While it is always difficult to leave a venture you helped create, I am happy to turn the editorial duties over to Simon Helfgott, MD, from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Simon is a very distinguished rheumatologist who is an outstanding scholar. I wish him great success and know that he will do a terrific job.
Windy City Musings
How will I conclude this final installment of the life and times of an academic rheumatologist who searches for fame, fortune, and funding (grants, of course) while traveling the high seas and flying the friendly skies?
If my recollection is correct, the last line of the final episode of Cheers was Sam Malone saying, “Have a good life,” to the departing figure of Diane Chambers as she walked up the stairs of the Boston bar made famous by its joyful but dysfunctional inhabitants. While I could end here with a similar statement, “Have a good practice” simply does not cut it. Such a finale has no pizzazz, no emotional oom-pah-pah.
Since I like to write about my travels, my hope was to describe the ACR meeting in Chicago, since there would much exciting science to recount as well as the exhilaration that always comes when the world’s rheumatologists assemble in America. Unfortunately, in journalism there are deadlines and there is no way that I could write about the meeting in time for the December issue. By circumstance, however, I was in Chicago in early October and I can at least give you my impression of the great city just before winter blasts in.
I went to Chicago for a meeting of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Arthritis, Connective Tissue, and Skin Sciences Study Section, which goes by the abbreviation of ACTS. I try to be a good citizen so, when asked by a program official in the review branch to lend a senior voice to the grants evaluation process, I had a hard time saying no. After all, the NIH has been good to me (not as good as I would have liked) and I have been the principal investigator on RO1, R21, T32, and program project grants. (What do you think I have been doing all these years, writing for GQ?) I therefore signed up for a four-year stint. I actually like reviewing grants, although two days in a dark conference room in a Holiday Inn somewhere in the great wasteland of Montgomery County is not exactly Shangri-La.
