Professor Angelo De Marzo explains that every laboratory test in a hospital is run in theory by pathologists, and so they actually are responsible for the output of every lab value.

Angelo De Marzo M.D., Ph.D. is a pathologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. His current research focuses on the inflammatory response and its link to prostate cancer. The research may lead to new diagnostic tests for early detection. “Every laboratory test in the hospital is run in theory by pathologists, and so they actually are responsible for the output of every lab value, even blood, blood work, serum analyses and what not. The type of pathologist that I am that actually is fairly common that people would know about or maybe not know about or maybe they don’t know about is a surgical pathologist. So if you think about at Hopkins we have maybe 30 operating rooms. Every single specimen from a little tiny piece of skin to a very large tumor mass ends up in the department of surgical pathology. The surgeons never make their own diagnosis anymore. In the early 1900s they did; now what they do is they take out the specimen, it goes to pathology, surgical pathology, the pathologist or technician will basically slice up that specimen into a portion that will ultimately be looked at under a microscope. And then the surgical pathologist looks at it under the microscope and decides yes, this is benign, this is malignant, or is cancer or is not. So every diagnosis of a piece of tissue is done by a surgical pathologist. There is another branch of pathology called cytopathology. And there instead of looking at whole pieces of tissue we look at individual cells. So a surgeon or clinician might stick a needle into a lesion and pull out individual cells and smear them on a slide and that way you have individual cells that a cytopathologist looks at and can determine whether it is benign or malignant for instance.”

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