In my second year after moving to the Medical School I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

During a trip to Iraq last fall I visited our theater hospital at Balad Air Force Base and witnessed these skilled medical professionals in action and met the brave soldiers whose lives they saved.

Listening to medical facts was not enough. People wanted one hundred percent guarantees.

If someone lives in New York he's a New Yorker - they are entitled to the best medical system in the world.

We also have a program in place for low income people. A family of four making $26 000 a year can receive medical coverage irrespective of citizenship or what documents.

I'd come out of the army after five years as a medic. I was a medical administrator and we ran hospitals and I was a Captain in the army at the end in 1945.

When I went to the University the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life its nature its origins and its ills.

I do not believe that Congress or the Administration should prohibit the medical community from pursuing a promising avenue of research that may improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Medical decisions have been politicized. What doctor wants a state legislator in his consulting room?

My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.

Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought its far over 20%.

No one wants to go back to a situation where if you have a pre-existing medical condition you you can be deprived of coverage. No one wants to go back to a situation where if you get seriously ill you can get thrown off your insurance. Seniors don't want to go back to paying more for their prescription drugs.

It's interesting when people make comments about celebrities' weight gain or lack of weight gain as if they're a medical professional that's treating that celebrity. Like 'This doctor does not treat Jessica Simpson but thinks her weight is unhealthy.' If you don't treat her then how do you know?

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious perhaps a weakness as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

If I'm pushed I'd also have to admit I don't like people with allergies. They just annoy me. There seems to be something far too self-centred about it. 'No thanks I'm allergic.' Why not just say 'No thanks'? I wasn't asking for your medical history I was just passing around the nuts. Trying to be friendly that's all.

Because I am not formally trained in the medical sciences I can bring in new ideas to AIDS research and the cross-fertilization of ideas from different fields could be a valuable contribution to finding the cure for AIDS.

Synergy and serendipity often play a big part in medical and scientific advances.

To date embryonic stem cell research has not produced a single medical treatment where ethical adult stem cell research has produced some 67 medical miracles.

In our own state we came up with I think what was a very novel approach to closing the gap on the uninsured. To harmonize medical records - which was a major step in getting costs out of the system.

Many of us are alarmed at the skyrocketing cost of medical care including patients who are the consumers. However medical malpractice is not the reason for these increasing costs.

Today all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude's are treated without regard for the family's ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of and for those without insurance all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital.

I am very abnormal... But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy.