One Heart Surgeon's Journey From The OR To The C-Suite

By Dr. Lishan Aklog

One-third of a century ago, I was a naïve but enthusiastic fourth-year medical student and aspiring surgeon scrubbed in on a gallbladder operation being performed by a very senior white-haired professor of surgery — a bit of a local legend — at a world-renowned Boston teaching hospital.

This was the dawn of the minimally invasive surgery revolution whereby innovative surgeons and engineers across the world were developing clever techniques and tools to perform gallbladder removals and other surgical procedures through ever-tinier incisions. I was immediately fascinated by these wrecking balls knocking down decades-old pillars of surgical orthodoxy and had already succumbed to their revolutionary fever.