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| Vol. 20, No. 20 |
| November 1, 1998 |
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"The Wellspring of the Future of Medicine"
Fred and people like him are the wellspring of the future of medicine. Without the discoveries they make and their drive to discover, the future is essentially the same as now. We need it to be better. And research is where it comes from. That really is the thing that excites me most about this award recognition. There are certainly benefits to the institution in terms of publicity, excitement and a morale boost for faculty and students. All of that is wonderful, and we are thrilled about it. But, to me, the most exciting thing is that this brings everybody's attention to what I consider to be the ultimate best of academic medicine anywhere in the world, certainly in America - that process of discovery. Researchers like Fred are really born. Of course, they have to be trained and shaped, and that is part of what we do. The best researchers are truly insatiable, they can't get enough data. Fred is a wonderful example of the kind of focused energy that drives the Health Science Center. We are fortunate to have a lot of others who have the same kind of focused energy, all applying it in different and creative ways. The clinical applications of what Fred discovered more than 20 years ago are already being realized, so in that respect, this one is wonderful. It is very important, though, not to lose sight of the fact that there is fundamental research without any immediate application that is as important, but harder to explain. One of our strengths at the Health Science Center is clinical research. We need to do a great deal more, but it is a strength of ours. We just sent in a proposal to NIH recently for a grant to train clinical researchers. We are putting together a curriculum collaboratively with M. D. Anderson and Baylor, and I think it is going to be very powerful. The point is to take young physicians and train them to do clinical research. Going back to the wellspring notion, this is where that kind of research originates. We not only have to do it ourselves, but train people to do it in the future. At UT-H, we're doing a great deal more research than we were eight or nine years ago. With Baylor, M. D. Anderson and us, the Texas Medical Center is a research powerhouse. And with growing research strength at Rice and at the University of Houston in engineering, physics, applied math, and computer science, and with the growing strength of the group at Texas A&M IBT, we really have gotten something going here. We all come at research questions from slightly different directions, but we are all trying to do the same things in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. I wouldn't be anywhere else.
- Dr. M. David Low, president of
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