Honoring a Family Connection
Y.T. Chen, MD, PhD, HS’78-’79, had offers from several medical schools when it was time to do his residency, but it was an easy decision. His father, C.L. Chen, had fallen in love with Duke in the early 1950s when he served in the Department of Pediatrics as the School of Medicine’s first visiting fellow from Taiwan. His counsel was unequivocal. “He said, ‘Don’t even think about anywhere else. Just go to Duke,’” Chen recalls.
He did, completing his residency and soon thereafter accepting a faculty position in pediatrics. At Duke, Chen conducted painstaking research that ultimately resulted in the first effective treatment, now used worldwide, for Pompe disease, a rare and formerly fatal glycogen storage disease in infants.
Chen and his wife, Alice, have generously supported medical genetics research in the Department of Pediatrics with gifts including a professorship, an associate professorship, a fellowship, and an endowment to launch and operate the Y.T. and Alice Chen Pediatric Genetics and Genomics Research Center at Duke.
“Pompe disease is what is called an ‘orphan disease,’ one that affects fewer than 200,000 people worldwide,” says Chen. “In some ways, pediatrics is like an orphan department. While you find many endowed professorships in other departments at medical schools, there are very few in pediatrics. So I thought it was very important to establish one in pediatrics at Duke, especially in the medical genetics division.”
In 2011, the Chens marked his parents’ 70th wedding anniversary by renaming the professorship in their honor. Their connection to Duke, initiated by Chen’s father, is strong and lasting: both of their sons— Jerome, T’99, MHS’10, and Gerald, T’03, L’11—graduated from Duke. And there are signs that more Chens may follow the same path; when their first granddaughter, Olivia, was born, then-President Richard A. Brodhead sent a letter congratulating them and welcoming Olivia to “the Class of 2033.”
“We now have three generations with links to Duke, and the fourth may be on the way,” Chen says. “So with all those connections, when we started to think about how we could give back, this was the first place we thought about.“