Robert Whitfield MD trained in general, plastic, and oncologic reconstructive surgery, where he frequently managed foreign-body complications. He notes the Human Genome Project was incomplete during his medical school, so functional genomics wasn't taught. He connects patient recovery differences to underlying biological factors shaped by evolving science.
I think, for everybody listening who doesn't know anything about my career. I did six years of general surgery, two years of plastic surgery, a year of oncologic reconstructive surgery. And I helped every surgeon who operates, who puts in a foreign body at one time or another in my career, help take care of a problem created by or an extrusion of a foreign body. And that's just the nature of doing that kind of work. And mostly the work that that I did was with respect to cancer reconstruction. But all those things have reactivity. And looking back throughout my career, why patients would have different intervals of, we'll just say recovery. We were not taught in school about functional genomics. In fact, the genome project wasn't even complete when I was in medical school. It was like a big idea, so to speak, pipe dream at that point.
