Correction to May 20/27 Issue: On the First M.D.-Ph.D. Holders
The Compass learned after going to press that Anne (incorrectly given as "Ann") Maitland is not the first, but may be the second, African American
woman to graduate from the M.D.-Ph.D. program at Penn--the first being Vanessa Northington Gamble, now assistant professor of medicine at the
University of Wisconsin. "I'm not absolutely sure that there were not others, but severalpeople who have been involved in the program for 12 to 20
-plus years remember only one previous Black woman graduate," said Maggie Krall, associate director of combined degree and physican scholar
programs at the School of Medicine. Dr. Maitland is the first to receive both degrees simultaneously, and first to take the Ph.D. portion in the biomedical
sciences, Ms. Krall added. Dr. Gamble earned her M.D. in 1983 and her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science in 1987. Dr. Gamble chairs the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee, the national group that pressed President Clinton to apologize last month to survivors of the federal
government's "Tuskeegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male"--a 1932-72 study in which 399 black men were recruited with promises
of treatment, but given placebos so that U.S. scientists could study the progress of the disease.
-- Ed.
Almanac
Volume 43 Number 36
June 17, 1997
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