Mel—Personal Reminiscence*

Mel—Personal Reminiscence* H. William Taeusch MD Professor Emeritus, Dept of Pediatrics, UCSF Mailing address: 6E, Dept of Pediatrics, SFGH, 1001 Potrero Ave., SF, CA 94110 btaeusch@sfghpeds.ucsf.edu On July 1, 1970, I started my fellowship in neonatology under the tutelage of Mary Ellen Avery. I entered her lab in the MacIntyre Building at McGill in Montreal. There were no other fellows or techs working in her lab at the time. The lab was spacious but sparsely furnished. In one corner was a pneumatic surface balance, hand-built, from the design of John Clements. A lab book lay on the bench with entries dated June, 1970, by Bob Kotas, my predecessor, who had neatly recorded data on lungs from fetal rabbits. I was alone and knew no one in the building. Mel’s office was several miles away at Montreal Children’s Hospital where she was, surprisingly, the new Chief of Pediatrics (An American! A Woman!). She was readily accessible in her hospital office but came to the lab only on Wednesday afternoons. There we sat nose to nose for three hours while she reviewed my week’s work. Not yet trained in the academic art of self-promotion, I once told her in three brief sentences of my past week’s efforts. She waited for more and then looked startled when I remained quiet. With her usual candor she said that after she returned to her office at 5pm, by the end of her workday, she would have completed more, much more, than I’d managed to do in a week. In heated response I blatted out all of my week’s successes and failures in extenso. She smiled and said, “Well that’s better. You not only have to do well, you have to show that you are doing well.” One of my many learned lessons at her knee. Not only has she been my mentor for life, she was generous enough to push me to learn from others with talents in some areas that exceeded her own (Mead, Bates, Milic-Emilie, Macklem, and John Clements, the first Mel Avery awardee of the Pediatric Associated Societies, Vancouver, 2014). Mel believed that cross-disciplinary collaborative research was key for major developments in the field, far before medical centers dressed up this concept as a novel way to get funding. She was impatient of ‘me-too’ research. She recognized and rewarded those that could produce results fitting her Venn diagram (new, true, and useful). Her curiosity extended from the Eskimos in Baffin Bay to hibernating turtles in Newfoundland to prematurely born sheep in New Zealand. She pored through my novel (about a mother deciding whether to allow surgery on her Down Syndrome newborn with multiple