Submitted by Brian Wooton, DO
Fargo, ND
When I arrived in Woods Hole for the BioMedical Informatics Course presented by the National Library of Medicine, I found myself standing along with several other strangers as the Peter Pan bus driver unloaded our wheelie bags onto the tarmac of the ferry dock. As I had been here once before when my medical librarian wife attended the course five years prior, I became de facto leader, picking my way past seafood restaurants, bars, and classrooms of a sleepy New England port that existed only because of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Like Make Way for Ducklings, we wandered over a tiny drawbridge, around Eel Pond, and then to Swope Hall. Though many of the younger students may have found dorm life a return to normalcy, a larger number of us were looking at our middle-age through the rear-view mirror.
The schedule began with a meet-and-greet. As I am a family physician working for the Indian Health Service in northern Minnesota, I didn’t think I had much in common with anyone. I knew from the list of students that people were from all over the country and from all professions. There were medical librarians, of course, but also folks from public health, dietetics, even an executive from a drug company. Even the physicians weren’t of my ilk, with representatives of psychiatry and heme/onc and even researchers. I mostly stayed off to the side, enjoying my glass of wine and letting others mingle.
The next morning, thirty laptops were set up in a classroom overlooking the harbor. I chose my usual “ejector seat,” in the back closest to the door, where I spent most of medical school. If things get too boring, it’s a short trip out the back door. The first lectures were about where medical informatics got its start, and the lecturers were scions of the discipline. Ed Hammond did his first work using punch cards, and Dr. Donald Lindberg took the NLM into the 21st century from the middle of the 20th. Lunch in the cafeteria, more lectures on the working parts of informatics, dinner, evening workshop on a database project. We were divided into groups for our project, to construct a database to aid a public health project.
It was the project more than anything that began to make the experience gel for me. There were six of us, two docs, three medical librarians, and a public health officer. We met for meals and for drinks at Captain Kidd’s, argued about design and goals of the project, and mostly got to know each other pretty well. I learned just how select a group we all were. Out of 300 people who applied, only thirty of us got in. The students were smart, interested in more than just medicine, peers in a world where we have spent our lives as the oddballs. We were either too smart or too driven or too geeky to fit in with society at large, victims of our success. The lowest degree in the room was a masters, with most people there with either two masters degrees or a doctorate level. Better still, they weren’t just family doctors. Family docs all know about the same stuff, knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep but generally restricted to medicine. These people knew stuff about stuff that added up to the group knowing a whole lotta stuff.
Over the course of a week, I started to groove on the subject material. Some very smart people have devoted a lot of mental horsepower to converting the art and mechanics of medicine to a process that allows capture of knowledge in a digital format. This has to happen while doing a difficult task, practicing medicine. We heard lectures on team building and overcoming institutional inertia, online resources, and database management. Even better, we made professional contacts, learned about other disciplines, and made friendships.
About halfway through the course, my wife emailed the link to a blog that was maintained by a classmate. Rachel, who is a librarian from Vanderbilt, had made an entry that told about going to “nerd camp.” This tickled me no end. Indeed, the smart kids were all together in one place. We had a lifetime of being the smartest one in the room, but now the smart kids were all in the same class. We went to Martha’s Vineyard together, we drank at Captain Kidd’s together, it was like we finally got rid of all the bullies and jocks, and slackers and the nerds now ruled the school. And the teachers weren’t just Mrs. Bjorklund trying to teach us Spanish. Many were near legends in their field and who still took time to lift a frosty mug with us after the day was done.
On the penultimate night, we had a clambake scheduled. I imagined finding a lonely stretch of beach and burying hot rocks on which we were to throw a bushel of clams and a few crustaceans. Instead, we were transported to a mansion overlooking a bay studded with sailboats. We drank free booze while standing on manicured lawns, the nerds having the country club experience. We had run of the house that had been bequeathed to the National Science Foundation; I explored every corner, every bathroom, even the basement and the kitchen. Earlier in my life I had been the one washing dishes in the scullery, now I was being served coconut shrimp. I felt like someone had died and I graduated to the grown-up table at Thanksgiving dinner. Afterwards, we went to the house allotted to Chris Cimino, our fearless leader, where we drank wine and beer and stronger spirits and I realized that at last, I had found my peers.
The last morning I was only mildly regretful of the previous evening’s activities, and our speakers reached a crescendo of whiz-bangery that blinded me. Michael Ackerman (who looks like Donald Fagan’s brainy cousin) told the story of the making of the Visible Human. After this, the NLM’s own Dr. Lawrence Kingsland lit us up with what’s on the Internet’s horizon and how this amazing technology is about to get unbelievably amazinger. The last event was the presentation of our projects, where it became obvious that the value of the project was in the team building and not the work itself. Goodbyes, hugs, promises to keep in touch, and then the gradual dispersal of our band of geeks.
That evening in the dorm after about half of our class had left, several of us had reason to sit in the hallway with a bottle of red wine and a few plastic glasses. Although I missed my wife, going home seemed a grim prospect. I didn’t want to leave this fantasy week of nerd camp. The next morning, a few of us got back onto the Peter Pan bus. I got a kiss on the cheek from an ad exec from Manhattan, a handshake from a public health officer from New Orleans. Logan Airport pared us down further, and the last of the gang waved goodbye to me from O’Hare’s terminal as she left for Springfield, Illinois, one of the ducklings who had originally followed me from the bus stop. When my wife greeted me at the gate of Fargo’s airport, most of me was home but a small part was left in Woods Hole, in a classroom overlooking the tugboat in the harbor.