So. The year was 1993. I was at the University of Texas, starting my studies for a PhD in Chemistry. I’d been fortunate enough to be taken on as a research assistant in the Chemical Engineering lab of Dr. Adam Heller. I didn’t know Dr. Heller. I didn’t know what he had done. I didn’t know what he was doing. I didn’t know what he was to go on to do.
I was just glad that somebody was going to pay me to do some research. Which was great, because I needed to defray some of the costs of my very expensive education.
I soon found out that he was focusing his attention on diabetes. And more specifically, on glucose sensors. It doesn’t get some of the press that other ailments do, but diabetes is a very serious condition. It affects about 11% of the population. And accounts for more than 100,000 deaths per year in the U.S. It’s the 7th leading cause of death in our country.
If you’ve got diabetes, you need to monitor your blood sugar very closely. For that, you need some blood. People were supposed to take 9 blood sugar measurements a day, but very few did. The combination of finger pokes, strips and frequency was just too difficult to manage.
So Dr. Heller set to work. With me contributing what little I could.
The result was something you see in drugstores every day. It’s called the Freestyle Libre. Yup, that one. Before getting a glucose sensor on the market, Freestyle, in its first iteration, was a new kind of strip technology that required about 1/3 of the blood that a mosquito takes when it bites you. Most of us can handle that.
He went on to develop Freestyle Libre Pro. It’s inserted beneath the skin and gives readouts automatically to doctors and patients alike. With no need for any drawing of blood.
Freestyle Libre would become one of the most popular glucose monitors in the world. Responsible for saving tens of thousands of lives per year.
Dr. Heller created a company called Therasense to market the device. It was eventually sold to Abbott for approximately $1.2 billion. If you’ve read my article titled A Man for all Seasons and all Reasons, this professor survived the Holocaust. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that he earned every penny of it.
First, that you can do a lot of good in this world and still make some money while doing it.
Second, it’s not the huge corporations that are the lifeblood of the American economy. It’s small and medium-sized enterprises. They’re also the source of most real innovation.
The third involves my son. He’s got diabetes. Neither my wife nor I have diabetes in our family trees. Sometimes this stuff just happens. He uses a device very similar to the type of device that I had a small part in developing that allows him to easily live a happy – as far as I can tell as a parent – and perfectly normal life.
The moral of this part of the story? Once you get down to the business of piloting your professional life in the proper way, you’ll be amazed at the beneficial effects this can have on your most important relationships. Often in ways you couldn’t possibly predict.