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James Doty's Helper's High
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Daily Good/Nautilus
Posted: September 2nd, 2014
http://www.dailygood.org/story/838/james-doty-s-helper-s-hig...
James Doty is not a subject under study at the altruism research center that he founded at Stanford in 2008, but he could be. In 2000, after building a fortune as a neurosurgeon and biotech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, he lost it all in the dotcom crash. His final asset was stock in a medical-device company hed once run called Accuray. But it was stock hed committed to a trust that would benefit the universities hed attended and programs for AIDS, family, and global health. Doty was $3 million in the hole. Everyone told him to keep the stock for himself. He gave it awayall $30 million of it. In 2007, Accuray went public at a valuation of $1.3 billion. That generated hundreds of millions for Dotys donees and zero for him. I have no regrets, he said. Doty [formed]with a seed donation of $150,000 from the Dalai Lama, whom Doty had met in a chance encounterthe Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE, part of Stanfords School of Medicine. Many of its core findings mirror Dotys own life. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, a neuroscientist, the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and former associate director of CCARE, sees Doty as a remarkable embodiment of what researchers are learning about altruism. He rose to absurd riches and found that having every possible need met isnt better, she said. That kind of question motivates him. Hes gone to the extremes of the pendulum, and hes trying to find the place in between that will bring him the most rich and authentic sense of purpose.
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