As a boy, he wanted to study the humanities: philosophy, literature, poetry. But Donald Seldin grew up during the Depression, and he needed gainful employment to contribute to his family’s finances. So in his last year of college, he started taking science classes. He went to the Yale School of Medicine and, after a stint in the Army, joined the faculty as an Instructor of Medicine.
In January 1951, at the age of 30, he left Yale for a job in Dallas, at the newest medical school in the country. He drove from Connecticut to Dallas with his wife and daughter in a big, lumbering Kaiser. He’d never been to Texas and was curious to see the school’s facilities. When he got to the corner of Maple and Oak Lawn, the young doctor pulled into a filling station. He asked the attendant how to get to the medical school. The attendant gestured in the vague direction of a railroad overpass down the road. Seldin drove on, but he found nothing but ramshackle military barracks, a dilapidated brick building, and garbage strewn in front of the entranceway.
He returned to the filling station, and told the attendant that all he’d seen were shacks and trash.
“That’s it,” the attendant said. “That’s the medical school.”
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Seldin drove to a motel for the night to think the situation over. When recounting the story in meetings and to friends, he never failed to mention how naive he felt that day, how he wished he’d come to see the school before accepting the job. There were holes in the wooden floors and windows that wouldn’t shut. When it got cold enough, they couldn’t do experiments because everything in the lab would freeze.
“It was a hell of a place,” Seldin would tell people later, the accent of his native Coney Island prominent. He was tall and lean and had a wry grin.
Things got worse before they got better. Soon, the most well-respected faculty member at the young school, the surgeon Carl Moyer, left. (Presumably for a place without so much garbage on the grounds.) Then, the only faculty obstetrician took a job at the University of Illinois. The pediatrician went to Rochester. And Dr. Charles Burnett, who had recruited Seldin to Dallas, announced that he was accepting a job in North Carolina. Within six months of his arrival, Seldin was the only full-time faculty member—which meant he was also the chair of the Department of Medicine.
Under Seldin’s direction, UT Southwestern Medical School would go on to produce some of the most important medical research in the world. He was hardly alone, but no other individual is more responsible for this transformation than Seldin. His three-pronged approach to research, patient care, and instruction changed the medical discipline forever. Today, there are five Nobel laureates at UT Southwestern (plus a sixth who got her start there), more than $400 million in annual research funding, and an endowment worth more than $1 billion.
His former students call him “magical” and “incredible” and “the only truly great man I know.” Some of the biggest names in medical science line up to praise him. Dr. Eugene Braunwald, the faculty dean at Harvard Medical School, has said Seldin is “one of the most impactful figures in the history of modern medicine.” Dr. Joseph Goldstein, who was a student of Seldin’s and won the Nobel Prize in 1985 for his work at UT Southwestern, calls him “an exceptionalist in academic medicine like Babe Ruth was an exceptionalist in baseball, Leonard Bernstein in music, and Steve Jobs in computer technology.” Dr. Michael Brown, another Nobel laureate, calls Seldin “my hero.”
It’s hard to say which circumstances produced Donald Seldin, someone with that special combination of knowledge and ambition, work ethic and political skills. But one moment early in his medical career had a lasting effect.
Before he came to Texas, before he was an instructor at Yale, Seldin got a lesson in the power of medical knowledge. This story doesn’t appear in his UT Southwestern bio. His friends and colleagues don’t discuss it much.
In 1947, having just completed his medical training, Seldin was a captain in the U.S. Army, stationed in Munich, Germany. He was summoned to Dachau to testify as an expert witness in the trial of a Nazi doctor. The German officer physician was accused of murdering more than 30 people by performing liver biopsies. The court had established that all of the patients had died following the biopsies, and Seldin, just 27 at the time, was brought in to address the state of the procedure as viewed from the medical community. The court wanted to know: were there any therapeutic benefits to the patients? Was it an experimental procedure? Should it have required informed consent?
Date: October 31, 2013