Exxon Grants Med School $500,000

The Harvard Medical School(HMS) announced this week that the Exxon Foundation has granted $500,000 over the next three years to the revolutionary New Pathway curriculum to help defray operational costs.

The unique New Pathway program--which has taken applications to enroll its first 25 students for the four-year M.D. degree in '85--was designed three years ago to provide physicians-in-training with social education in addition to technical instruction, George T. Moore, director of New Pathway, said yesterday.

Moore estimated that the annual operational cost of the program will probably run upward of $750,000.

President Bok's critical analysis of medical education in the country last April followed HMS Dean Daniel C. Tosteson's introduction of the new curriculum. Bok expressed concern at the alarming number of medical graduates around the country who had no training in the ethical and social issues of medical practice.

President of the Exxon Foundation Robert L. Payton agreed with Bok's analysis saying "every practical professional has to be sensitive to the ethics of what he does."

Payton added that he hopes the grant will help to demonstrate the merit of the program to other graduate schools across the country.

"We [at the Exxon Foundation] are concerned about the narrowing focus of many aspects of professional education. Such narrowing has a dehumanizing quality and interferes with the professional's ability to understand the full complexity of problems and situations," Payton said yesterday.

The technical demands of a medical school are significant and the fact that Bok and the HMS faculty have decided to include non-technical issues in a curriculum is impressive, he said.

Moore said because medical professionals have the highest rate of divorce, suicide, and alcoholism in the professional world, New Pathway has set out to "socialize" physicians before they begin to practice.

"We will try to foster compassion, honesty, sensitivity and responsibility toward patients and the medical world" in our graduates primarily by providing excellent role models throughout the students' four-year stay, said Moore.