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BULLETINHMS Faculty Council ReportAt the Feb. 26 meeting of the Faculty Council, David Cardozo, chair of the Task Force on Faculty Teaching Responsibility, reported on the recommendations of the task force, whose membership included Eugene Braunwald, Daniel Federman, Philip Leder, Daniel Lowenstein, and George Thibault. It was convened to formally consider issues surrounding the teaching needs of the School and the responsibility of the faculty. Faculty Teaching ResponsibilityHMS course directors report it is increasingly difficult to recruit faculty to participate in medical student education--despite the School having almost 9,000 faculty and more than 6,000 fellows and a policy stating that faculty members are to contribute 50 hours per year to teaching, if asked. Non-Harvard faculty from other institutions are often used to fill these roles and course directors are devoting excessive amounts of time to recruit faculty. In addition, faculty often feel teaching is not valued.This situation has resulted in a small cadre of faculty assuming a disproportionate share of teaching responsibilities, which sometimes has been detrimental to their own career advancement since teaching credentials have not been sufficiently recognized as a promotion criterion. The task force recommended that HMS departments form a new relationship with each other and with the course directors to assume the responsibility of providing medical student education and to ensure that these responsibilities are broadly distributed and equitably shared. The recommendations focused on three basic principles. First, departments should be assigned limited, specific commitments to courses with which they have a natural association. This would permit long-term planning and integration of a teaching commitment into the departmental culture and establish a mutually beneficial partnership between departments and courses. Second, teaching responsibilities should be assigned at the departmental level. In order for teaching to be valued, a commitment must be made by the department chair, allowing teaching faculty to be recognized as fulfilling an important departmental commitment. Third, the apportionment of responsibilities should be based on each department's resources and be done in the spirit of equitably shared commitments. The task force also detailed a series of proposed responsibilities:
A discussion followed in which it was noted that implementation of the recommendations would take considerable sacrifices at many levels. The importance of the department heads and senior faculty in this process was affirmed, as was the need to value teaching. HMS dean Joseph Martin noted that while the contributions of individual faculty members to medical student teaching are valued, the School does not own its affiliated hospitals and does not control the hospital-based faculty or the allocation of their time. He said that there is no dean's tax at Harvard and that the hospitals are faced with myriad outside pressures, most of which take precedence over responsibilities for medical student teaching. Martin expressed deep and serious frustration at not being able to convince more faculty that teaching responsibilities are the core of a faculty appointment and that faculty have an obligation to carry out their teaching responsibilities. He said efforts to convey this have been largely unsuccessful. On the other hand, he believes that the task force's recommendations go a long way toward addressing this problem. He also believes that the hospitals need to understand--at the highest levels--that they bear responsibility for the education of students and that the report of the Liaison Committee for Medical Education will undoubtedly identify this as a concern. Martin asked council members to talk to five colleagues each about the task force recommendations and to ask those individuals to speak with five more colleagues, initiating a chain of discussion among the faculty. Part-timers and Annual AppointeesLinda Heffner, vice chair of the council and chair of the docket committee, continued the discussion from an earlier council meeting of issues related to part-time faculty and annual appointees. The focus of the discussion was on the definitions of both part-time and full-time faculty, and the scope of acceptable core contributions to the academic mission of the School.Heffner noted that instructors are recommended for reappointment by their departments on a yearly basis, but that more senior faculty require Harvard Medical School Faculty Committee review for promotion. Heffner raised the issue of the linkage of HMS appointments with hospital appointments. Currently the two are coterminous, but she wondered if perhaps they should not be. Martin added that additional pressures have entered the system: the major affiliated hospitals, as part of their health care systems, are embracing community hospitals. This raises the question of whether physicians in these community hospitals should hold Harvard appointments. The council also considered the question of the scope of acceptable core contributions to the academic mission of the School. Heffner asked if the definition of core contributions to the academic mission of HMS (e.g., teaching, research, clinical efforts, and administrative service) should be more explicitly defined for purposes of appointment and reappointment. Effect of Resident Work Week LimitHope Ricciotti, the OB/GYN clerkship committee director at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discussed the impact that the new 80-hour work week limit for residents may have on medical students when it goes into effect on July 1.She polled other clerkship directors to obtain their assessments of how the new restricted resident hours will affect the student clerkship experience and found it varies by specialty. For example, psychiatry, radiology, and neurology will be the least affected, whereas surgery, OB/GYN, and pediatrics will be the most affected. Ricciotti noted that there are currently no restrictions on the on-call time for students and suggested that HMS should take the lead in examining the length of student call hours. Although patient safety is less of an issue (students do not have direct patient care responsibilities), the question of student hours may be relevant because prolonged working hours may affect student learning. From the observations of the clerkship directors, Ricciotti presented a series of questions for the council to consider: Will limits improve the quality of resident-student interactions? Will students experience less time or continuity with residents in clinical education? How will faculty teaching responsibilities change? And, Should HMS play a role in recommending medical student hours?
Students Take On Big Questions at Soma Weiss Ravi Kamath (right) explains his big-picture research to Soma Weiss keynote speaker Judah Folkman. (Photo by Liza Green, HMS Media Services) Many are attracted to medicine by the excitement of the hospital, but there is a cadre of students who also feel drawn by the more esoteric charms of the lab. Part of the allure is the opportunity to go beyond what can be observed in an individual patient and explore overarching biological patterns. "I originally became interested in my research because I like things on a large scale," said Ravi Kamath at the annual Soma Weiss Student Research Day. Kamath, HMS '04, was one of more than 90 HMS students exhibiting posters at the April 10 event. In addition to the posters, Kamath, along with Benjamin Leader, HMS '03; Eric Matten, HMS '03; and Ann Ramsey, HMS '05, gave spoken presentations. Judah Folkman, the Julia Dyckman Andrus professor of pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital, was the keynote speaker. Kamath took three years off between his second and third years of medical school to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge, England, with the goal of bringing the wealth of genomics data to life. Some try to link individual genes to their functions. Kamath set out to tackle the entire C. elegans genome. Using RNA interference (RNAi) to knock down individual genes, he worked with Julie Ahringer of the University of Cambridge to generate a library of nearly 17,000 bacteria, each capable of silencing a different gene in worms. They also developed a novel high-throughput method for screening mutants that revealed, among other things, that a gene's sequence was strongly predictive of its RNAi phenotype. Kamath and his colleagues have shared their library with others, including Gary Ruvkun, HMS professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, and it has already shown its worth. Using it, Ruvkun recently found 400 genes in the worm genome related to fat metabolism. --Misia Landau
U.S. News and World Report Ranks HMS Top Med SchoolFor the 14th consecutive year, U.S. News and World Report has rated HMS the top research-intensive medical school in the nation, according to its recently released 2004 ranking of graduate schools. The School tied for 17th among primary care-intensive medical schools. Schools also were ranked by medical specialties. As it did last year, the Medical School ranked number one for internal medicine, pediatrics, and women's health. It captured the number two spot in drug and alchohol abuse, the number three spot in AIDS, and the fifth spot in geriatrics.
The Southern New England Junior Science and Humanities Symposium brought more than 200 high school students and teachers from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to HMS on March 28 and 29. Ten students, whose abstracts and papers were selected from among 48 submissions, made presentations to an expert panel of judges. The top five presenters will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the national competition, though only the first-place winner will continue in the competition. Above, Mark Lipson of Lexington High School is congratulated by Joan Reede, HMS dean for diversity and community partnership, on being the first-place winner for his presentation, "Systemic Calculations of the Electron Affinities of the Elements." The symposium was sponsored by the HMS Minority Faculty Development Program. (Photo by Steve Gilbert)
Dana-Farber to Host Antibody LibraryOn March 13 the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute announced a collaboration with the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) that has resulted in the creation of the NFCR Center for Therapeutic Antibody Engineering (CTAE) at Dana-Farber. The center will conduct research and be a repository of antibodies available to the eight member institutions of the NFCR in the U.S., Germany, and China. The center also will foster closer communication between investigators at each location. The NFCR will contribute $500,000 to the new center, which will be used to further expand CTAE and to broaden the scope of the scientific collaborations, including the production of fully human monoclonal antibodies that could be used in preclinical and clinical cancer studies. It is the library's size that makes it unique; only a few other centers in the world approach it. By gathering the blood of 57 Dana-Farber employees--some recruited from the hallway--the new center's director, Wayne Marasco, HMS associate professor of medicine, has built up a collection of 15 billion antibodies. The library will act as a ligand clearinghouse, where scientists can screen a molecule of interest against a huge assortment of antibodies in the hope of finding some that bind with high affinity. In addition to its value to basic research, scientists could also employ the library to find molecules that bind to molecular cancer targets. Several drugs have been developed recently that fight cancer in this way; among them are Herceptin (anti-Her2) for breast cancer and Campath (anti-CD52) for a chronic leukemia. Officially launched last month, the center is still in the process of hiring and setting up a website, but will begin accepting samples soon.
In Memoriam Brian McGovern, HMS assistant professor of medicine and a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, died tragically on April 8. He was 47. A native of Dublin, Ireland, McGovern received his medical degree from the National University of Ireland. He came to HMS in 1981 as a research fellow in medicine at MGH and joined the faculty as an instructor in 1983. He became an assistant professor in 1989. McGovern specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias and was an active teacher of medical students, residents, and cardiology fellows at HMS and MGH. He was codirector of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service and medical director of the Medical Step-down Unit at MGH. In addition, McGovern shared his medical expertise with colleagues around the world. He published widely on the subject of cardiac arrhythmias and was founder and chairman of the Atrial Fibrillation Foundation. He is survived by his wife, Anne Jennings, a physician specializing in kidney disease who practices at the Medical Group in Beverly, and two daughters. Memorial service information will be published on this MGH website. Those wishing to send their condolences to the McGovern family may email pa@partners.org or mail cards to Massachusetts General Hospital, Attn: Jeff Davis, Sr. Vice President, Human Resources, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114. |
