It's really about the patients
Before he opens his mouth to speak, Hans Grossniklaus is drowned out by everything his office says about his 35 years as a pathologist: the walls are bare, save for three steel filing cabinets to the left of the entry - their slender drawers filled with nearly 50,000 Kodachrome (“old school”) specimens. A desktop computer competes with a microscope for space, while several unsteady stacks of professional awards, citations, and plaques remain on the floor.
What speaks volumes about this world-renowned researcher, ophthalmologist, and ocular pathologist are 20-25 newly minted pathology slides that can always be found on a pristine section of his desk.
In April, Hans Grossniklaus officially signed off on 350,000+ of those slides, a milestone reached by very few of his peers.
“Each patient generates at least five slides, so what that really means is I’ve signed off on about 70,000 cases, 70,000 patients,” Grossniklaus explained. “It’s really about the patients.”
Never were truer words ever spoken.
On Friday, May 31, the Emory Eye Center will celebrate Grossniklaus, the physician whose research and medical careers are both founded on the data delivered by these slides. The event, from 11 am to 1 pm, will welcome colleagues and friends from the Emory/Atlanta community to celebrate a career that has changed both patients’ lives and medical research.
“We are truly fortunate to have someone of Dr. Grossniklaus’s stature at the Emory Eye Center,” said F. Phinizy Calhoun Sr. Department Chair and director of the Emory Eye Center Allen D. Beck.
“His commitment to translational research, especially in the diagnosis and treatment of ocular melanoma, has ensured that patients are ultimately the beneficiaries of our research program.“
There are numerous ways to benchmark Grossniklaus’s career, all of them now part of the literature that defines modern eye pathology. He is widely revered for ground-breaking research that led to new treatment for various eye diseases, including choroidal neovascularization (CNV), uveal melanoma, and retinoblastoma. He has authored hundreds of journal articles, textbooks, monographs, and lectures that have trained some of the top ophthalmologists and pathologists at work today.
But Grossniklaus, himself, is a little uncomfortable with laurel wreaths too easily hung. He’ll admit to having a refined command of pattern recognition, a key trait for tracking pathologies. But he’s not done yet. If pushed, he’ll immediately point to the accomplishments of another two trailblazers, Dr. Lorenz Zimmerman (“the father of American Eye Pathology”) and Zimmerman’s protégé, Dr. W. Richard Green.
Grossniklaus studied under both men – at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) and at Johns Hopkins - before joining the Emory Department of Ophthalmology in 1989.
“Zimmerman transformed the field of eye pathology from a curiosity – practiced by a handful of labs with limited capacity - to a scientific discipline that has been able to identify the pathology of many eye diseases, like corneal dystrophy, AMD,” Grossniklaus said.
“He had the energy, the knowledge, and the ability to systematically derive the principles of different diseases by studying hundreds of cases.”
And while his most recent achievement – reviewing 70,000 patient cases – is significant, Grossniklaus sees it within a different context.
“My mentor at Johns Hopkins, Dick Green was associated with a lab that had processed 70,000 patients, too. But that lab reached 70,000 in 1984 - 61 years after they started. If I did the same in half the time, I benefited greatly from the groundwork they laid. They were just learning about eye pathology in the first 60 years, collecting cases, and developing some of the research technologies that I had at my fingertips when I started out.”
If prodigious research careers are the inevitable result of great minds simply passing the baton, the Emory Eye Center is only too happy to have supported this leg of relay for Dr. Hans Grossniklaus.
-Kathleen E. Moore