It must take considerable skills I'm sure you'll agree dear reader, to operate an extremely productive life, making history in the process, but still remain below the national radar. For 25 years, the people of Ocho Rios have been closely guarding the secret of Dr Derrick Aarons, Jamaica and the Caribbean's first trained bio-ethicist. And now it's no longer possible to do so.

AARONS. I had always wanted to serve the underprivileged

Moving about his family practice as a general practitioner, with his customary ease and laissez faire, Aarons' demeanour deceptively masks the striking fact that here is a man who can engage the finest international minds and bring arguments to a close on the ethics of difficult issues such as abortion or euthanasia, better known as mercy killing, or human cloning, or ganja-smoking, or medical malpractice, or homosexuality and the like.

In conference rooms teeming with scientific minds in far away places like Malawi, Africa, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy and Brazil, this Jamaican doctor, Kingston College old boy, sought-after speaker, community man and father of four, is a pioneer in the field of bio-ethics. He might have been discovered by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) long before Jamaica took note of him.

But the Jamaican government finally has a policy on things like genetic engineering, medical research and doctor-patient communication, thanks to his perseverance and passion.

Verandah debate

It took exactly that - perseverance and passion - to keep him at it. When he returned home from McGill University in Canada, with a Master's degree in bio-ethics, determined to work in his own country and region instead of taking a job that was just waiting for him, Aarons searched. in vain. for six months for a job in the field.

There was no such field. Jamaicans love a good verandah debate on the ethics of medical issues. But that is not yet a job. Not even now that he has a PhD in an area that is not bread and butter, but vital food for the mind and more besides.

The story of Derrick Earl Aarons is one for posterity. It began with his birth, to unwed parents on June 21, 1953, in the confirmed inner-city community of Brown's Town off Windward Road in east Kingston. Back then, Wellington Street was lower middle-class.

The young boy saw the dying embers of the fire that was prestigious Bournemouth Gardens. And the last days of communal responsibility for the children who lived in the area. The violence of today was yet unknown and everybody knew everybody else.

His mother is Sylvia Bailey, who operated a lumber yard at West Street in downtown Kingston and was a part-time dressmaker at the time of Derrick's birth. She took up dressmaking full time after the lumber yard went out of business. His father was Allan Aarons, a plumbing contractor who laid water pipes for the government in Franklin Town.

Coleen Brown, Paul Aarons, Mrs Hanchard

On his mother's side, Derrick has two siblings with whom he grew up - Paul Aarons, a chartered accountant now living in Atlanta, Georgia and Coleen Brown, chief executive officer of Virgen Advertising and public relations firm based in Kingston. His father had five other children: Gloria, Sheila, Audrey, Audley and Michele.

At age four, Derrick was sent to a prep school near his home and at seven he went to Franklin Town Primary School. He remembers being very fond of his grade two teacher Mrs Mitchell, his grade four teacher Mrs Coombs and his grade five teacher Mrs Cammock.

The headmistress, Mrs Hanchard, always looked out for him and had significant influence on his development, he recalls. He specially remembers students there like Rosie McLean, Paula Aquart and Alcot Bennett, the best football player there.

When Aarons passed the Common Entrance Examination in 1964, he chose Kingston College where the headmaster was the legendary Douglas Forrest. Money, as always, was tight with his mother and they could not afford to buy a KC blazer. "Mrs Hanchard, whose son, Barry Hanchard, was a headboy of KC, gave me his first-form blazer.

I was very grateful," Aarons says. In his first year, Aarons was selected to be a member of the KC choir and came under the influence of the man we now know as Dr Winston Davidson, who sings a wicked baritone. At a choir camp at St Hilda's in St Ann, Davidson played the piano and kept the boys in order.

Dennis Minott, Delroy Chuck, Michael Holding

When Aarons entered KC, the deputy head boy was Dennis Minott, now Dr Minott who is rapidly becoming known for his analysis of school CXC performance.

The head boy was Hugh Vaughn. The year after, Delroy Chuck of Jamaica Labour Party fame was deputy head boy to Alvin Kiddoe. Aarons formed lasting friendships with Dr Warren Blake, the orthopaedic surgeon, and Rainford Wilks, now Professor Wilks, head of the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

He recalls that Blake and another boy, Barrington Booth, were government scholars and the brains of the class. They always placed ahead of him, until fifth form when he came first, having come to the realisation that it would take hard study to do so.

Aarons liked the Cadet Corps and joined it in second form, eventually rising to company quarter master sergeant. He did well academically and otherwise.

He was captain of the KC rifle team, and at age 16 had the distinction of leading the KC Cadet rifle team to a competition in Canada, where he got nine out of 10 bull's-eye and was designated a marksman. He played on the basketball team as vice-captain, recalling how Michael Holding, later the famous West Indies fast bowler, "used to tease us that basketball is a girl's game".

Aarons was also the first Jamaican to complete the criteria and win the Duke of Edinburgh Award, recalling that he never received the award because the English teacher who introduced the award went back home before the presentation.

At GCE O' Levels, Aarons got eight subjects, three with distinctions and four credits and placed number two in the school. While doing sixth form, he pursued 11 extra-curricular activities, including basketball, cadet, rifle club, athletics (he ran the 100-metre as house captain), sang on the choir, the Interact Club (he was a founding member) jointly with KC and St Hugh's High School, and he was sports editor of his school magazine.

Kingsley Cooper, Howard Bell,
Geoffrey Madden

From 1970-72, Aarons was deputy headboy, first to Kingsley Cooper, the future fashion guru, Selwyn Goode, now a cardiologist in South Florida, and Rainford Wilks. He remembers schoolmates such as Howard Bell, the footballer; Derrick Dennicer, who also captained a KC football team; Erwin Jones, a future consultant engineer; and Geoffrey Madden, the attorney who was secretary to the Governor-General up to recently.

Aarons knew from as early as second form that he wanted to be a doctor. When a school librarian ushered him and some other boys who were idling into the library, he started reading a book on the human body and could not put it down. "I kept going back to the library until I finished it. I was fascinated by the information."

After 'A' Levels in 1972, he received a bursary to do natural science classes at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the following year entered medical school on a government scholarship, without which, he says, he could not have gone. While there, he sang with the Tamboulay Folk Singers and edited the medical students newsletter.

His hall was Block D, famously called "Attica" and controlled by former KC boys, he remembers. In 1978, he went to Spanish Town Hospital to spend two years as an intern. Here now Derrick Aarons would begin his life-long love affair with medicine.

The desperation of Nurse Saint

"I had always wanted to serve the underprivileged and so I went to the Ministry of Health to request that I be sent to an area where I could serve the poor.

I was working as a casualty officer at the time. They offered me one of three health centres - in Port Antonio, Ocho Rios and St Ann's Bay," Aarons recounts. This was 1980. He decided to visit all three and then decide which one to choose. He went first to St Ann's Bay, then to Ocho Rios.

Nurse Floral Saint was getting desperate. The Ocho Rios Health Centre had been without a resident doctor for three whole years. During that time, doctors had visited but none stayed. When she heard that the young Dr Derrick Aarons was coming to check out the place, she mentally drafted a plan.

"The moment I introduced myself she sprang. She held onto me and said 'doctor, you are not going anywhere else. It's three years now we have been without a doctor!' "

Aarons was dumbstruck. But the nurse clearly meant well and had seemed genuinely committed to her health centre.
Without going on to Port Antonio, he decided to remain at Ocho Rios and became District Medical Officer (DMO). Twenty-five years later, he is still serving Ocho Rios.

Aarons served for four years as DMO and later Deputy Medical Officer of Health for the parish of St Ann.

A year into the job, he lost his heart to Olive Alridge, proposed and she said 'yes'. The union, which would end in 1987, produced two sons, Derek Earl, who graduated magna cum laude in computer science from Benedict College and has just started his Master's in computer science at the University of South Carolina; and Marc Andre, who won a scholarship to pursue Environmental Science at Florida A&M University.

St Ann's first disaster plan

During the stint as deputy medical officer, Aarons was asked to develop the first disaster preparedness plan for St Ann. After five years in the government service, and with a young family, he began to feel the financial pinch and went into private practice as a family physician, although continuing his public service.

By this, he had begun to emerge as an activist, and in 1983/84 organised a northern branch of the Medical Association of Jamaica (MAJ), the umbrella grouping of doctors. He served for three years as secretary under the chairmanship of Dr Buddy Wilson.

His MAJ activism exposed him to big name doctors like Leighton Knight, Kildare Donaldson and Knox Hagley. When the Association of General Practitioners was formed, Aarons became the representative for the northern region comprising St Ann, St Mary and Portland in 1988.

The following year, he became secretary of the newly formed Caribbean College of Family Physicians.

An innocent invitation?

In 1991, Aarons was invited by then MAJ president, Dr Margaret Green, to sit on the association's first Ethics Committee. The invitation seemed innocent enough. But it would shape the rest of his life and he would play the starring role in a script not written by himself.

The next year, the Barbadian professor, Mickey Walrond, a surgeon, decided to host a conference on Health Care Law and Ethics in Bridgetown. Dr Owen James, the chairman of the MAJ Ethics Committee, was invited but could not make it. His deputy, a Dr Parchment, also could not make it. The invitation fell to Dr Aarons and he accepted it.

The main presenter was Professor Margaret Somerville of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, Montreal in Canada.

On the first day of the conference, Aarons found himself spellbound by her presentation on bio-ethics. By day two, he was hooked. Hanging desperately onto Somerville's every word, Aarons came to realise that from now on this was what he wanted to do with his life.

After the presentation, he introduced himself to the professor and confessed that he was hooked on bio-ethics. Was training available in that area? he asked. She said 'yes'. McGill had just introduced a master's specialisation in bio-ethics. She promised to send him the particulars and did.

He filled out the application, got accepted and began to search for a sponsor. Apparently, bio-ethics was not a Jamaican issue. Nobody was interested. Aarons turned to Dr Dilip Raje, dean of the medical faculty at Mona. Raje understood the need for study in such an area and encouraged Aarons not to give up. Raje sought financial help for him but also found the going tough.

How could you, CIDA?

"I made 24 applications in all, approached every medical-related body. Everybody agreed that Jamaica would benefit from this study, but everybody said they could not finance it and wished me well," says Aarons.

The unkindest cut of all, he discloses, came from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). "It had seemed logical to approach them. I was going to study in Canada and they were offering 25 scholarships to the Caribbean for study in any area of choice. Raje suggested I tried CIDA, but they turned me down."

The deadline for the McGill course was fast approaching and Aarons did not have a sponsor. That was the end of his dream, he thought. And it had ended before it began.

Next week: Pioneering Jamaica through abortion, mercy killing, cloning, homosexuality.

Send comments on this interview to desal@cwjamaica.com

Your View of the Interview

Gary Allen
. I am prompted to write this note because of this remarkable story of my favourite head boy at St Mary High. One could easily predict that he was destined for great things. He never flaunted his authority on us younger students, as some other prefects did, and he was always ready to give counsel to us.

I will never forget that when I became blind and came to Kingston in 1991 and never had any money to pay for my subjects, Gary Allen was there to the rescue.

After one call to RJR in which I outlined my problem to him, he made his way up to the Jamaica Society for the Blind and handed me the cheque to pay for the three subjects that I sat that year.

He has touched my life and made a major contribution to my transformation. Jamaicans must understand that to be great, one has to be truly humble. Gary Hugh Allen is that and more. One love, my brother.

Senator Floyd Morris
femorris@cwjamaica.com

. Impossible as this might sound, you just keep getting better.

Lloyd Russell
lloydrus@cwjamaica.com

. I was very pleased to have read your feature on Gary Allen. He is a colleague and friend who I have always been proud of, not only because of his high professional standards and assiduousness, but also because he is genuine. To 'Sir' Gary I say, "keep up the excellent work and may God continue to bless and guide you."

Yvonne Nicholson
Yvonne@jamstockex.com

. While I have called in the past to commend or otherwise comment on your excellent interview series, I have never before taken the time to respond in writing, but I feel that this time I should.

I have always been reluctant to openly compare bosses, especially since I still have a few, but I feel compelled to state on record that Gary Allen is, in many ways, the best boss I have ever had.

In my six years as a television journalist, what little success I achieved was due in no small part to the guidance and support he gave me when I entered a newsroom as a complete rookie with absolutely no experience or training in the field. I continued growing as a journalist after his departure to the CBU, but it was in the context of the framework I had acquired from him.

In addition, I stumbled into being interviewed at a TV station quite by accident, and because I was quite aware that I had no experience, at the time when he hired me I thought I was being hired purely because of my ability to write.

I had no idea I was being hired to be a "front-line" news reporter, which means that he saw something in me that I did not yet know I possessed.

Journalism misses him, but I am happy for him in his continuing corporate success. Keep up the good work with the series.
Tony Morrison
TonyM@boj.org.jm

Missed the column
. I missed your weekly feature in the Sunday Observer for the first two weeks that they went broadsheet. I am sure I scoured the paper several times but did not see your feature. I got a bit anxious and almost tracked you down to find out what the real deal was.

Glad to have seen it return last Sunday. After all, your feature is the main reason that I buy the Sunday Observer.
Keep up the good work.
Errol Greene
ecg@cwjamaica.com

. Just a quick note to ask if there was a column on Sunday (August 28). I did not see it on line. Let me know please! Thanks.
Claudette Cameron
Toronto
bogwalk@yorku.ca

. The Horace Peterkin article you promised should be out by now but I still have not been able to access it on the Internet. Has it been posted as yet? I am a bit anxious to read it to see what new information was provided and, of course, the angle from which you have approached it.

Ron Cunningham
Toronto
Rcunnin123@rogers.com

NOTE: The Horace Peterkin interview will be published at a later date.

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