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Uniting communities through science
Wally Dyck is an ambassador for cooperation in the biosciences between Bethel and a diverse medical complex in Texas.
by Aimee Siebert
Walter P. “Wally” Dyck ’57 claims his “whole life has been a series of fortunate accidents.”
The Bethel College Board of Directors and the many other institutions with which Wally has been involved over the years may not see it quite that way, recognizing more purposeful qualities in his reputation and leadership.
Wally became vice chair of the Bethel Board earlier this year. This appointment, added to his role as a member of Bethel’s STEM* Advisory Council, should give college and community a chance to learn from Wally’s experience uniting communities through science.
Originally from Winkler, Manitoba, Wally credits not science, but three young women for introducing him to Bethel College. The first was his older sister, Anne, who studied at Bethel herself. The other two were “very pretty” members of the Bethel College Concert Choir whom Wally’s family hosted while the choir was on tour in spring 1954.
Wally, already an accomplished violinist who had been touring with a string quartet in Canada, knew good music when he heard it. When Bethel President D.C. Wedel wrote him later that year, inviting him to study and to teach private lessons at Bethel, Wally was swayed.
He entered Bethel as a sophomore in 1954 and experienced a “wonderful first year with musical events” at Bethel. However, like many students, his interests diversified over time.
“I spent a summer driving combines,” he says. “That gave me a lot of time to think about what to do with my life.” He eventually decided to pursue a more scientific life by becoming a family physician, a profession that “married a lot of my interests.”
He acknowledges Bethel’s part in this pivotal decision. “Without coming to Bethel College, I would never have gotten into the sciences,” he says.
Wally earned his M.D. degree from the University of Kansas in 1961 and carried out his residency in internal medicine at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Research fellowships at the University of Zurich and the University of Toronto introduced him to basic research in biomedical science.
Supported by the National Institutes of Health, Wally next completed a two-year combined clinical and research fellowship in gastroenterology at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. His research there focused on the role of hormones in the control of pancreatic secretion. This subsequently proved to be a continuing interest, reflected by publications throughout much of his career.
At Mt. Sinai, Wally met Nick Hightower, a visiting scientist from Texas. He calls this encounter one of those “fortunate, accidental” meetings – it led to his move to Texas and eventual installation as head of gastroenterology at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas.
Temple, as it turns out, is not your average place to work. Fully one-fourth of the population is employed in some segment of the health care industry. Wally describes it as a “bioscience incubator.”
An early alliance between Texas A&M University and Scott & White Memorial Hospital resulted in the birth of a new medical school that has since evolved into a major academic medical complex. In 1998, Wally was named dean of the Temple campus and chief academic officer for Scott & White Health Care System.
He has been a major mover and shaker in the ongoing development of the Temple Health and Bioscience District (see templebioscience.com). The partnership between Texas A&M, Scott & White and one of the nation’s largest Veterans Administration Hospitals has provided rich opportunities to collaborate in education, interdisciplinary research and economic development.
The partnership has now expanded to include Temple College, a two-year community college that Dyck played a leadership role in creating, and the Texas Bioscience Institute (TBI), founded for the dual purpose of creating a skilled biotechnology work force and promoting excellence in math and science education at the high school and college level. High school students can earn a two-year Associate of Science degree at the same time as they graduate from high school. TBI received the Bellwether Award for “workforce development” – an honor given to the most innovative education programs in community colleges across the United States.
The whole district offers a myriad of entrepreneurial opportunities in the biosciences. “It’s an incubator for scientists to develop intellectual property and find patents for their work,” Wally says.
His heavy involvement in the Temple Health and Bioscience District allows him to be an ambassador for Bethel College. Bethel professors Jon Piper and Dwight Krehbiel ’69 visited this summer and now have high hopes that students from TBI could become interested in Bethel College.
“The Texas Bioscience Institute functions during the school year, but they don’t have comparable summer programs,” Krehbiel says. “We hope that we might be able to entice some of the students to visit Bethel for the Summer Science Institute, and eventually bring them on as full time students.”
Bethel recently received more than a quarter of a million dollars from the National Science Foundation to fund scholarships that will encourage women and minority students, in particular, to enter the sciences in college. Students from TBI are an exciting pool of potential scholarship recipients for this program.
Wally encourages Bethel to continue to keep classes small, intimate and personalized. At the same time, he feels Bethel must grow in order to survive and prosper. To that end, he hopes Bethel will explore academic-medical alliances similar to the ones in Temple, as well as alliances for areas of interest outside the sciences.
“Anything we do in the sciences can be replicated in hundreds of different places,” he says. “So the question is: How do you get all of these groups to cooperate?”
Collaboration between TBI and Bethel would be mutually beneficial, he says. High school students from the Temple area could be nurtured in the four-year liberal arts setting at Bethel. Bethel students with biomedical interests would have valuable connections with a well-developed network that offers a diversity of exciting post-graduate options.
Wally is a well-placed and well-informed ambassador in this emerging partnership. His professional experience proves the validity of Howard Thurman’s quote, “Community cannot long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers.” Uniting Bethel and the Temple bioscience community would be an especially fitting way for Wally Dyck’s professional life to come full circle.
Aimee Siebert is a junior from Topeka, majoring in psychology at Bethel.
*STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, a grouping used by the U.S. National Science Foundation to describe key fields of study and research in an advanced technological society. At Bethel, STEM covers biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, pre-engineering, physics and psychology.