Medical school alumnus J. McLeod “Mac” Griffiss, MD ’66, will speak about the impact of the Yale System on students of his era and on his own career as part of the Alumni Grand Rounds series sponsored by the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs. His talk, “You're Not Who You Were and What You Know Isn't True: Tales from a Curious Life,” will take place on Tuesday, March 21, at 6 p.m. in the Beaumont Room, Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven.
“When I was a Yale medical student in the 1960s, we were not expected to memorize the known but to be curious about the unknown,” Griffiss says. An infectious disease researcher and member of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), faculty for more than 30 years, Griffiss says that Yale gave him a foundation for assimilating new information and a facility for exploring new realms of knowledge.
He credits the school’s educational model, the Yale System, for allowing him to pivot and refocus throughout his career, and for encouraging him to follow his curiosity for a lifetime.
Griffiss is a professor of Laboratory Medicine and Medicine at UCSF, where he served as chief of immunochemistry from 1993 until 2015. A retired colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, he left active practice as a specialist in infectious diseases at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (VAMC) in 2015.
At 76, he remains active in research, serving as principal investigator for two NIH-funded clinical trial programs evaluating anti-infective agents as well as diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. A current trial involves a new oral antibiotic for gonococcal infections. Griffiss has published 185 peer reviewed articles, chapters, and reviews. He is a reviewer on the NIH Special Emphasis Panel on Non-HIV Infectious Agent Detection/Diagnostics, Food Safety, Sterilization/Disinfection and Bioremediation.
A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., Griffiss is descended from Joseph Johnston, a Revolutionary War soldier who served as a courier for George Washington. Griffiss graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1962 with Honors in English. At Yale, he conducted his thesis research on “Studies on Regional Blood Flow in the Kidney; An Application of the Thermal Diffusion Method.” Yale’s legendary chair of medicine in that era, Paul Beeson, MD, paved the way for Griffiss to train in medicine under Robert Petersdorf, MD, at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Starting in 1968, Griffiss spent three years as a preventative medicine officer in the Army, stationed near Stuttgart, Germany. He returned to the United States in 1971 as an infectious disease fellow at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., and spent the next eight years at Walter Reed as a staff physician. Griffiss joined the Harvard Medical School faculty and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1979. Four years later, he was recruited to UCSF to establish an infectious disease research program at the VAMC. His academic career was interrupted by the first Gulf War, when Griffiss was called to active duty as chief of internal medicine at Cutler Army Hospital in Fort Devens, Mass.
During a period when his experiments were vexing, Griffiss took a break and invented a silicon-based dry-cleaning fluid, GreenEarth, that is widely used in the US and Europe.
He enjoys hiking, bird watching, and being outdoors, and attending the ballet.
Alumni Grand Rounds is a series of talks that brings YSM alumni and students together for career-focused discussions about medicine and biomedical science. A light dinner will be served at 5:45 p.m. before the talk, which is open to the Yale community. Space is limited. Please let us know you are coming, reserve your seat at http://tinyurl.com/alumnigrandrounds.