February 19, 2014
Professor Emeritus Gordon Flynn, PhD, and his wife, Beverly, endowed the Gordon and Beverly Flynn Scholarship in 2009 to assist students at the College of Pharmacy where Flynn, now an emeritus faculty member, was a member of the pharmaceutical sciences faculty from 1972 until his retirement in 2001. Meeting their benefactors for the first time at the 2010 Albert B. Prescott dinner are Flynn Scholars P-3 Connie Cheng, PharmD’10, and P-3 Brian Meredith. PharmD’12. Photo by Gregory Fox.

A Labor of Love 13 Years in the Making

“The book is finished,” says Gordon L. Flynn, PhD. “It needs a publisher.”

That’s a succinct summary of the situation with Physical and Biophysical Foundations of Pharmacy Practice – Issues in Drug Delivery, the textbook that Professor Emeritus of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and a colleague spent 13 years producing. Now he faces the prospect of spending even more time getting it delivered to its audience.

“Producing” is the precise word. Flynn not only wrote almost all of the text, but also either commissioned or secured permission to use its 381 illustrations and learned enough about publishing software to format them – along with legends, references, charts and tables – “in a way that you could look and see what you had.”  The project almost defines the phrase “labor of love.”

“I never put a word on paper wanting to profit from it,” he says. “My sole motivation was to provide something we could use to teach pharmaceutical science that was on target in terms of what practicing pharmacists need to know about dosage forms and how they work.”

He had a contract for the book with the American Pharmacists Association, then known as the American Pharmaceutical Association. But, he says, “close to a year ago, I called and said I’m almost done, what should I do now? And they said they were having trouble with what they’d already published, students aren’t buying books, and they didn’t feel they could afford to publish it.

“They were probably looking forward to getting the book in three or four years after the original contract,” he admits, “but I couldn’t do that book in three or four years.”

Not if it was to be the comprehensive and appealing book he envisioned, one that would fill a void in the teaching of pharmaceutical science that had troubled him almost from the moment he joined the College of Pharmacy faculty in 1972, following seven years as a research scientist at Upjohn.

The nature of that void can be simply stated: pharmaceutical pedagogy hadn’t kept up with pharmaceutical practice. “The question nagged me: in our teaching, who are we preparing for what responsibilities?” he recalls. “I didn’t like the answer I kept coming up with, though I tailored my assignments, insofar as I could, to meet the unmet need.”

Which was that about half his students were going to become community pharmacists, and they needed to know a great deal more than how to compound prescriptions. They needed to understand what was in those prescriptions and why, and how they worked, and what happened to them while they sat on the shelf and when in use, and how to educate patients about them.

“In the 1960s, the medical community began to understand drug-receptor and drug-drug interactions,” Flynn notes. “Despite this, I know as a fact that teachings of the past droned on. I think some of the people who have looked at the book may feel threatened by it because it drifts away from the teaching they’ve done and the teachers that taught them and the teachers that taught their teachers.”

Throughout his teaching career, he says, “nobody on our then faculty of five required students to buy a dosage form science book. We all had the sense that published texts weren’t all that useful. This gnawed at me.” While attending a scientific conference in France in the mid-1990s, “I raised the issue of needing a better book than existed with two of my colleagues.”  One of them, Michael Roberts, an accomplished Australian professor, was sufficiently gung-ho that he and Flynn planned the book. In the end, though, Flynn wound up writing most of it.  One chapter was prepared by a former student of his, Maureen Donovan, now on the University of Iowa faculty.

Flynn is justly proud of the book’s comprehensiveness, the logic and clarity of its structure, the effectiveness with which the illustrations support the text, and its emphasis on pharmacy’s history, which has rarely been the subject of such a focused narrative.

“Pharmacists need to understand what dosage forms are and where they came from, so I bring in history wherever it seems relevant,” he says. “I think that’s important.”

“And I want those who teach dosage form science to always have the community and hospital pharmacist in mind when teaching.  Pharmacists need to know what happens to dosage forms and the drugs they contain following their administration.”  But in order for it to reach its ‘audience’, it has to be published.