Respectability always catches me by surprise. At one level of self-perception, I’m a blind guy, the kid from Buffalo. What’s the big deal? At another level, honors accrue, and I honor them.
One of the sweetest moments for me was the letter I received in 2016 inviting me to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Launched by John Adams and James Bowdoin way back in 1780, the Academy is among America’s oldest learned societies. Its members range from Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and (to jump way forward) me. Talk about asymmetry! But I was incredibly flattered to be tapped—there have been fewer than five thousand fellows inducted in the nearly 240 years of the Academy—and I join in whenever I can in the rich array of symposia available to its members. Apart from the intellectual stimulation, I feel almost duty-bound to do so, given all the opportunities America has afforded me and my family. But whatever takes me to Academy events—my own induction, talks by others, presentations in which I take part—I always know that I am there by the grace and upon the shoulders of those I have mentioned in this chapter and so many others.
21
A Promise That Cannot
Be Broken
I withheld the names of two other friends and mentors from the previous chapter, not because they are less important but because they propelled me so powerfully into the future that they seemed to deserve a special mention.
One of those wise counselors, Ron Wyden, the senior senator from Oregon, put much of this book, and my life, into perspective when he told me how important it is “to be in the tikkun olam business,” evoking a solemn commandment of the Jewish religion literally to repair the world.
“Perfecting the world, the opportunity—both for our country and for our world—to make them a better place for those who come after us is a very important Jewish value,” Ron continued, “and I happen to believe that Jewish values are American values.”
I agree, and would say the same thing of fundamental Muslim values, and Buddhist ones, and Christian ones, and Shinto ones, and agnostic and atheistic ones, and on and on. At heart, just about all of us want to make the world a better place for those who come after us. But Ron’s words had a special resonance for me because as he spoke, I was remembering my own tikkun olam moment: that dismal winter day in 1961 when, lying in my Detroit hospital bed, I answered a Call from a higher power and made a promise to help end blindness forever.
Have I been absolutely steadfast in delivering on my promise? No, not really. Education, marriage, children, the White House Fellows program, launching my first companies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Committee on US-China Relations—they all intervened. Success in school and in business is rarely time-neutral. But the Call was always there, waiting to be served, and I seized what opportunities I could to push it forward.
When I was asked to join the boards of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine, with its school of medicine and hospital and its acclaimed Wilmer Eye Institute for advanced research and treatment in ophthalmology, I eagerly accepted. Later, I became chairman of the board of governors of the Wilmer Eye Institute—a position uncannily appropriate for a blind person who has dedicated himself to ending all forms of blindness.
I was equally happy to serve as chairman of the Rural Health Care Corporation, created by Congress to bring the benefits of telemedicine to rural America. This work was particularly meaningful to me since rural areas are obviously underserved medically and often impoverished. It reminded me how important that service would have been to the people I knew in my childhood. It might even have prevented a young boy from going blind.
In that same spirit, I gladly accepted President Clinton’s invitation to serve on the National Science Board, which operates the National Science Foundation. That, in turn, gave me the standing to push hard for funding for further research on a retinal prosthesis being developed by Dr. Mark Humayun, a gifted young clinician-scientist then on the Wilmer faculty. Our first two attempts to secure funding came up short, but I’m nothing if not persistent, in business and in life, and our third try in 1998 proved the charm. Mark went on to invent and commercialize a retinal implant designed to help patients with genetic retinitis pigmentosa, but he didn’t stop there.
In the two decades since, Mark has done further breathtaking work on electronic visual prosthetics. I’ll let him describe his most recent breakthrough:
“Currently, the focus is primarily on developing a visual cortical implant that bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely. So far, six subjects have been implanted with good results.”
Six subjects is far from clinical confirmation, but the very real possibility that the blind can “see” essentially without working eyes and a functioning optic nerve suggests just how bold and daring the thinking has become in a field that once offered only alternatives to sight instead of hope for its recovery.
Along with my public service, many of the companies I founded were involved with medical technology. My first interest as a businessperson had to be the viability of each—I don’t shy from profit—but I also focused on whether each new company might provide value for the common good.
One of the companies I founded was a marriage of the biological sciences with information technology. We tracked how antibiotics work against various diseases. Hospitals would use antibiotic X or Y and report on that use and its outcomes into a database. My company would then aggregate
