Jeffrey Flier
Conversations about health reform usually revolve around insurance and budgets. Jeff Flier wants them to be about doctors and patients.
Jeff has been at the top of his field as a physician, a scientist, and an educator. As the dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016, he led a transformation of the medical school’s curriculum. “The job,” he says, “was totally different from anything I’d done before.” Jeff added online distance learning to HMS’ educational capabilities and created a Department of Biomedical Informatics to help Harvard find ways to bring the digital revolution to health care. All this while doing the usual dean stuff, like overseeing the medical school’s $700 million annual budget and its $4 billion endowment, leading its 10,000 full-time faculty, managing alumni affairs, and supervising the school’s academic research.
Before becoming dean, Jeff was best known for his work on insulin, and on the biochemical basis of obesity and starvation. He was the first to discover that a hormone called leptin played a key role in the way animals and humans adapt to starvation. “If you don’t have leptin, either as a mouse or a human, you become massively obese with uncontrollable hunger,” Jeff explains. “If you inject leptin, you become a normal person.” For this and other work, the American Diabetes Association gave Jeff the Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, its highest scientific honor.
While Jeff has spent most of his adult life at Harvard and in the Boston area, he grew up in the Bronx, the grandson of Russian immigrants. “A high point for me was attending the Bronx High School of Science,” he recalls. “That got me to think I wanted to go into medicine. There had been no one in medicine in my family.” From Bronx Science, Jeff went to the City College of New York, where, along with taking pre-med classes, Jeff studied philosophy and economics.
After med school at Mt. Sinai in New York, and a stint at the National Institutes of Health, Jeff found his way to Harvard. “I was born a Yankee fan,” he says, but “a number of years after moving to Boston I became a Red Sox fan. It took me a while to become interested in them, but now I’m a fanatic Red Sox fan.” Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose academic programs Jeff once led, is an official sponsor of the baseball team.
Jeff got into hot water with some at Harvard when, in 2009, he published an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal giving a “failing grade” to the health care debate that was then roiling Washington. “In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists,” he wrote, “I find near unanimity of opinion that [the Affordable Care Act] will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it.”
Jeff continues to be concerned about the high cost of health care: in particular, how it will make it harder for patients to afford their medicines. “Recombinant human insulin was the first biotechnology protein ever used as a medical therapy. And here we are 30 years later, and there are front page articles about people dying because they can’t afford their insulin. What’s wrong with this picture?” he asks.
Jeff has been an informative Twitter follow (@jflier) on the subject of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, leveraging his relationships in both the scientific world and the public health community.
Jeff remains on the faculty at Harvard, where he is the Harvard University Distinguished Professor and Higginson Professor of Medicine and Neurobiology. Jeff is now also a Visiting Fellow at FREOPP, where he focuses on ways to improve medical research, the practice of medicine, and the doctor-patient relationship. “The health care market has been taken over by special interests,” he says. “To expand opportunity, we need to make sure that markets are about helping people. That’s why I’m happy to join FREOPP.”
