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  On one of the colder evenings of an unusually warm winter, dozens of faculty, faculty emeriti, and department chairs gathered in Yale School of Medicine (YSM)’s Medical Historical Library to shake hands with the new dean and raise their glasses to the former dean. The affair was comfortable and familiar, with Nancy J. Brown, MD, the Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Medicine and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine, mingling and chatting with her new colleagues. She said she begins her journey as dean with YSM in “an incredible place, due largely to the leadership of Bob Alpern.” Robert J. Alpern, MD, Ensign Professor of Medicine and professor of cellular and molecular physiology, partook in the festivities, basking in the glow of 15 years’ efforts successfully handed over to a capable and competent successor. With that, one era was over, and another began.

n ancient times physicians extracted from the bark of the willow tree a substance—salicylic acid—that reduced fevers, inflammation, and pain. By the mid-19th century, a French chemist had mixed the acid with acetyl chloride to form acetylsalicylic acid, the compound that Bayer marketed in 1899 as aspirin. Over time aspirin transcended its original uses, and by the 1970s and 1980s it was seen as a treatment for stroke and heart disease. During the 1980s physicians and researchers also saw that it could fight cancer. By 1991, they’d found that aspirin lowered the risk of colorectal cancer, and subsequent studies linked it to a lower risk of other cancers. Physicians at Yale are helping to figure out whether aspirin can keep breast cancer from recurring in women who have already gone through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. “There’s an overwhelming amount of data that suggests that taking aspirin may be beneficial, and that aspirin is safe enough for the majority of people to take da