From the once-prestigious scientific journal Science:
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JUL. 24, 2023
MRINAL DEWANJEE Special Volunteer National Eye Institute, NIH
I was always a minority student in Bangladesh, Canada, and USA. My parents were Hindus. I faced the onslaught of systemic discrimination throughout my entire life. My Chairman, Dr. MH Khundkar, Chemistry Department, Dhaka University, harassed me publicly for applying to McGill University, where I used a letter of recommendation from a Hindu professor, Dr. De in 1962. My mentor, Dr. Leo Yaffe, Chairman, Chemistry, Vice Chancellor, McGill University did not give me a letter of recommendation after graduation in 1967, despite submitting an excellent thesis on the mechanism of spallation nuclear reaction using McGill cyclotron. I finally found a way to join the nuclear medicine division at Brigham Hospital as a part-time lab technician to prepare the radiopharmaceuticals and a post-doc in 1971. … However, I was not included, not even thanked in the clinical study published in the NEJM, 1974 by the group of radiologists and cardiologists. When I joined Mayo Clinic … Dr. Valentin Fuster, who asked my assistance in imaging and measurement of platelet thrombus in 1976, received the awards and attention and I was forced to leave Mayo Clinic in 1987. I faced a similar fate at University of Miami, School of Medicine, where I established the cardiovascular surgical laboratory with assistance from the President of Jackson Medical Center, Jerry Kaiser and mapped the platelet emboli in rat brain using the electron microscopic autoradiography (Stroke, 1993) and I left in 1996. I also left University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000 after four years. I did not have a better luck in NIST either and other federal institutions. I accepted my fate as a special volunteer at FDA and NIH laboratory since 2005 and pursued science at my pace with the support of current mentor at NEI.
… At 86, I wonder, how I ignored these insults, worked 12–15-hour days, survived and overcame the pervasive academic corruption! Finally, I summarized these exciting events and misfortunes in a book form in 2021: “Measuring and Imaging the Arterial Platelet Thrombus in Heart Attack and Stroke: Saving Lives with Drugs, Devices and Genetics”.
Thanks, Science for keeping us up to date on breaking news in the Elderly Egomaniacs Complain about Ancient Office Politics front!
