[SOUND]
I must say, you're very wise to clap before my speech
because, at least once you'll clap for me really from the heart.
[LAUGH] So how do you like my stylish pink robes?
It occurred to me that I looked sort of like a giant strawberry, so I
was trying to find a green hat but all I could find was this green tassel.
I think the effect is still pretty good.
[LAUGH] You guys on the other hand look like a bunch of bumble bees.
[LAUGH] So, so I was trying to get Mary Floyd
to change the recessional march to be Flight of the Bumblebee.
[SOUND] But she didn't think it would sound so good on brass.
So you guys, they're gone.
[LAUGH] I, I was promised a backup band for my interpretive dance segment
of my speech, so, I guess I'm going to have to scratch that part.
So, I want to spend most of my 2 hour time slot talking
to the soon to be graduates, but first, I want to address your parents for a second.
What did you guys do?
[LAUGH] You raised the most amazing group of kids I have ever seen.
And I was thinking that you guys should really
get together and maybe think about writing a book.
One of these parenting guides, something like the Guide, the parents
of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
graduates guide to raising amazing children.
I think it'll be a sure fire New York
Times best seller, Oprah Winfrey book of the month.
It'll probably help you pay off some
of your children's accumulated school debt [LAUGH].
So guys, I think your parents deserve a hand.
[NOISE] [SOUND] So as a father of 2 teenaged daughters
if any of you parents have any advice for me
I'll be by the punch bowl after the ceremony.
Now to, to this amazing group of soon to be graduates,
there are a lot of a dangers in giving a commencement speech.
One might say too much or too little.
One could easily fall into the traps of pretension, or triteness,
or simply repeat things that have been said many times before.
One could talk about politics or religion or atheism or
money or sports, none of them are my strong suits.
One could go over the 2 hour time limit allotted to me by the
Dean and I'm sure he would not
appreciate me trespassing on his generous time allottment.
A local blogger summed up the dangers of inviting me to speak as follows: The risk
instead may be that Lorsch will enthuse too
much about the early days of RNA enzyme studies.
[LAUGH]
I cannot promise that I will not be pretentious or trite,
or tread on ground that has been well-walked by many graduation speakers
before me, but I will promise you one thing, I will
not enthuse too much about the early days of RNA enzyme study.
I want to talk to you instead about bumper stickers in
particular, about 2 bumper stickers I've seen while driving around Baltimore.
The first said, don't believe everything you think.
Here's the thing, and I hate to tell it to you so
late in the game, but some of what we taught you is wrong.
[LAUGH] No don't worry, most of it's right.
But some of the facts we taught you will turn out not to be true.
Which ones were wrong?
They're starting to look a little panicked down here I got to tell you.
That's the trouble, we don't know.
That's what you need to find out.
Use the knowledge you have gained here,
but constantly question what you think you know.
Carry an ember of doubt with you and keep it glowing.
I tell my lab that it is usually when things are the most confusing
and making the least sense that you are on the verge of a breakthrough.
At times like these, rather than abandoning
the project, begin to question the facts.
Now some people say to be a doctor, you just need to learn the rules.
If you see these symptoms, you do this test and that test
and based on the results, you prescribe this drug or that drug.
But ultimately that is not why you spent the last 4 years in
medical school, and why you're going to
spend several more as interns and residents.
You couldn't learn the rules such as they are, in much less time.
Your job as MD's is to figure out what
is going on when things don't make sense, when the
tests you were taught to use don't differentiate diagnoses,
when the drug doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
Robots will one day be able to do differential diagnoses, but turning
the ember of doubt into a blaze of enlightenment will remain beyond them.
They don't have the breath you have on those embers is your job.
Those of you among the graduate students who were unfortunate
enough to be in my section of method and logic
all those years ago, may remember the series of classic
molecular biology papers we read at the beginning of the course.
We learned about the discovery of the double
helixical structure of DNA and about it's semi-conservative replication.
And that's science by the way, not politics.
We read the classic Benzer paper about the
nature of mutations and then about how Crick
used these studies to show that the genetic
code uses words that are 3 letters long.
Then, we talked about our own Howard Denz's
experiments that determined the direction of protein synthesis.
And then we came to that sad, sad tale of the group who looked at these,
the apparent simplicity of these results and assumed
that all of molecular biology must be simple.
They set out to determine the direction in which the ribosome reads the MRNA
to complement Howard's studies on the direction
of peptide synthesis and they got it backwards.
They got it backwards because they thought the experimental
system they were using was simple, but it wasn't.
And this made their data impossible to interpret correctly.
They believed what they thought.
You guys are incredibly smart and you have done amazing things.
You have passed the exams with questions that weren't questions
and with other questions that had 3 right answers.
You have mastered skills made discoveries in diagnosis and pushed this all deeper
into the frontiers of knowledge, but I'm afraid I have to tell you
that you'll still be students even after Dean Roffman hands you your diploma
that says you have a masters degree, or a PhD, or an MD.
Even the august and erudite people behind me on this stage don't know everything.
They are still students too and most of them graduated eons ago.
[LAUGH]
Confidence is important to be sure, but the ember of doubt is just as important.
Keep it with you and remember to blow on it.
Not just in the lab or in the clinic, but everywhere you go.
Am I sure he is wrong?
Am I sure I am right?
Okay I was in danger for a minute of
enthusing too much about the early days of RNA studies.
So I'm going to move on to the next bumper sticker.
The second bumper sticker said - It doesn't matter what
job you do, it only matters that you do it well.
When I first saw that on an old Toyota in
front of me on the Alameda, I thought, man, that's stupid.
[LAUGH] Of course it matters what job you do.
But then I thought about it for a minute
and I realized just how profound that sticker really was.
Obviously, the job you do should be of some benefit
to society, but beyond that, the point of the bumper
sticker at least as I saw it was that you
should strive to make yourself invaluable, no matter what your role.
You're going to hear from a lot of people, some of
them successful senior colleagues that you should focus on your own career,
just do what you need to do to advance your career goals,
whether they are in neuro surgery, neuro science, pediatrics, or public policy.
They will tell you to say no to
distractions like teaching, teaching
assignments or mentoring younger employees.
They will tell you to decline community service that doesn't advance
your immediate interests and in general, not to take on anything
that is not an obvious step on the path from where
you are to where you think you wanna be in 5 years.
But that is a bankrupt philosophy.
You want to become invaluable and you become invaluable by saying yes, by
helping when people ask you to help,
by diving headlong into teaching and mentoring.
You become invaluable by doing things that are not in your job descriptions.
That's what it means to do your job well.
I want to close by giving you an example of someone who did his job well.
My father-in-law, Joseph Saltzman passed away at the end of March.
He was born in Ohio, the son of an engineer.
He was always fascinated by history, current events, and geography.
During World War II, he was drafted into
the US Army and sent to the European theater.
He landed in D, in Normandy on D-Day plus 2, when the smoke was still settling.
He was part of an Army intelligence unit under the control of Wild
Bill Donovan, who later went on to help found the Central Intelligence Agency.
Donovan apparently took note of the young Joe Saltzman and must have considered
him someone who would not shy away from assignment beyond his job description.
Rather than having Joe read maps or aerial photos, his nominal job, he sent
him across enemy lines somewhere in Belgium,
with the specific goal of being captured.
The idea was that he would then escape from the Germans after a month
or so in captivity bringing intelligence and
other Allied prisoners with him when he did.
The actual merits of this plan may have been dubious.
But Joe was successful in getting captured, perhaps
the easiest part of the job and was
also successful eventually in escaping from the Germans
and making his way back to Allied lines.
The heroism of his acts is only slightly
tempered by the fact that his captors actually escaped
with him so they could surrender to the Allies
rather than face the Russians advancing from the east.
Joe was awarded both the purple heart and a bronze star for this adventure.
After the war he went to the University of Montana, where he majored
in forestry and became a smoke jumper
parachuting into wildfires to put them out.
He jumped on the infamous Mann Gulch fire
that claimed the lives of 12 other smoke jumpers.
When the time came to find a longer term,
and perhaps longer lived occupation, he followed his interest in
history and current events and headed to Washington to
take a shot at a position in the diplomatic service.
Partly because of his work for Wild Bill, he soon found himself with several offers.
He spent the rest of his career representing the
United States overseas in Iran, Morocco, France, and Switzerland.
Most of his exploits are sadly lost to history, but it's clear from the few of
them he told me that he had extraordinary
adventures, and he did great things for our country.
I had the sad privilege last month of seeing him buried with
full military honors, 21-gun salute, Taps,
a folded flag in Arlington National Cemetery.
So why am I telling you about Joe?
Because Joe was not someone who spent much time thinking about his
career trajectory and how to optimize it, yet he did great things.
And he was not alone in this outlook on life.
He was an archetype of the greatest
generation who said yes to doing things that
were not in their job descriptions or on the immediate path to their career goals.
They did extraordinary things because they said yes, not in spite of it.
They did their jobs well.
I hope you will look on, look to their
senses of adventure, and their willingness to take on
challenges whether they were on career pathway or off
of it, and use their generation as your role models.
So today, you and I are proud graduates of this extraordinary institution, together.
I hope you'll miss Hopkins as much as I know I will.
These are incredible people, standing behind me.
Incredible teachers, incredible scientists,
incredible physicians and incredible mentors.
You are where you are today because they said yes.
So to thank them instead of applause, and this is I
hope how traditions are born, can I hear one giant bumblebee buzz
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Yes, thank you very much and congratulations.
[NOISE] [LAUGH]