John Modlin - 2003-08-18
I left Columbia before our graduation ceremony and senior prom because of a summer job in northern Michigan and, except the summer of 1967 when my father died, I have returned for only very brief visits to my mother who moved to Colorado in 1969 and returned to Columbia in 1978. Mom died last year at the age of 86. My sister, Susan, and I arranged a memorial service for her last December at the UM Faculty Club where we were pleased to see Doug Miller, Jim Bryan, and Charley Blackmore among the guests. I have been in regular touch with Doug and his wife Jody over the years, but have not been very good in keeping up with most everyone else in our class. I have followed George Poehlman’s medical career with admiration and exchanged a number of emails with him the past 10-15 years.

After high school, I enrolled at Duke University. But this was before the days of the Cameron Crazies and thus I never had the opportunity to strip to the waist and wear blue and white paint at basketball games. I spent eight years in Durham and left with both AB and MD degrees. Influential medical school professors and role models convinced me my future was in infectious diseases, so I abandoned my original plan to become a surgeon, and started a residency in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital in Boston in 1971.The rich mix of history, culture, social life and professional opportunity in Boston was compelling to this kid who had never strayed far from small cities in the Midwest and South, and I wound up staying there through pediatric residency training, an infectious disease fellowship, and a few years as a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

Some early research successes in studying perinatal viral infections led to opportunities at other medical schools. I hated to leave Boston, but I couldn’t deny the offer from Johns Hopkins when in came along, so I took a position there in the Department of Pediatrics where I continued my laboratory work, studied patients with viral meningitis, and became deeply involved with AIDS that was just emerging in children in inner cities, including Baltimore. I joined with colleagues at Harvard, Duke, and elsewhere to design treatment programs for children with HIV infection, the most successful of which prevented the transmission of the virus from infected mothers to their newborn infants and led to the marked reduction in new pediatric AIDS cases. Johns Hopkins is an exciting and stimulating place to work because of the immense scientific and medical talent the institution attracts. (It is continuously ranked the nation’s best hospital by US News and World Report).

However, for many reasons, Baltimore proved to be a difficult place to raise a young family, so for purely personal reasons, in 1991, I accepted an offer from a colleague and good friend to go north and start a program in pediatric infectious diseases and clinical virology at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH. Dartmouth has neither the size nor the prestige of Harvard or Hopkins, but it certainly ranks among the very best small medical schools because of a diverse, accomplished student body and strong research credentials. I continued my laboratory research and participated in the usual clinical and educational activities at Dartmouth and, in 1999, took the position of Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at DMS and Medical Director of the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth.

I have had career long interests in viral diseases and vaccines. During the past decade I have participated on a number of committees and worked closely with the CDC, FDA, NIH and other federal agencies in developing public policy on immunization issues ranging from influenza to smallpox.

My wife, Sharyn, is a former advertising executive. We met in Boston and were married in 1983. Our two children, Andrew, now 16, and Chelsea, now 13, were both born in Baltimore. The kids both attend private schools in New England and spend the summers at our vacation home in Michigan, the same place I ran away to in 1963. The entire family has a passion for sailboats and racing sailboats, snow skiing, and winter vacations in the Caribbean, usually on a sailboat.

Dr. John F. Modlin is Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, and Medical Director of the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth. He is also a member of the Infectious Disease Section at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He received both the AB (1967) and MD (1971) degrees from Duke University. His pediatric internship and residency were performed at the Children's Hospital in Boston between 1971 and 1973, including a year at St. Mary's Hospital in London. After two years of service with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control, he returned to Boston in 1975 to complete his residency and infectious disease fellowship. From 1978 to 1983 he was a member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School and an Assistant in Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital in Boston. Dr. Modlin moved to Johns Hopkins in 1983 where he headed the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Program and subsequently moved to Dartmouth in 1991 in order to continue his research on enterovirus diseases. At Dartmouth, he was appointed Acting Department Chair in 1999 and Department Chair in 2001.

Dr. Modlin’s research and academic interests include perinatal viral infections, poliovirus immunization, and vaccine public policy. His initial clinical and experimental studies focused on the pathophysiology of enterovirus infections, especially infections transmitted from mother to infant. In the 1980s he led and/or contributed to a number of HIV treatment trials as a member of the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group, including the pivotal 049 and 076 studies. During this time he also helped to design and conduct clinical studies of enhanced potency inactivated poliovirus vaccine in combination with OPV and studied the effects of these vaccines on vaccine poliovirus excretion as a measure of intestinal immunity. These studies were instrumental in the decision to change polio vaccination policy in the United States in 1997 and again in 2000.

Dr. Modlin has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers in the medical literature. He has served as Vice-Chair of the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group Executive Committee and as Chair of the FDA Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee. From 1997 to 2003 he was Chair of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices during a tumultuous period in which the ACIP faced several contentious issues including mercury in childhood vaccines, intussusception as a complication of tetravalent rhesus rotavirus vaccine, emergency use of anthrax vaccine, and re-institution of smallpox vaccine for military personnel and certain health care workers. Dr. Modlin currently is a member of the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.