DukeMed Alumni News

A longtime advocate for the marriage of technology and data to advance health care, Amy Abernethy, MD’94, HS’94-’01, PhD, envisions a future in which the two are as ubiquitous and easy to use in the medical field as tongue depressors.

As the newly appointed principal deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—the highest position at the FDA that is not a political appointment—Abernethy has a national platform in which to help advance personalized medicine.

From the day she took office as dean of Duke University School of Medicine in 2017, Mary E. Klotman, BS’76, MD’80, HS’80-’85, has advanced the idea of One Duke: the premise that the key to achieving great things lies in collaborations across Duke, regardless of title, unit, discipline, or any of the other labels that traditionally have compartmentalized the operations of a major academic medical institution.

The day her eyelashes froze together turned out to be a pivotal day for Heather Whitson, MD, HS’01-’04, ‘06. She was a medical school student at Cornell University at the time, spending the winter in Boston doing research with a Harvard geriatrician. She was enjoying the research so much she was hoping to do her residency at Harvard so she could continue it. But when her eyelashes froze, she started dreaming of warmer climes.

More than 10 million people worldwide—about 1 percent of people over age 60—live with Parkinson’s disease. There are treatments that can help control symptoms, but there is no cure.

Living with a rare disease is a challenging journey for patients and their families. These diseases are frequently hard to diagnose, can be life threatening, and often have no cure. And rare diseases are more common than you might think. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there are 7,000 rare diseases that affect from 25 to 30 million people in the United States today.

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.