Q&A with Dr. Anthony Fauci (C-SPAN 1/8/2015)

Dr. Anthony Fauci Q&A interview on C-SPAN in 2015.

@ 12:27 Mins.

• LAMB: The Jesuits teach you high school, college, Holy Cross.
• FAUCI: Right.
• LAMB: Regis High School in Manhattan. What impact- what does it mean to be taught by Jesuits? We hear about Jesuits all the time.
• FAUCI: Well, it's a great experience, I have to say. They combine intense intellectualism with discipline, not in the sense of, you know, smacking you around, but intellectual rigor, discipline in how you handle yourself as a person, as a human being. And they have a general motto of-and I think this had a major influence on me and what I did-is the issue of service to others. That's very big.
• That doesn't mean that people who don't go into public service are doing anything lesser with their lives, but they tend to have a, I wouldn't say a pushing, but a leaning towards something about what you do is public service, either everything you do, which turned out what I did by going into public service, or at least a part of your life. So it was- it was an interesting combination of concern for mankind as well as a good intellectual rigor.
• LAMB: When did you want to be a doctor? Can you remember the time?
• FAUCI: I think it was early high school. I'm very interested in people. I'm very much of a people person, and probably, as part of the Jesuit training, which is very steeped in the classics and the humanities.
• So when I went to Regis High School we took four years of Greek, four years of Latin, a romance language, and ancient history and things like that. And when I went to Holy Cross, which is another Jesuit school, as a college, I took kind of a hybrid pre-med course. It was called- it's almost an oxymoron. It was called "A.B. Greek Classics dash Pre-Med."
• So you were majoring in the humanities and the classics with a lot of philosophy, but you took enough science to get into medical school. And the idea about when I wanted to become a doctor- I like science, I like discovery, I like the challenges of science, but I also so much liked mankind and the humanities that it was just a natural fit that, where do you put science and people in the same bucket? And to me that was medicine.
• LAMB: Who was an early mentor?
• FAUCI: Probably some of the very young Jesuits in Regis High School. In the Jesuit training, it's a long, long training before you become a Jesuit priest. And back then they had what's called scholastics, or people who weren't yet ordained as priests, but they dressed with the garb of a priest and they taught in the high school. And there were a couple of those scholastics who had a major impact on me, just great people, highly intellectual and highly nurturing of you and what you wanted to do.

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C-SPAN Transcript