Donald Wayne Seldin, MD: a conversation with the editor

Donald W. Seldin, MD, and William C. Roberts, MD

From the Department of Internal Medicine, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, Texas (Seldin); and the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas (Roberts).

Corresponding author: Donald W. Seldin, MD, Department of Internal Medicine, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75390.

Dr. Donald Wayne Seldin was born in New York City on October 24, 1920, and grew up there. In 1940, he received a bachelor's degree from New York University and in December 1943, a medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine. His medical internship and 2-year residency were at New Haven Hospital of the Yale University School of Medicine. He then spent 2 years in the Medical Corps of the US Army as chief of the Department of Medicine at a military hospital in Munich, Germany. He returned to the USA in 1948 and joined the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale. In 1951, he came to Dallas as an associate professor in the Department of Medicine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. Within a year he was professor and chairman of the department, and he served in that position until 1987. In 1969, he was named the William Buchanan Professor of Internal Medicine, and in 1988 he became the University of Texas System Professor of Internal Medicine in the same department.

During his 37 years as chairman, Dr. Seldin built one of the 3 or 4 strongest departments of medicine in the world. When Seldin became chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in January 1952, he was its only full-time member. When he stepped down in 1987, the medical faculty was 125 times larger. At the same time, he was a highly productive researcher and one of the world's finest medical statesmen.

He has been a member of the advisory committees or board of trustees of numerous organizations. He has been president of 7 learned societies: the Central Society for Clinical Research, the Southern Society of Clinical Investigation, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Society of Nephrology, the Association of Professors of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the International Society of Nephrology. He has received 6 honorary doctorate degrees, including one from his alma mater, Yale University. His awards are too numerous to list but include the Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians; the John P. Peters Award from the American Society of Nephrology; the Donald W. Seldin, MD, Medal for Outstanding Research in Nephrology from the National Kidney Foundation; the Distinguished Teacher Award from the American College of Physicians; the Robert H. Williams Distinguished Chairman of Medicine Award from the Association of Professors of Medicine; and the Volhard Medal of the German Society of Nephrology.

The influence at his medical center has extended far beyond his own department. In 1966, when Dr. Seldin was offered the prestigious Herman Blumgart chair at Harvard Medical School, he convinced the board of regents of the University of Texas that the only way to build a first-rate medical school was to have first-rate basic science departments. When the board agreed to supply the necessary resources to do that, he decided to stay in Dallas. He asked nothing for his own department! He has been persuasive in spreading his high standards to all areas of his medical center. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School truly represents the lengthened shadow of Dr. Donald Wayne Seldin.

Seldin has always had a strong commitment to research. That conducted by him in collaboration with many associates reflects his interest in the physiologic regulatory mechanisms controlling acid-base and potassium balance, the osmolarity and volume of body fluids, and the impact of disease on these regulatory processes. He has studied acid-base homeostasis, the regulation of ammonia production, the mechanisms of tubular acidification, the counter-current system, the control of tubular transport by adrenal steroids, the heterogeneity of tubular transport, and the mechanism of action of diuretics, among other diverse topics.

Those who know Seldin, as Floyd C. Rector, Jr., has so eloquently expressed, are most inspired by his “unique personal qualities: his fascination with the fruits of the human intellect in all its dimensions, his admiration for those who strive tenaciously for excellence, his own continual search for knowledge. . . . He was intolerant of the illogical or poorly informed argument, the disorganized lecture, pedestrian research, indifferent patient care. . . . He was lavish in his praise of the clever or novel idea, the ingenious experiment, the scholarly lecture, the extraordinary effort expended in the care of a seriously ill patient.”

As many of his colleagues have stressed, Seldin's profound eloquence stirs the minds and souls of students, residents, and staff and has established him as a teacher without equal. He renders the most complex subjects readily understandable. His greatest attribute may not lay in his teachings but in his exultation of the learning process. His greatest satisfaction may have come from watching his students' progress and from exhorting his colleagues as they collected and assembled information and created new knowledge.

Seldin is a complex, multitalented, and charming man. He can be formal and abrasive but also warm and caring. He is as comfortable in the humanities (literature, art, philosophy, politics, economics, architecture, music) as he is in the sciences. His scholarship in the broad spectrum of medicine, his magnificent teaching abilities, his “taste” for picking the right faculty, and his standards for patient care and research made him a unique departmental chairman, and his grasp of the entire medical school and hospital arenas allowed him to propagate his teaching, research, and patient care standards over the entire medical center.

How would the University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center have developed had Seldin not come to Dallas? It would be hard to imagine the medical center's producing 4 Nobel Prize winners and 10 members of the Institute of Medicine or the National Academy of Sciences without his enormous impact. Thousands of medical students have graduated from that medical school in the past 50 years, and a number of them are now connected to Baylor. There is no medical person who has had the impact on this community in the last 50 years as Seldin has had.

Seldin and his first wife, Muriel Goldberg, who died in 1994, had 3 offspring. In 1998 he married Dr. Ellen Taylor, whose interview follows this one.