Stubbornness is not often credited with motivating a career in medicine. But when a young Frank Longo, MD, PhD, asked why doctors couldn't help his sister with cerebral palsy, his mother, a nurse, told him that damaged brains can't be fixed.
Longo explains how that answer just wasn't acceptable to him in this video by Stanford Health Care:
That never left me. I thought about many other things but I kept coming back to wanting to create something that would fix a brain...
I can't turn away from an 'impossible' challenge.
That goal has propelled him to tackle the trickiest neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's -- with many successes. And now Longo is convinced: "It is not impossible to fix the brain."
Previously: Why become a doctor? A personal story from a Stanford neurosurgeon, Why become a doctor? A personal story from a Stanford plastic surgeon, and Why become a doctor? A personal story from a Stanford oncologist
