You have bestowed on me an honor which I know too many other individuals in Federal Medicine deserve more than I do.

When our Associate Chief of Staff for Research, Raj Goyal (who, in my mind, is probably the most prominent GI clinician- scientist in this country today) told me that he was planning to nominate me for the Frank Berry Prize, I initially told him not to waste his time. These important prizes do not usually go to surgeons, who are universally perceived as technicians who use their hands more than their brains! Little did I know then that the author of the Berry Plan was a surgeon, even a cardiothoracic surgeon like myself, and indeed a towering figure in American surgery. I am proud to follow in his footsteps. I commend U.S. MEDICINE and the Science Applications International Corporation, co-sponsors of the Berry Prize, for setting up, for the first time, a mechanism which recognizes the excellence in Federal Medicine as a whole.

As someone who has spent his entire career in the VA, and actually owes his academic career to the VA, I have been so frustrated by the VA's, and I suspect the whole of Federal Medicine's, inability to market itself properly and to advertise to the world the wonderful achievements that are being made on daily basis in Federal Medicine nationwide. By bringing to the limelight, every August, a sample of the Federal Sector's outstanding contributions to medicine and surgery, the Frank Berry Prize is assuming a crucial role and setting up a new tradition which I am sure Frank Berry will be so proud of. Thank you for making it all possible.

I am proud of the fact that I have been a full-time employee of the VA ever since I finished my training in cardiac surgery at the Mayo Clinic. When I interviewed at the West Roxbury VA Hospital in 1976, I also interviewed with Jack Collins, then the new Chief of Cardiac Surgery at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and one of my good friends today. The first question Jack asked me was, "Why on earth do you want to go to the VA? Why don't you join us here at the Brigham? It is a much more prestigious place for you." What I didn't tell Jack then was that the VA offered me a much better chance to assume a leadership role in caring for a very appreciative group of wonderful patients, and also a much better opportunity to advance my academic career, than the prestigious Brigham and Woman's Hospital.

The VA's generous funding of its core research facilities, its expertly peer-reviewed Merit Review and Career Development Programs, its outstanding and unique Cooperative Studies Program and Health Services Research field programs, its advanced computerized systems and informatics -- none of that would have been as readily available to me at the Brigham then. No wonder my Brigham colleagues now consider my rise to the rank of Full Professor at Harvard at the age of 42 as "meteoric". I owe that totally to the VA

The best news is that the VA today is even much more conducive to achieving excellence in health care and in academics than it has ever been. The enlightened, and I must add, revolutionlary, leadership of Ken Kizer, Tom Garthwaite, Jack Feussner, and others, have radically decentralized and transformed the VA into a vibrant, fluid, and effective system of health care delivery which is guided by the pursuit of quality through data-driven decisionmaking and proper assessment of processes, outcomes, and measurements of health care.

Taking my cue from the Oscars, the people who have contributed to my winning this prize are too numerous to list and to thank individually. But the single person who deserves this prize more than anybody else is My Lady in Waiting, Randa. This lovely lady knows what waiting for endless hours is all about. I know that without the foundations of our happy home, and the wonderful children whom she nurtured, I would not have been here today. Thank you again, this is a great honor which I will cherish as long as I live.

 The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 1999 is co-sponsored by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)