Keith Black Interview (page: 2 / 5) Pioneering Neurosurgeon	Print Interview

What was it like getting through college, both bachelor's degree and medical school, in six years?

Keith Black: When I got into the six-year medical program I was actually scared. I said, "I'm not a genius. All these kids coming into class are going to be geniuses. I'm going to get blown away. This isn't going to be a lot of fun at all." But I remember the first class that we had, it was sort of an accelerated chemistry class, especially for our group, and it was essentially inorganic chemistry. Basically moles and molecules.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We had a professor who had both a Ph.D. in chemistry and biology at the age of 23. I remember studying with my classmates for the first quiz that he had and, you know, you were all in the same dorm, and you go to their room and ask a question about this problem, and they said, "Oh yeah, on page 45. There's this equation like this on page 45." Oh my goodness, this isn't going to be good! And I walked into the quiz and we looked at it. And the quiz was, "If you have two organisms -- organism A and organism B -- and organism A utilizes carbohydrate as its main energy source and organism B utilizes protein, and you put them both in a capsule with two liters of oxygen and you shoot them off the moon, which one is going to run out of oxygen first?" And I said, "Well, this doesn't have anything to do with what we were studying." And then I realized what it was. It's a conceptual problem. You take what you had learned, and you apply it, and then you figure out -- you convert the moles to oxygen and so forth, and figure out how many moles can be converted to carbon dioxide. But the people that had memorized all the equations had a very difficult time. Conceptually, I was very good, so I figured it out very quick and wrote it down and walked out after about 15 minutes, and everybody thought I was a genius.

I found it very easy, because they wanted you to conceptualize, and to think, and not just to memorize. I had a good time. I enjoyed it. I could get done what I needed to do. I actually started doing research, because I had additional spare time, and I also had time during those years to learn to fly. I got my pilot's license and traveled around and did a lot of scuba diving and so forth. So I had a great time.

Spare time? You were going to class during the day, and we've read that you used to work in the research lab from 11:00 at night to 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning!

Keith Black: Right.

What kind of life was that? How did you manage that?

Keith Black: It's play.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In medical school, you're required to memorize a body of facts. You go to gross anatomy, and you learn what muscles attach where and what goes where. You memorize it. When you go into the research lab you're creating new knowledge, and it was play for me. It was like doing art, or writing poetry, or painting on a canvas. So it wasn't work. When I was in the research lab from 2:00 to 4:00 o'clock in the morning, it wasn't work for me. It was play. It's what I enjoyed doing. Now for someone that didn't like research it would be really hard work, but for someone who enjoyed it, it was fun.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Was that an important early lesson, that memorization isn't enough? That you have to be creative. You have to be imaginative.

Keith Black: I think it depends on what you want to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are an infrastructure person, and if what is required of you is to just sort of give back the facts, then it may not be important to be creative. You certainly don't have to be creative to be a good doctor. In fact, you don't necessarily want a doctor that's sort of creating as he goes. You want a doctor who is going to sort of follow the cookbook. There's a big difference between being a doctor and being a scientist, but being a good scientist is all about creativity. I mean it's all about creating what we don't know, so that the creative aspect of it really becomes critical. But in addition to being creative -- I mean it's not enough to be creative. You have to sort of be creative, and you have to figure out how you're going to prove what your creative concept is, which is different from an artist. An artist can just paint and say, "Here, go out and interpret it." A scientist has to create and then prove that his concepts are correct, and have the discipline to do that. And then, after he proves his concepts are correct, he then has to go out and communicate to the rest of the world what he has proven, because if he keeps it to himself then it's not a discovery.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Let's talk about your early years. Where did you grow up? Was that in Cleveland, Ohio or Alabama, or both?

Keith Black: Both. In the early years, Alabama; later years, Cleveland. I was born in Tuskegee. I grew up in Auburn, Alabama until I was ten and my family moved to Cleveland. So I spent essentially from ten years until 17, when I went to college, in Cleveland.

What was it like for you as a young boy growing up in Alabama?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Keith Black: Growing up in the South, for an African American it has some advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was that you had a lot of role models. You had black teachers, black principals, black doctors, black lawyers. I mean you saw people like yourself in roles of leadership within your community, because your community was isolated. In the fifth grade we integrated the school system, and I actually only spent a year in the fifth grade in an integrated setting at the time. My family was very active in the South. My father had done his graduate training in education at the University of Pennsylvania, went back to Auburn, Alabama as principal of the all-black elementary school there, and was very active in integrating the staff, teaching French to the students in the fourth grade. The black school, you know, having the best library even though we had, you know, not the best books at the time in the school system. And also, instilling in his students a sense of civil disobedience to speak out against injustice. So it was an interesting time. Sort of the best of times and the worst of times, in that there were some advantages and that you did have a very supportive community, but you were not a part of the larger community. You were isolated from the larger community and some larger opportunities.

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