Dr. Alexandra Levine: Caring, Humanistic Physician
By Joan Baum, Ph.D.
Without intending it,
Dr. Alexandra Levine, Chair of the Division of Hematology
at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern
California (USC), must surely find herself her at the center
of two extremely important issues: the role of women in science,
and research into AIDS. As just about everyone knows, Dr.
Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, set off
a firestorm last month when he suggested that women may not
be as naturally gifted or as willingly disposed as men to
pursue careers in the sciences. Two weeks later the papers
were full of news about a new and especially virulent HIV
virus discovered in a patient in New York City. Both subjects
go to the heart of interests long held by Dr. Levine, a Distinguished
Professor of Medicine at USC and a specialist in lymphoma,
especially as it is found among HIV patients, particularly
women, who now represent 30% of the infected population of
the country (worldwide, it’s 50 percent).
Dr. Levine, a soft spoken woman, fluent and deliberate in
her choice of words and gentle in tone, is nothing but passionate
in her unstinting advocacy on behalf of increasing the number
of women in medicine
and on preventing the spread of AIDS. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate
from the University of California at Berkeley, she notes that
when she went to medical school at USC, only 10 percent of
her class were women; today, the percent is 52 percent. In
1967 women tended to specialize in expected areas–pediatrics,
psychiatry; now, they concentrate on surgery as well, and why
not. Long seen as health care providers, women just started
moving up. “If they could be nurses, why not doctors?”
So, Lawrence Summers
is half right and half wrong, Dr. Levine suggests. Women
do have aptitude equal to men’s, but
they often find themselves living double lives, domestic and
professional. She herself started medical school just one day
after she got married–to a fully supportive (physician)
husband, she adds. It could never have been otherwise.
Graciousness, it’s been said, is often the mark of the
truly accomplished, and Dr. Alexandra Levine manifests this
maxim. With innumerable honors and awards for her work, including
being appointed to President Clinton’s HIV/AIDS Advisory
Council and serving as Chair of the Research Committee for
the Presidential Council, not to mention being HIV/AIDS Consultant
to the Health Department of Chile, Russia, India, and China,
Dr. Levine, an extremely popular mentor to women medical students,
keeps taking on mentees and volunteering to talk to school
children about careers in medicine. Where did this urge to
be a doctor come from? She laughs quietly, she really doesn’t
know. No one in her family was involved in medicine, but at
an early age “a little voice” pushed her, and when
she was 16 and a candy striper at LA County Hospital, she knew
this was it, the “turning point.” A member of the pre-med club at Hollywood
High School, she began visiting patients and one deeply affected
her: an elderly African American who was so grateful for her
time and good ear that the memory stayed with her forever. “I
cried for hours,” she says, and she vowed then that she
would practice medicine humanely, putting the “human
aspect” at the center.
Teaching and talking, she realized, were not then, or now,
the way to get ahead, but for this much published and highly
regarded scientific investigator, caring for the body has always
meant caring for the whole patient. She is proud that USC has
encouraged that view. In fact, she says, USC has been a pioneer
in instituting human interaction courses in the medical school
curriculum and doing so in the first, critical year. Introduction
to Clinical Medicine and its second-year follow up on the human
aspects of physical diagnosis, especially on how doctors should
handle patient fears, are now 30 years old. Effective education
is critical, especially “secondary prevention concepts” addressed
to those testing positive for HIV urging the infected to discontinue
continued sexual activity, not just because it is morally reprehensible
but because, practically, it invites further infection from
another viral strain.
The good doctor is too modest in giving over the banner of
humanitarian concern to USC. She herself has been a pioneer,
pushing at a time others did not, persevering in the face of
intense criticism, for clinics, inpatient wards, and general
understanding for patients with HIV/AIDS, for needle-exchange
programs, and for educating youngsters, starting no later than
junior high school. Through it all she has never diminished her medical ministering
and scientific research, much of it on the development and
testing of a therapeutic AIDS vaccine done with Dr. Jonas Salk,
whom she refers to as her most influential mentor, a “father
figure,” and a friend, someone who came along at a low
moment in her own life (she lost both parents to cancer). He’d sometimes call her at 3 or
4 in the morning with ideas, rousing her from sleep, but getting
her to scribble post-its all around her room for their subsequent
inquiries. As for today’s youngsters, she has this advice:
believe in yourself deeply; allow yourself to take advantage
of opportunities that may open on other roads; “go for
it.”#
