Commencement address given at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts, May 31, 2026
OF MEDICINE AND HUMANITY
By Gerald Chan
Thank you for the honor you have bestowed on me today. I am delighted that I can now call myself a fellow alumnus of today’s graduates who are both so brilliant and have worked so hard to come to this milestone in their education.
Of all the commencement speeches I have given, this one feels personal to me because this institution carries the names of my forebear. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of my father’s passing. In honoring my parents, I am reminded of the words of Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg that it is not for the living to dedicate anything to the dead. Honor was accorded to them by the very lives they had lived. Rather, it is for us to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that they had begun. My father did not have too much formal education and he wanted people to be educated. My mother was a nurse and she wanted to care for people. It is fitting therefore that this School, named after them, should train young people who are dedicated to education and to service.
The graduates today are graduating into a world that is changing at a dizzying pace. Many kinds of new career opportunities will be open to you. The distinction between what is a conventional career and an unconventional one is no longer so clear-cut. Jobs that do not yet exist today will be open to you and conversely, jobs that look secure today may disappear. Historical playbooks will have to be rewritten, or you will just have to make it up as you go. At times, you may even have to totally reinvent yourself, something I have done several times in my career. While venturing into the unknown always feels scary, it is more hazardous to assume that not changing will automatically equate with security.
AI is the biggest change accelerant ever known to man. Healthcare will be profoundly changed in ways that we have yet to know, but I do not believe for a moment that we will have a healthcare system without human doctors and nurses. One of the biggest laughingstocks in the AI world is the statement by Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather in AI, who said in 2016 that we should stop training radiologists because in five years, AI would outperform humans in reading radiographic images. The number of graduates going into radiology residency did decline for the next few years. Now we are in a dire shortage of radiologists and huge salaries are being dangled to attract them. Still, AI is here to stay and we must craft a future where human and AI will coexist and collaborate constructively.
For those of you in science, the funding environment is precarious. Science which has long been thought of as a force for good, a driver of progress, an enabler of human flourishing, is being called into question. There are attempts to dim the lights that guided humanity out of the dark ages. But this is temporary. History has never been on the side of those who wanted to turn the clock back. It is reassuring that the majority of our representatives in Congress consistently voted in favor of increasing the NIH budget. Jake Auchincloss, the U.S. Congressman from the 4th district of Massachusetts said it well in a recent email to his constituents, “In the long contest between biology and bullshit, biology is undefeated.”
Even though I no longer practice science at the bench, I have never regretted having invested all those years to become a scientist. The opportunity to decipher the secrets of nature and to translate those findings into benefits for my fellow men is a privilege of a lifetime. Last year, I got a drug approved by the FDA after working on it for twenty years. The undying hope that I could make a difference in people’s lives kept me going after the clinical trials failed time and time again. At the end, there is no greater reward than to know that some little children are eating dinner with their parents tonight who would have died had it not been for this work. When science makes a happy rendezvous with humanity, all the toils and hardship seem so worthwhile.
For those graduates who are clinicians, our healthcare system has become operationally too strained and financially too voracious to be stable. One result is that finance has come to dominate healthcare. The decision of what is best for a patient is no longer an unfettered one over which the physician has full control. The autonomy which has been a hallmark of the medical profession is being seriously challenged.
In its relationship to society, healthcare has been commodified. It is a commodity to be bought and sold. It has a price, and hence, for many, unaffordable. In its organization, healthcare is industrialized and that is a necessary evil so that care can be delivered to a large number of people. A corollary of these developments is that those entering healthcare are not only entering into a profession, they are also entering into an industry. As with any industry, healthcare is now organized to optimize efficiency. Tensions are inevitable when optimizing for efficiency does not align with optimizing for patient outcome. Previous industrial revolutions have shown that the relentless drive for efficiency always exacted a human toll. Workers were dehumanized and became cogs in a large machine. Unchecked economic forces will always dehumanize.
When doctors are dehumanized, patients are dehumanized. Patients become objectified. My cardiologist friend, the late Bernard Lown, told me that his intake interview with each patient was one hour long and his assistant knew never to interrupt that time. Today, a primary care physician has 12.5 minutes for each patient. The relationship between the doctor and the patient has become all too transactional.
Dr. Lown’s formation was in an era when medicine was underdeveloped. He had to talk with his patients extensively to uncover what was wrong with them. Great doctors of his time had to intuit what doctors today can ascertain by ordering a test or a scan. When medicine was primitive, it offered much humanity and not much science. Today, that imbalance has flipped. The success of science and technology has had the unintended consequence of denuding medicine of its humanity. We must now reclaim a workable balance between medicine as a technological feat and medicine as a humane endeavor.
In medicine, as in any human endeavor, what anchors us in perilous times is our humanity. By humanity, I mean that which is at the core of our being, that which makes us human, that common denominator that makes us all the same in spite of our differences. That sameness is what gives us empathy, what enables us to feel others’ pain and share in others’ happiness. By humanity, I mean the innate capacity to perceive and to hold on to meaning, to have purpose, to sustain hope, idealism, altruism, and even sacrifice for others. Never forget that medicine is fundamentally about humanity and should never be practiced at the expense of humanity.
I want to give a special shout-out to those who are going into primary care. Nowhere in the practice of medicine is it more important to see your patients as human beings than in primary care. I recently met a group of primary care physicians in the Midwest who still make house calls. One of them said that primary care physicians are probably the most idealistic of all physicians. They are paid less than the specialists, but their reward is in the joy of caring and that their patients know that they care. She said that in her practice, not a day passes without a patient of hers giving her a hug — a gesture of gratefulness, an act of human connection, an affirmation that we are in it together.
The future functioning of our healthcare system will depend critically on primary care physicians whose mission is as much to keep their patients healthy as it is to care for them when they are sick. They maintain a longitudinal relationship with their patients and act as guardians of their health. I think technology-enabled advance primary care will be one of the most exciting areas in medicine in the coming decade. With the value-based model of healthcare financing, there is even a distinct possibility that the pay gap between primary care and specialty physicians can be closed.
I am calling attention to primary care because I just learned the results of this year’s Match Day. Of the 700 or so medical school graduates in Massachusetts, only 3.9% matched into family medicine. Meanwhile, one third of the practicing primary care physicians in the Commonwealth are over the age 60. Simple math of supply and demand tells us what we are facing and where we must invest to secure the future of healthcare.
Before I sign off, I want to reserve my final words to express my admiration for Chancellor Collins and to acknowledge our friendship. A product of the finest Jesuit tradition, Michael, you exemplify the Ignatian ideals of inquiry, caring for the whole person, and service to others. In your nineteen years of leading this institution, you made Worcester, in the words of a member of the Nobel Prize committee who visited, a paradise for science to which the best people flock to do their research. You projected the excellence of UMass Chan to the world so that patients from around the globe come here seeking care.
You also exemplify a leader who never lost sight of the human side of his work. You personally mentored countless numbers of students and fellows in ways that go far beyond the call of duty. A fine example of your mentorship is my fellow honorand today, Dr. Bob Harrington, whom you mentored from a premed student to Chief of Medicine at Stanford and Dean of Cornell’s medical school. Michael, you are an inspiration, and on behalf of all those whose lives you have impacted, thank you.
To the graduates, with huge admiration for all your accomplishments, I send my congratulations and my best wishes for a rewarding career in science and in medicine.