Bill Boden was born in Rochester, New York, on June 21, 1948, and he grew up there. He graduated from the McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1966, from LeMoyne College in Syracuse with honors in 1970, and from SUNY Upstate Medical School in Syracuse, New York, in 1974. His internship and 2-year residency in internal medicine was at the Boston University (BU) Hospitals. Between his resident years, he was a research fellow in the Cardiology Section also at Boston University Hospitals. His clinical fellowship in cardiology was at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. His first staff position was at the Miriam Hospital of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was director of the coronary care unit. In 1986, he moved to Detroit as director of the coronary care unit and codirector of the cardiovascular clinical trials, and he was associate professor of internal medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine. In 1989, he returned to Boston as chief of the section of cardiovascular medicine at the Boston VA Medical Center and professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. In 1994, he became professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, and in 1996, he returned to Syracuse as professor and associate chairman of the Department of Medicine of the State University of New York Health Science Center. In 2000, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, as director of cardiology and as program director of the Henry Low Heart Center and professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. In 2006, he moved to Buffalo as chief of cardiology at the Buffalo General and Millard Fillmore Hospitals and professor of medicine and preventive medicine at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York School of Medicine. In late 2011, he assumed a new position as chief of medicine at the Albany Stratton VA Medical Center and vice chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albany Medical Center, where he will be a professor of medicine.
Dr. Boden’s research interests have focused primarily on myocardial infarction, stable and unstable angina pectoris, heart failure, and dyslipidemia, particularly in patients with coronary disease. He has worked extensively in the clinical trials arena, including as a project director or study chairman or co-chairman for several multicenter major clinical trials, including the Diltiazem Reinfarction Study, the Veterans Affairs Non-Q-Wave Infarction Strategies In-Hospital (VANQWISH) trial, the Incomplete Infarction Trial of European Research Collaborators Evaluating Prognosis Post-Thrombolysis (INTERCEPT), the Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggressive Drug Evaluation (COURAGE) trial, and the Atherothrombosis Intervention in Metabolic Syndrome With Low HDL/High Triglycerides: Impact on Global Health Outcomes (AIM-HIGH) trial. Dr. Boden has published >350 peer-reviewed articles, in addition to chapters in books. He has been selected for inclusion in the Best Doctors in America listing continuously since 2003. And finally, Bill Boden is the father of 5 offspring and an all-around good guy. He is one of the better speakers among the cardiology community.
William Clifford Roberts, MD (hereafter Roberts * ): Dr. Boden, I appreciate your willingness to allow me to interview you and particularly your willingness to do this while in Dallas and in my home. We are here on 4 August 2011, and it’s approximately 110 degrees outside. Bill, could we start with your describing your early childhood, where you were brought up, some of your early memories, your parents and your siblings?
William Edward Boden, MD (hereafter Boden): First, thank you for the privilege of coming today to spend some time with you in your home. I was born in 1948, and my parents, Edward and Mary, brought us up in a middle-class working neighborhood in Rochester, New York, where for the first 10 years of my life we lived in the same house with my maternal grandparents. They lived on the second floor and we on the first. I have 1 sister, Nanci, who is 3½ years older than I am. She still lives in Rochester, New York. In my current location in Buffalo, I have reunited more with my sister over the last 5 years than I have over the last 25 years. A benefit of returning to New York is to have more time with her. I came from a very much working-class family, and that includes my extended family. My dad was a machinist at a local tool and die maker, and he also worked for a time at a division of General Motors called Delco. He worked the day shift. My mother was a secretary at Taylor Instruments Company, which made precision instruments. Neither my mom nor dad went beyond high school. My sister also did not go to college, which was not uncommon in the 1960s for young women. She started work in the mortgage division of M&T Bank, and she still works there. My father had 3 sisters and 2 brothers, so we had a large extended family. My mom had 2 brothers. They all lived in the Rochester area. My cousin Ronald, on my father’s side, was the only other member of my extended family who attended college, and he also went to medical school and became a physician. He was 15 years older than me. He had a strong influence on my career, and I admired him. I was very impressed that he was the first one in our entire extended family, on either side, to go to college. He trained in ob-gyn, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and practiced there until his death in 2010.
My grandparents came from Poland and the Ukraine. My maternal grandfather came over from the Ukraine around 1910 and went to work for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in Rochester. He worked for about 10 years and saved enough money so that he could bring his family to the States. Shortly after he arrived in Russia in 1919, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and he and his family were trapped there for 9 years. My mother was born in the Ukraine in 1920. My grandparents were farmers. With the Russian revolution, however, they essentially lost any land and possessions they had. Fortunately, my grandfather had deposited money in an American bank, so he had a means to return to the USA. They returned in 1929 and settled in Rochester.
My father was born of Polish descent in Winnipeg, Canada. In his early 20s, he and his family moved to Rochester, where my parents met and married in 1941. My sister was born in 1944, while my dad was serving in the Army during World War II. He was away for nearly 4 years. He returned in late 1944. They settled in Rochester, and he went to work for Delco. My mother worked the evening shift (5 pm to 11 pm ), and my dad worked the day shift (7 am to 3 pm ). When I came home from school, we had roughly an hour to go out and play, and then we had dinner around 4:30 pm . Fortunately, we lived only 3 minutes from the plant.
I loved living with my grandparents. They spoke very little English, and despite my best efforts to teach my grandmother to read, I rarely succeeded. She tried mightily to learn English but never mastered it. Conversely, typical of that era, the émigrés to the USA wanted to be “Americanized,” so that they made a conscious decision that we would only speak English in the house. As much as they were fluent in both Polish and Ukrainian, I never picked up the language. I missed an opportunity to have a greater appreciation for my own heritage.
I loved to use the phonograph. I would sit for hours listening to 78-rpm and 45-rpm records. I very much admired Eddie Fisher and Perry Como, and I memorized their songs ( Figure 1 ). I became quite a good singer as a youngster. Whenever there was any kind of family get-together, I would almost invariably be asked to go on stage and sing. I would be bribed for a paltry sum of 25 cents to go and sing some songs. I was delighted. This was when I was 5 to 7 years old. I enjoyed mimicking the 1950s singers. My family was delighted and loved to hear “Billy” sing. Children in that era spent a lot of time outside playing, and we were no different. At least an hour before dinner and then after dinner I would listen to the phonograph or read. We got a black-and-white TV in the mid-1950s. I liked to watch the evening news with John Cameron Swayze. TV revolutionized what we did, I think, relative to an earlier era, when there was only radio. In 1957, my father had a medical illness, and I was told he had a “stomach ulcer.” He was admitted to the hospital, and had surgery, which, I presumed at the time, was removal of the gastric ulcer. I thought nothing further of it until 2 or 3 months later, when we moved out of the duplex we shared with my grandparents to the suburbs. We moved, when I was about 10 years old, to a middle-class neighborhood in a western suburb of Rochester. It was a residential neighborhood with single-family homes. Thereafter, we made new friends and neighbors. We had a very enjoyable time. In 1958, my father had to be rehospitalized for what I thought was recurrent ulcer surgery. As it turns out, and I found this out only many years later, he had been diagnosed with gastric carcinoma in 1957, and that was the precipitant for his wanting to move our family to a house of our own. My parents never disclosed the nature of his illness. But I watched his gradual demise over the course of a year, where he progressively lost weight, became weaker, and ultimately when I was 12, he died. This was in 1960. I was devastated, and the thing I regret is that I never knew he was dying, or if I did, I repressed it. I found myself withdrawing from my dad during those months, because it was hurtful for me to see him in such pain. Years after, I lamented the fact that my sister knew he was terminal, but everyone felt it would be too traumatic for me to know the truth. I was fearful of what would happen to us. My mother didn’t have a well-paying job. My father’s death forced me to grow up quickly. I had in my mind that I wanted to be a physician. In 1953, at the age of 5, I had a ruptured appendix. One evening, I was incredibly sick. I had severe vomiting, and the pediatrician came to see me at home, noted that I had a boardlike abdomen, and immediately rushed me to the hospital for surgery. This wasn’t long after penicillin became commercially available in the private sector. I remember the nurses and physicians commenting on the fact that this was touch and go, because I had severe peritonitis. There was no guarantee that I would make it through the surgery, much less have no complications. A very young skilled surgeon, Dr. Harry Phillips, did the surgery. I came home after a 2- to 3-week hospitalization. During the time in the hospital, I got first-hand exposure to medicine: to orderlies, nurses, and physicians. At that period, I decided that I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. That, coupled with my physician cousin, reinforced in my mind that I wanted to pursue a career in medicine. I became completely focused on that goal. When my dad passed away, I was concerned that my goal would be unattainable.
I worked hard and was accepted to McQuaid Jesuit High School. It was a very important step in my life, because I became exposed to very rigorous educators. The Jesuits really challenged students, both in high school and college, to become excellent thinkers. We were required to read voraciously. As a freshman, I read 25 books, all required reading. I was encouraged by the faculty to pursue the “Greek honors” curriculum as opposed to the “science honors” curriculum, despite the fact that it made sense to me, since I wanted to me a physician, to track in the science honors program. During high school, I took 4 years of Latin, 3 years of classical Greek, and innumerable other courses, but remained focused on becoming a physician. In my sophomore and junior years, I made the football team, although I didn’t play very much, because I wasn’t fast. In my senior year, I decided I would be the manager of the team. I was involved in other extracurricular activities: student council, yearbook. I also was on the debate team for 2 years, and really got an opportunity to engage in public speaking and the rigors of learning to defend a particular position. I graduated in 1966 and was seventh or eighth in my class.
Roberts: How many were in your class?
Boden: One hundred forty. I had my heart set on going to Boston College. I was inspired by Jesuit education and how they challenged me—the dialectic was thesis, antithesis, synthesis—which was drilled into our heads from the beginning. Every step in life, one had to be a rigorous thinker and to challenge conventional wisdom. (Now that I am saying this, it immediately becomes apparent to me how I’ve tracked in the professional career that I have, challenging conventional wisdom in a lot of the clinical research work that I have done.) I began looking for college interviews after my junior year of high school. My mother remarried when I was 16, in 1964. We then had a blended family of 5 new siblings and my sister and me. The 2 older stepsiblings were already out of the house, We had 3 stepbrothers—John, Jim, and Chris—still at home. We went from a family of 3 to a family of 7. What immediately became apparent to me when they moved in with us is that I had absolutely nothing in common with my stepbrothers. All they could do was sit and watch TV endlessly, eat ice cream, and not do anything that was in any way intellectual. They all went to public schools. I got home from football practice or an extracurricular activity around 6 or 6:30 pm and had dinner, often after the rest of the family had already eaten, and then go to my room and study for 3 hours. I was never a good test taker. I never figured out how to take the PSATs, SATs, or the MCATs. I’m convinced you are either a neurotic or a paranoid when it comes to taking tests, and I was always a paranoid. I kept looking for the curveball rather than the fastball down the center. I was an average test taker.
I was so thrilled to get an invitation to interview at Boston College. I met with the dean of admissions, Father Brady, who upon reviewing my scholastic achievement noted that I was a very good student, finishing high in my class but that I didn’t score very well on the SATs. He told me that they would offer me admission to Boston College but only in a liberal arts curriculum, because they didn’t think I had an aptitude to succeed in premed. I thanked him and said goodbye.
I was offered a scholarship to attend a small Jesuit liberal arts college in Syracuse, LeMoyne College, which was a relatively new school with a matriculation of about 2,000 students. Again, recognizing that I had to help my mother as much as I could, I jumped at the opportunity to get a scholarship to go to college. My major was biology/premed, and I did exceedingly well. I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities: student government (I was vice president of my class during 2 separate years), the yearbook, and the debate team, which I thought was quite a prize. I graduated from LeMoyne in 1970. The previous year, I submitted applications to medical schools. I don’t remember how many I applied to, but I received only 1 interview invitation, which was at SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. I think my not receiving other interview invitations was because I had gone to a small college and had only so-so MCAT scores (150 range). In the fall of my senior year, I was accepted to SUNY. In September/October 1969, President Nixon reinstituted the military draft for the Vietnam War, and it was a lottery system based on birthdays. There was random selection of birthdates starting from 1 to 365, and my day of June 21 was number 60. I was destined for Vietnam had I not gotten into medical school. As fate would have it, the individuals in college who partied the most and were the worst students ended up getting the higher draft numbers and didn’t get drafted. I was pretty anxious for several months, knowing that I only had 1 interview for medical school and knowing that I would be going to war if I didn’t get in that following spring. I got a military deferment.
I started medical school in 1970 and graduated in 1974. My cousin, David, who was a year younger than me, was drafted to go into the Army, and he sadly died in Vietnam when he came upon a landmine in his jeep. I remember how sad I was being a pallbearer at his funeral when I was a freshman in medical school, recognizing, Why him and not me? It took a toll on me to see my cousin die in the war and made me very grateful that I had been given the opportunity to pursue a career in medicine.
Roberts: What was your father’s full name?
Boden: Edward John Boden, born in 1912 and died in 1960. He was 47 when he died.
Roberts: What was your mother’s full name?
Boden: Mary Ann Babey, born 1920 and died in 1994. She had an acute myocardial infarct during my internship year. She survived and lived another 20 years.
Roberts: Were you close to your father? Did you have a lot in common?
Boden: We did until he got sick. We took a summer vacation every year to the Adirondack Mountains or to the Thousand Islands in upstate New York. We went camping and fishing. One summer, we drove to Prince Edward Island in Canada. We got hit by Hurricane Hazel, and we were stuck in our cabin for a week. When his health began to deteriorate, I tended to withdraw from him. I never thought he would die.
Roberts: What about your relationship with your mother?
Boden: I was very close with my mom ( Figure 2 ). I felt badly for her because she was only 39 when my dad died. She was young, attractive, and vivacious woman, who lost her husband too young. For a period of 2 or 3 years, she dated quite a bit. My sister and I hoped she would meet somebody that she could have a happy life with. She met a man who also worked at Taylor Instruments as a metallurgist, Herb Miller. Herb was a couple years older than she. They married in 1964. I believe they had a very happy relationship. There was a lot of stress in the house, because my sister and I didn’t have anything in common with his kids. I would feel tension because there were differences in how we were brought up and that created some conflict. I very much wanted to go away to college so I wouldn’t have to be in that environment daily.
At age 16, I went to St. Mary’s Hospital and asked for a summer job. I was hired as an orderly and assigned to an orthopedic floor with a demanding head nurse, Miss Marie Fink. She was a terror. Everything I did or said, in her eyes, was wrong. I stuck it out, and by the end of the summer, she valued what I could do, and I became one of her “favorites.” I made $1.47 an hour, the minimum wage in 1964. President Johnson increased the minimum wage to $1.62, which I felt was a windfall. In 8 hours, I made $10 to $12. But it was a wonderful way for me to see medicine from the nursing perspective, and I was able to save money for school and spending. Throughout both high school and college, I worked summers and holiday breaks as an orderly. When I was in college, I was routinely assigned to the emergency room. It gave me an opportunity to shadow an emergency medicine physician and watch what they did. I think I absorbed medical information through my skin. I observed very intently, to the point where as a medical resident, I moonlighted in the emergency room and became proficient at taking care of almost any problem.
Roberts: How did you and Nanci get along?
Boden: We got along reasonably well. My sister was very independent. She did not get along with our stepbrothers. Within 6 months of their moving into our house, Nanci left home at age 17 and got her own apartment. It bothered me that she bailed out of the household. In the subsequent years, we have become very close. We get together at least every month or so, if not more often, and it has been a real bonus being close to her again.
Roberts: Does she have children?
Boden: No. She was married for about 5 years, got divorced, and never remarried.
Roberts: It seems to me that your father, if he sensed he was dying, would have been pleased to have your family stay in the duplex with your grandparents?
Boden: I think his reasoning would have likely been “I don’t know how long I have to live but if we don’t move now, we’ll never have to opportunity to move.” He wanted to move the family while the getting was good. Years after I completed my residency, I unearthed his medical records. From the beginning (1958), his diagnosis was gastric carcinoma, and he kept it to himself. I believe he didn’t even tell my mother. He was told by the physicians that there was little they could do for him. He eventually had both liver and bone metastases and was miserable his last several months. I was struck by his silence in dealing with his cancer. It took courage on his part to move us to the suburbs under such difficult circumstances ( Figures 3 and 4 ).
