Barbara Murphy, MD
Barbara Murphy, MD, Chair of the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was a featured speaker at the May 2018 graduation ceremony of her alma mater, the School of Medicine of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).
During the event, Dr. Murphy—a pioneering nephrologist and immunology researcher, the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, and Dean for Clinical Integration and Population Health, at the Icahn School of Medicine—received a prestigious Honorary Doctorate Degree from RCSI, an award she found particularly gratifying. RCSI is based in Dublin, her hometown. Dr. Murphy was one of three siblings who graduated from RCSI with a medical degree, and her parents were again in the audience cheering her on.
“It was a chance to look back and see what pieces of advice I would have given myself as a graduate 29 years ago,” she said. Her advice was straightforward. “Do not be afraid to stand up and take risks for the good of your patients,” Dr. Murphy told the 283 graduates, who came from 29 countries. “You cannot have an impact if you live in the shadows afraid to fail or afraid of upsetting others. Success is not about abstracts, papers, awards, or titles. It is about having a positive impact on the lives of others, about meaningful change.”
Dr. Murphy discussed a highlight of her career, her work as a young physician at Mount Sinai in 1997, where she helped establish the feasibility of performing kidney transplants on patients with HIV, which is the standard of care today.
“We were still in the midst of the AIDS crisis, patients had staggering mortality rates and were socially ostracized,” she said. “I had met precisely two people affected by HIV prior to arriving in New York, and was now faced with many otherwise ‘healthy’ HIV patients who had no hope of getting off dialysis.” She and a small group of other researchers from eight U.S. medical centers—with support from the National Institutes of Health—found a clear scientific rationale for moving forward with transplants.
“We faced resistance,” she said, “and were even verbally abused and insulted by people who did not look at patient suffering, the science, or the data, but rather felt it was their right to pass moral judgment on people with HIV, and that there was a moral hierarchy when it came to allocation of donor kidneys.” Interestingly, she added, “Two weeks ago we received an email from one of our patients who was in that trial thanking us on his 15th renal transplant birthday!”
During medical school, Dr. Murphy said she planned on becoming a full-time clinician, not a researcher, and that the field of genomics research did not exist. “You cannot predict the circumstances, opportunities, discoveries that will occur that will change your lives,” she told the audience. “The question is, will you step forward and run with it when opportunity comes your way, or will you choose the status quo?”
Recently, Dr. Murphy took on an additional leadership role as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of RenalytixAI, Plc. RenalytixAI has partnered with the Mount Sinai Health System to create a novel artificial intelligence-based platform, KidneyTrack™, that predicts a patient’s risk for progressive chronic kidney disease.