Mentoring to Give Back to the World

For me, this is a story of mentoring and giving back to the world, even when tragedy devastatingly strikes. My mother, Emma J. Anekwe, shared with me an article on Tuskegee University’s website about a scholarship named in honor of Sam Dubal, Ph.D., M.D. Sam’s father, Dr. Bharat C. Dubal, a 1971 graduate school alumnus in biology at Tuskegee, and his mother, Dr. Saroj Dubal, established the Dr. Sam Dubal Scholarship at Tuskegee University in 2020. The scholarship assists students pursuing careers in healthcare.

Interestingly, Sam’s father was my father’s first graduate student that he mentored while teaching biochemistry at Tuskegee University in the late 1960s and early 70s.

My father, Gregory E. Anekwe, Ph.D., was a 1967 graduate school alumnus in biology at the university and my mother, a medical technologist at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital on campus.

My father and Bharat Dubal also published a 1971 paper together in the journal, Lipids, entitled, “Fatty acid composition of triglycerides and phosphoglycerides during growth in Glomerella cingulata”. Bharat Dubal’s son, Sam, tragically disappeared during a hike on Mt. Rainier in October 2020. Since then, his family, along with friends, and an unnamed donor, established a $1 million dollar endowment to provide full support for doctoral students in the field of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, where Sam earned his Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 2015. In 2017, Sam received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

---

Together with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Ph.D., Sam Dubal contributed to the birth of Radical Medicine, a new way of practicing medicine through the lens of justice and anti-racism. He envisioned a world where medicine would be practiced for our collective good instead of through a colonialist view of humanity.

I believe that Sam’s life was well lived. He should be remembered for how he enhanced medical education to heal and better people. When my father first mentored Sam’s father, I’m sure he could not have imagined that his mentorship would impact generations of world class medical educators, but it did. This story highlights how mentoring matters to the students we teach. As for me, I am so proud to have been a part of a story that needed to be shared.

Ethically Speaking,

Obiora N. Anekwe