Gotto: Always on Call

When Dr. Antonio Gotto, Jr., dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, heard about Haiti"s devastating earthquake, he was seized with a cold dread. There were five Cornell students and staff members working at a health clinic in Port-Au-Prince. â??We kept calling and calling, he said of the initial efforts to get in touch with them. â??But there was no response, their cells were dead. Finally, after 24 harrowing hours, the school was able to establish connection with the group. Luckily, they were safe and were quickly evacuated from the battered country. For Gotto, it was a welcome moment of relief punctuating a celebrated medical career spanning several decades. In addition to his role as the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, Gotto, 75, is a professor there. He has also been the national president of both the American Heart Association and the International Atherosclerosis Society. For someone with such a distinguished career in medicine, it"s surprising that becoming a doctor wasn"t Gotto"s first professional choice. â??I wanted to be a lawyer, said Gotto, who grew up in Nashville, Tenn. â??But my father didn"t trust lawyers. So he asked me [to] choose between teaching, theology and being a physician, he said, adding, â??I am glad I chose medicine. After completing undergraduate work at Vanderbilt University, Gotto won the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford and earned a doctorate in biochemistry before earning his medical degree. He studied lipid disorders and coronary heart disease risk at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and finally moved to the Upper East Side to be dean of Cornell"s medical college. Presently, he is raising money for the new research center on East 69th Street. â??The focus at this center will be to take findings from other labs and apply them to diagnose and treat diseases, he said. He is also involved in the construction of a new medical facility in the Persian Gulf Emirate of Qatar that will be staffed with Cornell doctors. Gotto emphasized that this facility would drastically improve healthcare in this part of the Middle East. Looking ahead, he"d like to extend medical facilities to places like Haiti. â??We have become so specialized these days and focus so much more on testing, he said. â??But when you work in these underserved places, students have to rely on traditional methods of medicine, which is to focus on medical history and physical examination. It"s an ambitious agenda, and he wouldn"t mind seeing more of his wife, three kids and four grandchildren, or getting in an extra day of sailing now and again. But somehow, he manages. â??It"s certainly more than a day job, he laughed. â??But it"s always interesting and never dull. With medicine, you feel that in some small way, you"re making a contribution to alleviate pain and suffering.