Arun Sridhar's Unconventional Journey in Science and Innovation

Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn where a ball was dropped at the top vertex of a right triangle, and the three paths that the ball took were tested. One was along the hypotenuse, the second was straight drop and rolled to the opposite baseline vertex, and the third was parabolic with a dip and then an incline. The posed question was – Which one did you think was the fastest? Much to mine and others’ surprise, the third parabolic path was the most rapid as gravity pulled the ball down quickly. Due to the incline, it had enough kinetic energy to roll to the opposite vertex of the right triangle. 

Now, let me ask you the question in a different way: If each of those paths were a career choice, which path would offer more learnings and break the dogma of what we know about life and career?

My life and career have been pretty unconventional, even by my standards of non-conformance from early childhood. As a millennial born in 1981, I grew up in a very stable middle-class family not that different from many of you, except that, unlike today, where salaries are high, my parents, like most others, spent close to 40% of their monthly salary on my education. While many moved away from the CBSE syllabus to Tamil Nadu State and Matriculation schools to ensure higher marks for college admission, I stayed in CBSE mainly due to my stubbornness. Fortunately for me, it made me miss my goal of becoming a doctor, a cardiac surgeon that I wanted to become. 

In 1998, when I finished school, I had two options, spend an extra year or two writing entrance exams to get into medical colleges or do something meaningful and different. Of course, having a driven father helps too. On his recommendation, I enrolled in a new program in India called BS Physician Assistant. The concept originated in the US and was introduced to India by Dr. KM Cherian through BITS Pilani as an off-campus program in Chennai. Dr. KM Cherian is the first to do a cardiac bypass, many novel cardiac procedures in adult and pediatric cardiac surgeries and even has the honour and achievement of performing the first heart and lung transplant in India. Had I chosen to get my MBBS, I would probably have taken another few years to work with him or perhaps even a decade later. By this time, I am sure my life would have taken a different course if I had chosen the well-trodden path of spending additional years preparing for medical entrance exams.

In stark contrast to university life, however, I was satiated intellectually by working at a hospital at the age of 18 and learning about advanced cardiology every day. It was the perfect combination of work, study, and experience-based learning. In the final (fourth) year, it was internship time and I worked as a second assistant in complex cardiac surgeries and learned what experienced surgeons do. Imagine being 20 years old and learning what surgeons 10 years older had just started to learn. My biggest worry at the time was that the PA program was not recognised at the time. Only in the last two years has the program received ICMR recognition, owing to the hard work of many physician assistants who might have cared for your loved ones at hospitals around India. I was sure that working in a routine hospital would not suit my life’s ambitions by this time. A late evening call from Dr. KM Cherian as he rushed into the OR at 7 PM changed my life forever. During that surgery, I was asked what my ambitions were. I reluctantly told them that I wanted to be a surgeon and could not. Without any hesitation, the two surgeons asked me to pursue research. Buoyed on by the fact that my ambitions met their blessings, I pressed on with more rigorous GRE preparations. During these four years, I had a chance to assist in over 300 surgeries in the last 18 months of my study. I also established the first homograft valve bank, which is still the best way to treat congenital cardiac conditions instead of using artificial valves. 

With the perfect alignment of my interests and their insistence, I landed in the US after a year of preparations that spanned doing word lists and analytics in a steamy, nauseating, staunch smell of carcasses in a mortuary where I would go to collect hearts for the valve bank. Since I had to wait before harvesting the heart from the cadavers and obtaining permission, I thought, why to waste time and study during that time. Anyways, this took me to The Ohio State University, where my stubborn nature again ensured I was only applying to universities with a solid cardiac research background. The rest, as they say, is history, but it was not without hiccups. I was admitted into the Biophysics Program at OSU. Due to my unconventional (lack of basic research) background, I was invited on a paid stipend in summer 2002 rather than fall 2002 to kick start my lab rotations. I had no clue about basic science or protein structure etc. So right on cue in my first term, my GPA fell below 3.0, and I was on academic probation. You can buy me coffee or a beer to have me describe how I got out of it in the following three terms. Nevertheless, this experience brought out a steely resolve that I would be the best at what I do, no matter the situation.