As I leave the Corps after over 36 years of service, I asked for the opportunity to give some personal thoughts and experiences as I move from the Corps into civilian life. My active duty is ending at a time when a new transformed life for the Commissioned Corps is emerging—a life in which my cohort of officers and I have hopefully contributed to create and maintain a useful and meaningful career system that is devoted to public service both for today and for future generations.

I stumbled onto the Commissioned Corps and the NIH in the summer of 1969 because of a passion and personal interest in research, an interest that went back to the days of high school science fairs and continued through college and medical school. It was this interest that moved me out of Missouri to Germany where I earned the nickname der Forscher (the researcher) and ultimately on to my research career at the NIH in the Commissioned Corps! As a graduate of Washington University Medical School, I applied for the CORD (Commissioned Officer Residency Deferment) program based on the casual suggestion of a classmate, and in July 1971, I joined the Corps. I did not understand the significance of being in a uniformed service—the USPHS Commissioned Corps—at the time but I wanted to be at the NIH because of its research. At the NIH, my interests in public service and research converged and drastically changed my life.

As I write this 36 years later, after a full career in the Corps, my own story is complex but hopefully sufficiently informative to warrant its telling. The excitement of infectious diseases research kept me at the NIH and in the Corps without any breaks in service. We understood that we were part of the Corps but did not match what today’s “transformed Corps” entails, namely, we were not uniformed or trained as we would be today, nor were we expected to deploy. Nevertheless, for me the public health importance of our pioneering work in diarrheal disease research conducted at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sustained my commitment to the lab for over 12 years until I transferred into a research administration billet in the Office of the NIH Director.

A few years later, presumably as a result of my research and research administration experience, I was invited by then Surgeon General Koop to a small, seemingly clandestine, meeting of selected senior NIH officers in April 1987, to discuss “revitalization” of the Commissioned Corps. We discussed his vision for the Corps and its appearance and roles; keep in mind, this was over 20 years ago! Shortly after my meeting with Dr. Koop, I was appointed as NIH Representative to the Office of the Surgeon General. That is where my personal transformation into an officer began.

My circle of Corps contacts grew as I worked closely with officers from all other agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, Food and Drug Administration, Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (now merged with NIH), and many others. Over the years, I participated in joint efforts that included creating the Research Officer Group; recommending policy changes regarding promotion, retirement, etc.; and engaging in strategic visioning. My fellow officers became colleagues, and I saw the mutual benefit of interacting with officers and constituents beyond NIH. I also came to recognize that although we all did excellent work in our agencies, there was value in these interagency interactions with fellow officers in meeting our public health responsibilities. Much later, I came to appreciate the importance of these collegial bonds as we enjoyed—and struggled—to work and pull together over issues like transformation. To wear the uniform daily became, for me, a natural outgrowth of recognizing and assimilating the value of the Corps into my thinking.

We as officers, however, do not exist in a vacuum, since our support is appropriately provided at the discretion of public health entities that hire officers. I recognized early on the fragile nature of the relationship between the Corps and HHS agencies, and I believe that the value of the Corps must be placed in the context of balancing an officer’s time between meeting our public health mission and the added responsibilities of emergency preparedness and response. The challenge for new leadership in the Corps today, in my view, is to enhance skillfully the synergistic and growing relationships between Corps and agencies to meet this dual mission.

Moving transformation forward will continue to require negotiation, accommodation, compromise, exceptions, flexibility, as well as resolve—features of most enduring and successful institutions—but I believe the Corps has been sufficiently transformed to meet this challenge. My care and affection for the Corps evolved over many years; it was a long, circuitous process to arrive at my present understanding of the value of the Corps. The recollection of valuable interactions with officers of all ranks and career stages—bonded together—motivates my desire to see a vibrant, transformed Corps for the future. We now, at last, understand better who we are as public servants, as commissioned officers and health professionals, but most of all, we know we know we serve to “protect, promote, and advance the health and safety of the Nation.”

September. 17, 2007