As a high-schooler, he rebuilt a hospital’s discarded X-ray machine to learn the science of crystallography using the principles of Bragg diffraction.
As a cardiac surgeon, he switched specialties to become a radiologist with special interest in advancing the state of the art in CT, MRI and diagnostic ultrasound.
As radiologist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he catapulted to president of Johns Hopkins University. He held that job for 13 years and then presided over the Salk Institute for six.
The list of appointments and accomplishments in the curriculum vitae of William Ralph Brody, MD, PhD, goes on and on. (Suffice it to say that his other noteworthy titles include medtech entrepreneur, commercial pilot and flight instructor.)
And he’s not done building yet. In fact, Radiology Business caught up with Dr. Brody soon after he accepted an advisory role with the San Francisco startup Sirona Medical. In our conversation he looked back, ahead and right where radiology stands today. Here are excerpts.
Radiology Business: It’s been said that, as the years go by, we only faintly recall specific projects we worked on; what we remember most vividly are the people we worked with. That said, you’ve had an up-close and personal connection to more than a few technologies that have changed medical imaging.
William Brody, MD, PhD: It’s been amazing to see technologies develop from ideas to novel products to established product categories. But who knows? Maybe 30 or 40 years from now people will say, “Photon counting CT—no big deal.” Or “Lung cancer AI—yawn!” [Laughs.] Something else may have come along to obviate the need for some of this stuff. There’s no predicting the future, which is a great thing.
And I would call myself a cantankerous contrarian. I’ve tended to look elsewhere whenever people were predicting this or that exciting technology would be the next big thing. For that reason, I guess, I’ve kind of stayed away from artificial intelligence. I took my first AI course in 1965 at MIT with [computer scientist] Marvin Minsky (1927-2016). And AI didn’t do much for 30 or 40 years, but now it looks pretty exciting. It really does.
Do you have any thoughts to share on point-of-care ultrasound as an emerging technology that’s kind of rocking medicine on a broad scale? Everyone seems to have it. And it’s a technology whose main challenge is a very human one: turf battles. Who owns POCUS? Radiology feels it should, but how in the world would radiology rein it in now?
Well I’m not going to comment on turf wars. Turf wars have gone on for years, and to me it’s about expertise. Whoever has the expertise—whomever is trained and qualified—is the one to take the lead. You know, in the broader world it’s an unregulated business. Inside academia there is an arbiter: The dean of the medical school can say yay or nay to this department or that. But in practice it can be the wild, wild west.
So too with medical photography and videos. You’ve got dermatology, ophthalmology, wound care—the unfolding umbrella of enterprise imaging, if you will.
Yes. There are also AI technologies to make medical imaging easier on the scanning and interpreting ends, both. My fear there would be equipping unqualified or barely qualified people to perform clinical duties that they wouldn’t even have attempted in the past. That’s something that will need to be watched.
As you look back over your career, how satisfied are you that you made the right move when you transferred from cardiac surgery to radiology in the early 1970s?
I’m sure I made the right move for me. About 20 years after I switched over to radiology, early- to mid-’90s, I was invited to give a talk to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Afterwards many of the people I knew from my days in cardiac surgery came up to me and said, “Bill, you know, we thought you were nuts to drop out of cardiac surgery. And now we realize we should have dropped out too.” [Laughs.]
But now, of course, cardiac surgery has become very interesting in its own right. The kinds of things that have happened there in recent years are extraordinary—reconstructing the mitral valve, transcatheter aortic valve replacement. But yes, I still feel that moving to radiology was the right thing to do for me. I have no regrets about it at all.
To the outside observer, your time as president of Johns Hopkins University would seem to be the pinnacle of your professional life. You left that post in 2009. What of that 13-year experience have you brought with you to each subsequent role you’ve held?
Well, the thing I loved most about being president of Hopkins was interacting with the students on a large scale. I mean, I love interacting with radiology residents and medical students, but I had a bigger opportunity. I still teach an undergraduate course at Hopkins called, kind of tongue-in-cheek, “Uncommon Sense: Everything You Need to Know about Life that Hopkins Won’t Teach You.” As university president I learned a lot about the world outside of radiology and outside of medicine. When you concentrate on a particular area of research and education to develop expertise, you kind of have blinders on. You can miss what’s happening in the broader picture.
Bring us up to date on what you’re doing right now. We know you’re joining Sirona Medical, so tell us about that and what else you’re excited about in 2023.
One of the things I really love to do is mentor people. I have a number of people whom I mentor informally. And Cameron Andrews, the founder and CEO of Sirona, is somebody I mentored starting when he was in high school. So I joined Sirona in part because of Cameron. He’s a great young man with a lot of great ideas.
What else do you have going right now?
Well, I’m trying to retire, but I keep flunking at that. I’m involved with Radiology Partners. And I’m advising some people who may end up doing something very interesting, whether that’s in radiology or in a field far apart from medicine. That’s what I look for because I really don’t want to have a job anymore. I just want to help people find their way or make a way.
What is the common denominator among the people you mentor?
They’re all different. Many of them once worked for me in one form or another. The retiring CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York worked for me at Johns Hopkins University as the dean of arts and sciences. He went on to be president of two universities. The current governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, is somebody I mentored when he was just graduating from Johns Hopkins. I take great pride in that.
Mentoring is just a wonderful opportunity. When somebody wins an award or gets a promotion or invents something, I can take pride. I hopefully contributed to that in some small way.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.