Winter 2001 Issue
Two EIS Alumni Help Make the EIS 50th an All-Out Success
It has been more than 30 years since Gary R. Noble, M.D., EIS ‘65, and Thomas M. Vernon, M.D., EIS ‘66, served in the EIS - yet their ties to the program remain strong. As co-chairs of the New York host committee for the January 11 EIS 50th celebration in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, Noble and Vernon, along with the other committee members, helped attract broad support for and participation in this milestone event for CDC and EIS. Their dedicated efforts over the months leading up to the event helped make the evening a grand success, raising more than a half-million dollars for the EIS program.
Vernon and Noble’s commitment to public health extends well beyond their participation in this event. With careers spanning, arguably, the four most active decades in public health, both Vernon and Noble are exceptionally qualified to help bridge the gap between CDC and the private sector to address public health issues.
From Swine Flu to HIV
What Gary Noble remembers about the summer of 1976 is not fireworks, tall ships and celebrations of the nation’s bicentennial. For Noble, who was then head of CDC’s influenza lab, it was the year of Legionnaires’ disease and swine flu - a mysterious outbreak and a new flu strain within a few months of one another.
In the early spring, a scientist at a New Jersey state lab called Noble after a 19-year-old recruit at Fort Dix died with a flu-like illness the lab could not type. Initial efforts to identify the strain with the usual methods were not successful.
“I somewhat jokingly said, ‘Why don’t you check it for swine flu?’ because we had actually found evidence of infection in farmers in Wisconsin,” Noble recalls. To everyone’s surprise, the isolate was identified as swine flu.
From there, CDC began working on a vaccination plan. But Noble was soon called to a meeting about an outbreak of disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. All the typical bacterial cultures turned up nothing, as did the lab’s attempts to grow viral cultures.
“For weeks, the influenza staff was spending a huge amount of time logging samples - filling freezers with everything from party favors to air conditioning filters,” Noble says. The search moved on to parasites and chemical toxins before Joe McDade, Ph.D., at CDC identified Legionella, the bacterium that causes Legionnaires’ disease.
Noble retired from CDC in 1994 after almost 30 years at the agency. Now he is vice president of medical and public health affairs for Johnson & Johnson. There he consults with Johnson & Johnson companies and works with external groups such as the American Medical Association. As chair of the American Academy of Pharmaceutical Medicine’s ethics committee, he weighs in on delicate issues such as the use of placebos and the economics of medical trials.
He sees his position at Johnson & Johnson as a fitting conclusion to a career that began with EIS assignments at an Omaha home for boys and an Eskimo village in Alaska and spanned intensive work on the AIDS epidemic. Noble chaired the first International Conference on AIDS in 1985, was U.S. Public Health Service AIDS coordinator from 1986 to 1987, and directed CDC’s AIDS program from 1987 to 1992, a time of intense activity.
The Road less Traveled
Like many other young physicians who planned to go into private practice, Thomas Vernon encountered a change of heart in the EIS program. His EIS assignment, first in the Bacterial Diseases Division in Atlanta with Dr. Eugene Gangarosa and then in the malaria eradication program in Nepal, made a lasting impact. “It was an eye-opening and extremely rewarding experience as a person and a doctor. It was remarkable in every respect: cultural, social, health care,” he says.
So remarkable, in fact, that it transformed the way he looked at medicine, broadening his perspective from the individual to the community and giving him a new vision of the world population’s health needs. And it transformed his career.
“It’s a different world view to be an epidemiologist with CDC,” he says. “I saw that I wanted to be not the internist I had set out to be, but in fact, a public health doc.”
Vernon joined the Colorado Health Department as state epidemiologist in 1972 and was named executive director of the department in 1983. In the 1980s, he says he was known for the unpopular decision to make HIV tests reportable, which brought him criticism from activists. He now sees that decision as an example of how implementing good public health policy must be tempered by current social and cultural concerns.
“Surveillance systems have been the bedrock of our efforts to control disease,” he says. “This is one of our many outstanding legacies from EIS founder Dr. Alex Langmuir. But the fact is that the social and cultural issues surrounding HIV were, and are, different from anything we have seen before.”
Vernon has remained a public health doctor at heart, he says, bringing this perspective to his current position as vice president for policy, public health and medical affairs for Merck & Company, Inc.’s, Vaccine Division. He is a liaison with CDC’s National Immunization Program and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and works on issues such as communicating the safety of vaccines to the public. He is involved in the ongoing vigil to make vaccines even safer. “Nothing is closer to the heart of public health than immunization,” Vernon says.
One issue close to his own heart is his work to strengthen state requirements for children to have immunizations to attend school. These policies, he says, are probably the most important factors in achieving the high immunization rates that are now protecting U.S. children from the dangerous diseases that can be prevented with vaccines.
- Beth Day