Seldin receives national and state honors
By Deborah Wormser
Two esteemed medical organizations have honored Dr. Donald W. Seldin, Professor and Chairman Emeritus of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, for his illustrious career in medical education.
In April, the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), one of the nation’s oldest medical honor societies, announced the creation of the Donald Seldin-Holly Smith Pioneering Research Award. The honor, established to support young physician-scientists at the early stages of their careers, was announced during the ASCI/Association of American Physicians (AAP) joint annual meeting in Chicago. Physician-scientists work to translate research findings into clinical advances.
In May, the Texas Medical Association (TMA) bestowed its highest honor – the 2015 Texas Medical Association Distinguished Service Award – on Dr. Seldin in recognition of his career, now in its seventh decade.
Expressing his gratitude for the ASCI honor, Dr. Seldin turned the spotlight back onto UT Southwestern, the institution to which he has devoted most of his career and the one where he was empowered to build the Department of Internal Medicine from a one-man enterprise to a large and vibrant entity in an academic medical center that now boasts six Nobel laureates, 23 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and a host of other distinctions.
“I am very moved to be named with Dr. Holly Smith for this permanent award. It recognizes the key role of medical science in the mitigation of human disease,” Dr. Seldin said. “The celebration associated with the establishment of this award represents, in high degree, the commitment of a major national medical institution (UT Southwestern) to the advancement of medical science.”
Dr. Helen Hobbs, Director of the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth & Development and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UT Southwestern, hosted a recent reception and dinner on campus for donors to the ASCI award. Guests included luminaries of medicine from across the nation, including Nobel Laureates, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and other outstanding physician-scientists, many of whom had been mentored by Dr. Seldin.
The ASCI award also honors, Dr. Lloyd H. “Holly” Smith, Jr., the former Chairman of Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Seldin received the TMA recognition on May 2 during the group’s annual conference in Austin. In the TMA’s award announcement, Dr. Dan L. Locker, Chair of TMA’s Board of Councilors, noted that during Dr. Seldin’s tenure as Chairman of Internal Medicine from 1952 to 1988, “Dr. Seldin built one of the three or four strongest departments of medicine in the world.”
The TMA’s announcement went on to note some “Seldin-isms” familiar to many of the thousands of medical students he taught or mentored since coming from Yale University to UT Southwestern, then called Southwestern Medical School, in 1951. “Treat all patients with respect and dignity and with equal value.” “Good care is not good enough. It must be great care.”
At 94, Dr. Seldin still routinely works at his UT Southwestern office and continues to teach and write. A major figure in the emergence of nephrology as a discipline, Dr. Seldin is founder of the American Society of Nephrology, one of seven learned societies around the world to which his peers have elected him president. He also holds six honorary doctorates, including one from Yale and one from the Université de Paris VI, Pierre et Marie Curie.
The TMA is the largest state medical society in the nation, representing more than 48,000 physicians and medical student members. The ASCI includes more than 3,000 members representing all medical specialties.
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Dr. Hobbs holds the Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair for the Study of Human Growth and Development, the Philip O’Bryan Montgomery Jr., M.D., Distinguished Chair in Developmental Biology, and the (1995) Dallas Heart Ball Chair in Cardiology Research.
Dr. Seldin, a UT System Professor of Internal Medicine, holds the William Buchanan Chair in Internal Medicine.
