DukeMed Alumni News

Imagine a doctor saying you need surgery to replace a heart valve, and if you don’t get it you will die from heart failure within two years. If you live in Honduras, once you get that diagnosis at a public hospital, the doctor will hand you a list of the items needed for the surgery: saline solution, sutures, gloves, an oxygenator, pain medication, and a heart valve. As the patient, it’s your responsibility to find—and buy-—the items on that list.

Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr., a Duke trustee and alumnus, was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Kaelin received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke and is a professor in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

A team of 18 Duke staff, including a current Duke medical student and several DukeMed alumni, traveled to the Instituto Nacional Cardio-Pulmonar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to perform heart surgeries. The hospital had nearly 100 patients on a waiting list for heart surgery, the majority were indigent patients with rheumatic valve disease.

For Andrew “Tip” Taylor, MD’68, the proverbial fountain of youth isn’t a fountain at all, but a river. Actually, lots of rivers.

For more than 40 years, Taylor—a renowned nuclear medicine physician and ambitious outdoor adventurer—and his friend Jim Slinger have connected for a yearly 3-to-4-week canoe and backpacking trip in northern Alaska and Canada. It’s not a casual undertaking: a bush plane deposits them in the remote wilderness, and until it returns to fetch them weeks later, they’re on their own in the wild, making their way through grizzly bear country.

Lung Transplant Survivor Gives Back

Growing up in Scotland, Gavin Maitland was intrigued by the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, in which Clint Eastwood’s character breaks out of the notorious prison and eludes capture by making his way through the dangerous waters of San Francisco Bay.

Donald McDonnell, PhD is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award.

It’s not particularly unusual for biomedical scientists to move from academia into the pharmaceutical industry. Donald McDonnell took the opposite route: before joining the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine, he worked for a number of years for the biopharmaceutical company Ligand Pharmaceuticals in California. This early exposure to pharma and drug development played a major role in his highly successful academic career.

Mark Humayun, MD’89, HS’90-’93 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is an internationally known pioneer in vision restoration who has literally allowed the blind to see. He is a retinal surgeon, engineer, scientist, and innovator whose accomplishments have been so distinguished in his field that he is the only ophthalmologist elected to both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.

Arthur Palumbo is the 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Honorary Alumnus Award. He is among the most dedicated friends of Duke University School of Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics. His philanthropic support for the school’s students and faculty has touched the lives of thousands of patients.

When it was time for Tai-Po Tschang, MD’72, to decide where to go to medical school, the choice could hardly have been easier. Duke, in fact, made it for him.

“I applied to nine medical schools, and Duke was the only one that accepted me,” says Tschang. “I didn’t have any other choice. The others turned me down because I only had three years of college, but at Duke that was the requirement, as long as you had all the prerequisites. I was very happy they took me.”

Caroline Philpott, AB’83, MD’87 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumna Award. She is one of the most respected international leaders in the biochemistry and cell biology of iron metabolism. She has made groundbreaking discoveries in iron metabolism that deciphered the human intracellular iron trafficking mechanism.