Memorial Tribute ― Ronald Hershow, UIC Colleague ― April 22, 2005

Doug was my friend and colleague and I will miss him terribly. During the years that I knew him, we talked often about our wives and children and it was clear that Doug adored Sherry and his two girls, Gina and Natalie. Julie Parsonnet, his mentor in Stanford, wrote that the image fixed in her brain when she thinks of Doug is a smiling face, a smile that was always the biggest when he was holding Natalie and Gina in his arms.

I would like to focus on his remarkable professional abilities and what it was like to work with him. I am grateful to those who shared anecdotes and memories with me. Many of you will recognize your stories and words in these remarks.

When I first met Doug, I was attempting to recruit him to join our faculty. I remember thinking… this guy is pure energy. His enthusiasm was palpable; he was bubbling over with ideas and I thought how great it would be if he came to our school of public health. Of course, Doug did take the job and it is hard to describe how profoundly he energized his colleagues and students. Ray Bradbury wrote, “Touch a scientist and you touch a child”. It always seemed to me that Doug never lost that childlike fascination with the world that is the driving force behind the greatest scientists. And Doug was a great scientist.

He worked on a wide array of infectious topics. He began his research on Helicobacter under the mentorship of Julie Parsonnet. When I talked to Julie on the phone however, she said that in Doug’s case, she was always a little uncomfortable with the title of mentor, because Doug was “larger than life” and quickly carved out his own research agenda focusing on the effects of that organism in children. Doug postulated that the loss of stomach acidity that follows Helicobacter infection sets children up for secondary infections with a wide array of gastrointestinal infections. To study this, he established collaboration in Peru and “resurrected” an out of use test of stomach acidity. When he first came to UIC, I was walking by his office and was startled to see him sitting at his desk with a naso-gastric tube inserted in his nose that was draining stomach acid into a beaker on his desktop. When I walked in, he acted as if he was surprised that I had even noticed the plastic tube protruding from his nose and explained that he needed this data to standardize the assay. I was about to tell him that self-experimentation was not a requirement for tenure, but instead I walked out of his office shaking by head in bemused admiration …and before he could ask me to volunteer.

It was my privilege to work with Doug on many projects. When I would inquire about the progress of some task, he would often say, “I’m all over it” and then I knew that I could relax, that it was covered. In the aftermath of the Anthrax outbreak that followed 9/11, we developed lectures for the school of public health and its surrounding communities. Together we conceived of the idea of training a group of public health students in the art of outbreak investigation so that they could aid state and local health departments in the event of a terrorist-related or natural epidemic. This became Doug’s pet project, a legacy that we will not allow to languish. But Doug’s contribution went well beyond this. Soon after the anthrax outbreak was recognized, Illinois State Epidemiologist, Mark Dworkin asked him to serve as Special Assistant for Bioterrorism Surveillance. I want to make clear, that Doug’s decision to serve in this capacity came at some personal risk. This was because it took time away from his own research at a point in his career when he was attempting to develop his research and attain tenure. When we sat down to talk about this; it became clear that he had already decided that it was the right and only thing to do. And, of course, he maintained impressive research productivity despite this commitment.

Doug loved to teach and he loved his students. He was a brilliant and demanding teacher. He was provocative in the best sense of that word, forcing students to move beyond accumulation of knowledge and mastery of analytic techniques, to ask questions and develop creative approaches to answer them. He exemplified Edward O. Wilson’s advice to young scientists: “You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist. The world needs all you can give.” …But Doug embellished this advice by showing his students that humor was the best way to deal with the bumps in the road that are inevitably encountered when conducting research. Julie Parsonnet wrote me that “Doug recognized the small stuff for what it was- the fodder for self-deprecating jokes. The big stuff –his family, the chance to make the world a better place, and the simple joy of living – were what really mattered.

He was unassuming, generous and tremendous fun to be around. His students recalled Doug’s first rule of outbreak investigation, never pass a Dairy Queen without stopping…and how he ran out of gas on a superhighway during an outbreak investigation. He was warm and accessible, the candy bowl outside his door a symbol of the welcoming place his office became for students. He took care of his students, funding their travel and creating novel learning experiences for them. It seems particularly appropriate, therefore, that Sherry has chosen to establish a student scholarship fund in his honor.

Even in the sometimes dry world of committee work, Doug’s personal radiance could not be subdued. In his first faculty meeting as the newly appointed chair of the Committee on Student Affairs, Doug intoned "I'm reporting for the Committee on Student Affairs.  My report is that they aren't having any."

Beyond, all this, Doug was a superbly trained infectious disease clinician. He served as an attending on the infectious disease service, bringing his incisive teaching style to the bedside. He thought that public health students should be exposed to the clinical arena and designed a course that would allow our students to round with him in the hospital and with me in the outpatient HIV clinic. Doug wanted students to see the real life challenges faced by patients with infectious disease problems, not only because these issues begged investigation, but because he believed that a public health student should never lose sight of the faces behind their data.

Albert Schweitzer said that “in everyone’s life, at some time, our inner flame goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should be thankful for these people who rekindle the inner spirit.” Doug was one of those rare people. So I ask myself and I ask all of you who loved him, how do you say goodbye to this luminous man. We are living through a nightmare this week… but it may help to remember Jonas Salk’s words: “I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.” My dream is that we will honor Doug by keeping his spirit alive and his initiatives going. So I would like to end with a reassurance. Doug, we’re all over it.