Dr. Jeremiah A. Barondess, Dr. John J. Connolly, Dr. George Lundberg and Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. attend The First Annual National Physician of the Year Awards at Metropolitan Club in New York City.
George Lundberg is an American clinical professor of pathology, editor, educator, and author of the well-known book, Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn't Been Fixed, that was written with James Stacey. He is the former editor-in-chief of Medscape, The Medscape Journal of Medicine, eMedicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Background
George Lundberg was born on the 21st of March, 1933 in Pensacola, Florida, United States. Lundberg’s parents, George David Lundberg and Esther Louise Johnson were Swedish immigrants who settled in Alabama. Many summers the Lundberg family would move to Troy, Alabama where they boarded in private homes while Louise attended college classes full time. Two of his aunts who were medical missionaries were killed during the takeover of China by Mao Tse-tung.
Education
George David grew up and attended Silverhill School where his mother also taught. It was during these early years that he decided he would like to become a doctor. Since both of his parents taught music, George David took lessons in violin and piano. He also taught himself to play the clarinet. Later, George was enrolled in the Training School in Troy, Alabama which was experimental educational classes for children. This boost in his schooling was one of the reasons he was able to skip three grades: fifth, eighth, and eleventh.
At Robertsdale High School he proved himself to be an excellent scholar and considering the amount of time his parents required him to study and the fact he was younger than his classmates, he was also a very good athlete. His high school graduation was two months after his fifteenth birthday in 1948.
George David went on to North Park College (now known as North Park University), the Mission Covenant college in Chicago to study premed. He enjoyed the college's intramural sports and being a part of the North Park Orchestra. He was an outstanding competitor in their ping-pong competitions. He graduated in 1950 with an Associate in Arts degree in premed.
Still having a desire to be a physician, Lundberg returned home and applied to The University of Alabama (UA), where he was accepted and spent the next two years earning his chemistry degree, playing the clarinet in the Million Dollar Band, and cheering on the football program he’d loved since grammar school. In his second year at UA, he preemptively applied to medical school, as was customary in the early '50s, but he was rejected by each of the schools to which he applied both in 1951 and again in 1952. Having finished his bachelor's degree and still unable to pursue his career as a doctor, Lundberg returned to UA to work on a graduate degree in biochemistry. He finished premed, graduating in 1952 at the age of 19 with a Bachelor of Science degree.
Fortunately, in 1953, the Medical College of Alabama (now UAB School of Medicine) in Birmingham reached out to Lundberg for an interview and he was finally accepted into medical school. He received a Doctor of Medicine from it in 1957.
In 1956, George Lundberg joined the army, where he served during the Vietnam War. Since he was in the army, he completed his internship at Tripler General Hospital, in Honolulu, Hawaii, 1957-1958, and his pathology residency at Brooke General Hospital, in San Antonio, Texas 1958-1962, and received his Master of Science degree in Pathology from Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas. Two years later, he left the United States Army as a lieutenant colonel.
George Lundberg earned honorary degrees from North Park College, Baylor University, the University of Alabama (Birmingham and Tuscaloosa), the State University of New York (Syracuse), Thomas Jefferson University, and the Medical College of Ohio.
In 1963, Lundberg had his first experience with a computer. It happened when he was stationed at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco as a captain in the United States Army and was assigned by his chief to automate the California Tumor Tissue Registry. He was successful in automating the registry. Two years later the Army sent him to the IBM education center in Poughkeepsie, New York to take a one-week course called "Computing for Physicians". About one hundred other physicians gathered to learn how to use computers. One of their main teachers was Donald Lindberg who was also a pathologist and an expert in computer medicine. Dr. Lindberg would become Dr. Lundberg's lifelong friend, joining him years later on the editorial board at JAMA and even later at Medscape.
With the information he learned at IBM, Doctor Lundberg went to William Beaumont General Hospital (now William Beaumont Army Medical Center) in 1965 at El Paso, Texas, as chief of pathology and installed the first computer system into a United States military hospital clinical laboratory. Two years later, while still at Beaumont, he installed the first electronic microscope in the United States military hospital lab.
After leaving the army in 1967 as a lieutenant colonel, he was a professor of pathology and associate director of laboratories for ten years at Los Angeles County and the University of Southern California Medical Center (LAC USC Medical Center) in Los Angeles. Between 1977 and 1982, he held the post of a professor and chair of pathology at the University of California in Davis. At the University of California’s medical center, he worked with drug patients and created a program whereby anyone could have a drug sample analyzed so that users would know which were the worst drugs. The results were published in the Los Angeles Free Press as the Dope Scoreboard. City authorities shut down the program, but physicians, the police, and judges protested, and it was resumed.
George took the post of an editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for the American Medical Association in Chicago in 1974. Eight years later, he accepted the post of editor-in-chief of Scientific Information and Multimedia Group. While Lundberg was always considered a controversial editor, he was ultimately fired on the 15th of January, 1999, after publishing a survey of college students’ views as to whether oral/ genital contact is the same as having sex. Lundberg’s survey related to questions of impropriety surrounding then-President Bill Clinton and presidential aide Monica Lewinsky and the editor had moved the publication of the survey to coincide with the debate surrounding Clinton's impeachment. Jerome P. Kassirer, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, called Lundberg’s termination an "ominous precedent" in a subsequent editorial, adding that his own publication often pushed up articles that are timely. Other JAMA editors denounced the action, and editorial board member Donald A. B. Lindberg resigned in protest.
After leaving JAMA, Lundberg accepted the position of editor-in-chief and executive vice president and the founding editor of Medscape General Medicine the world's first and still only, primary source, peer-reviewed, fully electronic general medical journal on the internet (now just Medscape), where he worked until 2009. In 2002, he became an emeritus editor-in-chief and special advisor to CEO and chair of WebMD. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CBS HealthWatch.com. He also served as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University in Chicago and at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Lundberg worked in tropical medicine in Central America and Forensic Medicine in New York, Sweden, and England.
Currently, Lundberg lives in California and has six part-time jobs to his name. Primarily, he works as the chief medical officer and editor in chief of CollabRx, a company that matches the newest medical information about cancer with the best possible treatments, drugs, and clinical trials currently available. He is also an executive adviser for Cureus, the only online medical journal that provides peer review before and after publication. He is a consulting professor of pathology and health research and policy at Stanford University and the president and chair of the Lundberg Institute. He is a frequent lecturer, radio and television guest.
In 1961, The New England Journal of Medicine published George's first scientific paper he had ever written. In 1975, his book, Managing the Patient-focused Laboratory came out. Since that time, he has been the editor and author for a number of books, including Pathology for the Practicing Pharmacist that was written with Bruce H. Woolley, Using the Clinical Laboratory in Medical Decision-making, and most recent, Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn't Been Fixed that was published in 2001 in collaboration with James Stacey.
Lundberg and his family were faithful church members at the Mission Covenant Church in Silverhill. As a boy, he was very active in church and youth activities. There, George David learned about mission work and the importance in helping others.
Politics
Tim Beardsley noted in Scientific American that Lundberg "frequently wrote editorials that did not sit comfortably with the policies or politics of his parent organization." In 1994, Lundberg’s ranking of health care reform proposals placed President Clinton's plan second from the top. Although the AMA had not put its seal of approval on any plan. At the time of Lundberg’s release, he was writing an editorial in which he proposed a "millennial constitutional convention" for the reorganization of American medicine, which he continues to argue no longer serves society. "Lundberg's plan was to reestablish a big tent for all types of American doctors that would have as its central ethic universal access to basic medical care," explained Beardsley.
Views
Over the years, Lundberg has called for physician solidarity in preventing nuclear war, argued for treating violence as a public health issue, and excoriated tobacco companies. Recently Lundberg made himself unpopular by calling for more autopsies.
According to Lundberg, pathologists essentially have two options for the future. They can either become "flunkies" who do the bidding of clinicians on the front end of the brain-to-brain loop. Or, they can become informed scientist-clinicians who provide interpretation and clinically actionable information.
Quotations:
"Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as a conversation at a bar."
Membership
George Lundberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, the Cancer Commons Medical Advisory Board, and a former president of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He sees editing a medical journal as a form of missionary work using information." - Tim Beardsley
Interests
Sport & Clubs
college football
Connections
Dr. Lundberg has been married to Patricia Lorimer Lundberg since March 6, 1983. They have three children, George III, Charles, and Carol.