From the Office of the President

Dear Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Family and Friends:

We are fortunate to be able to carry out our mission of educating the next generation of health care professionals, conducting ground-breaking research, and providing quality care to our patients in West Texas. The efforts of the entire staff of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center contribute to this endeavor, and I am proud to be associated with this quality team.

For more than three decades, we have been living this mission in West Texas. However, throughout the next decade, research will be the hallmark of this university while we maintain our recognized strengths in teaching and clinical care. Research is the key element in making certain that we teach the caregivers of the future in a way that equips them for the new era of curative medicine.

As the life sciences have evolved with the ascendancy of molecular biology and the intersection of the mapped human genome with information technology – leading us to a meaningful early understanding of functional genomics, we now can perceive an analogous transformation of clinical care – analogous to the change from descriptive to the mechanistic in biology. We are, in the clinical arena, poised for a major change – from the palliative to the truly curative.

As scientists and caregivers, we must always try to remember that society gives us very special privileges. They trust us with their privacy and confidences; they entrust to us their most personal concerns and their very bodies. We must always be grateful to our patients and remember that, in ways that are not comparable to any other walk of life, we serve other people. We are not lawmakers, politicians, priests, rabbis, police, judges or jurors; in fact, we must never be judgmental.

We are privileged to serve our patients through our research and our clinical efforts to do only two things: to relieve suffering and to prolong functional life. We strive to remember these two simple and profound limitations. If we do not act outside them, we will be inestimably valuable to others. Our gratification will be incomparable.

While uniquely significant, our relationship with the society and the individuals we serve should, at the same time, reflect the love and respect we have for our own families.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy spoke of his slain brother at the national convention in 1964 in simple terms that reflect the sentiments I believe we should all feel toward the patients we serve. The senator said of his brother, “When there were periods of crisis, you stood beside him. When there were periods of happiness, you laughed with him. And, when there were periods of sorrow, you comforted him.” Thus it is with our patients, as it is with our families.

This great research university is constituted of faculty, staff and students; it is faculty, staff and students. We pledge to make it all that it can be.

Sincerely,

John C. Baldwin, M.D.

President