Welcome to the photopage of J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, Harvard Medical School.
Bienvenidos a la pagina de fotos de J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, escuela de medicina de Harvard.
Bem vindos a pagina de fotos do J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, escola de medicina de Harvard.
Willkommen auf die Bildseite von J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, Harvard Medizinische Schule.
J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, Harvard Med (杰克•卫斯•乌尔姆), 醫學博士/哲學博士, 哈佛醫學系, 的照片的蜘網歡迎!

J. Wes Ulm, MD/PhD, Harvard Med (ジェイク・ウェズ・ウルム), [(医学)博士]と[（哲学)博士],ハーバード・メディカルスクール,の写真の ウエブページにようこそ!

First off, some photos from my original 5-show run on the TV quiz competition Jeopardy!  (Good for cocktail-party ice-breaking of nothing else.). Never expected I'd wind up on national television my first year of medical school but if nothing else, over five shows and the Tournament of Champions, it sure helped pay some of the bills.  This is a picture of me with my "vampire" stare, as an old friend described it; the assistants in the Green Room heaped gobs of make-up on my face (I don't blame them) yet I still projected that distinctive dark-circles-round-the-eyes appeal.  Well, maybe "appeal" isn't quite le mot juste here.

The Final Jeopardy! question that got me there; one could almost taste the pressure in the Sony Studios where we taped each match: 

One of my Daily Doubles, from an earlier match:

Another Daily Double.  We tape five shows in a single day (i.e., a week's worth of shows on just a Monday or Tuesday) and my synapses were practically smoking up by the third match; it really is exhausting to stand up there and tackle those clues in such rapid succession.  Fortunately, the contestant coordinators, Glenn Kagan and Suzanne Thurber, did an outstanding job of keeping everyone on the level; they're a major factor behind the success of each taping.

The other competitors that day.  One of the quirkiest aspects of the Jeopardy! experience is the manner in which we make acquaintances and even friends with each other, while waiting nervously for our matches in the Green Room.  It's such a strange, unique experience in so many ways, that Jeopardy! contestants really do develop a bond of admiration and mutual respect for one another.  John and Lisa are both bright, warm, and wonderful people, and I hope they're flourishing in whatever they're doing these days.

My third match was tough; both Peter and Jennifer (the other contestants that day) were adept at every aspect of the Jeopardy! challenge, and that show featured some lousy categories for me.  For any Jeopardy! contestant, the categories that appear on that board can make or break you, and you have to learn to use the Daily Doubles well and cross your fingers.  Jennifer in particular was sharp, and cleaned up the board on the Marlon Brando films category in Double Jeopardy!-- that sort of "category aversion" wound up being across the board for me in the Tournament of Champions, especially entertainment and "experience" categories (I was 22 years old at the time) were tough for me and the Teen/College contestants in particular.  In my third match, Jennifer was not only smart but quite shrewd in her wagering; even though she was behind going into Final Jeopardy! and put down the wrong response, she had more than 2/3 of my score and anticipated my wager (that is, enough to surmount her total if both of us got the right response, a fairly common Jeopardy! strategy).  She would have beaten me if I'd put down the incorrect response as well; luckily, I knew the correct response ("Jack," i.e. the stock symbol of Golden Bear athletic supplies, the company named from the nickname of its main founder, the Golden Bear golfer Jack Nicklaus).  I was definitely sighing in relief after that third match, which also happened to be the last one that I taped that day (five shows taped on a  Monday, five on a Tuesday).

My second match, going into Final Jeopardy! and a clue in the category Biographies (about Ben Franklin, in this case).  It was a gauntlet just to make it onto the show.  In the tryouts (which are usually held at an LA or regional soundstage in the various realms of Sony and King World Productions), you first have to pass a tough contestant test-- essentially, 50 different clues among the $1600 and $2000-level stumpers on the show--then undergo an old-fashioned audition and mock-competition.  Thus, anyone who even makes it onto Jeopardy! has accomplished a difficult feat.  I had to try out five times to get the call-- the first in high school (Teen Tournament), three times during my college days at Duke (College Championship), and finally the fifth-time charm the summer after I finished at Duke, on my way to med school.  I passed the contestant test on each occasion (which thins the group by about 80-90%), but I never quite had the right stuff to be called up for the Teen or College Tournaments.  It's not easy in general, since roughly 120-150 oontestants or so pass the contestant test nationwide for those tournaments, but only 15 are chosen to go in front of the cameras (and there's a geographical mix of represented colleges that also figures into the alchemy); but things just never quite clicked for those tournaments.  Regular Jeopardy! (the kind that's on most of the year) was a different matter.  I stood out more in the try-out, since I was a youngling in med-school on the East Coast; that sort of unusual bio is what helps to cinch the case for an invitation, although since far more shows are taped to begin with, it's not as difficult to be selected as for the College Championship.

My first match, still my favorite in many respects.  I was unbelievably nervous, yet somehow managed to pull it together; I hit one of those "zones" that athletes talk about.  The returning champion on the far left, a fellow named Stephen Heuser, was a restaurant critic at the time and a fine Jeopardy! player; he beat a previous champion, Lyn Payne, in his own prior match and given Lyn's skill and depth, that was no easy feat.  Ellen, the woman in the center, was an environmental expert at the time and one of the nicest people I've met.  As I said above, it's amazing how different contestants essentially bond with each other in such a pressure-cooker, but it's one of those things that makes the challenge even more extraordinary for those of us under the lights.

Goofing around with Alex Trebek after the commercial break.  The dollar values on the board back when I was competing (originally late 1990s) were half what they are now-- i.e., $100-500 for the Jeopardy! round and $200-1,000 for the Double Jeopardy! round (each range of course twice that today).  On the one hand, it usually meant that a winner's eventual take was naturally less than for Jeopardy! contestants today; conversely, it's probably even more nerve-wracking for contestants now (post-2004 or so), since with dollar values so high, anyone can come from behind to take the lead again (especially given the impact of the Daily Doubles on strategy).  The show does put on special tournamentts from time to time that often invite previous Tournament of Champion contestants, so there's always the possibility I might be inhabiting a podium in the "new" Jeopardy! for such a tournament.  I'd relish it on the one hand, but be scared out of my wits on the other; the contestants these days are a tough breed and they'd probably kick my tail for the nation to see.  I can't imagine going against Ken Jennings, let alone the all-time top Jeopardy! champion Brad Rutter from Johns Hopkins-- those are some high-powered names.

Answering Alex's Q&A

And now for something, uh, a little different... some photos from my annual retreat while finishing the MD/PhD program.

Hiking at the Harvard MD/PhD retreat at Waterville Valley in New Hampshire, October 2003.  Waterville Valley is in the midst of the White Mountains, and the hike at the annual MD/PhD retreat offered a wonderful opportunity to grab some fresh air, get an outstanding workout on the hiking trail-- and wind up with various bumps and bruises as we (especially yours truly) goofed around playing Frisbee and football in the rocky little "sub-valleys" that dot the trail.  This photo was taken at the summit itself; I'm the lazy guy lounging right in the center there, on the rock in the Ocean City sweatshirt.

At a "rest stop" on the way up to the peak.

An excursion to the Singapore Zoo back in February 2004, when I was on the island to present an abstract at the  International Society for Cancer Gene Therapy Conference, on the use of oncogene-based RNAi vectors as specific anti-cancer therapeutics.  The field has naturally moved quickly in the intervening years and the prospect of such specific "nucleic acid" anti-cancer drugs is still promising, though I suspect still a while away in practice.  Fortunately, there are plenty of folks far smarter than yours truly working to develop precisely those modalities, so perhaps we may see new treatments in the coming decade.

At any rate, that brief trip to Singapore (and points nearby in East/SE Asia-- the Airpass some airlines provide is a sweet bargain) supplied ample opportunities to become thoroughly lost in a variety of interesting places.  Here, at the Singapore National Zoo, I was with some colleagues from the conference, and it's without doubt one of the more impressive urban zoos I've ever visited.  Orangutans are in the background, and you really have to glimpse these creatures with your own eyes to believe them.  Their name is derived from the Malay for "wild man" (thanks to Dr. Timothy Ferris for that tidbit) and it's easy to see why; they climb, run, walk around, and goof off much like young humans.

Another photo from med school days (during one of those wonderful Boston winters):

----------------

J. Wes Ulm  ( J. Wesley Ulm )  ( Jacob Ulm )
MD/PhD, Harvard Medical School, Class of 2006
National Jeopardy! Champion

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Ulm,JW
http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide_50kwinners.php
http://tinyurl.com/yr2fbq
http://www.historybuff.com/library/refspain.html

Editor, Vision at Harvard, Volume VII and Lead Author, Volume VIII
Founding member of Project for Information-Based Recapitulation of Cellular Evolution, Pathophysiology, and Pharmacology and co-founder, Natural Sequestration and   Recursive Intelligent Network Strategy Toward the Systematic Reduction of Greenhouse-Gas Emissions in Urban Planning

"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."  -- Yogi Berra

"Nothing in the world is as complicated as the income tax." -- Albert
Einstein

"Life is like a box of chocolates left in a hot car-- occasionally sweet,
always messy." -- me

I can speak and do translation work for a total of 12 languages.  I am fluent in three (Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and German), advanced conversational in four others (Japanese, French, Portuguese, and Dutch), with intermediate skills in Italian, Danish, and Swedish and basic proficiency in Russian and Farsi Persian.  As I've worked these into my career, I have naturally focused on the first three as well as Japanese and French (which I hope to soon upgrade to the "fluency" category), in part using the etymological relationships among the languages to help "ratchet" quickly from one to another.  (Fortuitous conversations with native speakers are always a bonus.)  I have pursued intensive linguistics and language study now for 20 years, and it has been a priority for me behind only my biomedical career itself.