Early Childhood and Influences
E. Magnus Ohman, MD: Hello. I'm Magnus Ohman from Duke University in North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of the Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists. I'm very fortunate today to have my guest and friend, Dr Judith Hochman, who is the Harold Snyder Family Professor of Cardiology and Senior Associate Dean of Clinical Sciences at New York University School of Medicine in New York City.
I think most of the people who have interacted with you have realized that you've taken on the hardest clinical trials in medicine—the SHOCK trial,[1] the Occluded Artery Trial (OAT),[2] and now the ISCHEMIA trial. How did the endurance for these difficult trials arise?
Judith S. Hochman, MD: I have to go back to my childhood. First of all, I was very motivated to make a difference, and that goes back to an early age. We can psychoanalyze why that was, but in tenth grade, a biology teacher completely turned me on to science. His name was Mr Blank. We had an experimental curriculum on molecular biology, which was brand new back then. I said I wanted to be a research scientist. I did not go straight to medical school.
