Bluffton magazine: Alumni features

Serving his country.
David was considering graduate school when he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. As an alternative to combat, he participated in the Teachers Abroad Program through Mennonite Central Committee and was sent to Brussels, Belgium, for a year to study French and then to the Democratic Republic of Congo for two years of teaching.

Trading in a microscope for a stethoscope.
Upon returning from the Congo, David enrolled at Indiana University where he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry. Much of his doctoral work focused on antibody structure and human genetics, as he wanted to discover how genes are able to program the diversity human bodies have. He had an interest in health issues and more day-to-day interaction with people, so he decided to become a physician, specializing in internal medicine. In late 1985, he began working at Westside Health Clinic in Denver, Colo. “It was a wonderful mix of being able to do primary care medicine and hospital medicine while teaching interns and residents,” says David.

The beginning of an epidemic.
When David began seeing patients, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was just beginning. “I had seen maybe four or five patients with AIDS during my residency training, but there weren’t very many around,” he says. “The epidemic grew, and it grew fast enough in Denver that it overwhelmed our infectious disease specialists.” David was one of a group of internists who accepted the responsibility of taking care of some of the patients. “My clinic and several others within the Denver health system set up an HIV early-intervention service to take care of people who had tested positive for HIV,” he says. Today, two issues still need to be addressed medically regarding HIV/AIDS work, says David. One, antiviral drugs are needed that work to the level of cure that they work at for other diseases, and two, a vaccine is needed that works as well as the vaccines for polio and smallpox—one that will be able to completely eradicate the disease from the human population of the world.

Catch me if you can.
David’s first date with his wife, Jean (Purves ’67) Lehman, was at a Sadie Hawkins dance at Bluffton. “Officially, the women were supposed to ‘chase’ the men and touch them in some way, not tackle them, to ‘claim’ that man for a date,” says David. “Jean cheated and asked me out a couple of days ahead, which is what a number of women were doing.