Pat McNees, writer, editor,
personal historian

Pat McNees is completing a history of an interesting department of psychiatry in a volume to be published in September: Changing Times, Changing Minds: 100 Years of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Maryland. This was like writing a history of psychiatry in the United States wrapped around the story of this unusual department. Many people have participated by sharing memories, impressions, observations, photos, and so on (including patients, clinicians, researchers, faculty, and other members of the staff and community. Those who have not sent photos, NOW IS THE HOUR. Photos received so far can be viewed here, on a Kodak site: http:/​/​bit.ly/​9NeAkJ. Those who want to order a copy, e-mail Pat (at left).

Pat previously wrote about the patients, the researchers, and the medical mysteries investigated in the NIH Clinical Center, better known at the National Institutes of Health as Building 10. Part research hospital, part ambulatory care center, Building 10 is the home base for clinical research (research involving human patients) of the various national institutes.

Many scientists on NIH's Bethesda, MD, campus do basic research; Building 10 is where intramural researchers from the various institutes see patients. The addition this year of an upgraded hospital, the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, makes Building 10 the second largest federal building in the country, next to the Pentagon. It contains half the research beds in the United States and is the largest, most important biomedical research complex in the world. It is an invaluable resource for patients with rare diseases, or common diseases for which the NIH is developing and testing new treatments, and it is a key training center for clinical researchers all over the world.

The most fascinating thing about the Clinical Center is the patients who go there, who increasingly find their way to the Clinical Center through the Internet and through patient advocacy groups and the groups that form to discuss how to deal with a particular disease. (Often their conditions are difficult to diagnose, and increasingly they help their doctors find a diagnosis.) Those patient stories are what Pat is researching and writing now.

Pat has received several awards for her history of the Clinical Center, Building Ten at Fifty. "I could write about Building 10 for years," says Pat. "I don't know who is more fascinating, the patients or the researchers. You have never seen so many brilliant, dedicated, and hard-working people in one place. Even the patients are well-informed. That's part of the mystique of the place. Pioneering work, which Building 10 is designed to facilitate, is being done on a thousand different fronts."

“If you walk out the door to my office, on the right you walk into my laboratory, out the door to the left you walk around to the ward,” says Steve Rosenberg, a pioneer in immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer patients for whom standard treatment options have failed. “It’s a marriage of science and clinical practice that exists nowhere else. This hospital is a jewel in the medical universe.” The close proximity of laboratories and research beds encourages the flow of ideas from the laboratory bench to the bedside and back again, and the critical mass of expertise, dedication, and sheer intelligence creates an environment in which both basic and clinical research thrive. Pat also executive produced a 15-minute video emphasizing the Center's partnership with its patients. You can read part of Pat's history of the Clinical Center (in a program for the employees' celebration) online--or click on "Bench to Bedside and Back" and watch the video online.

Pat's previous book was an unexpected bestseller for the National Science Foundation. New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering went through its entire first printing in five weeks (plus an amazing 102,000+ downloads of the book, most of them in PDF format). Important findings from 225 NSF-funded projects on how girls learn — and learn to love (or hate and avoid) —science, engineering, and technology; on how women and “women's ways of knowing” are needed to fill national gaps in science, engineering, and technology; and on what can be done to improve science learning for girls and women. Click here to read Pat's Washington Post story, "Why Janie Can't Engineer," on how to hook girls on science.

“Pat McNees is one of my favorite writers,” said Barbara Greenman, executive editor of book development at the Literary Guild. “She put heart and soul into the project we did together, the anthology Dying: A Book of Comfort. Instead of using only her own experience helping her dying father, she researched the literature, found out (or intuited) what people facing a death or bereavement might need to read, and after finding an amazing amount of wise and wonderful material did a beautiful job shaping it into a gem of a book, which has helped many, many people. She was realistic about publishing realities, easy to work with, and knowledgeable and thorough about copyright and permissions (she teaches a course on the subject). Most important, she managed to make readers feel that dealing with a death could be a life-affirming experience. Over my 20 years here, Dying is the book I am most proud of publishing.”

DYING made the 25th anniversary list of favorite books by women, compiled by the Women's National Book Association (Washington).

My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History
ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees,
with a foreword by Rick Bragg

"At last, a collection that shows the 'why, what, and how' behind memoir as legacy."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author of Writing from Life, founder of Story Circle Network

A great gift for that person whose life stories should be recorded or told but who keeps saying, "Who cares what happened in my life?" Read excerpts here and click here to order directly from the Association of Personal Historians. Backstories about the process of getting the stories into print will be of particular interest to those who want to help others tell their life stories.

Selection from
Starting Over
by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees

"Ironically, one of our commercially successful projects led to a major Navy program, thanks to a secret ride that Rickover took on the Aluminaut….
We decided to take Admiral Hyman Rickover by rental car from the hotel in Miami to Miami Beach, where Bill Jones had rented a motorboat -- again, not too fancy and not too skimpy but entirely shipshape and captained by an extremely efficient retired Navy Chief -- to take up to six people to the Aluminaut and back. Then Mr. Jones went in search of seedless grapes.

"Admiral Rickover was a frugal eater, but with a fondness for grapes. Early in his history with submarines, crews provided him with grapes when he toured a vessel. As he toured, munching grapes, his mind was always on submarine tests and other important events on his schedule, so he would spit the seeds and sometimes the skins on the floor. Submarine skippers prided themselves on having perfectly clean submarines for the acceptance tests, which Admiral Rickover attended, so the specifications were changed: Admiral Rickover was to be provided only with seedless grapes with edible skin. Bill Jones was having trouble finding seedless grapes, as most of them had been shipped north and only a few specialty fruit stores had them. After he found the grapes, Mr. Jones drove me to the airport for my flight back to Groton. My plane left 10 minutes before the admiral’s plane arrived.

"Apparently Admiral Rickover’s trip with his assistants was a big success. On the vessel and afterward, he lectured his assistants that they could not create something so simple, rugged, and reliable for only three million dollars. Eventually it was said that his trip aboard the Aluminaut resulted in the specifications for the world’s smallest nuclear research submarine, the NR-1, which was launched in 1969. The NR-1 was used for military surveillance and marine research at mid-ocean depths (3,000 feet). In the early 1970s, Reynolds donated the Aluminaut to the Science Museum of Virginia."
~~~
From Chapter 4, “My Years at Electric Boat.” Herman, who was in charge of Electric Boat's R&D on nuclear submarines and other Electric Boat products, managed to survive in that position despite Admiral Rickover for many years. Click here to order STARTING OVER

Contemporary Latin American Short Stories

selected and with an introduction by Pat McNees
(Ballantine Books, a division of Random House)

Stories included:
Joaquim María Machado de Assis, Midnight Mass
Rubén Darío, The Case for Señorita Amelia
Leopoldo Lugones, Yzur
Horacio Quiroga, How the Flamingoes Got Their Stockings
Rómulo Gallegos, Peace on High
Miguel Ángel Asturias, Legend of “El Cadejo”
Jorge Icaza, Big Precipice
Juan Bosch, Two Dollars Worth of Water
Jorge Amado, Sweat
Roberto Arlt, Small-Time Property Owners
Jorge Luis Borges, Death and the Compass
Alejo Carpentier, Journey Back to the Source
Octavio Paz, The Blue Bouquet
Julio Cortázar, Letter to a Young Lady in Paris
João Guimarães Rosa, The Third Bank of the River
Juan José Arreola, I’m Telling You the Truth
Augusto Roa Bastos, The Vacant Lot
Hernando Téllez, Just Lather, That’s All
Adolfo Bioy Casares, A Letter About Emilia
María Luisa Bombal, The Tree
Juan Rulfo, Talpa
Carlos Fuentes, The Doll Queen
Gabríel Garcia Márquez, Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon
José Donoso, Paseo
Clarice Lispector, The Imitation of the Rose
René Marqués, Island in Manhattan
Juan Carlos Onetti, Welcome, Bob
Mario Benedetti, Gloria’s Saturday
Pedro Juan Soto, The Innocents
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Nest, Door, Neighbors
Norberto Fuentes, Honor Cleaned
Mario Varga Llosa, Sunday
Manuel Puig, A Meeting
Abelardo Castillo, Ernesto’s Mother
José Agustín, Mourning

Click here to order Contemporary Latin American Short Stories