C. Ronald (Ron) Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School is a physician-scientist who illuminated much of what we appreciate about the insulin receptor and the means by which it signals. He previously served as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and is the scientist with the most publications in the JCI. See the full interview on the JCI website https://www. jci. org/videos/cgms to hear more about Dr. Kahn’s (Figure 1) political aspirations beyond the presidency of ASCI and to hear who told him he’d never be a big deal in endocrinology.

JCI: What you were like as a kid, and where did you grow up? Kahn: My father was a merchant who had been born in the Ukraine. He came to the US at about 12. My mom was born in the States. They got married in Louisville, Kentucky, and my brother and I were born and raised there. I went to the public school system there; I had a couple of very cool friends actually, one who became quite a successful artist. He and I would hang around in an old Model A Ford that we had fixed up. I was always really interested in science, and my parents pushed my brother and I to be doctors. My brother became a PhD, and I became an MD, but we both did biomedical research, and I think my parents were very proud of us. JCI: By my calculations, you graduated from University of Louisville with a chemistry degree by the time you were 20. Kahn: My brother graduated by 19, so I had a role model. I decided to do all my undergraduate studies in three years, as I knew I wanted to go to medical school. As you’ll soon hear, I’m always strongly influenced by teachers or mentors who are impressive; when I was an undergraduate, probably the professor who impacted me the most was Tom Crawford, the head of the Department of Chemistry. He was doing NMR spectroscopy, which was really pretty new at the time. I worked in the summers doing research with him.