Yale Bulletin and Calendar

May 19, 2000

Volume 28, Number 32

'What is a Pathologist?':
Young students have winning answers

Many people would be stumped by the question "What is a pathologist?", but not Whitney MacClaren of Brown Middle School in Madison and Stephanie Porto of North Branford Intermediate School.

The two seventh-graders were the first-place winners in the Department of Pathology's "What is a pathologist?" essay contest for middle school children in the region. The contest was held in conjunction with National Medical Laboratory Week, celebrated this year on April 3-7, which honors the often overlooked medical laboratory professionals and board-certified pathologists who perform and interpret medical laboratory tests.

At an awards ceremony held May 5 in Brady Memorial Laboratory, Dr. Jon Morrow, the Raymond Yesner Professor of Pathology and chair and chief of the Department of Pathology, described how he and the other contest judges (Dr. Raymond Yesner, Professor Emeritus of Pathology, and Dr. Vincent Marchesi, the Anthony N. Brady Professor of Pathology, professor of cell biology and director of the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine) had expected to receive between 50 and 500 essays. They were overwhelmed when over 1,000 entries from 54 Greater New Haven area middle schools poured in.

Out of the multitude, said Morrow, the essays written by MacClaren and Porto clearly stood out. Not only did the two students understand that "pathologists do more than autopsies," as Porto stated in her essay, but they also incorporated in their essays the diversity and changes in the field of pathology. In her prize-winning essay, Porto described pathologists as the "'doctor's doctor' ... because they provide physicians with so much information and help." Without that information, wrote Porto, "physicians would not be able to make an accurate diagnosis." Her cowinner, MacClaren, explained, "A pathologist is one who studies the cause of a disease and the changes indicative of a disease. ... Techniques in producing the correct diagnosis of a disease include laboratory tests, microscopic examination and electron microscopy."

Delighted and impressed at the number and quality of responses, Morrow contacted representatives of Optical Analysis Corporation about donating microscopes for the winners. Through his efforts, MacClaren and Porto each received a $2,500 microscope made by Olympus America, Inc. A four-headed microscope worth $8,000 was also awarded to science teacher Jennifer Bauer-Tibor of Wooster Middle School in Stratford, whose seventh-grade class won eight of the 14 honorable mentions. All three winners also received boxed sets of nine human biology teaching slides assembled by Yesner which included normal and abnormal pathology for several conditions.

While applauding the efforts of the winners, Morrow took a moment during his address to highlight some humorous snippets from other essays. He had to agree with the entrant who wrote, "The job of a pathologist isn't as easy to get as a part-time job at McDonald's," but heartily disagreed with the student who wrote that most pathologists "go to work 3 to 5 days a week." One student even credited pathologists for humankind's very existence, stating, "Pathologists are the reason the human race has been able to survive this long and not become extinct like some other animals which history has caught up with. Because of pathologists, history will never catch up with us."

-- By JinAh Lee

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