Category:Celebrities with Medical Degrees
Michael Burry was a medical resident writing about value investing on internet message boards at night; he holds a Doctor of Medicine from Vanderbilt and has never returned to clinical practice. That pattern is what this membership is really about. The degree appears here attached to Nobel laureates who used medical training as a route into laboratory science, to physicians who left the examination room for Congress, and to a smaller group who took the qualification and went into pharmaceuticals, television or investing instead.
Laureates who trained as physicians
The laureates in this category all hold a medical degree, and in every case the prize came for laboratory work rather than for clinical medicine. Avram Hershko took his degree at the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School and shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his former graduate student Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. Robert Lefkowitz took his bachelor's degree and his medical degree at Columbia and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on G protein-coupled receptors. Roderick MacKinnon trained at Tufts University School of Medicine and won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure and mechanism of ion channels.
The medicine prizes follow the same route out of the clinic. Edwin Krebs took his degree at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and shared the 1992 prize for reversible protein phosphorylation. Stanley Prusiner took his at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and won in 1997 for prions, which the committee described as an entirely new genre of disease-causing agent. Rolf Zinkernagel qualified at the University of Basel and won in 1996 for the discovery of how the immune system recognises virus-infected cells. William Kaelin Jr. took a bachelor's degree and a medical degree at Duke and won in 2019 for how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
Physicians in Congress
The second concentration is a bloc of practising doctors who ran for federal office, and it is bipartisan. Ami Bera earned a bachelor's degree and a medical degree at UC Irvine and served as Sacramento County's chief medical officer before entering the House. Kim Schrier qualified at the UC Davis School of Medicine and practises paediatrics; Yadira Caraveo qualified at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, also as a paediatrician, and became Colorado's first Latina member of Congress. Kelly Morrison took hers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine after a bachelor's degree at Yale.
On the Republican side, Rand Paul was admitted to the Duke University School of Medicine without having finished his undergraduate degree at Baylor and practised as an ophthalmologist. Roger Marshall took his degree at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and practised as an obstetrician; Michael Burgess practised as an obstetrician-gynaecologist and added a master's in medical management; Neal Dunn qualified at the George Washington University School of Medicine and practised surgery in Panama City; Scott DesJarlais took his at the University of South Dakota; Mariannette Miller-Meeks came through a nursing degree at Texas Christian University and a master's at the University of Southern California before medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Herb Conaway is the outlier in this group: he holds both a medical degree and a law degree, and served in the New Jersey General Assembly for more than a quarter century before the House.
The degree used somewhere other than the clinic
The rest of the roster kept the credential and changed the job. Anthony Fauci graduated first in his class at Cornell University Medical College in 1966 and spent his career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases rather than in private practice. Francis Collins added a medical degree at the University of North Carolina in 1977 to a doctorate in physical chemistry and went on to lead the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health. Peter Hotez holds a Yale doctorate alongside his Cornell medical degree and works on neglected tropical diseases and vaccines.
Sanjay Gupta took his bachelor's degree and his medical degree at Michigan and holds a hospital neurosurgery appointment in Atlanta while working as a network medical correspondent. Leana Wen qualified at Washington University in St. Louis, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and became Baltimore's health commissioner. Peter Attia trained in surgery at Stanford and completed a general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins before moving into longevity medicine. Katrina Armstrong took her degree at Johns Hopkins and became the first woman to serve as interim president of Columbia University. Vas Narasimhan paired a Harvard medical degree with a Master of Public Policy and runs Novartis, and Michael Burry left medicine for Scion Capital.
See also
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