On Thursday, June 11th, I got an extraordinary opportunity to interview my primary mentor, Dr. John Perfect. I was very inspired than ever in my life and it’s exciting to share his career story with the rest of HHF fellows.
Dr. John Perfect is a professor of Medicine at Duke Medical center, a Physician at Duke hospital and runs a basic science research lab in the Division of Infectious Diseases. He is married and has 4 children (graduates of Duke, Dartmouth, Davidson and Kenyon college ). He grew up in a small town of approximately 3200 people in Ohio. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Arts at Wittenberg University, a small liberal art college in Springfield, Ohio. “I was the 1st generation to go to college in my family. I wouldn’t even have known that there was such schools as Harvard and Duke so I stayed within Ohio given that I was accepted in the 1st school I applied to” said Dr. Perfect.
Right after graduating from college, he attended the University of Toledo Medical center in Ohio, which had 50 students and was one of the first colleges with medical programs in Ohio. His MD program was 3 years long, which he thought was so short for medical training.
A couple of days later, he started an internship in Ohio at Wright- Patterson medical center, the hospital were he was born. He did his internship for 1 year. In a couple of months as an intern, he realized that he wasn’t excited about taking care of chronic illnesses like heart failure, diabetes and lung cancer, but was rather thrilled to make diagnosis, find a treatment and cure the patient. “ I thought my gift was to make diagnosis, then find a treatment and cure a patient and infectious diseases was that type of career. I knew by then that I wanted to be an infectious disease doctor and so had to get back into academia to get residency and be able to apply for fellowship,” said Dr. Perfect
He did his residency at the University of Michigan for 2 years, and then applied for a fellowship at Duke. He applied to Duke University not because it was the best place for infectious diseases by then, but just because it was a great place for internal medicine. Surprisingly he was the first fellow in the department of infectious diseases at Duke.
On Feb 14th 1978 at around 11p.m, Dr. John Perfect found his passion and focus. At that time, he saw a patient with Cryptococcus meningitis at Duke Hospital with a different strain of Cryptococcus neoformans in his first patients he diagnosed with the disease. Dr. Perfect discovered a new strain of Cryptococcus neofamans , which he named Cryptococcus neoformans Var. grubii H99. It was the 99th strain of Cryptococcus, and he has been studying it for the last 37 years of his career. H99 is now the classic human isolate that the world uses to study and understand Cryptococcus neoformans so as to develop at better treatment.
Before that day he diagnosed that patient, he was studying bacterial infections, but he decided to switch to fungal infections because he had found his focus.Dr. Perfect studied fungal infectious at Duke and developed an animal model. “ It took me time to develop the skill set of developing an animal model”, said Dr. Perfect. As an experimental pathologist, Dr. Perfect continued to study the pathogenesis of the organism (Cryptococcus N.) using different animal models such as Zebra fish, rabbits and mice to understand the structure of the organism.
Dr. Perfect has a grant with Botswana where he gets a supply of many human isolates from HIV patients. His lab is now moving to another level of understanding Cryptococcus since they now have the genome sequence of the H99 strain that enables them to interrogate the evolution of Cryptococcus neoformans.
As Dr. Perfect was still sharing with me his inspiring story, I asked him the exciting scientific questions in his area of research. He responded saying that there’s still about 15-30% mortality rate of Cryptococcus infections at Duke hospital and there lies so many questions. “ Why does Cryptococcus attack the Central Nervous system? Why that body site? How does is survive in Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF), a stressful environment with 37 degrees Celsius,” said Dr. Perfect. I’m very excited that my summer project focuses on answering the second scientific question as to how Cryptococcus survives in the CSF. Basically, I’m trying to identify the type of genes associated with the organism ability to survive in the host’s CSF.
Dr. Perfect went further to explain the kind challenges he has dealt with or still facing in while conducting his research. He said that one of the big challenges in his career is mentoring and asking the right questions expecting the right answers while pushing basic science research further. He said he had a big challenge in helping HIV patients with Cryptococcus meningitis as they were no ARV’s in early 80’s and such patients had very weakened immune systems. He also added that given several duties he has as a lecturer, doctor and basic science researcher, he finds it a little bit challenging to stay updated in all areas, but he manages. Dr. Perfect is an exceptional physician and scientist I have ever met in my life so far. He has always been passionate about his career and finds taking careful responsibility of his patients’ lives as a doctor a privilege he’s been blessed with.
He continued saying that finding grants for his research and finding a great team to work with was a challenge he overcome. He said that his lab’s main source of grants is the NIH (National Institute of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation), and his lab also gets external funding from Duke clinical trial industries since he’s a clinical researcher. During my interview Dr. Perfect appreciated the great lab team he has. He said that he feels blessed to have Dr. Jennifer Tenor, my secondary mentor, on his team who basically stages everything and highly helps him in managing the lab. And should add that it’s a great honor to have her as my mentor.
Dr. Perfect also said that the fact that he’s at Duke gives him the benefit to collaborate with great scientists, faculty, postdocs, technicians, clinicians, interns, residents, graduates and undergraduate students. “And that type of environment is very addictive like cocaine in a sense that it allows you to be very excited of what you are trying to do. You bring a group of good people together , give them the big picture , excite them with enthusiasm without micro-managing them and let them figure it out. Give them support, but let them do it. I thrive best when I have everyone on board looking at the big picture, when everyone is energetic and eager to work hard and give it his or her best. Students should take great advantage of the research infrastructures and opportunities at Duke,” said Dr. Perfect.
At last, I was curious as to whether there are other careers he considered before choosing a career in medicine. “ When I was a kid, I wanted also to be a high school teacher and share my knowledge,” said Dr. Perfect. Dr. John Perfect is not only a great scientist and doctor today, but also an outstanding teacher and I’m glad I will be shadowing him in the next 2 weeks as he round on ID (Infectious Disease) Transplant at Duke Hospital.
Many thanks goes to Dr. John Perfect for taking his precious time (about 1 hour 30min) out of his busy schedule to share his amazing life career story with me in a personal interview.
