President stresses collaboration, and Fauci counsels inoculation

By Roger Segelken

NEW YORK -- Two-thirds of the way into his inauguration week -- this time at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City -- Cornell's 11th president, Jeffrey S. Lehman, promised to foster and enhance two geographic and intellectual collaborations: one forming an axis that runs through the heart of the city and the other an axis running from the Medical College to the university's Ithaca campus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Cornell M.D. '66, gives his keynote address during the inaugural symposium at the Cornell Weill Medical College, Oct. 15. Robert Barker/University Photography

On Wednesday, Oct. 15, fresh from his first inaugural ceremony Oct. 12 at Weill Cornell's new Middle East campus in Qatar, Lehman spoke to an audience of medical college students, faculty, friends and distinguished guests about interdisciplinary international collaborations to further the medical and the life sciences. His inaugural address, in the college's Uris Auditorium, was the culmination of a symposium that earlier featured a talk by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci, who warned that microorganisms evolve and collaborate across borders, even if humans sometimes don't.

Cornell is ideally positioned to lead the revolution in the new life sciences, Lehman, said, because so many potential collaborators are already in place. He said Cornell is the only university in the world to have not only a medical college but also strong programs in agriculture, veterinary medicine, the basic physical sciences and engineering, human ecology and computer science. All are working together in the university's New Life Sciences Initiative, Lehman noted, and Cornell's humanists and social scientists are helping too.

The heart-of-the-city axis Lehman spoke of is the recently established Tri-Institutional Research Program, a biomedical and clinical research collaboration between The Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell's Ithaca and New York campuses. However, Cornell was building bridges long before this collaboration, he noted. He was referring to the earlier institutional union of New York Hospital and the Medical College by Cornell, which was founded in 1865 on the then-radical principle of giving equal attention to the liberal arts and the sciences.

And sometimes collaborations can be symbolic, as well as intellectual, Lehman said. He noted that the newly opened Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, where he had been earlier in the week (Oct. 12 and 13), has combined architectural elements from Cornell's Ithaca and New York City campuses with the Arab-Islamic tradition "to create an extraordinary building."

Many of the scientific breakthroughs cited by Lehman during his address were the result of interdisciplinary cooperation. He described the thrill of learning from CNN television news that a Weill Cornell faculty member, Michael Kaplitt, had been a pioneer in the first gene therapy for Parkinson's disease. The ultimate success of the technique is yet to be determined, Lehman said, but he pointed out that Kaplitt hadn't done it alone. Lehman described the cross-disciplinary invention, in the 1980s, of a device that had revolutionized genetic transformation -- the development of the "gene gun" by engineers Edward Wolf and Nelson Allen, together with horticultural scientist John Sanford.

Admitting he was not a scientist himself, legal scholar Lehman said he spent much of his first months as president trying to learn from scientists. One Cornell scientist had emphasized, Lehman said, "that it's all one biology." Mice, zebra fish and tomatoes have more in common, genetically speaking, than they have differences, he was told. And so, too, do all microorganisms, Lehman added, apparently reflecting on the earlier talk by Fauci. His point was that humans shouldn't let minor differences, such as academic specialties, keep them from working together.

The take-home message from Fauci's keynote address for the inaugural symposium was: "Get your flu shot this year." In his talk, "Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases in the 21st Century," he pointed out that humans and pathogenic microorganisms have been co-evolving and trying to outwit one another for millennia. A combination of good public-health measures and luck kept the SARS epidemic from devastating the United States last winter, Fauci pointed out. But this winter could be more difficult because SARS and influenza symptoms so closely resemble each other. But near-universal flu vaccinations, he said, could help health authorities eliminate one of two possible diagnoses in patient examinations.

Fauci, a graduate of Cornell's Medical College who also did his residency there, described his emotion when he was packing a U-Haul trailer in New York City years ago and heading for a fellowship position to study infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health. On the news he heard the U.S. surgeon general declare that infectious diseases were virtually conquered, and it was time to move on to other challenges. Listing HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as the three greatest threats to world health, Fauci pointed out that the surgeon general obviously had been wrong. Speaking directly to medical college students and research faculty in the audience, he said: "If you have an interest [in infectious diseases] you will never be out of work."

Later, at the conclusion of his second inaugural address, Lehman told the audience: "The interdependence of the two Cornell campuses [in Ithaca and New York City] will continue to deepen ... I look forward to working with all of you in the years to come."

The full prepared text of Lehman's inaugural address in New York City can be found at http://inauguration.cornell.edu/news/stories/nyc_address.cfm.