Another time, at a demanding medical school, a senior professor made little effort to hide his skepticism. When I asked if there were any questions, he stood up and said, “What happened to academia? We are training future Nobel laureates here, not nice people.” As if the two qualities couldn’t coexist within one person. There were so many prejudices, weaknesses, and contradictions encoded into that statement, it would have taken many hours of discussion (and probably a lot of therapy) to untangle it all. The plainest, shortest response I had was, “Well, you could be training
