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Partners in Health: Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim
Howard Hiatt Physician
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A great deal of my time at the Brigham has been spent mentoring students and residents, particularly those who are not following conventional pathways during their training. I've seen and been advisor to students who have strong backgrounds in economics, in engineering, in biology and chemistry, of course, those are the traditional backgrounds that see... we see so often in our students, but a range of, of areas. I suppose the two students, and subsequently residents, at the Brigham who were, who are by far the most remarkable are Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim. Both of these men graduated Harvard Medical School in the early 90s with MDs and PhDs in anthropology. When Paul was a student at... an undergraduate student at Duke he began going to Haiti during his summer vacations and at other times of year as well, initially as a teacher. But when he became a medical student, he began a, a clinic and subsequently worked there as a resident part-time. Early in his residency he won one of the so-called genius awards of the MacArthur Foundation, and without indicating to anybody at the Foundation, he turned the entire sum over to a non-profit organization called Partners in Health, that he and Jim started when they were still in medical school. That organization, Partners in Health, has been what Paul terms the effecter arm of the work that he and Jim, and now a growing number of others, have done. It really is the organization that makes possible buying drugs or buying gasoline for the jeep that they use in the places where they work, and it has, in Paul's view and my own, been a model that we think other institutions, concerned with global health issues, should look at very hard.

Born in 1925, American Howard Hiatt set up one of the first medical oncology research and training units in the US and has headed up some of America's most prestigious medical institutions. Hiatt attended Harvard College and received his MD from the Harvard Medical School in 1948. He was a member of the team at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, that first identified and described mRNA, and he was among the first to demonstrate mRNA in mammalian cells. From 1991 to 1997, he was Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he began and directs the Academy's Initiatives For Children program. He is also committed to helping disadvantaged people access decent health care.

Listeners: Milton C. Weinstein

Milton C. Weinstein, Ph.D., is the Henry J. Kaiser Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. At the Harvard School of Public Health he is Academic Director of the Program in Health Decision Science, and Director of the Program on Economic Evaluation of Medical Technology . He is best known for his research on cost-effectiveness of medical practices and for developing methods of economic evaluation and decision analysis in health care. He is a co-developer of the CEPAC (Cost-Effectiveness of Preventing AIDS Complications) computer simulation model, and has conducted studies on prevention and treatment of HIV infections. He is the co-developer of the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model, which has been used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of cardiovascular prevention and treatment. He is an author of four books: Decision Making in Health and Medicine: Integrating Evidence and Values; Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine,the report of the Panel of Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine; Clinical Decision Analysis; and Hypertension: A Policy Perspective.He has also published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed medical, public health, and economics journals. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Award for Career Achievement from the Society for Medical Decision Making. Dr. Weinstein received his A.B. and A.M. in Applied Mathematics (1970), his M.P.P. (1972), and his Ph.D. in Public Policy (1973) from Harvard University.

Tags: Harvard Medical School, Haiti, MacArthur Foundation, Partners in Health, Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim

Duration: 3 minutes, 3 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2006

Date story went live: 24 January 2008