Biography of Douglas T. Fearon

摘要

When immunologist Douglas T. Fearon was a young physician in Boston in the early 1970s, he began treating a patient with rheumatoid arthritis. For 15 years, he tried to stop the progress of the crippling disease, but the patient's immune system continued to degrade his cartilage and destroy his joints until the disease finally killed him. Fearon learned that treating patients did not always mean saving them. In the end, real help could come only from a better knowledge of basic science. "Contrary to what I thought when I went to medical school, we weren't really curing a whole lot of people," he says. "This patient's death told me I had to either put up or shut up. If I was committed to being a physician-scientist and making discoveries, and if not being able to cure patients truly bothered me, I had to do research 100 percent of the time." To Fearon, the logic was clear. The path to making his patients well again began first with understanding what made them sick. Yet clinical duties stole time away from Fearon's research, and his concern for his patients ironically meant he needed to stop seeing them altogether. Indeed, by the time he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001, his pursuit of basic science had led to a rewarding career as a researcher but also took him away from much that he valued: his patients, his career as an academic physician, and eventually his home country.