Grand Rounds

     Every Thursday morning all the surgical residents go to Grand Rounds. For grand rounds we all meet in a large lecture hall and have an hour lecture on different medical and surgical topics, and because this is Hopkins we have had some phenomenal speakers. I am just so impressed each and every week by the amazing things these physicians are doing or have accomplished in their careers. Today the lecture was titled "Marshaling the Immune System to Cure Cancer." A lot of the lecture was a bit too scientific more me to understand at this point in my training. The speaker was Drew Pardoll, M.D. Ph.D who has dedicated the past 30 years of his life to cancer research and has been able to develop vaccines that are showing incredibly promising result in helping to cure various types of cancer, he has published over 250 articles on the subject and is in phase three of several clinical trials. To me, this is like meeting a rock star. I can't wait to see where this research goes.
     A few weeks ago we had a grand rounds lecture by Stanley J Dudrick M.D. who first conceived of the idea of total peripheral nutrition during his surgical residency. Everyone said that he was crazy but his rationale was that if we can be fed by a vein in utero then why can't we be fed by a vein in vivo? His experiments we designed using beagle puppies and he was successful in growing them using entirely parenteral nutrition. Then one day after giving a lecture on his beagle puppies a doctor came up to him and told him about a neonate he was taking care of who had a failure to thrive and asked if he would do his "puppy trick" on her. And that little neonate baby girl was the first human to be saved simply by being given nutrition through a vein. He told us in grand rounds that since that day total parenteral nutrition has saved the lives of over 10 million neonates. Not to mention the other millions of lives that he has saved from morbidity and mortality with his research.      It just amazes me that these are the types of doctors that I get to walk the halls with and hear from on a weekly basis. I am truly lucky to be learning at this amazing institution.