Which teacher, parent, coach or friend most made you who you are, and what did you learn from them?

My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.

The person that inspired me the most was Judah Folkman. He was the man that I worked with when I was a postdoctoral fellow. He was really an inspirational person for a variety of reasons. One, he was a big thinker, and lots of people told him that his ideas wouldn’t work or that they were impossible. He persevered in spite of that, and did very, very well. And secondly, he was very encouraging, very sort of like positive reinforcement, in terms of how he would deal with me and others. So I would say he certainly had a pivotal influence on my career when I was a postdoctoral fellow.

I had lots of teachers encourage me. And I still know some of them, my high school teachers. But one of them encouraged me. She said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to be a doctor.” And she asked me where I wanted to go to school, and so I named all the Florida public universities which seemed within reach, financially. And she said, “Well, maybe you ought to apply to Duke, and maybe you’ll get a scholarship.” And I did both those things. I applied and got a scholarship. Her name is Wendy Tellone, and she’s still involved in public school teaching. I think she’s still in Florida.

The man who inspired me most, I think, was Dr. Alfred Blalock, who was professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins. He was a rather simple man with a burning curiosity. It was through his curiosity that he made many real contributions to medical science. I didn’t think he was an especially brilliant man, I just admired him for his curiosity, and for his perseverance.

In my early years it was undoubtedly my father. My father was director of a sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there were no antibiotics, tuberculosis was a terrible disease. And, he and I would walk in the woods around that sanatorium and he would discuss his worries about his patients. And from him, I certainly inherited this extreme concern about the well-being of patients. I’ve seen him very happy when he succeeded after months and months of rest and other things to have these people go home cured. I’ve also seen him crying and desperate after trying for a long time and a patient did not get well, and went home to die.

I can’t remember that anyone in particular did. I think perhaps it was my mother who influenced me the most. She was a housewife. She had no higher education, but had the most common sense of anyone I knew, and she wanted me to have a career. So she was always very supportive, at a time when many women of her generation would not have been.

One in particular, Mrs. Gordon. I hated her. I took AP English. The AP courses were just starting in the ’50s. And you could take a maximum of two. I took Chemistry and AP English. Today, the kids come into Duke, they have ten, 12, 15 AP courses. They start taking AP courses in their first year of high school. It’s absolutely amazing. Mrs. Gordon taught AP English. And she took a disliking to me for some reason early on, and she didn’t like the way I wrote, so she gave me very bad grades on all my essays. She pounded into me about how to write clear, effective, succinct English. And I learned those lessons well. But what I remember — and I pay her a tremendous tribute for that because there’s no more important skill, certainly for a scientist, but really for almost any profession, than to be able to express yourself clearly and succinctly. And I think she really taught me that.

The closest to inspiration was my beloved fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ponti, who I’m delighted lived long enough to get that book’s dedication. I exchanged Christmas cards with her for the rest of her life. She was a wonderful woman. I think the main way she inspired was by respecting students’ interests. She herself knew very little science. Science was not formally taught at all, as far as I can remember, at grade school level. She realized there were a group of us who were interested in science, so she would let us sit by ourselves in the back of the classroom once a week for a couple hours, and she got books for us and discussed science. So I suppose she was a very good model for good students.

I definitely had some teachers who were important. My fifth grade science teacher, Mr. Jake, was really the first teacher to express confidence in my academic abilities because I was the only person who could identify a rock, which was obsidian and it was because of the reading that I had been doing because after I got through with the animal books, I went to plants, and when I finished all the plant books, I went to rocks because we lived on the railroad tracks and there were a lot of rocks, so I became an expert in geology, and this was while I was still a dummy in the class. So, it was like the first time that I had an opportunity to raise my hand and demonstrate my knowledge because nobody else knew the answer. Everybody was absolutely flabbergasted, but Mr. Jake said to me, “Benjamin, that’s incredible.” He said, “Why don’t you come by the laboratory after school and we can talk about starting a rock collection for you.” And, from there I started going to the laboratory every day, getting involved with feeding the squirrel, a red squirrel named Maynard. There was a tarantula, crayfish, a Jack Dempsey fish and I got involved in all this stuff. There was a microscope and I started looking at water specimens and learned all about paramecium and volvox and amoebas, and it was just incredible. That really was what started me on my way.

It so happened that we had a very good math teacher, who was a Communist. I remember having learned from him something that I never forget: the rule of nines. A simple point: you add up the numerals in a number, and if the original number was divisible by nine, then the sum of the figures also is. For instance, you take a number like 243. Two and four and three is nine. Therefore, 243 must be divisible by nine. Actually it is nine times 27. The rule is interesting because it’s so simple. What was really interesting to us ten-year-olds is that our math teacher proved it. The proof is not terribly difficult, but it was one of the first simple and not quite obvious mathematical proofs that I encountered.

They were local. They tended to be the math teacher at junior high school, Jack Druckman, the math teacher in high school, Irene Finkel, who ran and supported the math team. They tended to be very local heroes. I was never one at those times for distant heroes and truly heroic legendary heroes. They were the local teachers who really made a huge difference in my life.

Dr. Alton Ochsner certainly was, from a surgical standpoint, my mentor, and the one who influenced me more than anyone else. He was also, like my father, a very strict disciplinarian, and a perfectionist. I liked the way he did things, even though he made you toe the mark. He was almost like a father to me. Took me under his wing, and helped me in every possible way, especially in the research laboratory. He was a brilliant researcher himself. I learned a great deal from him, in terms of how you develop yourself, how you conduct yourself, and the importance of experience and the importance of doing things until you do it perfectly. He had a great influence on me. I am really indebted to his memory, for what he did for me.

There was a teacher at school who was fun. I don’t know if he had a big impact on my thinking, but he was a lot of fun. His name was Dow Bunyan Bean, and he had a Doctor of Divinity degree, from some place in the South. I think he came from Georgia. And he had lost his faith and he had lost his interest in religion, and had become a secular high school teacher. Everybody called him Doc Bean. He was marvelous. He was full of animation. He was relatively old at that time. At least we kids considered him relatively old. But he was very lively, jumping around, raising his voice, lowering his voice in all sorts of interesting ways, with a racy line of talk about whatever he was discussing, and suddenly stopping and asking somebody a question to make sure the person was listening. Writing down some little grain in his book. He was lively, and it was marvelous. And if he didn’t know something, then he would immediately send whoever asked the question to the library to see what was known on the subject. I thought that was particularly splendid. Not that, of course, everything is available in a library. Lots of things are simply not known, or maybe unavailable in a high school library. But the fact that he wanted to push every inquiry as far as it could be pushed with the local resources, that really impressed me. I thought that was great.