*note: larger versions of the images in this article are available by clicking upon each of the images below
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Dr. Douglas has also been able to bridge the great divide between the world of medicine and the African-American community, whose medical needs are still vastly underserved. The result of the church meeting? Dr. Douglas and registered nurse Robin Cunningham, research coordinator for the Clinical Hypertension Program, explained to the ministers how carefully they would monitor the health of study participants (see “The Hypertension Puzzle”). Then, a few of the ministers who had already hosted the program in their churches began to speak in support of it. The turning point came when one of these ministers rose to his feet and waved his hand at Dr. Douglas, declaring, “That woman saved my mother’s life!” He explained that during a blood pressure screening at his church, Dr. Douglas’s staff discovered that his mother was using the wrong medication for her hypertension. With that, the roomful of ministers endorsed her program—an endorsement that will not only bring more participants into Dr. Douglas’s study but will also open new pipelines for medical information and services into Cleveland’s African-American community. The result of the second meeting? The physicians were in rapt attention through their shrimp risotto and the dessert pastries that followed. They broke into applause after Dr. Douglas finally sank into her own chair and waiters rushed to fill her empty plate. “I learned so much!” one exclaimed as she made her way out of the room. And this seemed to be the general consensus: That even for these physicians who focus on women’s health, Dr. Douglas had provided new insights about cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of both women and men. “Don’t Be Satisfied with What Is” What launched such a stellar scientific career? Janice Douglas looks a bit embarrassed by the question, then laughs. Her computer beeps with the announcement of two incoming e-mails as she considers a reply. “There wasn’t really anything,” she says, pushing herself away from the computer. “I was interested in medical school or graduate school, and I just got around to filling out the medical school forms first. I loved school. I’d still be going to school if someone would pay me to do it!” Then, in what seems like a non sequitur, she pulls a picture of a woman down from her bulletin board and hands it across her desk. “That’s my grandmother.”
Dr. Douglas’s grandmother, their child, went on to earn two degrees at Oklahoma’s Langston College, one in English and one in music. She joined the Langston College faculty and married another Langston professor, who taught agricultural science. Years later, she agreed to take Janice and her older sister, Elna, when their parents went to Meharry Medical College to earn degrees—their mother, Electa, in dentistry, and their father, Louis Green, in medicine. The parents lived in low-income Nashville housing, with Louis working as a janitor to support them. The girls thrived on their grandmother’s farm in Oklahoma. It was on this farm that Janice Douglas began a lifelong fascination with the “why” of things. Her grandmother turned everything into a learning experience. As they planted crops, she talked about how they grew and what they were good for. When Janice’s parents came to the farm for summer vacations, her father continued the lessons. He had developed an interest in plants when he worked as an assistant in the late 1930s to George Washington Carver, the legendary African-American agricultural chemist and agronomist. “Janice and I worked in the garden together,” recalls Dr. Green, who later became the first African American to pursue specialty training at the Cleveland Clinic. By 1978, he was chair of Meharry’s pathology department. “We’d even sing to the plants. Carver was interested in the way that plants respond to light and sound, so she and I would try our own experiments.”
When Electa and Louis Green graduated from Meharry in 1948, they submitted a picture of five-year-old Janice to the yearbook along with their own. Janice and the other graduates’ children had their own page in the yearbook, with a hopeful banner reading, “Class of 1968.” When the family reunited in Birmingham, her parents opened a small medical office that had a shared waiting room with two doors: one for the family dentist, one for the family doctor. This idyllic scenario was soon rattled by the maelstrom of the civil rights struggle. Angered by the refusal of most city hospitals to admit his patients, Dr. Green became one of the movement’s most outspoken leaders. He wrote letters demanding change and organized luncheons of black professionals, so that they could all speak with one voice. His daughters were proud, even when their family became a target for vituperative racists. In the mid-1950s, the family moved to the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, because they knew of the school system’s national reputation for excellence. There were only a few African Americans living in Shaker Heights at the time, and the Drs. Green were required to get signatures of approval from their potential neighbors before they were allowed to bump up the percentage. “Then the school wanted to put me and my sister back a grade—they thought we weren’t going to be able to compete, coming up from the South like that.” Dr. Douglas says this mildly, almost as if she is now amused by what must have been a distressing time. Maybe she was amused even then: She admits that she relishes competition, that, even in the midst of her busy research career, she’s made time for competitive skiing and ballroom dancing—and she has the trophies at home to prove it. Perhaps this brush with the Shaker schools was just another contest that she knew she could win. At her parents’ insistence, the school did not put her back a grade, and, when her class took its first standardized test, her score was the highest. When Janice Douglas began to apply for medical school, she had few qualms that her school of choice—CWRU—would accept her. After all, she had maintained a perfect average at Fisk University, graduated with top honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key, and had excellent MCAT scores. Still, the admission officer shook his head solemnly when she came in for an interview and told her that she’d be better off at a school for minorities. With that, she and her new husband enrolled at Meharry Medical College. Four years later, she made good on the prediction in her parents’ yearbook: She graduated at the top of Meharry’s 1968 class, a diploma in one hand and a baby girl in the other. Force for Change Here’s one of the ironies of this story. In 1976, the University’s School of Medicine recruiters were searching for bright young scientists and targeted Janice Douglas as a good catch. She was then a senior staff fellow at the NIH, three years out of subspecialty training in endocrinology at Vanderbilt University, and had two young children. After she told the chagrined recruiter that CWRU had turned her away only twelve years before, he insisted, “But it’s changed—it’s different now!” So she returned to Cleveland as an assistant professor of medicine and became a force for even greater change within the University, one breakthrough at a time. And one breakthrough at a time, her reputation as a first-class scientist began to spread around the country. She focused her research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of blood pressure regulation and was steadily making significant contributions to the field. In particular, she was able to identify several of these previously unknown mechanisms, including the cell receptors that mediate the action of angiotensin, a hormone vitally related to the regulation of blood pressure and body fluids. She was also making progress in figuring out how all these mechanisms interacted. “It is no small matter to put the pieces together within the microcosm of a single cell,” says John McGiff, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at New York Medical College. “Either one has a level of creativity or one does not. There are many drones in science, but there are also people like Janice who forge ahead and create direction. They drive the new movements in science.” Compared to what her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had to face, Dr. Douglas claims that all these successes weren’t so terribly difficult. “I had many people who were willing to give help and advice,” she says, ticking off their names. Charles Proctor, who supervised research in neuroscience at Meharry. Robert Brown, a pulmonologist who was one of her favorite teachers at Meharry. Grant Little, chair of the endocrine division at Vanderbilt, who guided her career through Vanderbilt and the NIH. “He’d even pick up my daughter and me if my car wasn’t running,” she recalls. “Years later, when he was in a wheelchair, he’d still get together with me if I had to make a presentation at a national meeting. He’d look over my materials and comment, even saying things like, ‘Get the fingerprints off that slide!’”
Dr. Douglas finds the time to be an active mentor to medical students, college students, even high school students. Though many more black students go into medical school now than in 1964, the number of African Americans within the ranks of academic medicine is paltry: They are less than three percent of the total. Faced with huge medical school debt, many rush into private practice instead of going on for further training. Mindful of this discrepancy, she reaches out to African-American students and encourages them to keep on the arduous but rewarding path to academic medicine. “Her door is always open,” says Kaine Onwuzulike from a cell phone as he hurries from one class to another. After spending two years in medical school, Mr. Onwuzulike decided to enroll in Case Western Reserve’s MD/PhD program after Dr. Douglas encouraged him to spend a year researching hypertension in Uganda. “I never have to make an appointment with her, and neither does anyone else.” Dr. Douglas goes beyond encouragement: She has already recruited two of her brightest young trainees into the hypertension division. Becoming the director of a division in 1988 has given her powerful new tools to pursue her research goals. She is now in a position to craft a team that can help break the curse of hypertension among African Americans, who are disproportionately affected by this condition. “It’s not like the old days in which a scientist would be in his lab all by himself, all hours of the night, making great breakthroughs,” Dr. Douglas says, then pauses and laughs. “In fact, they didn’t get that much accomplished in the old days. But with a group of people who want to work together and have cohesive interests, we can really get something done.”  Kristin Ohlson’s last story for CWRU was “Character Studies,” in the fall 2001 issue. The Cleveland writer’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, Discover, and Salon.com, among many others. Portrait of Dr. Douglas in her lab by Daniel Milner. Other photos courtesy of Dr. Douglas. |
ne meeting was in a church basement. Forty of Cleveland’s most influential African-American ministers were clustered around a long, long table in late September, pondering whether they should encourage their congregants to join Janice Douglas’s study of salt-sensitive hypertension among black families. Dr. Douglas herself, a CWRU 
