So this is 40…
Up until last fall, we used to say that Alpert Medical School was so young all of its former deans were still living. Then came a series of losses—Stan Aronson, David Greer, Ruth Sauber, Marge Thompson—that reminded us that no one is getting any younger, even the Medical School.
June 2 marks 40 years since the first Medical School class of the modern era graduated. And Alpert Medical School is in the same place many 40-year old humans are. We strive to raise the next generation even as we work to preserve our elders’ history, to make sure we hear their stories before they are gone. We take stock of our lives and assess whether they’ve turned out as we thought they would, or as we wanted them to. We grapple with weighty questions: how are we going to finish strong and make the next 30 or 40 years count?
Forty is not old but it’s no longer young. At the Medical School, we are asking, how big do we want to grow? How do we increase our capacity for and impact on clinical research? Change is hard, and maybe not everyone will agree with the chosen tack. But we owe it to both our students and to our forebears to take the next steps forward.
We’ll tell you more about those plans in future issues. For now we’ll reflect on our beginning with founding dean Stanley Aronson, and where we are in the field of medicine, which he called “intensely imperfect.” We honor the past while watching the future take flight in our graduates.
This is what it’s like to be 40.
Kris Cambra
Editor
