Conversation with Sophie Shulman, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sci. – Director, CFI-Victoria

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was early life like? I want to touch on the language in the home, the culture of the community, the religion of the area, and expectations for women time.

Sophie Shulman, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sci.: I was born in pre-WWII Stalin’s purposefully pauperized Russia when ‘steel and guns replaced shoes and butter’ as the official goal TO CATCH UP WITH AMERICA at all costs. The costs for the population had been grand, but so was the ultimate reward: the victory over Nazism.

My parents (both MD), my nanny and myself as a child, all lived in one room of a communal apartment (7 rooms, 7 unrelated families of all walks of life, one shared kitchen with two electric ovens with 8 hot-plates, one communal bathroom (each family had their day of a week for family bathing and by-hand laundry; clotheslines crisscrossed the air under high kitchen ceiling) and a telephone on the corridor wall); all families struggled to make the ends meet. Our next door neighbor was a known lawyer with his wife, an aspiring concert-singer, the next one – a single seamstress, then a factory worker with his family, an accountant with wife, etc.

Russian culture and Russian language exclusively. The Soviet Union was officially a secular state; my parents were secular, no religion in my childhood.

Feminism was ‘in the air’ and I had been sensitive to it: as a pre-schooler, I objected that my last name was my father’s name: “unfair, it should be both, hyphenated father’s and mother’s names!”.

Shulman: I had always liked medicine as a branch of science; my parents were both MD (an internist and a pediatrician). Quackery was not on the radar.

Shulman: I searched for them, volunteered: it is so encouraging and comforting to be among those who think alike with you.

Shulman: SAPERE AUDE or DARE TO THINK FOR YOURSELF. I agree with Kant that this is the [noblest] motto of the entire Enlightenment and as such – the major guiding light for me too.

Jacobsen: What advice would you have for young people entering into the medical disciplines?
Shulman: Well chosen, good luck! But do not just pursue ‘big’ money, there is so immeasurably much more in medicine!

Shulman:  It suits me well: I’m a secular humanist, have always been.

Jacobsen: What is your favorite book? Who is your favorite thinker?

Shulman: Too many to be listed: they differed at various periods of my life. As for historical figures – Marquis de Condorcet, the Gracchi brothers.

Shulman: Dissociation between the need and availability, such as in organ transplantation (who get it and who equally needs but doesn’t).

Shulman: Thank you, Scott.