Sidebar: 1997's Roll Call of Honor
Many encouraged their audience to accept new challenges. Nobel laureate Peter C. Doherty, who holds the Michael F. Tamer Chair in Biomedical Research at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., told Tufts University medical school graduates to anticipate being "called on to defend the intellectual basis of what you do for a living . . . It is dangerous to ignore the challenge." Doherty, who shared the 1996 Nobel in physiology or medicine, notes that he worries about what he perceives to be a rising distrust of physicians. "You could call on the medical profession to defend medicine, just as scientific research needs to be defended [as important to the U.S.'s economic and intellectual future]," he tells The Scientist. An increasing concern, he adds, is that dissatisfied patients may access the Internet, where they can get both accurate and inaccurate information.
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