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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 Flier has exposure to all these challenges. He has run a large research operation (in remarks to the HMS community on July 16, he cited the past and current 100-plus associates in his laboratory). He has been based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which ranks in the top tier of affiliated hospitals in providing clinical education for HMS M.D. candidates, and during the past five years he has served as both chief academic officer and Harvard faculty dean for academic programs there. One of his early priorities will be to continue implementing HMS’s new course of study, which aims to improve medical education by having students stay with patients for an extended period, and by immersing them more deeply in modern, complex hospitals and other healthcare settings, rather than rotating them from place to place too rapidly (see “The Pulse of a New Medical Curriculum,” September-October 2006, page 64). Beth Israel was hardest hit among the University’s principal affiliates when academic medical centers nationwide had financial problems (or in its case, crises) earlier in the decade; Paul F. Levy, then HMS executive dean for administration, moved over to the hospital as president and chief executive officer in January 2002 to perform a radical financial restructuring that by all accounts saved the institution—so Flier has some immediate sense of the affiliates’ problems and needs. Levy appointed Flier as chief academic officer during a time when the hospital’s teaching mission was severely tested. Finally, Flier was also a member of the University Planning Committee for Science and Engineering, in which Provost Steven E. Hyman brought together Harvard schools and affiliated hospitals to investigate how to organize and fund interdisciplinary research and teaching. He then became a founding member of the implementing body for those recommendations, the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee. That work helped acquaint Flier and other scientific leaders from across the University and beyond with each other and with the most exciting opportunities for collaborative research (see “For Science and Engineering, New Life,” March-April, page 65). The committee’s initial concrete fruits are the first multischool academic department (of developmental and regenerative biology, a formal home for research, faculty appointments, and teaching in stem-cell science and related fields), a $50-million commitment from the Corporation for start-up support, and a very large scientific research facility now in advanced stages of planning as the first new building to be constructed as part of the Allston campus. Nor are such issues all external to HMS, at the boundaries among schools and hospitals. As President Derek Bok pointed out in his report to the community published in June (see “Managing Harvard: A New Deal?,” July-August 2007, page 62), there are significant differences of opinion within HMS about how best to conduct biomedical research and teaching in the future. Bok described how the school “has built a series of highly distinguished departments of preclinical science of which the University can be justly proud,” but added that “few of the preclinical scientists teach medical students and…many of them do research that is more closely related to the work of scientists in Cambridge than it is to medicine or human health. Only recently, after the number of preclinical faculty had grown to more than 100 scientists, did the question of their relationship to the rest of the Medical School become clearly visible when all of the preclinical chairs announced a desire to move en masse to Allston.” No such massive relocation of staff from HMS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences appears in the offing, but the faculty debate suggests just how significantly biomedical research may change. In sizing up the dean’s responsibilities and strengths at the July 16 HMS reception, Faust, an historian, recalled President Charles William Eliot’s centennial remarks to the school in 1883. She quoted him as saying that the school had “no thought of resting contented with its present condition,” and that medicine itself was a “fresh and boundless field of unimaginable fertility.” Accordingly, Eliot noted, “a medical school must always be expecting new wonders.” She also cited another speaker that day, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said of an eminent HMS professor that he was “a man who forgot himself in his care for others and his love for his profession”—a description she said suited Flier perfectly. In his own remarks—which included thanks to Beth Israel’s Levy (for his example of how to “transform an institution” through the force of character and insight), and to his own mother and daughters—Flier revealed an energetic and open style, as well as a willingness not to take himself too seriously. He had forgotten to acknowledge his wife, Dr. Eleftheria (Terry) Maratos-Flier, associate professor of medicine, who is also a research colleague, he told the crowd. Therefore, anyone who thought their new dean would not make mistakes had just seen a definitive counter-example—a “whopper,” which he moved promptly to remedy with warmth and grace.  
 
 
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