Interview with Peter Holt, MD by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

Dr. Norma Braun (neé Wang Mai Tsen) was born in Shanghai, China during the third Japanese invasion, before the World War II. Prior to the war her family was well off and very well educated. Both her grandfather and father spent time in American universities. Norma, however did not attend school until age 10, because of the war. In 1949, she, her mother and siblings relocated to Philadelphia. Norma, who desired to be a doctor from a young age, started medical school at Temple University but transferred to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (Class of 1963) after being offered a scholarship. She completed her internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital and began working at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1982, as a cardio-pulmonary fellow under A. Loomis Bell, MD, who ran the cardiopulmonary laboratory. Eventually she narrowed her specialty to pulmonary medicine, and continues to work in that area at St. Luke’s, now Mount Sinai Morningside.

Peter R. Holt, MD was born into a Jewish German family in Berlin, Germany and left in 1939, with his parents, shortly after Kristallnacht. The family relocated to England, where he pursued medical studies at The London Hospital Medical College and following an internship at The London, two years in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He came to the United States to pursue additional medical studies, being accepted for a residency at St. Luke’s Hospital, and later a research fellowship in Gastroenterology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He was invited to establish the Department of Gastroenterology at St. Luke's Hospital, later St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he trained over 100 gastroenterologists. In 2000 he resigned from St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center to pursue clinical translational research interests. For the past decade, he has been a Senior Research Scientist at The Rockefeller University using its nutritional and metabolic facilities to conduct translational human studies in cancer prevention.