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Allegro e Appassionato
Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., a noted physician, humanitarian, and medical anthropologist, has been invited to Dartmouth to give the annual Helmut Schumann Lecture.
Spielberg, dressed casually in a brown-and-olive striped sweater, hurries in just as the lecture is about to begin. The room is packed, with people filling the aisles. Spielberg scoots down to the front of the auditorium and sits, cross-legged, on the floor. Farmer—who is the subject of a recent book by Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains—begins his talk. A few minutes into it, he suddenly notices the dean. "I know I've arrived when the dean will sit on the floor to hear me speak," Farmer jokes.
Saturday, November 13, 9:00 a.m.
Roosevelt Hotel, New York City
Spielberg and his wife, Laurel, came down to New York yesterday to attend several Dartmouth College campaign kickoff events—a gala dinner last night and today a series of celebratory talks and panel discussions. (See more about this event on page 14.) Spielberg is slated to give
Time for reflection and writing is hard to come by, given Spielberg's busy schedule. That sort of work gets done at home on evenings and weekends, "sometimes with music or TV in the background," as well as on planes and, he admits, "in the shower in the morning."
closing remarks at a panel titled "Transforming Medicine," after Susan Dentzer, a Dartmouth graduate and a health reporter on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, has moderated a discussion between Mark Israel, M.D., director of Dartmouth's Cancer Center, and John Wennberg, M.D., director of CECS.
"I think this is a truly special time," Spielberg says when it's his turn. "Medicine can no longer work in isolation
—we need biology, chemistry, computer science, sociology. . . . Medicine is not going to succeed in a vacuum." He also stresses the importance of DMS working collaboratively with the rest of Dartmouth. "It's important for Dartmouth College grads to understand" how science is integrated everywhere in society, he says. "The Medical School is a partner in the undergraduate experience," as well as with Dartmouth's other professional schools—the Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering. Collaborative initiatives are flourishing at Dartmouth, he concludes, because "we are right-sized."
The director mentions public-private collaborations, saying, "Of course, the devil is in the details." Spielberg notes that big foundations like to give money for high-profile causes. "The problem is, pediatrics is always at the bottom of the heap."
It's a refrain he's delivered many times before. But, like the good musician that he is, he plays it each time appassionato—with passion.
Laura Carter is the associate editor of Dartmouth Medicine.
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