sense of pride and accomplishment as I was now officially a member of the Yale School of Medicine Class of 2014.

Yet upon wearing the coat, I noticed something on the side of it: a patch, symbolizing the bicentennial year of Yale Medicine. As if the pressure of wearing this piece of clothing that announces, “I am a doctor,” was not enough, I now represented the future of 200 years of rich history, and it was only my first day on campus.

Throughout my first year, casual celebrations of the bicentennial continued. Walking around the hospital with my white coat and patch while I learned to take a patient’s history or perform a physical was daunting. I was incredibly wet behind the ears. Yet to those I met, I was the future of Yale Medicine. It is true that I would be thought of as that in any year here, but there was something different about being part of the 200th year of Yale School of Medicine.

The Bicentennial Symposium on April 28, 2011, brought into focus what it personally meant to be part of the future of science and medicine at Yale. Previous experiences in the classroom, such as when I was at a physiology conference discussing a patient case and someone at Yale had invented the treatment or in a cell biology course learning a pathway discovered by the professor, made me aware of the rich history of discovery in science and medicine present at Yale. While it is one thing to hear about Yale scientists’ accomplishments in a Yale classroom, it is quite another to hear scholars from other institutions, Nobel Laureates and Knights among them, talk about Yale Medicine in high regard.

I took my seat in a crowded auditorium and anxiously awaited Dr. Eric Kandel’s speech. After an introduction by Dean Robert Alpern, a very enthusiastic and humble man took the stage. He broke the ice by thanking the crowd for its generous applause and thanked Yale for offering to let him speak. He then said of this warm recognition that “[his] father would have enjoyed it, and [his] mother would’ve believed it.” With that, the aura of him being such a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner was broken with a wave of laughter and a sense of excitement for what was to come.

Instead of starting his talk entitled “On the Persistence of Memory Storage” with a background on memory, Dr. Kandel did something no one would have expected him to do: He started talking about the history of Yale Medicine, in particular the fact that Yale was the first medical school to give a degree to “a person who had never attended the school.” Among roars of laughter from the Yale students and faculty in the audience, he told the story of Daniel Turner, a Londoner who asked for a medical degree in exchange for the donation of books to a library at Yale. Turner wrote, “If Your Lordships judge me worthy of the Degree of Doctor of the Yale Academy, and care to transmit to me a Diploma, I shall accept it not only as a token of Your Gratitude, but shall consider it an honor as great as if it had been conferred by another, even more renowned University” [1]. Yale agreed to this exchange and gave Turner a degree. Dr. Kandel joked that exchanging recognition for books has helped Yale School of Medicine acquire one of the best historical libraries in the world.

Looking at his past work and also to his future, Dr. Kandel described in detail the biology behind his memory storage experiments in Aplysia, a giant marine snail, and his unpublished work advancing these studies in other animal models. While his brilliance shone through his eloquent descriptions and novel approaches to long-term memory creation, what struck me most was that he credited each and every researcher in his laboratory for their projects and their work. He did not say “we” when an experiment was carried out in his laboratory under his supervision, but instead said “him” or “her,” acknowledging each person’s efforts individually. While Dr. Kandel’s work is outstanding and his thought process unmatched, his investment in mentoring, and thus in the future of medicine, was particularly inspirational. As my friend in the MD-PhD program in neuroscience rushed the stage after Dr. Kandel’s speech to have him sign her copy of his famous neuroscience textbook, what he wrote to her says it all: “I hope that you like Neuroscience as much as I do,” and with that, the neuroscience “pope” signed the neuroscience “bible” and inspired another future neuroscientist.

Sitting in the audience listening attentively to Dr. Kandel’s every word and seeing my friend’s excitement following her interaction, I finally realized what it meant to be a member of the bicentennial class and a student at such a remarkable institution. By demystifying the role of the expert and emphasizing the role of the student, Dr. Kandel made me less intimidated by Yale’s scientific past and present. At Yale, not only will Nobel Prize winners like Dr. Kandel come to speak about their cutting-edge research, but they will also acknowledge their students’ role in that research. While Yale Medicine remains a place of rich history, from his speech I realized that I would be guided and mentored until I could find my place within it.

As someone who read Dr. Kandel’s novel, In Search of Memory, and quoted it in my medical school admissions essay due to its eloquent descriptions of life in academic medicine and research, listening to this talk was really reaffirming. As a high school student, I admired his words and achievements from afar, and, in a way, he inspired me to become a doctor. Now, as a medical student, Dr. Kandel has once again directed my thinking. With his help, a weight has been lifted, and I am finally able to envision my own space in the future of medicine and in this institution. I feel honored to be at Yale and even more proud to wear a white coat.