Of rice and men: Bill Kelley's next generation.

I first met Bill Kelley in 1970 when I applied for a fellowship in his laboratory at Duke. I had the feeling in this first meeting that this was a man who could have a significant impact on my life. Thinking back 35 years now, I know that he did and I suspect that he had a similar influence on many in the Association of American Physicians. Bill has been a remarkable visionary leader, always knowing where he wanted to go and how to get there. He has transformed every place at which he worked by bringing in new people and ideas, developing creative programs, and constructing modern facilities. People remain at the heart of all that Bill has accomplished. He identified the best people, recruited them, provided them the resources to succeed, guided them in their careers, and watched with great pride from near or far as they made important contributions to American medicine and science. I am indebted to Martin Van Der Weyden, one of Bill’s former fellows at Duke and now Editor of The Medical Journal of Australia, for calling up an ancient Chinese proverb that suggested the title for this presentation – Of Rice and Men: “For next year plant rice; for the next generation, train men.” Annually and day by day, Bill sowed rice everywhere he worked and ideas, programs, and facilities sprouted, as a generation of physician-scientists grew to maturity under Bill’s watchful gaze. Bill Kelley was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 23, 1939. It was an ominous year for world geopolitics, but a great year for movies. Atlanta received much attention that year in the movies because of the world premiere of Gone With the Wind — while Captain Rhett Butler became a movie legend, another commander who would come to be a major leader in the real world of American medicine was developing unnoticed in Atlanta. Bill’s fascination with the military was soon replaced with an interest in medicine based on his frequent excursions with his father on house calls and hospital rounds. In 1956, he graduated from High School in West Palm Beach, Florida (Figure 1). Then it was on to Emory University where he majored in math. Bill’s fascination with data would influence the rest of his career, but he could not give up his first love — medicine — and he entered the Emory University School of Medicine in the fall of 1959. And he returned to his other first, and lasting, love, marrying Lois Faville, whom he had known since kindergarten (Figure 2). As his medical career began, so did his family, and Lois and Bill welcomed their first children — Paige in October 1960 and Ginger in January 1962. Following medical school, Bill pursued internship and residency training in internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Dan Foster, who had just taken a faculty position at Southwestern after returning from the NIH, remembers that Bill “was a dazzling resident.” Don Seldin, then Chairman of Internal Medicine at Southwestern, and a mentor to Bill throughout his career, encouraged Bill to pursue his interest in biomedical research and he arranged for Bill to pursue the next phase of his training at the NIH. Before leaving Dallas, Lois and Bill added Lori, their third child, to the family. Bill became a Clinical Associate in the Section on Human Biochemical Genetics at NIH. It was here — in the laboratory of Jay Seegmiller — that scientific inquiry first captured Bill’s imagination. Bill became intrigued by a young boy