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barbeques, to walk the trails, or to play with the dogs, chickens, and horses. Given Witters's appearance and close-to- nature lifestyle, perhaps it's not surprising that he graduated during the turbulent 1960s from Oberlin College, an institution known for liberalism and activism. "Other than my marriage and my children," says Witters, attending Oberlin was "the most important thing that ever happened to me."

At Oberlin, he found a diversity and "ways of thinking about things" that were "quite different from the fairly conservative, Caucasian, Christian, Protestant, Republican town [in northeastern Ohio] that I grew up in," he says. "It was a pretty incredible time to be going to college. We had lots of activist people come through campus." Martin Luther King, Jr., visited three times and was the keynote speaker at Witters's graduation in 1965.

Every year, on Martin Luther King Day, Witters invites a small group of students to listen with him to a recording of that speech. Titled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," it was a call to stand up against injustice. In the speech, King describes how depressed he was by a recent trip to India. "How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people gone to bed hungred at night?" King asks, using a Biblical term for hungry. "How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes millions of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night? . . . Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" Of food surpluses in the U.S., King says, "I know where we can store that food free of charge . . . in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God's children in Asia and Africa, in South America, and in our own nation who go to bed hungred at night."

Though Witters never became a frontline social activist, Oberlin and King's words have shaped his worldview and many of his life choices. For example, Witters opposed the Vietnam War. So after he earned his M.D. from the University of

"Lee is a natural teacher," says former student Christina Ullrich, now a fellow at Children's Hospital of Boston. He made "enzymatic pathways . . . [more than] just abstractions."

Rochester in 1969, knowing he would face the draft upon completing his residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Witters applied for a three-year fellowship at the National Heart and Lung Institute in Bethesda, Md. But he wasn't "just avoiding Vietnam," he insists. "I was very committed to an academic career and a research career." So committed that he had spent every spare moment during medical school doing research in an endocrinology lab. He even wrote a thesis on measuring testosterone and anabolic steroids in urine.

After Bethesda, Witters became a research fellow at Harvard in 1973 and by 1982 was an associate professor of medicine. He eventually found his way to Dartmouth by way, one might say, of Scotland.

In the early 1980s, Witters spent a year as an honorary fellow at the University of Dundee, working on early AMPK studies. He not only enjoyed the research, but he and his family found they preferred the rural life of Scotland to the suburban life of Massachusetts's South Shore. He'd grown weary of the long commute to Boston that stole family time. "My kids were starting to grow up outside of me, and I didn't particularly like that," says Witters. In Scotland, "I sort of recaptured my family." The year abroad also helped cure Witters of what he calls "a serious case of Harvarditis." In Scotland, "I realized one could have life outside of Harvard and Boston . . . in a small, nonurban area." So a couple of years later, when Dartmouth was recruiting a chief of endocrinology and metabolism, Witters applied.

Still, it was a difficult decision to leave Boston. "I had to satisfy myself that professionally I would be happy, and I really wasn't sure," he admits. "What convinced me is I saw a strong core of

endocrinologists here. . . . I felt I would have a home" at Dartmouth.

In the 22 years since that decision, Witters hasn't looked back once. He has continued to produce research published in prominent scientific journals while also discovering his love for teaching. And he has returned to the issues that inspired him at Oberlin. He designed a course called the Biology and Politics of Starvation, which intertwines the physiologic processes of hunger, satiety, malnutrition, and starvation with the sociologic and political realities that result in millions of people starving around the world.

"My contribution to social equity and justice can be by being a teacher," Witters says he realized, by acquainting "students with the power of concern at every level." And Witters truly means every level—from the most rigorous scientific research to world politics. "Compassion begins with competence," Christina Ullrich remembers him telling her once. A physician's compassion "must be predicated on complete competence in medical practice in order to truly serve," she says. That idea "has inspired me during long hours studying in medical school and later during long nights on call in the hospital."

Yet even Witters, who has helped launch the careers of so many young scientists and physicians, sometimes worries that he should be doing more to better the world. A few years ago, he attended a talk at Dartmouth by Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., a Harvard physician famous for his tireless work on world-health issues. Witters recalls that he couldn't help thinking, "Why am I not doing this?"

"I couldn't do what you do," Witters told Farmer after the talk. And Farmer replied, "I couldn't do what you do. We both need to be doing what we're doing."

Witters truly loves what he does. "Finally, through trial and error, and a bunch of serendipitous events," he says, "I got to a happy place." So like all his stories, this one, too, ends happily ever after.


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Jennifer Durgin is Dartmouth Medicine magazine's senior writer.

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