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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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MS expert will lead neurology department Yale has snagged another top medical recruit from Harvard. But he doesn't want to be just another notch on the Blue-versus-Crimson scorecard. He'd rather tamp down the old rivalry, at least where research is concerned. "You know, I have an idea" for taming those competitive urges, jokes neurologist David Hafler: "Why don't they get together and have a football game once a year?" Much has been made of the Blue-Crimson battle in media coverage of Hafler's decision to become chair of the medical school's neurology department and chief of neurology at Yale-New Haven Hospital on September 1. But while Hafler was hired as part of an aggressive Yale expansion plan -- and while he hopes to lure more of his Harvard colleagues -- he has a different notion for relations between the two universities' medical schools: cooperation. "There's been a dearth of interaction," he says. "There's a lot more we can do." One of the nation's foremost experts on multiple sclerosis, Hafler says his emphasis will be on building "translational" programs that close the gap "between the basic sciences and clinical care patients." "Yale, uniquely, has a fantastic group of research scientists" in neurology, he notes. He intends to boost the neurology department's clinical side and to connect the two more closely -- "really, to train physician-scientists." "In my field of multiple sclerosis," Hafler says, "we have studied the disease at a molecular level and at a clinical level. We can do that with other diseases -- stroke, brain tumors -- to devise new treatments." Through the International Multiple Sclerosis Genetics Consortium, which he helped create, Hafler and other scientists identified genes associated with multiple sclerosis. "By working together, we've been able to move much faster in figuring out the genetics of MS," he says. "Science is increasingly moving toward a collaborative model, where the data generated goes into the public domain for everyone to work with as fast as possible." Like several other scientists in the MS consortium, Hafler is affiliated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Institute, a collaboration in genomic medicine among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and its affiliated hospitals. He cites the five-year-old Broad Institute ("a place to do audacious science") as a model for scientists working across institutional boundaries to benefit patients. "There are limited resources," he observes. "To be able to work together in key ways and not duplicate resources will move our understanding forward and help cure human disease." Still, what lured Hafler to Yale was not so much the chance to build bridges to other universities as the opportunity to build the neurology department at Yale. (It also helps that his wife, Janet Hafler, will become assistant dean of medical education at Yale.) ''Right now, the Harvard Medical School is in a non-expansion phase," he says. Yale, by contrast -- despite a similar plunge in its endowment -- intends to forge ahead with growth plans. This April, Yale recruited Thomas J. Lynch Jr. '82, '86MD, from Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital to direct the Yale Cancer Center. Robert Alpern, dean of the Yale School of Medicine, told the Harvard Crimson that he's bringing Hafler on to "invest heavily" in the neurology department. "I want our neurology program to get much bigger than it is now," Alpern said. "I actually want someone with his great taste to come here and recruit a lot of clinical and research faculty, and so we put up a package that would allow him to do both." And, "this being such a major pool of talented individuals," that recruitment will focus in part on Harvard, Hafler says. "But we're going to recruit widely from all over the world." In the end, Hafler insists, intercollegiate competition has little meaning in the world of medical science. "I don't think that any of that exists," he says. "We really are grounded by seeing very sick people. When it deals with care and understanding disease, it really transcends the Harvard-Yale or any other rivalries." Then again, it was Yale -- not Harvard -- that put out a press release trumpeting Hafler's move. |
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