Senior Fellow in Science

This story has only a beginning.

It starts when Cleto DiGiovanni was in the seventh grade telling people that he wanted to be a doctor. But this wasn't the usual little boy, tossing almost even between being a doctor and a fireman; Cleto knew where he was going.

In Detroit, where his father is in Industrial Relations for Ford, Cleto attended Cass Technical High School. There were terms on the student council and as editor of the newspaper and yearbook. There was plenty of scientific study also and, by his senior year, his interest in medicine had distilled to a concentration on the biological sciences. He brought this with him to Dartmouth. Friends speak of his seriousness, dedication and hard work; this he also brought to Hanover, along with a Ford Motor Company Scholarship.

Freshman year he worked for a while on The Dartmouth, but he was taking the heavy ones and there was little time for extra curricular interests. In the classroom, hard work didn't always find its reward on the record: there were C's as well as better grades. But, with each semester, he was getting further along the way.

He spent the summer of his freshman year on the line in Detroit inspecting grille work. The search for nicks and scratches in Chrysler's best brought a lot of his father's dinner table comments to life, but it did little for his medical education; it was the only detour he has allowed himself.

The next summer he took advanced work in Bacteriology at the University of Michigan. Vacations during the college year were spent talking with scientists or visiting hospitals, like the trip he made one Thanksgiving recess to the famous Trudeau Tuberculosis Sanitarium at Saranac Lake. As an upperclassman, he did particularly well in advanced courses and original work under Professor Raymond W. Barratt of the Botany Department.

Last spring Cleto DiGiovanni was named a Senior Fellow in order to enable him to carry out a specific investigative program under the guidance of Professor Barratt, Assistant Professor Philip Nice of the Dartmouth Medical School and Dr. G. Winthrop Sands of the medical service at Dick Hall's House. His study involves an attempt to isolate the virus of a typical virus pneumonia as it occurs in the college population.

Cleto spent last summer on a Hitchcock Foundation fellowship organizing his work and conferring with authorities about investigative techniques for virus study. He reports enthusiastically about his extended visits to the Children's Medical Center in Boston and to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He is now at work in a well-equipped laboratory adjacent to other research laboratories of the Hitchcock Foundation in the hospital and provided under the terms of a specific grant from the Foundation.

Cleto's plan - and everything seems on schedule to date - is to go on for his M.D. at Michigan or Chicago and then take a Ph.D. in virus research at the University of California.

In investigative microbiology the possibility of success is usually weighed heavily on the negative side. Often the scientist must sense accomplishment merely from covering ground - sometimes even when he cannot be certain of his direction. He must have the drive to go on when the results of countless experiments stubbornly total zero.

Does Cleto DiGiovanni have the stuff? How far is he going? As a Senior Fellow at Dartmouth he has just embarked on his first major research project. It is only the beginning.

Cleto DiGiovanni '56