What exactly do you guys do here? What’s the name of the company?

It’s called Stratatech Corporation. We make skin. We grow skin. Well, yeah. We basically make skin in a lab and we’re doing a human clinical trial right now on burn victims.

Is it all going through trials right now?

Yeah. We’re just a private company in the beginning phases of a clinical trial.

So is the revenue grants from the university?

Government grants and private investors.

So how many employees do you have here?

I think twenty-five to thirty.

And you’ve been here for four years. How many employees was it four years ago?

Oh gosh. I think like, fifteen or sixteen.

What exactly do you do here?

That’s a good question. I do a lot of stuff. I work on a research grant. We have our main line product that we call Stratograph. It’s skin that we make here in the lab. We also have several research grants where we can actually modify the skin and tailor it to different patient types.

That’s pretty cool.

So I work with research and development. Basically, to make the skin that goes to the hospitals, we need to work in a clean room environment. Which basically means extremely sterile conditions. We wear tie vech bunny suits head to toe. The whole nine yards.

So I do that. I’m usually over there once a week. We usually contract out a different facility to do that. I do a little bit of quality control stuff as well.

Why do you love it? Why have you been here for four years?

Well, I just think it’s really exciting. The possibility of helping people is really what keeps everyone going. Our president is really inspirational. She’s just an awesome lady. I love the people who work here. Everyone is really supportive.

I think for me honestly, that’s the best part of it.

Do you like being in the lab?

Yeah. I love the science. It’s really stimulating. Once a month we have meeting where everyone gives each other updates on what’s going on in the lab and what’s going on with the different research projects.

Is this something that you want to do forever? What do you eventually hope to end up at in your career?

Yeah. I don’t really know. That’s a good question. I mean, I kind just landed myself here and I’m really loving it and seeing where it takes me, I guess. But I think I really want to see where the company goes and try to help it get to where it’s going.

How far off do you think they are from having something approved that’s on the market?

It’s really hard to say. It’s going to be awhile.

Years and years?

Years. I’d say.

Do people ever get burnt out? Do they lose faith in the possibility of it being approved?

You know, I think it could happen like that. But I always feel motivated. I never have gotten to the point where…there’s definitely been times where it’s been a little discouraging, but even though sometimes it’s slow, I feel like we’re always moving forward and always making some progress.

I think we’ve gotten a really good response from hospitals and the people who would actually be purchasing the product. We just have been getting really good responses from people and we’ve received a lot of grant money. I know a lot of people are real excited about our research too.

Are there a lot of companies who are doing something similar? In a sense, developing the same product?

Not a lot. There’s at least one other product that’s similar to ours and it’s called Appligraph. They’ve been making that product for a long time. It’s already approved. There are differences between ours and there’s. It’s hard for me to say what the differences are.

But there’s no one that you’re racing against for approval right now though?

Not really. For the actual skin product, the research is a little more competitive. A lot of people are working with the different proteins and stuff we research. It’s kind of exciting.

You said you graduated in 2003? So this is your first job out of school?

Yeah.

That’s pretty cool. What would be the one piece of advice if you could go back and say to yourself at graduation?

Wow. I think I would just say…yeah. I don’t know. I have to think about it. I guess I’m really glad that I stuck it out. Sometimes your first job out of college, you’re not always going to like everything about it. You kind of just have to start somewhere. But I’m just really glad that I stuck with it and it just turned into a really great job.

I’m Kathy Murhead. I love my job. I really do. Anything where I can learn something new every day, work with really bright people doing really challenging stuff that’s going to help people’s health and welfare, and get paid for it? Man, I’d do any job that involves doing that (laughs).

I am one of a two person company called Scigrow. It has nothing to do with fertilizer. The idea is actually around science and growth. Science based growth. What we do is we work with little companies. Anything from the gleam in the inventors eye to maybe early stage proof of principal in people that are developing new bio medical products. It could be the next great drug, it could be a new medical test that would help you decide which medicine will be better for you individually as opposed to someone else. It could be medical devices, like something that helps fractures heal faster or an external device that could be used instead of medicines to treat depression.

So people have these ideas and they come to you?

Well, they have the ideas. Sometimes they come to us, other times people tell them they should come to us. Because your first step in what you think is a good idea, is to try and figure out a) what would it take to test it and b) where am I going to get the money. Because for the kinds of companies we work with, usually there’s some kind of laboratory testing that’s involved. We’re both scientists by training. What we help companies do is figure out what’s the science, what you’d call ‘basic science’ at the university, the purposed of which is to create new knowledge that maybe someday will turn into a product. But at least right now it’s just curiosity. Why do things work that way?

Eventually something will come along and you’ll find a way to make a person better. You could give them a new medicine, a new treatment, a new test.

So is it kind of like consulting where you fill in the gaps for science?

It is a kind of consulting. It’s definitely consulting. We’re heads for rent. We’ve both lived in academic medical centers in the past. I worked in a big drug company. We both worked in a small startup that thought we were going to be able to use cells to deliver new therapies. Didn’t work the way we thought, but boy did we learn a lot about what you have to do to make a product besides the science. That’s really what we try to help the companies we work with find out.

That’s the motivation for starting what you’re doing.

The motivation for doing what we do now is we wish we could have had someone that would have told us all the things we learned the hard way. Or at least warned us that we needed to watch out for some of those things.

How’s the transition been going from having a paycheck to being an entrepreneur?

Actually, that wasn’t the scary part. But then, we were lucky. We both happen to have husbands who are employed at the time. Mine’s retired now, but ten years ago it was okay to try this for a year and see if it worked. Either there was a niche or there wasn’t a business. So we made our laundry list of stuff people said we were good at doing or that we liked to do, and that we’d be willing to do. We talked to our various friends we’d worked with in our prior lives and asked if they’d be interested in someone that did this. Some of them said we didn’t need to do this, but that they’d kill to have someone do this for them. Because they didn’t have the time or expertise or whatever.

So eventually, ten years later, we’re pretty convinced there’s a niche.

What has been the scariest part?

The scariest part, frankly for me as a scientist, is having to stand up and sell your product. Which is why should you want us to come up and help you think about and plan this development in science.

How do you overcome that then?

Well, I guess the answer is that first, you tell them you don’t want their job. Because I don’t. I like my job. My job is to help them figure out the right things to do to figure out if the idea will work before you waste more time and money than it’s worth. Because it’s too easy to do all the things that you know will probably going to work about the idea. And then all of a sudden, all that money you raised the really hard way by getting to the venture capitalists or the angels or however you want to raise money to do the testing, it’s gone. You still don’t really know whether the critical things are going to work or they’re not going to work. That’s the problem in the company I was part of. We didn’t test the hard things first.

When we finally did get around to testing them and found out it didn’t work, we just said that the product wasn’t going to work the way we thought it was going to work, and we focused our efforts on something else. But we waited too long to find that out.

So what I think I like about the job is sometimes I can help other people avoid having to learn it the hard way. So first I say, ‘I don’t want your job. You’re the experts. You know your idea. You know the possibilities.’ Our job is to ask the hard questions. ‘How do you know it will do what you think it’s going to do? Have you ever actually done an experiment in the lab that says it will do that?’

Do you think people are afraid of addressing those hard questions? Why don’t people address them?

Most people, some people are afraid of them. Some people frankly take them as an article of faith. When you’re in a little company, you wouldn’t be there unless you really believed it was possible. And you just put everything you have into making it happen.

You know things are going to go wrong. You’re going to find things you don’t expect. Certain things you just believe because it’s an article of faith. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in that position of being the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to believe when no body else does. Because they haven’t shown it yet. So you have to believe it.

Sometimes that means you say, ‘Well of course I believe that.’ But you have to really test it. It’s because you believe. So it helps to have someone outside the situation who can step back and say, ‘We know you believe you can do that. But all those venture capitalists are really hard nosed. Or the government who will read your small business grant application and decide to give you money to go do this stuff in the lab.’ They might actually want to see some evidence that it could work. That’s where we have our fun. We get to help plan and think about the science.

I’ll tell you truthfully, being in a small company and having to do it all, every day by yourself, you’re too young to understand this, but it’s a whole lot more like being a grandparent than a parent. Okay. I have lots of nieces and nephews an no kids. It’s like being an aunt or an uncle instead of a parent. You get 80% of the fun and only 20% of the hard work (laughs).

That support network of having that consultant there, where does that rank on the list of being successful for entrepreneurs or a successful company?

Let me say a successful entrepreneur. Because usually in the beginning, the entrepreneur is the company. They’re the spark plug that gets everything started. I think at least based on the entrepreneurs that we’ve worked with, the ones that are going to succeed are the ones who have the faith, can get other people excited about it, but know enough to know that they don’t know it all, and have around them people who will help try to make sure that the right questions get asked. Sometimes they have to get asked financially. Other people do that. I don’t have to. But you need good financial advisors. You need good scientific advisors. They need good business advisors who are going to say, ‘Yes. I suppose your idea can do this. Who are the people that are going to use it? How are you going to turn it from an idea that can only be done by an expert in a well equipped laboratory to something in shrink wrap that you can sell at a clinic site that doesn’t have any specialized equipment?’ That’s the difference between the idea and the product.

There’s a lot of things that have to be done scientifically to get it from here to there.

What would you tell someone who is stuck to be in a corporate job that aspires to be an entrepreneur who is thinking about making the leap of faith, but hasn’t quite made it and is on the teetering edge of that decision?

I’d say you have to know your own comfort level. You will learn things being an entrepreneur in a little company that you would absolutely never learn in a big corporation. Big corporations put you in your little box and say you’re a specialist in this, you do that.

The good news is if you go to a little company and you become an entrepreneur, you will get to do things that you never ever thought of doing before, and probably never knew you could do before. The good news is that you get a lot of things to try. The bad news is if you screw up, it could screw up the company. You get a lot more responsibility, but you have to take a lot more responsibility.

You have to decide how you feel about that. If the idea of being able to take the responsibility and make it happen, even if you have to do stuff that takes you outside of your comfort zone, is exciting, then do it. If that scares the dickens out of you, don’t do it. Consult with a little company, become one of their experts, or become their internal advocate at the big company that says, ‘These guys are doing something really exciting. We ought to be watching them.’ But do go be in the company.

It’s all a matter of matching the things you like to do to the things that need to be done.

Simple, right?

Sometimes you just have to try it. But, I think the hard thing about saying you’ll try being an entrepreneur, there’s a real difference between the first company and the one I’m in now. The first company I was in, to get that product to market it was going to take millions of dollars and a lot of time. There had to be a lot of people involved. So once you started down that path, you felt a lot of responsibility to those other people. It really was a very family oriented feeling of setting.

You worked hard, but not because you wanted to see the idea succeed, but because you knew that if you didn’t do your job, it was going to impact a lot of other people. It’s not that I don’t feel that way about the current company, but it’s just the two of us. We can decide whatever we want to do. If one of us needs to stop and take care of a health emergency for a parent, the other one can cover. It’s not so easy to do that when you’re in a different kind of company. Again, it’s matching the needs to the likes.

My name is Kenry Robinson, a senior at Peoria High School. My Pursue the Passion interview was with Dr. Nate Miller, a physician from the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington. The medical center is located on the Ft. Lewis Army Base.

What is your name and title?

Nate Miller, MD, CPT, USA, MC

How long have you been employed with this firm?

3 years

What are your specific job responsibilities?

I see patients in outpatient clinic 1 to 3 days a week. These consist of acute illness appointments and well health check up appointments. I operate 1 to 3 times a week. I also have weekly responsibilities on the labor and delivery unit managing patients in labor, attending their deliveries and performing surgeries like c-sections.

What are the qualifications for your position?

Bachelor of Arts/Science and Medical School

What do you like about your job?

Seeing people at their very best and very worst with the ability to provide necessary care for them in those times. It is a unique experience for patients to let complete strangers (physicians/ nurses/etc) provide care for them. I enjoy the people I work with in that we work as teams for the common good of others. One of the other things I enjoy about my job as an Active Duty Army Physician is having the blessing of taking care of our nation’s finest and their loved ones as they continue to do what is asked of them.

What do you dislike about your job?

Personal sacrifices of time with family and friends. Patients who choose to not take care of themselves.

Pursue the Passion spoke to a couple hundred FBLA students recently to get them excited about doing PTP interviews, and one student, Jayden Sanders, got his opportunity to interview sooner than expected. During a game of ‘Collide-a-Scope,’ he dislocated his kneecap and was carted off to a local hospital in an ambulance. He ended up interviewing the paramedic on the way.

Judy Caplan, a registered dietitian and founder of Nutrition Ammunition, in Oakton. VA, is a perfect example of passion put on hold, then reinvigorated stronger than before.

“I see nutrition as an entrée into myself,” says Judy. “I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family and I think I saw nutrition, from a very early age, as a way to nourish myself on the most concrete level. From there, I was able to learn how to nourish myself on many other levels.”

A graduate of the University of Arizona, in Tucson, Judy learned what she calls “Wonder Bread Nutrition,” something she was able to outgrow by reading progressive literature during the late 1960s and early 1970s. She returned to Arizona to get her masters in human nutrition, foods and dietetics, but however benignly, her passion was interrupted.

Wanting to raise a family, Judy put her professional dreams on hold while raising two children, with her husband Dean. As her oldest entered college, a friend asked Judy to speak at her daughter’s boarding school, where the girls had been practicing some atrocious eating habits. The talk went so well that Judy was inspired to write a book. From there, more speaking engagements came, then referrals from doctors and home visits, to patients, and also
accompanying trips to the grocery store, to help teach people how to shop.

Judy exudes energy and love for what she does, and her confidence is encouraging. “There’s nothing you can’t do,” she says simply. “And everything you do do is part of something bigger, later. Everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. It all adds up to something greater.”

Judy’s Nutrition Ammunition can be found at: http://www.gobefull.com/

The companies started here were companies started here at the University. By professors at the university who discover something that would be of interest to the research community or for therapeutic purposes. In their own labs, they can’t distribute it to a lot of people. They’re limited as far as what they can do.

So they’re here to make it happen.

Yeah. They start companies where they can get people to work on either developing something that can be sold, or for therapy.

What’s Muris all about?

Muris is all about gene therapy. Doing gene therapy. It was started by Dr. Wolfe at the university. He’s a pediatrician. His patients are kids who have genetic diseases. So he would like to make them better, and ultimately if they’re missing a gene for something, the best way to make them better is if they could get a good copy of the gene.

So your job as a researcher is to go find the good genes?

No. There are people who know what the genes are.

Is this stem cell type stuff?

No it isn’t. We’re working with people who already are here. The project I work on is for muscular dystrophy. There are a lot of people who have muscular dystrophy. Boys, they usually die around the age of 20 because their muscles are all defective.

So the gene is known, it’s just an issue of how to get that gene into them. All of their muscle fibers are missing it. So it’s like one in three thousand boys is born with duschan muscular dystrophy.

When you say they’re missing a gene, how do you find that gene?

We all have the good copy in us. What they have is a gene with a defect. It maybe has a pointed mutation that stops making the whole protein and instead makes a defective part of one. Or else they’re missing a big chunk out of their gene. In any case, they end up without having a correct copy of the gene. So they can’t make the distrophin and their muscles waste away and they lose all their strength.

So at Muris, we’re interested in how to get the…the genome has been sequenced, especially the diseased genes, most of them are known. We are working on how to get the good gene into the person that needs it. As far as the muscular dystrophy project, we are trying to perserve their hand function. Because if they can use their hands, they can operate the wheelchair. They can work on the computer. They can interact with the world.

It would do a lot for their quality of life. It won’t prolong their life because they’re still, the diophram gives out. They can’t breath as they get older. But this method that the researchers here, with Dr. John Wolfe, the head of the company, they’ve developed the method for delivering the gene to the limb muscles. So in the arms and the legs. It actually works very well.

Is there a reason why it wouldn’t work for other places?

The method is basically like a blood pressure cuff. The DNA is injected into the vein in a large volume of saline so that it can get to the muscles. One injection goes into about 25% of the muscle. So that’s pretty darn good. That does a lot to preserve their function.

So we’re doing studies in animal models to make sure this is all working well. We have mice with muscular dystrophy and we have to make sure they get stronger and show that it’s effective. We’re doing things like multiple injections to see how well animals tolerate that. We’re preparing to do a trial in twelve year old boys. After we do the studies in animals to make sure that everything is okay. It’s looking like it’s going to be out in 2010. It’s going to take that long to do all the preclinical studies.

That’s a lot of pressure on you. Getting ready to do on people? Not a lot to lose I guess. I don’t want that to sound morbid.

Well, we just keep doing what we do. We certainly hope it works. We definitely hope it works. But until you try it, you don’t know. The parents of kids with muscular dystrophy are so involved. They’re so interested in getting some kind of therapy because there is no treatment. Their kids are all going to die and they say to give them whatever we have. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know that you could make some aspect of it better, just give us whatever you have now because we want to try it.

Of course we still have to do things in an ethical way. We have to make sure it’s good in animals. And like the father said, ‘Try the procedure on us.’ All the parents volunteered to the injection procedure.

Don’t they already have the correct gene?

Well, we wouldn’t give them that volume of saline. We’d just go through the procedure to make sure the procedure is safe. Because you have to do that too. But the FDA said they weren’t interested in that because it has no potential to be beneficial to the parents. So they said no, they don’t want us to do the therapy on the parents, just the boys. Then it has the potential to help them.

As a researcher, you have a million topics you could research. But what’s your motivation to research this area?

Well, it mainly has to do with how can you deliver the gene. When I started I was hired to develop a way to treat diseases that originated in the liver. Like Chemophilia. My area is transcription geneic expression. So we know the gene, but you actually have to put lots of different elements on a GMA to make that gene get used by the cells. So you have to put all the right sequences on it. That’s called gene regulation. Because the gene alone is just codes for the protein. But it won’t do anything by itself. You have to put signals on it that tells the body to make the protein. That’s what I do.

But personally though, why are you doing this? Why research this and spend 40, 60 hour weeks on researching this?

Well, it’s fun. It’s very exciting. You’re trying to do something no one has done. It has the potential to be really helpful to people. There are just so many people with genetic diseases. So many people who are hemophilacs and those kind of things. It’d be really great to be able to contribute to making them better. So there’s that aspect of it.

The other aspect of it is, as far as gene regulation goes, it’s exciting the idea of knowing you have this gene in here. And it used to be that you put it into the mouse, and the first day there’s a lot of expression. It makes a lot of the clotting factor if you’re doing hemophilia. But then it just, ‘BOOM!’ It drops a thousand fold in a week and it doesn’t help anybody. That’s not enough.

So I was hired to make something that would make expression go high level for a long time. You know, it’s an exciting problem. Can we do this? This could be very useful. That’s what I was hired to do, and I did. Now that basically can’t go forward until we figure out a way to deliver the genes to the liver and people. So we can do it in mice, but it involves injecting the tail vein with a large volume and it’s not a method we can use in people.

When you were my age, did you picture yourself doing this?

No. When I was your age I was trying to homestead in Alaska (laughs). It failed miserably. No, I didn’t even think about science. I started going to college when I was 25 and I already had kids. It took me a long time to get through my undergraduate degree because I had kids and I had to work. I was a waitress for a long time.

But I had a professor who was a plant taxonomist. He made it sound so exciting about the things that were inside plants. Why did plants make interesting things like why does a vanilla bean make something that smells so good? All these interesting characteristics inside of the plant. I thought I’d like to know the chemistry inside of the plants. How does that happen?

I eventually learned that that term would be called molecular biology. Then I needed a job and I got one in this professors lab who was a neurobiologist. A molecular neurobiologist. So I went from plants to people. And I just kind of came this way.

When I finished my PhD I was looking for a job and I thought I’d really like to do something that will help people get better who are suffering from something. And I wanted to do something exciting. Research is really fun. It’s like this wild roller coaster ride. If you design an experiment well, you get information. And every little step you move forward toward the goal. And you get closer.

Is it exciting on a daily basis? Or are there droughts of time where nothing really happens and you have to deal with the same problem over and over again.

I think it’s exciting a lot of the time. Although, mainly what I’m doing now is I’m writing a lot of reports. Because there are a number of people who work on this project, and I’m the leader. I get the information from the people and I do a lot of analysis to see what the information says. It’s surprising how often the secrets are in the little details. All the things you might ignore. Like an experiment worked in a strange way this time, and why did that happen? You might just say, ‘Oh well. That was for whatever reason and you’ll throw it out.’ But actually, that’s where you find some secrets on what to do next. What could be the answer. In fact, John Wolfe, the founder of the company, the first time he discovered you could inject somebody with the gene using a circular piece of DNA that has the gene with control elements, he just injected it into the muscle. It was supposed to be a negative control because he was using a viral vector that would get the gene in. And it worked! It’s like, ‘Whoa! We didn’t think that was going to work.’ That’s how it all started, and it’s developed since then. If that worked, let’s try injecting it into a vein. Then it progressed from there.

So I’m sorry, Alaska, 22, doing what?

Trying to live off the land. That didn’t go very well.

A communal thing with other people?

Well I was married with my husband. But it was a big disaster. Things don’t grow that well up there. It was a lot of winter.

So if you could go back and tell your 22 year old self one piece of advice, what would you say?

Well, I think it’s important to pursue what excites you. I wasn’t ready to go to college when I was 18. I was just overwhelmed with the world. I suppose I could have gone back sooner than 25, but I guess my main piece of advice was for people to finish your education before you start having kids because it really complicates it. It really slows things down.

But otherwise, I think it’s just good to take classes in whatever seems interesting. Whatever class is most interesting, you go that way. You take more classes like that.

It sounded like your teacher’s enthusiasm stimulated your interest.

Yeah. There were two of them. One of them was an organic chemistry professor, believe it or not. Most people think organic chemistry is so boring, but this guy was a wiry little guy who was so full of energy and made you feel alive when one molecule wants to interact with the other one. That just very passionate approach to understanding life did a lot for me. That professor, and then the plant taxonomist. They really inspired me and lit a fire way back when. The only time I started thinking, ‘Whoa. Maybe I don’t really like this’ is when I transferred to the University of California. This was in Louisiana when I started school. And then I transferred to UC Santa Barbara and at first I had all of these teachers who were really dull. It wasn’t very interesting. And I thought, ‘Wow. I like this, but maybe I don’t like this.’ And then there was this guy who was a good teacher who talked about something exciting again and I realized I did like it after that.

Who would have thought a plant taxonomist and an organic chemistry teacher would have done it for you.

Daren Friesen, owner of the Moksha Yoga Studio in Chicago, IL, advises anyone to embrace their situation. “Embrace whatever you are doing,” says Daren, “whether you like it or not. To distinguish what is true from what is not true, fully embrace the moment.”

The Omaha born, USC educated yoga instructor, speaks with an incredibly calm calculation, like a man who knows something about inner peace. With the support of his parents, Darren traveled through Japan as a high school student, and later studied the practice of yoga in India. It was there that he saw the life beyond the yoga studio, the life that was practiced by many people without material wealth, yet seemed happy beyond American standards.

Yoga is about “learning how to open yourself” to what will make you truly happy, and it doesn’t necessarily take place in a studio. Daren says that simply making better choices at the grocery store can be a form of yoga, where choices lead the chooser down a path to self-improvement. Yoga is, says Darren, “how to work with the mind,” and better control it to help with personal fulfillment and satisfaction. He uses yoga as a method of defeating his own fear. “Fear holds us back from embracing our true happiness,” says Darren, “Everyone needs a tool or technique to battle their fear.” Meeting Darren, you immediately sense he knows exactly of what he speaks.

Amanda Latimore looks like a model, which is not surprising considering she used to be one. To write her off, however, as just another pretty face, would be a dreadful miscalculation. A graduate of the University of Tampa, Amanda is doing research in Long Beach as an epidemiologist, but her life does not consist of white lab coats and microscope slides. Amanda’s background is in the social sciences, and she is using that background to help gain a better understanding of the habits of marginalized populations.

What is so admirable about Amanda’s work is that she dares to tread in areas that many consider taboo, even in the United States government. Her work largely pertains to people outside of the normal scope of everyday life. This includes sex workers, the homeless, and those suffering from the diseases related to HIV and AIDS. Amanda is an excellent source of perspective. She personally interacts everyday with people who struggle to survive, and therefore she is able to contextualize the problems she faces in her life.

Soon to be starting a coveted graduate program at Johns Hopkins University, Amanda will surely be on the cutting edge of social understanding for many years to come.

An aside:

If you think you’re having a bad day, here’s something to keep you grounded. One day a client of Amanda’s walked in her office and told her what had just happened. This woman told Amanda that during the morning, her son had been taken away by Social Services. Hours later, her house was repossessed. As she wandered down the street, she was mugged and stabbed in the neck with an ice pick. Then she went to Amanda to tell her about it.

Make you feel like you don’t have it so bad? Sure makes me think twice.

First off, let me say that if we had an award to give out to a person that has pursued their passion to the fullest extent it would have to go to John Freedman. John was one of the most interesting people that we talked to on our 2006 tour. His story is one in which a passion was identified and built upon in a most unusual and beautiful way.

It starts in 1976, when John graduated from Brown University with a degree in English Literature. Feeling that he could do something more for humanity, he took a handful of science courses in addition to his degree’s coursework. As a result of his academic exploration, John developed a love for medicine. Upon completion of his pre-med requirements, he applied to medical school at Yale. He attributes his acceptance letter to his diverse academic portfolio, which helped differentiate him from competing applicants.

John was attracted to Yale because of their prestigious psychiatry program. After receiving practical experience in the field however, he realized that psychiatry moved much too slow for his liking. While working in an intensive care unit he became interested in the dynamics of internal medicine. He became fixed on becoming an anesthesiologist. This road would eventually lead him to Santa Rosa, California where he took a position as chief of a newly constructed hospital.

After four years of college, another four years of medical school and a brutally demanding medical internship, John accepted a position as a research assistant in Salvador, Brazil. His time in Salvador exposed him to new people and experiences, which inspired him to further his involvement in third world medical projects. He would later return to Brazil to work in a tropical disease hospital, followed by a stint in Zambia, Africa as a visiting professor in ‘94, in ‘97 went back to Africa to Kilimanjaro Medical Center. Then in ‘99 he received a letter from President Clinton requesting that he lead a group of physicians to Cuba. After traveling to all these places and hearing people ask what they can do to contribute, John realized that some kind of organizational structure should be created. The culmination of both his education and first-hand experiences was the development of Medical Exchange International (MEI), a non-profit organization dedicated to international health care collaborations.

“Small things in these type of environments can make a big difference. I was in Cambodia last October, and they had one piece of equipment in their hospital which told a doctor some valuable information about your blood by percent. The wire on this piece of equipment was frayed to the point that its days were numbered. When I got back home, I found a replacement cable to send back over there. Very small thing, but when you look at what they really need, it makes a huge difference.”

Not such a little thing is the fact that Kilimanjaro Medical Center’s latest medical book was published in 1968. MEI took it upon themselves to change this. They raised the money to do so in a most unconventional way. Pledges sponsored John’s ten year-old son in his mission to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. He accomplished the feat and enough money was raised to purchase and ship new medical books to the facility.

Please visit their website at: www.medicalexchangeintl.com with the following story in mind. A patient of John’s had a dramatic cesarean section experience, and the husband wanted to thank John for his assistance. The husband was a very tech-savvy guy and wanted to learn more about MEI. He researched the organization online and found that they had no official website. He approached John and offered to build the website pro-bono. As a result, the general public can now read and follow MEI’s past accomplishments, current projects and plans for the future. John is currently a practicing physician and chief of department for Kaiser Permanente. He also leads “Hikes for Healthcare” an MEI fundraiser.

“Hard work, focus, and believing what you are doing are the keys to getting by in school. Really learning from something and going beyond what you’ve learned secondhand is important. It also is really important to have good people around because that has a huge influence on you and your learning and development as a person. But it develops over time.”

John has been to a little over 80 different countries in his lifetime. Going to different countries have been fascinating, and John says that even if your introductory experience may be formalized or propagandistic, it is still better than no experience because you can look someone in the eyes and see them and their society. “The most interesting countries are the ones that are emotionally involved, and those are countries that I could go to again and again and again. Each time I go it’s like peeling an onion, and you keep getting to a new layer, and the way that you get to that next layer is to become emotionally involved in that country.” Cuba, Vietnam, Brazil, and Japan were the most fascinating countries that John said he has been.

We had to ask him about the dangers of traveling because he was in Vietnam for the first SARS breakout, and for the Avian flu! He has traveled in a lot of malarias regions, where every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria. But John says “it boils down to taking calculated risks, having common sense, and showing vigilance.”
Another question we asked was if he could give students any piece of advice, what would that be.

“The secret to happiness is to find something that you love to do and become the best at it, which is the best you can be. And then, find someone that will pay you well for it.”