200 Congregation booklet_1701_Final

13 Professor Sophia Chan, Professor Ian Holliday, Professor Gabriel Leung, students, families, distinguished faculty guests, and friends, I am deeply honored to be your commencement speaker today. Class of 2018, today is great day. It is your day of celebration. Let me be among the first to welcome you to the health profession. You worked hard to reach this important moment. My sincere congratulations to you, to your parents, and to your loved ones who have given their unwavering support, encouragement, and guidance to help you get here. Let's have a round of applause for all of you! You have worked hard to reach this important milestone. This is a big undertaking and you should be proud of all that you have accomplished. I know how difficult it must have been for many of you to be working constantly with little rest, studying many complex scientific subjects, and, for many of you, being on night call and staying up without sleep. These demands probably seemed never ending. But you survived. In fact, you thrived and have reached this important moment of graduation. From these experiences, you have learned the importance of being adaptable and resilient as a health professional. Graduating from the Facult y of Medicine is quite an accomplishment. Some of you will go on to pursue further study. And many of you, at last, are ready to launch your career! After all of the studying and late nights, after all of the work you've done in clinical rounds, you're finally finished. But I have some news for you. You're not done learning yet. Not by a long shot! As long as you’re in the health profession, you will never be done learning, throughout your career, you will be asked to master new knowledge, new technologies, and new systems. You're very lucky to be graduating at a tremendously exciting time in health and medicine. It's really quite remarkable how much knowledge we've gained and how much progress we've made in just a few generations. Think about it. Over the last century, we almost doubled life expectancy. We made those gains through the development of vaccines and antibiotics, greater access to safe drinking water, clean air and better nutrition. In your parents' lifetimes, we cut the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease in half, and many types of cancers that were once considered a death sentence are now treatable and even curable. And we've made tremendous public health gains in terms of getting people to wear seatbelts, quit tobacco, and take charge of their health. We now know that social and economic factors such as jobs, education, strong relationships, and a sense of meaning in our lives are essential to individual and community health. We’re learning better ways of working in our neighborhoods to truly understand what health actually means to different people. This expanded perspective of health will enable us to develop health care that is truly for the people and by the people. What advances will we see in your lifetime? I am certain that science and innovation will bring breakthroughs and transformations during your career that were unimaginable to previous generations. In the past decade alone, we have made major strides towards making precision medicine a reality. It is now possible to sequence your entire genome for less than $1000. Cancers can be individually sequenced to identify specific gene mutations that can lead to more rational and targeted drug treatment. Furthermore, new immunotherapies are helping patients harness their own immune systems to fight their own cancers. We're also seeing new lifesaving medicines for many serious and chronic disease such as diabetes, high cholesterol and heart failure. But that is just the beginning. Through an exciting new field called regenerative medicine, I believe that sometime during your career, we will be able to use a patient's own stem cells to help repair his or her damaged heart or brain or even create new organs outside the body for transplant. Our expanded knowledge of the human genome – combined with the new genome editing technologies – means that in the future, you will be treating, curing, or even completely eliminating devastating genetic diseases that have preyed upon individuals and families for generations – diseases such as Huntington's, sickle cell anemia, or Duchenne muscular dystrophy. I know that to many of you, this almost sounds like science fiction: a Steven Spielberg movie. But it's very real, and the research is moving forward quickly. Besides these amazing medical breakthroughs, we are witnessing the emergence of digital technology and other sophisticated new tools that can monitor patients remotely, help people stay on track and healthy, and future robots may provide assistance and care. How many of you wear a Fitbit to track your steps and activities every day? It's basically a wearable sensor that is collecting all kinds of personal data – your heart rate, your activity level, your sleep patterns, and more. It's a small example of the vast amounts of data – on patient behavior, clinical encounters, or the environment – that we increasingly are able to capture in real time. I believe that one day you will be basing your clinical decisions on a wealth of “big data” that identifies what works and what doesn't – more accurately and precisely than ever before. Indeed, artificial intelligence is likely to transform all areas of health and medicine – from image interpretation to drug development to clinical decision support to public health surveillance.