In his nearly nine years working at Duke, Lowell Tyler says there have been countless times when he’s been the only Black person or Black man in the room. It can be a bit of a challenge, and even though it’s a situation he has gotten accustomed to, he says it’s one that can—and should—change.

A paper hat made by a five-year-old, especially one that doesn’t quite look like a hat at first glance, may not appear to have anything to do with racism. But for Kenyon Railey, MD, and those listening to his presentation during the Duke University School of Medicine’s “Turning a Moment into a Movement” event last June, the hat has to do with just that and more.

When reports early last winter indicated that a mysterious new infectious disease had broken out of its point of origin in Wuhan, China, Charles Lucore, MD’83, P’17, MBA, began to prepare for its possible arrival in New York. Lucore was one year into his new position as president of St. Francis Hospital, a highly rated hospital and cardiac care center on Long Island. Because New York is a hub of international travel, he anticipated the novel coronavirus would eventually show up.

In 1972, when William H. Spencer III, AB’61, MD’65, HS’69-’72, P’89, P’89, P’89,’93, completed his fellowship in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center and headed to work in a private practice in Houston, Texas, his mentors cautioned him about the new career path he was about to start.

“Before I left Duke, they said to me, ‘You can’t make a living doing heart catheterizations,’” says Spencer, professor emeritus of cardiology at the Medical University of South Carolina. “It turned out to be the opposite.”

Biochemist Irwin Fridovich, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Medicine and a familiar figure on the Duke campus for more than 60 years, died on November 2, 2019, at the age of 90. Fridovich was internationally known for his work on the body’s responses to “free radicals,” dangerously corrosive oxygen molecules that would cause serious damage to tissues if left unchecked.

As an Air Force surgeon stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, during the height of the Vietnam War, Robert Green, AB’56, MD’60, saw a lot of badly injured servicemen cross his operating table. But one of them in particular stuck with him, a wounded young pilot whose journey from the skies over North Vietnam to Dayton was especially remarkable.

When Wilburt C. Davison, MD, the founding dean of Duke University School of Medicine, was looking for a candidate to serve as the school’s inaugural chair of the Department of Medicine, the first name that came to mind was that of Frederic M. Hanes, MD.

Growing up on a large farm near Toccoa, Georgia, Winnifred Allen “Al” Addison, AB’56, MD’60, HS’60-’65, HS’71-’72, P’83, GP’14, GP’18, was interested in anatomy from a very early age. He dissected a stillborn calf at his farm when he was just 13 years old. “I wanted to see what the inside of an animal looked like,” says Addison, the Walter L. Thomas Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

C. Keith Ozaki, AB’84, MD’88, majored in political science as an undergraduate at Duke, but he soon found himself drawn toward the life sciences. “I felt like we were studying the real world, as opposed to the man-made world of politics and policy,” says Ozaki, the John A. Mannick Professor of Surgery and vice-chair of the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. “Pretty early on, I decided I wanted to explore science and medicine.”

When Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, is in the operating room performing surgery on a patient with breast cancer, she focuses all of her considerable experience, skill, and knowledge on the task at hand: giving this individual patient the best possible outcome. At the same time, she recognizes that every operation is an opportunity to learn just a little bit more about the disease she battles every day. Every patient and every procedure add to the store of knowledge that guides research and ultimately informs the advances that improve care.