Medal Winners: How the Vietnam War Launched Nobel Careers

by Raymond S Greenberg

As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly minted physicians’ few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century. Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize–winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s.

440 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 10, 2020

Reviews

[Ardon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few weeks ago, I was scrambling to find an interesting start to a presentation I had to give on training programmes for those who wanted to become clinician-scientists (i.e. medical doctors who also engage in scientific research). In the process, I stumbled onto what must have been the most effective unofficial pipeline for producing such individuals.

In the USA, the draft during the Vietnam War applied to all eligible men, including doctors. However, doctors drafted during the war could apply to carry out their military service in the National Institutes of Health as clinical associates, allowing them to remain state-side. They would spend two years working there with senior scientists, learning the ins and outs of basic biomedical science, with some clinical practice mixed in. This programme, during its time of operation during the Vietnam War, produced 9 Nobel laureates.

Greenberg reviews the history of this programme, and how it set up these clinical associates for great scientific and professional success. He individually delves into the 5 most famous Nobel Prize winners from the programme - Brown & Goldstein, Varmus & Bishop, and Bob Lefkowitz, looking at their lives before, during, and after clinical associate training in the NIH. It’s a great complement to Bob Lefkowitz’s biography, and does offer substantially more breadth in terms of how the “Yellow Beret” programme (as it was pejoratively known as) developed core scientific competencies in medical doctors.

On the whole, I think this book does a great job laying out the individual successes of these 5 laureates and also makes a larger point, that training doctors to think like scientists advances both basic biomedical science and medical practice alike.