On March 7, Leonard Wartofsky, MD, MACP, editor-in-chief of Endocrine Reviews, stopped by the Endocrine Society offices in Washington, DC, for a “lunch and learn” session with Society staff, to discuss his interest in endocrinology.
Wartofsky is chairman of the Department of Medicine at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University, a past president of the Society, served as the previous editor-in-chief of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), and is a leading expert on the thyroid. He received his medical degree in 1964 from George Washington School of Medicine in Washington, DC and interned at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. His original interest was in gastroenterology, particularly in the liver, but he changed his mind when he got to Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York to begin his residency.
“I left St. Louis to go to New York – the Bronx – to Albert Einstein where there was a great liver guy named Irwin Arias,” Wartofsky says. “He was the leading researcher in the liver at the time. When I got to Einstein, Dr. Arias promptly left for a year sabbatical.” So during his year of clinical work and seeing patients with endocrine disorders is when he says he became fascinated with endocrinology.
Wartofsky trained in Boston, then served in the Army and ended up at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital in Bethesda, Md., where he remained for 25 years. As a native of Washington, DC, he said that post was attractive, from both a social and a professional standpoint. “I had unlimited research money, I was the chief of the section of endocrinology, I had a huge division of clinical researchers, three PhDs, about a dozen technicians, and we were published 30 to 40 papers a year,” he says.
He goes on to say that this unit graduated many fellows who went on to become leaders in endocrinology. Kenneth Burman, MD, is director of the Endocrinology Fellowship Program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and Wartofsky’s boss. “He was my first fellow at Walter Reed” Wartofsky says. “I’m glad he’s still working because what really upsets me is when my fellows and residents retire and I’m still working.”
Wartofsky calls endocrinology the “cognitive specialty,” since endocrinologists have to think to solve, complex, long-term problems, contrasting that to a surgeon, who simply cuts out the problem and moves on. He also points out that endocrinology is among the lowest paid of subspecialties, yet have the most fascinating cases, because they are so challenging. “All of these very complex interactions,” he says, “whether at the bench or the bedside really drive us and keep us coming to work every morning and being happy to get to work every morning.”
To that end, he touched on what he says is a developing trend in endocrinology – personalized medicine. Now that researchers and physicians are understanding more and more about the phenotype and the fact that every individual is different, it’s altering the way they approach diseases. For example, says Wartofsky – who has a particular interest in thyroid cancer – we can now begin using more targeted chemotherapy approaches to treat cancer, rather than just the blanket approach that was used in the past.
In response to various staff questions, Wartofsky says that his favorite journal is JCEM, because of its worldwide prestige and popularity, and that he hopes to get Endocrine Reviews to that same level. He touched on his concerns over funding the much-needed studies in endocrinology, saying that funding clinical research has been a problem ever since he could remember. And the problem is that if these studies looking for important answers get too expensive, they won’t get funded, and that means fewer articles published in journals like JCEM and Endocrine Reviews.
But it wasn’t all shop talk. Some staff wanted to know where Wartofsky grew up (Northeast DC, above his parents’ mom-and-pop market), where he went to high school (Roosevelt Senior High School in Northwest DC), and his favorite place to travel (India).
These “lunch and learn” sessions were established by Society CEO Barbara Byrd Keenan in order to give the staff an opportunity to not only meet the leadership of the Endocrine Society but to learn about the organization’s initiatives from the member leaders involved in creating them and determining the Society’s direction.
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