Forbes® Best Business Mistakes: How Today's Top Business Leaders Turned Missteps into Success

Chapter 11. DR. BILL FRIST

Set up organ transplant center at Vanderbilt University

Professor of business and medicine, Vanderbilt University

U.S. Senate majority leader, 2003 to 2007

People who undergo a heart transplant to extend their lives probably don't think about it, but successful organ transplantation is all about learning from mistakes. Dr. Bill Frist (yes, the former Senate majority leader) helped set up the first organ transplant center at Vanderbilt University.

"Every time you cured one problem," he says, describing the early days of transplantation research, "there was a new problem."

Already a Harvard-educated cardiac surgeon in the early 1980s, Frist spent a year and a half training under Dr. Norman Shumway, a pioneer in the field of heart transplantation, at Stanford University.

"You do a heart transplant and the patient lives for two weeks, and then they have some rejection, but there's no way to diagnose the rejection," Dr. Frist says, touting the scientific approach that Dr. Shumway established at Stanford. "Dr. Shumway would go back to the laboratory and invent an instrument to diagnose rejection—like a biotome, which you would insert into the neck, then into the heart, pull a piece of the heart muscle out, look at it under the microscope, and then you'd get the patient out to six weeks. And then you'd have a problem with infections, so he would go out and invent another combination of immunosuppressant drugs that would make it less likely to get infections."

The enthusiasm ...