2009 Joseph W. St Geme Jr Leadership Award Address: The Whole—and the Sum of Its Parts

I am tremendously honored to receive this award. To receive a leadership award named for Dr St Geme and to be associated with the previous awardees is a privilege and honor that I would say leaves me speechless, but you are not that lucky. Receiving the award in Baltimore is even sweeter, as my wife Ellen and I lived in Baltimore for 21 years, and it remains a special place for us: it is where we met, fell in love, got married, and raised our children. It is also where I received standard advice about preparing for an academic career: find a niche and ensure protected time to establish myself. The more I looked at each subspecialty, however, the more it became clear to me that I have the “curse of the generalist”: instead of wanting to know more and more about less and less, as the quip goes, I...