Joseph B. Martin, who served HMS as dean from 1997 to 2007, chronicles his life’s journey from modest beginnings as a Mennonite farm boy to the pinnacle of U.S. academic and medical leadership. Martin—the first in his family to receive a college education—recounts his evolution, starting with his first professorial appointment, at McGill University, to his tenure as dean of medicine and chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, to the HMS deanship. Martin also explores the creation of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, the redesign of the HMS medical curriculum, the planning and implementation for a new research building, and the creation of one of the country’s first department-level programs in systems biology.
Because Martin, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology, witnessed and led many of the events and discoveries central to the transformation of medicine in the past 50 years, he is ideally positioned to offer here an incisive assessment of academic politics and health care in Canada and the United States. Alfalfa to Ivy is an important and absorbing read for anyone interested in academic and medical leadership and the history of American medicine and biomedical research.
