This blog contains my remarks from the 2022 Lindberg-King Lecture and Scientific Symposium: Science, Society, and the Legacy of Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D., which took place on September 1, 2022. Watch a recording of the event here.
I had the great fortune of becoming the director of the National Library of Medicine immediately following the 30-plus-year tenure of Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD. I am sure that each of you here today treasures your own recollection of Don, maybe from a conversation or a laugh you may have had with this great leader, teacher, visionary, and colleague (and husband to Mary, father, grandfather, and friend). I am both proud and humbled to stand on the shoulders of this giant as I lead this incredible organization.
I know more viscerally than most about Don’s legacy as NLM director. I sit in the office he occupied, I walk the halls he walked, I work with the people he hired, and I see and experience the fruits of his judgement, investments, and vision.
I now sit where Don once sat, representing NLM at the leadership table of NIH with the other Institute and Center directors. With Don paving the way, I have a platform to extend NLM’s thought leadership and technical knowledge to guide NIH’s continued efforts to advance data-driven discovery. The good will and collaborative spirit engendered by Don across NIH opened doors for me and helped me continue his legacy to deliver on the promise of science accelerated by broad access to literature and data.
Don and I share a deep commitment to ensuring that the public benefits from NLM’s efforts to assemble, organize, preserve, and disseminate biomedical knowledge for society. It was his early vision that made MedlinePlus a trusted resource for consumer health information and ensured that the PubMed citation database and the PubMed Central full-text literature repository were open and accessible to everyone, everywhere, with an Internet connection, at any time and place.
Don’s commitment to the public was also evident in his efforts to educate the next generation of biomedical informatics scholars. Frankly, I believe that of all of the aspects of his job, engagement with trainees was his favorite!
When you stand on the shoulders of a giant, you have a great advantage. The foundation Don built and the relationships he established provided me, the 4th appointed director of NLM, with a playbook right out of the gate. It is not enough to solely rely on his vision to guide our future as Don also inspired innovation; in one of our last conversations, he said to me, “This is your game—make sure you play it well!” In order to do that, I cannot simply stand on the shoulders of a giant; I must also keep my head up and my eyes forward to the future to envision new pathways and find new opportunities to bring forward the riches of NLM to the future benefit of science and society.
I close by inviting all of you to stand on the shoulders of this giant and meld your sights with his, for it is not by holding tight to that which he could see, but by using his vision as a stepping-off point for our own that will serve his legacy.
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD
Director, National Library of MedicineDr. Brennan is the Director of the NIH National Library of Medicine, a leader in biomedical informatics and computational health data science research and the world’s largest biomedical library. Under her leadership, NLM has grown its intramural and extramural research enterprise, extended stakeholders’ access to credible and reliable health information, and acquired and preserved biomedical literature using cutting-edge digital research and outreach. Read more about Dr. Brennan.
One thought on “When You Stand on the Shoulders of a Giant, What Do You See?”