Chairman of the Department of Medicine, California Pacific Medical Center Pacific Campus
Clinical Associate Professor; University of California, San Francisco, Medical School
Keith Marton, a general internist, has been the Chairman of the Department of Medicine since 1988. He is also a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.
A native of Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Marton received his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Stanford. He graduated from Stanford Medical School in 1970, then completed two years of post-graduate training at Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.
Beginning in 1972, Dr. Marton spent two years as an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control, working primarily at the Los Angeles County Health Department specializing in infectious diseases. In 1974, he returned to Stanford as a senior resident in medicine. He then became chief resident and a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholars program developing skills in clinical decision making, health economics and health policy issues.
From 1977 until 1984, Dr. Marton was an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of General Medicine at Standard while directing the house-staff teaching program at the Palo Alto VA and serving as that hospital's assistant chief of medicine. In 1984 he established the Division of General Medicine at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, administering the department for four years. While in Boston, Dr. Marton was also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Although he is a general internist in his clinical activities, Marton's research and professional skills are primarily focused in the areas of risk assessment and cost-effective decision making. His research interests are centered on the assessment of heath technology, the psychology of decision making and the cost- effective use of medical resources and have resulted in many articles on decision making in medicine and the co-authoring of a book about clinical decision making.
One of my patients, the intelligent wife of a minister, once asked me how I could dedicate my life to helping children, then turn around and make "alcohol."
I couldn't help but remind her that Jesus performed his first miracle by transforming seven stone cisterns of water into wine. His mother actually urged him to do it, since there was no wine to properly celebrate the wedding in Cana (John 2).
I next blurted out that wine is much more than just alcohol, and in fact, both the medical and the clerical paths have been intertwined with wine through the ages. Wine was part of human civilization long before any of the world's modern religions were organized.
I spent six months studying in Florence when I was 19, and it was there that I encountered wine as a matter-of-fact, pleasant, unpretentious part of the evening meal. It wasn't a "score" that I had to make with a fake ID in a liquor store. It wasn't a sexual thrill, and it wasn't a macho overture. It was supper.
I had a Fiat 600 sedan (that's 600 cc engine displacement, smaller than most respectable contemporary motorcycles), and I had a map of Tuscany that had a scale of 1 cm representing 1 km on the ground. I found the roads marked with dotted lines and followed them until they stopped. At the end of each of these roads, I found someone making wine.
Those Tuscan families introduced me to the open, gentle customs of winemaking, to a sense of history in the soil, to a sense of respect among the generations, to sharing with strangers.
I returned to college, and based upon my exposure to the "humanities" in Italy, switched my major from metallurgical engineering to medicine. Some of my medical school classmates were clearly destined for research careers, academic fame, and a few for fortune, but there were a memorable core who took the spirit of the 1960s to their hearts: "Do something real for people." I wanted to be one of them.
I became involved with a farmworkers organization in the San Joaquin Valley and helped to establish a free clinic for migrant workers. While hitchhiking three times a week from Palo Alto to Merced County, I rapidly discovered that the "establishment" shared many of the same health care concerns. I also learned there's no such thing as "free." The free clinic took on a bolder mission.
One of my enduring proud memories was the opening of the Livingston Community Health Center, a clinic owned and serving this entire diverse and energetic community. It recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.
As I churned through medical school and pediatric residency, I also discovered that the world had some wines that far surpassed the ones I could afford. A friend of mine worked at Ridge Vineyards, and he introduced me to the big Ridge Zinfandels of the 1960s. That proved to be a quality standard I've pursued ever since.
Once in private practice in a small rural community, I saw a tremendous pride and energy among people who worked the earth. I also saw a small hospital that had great room -- and a certain urgency -- to grow in pediatric services. I founded the first intensive care nursery in the Monterey Bay area, and also launched one of the first hospital-based lactation centers in Northern California. In 1985 I published a book on children's medications entitled Little Ills and Bitter Pills.
I also could finally afford bottles with corks. After a few years of visiting wineries and learning how to taste wine, I wanted to do it myself. I guess I'd rather be a wine player than a wine Spectator.
Starting as a home winemaker, with some timely guidance from Jeff Baker (now winemaker at Carmenet), I rapidly began to appreciate the challenge of doing it right. For about ten years, I took as many courses in winemaking at University of California, Davis Extension courses and Napa Valley centers as I did in continuing pediatric education. The home wines did very well in competitions, but the quest for better quality grapes, new French oak barrels, and better tools began to consume a great deal of time and money. It wasn't a hobby any more. I received a great deal of encouragement, and with a gulp, I opened Salamandre Wine Cellars as a commercial, bonded winery in 1985.
The grape harvest has put smiles on people's faces and aches in people's backs since the pre-history of the Mediterranean. At the end of the day in October, I'll be sitting on a stack of dirty lug boxes, hairs all stuck together with must, T shirt stiff and dirty, grinning like a kid at some large circular container full of crushed purple grapes. At the same time, some guy and his wife are sitting on a stack of boxes in Portugal and Italy and France and Greece and Russia with the same grin. In wine there is a unity among people that transcends politics and language, and it goes back in time long before even democracy was invented.
In the early 1980s, I began collecting medical information about wine, and I was amused that there was actually a legitimate body of science on the subject. It made entertaining coffee-table conversation.
The politicization of alcohol issues, using health claims as a central focus, removed wine and health from the coffee table and thrust it into the media battlefield. I became first annoyed ... and then outraged by the self-righteous distortion of balance by national agencies charged with public health.
I dug into the scientific literature in earnest. I've written for several trade journals, and serve as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Wine Institute of California.
I've been amused by comments I overhear when I talk to medical and winemaking audiences. The winemakers seem to say, "Here's another dilettante doctor tax-dodger getting into the wine business." The doctors say politely, "Well, how can you be objective since you're making all that money in the wine business?"
To winemakers, I say that Salamandre Wine Cellars produces about 2,000 cases of wine a year; you might say Tuscan hillside dimensions. That comes from around 30 tons of grapes, practically all of which I've personally lifted three or four times before turning it into juice I can pump. Two thousand cases is a tiny amount compared to most Napa Valley wineries, and a mere speck of mist in the eyes of the very largest. But that 2,000 cases of product weighs 40 tons, and that's a lot of boxes to shuffle without a fork-lift.
For the doctors, I have to remind them that I didn't choose pediatrics for its investment potential. If small winery economics were ever to distort my objectivity, it would probably be to provoke a woozy headshake about my financial foolhardiness.
After seven years of a backbreaking, sweaty, gritty labor of love, Salamandre finally broke even in 1991. Maybe the winery will eventually subsidize the college educations of my daughters. Hardly the sort of money that makes a man sell out his scruples. Personally, I'm holding out for a lot more money before I let anybody get their hands on my scruples.
Science speaks clearly and I gain nothing by twisting it. Jiminy Cricket told Pinochio, "When in doubt, tell the truth." That's good advice; I wish the government would try it.
Author:
Almost Scientist, Accidental Journalist
Lewis Perdue almost became a scientist, but wound up a journalist instead -- mostly by accident and economic necessity.
Perdue started his college education in electrical engineering, working in the summers as a technician for Westinghouse Electric where he worked on a variety of projects including building instrumentation for space satellites, calibrating instruments used in nuclear reactors and wiring circuits used in lab equipment.
He gradually changed his interest to physics and then biophysics. As a biology/physics major at Cornell University, Perdue supported himself financially by working as a reporter for the local Gannett chain newspaper, The Ithaca Journal, and by selling freelance magazine articles.
Perdue had earlier gotten an A.S. degree in math and science from Corning College (becoming the first student in the college's history to graduate with a perfect 4.0 grade point average) while working as a reporter for another Gannett newspaper, The Elmira Star-Gazette.
By the end of his junior year at Cornell (and lacking only three courses for his major) Perdue decided that being a journalist was more rewarding than being a scientist. While it took a number of special petitions to academic committees, he was eventually allowed to convert his science courses into electives and take all of his major subjects in the two semesters of his senior year. He graduated first in his major with a 3.5. in Communications in 1972.
Since then, Perdue has worked as a Washington correspondent investigative reporter, business journalist, Congressional news secretary, computer marketing consultant and computer industry reporter. Along the way, he also managed to write 13 books in addition to this one.
Following his graduation from Cornell, Perdue worked full-time for the Ithaca Journal, taught magazine writing at Cornell and then took a job with Mississippi Gov. Bill Waller. Waller was famous for his earlier work as the district attorney who prosecuted the assassin of civil rights advocate Medgar Evers despite death threats and pressure from the state's segregationist-controlled Democratic Party.
Earlier, in 1967, Perdue was kicked out of the University of Mississippi for leading a demonstration. The incident was somewhat embarrassing for the family since Perdue's great- grandfather had once been chancellor at Ole Miss; his grandfather had been a chemistry professor there and his father worked for the governor at the time. An even earlier relative, great-great- grandfather James Z. George was a U.S. Senator, chief justice of the state Supreme Court, author of the state's post-Civil-War constitution and the creator of Jim Crow Segregation embodying in the constitution the literacy test and the poll tax.
Four years after being expelled from Ole Miss, Perdue wrote a seminal (and widely reprinted) piece on "The New South" for The Nation, theorizing why he and some others of his generation had rejected the racist culture that had nurtured them.
The work for Waller thrust Perdue into the public eye and into a hotbed of political intrigue. Perdue later went to Washington D.C. to work as news secretary to moderate Congressman Thad Cochran, and later to help manage and consult for campaigns for liberal Republican candidates for Congress, a task he describes as "more frustrating than waiting for Godot."
Frustrated with politics, Perdue returned to journalism. His most prominent investigative reporting experience came in 1977 when, as a freelance journalist, he helped break the Koreagate Congressional bribery scandal. During that time, his freelance articles were printed in The Washington Pos, Jack Anderson's column, Washington Monthly, and wrote a weekly column for the Washington bureau of Gannett News Service.
In addition to his work on Koreagate, Perdue wrote the first articles on Congressional misuse of perks, sex discrimination on Congressional staffs and even about an illegal gambling ring for Congressmen and their staffs which operated with the knowledge of the Capitol Police Force.
Following his freelance work, Perdue served as a correspondent covering the White House, Congress and Supreme Court for Dow Jones/Ottaway Newspapers and for States News Service.
It was as a reporter in the nation's capital that Perdue realized that members of the U.S. government had institutionalized the act of lying to each other and to the country's citizens. Like parts of this book, many of Perdue's articles documented the ways that bureaucrats and public officials lie to protect their turf and to advance the hidden agendas that frequently diverged from the public interest.
Of particular interest to him was the ways in which government distorted and misused scientific data. His scientific education gave him the background -- unusual among journalists -- to understand when and how data were being twisted for ulterior motives.
Finally, in early 1979 -- disgusted beyond tolerance for politics -- Perdue went to Los Angeles where he taught journalism at UCLA and also served as advisor to the student daily newspaper there. During this time, he served as the editorial page editor of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook where his work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Already the author of two books by this time, Perdue began writing in earnest with two bestsellers (The Delphi Betrayal, 1981 and Queensgate Reckoning, 1982, Pinnacle Books.)
He also continued his freelance work, writing for the Los Angeles Times, California Magazine, California Business Magazine and others. His life took an abrupt turn in 1984 when UCLA abolished the journalism department because the university administration felt it was too "trade-school-like" and not sufficiently academic. On the heels of this setback, the publisher of Perdue's bestsellers went bankrupt in 1984 (still owing Perdue most of his royalties). Perdue quickly put his technical and writing education to work for several films which provided marketing and public relations services to computer firms.
Perdue eventually started his own consulting firm, sold it in 1990 and moved to Sonoma, Calif. in the fall of 1990.
Along the way, Perdue found time to conduct technical product reviews and write for PC World, Info World, Publish, Computer Currents and other computer magazines. He also wrote the first book on how to upgrade IBM PCs.
In February 1991, he founded Wine Business Insider, a fortnightly newsletter covering the management, finance, regulatory, marketing and other business aspects of the wine industry. Wine Business Insider is now the largest circulation trade newsletter in the American wine industry.
In addition to the Insider, Perdue regularly writes for the San Francisco Chronicle.