From Metamorphoses: Memoirs of a Life in Medicine -- Raising the Money

One of my functions in leading the Medical Center was to provide the means to finance its growth and development. This was known as fund-raising. I had some limited experience raising money for my own laboratory projects from both the NIH and the American Cancer Society, but this was not fund-raising on the scale demanded from the head of the Medical Center. The first major grant that I solicited and that we were fortunate to get shortly after I became dean was from the Commonwealth Fund of New York, to help implement the Medical School's new curriculum. That was the first time I recall going after big private money. I have found that many of the people who have large amounts of money for private philanthropy either never went to college or did not finish the usual four years. Examples include Jack Whitehead, J. B. Fuqua, and Dave Thomas. Others who did go to college were very individualistic and had to be cultivated for quite some time. It was helpful if they or their families had been patients at Duke. The one thing that I always tried to impress on the small staff I had in development--which is what fund-raising is rather euphemistically called in academic institutions, and which started in the Medical Center with one person and then built up to a handful--was to insist that they not rush, but that they devote a certain amount of time to cultivating individuals. After all, it took President Few twelve years to convince James B. Duke to make his magnificent gift to create Duke University. The Medical Center is big business today--and has been, almost from its start. I would guess that the Medical Center budget accounts for about 60 to 65 percent of the total Duke University budget and that about 60 percent of the faculty is in the Medical Center. (Contrast this with the situation at Yale, where the medical center accounts for about 45 to 50 percent of the total budget, because the Yale--New Haven Hospital is a separate corporate entity. Once you put a teaching hospital into the equation, as we do at Duke, the figures change dramatically.) In the course of raising money to support this large enterprise, I met many wonderful people and some challenging ones. One of the more memorable was Doris Duke. Doris Duke was one of the richest women in the world. More to the point in the context of my work, she was the daughter of James B. Duke, the man who had founded Duke University and established The Duke Endowment. While her word may not have been law at Duke, it certainly carried heavy, heavy weight, as I was to discover in the late sixties. Doris Duke had made the acquaintance of one Kenneth S. MacLean in New York. Dr. MacLean was a Canadian with an M.D. from McGill Medical School, who trained as an obstetrician-gynecologist at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal and at Doctors Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital in New York. He headed an institute of biomagnetics, where he used magnetic force to treat a variety of ills, ranging all the way from lack of energy to cancer and heart disease. Doris Duke's principal interest in MacLean was that he treated her for chronic fatigue, that he literally recharged her by having her lie in a magnetic field. Miss Duke felt that MacLean's treatment also had rejuvenating effects, so she had become not only a patient but also a disciple of his. Periodically, Dr. MacLean would pack his batteries and magnet and charter a plane to fly out to treat Doris wherever she was at the time, be it California or Honolulu, Thailand or Paris. Although MacLean had accumulated a dossier of letters from doctors who testified to the efficacy of his treatments, his method had not been received with open arms by the medical community. No reputable--or for that matter, disreputable--medical center had run any tests to substantiate his claims. The MacLean matter came up at Duke University Medical Center when Dr. Davison was contacted by MacLean. Miss Duke had requested that Duke run some trials of MacLean's methods. Davison thereupon contacted Bob Gregg, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, who had received a small grant from Doris Duke's foundation. At some point, Dr. Gregg thought that he was in over his head, and he asked for my help. From the correspondence over this episode (eventually, I had to prepare what amounted to a legal brief on the whole matter), I have been able to reconstruct how it unfolded. I went to see Dr. Davison, who was very supportive of Dr. MacLean. I felt, however, that very little was known about the effect of magnetic fields on biological systems, and the closest people to the field at Duke were the radiobiologists in the Department of Radiology. As was my usual approach, I went through the chairman, at that time Dick Lester, whom I had just recruited to Duke, and he contacted Aaron Sanders, who was a radiobiologist and a radio-isotope man and thus probably came closest of anyone at Duke to working with magnetic fields. Both Dr. Sanders and Dr. Lester visited Dr. MacLean. We caucused after they came back and felt that we could not dismiss the matter out of hand, so we agreed to set up an experimental lab, hoping it would be partially supported by Doris Duke, to study the effect of magnetic fields on living biological systems. I remember in one conversation with Doris, when I told her we were willing to do this, she said, You are not going to use dogs and cats, are you? I said, No, this will be done on mice and rats, and she said, Thank goodness. She was a very strong animal lover and a champion of animal rights. Somewhere along the line I decided it was time for me to visit Mac Lean and, separately, to visit Doris Duke. MacLean was in a dingy third- floor walk-up in a townhouse in mid-town Manhattan. In the middle of a large room stood a huge magnet, probably several feet across and from top to bottom, mounted vertically and powered by six automobile batteries because the health department of Manhattan had turned off the power source to the magnet. MacLean came across to me not as a quack but more as a schizophrenic individual, who seemed out of touch with reality and very nervous about what he was trying to tell me. He had a lot of slides of patients before their treatment, but none of the same patients after treatment. In order to show me what he did, he had me hold a large hammer with a steel head in between the poles of the magnet. Then he threw a big switch to activate the power from the automobile batteries and just about wrenched my shoulder out of joint as one of the magnetic poles attracted the hammer. There was, indeed, a magnetic field. Subsequently, when I visited Doris, we had a lovely tea in her Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park. I explained to her that so little was known of the effect of magnetic fields on biological systems that we proposed doing this research project for a modest amount of money. Everything seemed to be just fine when I left. As a matter of fact, one of the buttons fell off my jacket onto her shaggy rug, and she was kind enough to take off her shoes and walk around barefoot trying to find my button (without success). As I left New York to fly to a meeting in Washington, I kept wondering why people felt that she was a difficult woman. She was very charming, very friendly, and seemed to understand what I was proposing. Not too long after that she called me from Honolulu, and her tone of voice was ice cold. She said that she understood that I wasn't going to use this machine on humans. She was very, very angry, and at one point she hung up. I assume this was the point at which she activated her channels to Dr. Davison, who became very rude to me in subsequent phone calls, telling me such things as, What the hell difference does it make if you move the damn machine to Durham and just put some patients under it and satisfy Doris? I explained to Dr. Davison that this was unethical and bordered on the immoral, and that the institution he built and that I was trying to develop further would be jeopardized for treating patients with an unproven therapy. It certainly was against any of the guidelines of the U.S. surgeon general in terms of acceptable new treatments. Dr. Davison went so far as to call me up one evening when I was in Minneapolis having dinner with Lewis Wannamaker, who was a candidate for the chair in pediatrics. Dr. Davison insisted I be called to the phone, whereupon he became quite rude. It was the only time I ever hung up on anybody. It was not too long after that that I learned that Dr. Davison had asked the executive committee of the university trustees to have me fired as the dean by Duke University President Knight. When Doug Knight got the word, he asked me to fly back from a Markle scholar meeting at Hot Springs, Virginia, to appear before the executive committee and to present my case. When I finished making my presentation to the executive committee, Tom Perkins, who was also chairman of the board of The Duke Endowment and a former lawyer of Doris Duke's, and who had also at some point disagreed with her, made the motion to the committee to clear my name and to support what I had done. He was seconded by Marshall Pickens, who, in addition to being on the executive committee of the Duke University trustees, was also vice chairman of The Duke Endowment Board of Trustees. The vote was unanimous in support of what I had done. After that, I never heard another negative word from Davison, and in his last few years we got along fine.

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