Eugene Kim, Pediatric Surgeon and Wine Connoisseur

 

152. Eugene Kim

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Eugene Kim

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Eugene. Kim. Eugene, welcome to the show.

 

Eugene Kim  00:17

Thanks so much. Will. It’s great to be here, and I just want to add my thanks and congratulations for all you’ve done for the class. I’ve enjoyed listening to the many fascinating stories of our classmates.

 

Will Bachman  00:29

Well, that’s very kind of you say it’s doing these is the highlight of my week. You know, hearing these stories. So, I’m glad that you’ve enjoyed a few of them, too. So, let’s start with Tell me about your journey since graduating from

 

Eugene Kim  00:44

Harvard. Yeah, I think most immediately, I stuck around the summer after graduation, I wanted to continue finishing up some research that I took as part of my thesis at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which had really laid down the groundwork for my own cancer research that I’ve conducted as an investigator over the years, and that early interest in science and understanding science came from that experience at Harvard. And I also continued to work at the now since closed, but the love the border cafe. I worked there for a couple of years as a host, and it was great to not only see the people who came in, but also to enjoy the wonderful staff that worked there. So that was my summer immediately after.

 

Will Bachman  01:33

And I love the border you know. And maybe my tastes have shifted. I don’t know, living in New York City, traveling around a little bit more, but at the time, I’d say the border seemed very sophisticated to me, and I enjoyed it. I’m curious, what did you learn as a host at the border that’s been valuable to you in your medical career?

 

Eugene Kim  02:00

Be kind to people. And you might have a shorter weight, okay, is an absolute. You know, for someone who was under 21 it was a lot of fun to work there. And, you know, it was incredible. On a Friday night, there’d be like, a three, four hour queue for a table. And you know, my God, people would come in, and you just line up the names, and then you’d see your buddy come in. You’d be like, Hey, I have a table for you right now. So that was the advantage of knowing the host at the border cafe,

 

Will Bachman  02:35

knowing the host, okay? And, wow, so any other inside, inside insight, insights into the world of the border cafe.

 

Eugene Kim  02:45

Well, probably little known fact, all of the people in the kitchen, the kitchen staff were Brazilian, so you learned the most foul Portuguese. That shouldn’t be repeated. But you know, they were happy to be good teachers. And you know, they it was, it was this weird subculture, the waiters and waitresses at the time. They were just, just really interesting people backgrounds. And so as someone who was in college or just freshly graduated from college, it was kind of a cool crowd to hang out with. They were, like all adults, you know, and you’re just going to graduate school soon? So

 

Will Bachman  03:22

what is, sort of, what makes I’ve I’ve never worked in a restaurant, what makes for a good host? Like, what are the skill sets that that doing well at that job requires?

 

Eugene Kim  03:37

Yeah, I think just not getting flustered. You know, actually, this has served me well in my medical career too. You know, you just get a lot of demanding people, and you just stay on task and you keep things in order, and you just remember who has the leverage. You know, when you have four hour wait list, you have the leverage, you know, nice and so people, you know, by and far though, most people were really good citizens, and they waited their turn, and we’d call them and they’d come in three and a half hours later, they show up and get their chicken burrito. But that had a special that was just a weird person popularity about that place that was fun to be

 

Will Bachman  04:22

around. I think the black and catfish was pretty good.

 

Eugene Kim  04:25

Yes, everything was good, I have to say. You know, sometimes people talk about the dirty secrets of the particular restaurants, but this place did it right. The food was fantastic.

 

Will Bachman  04:35

And yeah, all right, cool. Okay, so moving on from border cafe.

 

Eugene Kim  04:40

So have said they worked at the border, so I had to throw that

 

Will Bachman  04:43

1. Now, I’m curious. I was a physics major, and I didn’t do anything even remotely in the same state, much the same zip code, as, like, original research as an undergraduate, like, you know, just like tech. Book, basic stuff. What? How did you end up doing research as an undergraduate? Were you kind of meeting paired up supporting a professor’s project? Or tell us a little about how you got involved in research as an undergraduate? Yeah.

 

Eugene Kim  05:18

So my major, I think they called it biochemical Sciences at the time, and I think it was supposed to be like biochemistry, but the aspect that I loved about it was molecular biology, and I think it was becoming more popular. We were understanding things better, but truly the assays we were using to sequence DNA and and and and RNA was like, quite laborious, you know, we ran these gels. And, you know, everything you you can recall from old science, you know, type movies and so there were, it was just starting to burgeon, but we had these nascent techniques on how to figure out the inner workings of the cell. So through this, you know, I think there was a list of researchers that you could go look at and see what their projects were about. And I don’t know how picky I was, I think I was just lucky that they said, Yeah, you can come work in our lab and we’ll pay you 10 bucks an hour. And I was like, Oh, sweet. This is not left for me. So I worked for a researcher by the name of Sam speck at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. And, you know, there was a shuttle bus between Harvard Medical School and the college, so I’d write that down. And every, every afternoon, you know, they had such a great atmosphere. It’s like its own culture. There was, like, the 70s dude who had the long hair doing research, you had the clean cut graduate student. There was a guy from China who I worked with, and so there were a lot of cool people in the lab, and everybody doing their thing and their projects. And so I got tagged with one of the PhD students, and we worked together, and I carved out a part of that to be my senior thesis. So that was that was really cool. And just the understanding how to put science together, how to write an introduction, you know, essentially what I wrote was, you know, the the the culmination of a lot of projects that would go on to, you know, that would be worthy of a publication. That was the whole idea to teach you how to write and publish, of course, which, you know, I’ve done many times over my career, but that was really the first time I understood you really got to practice that scientific process.

 

Will Bachman  07:33

Yeah, and what was the actual hands on thing that you were doing there?

 

Eugene Kim  07:39

Oh, gosh, everything you know, from growing out bacteria to running gels to, you know, just every basic science assay that you you can think of, and it really taught you the importance of just fastidious, meticulous work, because, you know, you’ll be pipetting like, just like micrograms of antibody into something, and if a tiny little drop is there, your whole experiment is wrong. So it really taught you not only to be careful, but also to use perfect technique. And that’s probably something that’s also led to just my general practice in medicine, but also how I approach science in the same spirit of generosity, and I’m jumping ahead a little bit. I’ve hosted many college student, high school student, even a very precocious middle school student, in my basic science lab. And I also know it’s a risk, because they don’t necessarily carry the same meticulous technique. I remember all of my cell lines were wiped out by bacterial infection by one of our visiting students, and so now I have to ask the staff in the lab, keep a close eye on these guys and make sure that they follow proper protocol. But I was given that freedom as a college student in the lab, and I so appreciated that I I remember one Thanksgiving, I don’t know if you were around, but you know, it was snowing really heavily on Thanksgiving, I didn’t go home, but I was literally the busses were all closed, and I literally biked through the snow across the bridge and over to the medical school to do a few hours of a research. So that’s how much I loved it. So it was cool.

 

Will Bachman  09:25

That is awesome. So, and did you and, and for the what was the technical thing that you were working on there? The it had

 

Eugene Kim  09:33

to do with the Epstein Barr Virus. Everybody knows EBV is being associated with chronic fatigue. It’s known to be the agent responsible for, gosh, the swollen lymph nodes.

 

Will Bachman  09:53

Okay, swollen lymph nodes,

 

Eugene Kim  09:54

yeah. But it’s also known to be, and this is what we were interested in. It’s also known to be. The the virus responsible for a couple of important cancers. One’s called Burkitt lymphoma, and the other is nasal pharyngeal carcinoma. And in order for that to happen, this virus, like many viruses, they go to sleep, or they wake up, and then when they wake up, it can become a problem. And so we were studying that off on, sleep, wake up, cycle of the virus. And it was really just just so eye opening to me to learn how you can sequence different parts of a virus to figure out and then knock them out and figure out what, what are the targets that are actually responsible for this? Wow.

 

Will Bachman  10:39

Okay, very cool. All right, so continue your story. So you spent the summer doing some research, and poured a cafe,

 

Eugene Kim  10:46

backed up the car, said, bye to my last chicken burrow. And then I headed to New York City, where I headed to Columbia medical school. And I’ve heard a couple of my classmates already on the show who who spoke about their experience. They were indeed in the same class. And so we were only a class of about 150 so we all knew each other really well, and it made for a nice community. And so, you know, still stay in touch with several of those folks. You know, after being in the New York area for, I’m sorry, in the Boston area for about seven years I had, you know, I went from a small Texas town to going to Phillips Andover and and then I went, you know, and then graduated from Harvard. So I’ve been in that Boston, New England area for a while. And for me, the best place to learn medicine, the biggest place was to go to New York City. And so, I was so thrilled to get into Columbia. It was my top choice, and I just enjoyed the excitement of living in the big city. Of course, that excitement would wane over time, because it’s less exciting and more loud and noisy, but I was essentially there from 1992 to 2003 four years of that was for medical school, and then I stayed there to do general surgical training there. And that general surgical training is usually just five years. And then in the middle of that, I did two additional years to work in a Cancer Research Laboratory, so again, developing my interest in in pediatric cancer, which is where my career has taken me to this day. So at that time, I specifically studied a very aggressive pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma, despite its name neuro, it actually is the most common abdominal tumor in children and very aggressive, and kids with high risk disease have a very poor prognosis. So that continues to be a strong interest of mine today. So 11 years in New York City, I think that was highlighted by 911 and many of us were there at that time. It was an interesting time for us at the hospital, because, as you may recall, many of us were worried about, you know, how many injured people we would need to take. So where I was at Columbia and all other hospitals, I think we rapidly just cleared out our hospitals and discharged anyone with their eyes open just to create beds for the influx of people from the World Trade Center. And as we all know, there were no survivors. And so we were just sitting around. We canceled all our elective surgery, and we were just sitting around waiting. And then we all decided we needed to go down and help in any way that we could. So, we started to go down in teams. We I don’t know if it’s kosher to say, but we raided the supply closet with gauze and everything you can think of, and we headed down to Ground Zero, and our medical badges, they let us right down there. And you know, I don’t know if you saw it, but nothing can ever compare to that site of destruction. It was a huge mountain of metal. I had never seen anything like that, probably never will, but they welcomed our help down there. We would spend a few hours down there, and what we ended up doing was less about helping any survivors, but we were helping the people, the first responders, who were there. We were helping them with their injuries. They were cutting themselves. They were getting injured on the site. We were helping them and in any way that we could. So that was pretty memorable experience, I think I took away towards the end of my training there.

 

Will Bachman  14:53

What was that conversation like when you were saying, hey, nobody’s coming up here, she’s. Think we should head downtown. And, I mean, were some people like, Are you kidding me? And some people are like, No, we need to go. What was that? Like?

 

Eugene Kim  15:08

No, there was really no convincing. You know it, you know, it was pretty clear after a day or two where we’re sitting around literally doing nothing, because we essentially closed the hospital. And, I mean, people were coming in, we were taking care of, you know, urgently sick people, but we weren’t doing any elective stuff, you know, okay. And, and I don’t know, I don’t even remember who, but it just the idea came up. No one, no one even said anything. Was just like, let’s go, you know. And I don’t know if you remember, but the roads were all empty, so you could literally take the West Side Highway straight down and get right down there. Of course, they were holding people up, but it was like just a flash of the idea, and they let you down there. So, you know, it’s interesting today, because there’s more and more research coming out from the people who lived in that part of Manhattan about some of the health problems they’re having. One of the things that I recall was an incredible smell in Manhattan after 911 it was a smell of like burnt plastic and metal. I mean, the best description for it is probably destruction and but, you know, there’s this feeling that, you know, there were probably toxin chemicals that people can’t speak of, and they’re starting to publish a lot on some of the conditions that people come out who have lived there through that whole thing and even afterwards. So, you know, I think about that. Now, we were, of course, on the Upper West Side at that time, so I don’t really, I haven’t had any chronic issues with that, but, you know, it goes to show you know that, and some of the modern day disasters and the effect that it can have on people’s health.

 

Will Bachman  17:00

Wow, that’s pretty awesome that you guys went down there to help out. And then so you were in New York until 2002

 

Eugene Kim  17:11

1003 2003

 

Will Bachman  17:13

Alright. And then so my,

 

Eugene Kim  17:15

my love of New York had waned. It wasn’t about 911 so much, but, you know, I was just ready for a change. My mentors there felt like it was the center of the universe, and they wanted me to stay, but I knew I wanted to be a pediatric surgeon. By that point, I’m in the middle of everyone’s adult surgical training. You have to kind of decide, do I want to specialize in something. And I will say, since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a heart surgeon and and you know what inspired that is, I don’t know if you remember when we were kids, and we were in elementary school, and they showed those rickety science movies, you know, in class, in your science class, and one of them was a dog’s open chest with the heart beating. And I was mesmerized by that. I was like, that’s what I want to do. And I followed this path, and somehow it remained open for me. And when I went to Columbia, I immediately got involved with the cardiac surgery labs, the cardiac surgeons. I was doing research with the cardiac surgeons from my first year of medical school, and I loved that opportunity. They also took medical students to harvest organs for for heart transplants, and that too was a big thrill. I started to see the light towards the end of medical school, I was paired up with a well-known pediatric surgeon who would then go on to be Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Columbia, and he’s probably one of my closest mentors. And the reason why I went into children’s surgery was watching him take care of children who were really ill, sick on death’s door, watching him repair congenital anomalies to change a lifetime. And I was so touched by that and that message that it changed and altered my course and so during and that’s why, during the middle of surgery residency, I didn’t go work in a cardiac surgery lab. I went to go work in a pediatric surgery lab, and that is kind of what you have to do to get into a pediatric surgery training program. It is. It has historically been incredibly competitive to obtain a spot in pediatric surgery training. And so spending two years in the research lab and publishing well is kind of a prerequisite to obtaining one of these coveted spots. And so to that end, you know, I was able to match into my top choice, which was actually Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. At the time, I thought they had the best training program in. The world. They had all of the latest techniques, but they had really kind Midwestern people, which it was a big difference from being in New York. And so I spent two years in Cincinnati, Ohio. They speak about this, this Chile in Cincinnati, and I have to say, I can’t recommend that being from Texas, but to each their own right. I also recall they had the worst blizzard and the most humid summer, so I wouldn’t call it a destination spot for most. But as

 

Will Bachman  20:35

for they got that good ice cream place, right? Graders, graders, yeah, all right, I did a six month project in Cincinnati.

 

Eugene Kim  20:43

I would say, You came away with the right message.

 

Will Bachman  20:47

I did stay away from the chili. But I would sometimes buy graders and bring it home and the plane right? And like, they’d give you this refrigerated pack. That’s right, that’s right. Oh, okay, delicious. So two years in Cincinnati, and so

 

Eugene Kim  21:01

I got, I got trained up in pediatric surgery. And one thing I’ll just mention about pediatric surgery is that, you know, adult surgery has become so specialized. So there are people who just do colon surgery, there are people who just do endocrine surgery, which is just, you know, your thyroid, you know, and your adrenal gland. There are people who just do liver and, you know, and there are people who just do stomach surgery, in pediatric surgery, you have to do it all. So we do neck surgery, we do thoracic surgery, we do cancer surgery, we do all the intestinal surgery. And it’s probably one of the things that really interests people in this field, that you really get to operate on all aspects, and you have to kind of master all areas? And so I thought Cincinnati helped me do that. So I then moved down to Houston, Texas. And okay, so I got a question about that. Oh yeah, yeah.

 

Will Bachman  21:54

They so, no, no, I got a question about the specialization thing. Oh yeah. So is that driven by kind of market dynamics? In the sense that a given hospital, there’s lots of adults in the area, but there’s only so many kids who are going to need surgery, so you can only afford to have one pediatric surgeon, so that person has to kind of be a jack of all trades. Is it,

 

Eugene Kim  22:18

some ways, is it kind of like that true for people out in the community. There aren’t enough pediatric surgeons in some of the rural areas. So, it’s true about that, but in some of the larger medical centers, even pediatric surgery has started to become specialized. So if you’re part of a big group like Boston Children’s or Texas Children’s or Cincinnati, you’re going to have enough people where you’re going to want people who just, you know, tend to specialize in some things. Now, we all do everything, but you’re going to want to specialize in something. So as I entered a very large practice at Texas Children’s, my boss great, great surgeon. He said to me, you’re going to want to specialize in something, and you’re going to want to do research in it, and you’re going to want to do that surgery. So my mentor from New York said, Well, you know, cancer research, you should probably go do that. So I was like, Okay, that sounds good. And so I started my lab up again, and and I worked under the tutelage of a fantastic surgeon in Houston who literally just oversaw my growth as a cancer surge in children, because small organs, major blood vessels, you got to know what you’re doing before you get in there. And so, I needed him to work with me, and I think you do have to have a certain like ability to do it, but you also need a lot of mentoring, and so that’s what I appreciate. And I’ve heard this topic come up on the show as well, about mentorship, you know, and it certainly is true for medicine. I have been the recipient of great mentorship, and I have devoted a huge part of my career to mentoring young surgeons as well as well as young researchers and surgeon scientists. So,  that’s where my career took off, as far as devoting it towards children’s cancer surgery. But when you’re a surgeon at Children’s Hospital, you’re right, there’s only so much children’s surgery to be done, and so you you kind of take on whatever comes up. So, you know, if a child is born whose esophagus is not connected to the stomach, you have to be able to go into the chest and reconnect things. If a child is born with a huge hole in the diaphragm and all the intestines are going up into the chest, you have to know how to manage that child. And so there’s so many different things and different parts of the body that we had to learn. Not to mention, the physiology of children is so much different than adults that that’s part of our training as well. So, you know, I’d have to say, if I had to do it all over again, you know, I was very happy that I picked this field over and. Cardiac Surgery.

 

Will Bachman  25:01

Now, on the specialization issue, my intuition is, if you say will, you’re going to have to get liver surgery, that’d be a bummer, but I would say, okay, great. I mean, it’d be a serious bummer. But I would say, okay, great. I want the person who is the expert who only does liver surgery all day, every day. That’s what I would think. But is that a correct intuition or

 

Eugene Kim  25:25

No, that’s right, and that’s probably even though pediatric surgeons can still do everything. That’s why we’ve probably moved towards specialization. So even at a very busy cancer hospital like Texas Children’s, you will only see about 15 to 20 types of a particular type of tumor. And if those 15 cases are being split up among 15 surgeons, who’s going to be the expert? So as my old boss said, you know, I do believe there has to be specialization. Because if you want someone to be the city’s best, the state’s best, the country’s best. You’ve got to shunt all those cases to that person, or people, couple of people, to do all those cases. That’s exactly what we did, and that’s exactly what’s happening at a lot of the larger children’s hospitals.

 

Will Bachman  26:17

So tell me about how when, when you’re being mentored as a surgeon, talk to me about, to what degree is that the physical technique of and how much of it is the more intellectual mental, okay, what’s going to be your pathway? And, you know, how are you going to what’s your plan of attack for this? So, like, what are they mentoring? Like, what does that mentoring consist of?

 

Eugene Kim  26:45

Yeah, you know, I think about how I was mentored, and along the way, I thought, Man, I wish they would have done this. And that’s how I mentor people now, you know. So, like, Take, for example, say, there’s a young surgeon who’s interested in cancer surgery, and I’m mentoring them up. It starts from the beginning. They tell me about the patient, and we look at the scans together, and we look at the tumor, and we look at its relationship to all the vessels, and we talk about each one, and I tell the parents, and it’s, it’s, it’s true for my own patients, I study film like Peyton Manning, studied film before a big football game, I went through every blood vessel, every nuance. I looked at it from front on sideways and each direction to account for every important blood vessel so that when I was in there, I would not be surprised, or as I was approaching an area that was high risk for hurting something that I shouldn’t hurt, I would be aware and I would slow down. And so that’s how I teach my mentees. Now we go through the films together slowly, and then we will start the operation. Usually, if I do have a mentee, they’ll start the operation without me, because there’s a lot of work to be done before the hard part. And then as we get to the hard part, I’ll step in and just kind of go through and look, and then we’ll point out the areas, and then we get through it safely. Some of these operations, my longest one, took 16 hours. I know some operations that have gone up to 24 hours, and they are real slogs. You know, a typical one, particularly of neuroblastoma, which can totally invade the whole back of your abdomen, and in case, all of the important blood vessels, like aorta and inferior vena cava, those usually take about six to eight hours to clear as much tumor as safely as possible. So it’s good to have a good plan going into those cases, and and it’s hard to learn these on your own. So I appreciate those who sat by my side when I was learning this, and I feel it’s important to do so for the future.

 

Will Bachman  28:49

Talk to me about just physical fitness and how you deal with that. I can just, I mean, is it a learning process of getting used to it? Because I can imagine standing there and leaning over and doing careful work for 16 hours would be just excruciating on your back and just, I mean, it must require, like, being physically fit. And tell me, tell us about how you get used to that, and if you like, how you work out how you train for that,

 

Eugene Kim  29:20

yeah, I will say during the periods, and I will for the most part, after completing my training, I pretty regularly went to the gym. You know, I’m not a runner like yourself or anything like that, but I do love running. I like getting on a treadmill and popping out a few miles and then doing some weights as well. But it’s more about overall, general fitness. You know, you see how these golfers have these new specialized you know, all these guys are doing this incredible gym work. Now to I don’t do anything like that. It’s more about general fitness for me, but you’re right doing a case like that. You’re not right for about a week. And you know, you have aches and pains for. Standing at a certain angle for hours on end, and it takes time to recover. But you know, you do these cases when they have to, because they’re timed on a protocol, so they’re getting chemo, and there’s a window, and you have to do the surgery in that window, and sometimes the timing is such that you may have to do two cases in a short period of time, and that’s really brutal. I did two in one day, and I thought, Oh, I’d be able to get through it, but I was, I was mentally injured. But no, both kids did great, and we got the job done, but I made a mental note to myself not to do that again. But yeah, you’re right that the more fit you are, the better you are to handle those cases, and I think the better you are to recover from those cases. The whole prospect of making sure you get to the gym and exercise or do whatever it is that you do can be quite challenging. You know, we, we, we are victims to administrative meetings, research, you know, family time, so it is a very mindful thing to have to carve out time for that.

 

Will Bachman  31:10

Okay, talk to me about what you know now as a surgeon that you didn’t know even five or 10 years ago, or even five years ago, I imagine that someone like yourself, you’re continually learning new techniques, new approaches, new Yeah, something.

 

Eugene Kim  31:35

I will say that when I was younger, you know, your vision’s better, your flexibility, everything’s better. So while my mind and experience has gotten better, the body is it’s harder to do the stuff and my focus is hard. Of course, we wear these microscopic glasses called loops, and you know, you’re staring at a target for a long time, so that messes with your neck. And as a side note, there’s a whole area of surgery that’s coming out on the ergonomics of how to stand and how your head should be turned, because this, this topic of chronic injury, has come to the forefront in in all of surgery. And so I’m thinking about that now, making sure your shoulders are down and whatnot. You know, if you’re doing, you know, we do laparoscopic surgery, where we put the camera inside of a body, and if your shoulders are too high, you get tetany, and you start to shake, and so you got to make sure your shoulders are down and your head is at the right angle, where you can get chronic neck problems. While I have had the regular aches and pains, I think of any respectable middle-aged person, some people have actually had spine issues and nerve issues, and so it’s important to be mindful of that. So I think as an older surgeon, I’m more mindful of these things. And I think one of the best things is to remain open minded to new technology and new ways of doing things. I was trained in a very traditional way, but as I’ve come along, new and less invasive and very cool techniques have come out. I’ve spent most of my time at what they call freestanding Children’s Hospital. These are Children’s Hospital that stand on their own, and they’re not associated with an adult hospital. These are the ones that you think of, Texas Children’s, Boston Children’s. They are their own entities, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But in about three years ago, I moved to take a leadership position at Cedar Sinai, and I’ve been wonderfully introduced to some incredibly talented and visionary and innovative adult surgeons, and so it’s like a kid in a candy store, or it’s how you’re learning newer and newer ways to incorporate chat GPT in your life. It’s like, wow. It’s like, okay, there’s this technology. How can I use it for my kids? Because they’re doing in adults all the time. So for example, say, a kid has a little his lung, and they’re worried about it. You know, it’s hard to see or feel it when you go into their chest. So now we have a robotic scope that goes down the airway when they’re asleep, and you can snake it all the way to that lesion, inject the dye that fluoresces, then you go into the chest, turn on a special light, and it lights up green, boom. Take that out, and it’s something I had never used before in children’s hospital. But frankly, children’s hospitals don’t even have this technology, so it’s been wonderful to take part of all that adult hospital has. You know, we do a lot more robotic surgery now here in children than I did at the Children’s Hospital. So by working with people who are. Bring such new technologies. You know, you want to do it safely and you don’t want to go cowboy on on your patients, but at the same time, you want to recognize an opportunity to help someone in a less invasive way.

 

Will Bachman  35:15

Give us one or two examples of cases that you’re particularly proud of that when you think about your career, like, yeah, that was a that was a highlight.

 

Eugene Kim  35:28

You know, one of the sad things about pediatric cancer is you can work on someone for 1012, hours, and you will completely clear virtually almost all of the tumor from their abdomen, and it’ll come back in six months, then they’ll pass. And we’ve seen that over and over it, you know, for a surgeon, you know, it’s, it’s hard, it’s, I think it’s even harder for the oncologist, because they’re with them through the entire journey, but there are also some tumors where, you know, you can remove something and they will live completely in wonderful, great lives. And you know, not to brush off the question, but these cases that you talk about are every day for us, you know, and so to see a child whose intestines weren’t created correctly, and to go in and repair them, and they follow up with me for a couple of years, and see these little children run in and just act like completely normal toddlers and destroying your exam room. That’s like, Ah, this is good. This is good. You know, there are some babies that are born with a condition called Hersh bronze disease. That’s when the nerves don’t form properly, and the bottom part of your anus and rectum, and they can’t poop, so it acts like a blockage, and so the treatment for that is to surgically remove that and pull everything down. It’s called a pull through procedure. And so you go from a child who can’t, who’s obstructed and and can get very sick, to being these totally normal kids and not having any pooping issues, and the family’s happy. The kids are happy. Those are ones that I take away from you there. There are too numerous to count, and I think that’s probably one of the blessings of our field, but it probably also is the positive reinforcement for the brutal hours that we endure.

 

Will Bachman  37:32

Yeah, yeah. I imagine that you get asked this a lot, but, you know, it’s maybe a tougher field than if you’re doing like, you know, cancer surgery on elderly patients who you know a whole life, lung cancer or something. I mean, that’s sad, but you know, little kids, right? How does it affect you? And how do you deal with when they do, you know, when they don’t, don’t recover from from the cancer and they pass away.

 

Eugene Kim  38:07

Every I think every doctor has to handle this in their own way, and it not even only just cancer, but also just all of surgery. You know, how do you separate yourself from the patient? I’d like to think I have actually a very good rapport with my families, the parents, because, you know, I think that’s just such a critical foundation for taking care of someone. I I see these parents for the first time when they’re getting the diagnosis. And you know that look when you see them, they’re like deer in headlights. They just found out their kid has this horrible tumor. And you’re sitting with them and you in many ways, you already know what the outcome is going to be, but you still have hope, because there are some kids who do okay. You just don’t know who, but you sit down with them and say, This is the beginning of our journey, and this is what this is what this is going to look like. And you take it step by step, and you take them through that. But I have to keep myself somewhat separated a little bit, because you can’t be objective and do what you need to do if you’re not, in my opinion, other people may handle it differently. I I remember some very good friends in medical school, when they were with patients, they would cry with them and hold their hand. I can’t do that, you know? I think that would, that would be too hard. And so I kind of maintain a little bit of distance. I try to be that objective and somewhat source of strength that they need. Because some, you know, in their time of concern and distress, they need someone that they can look to and say, Okay, this is our is our person who’s going to help lead us, you know, and so you want to kind of rise above the. The that some some of those emotions at the time to help them.

 

Will Bachman  40:04

That’s, that’s the definition of being a professional. So, you know, some people say, Oh, we should be authentic. But people don’t want an authentic profession. You know, they don’t want an authentic doctor who’s demonstrating authentic emotions, right? You want someone who’s going to be a professional and be concerned, but also, you know, treat it matter effectively and straightforwardly, right? Yeah, tell us, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s roll back the clock. Let’s, I could, I could keep going on this and hearing about, like, the insides of this, but I, I know you probably have cases to get to, so I want to ask you

 

Eugene Kim  40:49

about not today. I cleared my afternoon for you. Oh, all right, perfect. Okay, so we have time.

 

Will Bachman  40:53

So tell me about, let’s go back to Harvard. Tell me about any, I mean, you already mentioned the research, but tell me about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard, or activities that you were involved in that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Eugene Kim  41:08

You know, well, it wasn’t for anyone else other than myself that I didn’t want to be a science nerd. Sure, my major was and some of my major classes were, but I wanted to know more about the world, and I’ve appreciated that from some of our classmates as well. So I took a lot of art history. I wanted to go into a museum and understand every painting that I was looking at, to understand the history of what was going on in that time of the world. And that’s kind of been my theme throughout life. But one core course, it was about Japanese art and history, and it was taught by a gentleman named John Rosenfield who was older, but has since passed, but apparently was the world’s expert. And you know, just one of the great things about Harvard is you could take an intro class, and you were with the world expert. And as you know, not all world experts teach well. He was brilliant. His lectures were amazing. And I just got so immersed in that. And while I enjoyed all my art history classes, his was particularly memorable to me in learning about the history of a country, but the artwork that went with that, I told you about my thesis, time with Sam Speck, which was, of course, important coursework for me. But that what went along with that is a seminar course I took with Mark Ptashne that really started. It was brilliant, because he wrote all these seminal papers on teaching us about how viruses and the genes and viruses get incorporated into ours, and just some really basic molecular biology stuff. And someone who was seminal in discovering a lot of that stuff. And I was like, Oh, my God. It’s like, it’s like, hearing about the Commandments from Moses, you know, amazing. So, so that was such a pleasure. And it was small, sometimes, like six of us, and it was like everybody was reading his papers, and we talk about, it’s like, Jesus is This is amazing stuff, and probably has fed my interest in science to this day. So, yeah, no those courses in particular, and an intro to architecture course with James Ackerman, you know, just a huge architecture person. I hear about all these other courses that my gov and econ concentrators took. I wasn’t so open minded to a lot of those. I was really science focused, but I appreciated the requirements that we had to take. They were really good for us.

 

Will Bachman  43:53

I totally agree, and I’m jealous. I I wanted to take an architecture course, and I could never manage to fit in. I wanted to take an art history course. Never fit it in. So that’s awesome that you did that, you know, I didn’t get to, I didn’t really open it up, or we didn’t talk much about your life outside of the clinic and being a doctor, anything that you want to share about, you know, hobbies outside, interest outside life. You’re not wearing the white coat,

 

Eugene Kim  44:19

you know, I think I don’t know, just outside, you know, again, I didn’t want to just be this doctor, you know, I wanted to have interest outside. And so, you know, I think it was in medical school, I was at a wine store, you know, probably getting a bottle of wine for a date or something. And then I, I, you know, there’s that little rack that they kicked behind the lock. And so, I looked at that record like, what are these bars like Chateau Latour, Chateau Marco? I was like, what are these? Why is that bottle $500 you know? I asked myself, why can’t a guy like me drink a bottle like that, you know? And then I became interested in wine. And so as much as I was reading the New England Journal, I was reading Robert Parker’s wine advocate, and I was reading wine Specter, I just became immersed in wine. And as I became a resident, and you know, we were all the same vintage as it were. But you know, the the web, the World Wide Web, the Internet came live for us sometime in the late 90s. And with that, you know, came some of the first wine auction sites. So, these were not wines that were ridiculously marked up at retail, but they were like fair priced wines. And so, with my very meager resident salary, I was buying up Latour, I was buying up Lafitte. I was buying up first growth, Bordeaux. And after I had my fill of that, I moved on to the next room, and I started learning and concentrating on various regions about wine. So then it went to California cult Napa wine. So like Harlan, the state Colgan, Screaming Eagle. And then I would move to Italy and learn about brunellos and super Tuscans. And then I went to Australia to learn about the Shiraz. And then after I tapped out on reds, I was like, Let’s do whites now. So I learned about the northern coast Chardonnays of California, white burgundies. Then I hit champagne and then finally, dessert wines. And then I built a large collection along the way. But sadly, and you know, maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, we were unfortunately victims of the Palisades fire several months ago, I launched, I lost a huge part of our collection at that time. Very fortunately, I had one off site locker with some of my best stuff. There, it was only a couple 100 bottles, but we will forever miss the bottles that we lost. But fortunately, there’s more wine to be bought every year, a couple, how

 

Will Bachman  47:02

many? Mean, I got asked, like, how many bottles were in your home?

 

Eugene Kim  47:06

Oh, gosh, at that time, it was only probably about 500 500 bottles. But I had, I had actually sold half my collection at auction during the covid period. Okay, my wife had slowed down on a red wine drinking because it caused reflux. I was like, Well, I’m not drinking this down. So I sold off about half of it, but then I brought a lot of it home, which unfortunately that that escalated quite quickly that day.

 

Will Bachman  47:37

All right, wow. What a story. So wine, so why? And we It sounds like you were very methodical about, you know,

 

Eugene Kim  47:45

one spreadsheets knowledge, but it helps you appreciate it more. And you know, as I have visited wineries over the years, it’s more than just ordering something from a website, but it’s about getting to know the people, their story. So everybody knows. Robert Mondavi and his son Tim opened a wonderful winery up in Pritchard Hill, which is right next to Colgan and some very other well to do Winers. And so, we visited that we talked to the winemaker, and just just really getting to know those stories. One of my favorite wine stories, I was in Australia, and I do a fair amount of international travel to give lectures and whatever. So I was there as part of a medical conference in Australia, and we were in Adelaide. Adelaide is essentially the Napa of Australia. It’s south and it’s central, and Barossa Valley is like 30 minutes away. Okay, so, of course, I went twice during that week, and one time that we went, I had made friends with the head red wine maker from Penfolds. That makes the huge lineup of reds and a few whites. And he always said, Hey, whenever you’re in Barossa, your ring, and you know, it’s one of those things, when does he ever come to Australia? So sure enough, I emailed him. He responded back immediately, and he said, we would love to host you. So I bought, like, 10 of my friends and we and I knew we shouldn’t drive, so we took this party bus there, right, and he gave us a tour of the entire Penfolds winery in they have several, but this was their main one in Barossa. And we went around and we saw everything. It was unbelievable. And I saw some writing on a on a whiteboard in the factory. They said, factory is closed today for private tour. That was us. They closed the whole thing for us. And so at the end, you know, he goes, You know, we were talking about, oh, should we go visit this other winery? Should we go this other winery? And he said to us, well, we thought you might want to taste some wine with us. So we’re like, Oh, heck yeah. So we head back to the main wine place, and there are all sorts of people tasting here and there. I’m like, Oh, what are we going to taste? And you know, these are, like the regular tourists. He took us back to this private room, and he brought out this old, dirty box, and he started pulling out bottles. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with wine, but probably the greatest wine made in Australia is Penfolds Grange. It is a it is a Shiraz. It is the Shiraz. And he pulled out, like, six bottles of Grange, going back to the 70s, and he pulled out all these other gems. And we started just tasting all of them. I’m going out of my mind. This is unbelievable. We’re tasting with him. He’s offering notes. He’s offering thoughts. Amongst all of us, we probably get through half of all the bottles, and it’s time for us to leave. We’re all pretty toasty at this point. He’s spitting the wine. We’re guzzling it and and one of my friends who went with us, he said, So what do you do with these leftover bottles? And he said, I thought you would like to take them with you. Yes. So we headed back to the hotel and had hamburgers with the leftover Grange. It was a pretty cool experience.

 

Will Bachman 51:17

All right, what a story. Eugene, where can listeners find your online bio or follow up with you if they want to find out more about your research or about where you’re working now.

 

Eugene Kim  51:30

Yeah, I have my website at Cedars Sinai, and so if anyone ever has any questions, they can feel free to reach out to me. I’m on X or Twitter. We do, you know, I of course, a lot’s going on with that website, but it has, for some reason, been the home for academic surgery. So we promote a lot of our research and our presentations, and promote some of our research on that site. So those are some great places. Fantastic.

Will Bachman  52:01

Okay, we’ll include those links in the show notes. Eugene, thank you so much for joining fascinating conversation. Really, really great. Speaking with you.

 

Eugene Kim  52:10

Great catching up. Thanks so much.