It was called eBay.
Meg Whitman is now the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company and one of the most powerful and successful women in the business world.
There were people like that all over campus. To succeed, I was determined to work as hard as anyone.
There was only one little problem concerning my grand plan to become an international lawyer – namely, my prelaw courses.
I despised them. And I was awful at them.
How quickly my dream to be a lawyer crisscrossing the Continent was dashed. Was I abandoning it because it was a new challenge? No. Crew and getting into Princeton and losing forty pounds in forty days proved to me that I didn’t shy away from challenges, no matter how tough.
I let go of my “dream” because I would not devote my life to a professional pursuit that I didn’t love.
Someday, the dizzying, international life I’d fantasized about would, in fact, become a reality. Meeting an English princess at Ascot. Flying to far-flung parts of the world in private jets to perform work I was trained to perform. Dining with United Nations diplomats and Hollywood directors. Helping one of the most influential and high-profile politicians in America to deal with the one thing he was sure would cost him his career. Accepting a first lady’s invitation to cross the country to talk to her. Dating beautiful, intelligent, accomplished women. All of that would be part of my future.
I just didn’t know it at the time.
As I finished up my first semester of sophomore year, I was despondent that I truly had no idea of what I wanted to be. And now, suddenly, my boyhood fantasy of mystery and faraway intrigue seemed childish and unsuitable. Little did I know, though, as I took long, broody walks around the Princeton campus, past shade trees and often circling the Institute for Advanced Studies, made famous by Einstein in the fifties, that I was zeroing in on my future. That as I daydreamed while sitting in class, I was mere weeks from discovering my passion. And that that passion, like Dorothy’s dream of home in The Wizard of Oz, really was right there in front of me the whole time.
After a short lifetime telling myself I was going to do something, anything, but be a doctor, which I saw as a dignified, meaningful, admirable, quiet, unadventurous, even boring livelihood, I started to think only about life as a doctor. Part of it was the realization, while sitting in science courses in college, that the material came easily and felt so familiar, yet I found it stimulating, too. There were formulas and constants, hard facts and other immutables, but science was always changing, too; one piece of knowledge was always built on the back of another, and another would one day be built on that one. To me, that evolution was more animated and exciting than what I learned in the arts and humanities and social sciences, as much as I enjoyed them.
I had what amounted to another epiphany. Of course, one of the reasons I respected my father and his work so much, and the reason he was respected so much by others, was simple: He helped people. He made their lives better.
My realization? What life could I possibly carve out – crisscrossing the globe, being involved in high-powered deals, you name it – that could outdo, for personal fulfillment, a lifetime of helping people? Dad made kids with asthma breathe a little better, so in the summer they could run around like kids. He helped old people. He helped women and men and families.
I could do that. I wanted to do that.
I’d found something exciting, something important, and something I was passionate about: medicine.
By the time I returned home for Christmas break, my grandmother had got wind of my interest, and she arranged for me to meet Dr. Henry Ransom, a longtime acquaintance of hers who was professor of surgery at the University of Michigan. On a snowy December day, Grandma and I drove the hour and a half through a snowstorm to Ann Arbor, to meet the doctor at University Hospital. Dr. Ransom had grown up on a farm in central Michigan, Grandma told me on the drive, and he was known as a great teacher and an excellent surgeon. He had neither wife nor children. He was in his eighties now, a professor emeritus.
When we pulled into the parking lot, it was the first time I’d ever been to a university hospital, and it was not at all like Dad’s hospital – St. John’s in Detroit, the inviting, humanly scaled institution my father had been affiliated with since I was a kid, the place I felt so eager to stop in to see him, always feeling comfort inside its walls, even pleasure. But this place, University Hospital, was gigantic, cold, impersonal. For the first time, I understood the anxiety that ripples through most nonmedical people when they set foot inside any hospital.
While Grandma and I rode the elevator to the top floor, I wondered if perhaps this place wasn’t the norm, St. John’s the exception, and whether I needed to reevaluate my new, curious, nineteen-year-old’s urge to spend the remainder of my waking life in dungeons just like it.
Had you hung a stethoscope around Henry Ransom’s neck and slipped a black leather doctor’s bag into his hand, you could not have made him look more like the classic physician. When we got to his office, he was sitting behind a big desk, in his white coat. My eyes immediately went to the surgeon’s long, thin fingers. Dr. Ransom looked the epitome of an emeritus anything: white-haired, elderly, elegant.
After some pleasantries, the doctor asked about my background. I told him I was at Princeton. Despite my unexpressed reservations in the elevator ride up about the hideousness of University Hospital as a workplace, I said I’d become interested in pursuing medicine.
“Would you want to work in our department of surgery?” he asked me.
The offer was so sudden, and he knew so little about me, that I thought he deserved an equally impetuous answer.
“Yes,” I said, having no idea what the job entailed.
And just like that he was up from behind his desk and motioning for me to follow him. “I want you to meet someone,” he said, and we walked into the neighboring office, where a balding, slightly overweight man sat.
“Jerry?” said Dr. Ransom. “I think this young man would be a good researcher.”
That was it. My grandmother must have been well regarded by the doctor, I thought, because unless I was wrong, suddenly I had a summer job waiting for me the end of sophomore year, in the department of surgery, at the University of Michigan. And I had yet to take organic chem.
To his credit, the man to whom I’d just been introduced, Jerry Turcotte, the chief of surgery, didn’t act put-upon (which said a great deal about his respect for Dr. Ransom). Dr. Turcotte had an easy smile. He’d grown up in Grosse Pointe, too, it turned out, two blocks from my house on Fair Acres Road.
“I know just the spot for you,” said Dr. Turcotte. “We’re doing research for kidney transplants.” Quickly, I was realizing – though I’d had ample evidence to learn it while growing up, from my father the doctor – that medical people, especially surgeons, don’t pussyfoot. They don’t have time to. They make bold decisions – quick, yes, but bold, first and foremost.
The “research” they had in mind for me that summer, it turned out, did not involve my poring over a bunch of medical texts and data readouts.
They wanted me to cut open dogs.
The doctors in the department were working on an important experiment. They wanted to see if a particular drug, administered just after surgery, would improve the rate of acceptance for kidney-transplant patients. Back then, in the mid-1970s, a kidney transplant was a last-ditch, usually unsuccessful strategy to cure someone suffering from kidney failure. But it was hypothesized that if the patient was given cyclosporine, which reduces the body’s rejection of foreign cells, transplants