TheFetus.net

Audio/Video Link  *requires RealPlayer - free download

Arthur Fougner, MD: "Hi, I'm Art Fougner, and I'm here with Dr. Philippe Jeanty formerly of Yale and now The Fetus.net."

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "That's correct. I'm actually in private practice with a wonderful group called the Women's Health Alliance in Nashville and it's a private practice group that encourages doing some academic work, which was not necessarily the case in my previous institution. I have a lot of time to work on the page called The Fetus.net."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "I imagine Dr. Hobbins must be very pleased with himself raising this entire generation of ultrasound progenies."

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "John is a master, an inspiration, and he's a mentor. John has a very different perspective than anyone else. John is a person that derives happiness from developing other people instead of happiness from developing a bigger ???-video (career) for himself. He's an extraordinary generous person, really a wonderful mentor, and I'm very fortunate that I was one of his early pupils."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "Philippe, how did you get started with the idea of instead of going to a straightforward book or a journal to branch out into multimedia?"

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "What happened is originally I got frustrated because case reports were really the orphan of the literature because what happens is big journals don't want to spend the space because it's not very interesting and it's not very defined. So in 1990 I started a journal called 'The Fetus' that was on paper and was organized not as a body journal but as loose-leaf pages that could be organized in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately at that time I was working in an institution in which doing academy work was not particularly seen and so I was forced to stop that because it was too academically oriented. Then when I moved into private practice I thought it was a great time to restart this. The advantage of doing it on paper was not good anymore; it was much better to do this on the web. Another of my big pet peeves is that things are too expensive outside the United States for people to purchase and so I wanted to make sure from the onset that everything would be free and that's why I designed it to be free."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "I think for me anyway some of the lecture material is easily as exhaustive as many of the textbooks that are for sale out there and with the added advantage that it's updated much more frequently."

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "Also, you can search. If you have a baby that has a certain anomaly, when you don't have the textbook or you don't have a journal, you have to ask for an interlibrary loan, you get a fax copy, and you can't read anything. Here you can get it immediately and The Fetus now has a very large collection of images. There are over 2,700 images, there are 120 video clips, and there are some animations. This is bigger than any other textbook including my most recent textbook."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "And we haven't even gotten to those cases of the month."

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "This is an area that is really very much appreciated by people. We have a case that is provided every two weeks and these are very extraordinary cases. There was a recent case of Mohr syndrome, only four cases were described in the literature, one of the four cases was described over there. It is unbelievable the energy that people spent all over the world to resolve those cases and the only benefit they get is their name in the winner's list so it's really a very educational project. Very interestingly, I had tried to at some point move from one case every two week to a case every week and I got lots of people telling me no, no, don't do that because it takes two weeks to resolve one of these cases. We can't manage more than one case every two weeks."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "I think that's fabulous. Any other projects on the horizon?"

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "Very recently, actually two weeks ago, I formed a non-profit corporation so The Fetus is entirely a non-profit educational corporation so companies that want to spend some tax free dollars can spend it over there. I have also donated my fetal echo CD whose profit goes into supporting the webpage and providing equipment for people in less privileged countries so lots of things are happening. Recently, we also provided a translate button so people who don't speak English or don't read English very well can go read an article and click the translate button and have the article translated in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, even Chinese so that's quite an interesting addition."

Arthur Fougner, MD: "Outstanding, it was my pleasure speaking to you today."

Philippe Jeanty MD, PhD: "Thank you very much, Art."