[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 81 (Friday, May 16, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E957]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               A TRIBUTE TO DR. ALFREDO QUINONES-HINOJOSA

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. ANNA G. ESHOO

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 16, 2008

  Ms. ESHOO. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and 
accomplishments of an extraordinary neurosurgeon, professor, mentor and 
hope-giver, Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa.
  The New York Times, May 13, 2008, carried a story which described Dr. 
Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa's incredible journey from Mexicali, Mexico, 
to the world-renowned halls of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. 
His story is the story of America and what immigrants in every chapter 
of our history contribute to our Nation.
  Below is the full text of the article:

 A Conversation With Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa: A Surgeon's Path From 
                    Migrant Fields to Operating Room

                          (By Claudia Dreifus)

       At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Alfredo Quinones-
     Hinojosa has four positions. He is a neurosurgeon who teaches 
     oncology and neurosurgery, directs a neurosurgery clinic and 
     heads a laboratory studying brain tumors. He also performs 
     nearly 250 brain operations a year. Twenty years ago, Dr. 
     Quinones-Hinojosa, now 40, was an illegal immigrant working 
     in the vegetable fields of the Central Valley in California. 
     He became a citizen in 1997 while at Harvard.
       Q. Where did you grow up?
       A. Mexicali. My father had a small gas station. The 
     family's stability vanished when there was a devaluation of 
     the Mexican peso in the 1980s. My father lost the gas 
     station, and we bad no money for food. For a while, I sold 
     hot dogs on the corner to help. As the economic crisis 
     deepened, there seemed no possibility for any future in 
     Mexico. I had big dreams and I wanted more education. So in 
     1987, when I was 19, I went up to the border between Mexicali 
     and the United States and hopped the fence.
       Some years later, I was sitting at a lunch table with 
     colleagues at Harvard Medical School. Someone asked how I'd 
     come to Harvard. ``I hopped the fence,'' I said. Everyone 
     laughed. They thought I was joking.
       Q. After you crossed the border, what kind of work did you 
     find?
       A. I was a farm laborer in the San Joaquin Valley, seven 
     days a week, sunup to sundown. I lived in this little trailer 
     I paid $300 a month for. It didn't take long to see that farm 
     work was a dead end.
       After a year of it, I moved to Stockton, where I found a 
     job loading sulfur and fish lard onto railroad freight cars. 
     My eyes burned from the sulfur, and my clothes smelled from 
     fish lard, but it paid me enough so that I was able to go to 
     night classes at San Joaquin Delta Community College. There, 
     I met this wonderful human being, Norm Nichols, the speech 
     and debate coach. He took me into his family and mentored me. 
     Norm helped me apply for and get accepted to the University 
     of California, Berkeley.
       Once at Berkeley, I took a lot of math and science classes 
     to up my G.P.A. Science and math are their own language. You 
     didn't need to write in perfect English to do well in them. I 
     pulled straight A's in science. In my senior year, someone 
     told me to go see this guy, Hugo Mora, who helped Hispanics 
     with science talent. I brought him my transcript and he said: 
     ``Wow! With grades like these, you should be at Harvard 
     Medical School.'' That's how I got to Harvard. All along, I 
     had much luck with mentors.
       Q. Did you find Harvard tough?
       A. Not really. Compared to working in the fields, it was 
     easy. The question was what kind of doctor should I become? 
     For a while, I thought I'd be a pediatric oncologist, because 
     I wanted to help children. But then I thought, I'm good with 
     my hands. Maybe I should do surgery.
       One day, I was waltzing through Brigham and Women's 
     Hospital and I saw Dr. Peter Black, the chairman of 
     neurosurgery. I introduced myself, and he invited me that day 
     to come to watch him do an operation. As it happened, he was 
     doing an ``awake'' surgery, where the patient's brain is 
     exposed and the patient is awake so that the surgeon can 
     ask questions. As I watched that, I fell in love with 
     brain surgery.
       Q. What about it spoke to you?
       A. Imagine, the most beautiful organ of our body, the one 
     that we know least about, the one that makes us who we are, 
     and it was in Dr. Black's hand. It was in front of me. It was 
     pulsating! I realized I could work with my hands and touch 
     this incredible organ, which is what I do now. I cannot 
     conceive of a much more intimate relationship than that. A 
     patient grants you the gift of trusting you with their lives, 
     and there is no room for mistakes.
       Dr. Peter Black, he was a very humble person. And he took 
     me under his wing. So here again, I was very fortunate with 
     mentorship.
       Q. I'm told that you do something that not all surgeons do: 
     you spend a lot of time with patients before an operation. 
     Why?
       A. I meet them several times, and their families. They 
     don't know if they are going to wake up after the operation. 
     Not all the time am I successful. I do about 230 to 240 brain 
     tumor operations a year. The majority make it. Some have 
     complications. And some--2 to 3 percent--it takes a while for 
     the patients to wake up. I need to meet everyone so that they 
     know the risks. But getting to know these patients, it's the 
     most painful part.
       I was at a funeral yesterday. This was a 21-year-old man 
     with a young wife, pregnant. Three surgeries, and the tumor 
     kept growing and growing. And he told me, ``There's no 
     possible way I'll give up.'' He fought so hard. He trusted me 
     with his life. Not once, several times. I owed him my 
     presence.
       Q. How do you handle such losses?
       A. One of the ways I work it out is through research, the 
     laboratory. I'm trying to learn about the causes of these 
     recurring tumors. The patients, they can donate tissue, which 
     we will examine.
       My hypothesis is--and there are quite a few scientists who 
     believe this--there are within these brain tumors a small 
     subset of cells that can keep growing, even when you think 
     you've taken them all out. We call them brain stem cells. 
     They can keep making themselves, and they can make ``daughter 
     cells'' that can become anything else in the brain. They have 
     the ability to go to sleep for a little bit and then wake up 
     and do it again. So we're trying to identify this small 
     subset of cells we may be leaving behind when we make these 
     beautiful surgeries.
       Q. Have you actually found them?
       A. Yes, but only in the laboratory. When we've found them, 
     they may be a product of the experimental conditions of the 
     laboratory. We haven't found them yet in live patients. The 
     next challenge is to see if they truly exist in the human 
     brain while the patient is alive.
       Q. When you hear anti-immigrant expressions on talk radio 
     and cable television, how do you feel?
       A. It bothers me. Because I know what it was that drove me 
     to jump the fence. It was poverty and frustration with a 
     system that would have never allowed me to be who I am today.
       As long as there is poverty in the rest of the world and we 
     export our culture through movies and television, people who 
     are hungry are going to come here. There's no way to stop it.

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