Dear Weill Cornell Medicine community,
As we begin the fall semester, I’ve been energized by campus beginnings and new prospects for the future. The chance to connect with those new to our campus, and to re-connect with those returning from the summer break, is wonderful.
This month, 106 new MD and 50 new PA students proudly donned their white coats at 1334 York, symbolizing their new role in advancing health care. In our graduate school, 70 bright minds have begun their journey towards a Ph.D., as have many more in pursuing master’s degrees. Across the globe in Qatar, 57 medical students and 54 pre-medical students got their start during our Opening Exercises.
All have stepped into something bigger than themselves – a tradition of scientific triumph.
In preparing for the new semester, I’d like to offer a story of one of those triumphs. In 1982, when I began medical school, an unusual disease was rapidly emerging across the country but especially in large cities. We faced uncertainty about what caused it and how to treat the consequences of opportunistic infections and unusual malignancies.
What happened next is at the heart of why science matters. Scientists and clinicians soon identified HIV, the virus that caused AIDS, found ways to suppress the disease, and developed drugs and treatments – allowing people to not just survive HIV but live healthy lives. U.S. government funding for research critically helped us overcome this plague globally.
Grants and other federal support also bolstered our academic partnerships with The Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering, drawing some of the best minds in the world to our Upper East Side corridor of science. These and other partnerships have created not just co-authorships but coalitions, an unparalleled ecosystem yielding important discoveries and how to best apply them. Weill Cornell is built for scientific collaboration: united with a great university in Ithaca, neighbors to the Cornell Tech campus, and connected to affiliates far beyond New York and the United States.
Powered by these collaborations, every day our faculty, staff and students pursue elusive questions and find incredible answers. We can solve problems that were previously impossible; create a healthcare work force grounded in our traditions and prepared for the future; improve standards of care and population health at scale; inject economic strength into our nation and beyond; and help those in our clinical practices live better, longer lives.
Science continues to triumph and show its value every day, reflected in everything we do.
Here at WCM we care, discover and teach so that our world will experience a better future that we can hardly imagine today. As we begin the fall semester, let’s all appreciate our past, present, and future contributions to science and medicine.
With appreciation,
Robert A. Harrington, M.D.
Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean, Weill Cornell Medicine
Provost for Medical Affairs, Cornell University