Summons to the helm
From the standpoint of Dana-Farber's trustees, the decision to ask Nathan to become Institute president Danawas clear. His credentials were rock-solid: a renowned scientist who had made critical discoveries in diseases involving red blood cells, he had also created at Children's Hospital and Dana-Farber one of the world's premier training programs in pediatric hematology and oncology. Since 1985, he had been chair of pediatrics and physician-in-chief at Children's, where he had worked to develop the hospital's physiciantraining and research programs.
September 1997 — Nathan and Red Sox CEO John Harrington celebrate the naming of Jimmy Fund Way on the Dana-Farber campus.
"If you look at a list of the people David has trained and the positions they now hold, the grants they pursue, and the work they've done, it's very compelling," says Eva Guinan, M.D., of Dana-Farber's Department of Pediatric Oncology. "He always stresses that the work should relate to the patient — that patients should frame the questions doctors ask."
From such a record, and the immediate need to improve patient-safety procedures at Dana-Farber, one might have expected that Nathan's presidency would be an active one. But there would have been no way of foreseeing the extraordinary scope of change that would occur under his leadership.
The initiatives undertaken at Dana-Farber during the five years of Nathan's presidency have touched virtually every aspect of the Institute — from clinical care to research to the mentoring of young scientists and physicians. A common theme of these efforts has been collaboration — the idea that by forging partnerships with doctors and scientists at allied institutions and by opening Dana-Farber to new relationships with health educators, providers of complementary therapies, and patients themselves, the Institute could both broaden its services and hasten the discovery of new therapies.
Initiatives at Dana-Farber during the five years of Nathan's presidency have touched every aspect of the Institute — from clinical care to research to the mentoring of young scientists and physicians.
Together, these initiatives have led not only to physical changes in the Institute's clinics and laboratories, a top-to-bottom reorganization of research and clinical activities, and the recruitment of some of the country's top cancer scientists and clinicians, but, in a real sense, a redefinition of Dana-Farber's identity and mission.
