Transcript: Lindberg In Memorium

[Music Playing]

[Lindberg] I, Donald Lindberg, do solemnly swear, that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States.

[Graphic] “Take hold of the work which you can do, and which ought to be done.” John Shaw Billings, Director, Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, 1865 – 1895

[Graphic] “I predict Lindberg may transform the mass and intra professional communication of health and medicine.” William Stephenson, Psychologist & Physicist, Oxford University, 1977

[Lindberg] It seems clear that the trend toward increasing specialization is not likely to change. This means, of course, that the need for information systems that span disciplines and that integrate and evaluate knowledge will be evermore necessary.

[Graphic] “The notion that we should build computer systems that could understand medical meaning is an idea that Don Lindberg brought to the NLM in 1984” Betsy Humphreys, Deputy Director, NLM

[Lindberg] The truly thrilling progress in such fields as cancer research and molecular biology will be to the average citizen not an idle curiosity or newspaper headline but a matter of immediate personal concern. For the practitioner of medicine, the book or a journal on the shelf will become increasingly too remote for immediate patient care decisions and the computer-based personal information station will become increasingly useful, comforting, perhaps essential.

[Graphic] “He shepherded the NLM into the medical library of the future…it’s really the example for the whole word.” David Lipman, MD, Director, NCBI

[Graphic] “He has always kept the patient at the center and thought about the impact on health.” Suzanne Bakken, Rn, PhD, Columbia University

[Lindberg] Computer and information science will increasingly become a major field of study. In medicine, lagging as usual, humbly behind, medical informatics will emerge as a formal research field and academic discipline.

[Graphic] “The tools that we use every day were his vision and his funding. He is really the air that informatics breathes.” Justin Starren, MD, PhD, Northwestern University

[Graphic] “Your leadership invented what we know today as biomedical informatics.” Judy Ozbolt, PhD

[Lindberg] The poet Alexander Pope said, very well in 1700, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man.” Now to the extent that investigation of man's cognition, learning, and decision making -- that is his information processing skills -- can lead to better representation, storage, and retrieval of knowledge in medicine, then these studies must be an essential activity of the National Library of Medicine during the coming decades.

[Music playing]

[Graphic] Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, 1933 - 2019

Last Reviewed: August 21, 2019