‘I feel. . .lucky because I get paid to develop my own ideas.’
There are 10 pediatric endocrinologists in San Diego, and Dr. Alberto Hayek figures prominently among them. Hayek, 46, has been a part of this sub-specialty for 24 years. The Colombia native has concentrated on research and treatment of children with diabetes and problems related to growth. His devotion to the “world of hormones” has led him from South America to Yale, Harvard and the Medical Cell Biology Institute of Uppsala University in Sweden. Now, firmly entrenched as the head of the Lucy Thorne Whittier Children’s Center at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, Hayek divides his time between his first love, research, and caring for children afflicted with diabetes and endocrinological problems. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed him at the Whittier Center and Vince Compagnone photographed him there.
When I went to medical school, the world of hormones made sense as being very logical. Everything could be explained. If it couldn’t really be explained with facts, it could be theorized. I could truly find reasons for physiological processes that were happening in the body. So, I sort of fell in love with logic.
Why I chose pediatrics, I really don’t know. I was really, really very young. I was 22 when I became a physician, but this is because of the educational system in South America. Maybe my youth had a lot to do with my decision to pursue pediatrics. I felt closer to children.
When I finished medical school, I came to this country to do my pediatric training at Yale. When I finished there, I went to Harvard and did my training in pediatric endocrinology. In the 1960s everybody desired a reputation of being trained in the States. It was very fashionable.
My idea was to return to Colombia after I had my training. There were no pediatric endocrinologists in Colombia, and I decided I was going to be the first one.
I went back to my country and I became the chairman of pediatrics at the medical institute and I stayed there for three years. I wanted to start research, then the problem was how do you do research in a country where the children are dying of hunger? As chairman of the pediatric department, my biggest problem was there wasn’t enough milk or food or blankets for the children.
Then I realized that a pediatric chairman in South America had to be very actively involved in politics and in the social issues of children. You had to take sides. That’s something one doesn’t learn in places like Yale or Harvard. I mean, you truly become more of a scientist than a social activist (in the United States). So, one day I was forced to choose.
It was very painful. Matter of fact, it was so difficult for me that the only way I sort of could cope with coming back to the States and not feeling like I was leaving my people was by joining a friend of mine in Watts at the Martin Luther King House. We went to the ghetto and we tried to get scientific research facilities for minorities, and that was extremely difficult, almost as difficult as being in South America.
The reason for combining both--taking care of children and doing the research--is because every time you face an incurable disease, you really feel like failure, even though you can help and provide a pretty normal life for a child.
Research is like a hobby. I feel myself very lucky because I get paid to develop my own ideas. A researcher is almost like an author. You do what you really want to do like an author truly has free rein on his imagination. We do the same. We write our own tickets.
The hardest part of my work is when families come here hoping that I will tell them their children do not have diabetes. That is very hard to tell them. For the first five or 10 minutes you have to tell them it’s an incurable disease. I think being a father and a pediatrician, I just put myself in their position and I truly cry with them. On the inside.
The nicest part of my work is where time goes by and that family makes it again. I mean, they do have a child with diabetes, but you wouldn’t know. That makes my life, and I think that sort of compensates for the difficulties surrounding my research.
