Whistleblower

Best known for taking on Big Tobacco, Kessler constantly irritated conservative members of Congress in his zeal to protect consumers from tainted food and dangerous drugs. In an early act, he authorized the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota to seize a large quantity of Citrus Hill Fresh Choice orange juice after concluding that parent company Procter & Gamble's use of the term "fresh" was false and misleading. The company changed the product's label.

Such actions earned Kessler widespread admiration as well as scorn. House Speaker Newt Gingrich called him a "bully and a thug" and the "worst appointment ever."

Kessler's move to rein in the tobacco companies, which began shortly after he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and picked up steam after he was held over in the Bill Clinton administration, was long and combative. Although the U.S. Supreme Court voted five to four to thwart regulation of tobacco as a drug in 2000, Kessler's campaign helped bring cigarette manufacturers to heel and set the stage for billions of dollars in tobacco settlements.

"The joke at FDA was that David was renting because he thought he could be fired at any moment," says Washington, D.C. attorney Bill Schultz, a top policy aide to Kessler at the agency. "It's not in his nature to walk away from something, especially if he thinks there's wrongdoing."

His colleagues describe Kessler as private, intensely focused, and extraordinarily free of ego for someone whose pedigree includes having run a large government agency.

Yet his management style didn't suit everyone. "David can be in the middle of a conversation and hear something that he thinks is brilliant, and will say, 'Hold that thought,' and come down the hallway to your office and say, 'Can you come with me for a minute? I want you to hear this idea so-and-so has,'" says one faculty member who worked closely with Kessler. "Some people find that endearing; others are put off by it."

Kessler as dean carried two cell phones and a BlackBerry; friends and associates marveled at his ability to glide between conversations. "No time is wasted," one said. "It doesn't matter if he's getting into a cab or grocery shopping."

His multitasking has also exhibited itself in other ways. Kessler acquired a medical degree as a pediatrician at Harvard and a law degree from the University of Chicago within the same year, thanks to overlapping studies for each. "I thought it was some kind of mistake when I first saw the résumé," says Jeanne Robertson, the ex-UCSF Foundation chair. Kessler soon doubled up again, doing a medical residency at the Johns Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore while commuting to Capitol Hill to work as a Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee staffer for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.

"David is blessed with a lot of energy," says Paulette Kessler, a University of Chicago–trained attorney who has practiced law off and on during the couple's 34-year marriage. They met when she was an undergraduate at Smith College in Massachusetts and Kessler was at Amherst nearby. (Their daughter is in her second year of law school at Georgetown; their son works for a government relations firm in the nation's capital.)

"This is someone of extraordinary righteousness," says John Greenspan, director of UCSF's AIDS Research Institute and one of the few university colleagues willing to speak about Kessler for the record. "From my observations, I've found him to be of impeccable integrity."

Yet insiders who praise Kessler's stewardship of the medical school are similarly complimentary of the man who fired him, the mild-mannered Bishop, who is credited with helping UCSF make great strides during his 10 years as chancellor.

Colleagues describe Bishop as a voracious reader with an engaging sense of humor who is "enormously erudite." Like Kessler, he has a compelling personal story. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he spent his youth banging out hymns in the Lutheran church where his father was the minister. According to his official biography, he attended a two-room school from the first through the eighth grade before studying medicine at Harvard.

Bishop's work in the mid-'70s with fellow UCSF professor Harold Varmus (which earned the pair the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989) involved the study of ocogenes, genes that control growth in living cells and which, under certain circumstances, can go haywire and turn cancerous. It led to great strides in the diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers.

Friends say it was Varmus who introduced Kessler to Bishop. Asked to comment for this article, Varmus, who heads Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who is a friend of both men, said he would prefer to "take a pass."

That echoes the reticence at UCSF, where the initial shock of Kessler's ouster has given way to guarded resignation. "David's firing has created a chilling atmosphere," one veteran staffer said. "People who might have been relatively free with their opinions aren't so comfortable right now."