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The Honorable William H. Frist, M.D.: Biographical Sketch
Born February 22, 1952, in Nashville, Tennessee, Bill Frist was raised with a passion to serve others. His earliest memories are of his physician father leaving the family dinner table with his black doctor's bag in hand to make nightly rounds at the hospital. This sense of service to community has been the consistent driving force throughout Frist's life.
True to the family profession of healing, Frist enrolled in Princeton University knowing he would devote his life to serving through medicine. While at Princeton, he began to cultivate an interest in medicine that extended beyond one-on-one health delivery. He spent his junior and senior years specializing in health care policy and international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
His Wilson School experience led him to a summer internship with veteran Tennessee Congressman Joe Evins (D) in Washington, D.C. The dean of the Tennessee's congressional delegation counseled the young intern that should he ever want to serve in Congress, he should first excel in a profession other than politics. The seed to be a "citizen legislator" was planted.
Frist noted the advice and, after graduating from Princeton in 1974, earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He graduated with honors in 1978 and spent the next six years in heart surgery training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and Southampton General Hospital in England. His training culminated with his selection as Chief Resident in Heart and Lung Surgery at MGH.
At each stage of his life, Frist acts to find new solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. When Boston decided not to undertake the brand new, risky field of heart and lung transplantation, Frist left Massachusetts for California to pursue his dream of helping pioneer the emerging dramatic therapies for what were then considered "untreatable and uniformly fatal diseases." In 1985 he joined the team of innovative heart transplant surgeon Dr. Norman Shumway. An outside-the-box, visionary thinker, Shumway's philosophy of "Conceive it. Believe it. Do it." became Frist's mantra for life.
After completing his fellowship at Stanford and equipped with a strong foundation of transplant expertise, Frist returned to his hometown of Nashville with a goal to create the region's first multi-organ, multidisciplinary transplant center. In 1986 he became Director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center's heart and lung transplantation program. He also taught and operated at the Nashville Veterans Administration Hospital.
Frist immediately began building on his vision for a first-of-its-kind, innovative transplant facility that would gather into a single center transplant specialists, scientists and ethicists from a broad range of disciplines who would not otherwise have worked together. In 1989 he founded the multi-organ Vanderbilt Transplant Center. Under his leadership, the center became recognized as one of the premier, full service transplant facilities in the United States.
During his 20 years in medicine, Dr. Frist performed over 150 heart and lung transplant procedures – including the first lung transplant and the first pediatric heart transplant (his youngest patient was a 6-day-old neonate) in Tennessee and the first successful combined heart-lung transplant in the Southeast. With a focus on developing innovative, meaningful solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems and then applying them clinically, he was equally comfortable in the basic science laboratory as he was in the operating room. He authored over 100 articles, chapters and abstracts on medical research and was co-author of his first book, Grand Rounds in Transplantation. He was board certified in both general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery.
Frist had risen to the top of the medical profession at a remarkably young age. And he was devoting his life to what he loved the most – healing and giving hope to people by curing their fatal diseases with new therapies he had helped develop.
But Frist believed he could do even more for medicine, for patients and for the people of Tennessee and the United States of America. To address the critical shortage of organ donors for those thousands of potential recipients who were dying as they waited, Frist reached beyond the operating room to educate the American people about the need. In 1989 he wrote and published his second book, Transplant: A Heart Surgeon's Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine. He sought to examine the social and ethical issues of transplantation, dispel the myths about transplantation and encourage people to become organ donors. He lectured nationally on the subject and led a successful campaign to return the organ donor card to the back of the Tennessee driver's license. He witnessed how public education and public policy could exponentially save people's lives. He saw that public policy matters.
So it was only natural that Frist then began exploring the idea of seeking public office. Healing one-on-one as a physician could be expanded to healing a community, he reasoned. In 1990 he met with fellow Tennessean Howard Baker and talked with the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and White House Chief of Staff about the benefits and burdens of public service. Baker counseled Frist that the U.S. Senate would provide the most appropriate forum for his talents and expertise, even though Frist had never served or run for any public office. Go straight where you can make the most difference, Baker told Frist.
Frist, remaining active in the research laboratory and in the operating room, kept up his public involvement as well. He wrote newspaper columns about health care policy and chaired a statewide task force on Medicaid reform. After another meeting with Baker in 1992, Frist began traveling across Tennessee and listening to people's ideas and hopes, considering a possible run for the Senate. Frist officially launched his campaign in 1994, a political novice who had a dream to serve.
After defeating five opponents in a hard-fought primary, Frist faced a popular three-term incumbent senator who had been slated to be the next leader in the Senate. The campaign unfolded as a battle between a career politician and a populist outsider whose life was dedicated to healing. Frist won by a resounding 13 percentage points, the only challenger to beat a full-term incumbent senator that cycle. He became the first practicing physician elected to the Senate since 1928.
Six years later Senator Frist won reelection with 66 percent of the vote and received more votes for statewide office than any political figure in Tennessee history, a record that stands today. During that time, he wrote a third book – Tennessee Senators 1911-2002: Portraits of Leadership in a Century of Change.
As a Senator, Frist emerged as one of the leading voices on healthcare issues in America, serving for a period as chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Health. He fought hard to strengthen Medicare, provide seniors with affordable access to prescription drugs, expand children's health, eliminate health care disparities, bolster pubic health and make healthcare more affordable and available to every American.
Frist is consistently recognized among the most influential people in healthcare in America. He is one of only two individuals who have ranked in the top 10 of each of the last five well-recognized Modern Healthcare Magazine annual surveys of the most influential people in health care in the United States, ranking third in 2006.
Frist's professional expertise in infectious diseases enabled him to lead the fight against one of the new, most existential threats to the health and security of our nation – bioterrorism. Following the October 2001 anthrax attacks along the east coast, Frist was a calming voice during a frightening time. He quickly led passage of landmark legislation to bolster America's defenses against bioterrorism. He then wrote his fourth book, When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know about Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor, to educate families as to what they could do to prepare for and respond to potential future attacks with biological agents. All profits were donated to charities in Tennessee to assist with local preparedness plans.
As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Frist served as one of only two congressional representatives to the United Nations General Assembly in the 107th Congress. Having personally treated patients with HIV, Frist also served as a strong advocate for increasing funding and expediting new therapies for global HIV/AIDS. He led the fight in the Senate for the unprecedented $15 billion commitment to fight AIDS throughout the world, the largest commitment a nation has made against a single disease. Frist has called HIV the single greatest moral, humanitarian and public health challenge of our times.
And as he did with bioterrorism, Frist has taken the fight against global HIV/AIDS beyond the Senate chamber. At least once a year, he travels as a doctor to Sub-Saharan Africa as part of World Medical Mission to do surgery and care for those stricken with disease. He has been a tireless advocate for clean water around the world, and he introduced "using medicine as a currency for peace" into our national public diplomacy.
America's children have been another top priority for Senator Frist. The author of the original Ed-Flex legislation that gave local schools greater flexibility in exchange for more accountability, he strongly supported President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which provides regular testing, local control, more federal funding and greater accountability and flexibility to our public education system. Reducing childhood obesity, halting childhood vaccine shortages and fighting methamphetamine drug abuse have served as focal points of Senator Frist's efforts to improve the health of our children.
Many people rise to the top of one demanding profession in their lifetime. Frist has risen to the top of two.
The Senator's colleagues chose him to serve in leadership positions throughout his service in the Senate. In 1999 he served as a deputy whip. One year later his colleagues elected him Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. There Frist accomplished another first. Under his leadership, the party of the president took back majority control of the Senate in a first mid-term election for the first time in history.
Frist was chosen unanimously to serve as the 16th Majority Leader of the United States Senate on December 23, 2002. Two years later he was reelected unanimously. When first elected Leader, he had served less total time in Congress than any senator in history to hold that position.
During his service as Majority Leader, Frist recorded a number of legislative accomplishments: the most comprehensive national security reforms since the creation of the CIA in 1947, the third largest tax cut in American history, the United States' first comprehensive national energy policy, enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, establishment of SMART education grants to increase the country's economic competitiveness in the 21st century's global economy, extensive reforms to reduce lawsuit abuse throughout the judicial system, authoring the Medicare Modernization Act that provided access to affordable prescription drugs for 43 million seniors in its first year of implementation, a ban on partial-birth abortion, landmark bioterrorism preparedness legislation, championing American leadership in the global fight against HIV/AIDS and ensuring access to clean water served as a cornerstone of foreign assistance. Frist also shepherded the confirmations of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito through the Senate.
Senator Frist served his country as a true "citizen legislator," just as Congressman Evins had suggested to him as a young man. In 1994 he pledged to the people of Tennessee that he would go to Washington to serve two terms and would then return home. He did just that, voluntarily stepping down as Majority Leader of the Senate to return to Nashville with his wife Karyn and live in the same house – and with the same values – in which he was raised.
Anyone who knows Frist knows his family is his number one priority. He refers to Karyn and their three sons – Harrison, Jonathan and Bryan – as his "foundation and inspiration in life."
Frist has now joined former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to co-chair Bono's ONE Campaign presidential initiative: ONE Vote '08. He also serves on the Boards of the Hope through Healing Hands Foundation, Africare, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience, the Montgomery Bell Academy and the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project as well as the Dean's Council of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Doctor-Senator Frist spends his spare time running (7 marathons in last 10 years), flying (commercial and instrument ratings), writing (5 books) and completing annual medical mission trips.
His passion is simply to serve.
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