Sure, the Stanford degrees helped. And yes, the MD from Duke and the PhD from UCLA were important too. But like many smart engineers, William New never let a good education overshadow his best ideas. In fact, New's success may derive less from academic pedigree than from sheer self confidence, a habit of breaching professional barriers, and maybe a couple of nifty Cub Scout tricks.

The first trick came early, when New found the crystal set project in his Cub Scout manual. At age six, he built it and tuned in KGO. Soon, he was adding volume, stations, tubes, transmitters—hooked on radio magic.

The other trick was learned on camping trips, late at night. "If you shine a flashlight behind your hand," explains New, "you can sort of see through your hand. And if you pla your fingertips you can see a red pulse in the finger when your heart beats."

This sleeping bag reverie, years later, became the inspiration for the pulse oximeter, the elegant low-cost device now used in 90% of operating rooms to monitor oxygen and perfusion levels in anesthetized patients. The tool clips on the fingertip and uses light-emitting diodes, photocells, and simple integrated circuits to allow continuous monitoring of respiratory status. The noninvasive test was the basis for Nellcor, founded by New in 1981 and then sold for $2 billion in 1995.

In the 20 years between the crystal set and the pulse oximeter, New was busy inventing his own eclectic self. In high school, he became a math whiz and built a crude wire recorder that impressed Ampex engineers. They hired him for the summer, the first in a series of part-time engineering jobs that would put New through Stanford.

"I became a tape recorder guru," says New, recalling the assortment of tape devices he helped build at Ampex, Precision Instruments, and Hewlett-Packard. One of those devices was purchased by the Stanford Medical School anesthesia department, which offered New a research assistantship to help them capture measurements like pulse and ECGs.

Thus, just as Stanford Professor Jim Gibbons was opening New's eyes to solid state electronics, the medical faculty were opening his eyes to the potential for engineering applications in healthcare. A foot in each camp, New could feel better than most the forces of attraction and repulsion between doctor and engineer.

"Doctors had a lot of interesting problems," says New, "but no knowledge of technical solutions. The engineer had a whole palette of interesting technical solutions, but no understanding of the medical problem." This was the deep divide that the newly minted Stanford engineer set out to bridge by becoming a physician and getting a PhD in cardiac physiology.

But after his Stanford residency in anesthesia and years of clinical practice, New once again charted his own course by steering away from the academic research career counseled by physician friends.

"At that time," he says, "there was little cross-pollination in academia. And the most interesting problems, I found, were at the interfaces." Thus, instead of the safe harbor of academic research, New spent a sabbatical year in the Stanford Business School's Sloan Program. Soon thereafter, he created Nellcor.

In 1989, New shifted his energies to Natus Medical Inc., a company that makes a low-cost and easy-to-use device to screen newborns for hearing loss. Today, New also runs the Novent Group, which provides seed capital for early-stage medical companies.

Whether helping critically ill patients or newborns, New has proved unusually well-equipped to craft solutions that balance the requirements of engineer, physician, and businessperson.

"You should be able to take Silicon Valley magic and apply it to medical problems," he says. It's a form of applied magic that Bill New has mastered.

back to top