Colon Polyps: Going and Gone Jerome D. Waye, MD, MACG, was born in Shanghai, China and came to live in Kankakee, Illinois when he was five years old and later moved to New Jersey until attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at MIT he was the coxswain of the crew team which won every race in his senior year and then won their event at the Henley Royal Regatta in England. He went on to attend Boston University Medical School where he was on scholarship and worked three jobs: one was on the Third Surgical Service at Boston City Hospital where he arose at 4:30 each morning to draw blood on 60 surgical patients. In the evening he worked in the laboratory at Deaconess Hospital and at a private mental infirmary.
2021 David Sun Lecturer
He came to New York for internship and residency as well as a GI fellowship and has stayed at Mount Sinai Hospital ever since. During his GI fellowship, fiberoptic instruments were acquired but the teachers of rigid instruments paid them little attention. In the next three years advances in technology overcame the two instructors of rigid procedures who resigned and Dr. Waye became the new chief of endoscopy as fiberoptic scopes completely replaced the rigid instruments. Following completion of training he went into private practice but remained chief of endoscopy for over 20 years. Dr. Waye developed an interest in colonoscopy when those instruments first came out and also in ERCP. Dr. Waye traveled to Japan to learn how to do ERCP and came back to perfect the technique and then introduced this procedure to New York where he traveled on weekends around the city to teach ERCP at various hospitals. When the era of therapeutic ERCP began, Dr. Waye made a decision that he would rather perform colonoscopy and devoted himself to that technique. During 51 years in private practice, he developed techniques that circumvented the need for fluoroscopic imaging during colonoscopy and various new approaches to the performance of colonoscopy and polypectomy. While in private practice, he wrote seven books including the major text on colonoscopy and became a professor of medicine. Dr. Waye has written over 200 papers in peer reviewed journals and has lectured and participated in live endoscopy demonstrations in every continent with the exception of Antarctica. He has been made an honorary member of seven gastroenterology and endoscopy societies. In his spare time, he pursued an interest in magic and was often the evening entertainment at international GI conferences. Dr. Waye has served as President of the ACG, the ASGE, and more recently, the World Endoscopy Organization. He was a founding member of the New York Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, and also served as its President. He was also President of the Mount Sinai Alumni Association and received its highest honor, the Gold Headed Cane Award. He has been given the highest honor of the ACG and the ASGE, the Samuel S. Weiss Award and the Schindler Award, respectively. Dr. Waye joined the full time staff of the Division of Gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 5 years ago and developed the Center for Advanced Colonoscopy and Therapeutic Endoscopy at Sinai (CACTES). He retired from practice on the last day of 2019. Since then, Dr. Waye traveled to Ethiopia and Uganda to teach seminars in colonoscopy. He has continued to teach and is the first person to train doctors in endoscopy remotely via the Zoom platform.
The David Sun Lectureship in Postgraduate Education was established by Mrs. Sun in memory of her husband. Dr. Sun died at the peak of his career. He was an outstanding gastroenterologist and investigator. The speaker, with a distinguished background in gastroenterology or an allied field, is chosen by the President and Course Directors of the Postgraduate Program subject to the approval of the Board of Trustees.
2020–2021 ACG AWARDS & LEADERSHIP | 15
ACG LECTURESHIPS ACG LECTURESHIPS
Jerome D. Waye, MD, MACG
