ATVB Named Lecture Review-Insight Into Author: Edward A. Fisher.

Abstract

ATVB Named Lecture Reviews–2013 George Lyman Duff Memorial Lecture Insight Into the Author: Edward A. Fisher, MD, MPH, PhD, Department of Medicine (Cardiology), the Marc and Ruti Bell Program in Vascular Biology, and the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, New York University School of Medicine Neither of my parents had anything to do with science. My father worked in a pawnshop, and my mother had a vocational high school diploma in sewing. I think my initial interest in science was pretty much instinctive: isn’t everyone curious as a child? This was reinforced by excellent science teachers in the New York City public school system, especially at my high school, the Bronx High School of Science. My parents worked hard to give my brother and me educational opportunities they never had, and it turns out we both used these to become scientists, he a physical chemist. Why I chose metabolism as a field is based in part from my clinical experiences when I was a pediatrics resident at Duke. We had a chief of metabolism, Jim Sidbury, who was very inspiring. We talked at length about some of the patients with metabolic disorders, and he encouraged me to get the hard science training needed to understand biochemical mechanisms, to make more accurate diagnoses, and to improve treatments. He also pointed me to a joint graduate program at MIT and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals in metabolism, and in one of my first year courses, I attended a lecture by Jan Breslow on lipoproteins, which led to my joining his lab. I already mentioned two mentors, Jim Sidbury and Jan Breslow, who also became role models as highly successful physician-scientists in the area of metabolic disease. When I became an assistant professor of biochemistry at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Julian Marsh, …