“How often do you meet with members of the Pharmacology Department?” asks a researcher from Japan, a member of a delegation from thirty-five Japanese medical colleges that is visiting the Yale University School of Medicine.

Richard Lifton, M.D., Ph.D., pauses for a minute. Interaction among researchers in different departments is constant, and most commonly takes place in hallways and courtyards. Because Yale’s medical center is unusually compact, basic science investigators often work side-by-side with–not halfway across the city from–both clinical colleagues and researchers in other fields. They encounter each other at the Center for Cell Imaging or the Magnetic Resonance Center or the photocopier down the corridor. Scheduled meetings don’t begin to reflect the pervasive exchange of ideas and information that is the hallmark of the school.

These creative encounters make scientific advances happen. Lifton, who is chair of the Department of Genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is one of the world’s leading researchers in the genetic bases of cardiovascular and renal disease. His discovery of mutations in genes that cause severely high or severely low blood pressure has changed the scientific view of hypertension. His laboratory has now developed sensitive genetic tests that can identify patients with certain especially severe forms of hypertension. As a result, such patients can be treated with individually tailored drugs, or, in some cases, doctors can turn off the mutant genes with drugs. As a practicing physician and scientific investigator, Lifton brings together an understanding of physiology at the molecular level and an awareness of the symptoms of patients in their hospital beds.

Work among faculty and students of such high intellectual caliber is exciting and productive. The result is true synergy–the unscheduled conversations that make the Yale University School of Medicine more than the sum of its departments.

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Richard Lifton (fourth from left) runs a laboratory that exemplifies the interconnectedness of basic science and clinical medicine.

Frederick J. Sigworth, professor of cellular and molecular physiology.

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