The 1960’s and early 70’s were an exciting time for young clinical investigators. New information to help us understand clinical problems was pouring out of biochemistry and physiology laboratories. We trained in those labs and usually had a publication or two or more when we assumed our first position as Assistant Professor–usually of Medicine. A job was easy to find since new medical schools of high quality were being founded and others were expanding their research base. A grant from the expanding NIH soon followed without much problem. The AFCR (the Squirts) was expanding and providing a larger portion of our Atlantic City spring research programs with our more senior colleagues in the Turks and Old Turks. Our labs were more individual than program project in nature. The AFCR was the largest and most representative organization of clinical researchers in the world. To serve as one of its officers and President was an honor and obligation unimagined for a faculty member aged forty two or younger. It was hard for the officers of the Turks and Old Turks to keep us in our place in planning, but they were our bosses when we got home.
It also was a time when we were first beginning to look at the design and function of our delivery systems from a data-driven or experimental point of view. It was the AFCR which first recognized this and added a Health Care Research scientific session. I was the first President who selected a paper from this section for the President’s Plenary Session of the national meeting because, though basically a biochemist, I sensed the importance of these disciplines for the future of our profession. It helped that the author was David Sackett, then a young pioneer and now an international guru, and a college buddy of mine from Lawrence University in Wisconsin.