After more than 50 years at Einstein, Edward Burns, M.D., is retiring. He was born and raised in the Bronx, graduating from Yeshiva University in 1973 and Einstein in 1976, then completing a residency in medicine and a fellowship in hematology and medicine at Montefiore. After a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University (NYU), Dr. Burns joined the faculty at Einstein in 1981, working in research and clinical care before being promoted to professor of pathology and of oncology. For the past 24 years he has been executive dean and is now the senior adviser to the dean at Einstein. Dr. Burns is an author of more than 50 publications, including two textbooks, and holds five U.S. patents. In 2015, he was awarded Einstein’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Einstein magazine joined Yaron Tomer, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean at Einstein and chief academic officer at Montefiore Einstein, to ask Dr. Burns about his experience here over the past several decades, including sharing some of the lesser-known details about the College of Medicine’s history.
Dr. Tomer: Your knowledge of Einstein is deep, so let’s start this interview by going back to the early 1950s. Can you tell us how the College of Medicine persuaded Albert Einstein to allow us to use his name? We understand that he was being taken care of by a Montefiore physician, and that had something to do with it.
Dr. Burns: Albert Einstein was very reluctant to lend his name to any institution. He was given the chance to become president of Israel, and he turned that down because he said that he did not want to become a politician. He refused to allow Brandeis University to be named after him.
So why did he say yes to us? Well, Harry Zimmerman, [M.D.,] who was the chair of pathology at Montefiore, was given the title of director of the soon-to-be medical school of Yeshiva University, and he was given the task of trying to get Albert Einstein to permit his name to be used for the school. Dr. Zimmerman was a friend of Dr. [Gustav] Bucky, the physician who took care of Albert Einstein at Princeton, and Dr. Zimmerman asked Dr. Bucky for an introduction.
On March 15, 1953, the day following his 74th birthday, Professor Albert Einstein formally agreed to permit his name to be used for the first medical school to be built in New York City since 1897.
So on the eve of Albert Einstein’s 74th birthday, Dr. Zimmerman went to his home in Princeton and asked him outright: “Will you agree to give your name to our medical school?” Dr. Zimmerman pointed out that the name “Einstein” would enhance the reputation of the fledgling College of Medicine because it would help attract star scientists. He also noted that prejudice was rampant among medical schools throughout the United States at the time. In 1953 it was very difficult to be accepted to a medical school in the U.S. if you were not a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male. That was a critical factor for Einstein, a German-born Jew who fled the Holocaust to come to the U.S. And that was the second reason that Dr. Zimmerman gave to Professor Einstein for why he should give us his name, and he did.
Dr. Tomer: Your own history is intertwined with Einstein’s history. You grew up in the South Bronx in the 1950s and moved to the Pelham Parkway neighborhood, not far from Einstein’s campus, in the 1960s. Can you describe the first time you walked over to the Einstein campus as a teenager? What were your thoughts when you saw the College of Medicine?
Dr. Burns: My thoughts were very similar to those of Dorothy when she went to the Land of Oz. At the time I was a senior in high school and lived about eight blocks from here. I had heard of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, but I had never actually seen it. So I walked over one day, and as I approached Morris Park Avenue and saw the buildings—Belfer, Ullmann, and Forchheimer—it was exactly like Dorothy must have felt when she saw Oz for the first time. These great, magnificent buildings were just amazing. Einstein’s campus was large, it was modern, and when I walked in and saw everybody scurrying around wearing their white coats, it was an extraordinary feeling.
Ed Burns as a high school student in the 1960s.
Dr. Tomer: When you were still in high school, you had a summer job working with Sam Seifter, Ph.D., Einstein’s chair of biochemistry. How did you get the job?
Dr. Burns: Well, I got the job by walking lab to lab. I started in the Ullmann Building because it was the most interesting architecturally. I went in and asked the lab heads if they would be willing to take on an aspiring scientist over the summer. One did: Dr. Seifter. He was not the chair yet, but he was considered to be an extraordinary scientist, and of course I didn’t know that at the time. He welcomed me in and asked me why I was interested in doing biochemistry research. So I told him that I had a high school biology teacher who had us read Scientific American articles instead of textbooks. And I had read an article by a scientist, Christian de Duve from Rockefeller University, which showed via electron microscopy the actual organelles of cells. I was so taken by it that it made me realize that research was the way to go. And I told him that although I was not sure that I wanted to become a full-time Ph.D. researcher—I thought I wanted to become a physician—I wanted to have research as part of my portfolio. And he said, “Well, come work for me.”
Dr. Burns started his career at Einstein working in the Ullmann Building as a summer researcher.
Einstein was open to everyone regardless of their race, gender, or religion. Both of my parents were Holocaust survivors, and fighting prejudice and racism was central to my life.
—Dr. Ed Burns
Dr. Seifter showed me that you could be more than a doctor or a scientist. He was an advocate for the economically and socially underserved—a great role model. That experience was a major reason I applied to Einstein. Also, Einstein was open to everyone regardless of their race, gender, or religion. Both of my parents were Holocaust survivors, and fighting prejudice and racism was central to my life.
Dr. Tomer: You attended the College of Medicine in the 1970s. Where did you live? What was a typical day like?
Dr. Burns: What is now the Block Building was then the dorms where I lived. A typical day was nothing like today, which is much, much more interesting to a fledgling physician. At that time almost everything was a large-classroom experience, encompassing our large class of 176, with the exception that we could sign up for a clinical experience where we would follow a pregnant woman from the Bronx throughout her pregnancy and delivery, and that was unique. But beyond that, there was very little clinical activity for the average student in the preclinical years.
Sam Seifter, Ph.D., Einstein’s chair of biochemistry from 1976 to 1987.
Dr. Tomer: Tell us about your residency and fellowship in hematology at Montefiore. What was it like?
Dr. Burns: It was fabulous. My residency was in internal medicine, and it was terrific. I had done what I thought at the time was some significant research in medical school, where I worked on platelet factors that cause atherosclerosis. I was pretty sure that I was going to be accepted to the residency that I was interested in, so I applied to only two places. I applied to Yale, and I applied to Montefiore. When I spoke to David Hammerman, [M.D.,] who was the chair of medicine at Montefiore, he said, “Why would you want to go to Yale? We need good physicians to take care of the Bronx community. You’re going to be needed here.” So that’s why I went to Montefiore.
The passion to go into hematology and, specifically, my interest in platelets and atherosclerosis really started during the very last course of my second year of medical school. Until that time I was sure I was going to become a neurologist, but the very last course given in the second year was hematology, and it was given by a professor named Ted Spaet, [M.D.,] who was the leading teacher of hematology throughout the country at the time. He gave lectures on platelets and atherosclerosis, and I was so taken by him. I went up to him and I said, “I’d like to speak to you.” He said, “OK, come see me tomorrow.” So I went to his office, and he told me, “Well, if you want to become a hematologist, you can be trained by me, and if you want to be famous, you will follow my footsteps.” And I said to him, “Well, you’re not famous. The Beatles are famous. Mickey Mantle is famous. How many people outside your own family know you? Five hundred people?” And he said, “You’re exactly the kind of unorthodox guy that I’m looking for.” And I went to work for him.
Dr. Burns at his Einstein research lab in the 1970s.
Dr. Tomer: You worked in the Bronx early in your career, during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. One of the epicenters was right here in the Bronx. Can you tell us what it was like?
Dr. Burns: Yes, it was absolutely terrible. The infectious-disease group took care of the patients on the West Campus, namely Montefiore Medical Center. The immunology group took care of patients on the East Campus, at Einstein and Jacobi. Arye Rubinstein, [M.D.,] the head of immunology, asked me if I would like to see the patients who had hematologic problems. It was terrible because we didn’t have any treatments. All we could offer was symptomatic relief and to hold their hands. We were there until midnight every night, trying to help.
Dr. Tomer: Einstein was built on the shoulders of giants. I want to talk about one of them, the late Ernst Jaffé, [M.D.,] a distinguished university professor emeritus of medicine and hematology. Can you tell us about Dr. Jaffé as a teacher, as a researcher, and how he inspired you?
Dr. Burns: Dr. Jaffé hired me after I finished my hematology fellowship. He was chief of hematology, as well as the executive dean, at Einstein. I had just completed a two-year postdoc at NYU with Dorothea Zucker-Franklin, [M.D.,] who was an electron microscopist. When it came time for a job, I had two offers. One was to become the next chief of hematology at SUNY Downstate [Health Sciences University] at $65,000 a year. The other was to come to Einstein and work with Ron Nagel, [M.D.,] on sickle-cell disease. I was interested in sickle-cell disease, and I thought that there would be some utility to using electron microscopy to look at the interactions between endothelial cells and sickle cells.
I spoke with Dr. Jaffé about it. I said, “I’m newly married, and Downstate is offering me $20,000 more than what you are offering, and I owe it to my wife to take the better offer.” He replied, “You should come here. The salary doesn’t matter. Here, you’ll do research, and even if you turn out to be not a person who does the research yourself, you will do what I do, which is support research.”
Dr. Ed Burns with his wife, Chaya, and two of their eventual four children in the early 1980s.
So I spoke to my wife, and I told her about the $20,000 difference, and my wife was very supportive. She said, “You have to do what you want to do for your career. And so we won’t eat meat for a couple of years.” We had a child, and it was tough making it for a while, but I was very happy with my decision to come to Einstein. And Dr. Jaffé was the person I wanted to be like outside of hematology. So for the first 20 years of my life here in Einstein, I was a clinical hematologist. That’s when I took care of AIDS patients and sickle-cell patients. Then I joined the dean’s office with the hope that I could emulate Dr. Jaffé.
Dr. Tomer: So let’s talk about Dominick Purpura, M.D., Einstein’s longest-serving dean [1984 to 2004]. When he died in 2019 you said, and I quote, that he revolutionized the way medical education was taught. Why was that?
Dr. Burns: Until that time, at Einstein medical education in the basic sciences involved having textbooks that reflected whatever specialty you taught. Dr. Purpura first introduced the syllabus at Einstein as the major teaching tool. Every single course developed its own syllabus that reflected the teaching of the instructors who actually taught you, not the textbook authors at some other institution. So if I was learning nephrology, I got a syllabus of the nephrologist who was seeing patients at Einstein and who was actually teaching us, and that, of course, personalized it to a greater extent.
Dominick Purpura, M.D., Einstein's longest-serving dean, with Dr. Burns and "Uncle Albert" at EInstein's 50-year anniversary celebration in 2005.
Dr. Tomer: One of the most important offices at Einstein is the office of biotechnology and business development. That’s a key office for the future of drug development, and you actually created this office in 2000 to find commercial partners to give our discoveries the best possible chance of being turned into drugs. Can you tell us more about why you decided to establish the office?
Dr. Burns: The reason I got involved in this was because of a bad experience I had before I became a dean here. One of my previous positions was director of clinical laboratories at Weiler Hospital. One day a phlebotomist came to me and said, “I’m going on vacation, and I’m the only one who knows how to draw blood on the newborns.” I asked her to show me how it was done.
She took me upstairs to the newborn nursery, and she took out a no. 11 surgical blade, and she jammed it into the heel of a newborn, and she squeezed it, and blood came out. That’s how they did the newborn screening back then. So I said, “Well, that’s terrible. No wonder nobody else wants to do this.” You could cut yourself, or you could go too far into the heel of the baby and cause a bone infection. I mean, it was terrible. So that night, I went home and designed something that could automate the process, and it was based upon a bleeding-time device.
I developed a way of having the blade quickly go into the heel of a newborn when you pushed a button. It was so quick that a newborn wouldn’t even flinch. I went to a company that makes bleeding-time devices, and I said, “Would you be willing to manufacture this?” So they made six prototypes, and we did a clinical study here to see which one worked best, and they started manufacturing and selling it.
The Belfer Building houses the office of biotechnology and business development.
I was so upset that I missed out on this patent opportunity that I came back to Einstein and said that we had to have a patent office to take care of every invention of every single Einstein faculty member.
—Dr. Ed Burns
I had not thought of patenting it. They said, “Thanks very much. Here is a check for $50,000.” And I said, “No, I want to have a share of every device sold.” But they wouldn’t agree to that. So I hired a litigator to take my case, and after a year and a half, the litigator told me the company was willing to give me $100,000 to settle the lawsuit. But her fee was $150,000.
I was so upset that I missed out on this patent opportunity that I came back to Einstein and said that we had to have a patent office to take care of every invention of every single Einstein faculty member, from the idea to patenting it to selling it to marketing it. And that was how we did it. Our new patent policy says that if you create something, you have to give the school a chance to profit from it along with the inventor.
Dr. Burns receives the EInstein Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015.
Dr. Tomer: And now we have hundreds of patents, and many startup companies out of Einstein, which has been a huge success story. So thank you for this, Ed.
I want to move on to 2015, when you were awarded Einstein’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. Which classes did you teach? How has medical education changed in the past 40 years that you’ve been a teacher at Einstein?
Dr. Burns: When I took over the hematology course, we weren’t providing the information that our students needed. I said to the dean of education who appointed me that I first needed a year to actually listen to all the lectures, which I did. At the end of the year, I fired my co-director, and I instructed the young people who were going to be teaching to teach to the boards, which was not considered very “Einstein-tonian,” since we are supposed to be teaching research. But if our students can’t learn what they need for the boards, then what good is that? Other institutions, which were not as highly regarded as Einstein, did much better on the boards than we did. So what has changed is that we now teach the critical knowledge you need to know to be an outstanding clinician, and we also prepare our students for the boards. And I think that makes our students better prepared.
Dr. Tomer: Yes. Preparing the students for the boards is essential for their success.
I want to talk about your tenure as executive dean. You became executive dean in 2000 and held that role for 24 years. Why did you choose to become an executive dean, and what were your most-important accomplishments?
Dr. Burns: I wasn’t sure that I wanted the job when [Dean] Purpura offered it to me. I asked for some time to think about it, because I was enjoying heading up the clinical laboratories at Montefiore and Jacobi, leading the clinical hematology service at Weiler, and running the course. I was having a great time. So why change? But there were a couple of things that I thought could be done better. One was the patent office, as I mentioned earlier. I thought that was a major issue. And the other thing was that we were not doing enough clinical research. That’s why I took the job.
I think that would be my most-important accomplishment: opening up the level of trust between the administration at Montefiore and the administration at Einstein.
—Dr. Ed Burns
While in the position, I think I projected a face of the dean’s office that was a positive one, one that said, “Come talk to us.” There had been a cold shoulder between Einstein and Montefiore, and I think I warmed it up. I think that would be my most-important accomplishment: opening up the level of trust between the administration at Montefiore and the administration at Einstein, because I had Einstein credentials and Montefiore credentials, and that allowed me to bridge the divide.
Dr. Tomer: That brings me to the merger with Montefiore, which is one of the most-important events in the history of Einstein. Can you tell us how the idea was conceived? And I know it was not an easy separation from Yeshiva University, but can you reflect on the impact of the merger on Einstein?
Dr. Burns: It was terrible when it happened, but it had to happen. We ran deficits that were difficult for the university to sustain, and it became a finger-pointing contest.
I would say Steven Safyer [M.D., president and chief executive officer of Montefiore Medicine from 2008 to 2019] probably came up with the idea of our having a marriage with Montefiore, but he did not want to tell me about it, because he felt that I was a product of Yeshiva and a product of Einstein, and that’s true. But ultimately you have to do what’s right, and what was right for the medical school was to align with Montefiore.
I remember writing a letter to the then-president of Yeshiva, saying that we had to go on our own, and you should let us do it. And we should do it in such a way that shouldn’t cause problems. And I showed it to Allen Spiegel, [M.D., dean of Einstein from 2006 to 2018] and I showed it to Steve Safyer, and I showed it to Roger Einiger, the chair of the Einstein Board, and all the legal people, and they agreed that I should send the letter. I still have it.
The response to the letter was very complex and involved the idea of separating the education that went on in the College [of Medicine] from the research—an untenable proposition. But the reputation of the medical school and of the medical center was such that we had eclipsed what we were. And I think that the binding of Einstein with Montefiore is what makes it possible for us to elevate ourselves in the future.
I still have a lot of love for Yeshiva. I’m a graduate of it, and a proud graduate, and I want to help it in any way I can. But ultimately it was the right decision for Einstein, for Montefiore, and for Yeshiva.
Ruth Gottesman, Ed.D., professor emerita of pediatrics, with Dr. Burns at Einstein's outdoor graduation in 2021.
Dr. Tomer: I couldn’t agree more that the merger with Montefiore was the key to Einstein’s future. There is such a great synergism because it’s between an incredible health system and a cutting-edge, world-renowned medical school with shared values and cultures.
Another more-recent, monumental event in Einstein’s history is the transformational gift given to us by Dr. Ruth Gottesman, [Ed.D.,] making Einstein a tuition-free institution. What do you think will be the impact of free tuition on future students at Einstein?
Dr. Burns: As Dr. Gottesman has said, the hope was that students would be freer to pick lower-paying specialties like family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and primary care. I hope her gift will allow students to do what their hearts tell them to do, because then medicine will be a passion for them. It won’t be a career, and it has got to be more than a career. It has got to be a passion.
Dr. Tomer: The long-term impact of the gift is hard to predict, but the immediate impact is that students can be students again. They don’t have to look at their bank accounts every semester to see their loans going up and worry about them, or make long-term decisions based on them. They can just be medical students and be the best they can be.
Dr. Burns: I agree.
Dr. Tomer: We have more than 11,000 amazing alumni that I have the privilege of meeting at different alumni meetings. What message would you want to send to alumni who are looking to reconnect with their alma mater?
Dr. Burns: They have to come see the place. There is no substitute. What has been done for the students is amazing under your tenure as dean. To reconnect, they have to actually come here and see what has improved and how the student experience is much better than it was when they were here. The housing, the places to study, the library, Albert’s Den, all the things that we have accomplished recently. That should help make a reconnection possible.
Dr. Burns with Einstein Dean Yaron Tomer, M.D., in 2023.
Dr. Tomer: Now that you’re stepping away from a full-time role at Einstein, how do you plan to spend your time?
Dr. Burns: There are committees that I would like to remain part of as an emeritus. I am not a member of the patent committee, although I attend every single meeting, but that’s something that I’d like to do. I’d like to continue to do these things even after I retire.
When people ask why I’ve stayed here so long, the answer is simple: It’s the people. This place attracts good people, from the security guards to the researchers to the teachers to the administrators. Everybody genuinely supports the mission of the institution.
Dr. Tomer: So I have a few words for you myself. As you know, you’re the first dean at Einstein whom I interacted with as a candidate for the position of chair of medicine. You chaired the search committee, and we immediately connected and bonded, even before I knew that I would be a faculty member at Einstein and chair of medicine here. And what I’ve learned over almost 10 years of being here and interacting with you so frequently is that you embody what this institution stands for, and you’re really the heart and soul of it. Anyone can come to you and talk to you about anything that they need help with, whether it’s personal or professional.
It’s not just that your door is always open, but your heart is always open for everybody. And that is how I would define your impact on Einstein. I think that this open heart that you have has radiated to so many other people here. We will always face challenges; we’re facing challenges now, and we’ll face challenges in the future. We will address them with an open heart, and that’s your legacy that will stay with me, and I’m sure with many people here. So thank you.
Dr. Burns: Thank you for saying that. It’s beautiful, and it means a lot.
