I cite this company as an example of the kind of business that has attracted me. It was an opportunity to do something for my larger community. As Tom Stoppard wrote, “Information is light.” That this and other companies I founded did very well gave me the means to indulge my Call in ways unavailable to most Americans.
Two early examples stand out in this regard. The first, in 1984, came about with the personal help of Dr. Torsten Wiesel, winner of a Nobel Prize for mapping the visual cortex. At my request, Dr. Wiesel organized a symposium of outstanding scientists, held privately in Washington, to assess the work going on in the field. Further colloquies were later held through the good offices of Dr. Elias Zerhouni, then director of the National Institutes of Health.
These gatherings were rich with leading experts and invariably intellectually exciting, but none of them gave me confidence that the relevant science was far enough along to yield feasible clinical results anytime soon, or perhaps even within my lifetime. In the end, much as I enjoyed them, they left me more anxious than satisfied.
Yes, all these outreaches were “proof” that I had made a good-faith effort to fulfill my promise—I was actually trying to find a way so that youngsters like I had been would never again go blind. But if I lacked faith that these efforts would produce anything close to the desired outcome, was I just making a devil’s compromise with my own ambition?
I imagined that if I went back in time and explained to my newly blind self that I had tried “really hard” to accomplish what I had promised, that stern young man would reply, “Not good enough! You think it is okay just to try? Columbia doesn’t grade on effort expended, on hard work. It grades on results. Just trying is insufficient.”
At least, I comforted myself, my promise to end blindness was closely held. My mother and my lifelong friend Sandy Hoffman had been in the hospital when I made the vow. Later, I told my college roommates Art and Jerry, and Sue, of course. But that was it. I had wisely spared myself the public embarrassment of shouting it from the rooftops, then coming up short.
“Wisely”? The more I thought about it, the more that adverb caught in my throat. Maybe, I finally acknowledged, the problem lay right there. I hadn’t dared enough. I had talked big in a small circle. I had even thought big along a narrow track. Perhaps the time had come to reach out to a wider world.
As I pondered this, I found my thoughts returning more and more to my close friend Sol Linowitz. Sol had won early fame by turning a company called Haloid (soon to be rechristened Xerox) around, but he had subsequently emerged as a highly successful diplomat and a leading Washington lawyer and powerbroker. If I was going to take the Call beyond my immediate circle and broaden its ambition, I couldn’t think of a better person to include, and so I did. Sometime later Sol called me and said that he would like me to meet Dr. Jonas Salk of polio vaccine fame.
And that, as Robert Frost once wrote, “has made all the difference.”
The three of us duly convened in Sol’s office for the better part of an afternoon. When the meeting was over, I walked outside and asked my driver to take me to a peaceful open space so I could be alone. At first, I only listened to the chatter of birds, but then my excitement grew. For the first time, I felt there was realistic hope for the promise I had made to God. The reason: Dr. Salk had urged upon me a focus beyond the treatment of a disease’s symptoms or its individual physiological effects. After all, he had made his own objective nothing less than to end a disease…and he succeeded! In my mind, I repeated, “End it! End it! End it!” I have never forgotten that.
That was the first step not only to regaining confidence that I could deliver on my vow but also to thinking in a larger, far bolder arc. To date, at least in my own mind, I had been defining success as developing techniques to regenerate the optic nerve. (That would hold the potential for allowing me to see again, for example.) But blindness takes multiple forms, just as polio does, and Jonas Salk’s genius, I now realized from sitting with him for an afternoon, was twofold: to attack the entire range of the disease and to start at the finish line—not with incremental progress but with routing the disease itself.
Just as John F. Kennedy had with his vow to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, so Dr. Salk had raised a signpost for others to see and follow. Both men provided an organizing principle that broke down narrow interest groups—the MBA term is “silos”—and turned isolated, helter-skelter research to common purpose. And, of course, in both instances, the results were giant steps forward for mankind.
If outer space and polio, I began to think, why not blindness, too? If Jack Kennedy and Jonas Salk, why not—of all people—a blind Buffalo guy named Sandy Greenberg? And if blindness, why not the whole range of other conditions that would benefit from the capacity to regenerate and otherwise repair tissue across the entire central nervous system? Isn’t that the essence of a tikkun olam—something so
