Doctors' Dilemma

When Thomas Edison Miyawaki applied for a teaching assistanceship at the University of California's San Francisco Medical Center in September 1964, he had what its officials considered "a very excellent record." Indeed it was. According to his transcripts, Hawaiian-born Miyawaki had a science degree from Johns Hopkins (Phi Beta Kappa, and all A's and B's), an M.D. from Columbia University. He also claimed two years of internship and residency at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Naturally, California gave him the assistanceship, along with a salary of $304 a month.

As a teaching assistant, majoring in anatomy, Miyawaki proved to be chatty and charming, fluent with learned quotations from eminent Boston physicians. In fact, he did so well that Dr. Ian Monie, head of the Center's anatomy department, last September recommended his promotion to associate, and a pay raise to $551 a month. "He was popular and well liked," says Dean Harold Harper of the Center. "Everyone expected him to do well on the oral qualifying examination for the Ph.D."

Miyawaki didn't. In fact, he failed so miserably that Medical Center officials finally got suspicious and made a few fast phone calls. To their horror, they discovered that Miyawaki was no doctor at all. A short-term undergraduate at Berkeley and at Loyola University in Los Angeles, he had taken a few lab courses at Johns Hopkins University. He imaginatively doctored up his Johns Hopkins transcript and forged his name on another student's Columbia Medical School transcript. California, which handles 30,000 graduate applications a year, uncritically accepted Miyawaki's papers.

Back home in Hawaii, Miyawaki gave a scrutably Oriental reason why he had undertaken the hoax: filial piety. His parents, he explained, "so much wished me to be a doctor that I could not let them down." Miyawaki still has a wistful sense of what might have been. "The oral examination wasn't hard," he says. "I think the reason I failed was my presentation. They asked me simple questions, and I tried to tell them about the latest research in the area of each question. I just flipped."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.