UCLA’s Mellinkoff Is in Medical Spotlight : Retiring Administrator, 66, Shepherded School Through 24 Years of Growth and Achievement
Albert Einstein must be giving Dr. Sherman M. Mellinkoff a lot of comfort lately.
Over the last few weeks Mellinkoff, who is retiring after 24 years as the dean of the UCLA Medical School, has been subjected to more praise than a home-run hitter in the last inning of the seventh game of the World Series.
He’s been called “good,” “wise” and “courageous,” to list a few of the milder adjectives. He’s been compared with Thomas Jefferson. He’s been toasted by hundreds, literally, at a banquet in his honor. A newly endowed chair at the medical school, funded with $1 million, will be named for him.
No Longer Low Profile
All in all, it’s been the kind of attention usually reserved for politicians, magnates and movie stars, not low-profile academic doctors with a penchant for wry humor, writing poetry and citing quotations dredged from the classics, the not-so-classic and the sports pages to make a point.
In brief, those are some of the reasons why the words of the great physicist on Mellinkoff’s office wall probably are getting a lot of eyeballing: “The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working.”
Whatever else he may be--and he is many things to many people--it’s abundantly clear that he would rather not endure the rounds of public affection and admiration that are punctuating the time to his exit July 1. He has fired back with quotes from baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan and self-deprecating jokes--one of them being that when brain transplants become practical, “deans’ brains will be in highest demand because they’ve never been used.” And at the end of the banquet in his honor the other night, Mellinkoff dryly remarked that friends and colleagues had said “so many kind and inaccurate things that I have become embarrassed.”
Survived and Prospered
However, Mellinkoff, 66, is well-schooled in surviving both the pressures of the moment and the pressures of decades. He came to the medical school in 1953, when it was little more than a slapdash assembly of temporary buildings. He was named dean in 1962 and has lasted and prospered over nearly a quarter-century, longer than any other currently serving medical school dean. Most other medical school deans seek other employment after only about three years--a figure that speaks volumes about the nature of such jobs.
During those record-setting years he has worked quietly out of his Spartan, seldom-painted office-conference room, a refuge hidden away from the hurly-burly of the UCLA Medical Center. In that time the medical school grew from a modest institution with a budget of less than $15 million when he took over, to one with a budget of more than $180 million, as well as about 650 students--plus 1,500 interns, residents and fellows, about 1,200 full-time faculty members and 3,085 clinical faculty on the UCLA campus and at seven other hospitals. Mellinkoff is only the second dean of the school, which has graduated 3,000 students since the first class of 28 received its diplomas in 1955.
Perhaps more importantly, the school has acquired an international reputation for both medical education and research. Mellinkoff is proud to note that the school has renal, bone marrow, heart and liver transplant programs. Seven faculty members have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Recently, UCLA bone marrow transplant experts were prominent among physicians who went to the Soviet Union to aid victims of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster.
Not unexpectedly, Mellinkoff, who first thought it was an absolutely crazy idea to make him a dean, disavows any connection between himself and the school’s renown. “I take no credit for any scientific discoveries here,” he said in an interview. “I’ve taken vicarious joy in the many great achievements of the faculty.”
However, Mellinkoff, whose specialty is gastroenterology, has worked to stay current with developments and can recite a long list of achievements--ranging from pinpointing brain arousal centers to tissue typing to calcium’s role in physiology--that have put the medical school on the map.
Nearly everyone who knows Mellinkoff seems to be impressed with his achievements. At the banquet, longtime friend and colleague Dr. William P. Longmire noted that when he and Mellinkoff disagreed over medical and administrative matters, Mellinkoff was usually right. Dr. Kenneth I. Shine, the heart researcher and cardiologist who will replace Mellinkoff as dean, told the audience Mellinkoff is “a remarkable scholar” and the “wizard” of the medical school.
A Lover of Literature
Like many others, Shine is impressed with Mellinkoff’s knowledge of literature, ranging from the Talmud to contemporary authors. He described his friend as the only man he knew “who could quote James Thurber and Ecclesiastes in the same sentence.” He also noted that Mellinkoff has been singularly unsuccessful in his attempts to not quote from those two sources. Shine related that Mellinkoff devoted much of one vacation to discovering substitute quotables, only to relapse within days of his return.
A variety of other sources provided some insight into Mellinkoff’s life and character. A classmate at Beverly Hills High School remembers that he was “president of everything” and even then was expected to be a success. One co-worker described Mellinkoff as an avid baseball fan with a disdain for interior decoration, adding that he would much rather spend money for research than refurbishing his office.
A graduate of Stanford University’s medical school, Mellinkoff met his wife, June, a nurse at the time, while he was still a student. They have two children, a son, Albert, who is an actor, and a daughter, Sherrill, who has been a teacher and is now training to be a court reporter.
A lover of the outdoors, Mellinkoff once planned to set up practice in a small town but went back East for a short period of additional training that stretched into years. By the time he returned to the West Coast, Mellinkoff was firmly placed in an academic career.
What Mellinkoff does take credit for is delegating responsibility. It is, he said, a form of administration that might assure a higher survival rate among medical school deans.
All the department chairs, committee chairs and assistant deans in the medical school know that the credit and the blame are all theirs, Mellinkoff said, citing biblical and historical examples.
“Somebody figured out that it’s not possible for one person to have good rapport with more than 10 people or so,” he explained. “As you probably remember, Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, advised him to divide people into groups of 10 and then captains of 10 and so forth. Interestingly, most armies going back to Alexander the Great and through the present have a squad of 10. At any rate, I think the dean should be representing the faculty. . . . I feel that I’m interested in what everybody’s doing and I’m a little frustrated that I can’t keep up with it all. But I feel that I can approach that by knowing through the chairmen what’s going on and what needs to be done. . . . “
Mellinkoff believes that judicious delegation is especially useful in areas where value judgments are crucial--namely in selecting the 140 first-year medical students from about 4,500 applicants.
“Rightly or wrongly, our policy with respect to admitting students has been that the criteria would be decided by the admissions-policy committee. . . . I told them (the committee) the first year I was in this office that if they made mistakes they would get all the blame, and if they made good selections they’d get all the credit and that all I would do would be to ensure their sovereignty. I think that by giving them the full responsibility that you are more likely to get conscientious and judicious appraisal in the mid-zone. I think the most outstanding students, clearly superb students, they probably would take even if somebody was looking over their shoulders, so to speak. The ones who are not up to UCLA standards I think they probably would also weed out. But in between there is a spectrum of students who are good students . . . and I think that if they know that they are going to get all the blame and all the credit, they are more apt, first of all, to make conscientious judgments and, secondly, they’re more apt to remember and to learn from their mistakes and their successes.”
As Mellinkoff sees it, his job has been to be a kind of quality-control expert. His first duty is to make sure the faculty is composed of people who are “not only great teachers but also people who are going to be discovering new things, devising new things because it’s that kind of mind that stays on the cutting edge, the frontier.”
But while staying on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge is the first priority for the medical school, Mellinkoff said that the excitement of discovery must not submerge another important goal.
That goal is “to make sure that we’re not losing sight of the central purpose of physicians, and that is to take care of people, to prevent disease, best of all, or to cure it, second best, or to ameliorate its effects, and to provide comfort when none of those first three things is possible.”
By all accounts, Mellinkoff is a deliberate man. His decision to retire, he said, was made gradually, largely in the rare moments he was alone.
“I walk to work through the Botanical Gardens, which is a beautiful little sanctuary,” he said. “Sometimes when I walk it is the quiet time, a time of reflection, and I usually think over the day’s events and sometimes get a different perspective than I had at first reaction. And I would say the last five years maybe I have occasionally reflected on some decision I made during the day and I’ve asked myself the question, ‘Did you make that decision not to take a certain action or to take a certain action because you’re getting old or because you don’t want to engender an uncomfortable situation? Or did you do that because over the years you’ve gained a little wisdom and decided that that particular controversy was not worth the candle, and that it was better in the long run to compromise?’ ”
He paused a moment before adding: “Well, I suppose I’ve always thought about things like that but not perhaps in those terms. When one is faced with a difficult decision, I think one always has to weigh those two possibilities at any stage of one’s life. But the fact that I was asking myself that question perhaps a little more often than I used to left me feeling, ‘Well, I hope I did the right thing today.’ The fact that the question occurs to me more often now suggests to me that a younger person should be in this office, as I was when I started. I was 42.”
Despite the doubts that led to his retirement, Mellinkoff, who will spend a year abroad with his wife before returning to teaching at UCLA, entertains no such doubts about the future of medicine.
“I love medicine and I think that students who love medicine will always find happiness and rich rewards in doing the best they can. After all, this is a very perilous and capricious and unsettled world, but a good doctor’s relationship with his or her patients, that relationship has survived a lot of vicissitudes. About 2,500 years ago Hippocrates started all this. A lot of wars and plagues and depressions have come and gone but that little relationship has survived it all. . . . There’s something rewarding in knowing that you’re about something that has survived all those things.”
