简介

Dr. Laurence Fuortes encourages medical residents to find a harmonious work-life balance, but his own experience shows how complicated that can be. Fuortes serves in a variety of roles at the University of Iowa. One of his long-term roles has been as principal investigator in the U.S. Department of Energy epidemiologic health survey of Department of Defense Contract Workers. Known as Iowa’s Former Worker Medical Screening Program, the program offers free medical screenings to former U.S. Department of Energy workers from the Ames Laboratory and Iowa Army Ammunition Plant near Burlington. Fuortes has served as their advocate in expanding the groups eligible to receive compensation for their work-related medical conditions. “Those patients are dying off,” he said of the workers, who were employed in the early years of the nuclear weapons industry, beginning in the late 1940s, and are now reaching their mid- to late-80s.