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Vital Signs

Emeritus rank doesn't necessarily equate with being "retired"

By Laura Stephenson Carter

Two longtime Dartmouth Medical School faculty members were named by the Dartmouth Trustees to emeritus status during 2006. The word "emeritus"—which comes from the Latin emereri, meaning to serve out one's term in an office or position—is often equated with the word "retired," but that's not necessarily always an apt association.

E. Robert Greenberg, M.D., who was the director of Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center from 1994 to 2001, has moved to Seattle, where he is an affiliate at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "I still do some cancer prevention research and am trying to focus on health issues in the low- and middle-income countries of the world," he wrote in an e-mail several months ago.

Greenberg earned his M.D. at the Case

Western Reserve University School of Medicine and did his residency in internal medicine at Dartmouth. Soon after joining the DMS faculty in 1974, he began to devote himself to studying the causes and prevention of cancer. He is well known for his epidemiological studies of betacarotene and its possible role in preventing cancer. Now he is trying to initiate a large clinical trial studying gastric cancer prevention in Latin America. "It's an immensely important, but largely ignored, health problem in much of Central and South America," Greenberg says.

Robert Fairweather, M.D., Ph.D., after spending 10 years as a chemistry professor at the University of Connecticut, decided to give up chemistry in 1979 for a career in medicine. Now, after more than 20 years at DHMC, he's ready for another change.

Fairweather received his doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University in 1967 and his M.D from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in 1983. He did his residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at Dartmouth from 1983 to 1987 and joined the faculty soon after.

He served as chief of the DHMC Section of Clinical Pathology from 1990 to 2000 and as medical director of the Hematology Laboratory from 1990 to 2006.

As part of his research on blood coagulation and clotting disorders, he helped to develop the D-dimer assay, which has become an important diagnostic tool for detecting blood clots in the lung.

Fairweather is now looking forward to playing golf, skiing, going to plays and concerts more often, and playing classical guitar at recitals and other gatherings.


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