An Orgo final to remember

To begin with, I must state that I was pre-med from the time of my orientation in September 1949 until my graduation in June 1953. I managed to get into Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons Medical School and my career path since then led me to San Francisco in 1961 and a 40-year solo practice in Internal Medicine in that beautiful city.

But getting into medical school even then was very difficult, though perhaps less so than it has been in recent decades. I had to compete with some very mature and motivated World War II veterans to get a school acceptance. At that time, getting a good grade in professor Charles Dawson’s organic chemistry class was considered a key to gaining admission into a top-notch eastern medical school. Professor Dawson had been teaching this course for more than a decade, and although about a dozen other science courses were required or recommended to all pre-meds, somehow admissions officers at several medical schools in the northeast had made a discovery over the years: A strong correlation existed between the grade that a Columbia student acquired in professor Dawson’s course and how well they did in medical school.

This fact was well-known to all of us pre-meds, and we strove mightily to do well in his course. I was just an average student getting B grades in most of my classes and, indeed, I got a B on the organic chemistry midterm. But the final was the real cruncher. There were 10 questions on the exam worth 10 points each with the last question being “special.” This was a “bonus question” wherein we were asked to draw the chemical structure of an organic compound that Professor Dawson had mentioned in class but whose structure he had never drawn on the blackboard. We all knew the diagrams in the required textbook cold, but while I was studying the night before the exam with a fraternity brother, he suddenly pulled out his brother’s different organic chemistry textbook from NYU. My friend quickly leafed through it. He suddenly stopped at a page and asked, “Did Dawson ever mention DDT to us?”

“Yes,” I replied after some deep thought, “Something about it being recently used in Africa to wipe out mosquitoes and eradicate malaria.” So the last thing I did before finally going to sleep at 2 a.m. was to write out the complex chemical structure of DDT. As luck would have it, when I opened my exam booklet in the cavernous gym the next morning, I quickly turned to Question #10, and there it was! Only a handful of students got it right, and I was handed a “gift” 10 points on a platter. Only 6 members of the class of more than 100 were given A grades, and I was one of them!

This will be hard to believe, but after World War II, final grades were posted on a huge circular bulletin board in University Hall for all to read. My first inkling of my sudden fame came a few days after the exam when about a dozen of my pre-med classmates ran across Broadway to shake my hand and congratulate me. For several days afterward I was the “Hero of Morningside”. I felt as if I had scored a winning last-second touchdown against Princeton. I still recall one of my egghead friends who had barely spoken to me in 3 years coming over to offer his congratulations while patting me on the back and saying, “I had no idea you were that smart!”

That fall when I took a train up to Boston for my interview at Harvard Medical School, my interviewer took my transcript from a folder and after looking it over, suddenly said, “I see that you got an A in Dawson’s course. Because of this I am hereby authorized to offer you an acceptance here and now to Harvard.” But I didn’t take it, preferring to go to Columbia P&S where I came under the magic spell of Dr. Robert Loeb, head of the department of medicine, and I have never regretted my choice.

And so, this is my most vivid memory five-and-a-half decades later of an undergraduate experience that shaped the rest of my life. How I ended up in California is an even weirder story that I will save for another time.