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 By
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., ’62
Below are remarks delivered by Dr. Fauci, director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
during the Washington Regional Campaign celebration held
at the Supreme Court on Nov. 22.
Justice Thomas, thank you for arranging for us to visit
together in “our home,” and thank you for your
years of outstanding performance in these hallowed halls.
Father McFarland has asked me to share with you, from my
own personal perspective, what effect the “Holy Cross
experience” has had on my life. The first thought that
came to my mind was that in many of life’s experiences,
we are not fully aware of the importance of the experience
at the time that we are actually going through the process.
Indeed, that certainly was the case with regard to my years
at the Cross. I sensed that something very positive was happening
during those years, but I did not imagine at all the depth
and breadth of implications that this experience would have
for me over the ensuing years.
Furthermore, as I reflect more closely, my Holy Cross experience
actually began years before I even entered the College, during
my four years of Jesuit training at Regis High School in
New York City. For the Holy Cross experience is, in reality,
the “Jesuit experience,” an experience that happens
to have taken place on a beautiful campus and in the company
of an extraordinary group of fellow students and faculty.
It is the combination of the “Jesuit experience” and
the particular environment in which that experience was realized,
that makes Holy Cross so special. And so when I speak over
the next few minutes about my Holy Cross experience, I actually
mean the experience of training according to the spirit,
the principles and the method of the Society of Jesus in
an institution that had plenty of very smart and very nice
people.
It mattered not whether our teachers and counselors were
or were not actually Jesuits themselves, as many were lay
professors, for the spirit and the environment were distinctly
Jesuit. What does that statement mean specifically to me,
and how do I carry it with me every day of my professional
and personal life?
Recognizing that there must and should be great differences
as well as great similarities among us in how we have integrated
this Holy Cross experience into our lives, I will consider
certain issues that stand out in my own mind and that I am
sure many of you have shared. Let me borrow a metaphor from
my own profession as a physician/scientist, and say that
Holy Cross is something of a laboratory, where each of us
leaves with a clone of a Jesuit deep inside of us. The degree
of expression and development of this clone varies from person
to person, but it is there in all of us because of our common
experience. Only years after graduation did I become aware
of certain characteristics or qualities of mine that I either
had, or that I was in the process of developing, that were
in fact the “Holy Cross factor” or said another
way, “the Jesuit in me.”
The examples that I will give are derived from my own experiences;
however, I know that they are generic to so many who have
shared the Holy Cross experience. I will address five issues
very briefly: 1) the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, 2)
the rule of excellence, 3) discipline, 4) intellect and spirituality,
and 5) public service and social responsibility.
First, let us talk about the thirst for knowledge and the
fact that 40 years later, I have realized that in many respects
I have never left Holy Cross, for I am a perpetual student.
I believe that I had a natural inclination for this, but
it was Holy Cross that fully nurtured it in an insidious,
but positive, way. Now there is good news and there is sobering
news with regard to being a perpetual student. The good news
is that we almost never get bored and we are constantly trying
to be productive, and hopefully improving ourselves. The
sobering news is that we will likely develop a chronic sense
of low-grade anxiety and a nagging feeling of inadequacy.
I describe this to my students and postdoctoral fellows
at the National Institutes of Health as the “curse of
the Jesuits.” This feeling, however, is not necessarily
all bad, since it can be transformed into something productive
and positive. When we realize that we never know as much
as we want to or should know, and that if we are living it
correctly, our life is a dynamic process with a steep learning
curve, we must strike a delicate balance. On the one hand,
we cannot be immobilized by this potentially overwhelming
concept. On the other hand, it should create in us a healthy,
positive and productive tension whereby we never feel completely
comfortable. It is this tension that can serve as the catalyst
to constantly improve ourselves and fulfill our God-given
potential.
Thus, for me the “curse of the Jesuits” has been
a wonderful curse since it has energized and pushed me over
the years to pursue directions of research and tackle problems
that I might not have, had I not been driven by my special
training and experiences.
Very closely related to all of this is the belief and the
practice that to strive for anything short of excellence
is entirely unacceptable. That is a concept that has Holy
Cross written all over it. That is how I run my laboratory
and how I run the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Some people
around me in Washington think that I am a bit obsessive on
this point of striving for excellence; however, I merely
brush it off as just being “the Jesuit in me.” You
have heard of the phrase “The devil made me do it.” I
just say: “The Jesuits made me do it.”
What about the question of discipline? This is one of the
most misunderstood elements of the Holy Cross experience.
To me Holy Cross discipline was not about strict rules and
lights out at certain times, or getting up to go to Mass
when it was dark and icy outside. Sure, that can toughen
you up, and I do not deny that this teaches you discipline,
order, dependability and the like. These are important lessons,
and I am glad that I have learned them. No subsequent rules
or regulations have ever fazed me after my experience at
Holy Cross. However, the lessons in discipline that I learned
at the Cross and that I carry with me today, are lessons
of intellectual and expressive discipline.
I have referred to it as “precision of thought and
economy of expression.” In other words, understand precisely
what you want to say and express it as succinctly as possible.
In this regard, I have had the honor and the privilege to
know and interact relatively frequently with the last three
Presidents of the United States of America. Jesuit training
comes in particularly handy when you have approximately five
minutes to plead with President Bush (#41) to invest even
more resources in HIV research, or four minutes to re-enforce
to President Clinton why global health should be a foreign
policy issue, or 10 minutes to explain to President Bush
(#43), (I get more time with him because I knew his father),
that smallpox is a real bioterrorism threat and that we should
rapidly restore our supplies of smallpox vaccine.
Actually, it was really quite simple. I merely imagined
that I was back at Holy Cross and a smiling, but quite serious,
Jesuit was standing over me and saying “OK, Fauci, make
it correct and complete, but make it brief.” That is
what I mean by discipline!
What about intellect and spirituality? How can you be truly
intellectual and still have a spiritual life? Come to Holy
Cross. Historically, the Jesuits have been criticized by
the less intellectual (dare I say that) of the laity or clergy
of the Catholic Church for being too intellectual. The unabashed
intellectualism of the Jesuits and hence of the atmosphere
at the Cross is the precise reason why spirituality comes
so naturally to us who trained there. Intellectuality and
spirituality are complementary, not contradictory. The answer,
as you know, is faith. You have to be around some very smart
and intellectual people for a while, who are also very spiritual,
to fully appreciate this. Holy Cross has made these two issues
seamless.
What about the concept of dedication to public service?
Clearly this is one of the most important, if not the most
important characteristic of the Holy Cross experience, and
it has had a most profound effect on me. The concept was
instilled in me by my parents, was carefully nourished in
me by my high school Jesuits in New York City, and flourished
on the Hill, where I developed a deep commitment to serve
mankind. Becoming a physician was only a part of this since
I had decided that I would enter the field of medicine even
before entering Holy Cross. How I would relate to my fellow
man professionally and the way that I would use my training
and skills was profoundly influenced by my Holy Cross experience.
Importantly, how and why I became involved in switching
the direction of my career in 1981 to begin studying a small
number of gay men who had a bizarre disease of unknown etiology—at
a time that few researchers showed any interest, since this
was a seemingly rare disease in a marginalized segment of
society—was very much a reflection of the “Jesuit
in me.” I wanted to get involved in important social
issues without relinquishing the hard science and clinical
medicine that was so much a part of me.
Health professionals often find themselves swept into a
variety of cultural, behavioral, ethical and social issues.
And nothing crystallizes social issues more than does health,
either individual or public health. Indeed, allow me to borrow
a metaphor that arose in a conversation I had 15 years ago
with Admiral James Watkins, former chief of Naval Operations
and subsequently chairman of the Presidential Commission
on the HIV epidemic, during the Reagan Administration. He
opined that the AIDS epidemic had created the opportunity
to view contemporary society through the lens of the human
immunodeficiency virus and had brought into sharp focus many
weaknesses and faults in our society.
The epidemic had brought to the forefront difficult questions
regarding issues of public health and civil liberties, and
it highlighted painful truths about drug abuse, discrimination,
poverty and despair. That was 15 years ago in this country.
Now that our attention has been directed to HIV/AIDS in the
developing world, and we are struggling with how to address
its enormity, we are shocked at conditions in those countries
that should have gained our attention decades ago.
Indeed, the AIDS epidemic, as tragic and horrific as it
was and is, has provided me with an opportunity to practice
my profession as a physician/scientist at the same time as
it has unleashed completely the Holy Cross Jesuit in me,
for the social responsibility is as great as are the medical
and scientific responsibilities. And as such, I have had
to deal with not only the environment of medical wards, but
with the culture of gay bathhouses and heroin shooting galleries.
This is what Holy Cross has prepared me for, and that is
why there was never a question that I would follow this road.
I cannot leave this subject without emphasizing that I have
given here a very personal example of how Holy Cross nurtured
my sense of public service and social responsibility. However,
it is very clear that one need not have entered a profession
that is officially one of public service to exercise one’s
social responsibilities. My job description happens to be
one of public servant since I am a federal employee. However,
I am merely one in the ranks of thousands of Crusaders in
this room and throughout the world who are living the tradition
of St. Ignatius Loyola, and I feel proud to be in your ranks.
Finally, it is clear that the future graduates of Holy Cross
will be facing a world beset with seemingly unsolvable problems.
One only needs to glance at any newspaper: The Middle East
crisis; abject poverty throughout a good part of the world
at a time of corporate greed among many at home; seemingly
insurmountable problems with public health in developing
nations plagued with HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis;
the threat of future terrorist attacks from a culture that
we barely understand; and on and on. Can and will future
Holy Cross men and women accept the challenge and continue
the tradition of St. Ignatius Loyola?
Let me try to answer that question by reflecting on someone
who was not, but should have been, a Holy Cross graduate.
This past February, one of my heroes of government service
passed away at the age of 90. He was John W. Gardner, who
was appointed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson to serve
as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare—now the Department of Health and Human Services—and
who later went on to play a founding or sustaining role in
one vital civic organization after another: first the Urban
League, then Common Cause, and then Independent Sector.
When confronted with the many seemingly insurmountable deficiencies
in our society as he took the helm of his department, he
chose leadership rather than despair. He issued a wonderful
quote at the time: “What we have before us are some
breathtaking opportunities that are disguised as insoluble
problems.” I have no doubt that the future generations
of Holy Cross men and women will seize these breathtaking
opportunities.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here with
you tonight and God bless you all.
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