by Ming Wang
My mother, Dennis, and Shu in Boston. (1990)
At the Harvard commencement ceremony, Dennis grabbed my MD diploma before I even had a chance to look at it myself. (1991)
Graduating with my MD degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard & MIT, and the first-place award for my MD graduation thesis. (1991)
With my parents and Ming-yu at my graduation from Harvard & MIT. (1991)
My Harvard Medical-school diploma. (MD, magna cum laude, 1991)
My first place award from Harvard for my MD graduation thesis. (1991)
Graduation diploma for Harvard & MIT joint MD program. (1991)
My eight ophthalmology textbooks. (2015)
A fetus in the amniotic sac, showing the amniotic membrane. (1996)
During my corneal fellowship at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, I conducted amniotic membrane transplantation experiments on rabbits involving lasers. (1996)
My U.S. patent for the amniotic membrane contact lens. (1999)
The world’s first amniotic membrane contact lens, based on my 1999 U.S. patent..
We prayed, just before we removed the patch from Francisco’s eye, after over two years of surgeries, including an unprecedented quadruple surgery. (2001)
Seventeen-year-old blind Mexican patient, Francisco, sees himself for the first time in seven years! (2001)
The top panel was the last time Francisco used Braille; the lower panel was the first time in seven years he was able to see to write (in Spanish). (2001)
Twenty-four years after I completed high-school in China but without a diploma, North Carolina’s Chapel Hill High-school awarded me this honorary diploma, a gift from Francisco. (2001)
Our 501(c)(3) non-profit charity has helped patients from over 40 states and 55 countries, with all surgeries performed free-of-charge. (2015)
The world’s first laser artificial cornea implantation on Wang Foundation’s first patient, Bobby Joel Case. (2004)
With Bobby Joel Case and his mother Anna at the first EyeBall. (2005)
With China’s first bladeless all-laser LASIK patient, the first in a country of 1.4 billion people. (2005)
Brad, blind for 13 years, saw me for the first time and asked me, “Is this your face? Yeah, I can see your face over there!” (2007)
“Yeah, that’s me!” Brad saw himself for the first time in 13 years. (2007)
“I can see you now!” Brad saw his wife Jackie for the very first time! (2007)
With Jackie and Brad, the world’s first combined saliva gland transposition and laser artificial cornea implantation patient. (2007)
Kajal, a four-year-old orphan, was blinded by her stepmother, who poured acid into her eyes while she was sleeping in order to make money by turning Kajal into a “blind child singer.” (2006)
With Kajal and her caretaker, Grace, before Kajal’s surgery. (2006)
Kajal sang a song at the foundation’s annual EyeBall gala. (2007)
Kajal and I did the first dance at the EyeBall. (2007)
With Gwen, Elisa, my parents, my brother, and Parish. (1995)
With my godparents, June Rudolph and Misha Bartnovsky. (1998)
With Dennis and my parents on the Stanford University campus. (2005)
With Dolly Parton, composing, playing, and recording erhu for her country song, “The Cruel War,” for her album Those Were the Days. (2005)
On a mission trip to Moldova, Lynn Hendrich met Maria, an orphan who was shy and withdrawn because she had been blind since birth. (2012)
Examining Maria for the first time. She made a long trip around the globe to our sight foundation, with the hope of having a chance to see again. (2013)
Moments before Maria’s extremely difficult sight restoration surgery. (2013)
“We got it!” God successfully pulled us through Maria’s nearly impossible surgery. (2013)
“How many fingers?” “Unu!” Maria can see! (2013)
“I am so pretty!” the 15-year-old, formerly blind orphan from Moldova exclaimed (in Romanian) when she saw herself for the very first time! (2013)
Maria has gone from a blind orphan, at the brink of human trafficking and prostitution, to a happy teenager who can now see and lives with the Hendriches in Franklin, TN. (2013)
With Anle and Maria. (2015)
Competing in a pro-am ballroom dance competition with my teacher, Shalene Archer. (2007)
A family photo (left to right): Xiao-hua, Lili, Peggy, Ming-yu, Alisa, Dennis, Dad, Yong-yong, me, Mom, and Anle. (Thanksgiving, 2014)
Receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Trevecca Nazarene University, with Richard, Tony, Anle, Jim, Tony, Christin, Megan, and David. (2015)
Nashvillian of the Year Award, and the team of Wang Vision 3 D Cataract & LASIK Center: Front row: Drs. Ebrahim, Zimmerman, Connolly, Wang, and Rock. Second row: Shannon, Beth, Heather, Leona, Anle, Ana, Tammy and Clare. Third row: Cameron, Skyler, Chloe, James, Suzanne and Dr. Zhao. Back row: Crystal, Amanda, Ashley, Kayla, Erica, Haley, Eric, Scott, and Dr. Jiang.
I had been advised to apply to up to thirty medical-schools, but that would have meant thousands of dollars in application fees. I didn’t have that kind of money, so I only applied to a handful of top institutions, including Harvard Medical-school and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Acceptance letters from these two schools arrived in January of 1987.
Not long after that, I received an unexpected phone call.
“Is this Ming Wang?” the caller asked. “Have you received our admissions package for Johns Hopkins? We’ve extended to you the highest scholarship in our school’s history. We’re anxious to know if you’ll be accepting our offer.”
The voice sounded familiar. “I’m still considering it,” I said, “but I’ve been accepted to Harvard as well.”
“I understand. Both are very good schools,” he said. “You might find that some schools treat you differently, but just remember that here at Johns Hopkins, we greatly respect talent and academic achievements. We hope you’ll consider joining us.”
When I finally recognized the voice on the other line, I was amazed that he was the same person who had discriminated against me due to my ethnicity only a few short months ago … Dr. Norman Anderson. He hadn’t believed that a minority student could succeed in getting into medical-school. I felt the urge to point out that I was the same student he had brushed off a few months ago, that his prejudice against ethnicity or skin color was just wrong, and that it hadn’t stopped me but rather energized me to study for the MCAT to prove him wrong. I thought that information could possibly help him, but I didn’t say anything because I come from a culture that respects and values its elders. I couldn’t speak against a teacher, not even one like him.
And I chose Harvard.
* * *
Thinking back, I was happy I didn’t let one person’s bad behavior deter me from the great opportunity that America had to offer to me. In fact, I realized that it wasn’t America that was broken, but rather Dr. Anderson himself, and America deserved better. Besides my love for America, my hard work and accomplishments were also due to my own drive and my need to prove that we should never let narrow-minded people like Drs. Miller and Anderson stop us from achieving our dreams. I wanted to do my part to help defend the most prized foundation of this great country—the concept that all men and women are created … and shall be treated … equally.
While I’d like to say my choice of schools was due to my desire to have sweet revenge against Anderson, it was actually just a smart decision. Harvard was not only the top medical-school in the country, but my admission also included acceptance into a highly competitive joint MD program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), called Health Sciences and Technology (HST). As an HST student, my training would encompass not only medicine at Harvard, but also biological sciences and engineering at MIT.
By the early 1980s, ophthalmologists were studying how lasers could drastically improve the precision and effectiveness of eye surgeries. The sa
me tool that was used in microscopic electronics—like computer chips and atomic colliders that I experimented with for my PhD thesis—could now be used effectively for clean, precise incisions on the intricate and delicate eye. Since I was entering medical-school as a laser physicist, I realized I had a unique opportunity to contribute to the advancement of how this new biotechnology was applied to the treatment of eye diseases. Using a laser instead of a scalpel in eye surgery was still a very new concept at the time, and I wanted to be part of the impending innovation.
Several months earlier I had traveled to Boston for admissions interviews at Harvard. After my final interview, I found myself walking around the medical-school on a cold night. I dug my hands deeper into my coat pockets, and strolled along the walkways in front of the imposing buildings that framed the long, rectangular lawn called “the quad.” The moon was full and bright, and the white marble structures were lit up against the dark backdrop. I remembered being a little kid walking through the woods of Hangzhou at night with my dad, in awe of the moon. And I remembered how only ten years earlier, I was penniless and was denied any opportunity to attend college, and now here I stood on the brink of acceptance into the most prestigious medical-school in the world. How is it that I was able to overcome such tremendous odds to get to this point?
At the time, I believed that I made it through the extreme circumstances of China’s Cultural Revolution and challenges that I faced when arriving in America as a penniless student due mainly to my parents’ help, my own innate tenacity, and this great country of America, which gave me the freedom to choose and to reignite my lifelong dream to pursue medicine. People like Miller and Anderson are few and far between, and the vast majority of Americans are loving, fair, and supportive toward people from all over the world, and toward all cultures and ethnicities. China and my family had given me cultural roots and had helped shape my character, and America—my adopted country—gave me a positive outlook and valuable opportunities.
But later I realized that above everything else perhaps something more important, and much deeper, was to be credited for my accomplishments. Yes, I had worked diligently and had been given many opportunities, but on several occasions the results struck me as truly amazing. I thought back to my prayer for help over the atomic collider in the lab, when I had done everything I could think of and couldn’t continue any longer. That moment, as I prayed and watched the bright yellow dot magically start to glow, was my first experience with the power of spirituality. This divine encounter opened the door to a place of wonder and sparked questions about what existed beyond the material realm. I had begun to believe that maybe there was indeed something beyond myself; a more powerful force was at hand.
I stood in front of the quad’s stately main building, gazing up at the enormous Greek columns and the words “Harvard Medical-school” prominently inscribed on a horizontal panel at above them. Beyond all logic, I sensed this force might be guiding my life for a reason I couldn’t yet comprehend. I had lived my life unrooted in faith of any kind, driven by the need to escape constant darkness and ghosts. Now, given all that had happened in my life—much of it beyond my own expectation and capability—I realized that perhaps my life might indeed have a purpose. But if so, what was it?
Though I would never forget the harsh words Miller and Anderson had spoken, their prejudice would no longer remain my only inspiration to work hard. Yes, I would still fight to prove their discrimination unethical, but if God did exist and had a purpose for my life, then the stakes must be much higher than just my own personal gain or benefit. To discover this deeper sense of meaning and my life’s purpose became the ultimate inspiration that moved me forward.
Chapter 11
A Higher Power
The room was barren and cold. Rows of steel tables reflected the glare from overhead lights. Air hissed through circulation vents to reduce the smell. I had known this day was inevitable, and there was no way I could escape it. We stood in small groups around the tables, quiet since it felt like a sacred moment, yet also nervous about what would come next. On the steel tables, draped in white sheets, were bodies that had been donated to science. Except for the body parts in jars at the medical college back in Hangzhou, I had never before been this close to a dead person. Now not only was I close to one, but I also held a scalpel in my hand, ready to cut into it. My hands shook. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.
It was September of 1987, and I had just moved into Vanderbilt Hall at Harvard Medical-school. I loved being in Boston. Newspaper stands sold papers from around the world in a variety of languages. Harvard Square in nearby Cambridge brimmed with ideas, history, books, and poetry. The abundance of literature from around the world stood in stark contrast to how deprived we had been of reading materials in China during the Cultural Revolution. I thought about the clandestine book of Tang Dynasty poetry my dad and I had kept hidden in our bookcase in China a decade earlier, when knowledge and education were stripped from me. But now I lived in the hub of education and intellectual drive in this country. It had indeed been an incredible journey so far!
In the mornings, those of us in Harvard and MIT’s Health Science and Technology (HST) program went to medical-school classes at Harvard; and in the afternoons, we were shuttled to the MIT campus on the north side of the Charles River for corresponding courses in biomedical engineering. For example, in the mornings we would study the cardiovascular system at Harvard Medical-school to learn its anatomy and physiology for the MD program. Then in the afternoons, we would learn the cardiovascular system at MIT from a bioengineering perspective, that is, how the heart is like a battery, with arteries as resistors and veins as capacitors. As a student in the HST program, I was fascinated with going beyond mere anatomical descriptions and delving into the mechanics of the human body to see how engineering principles could be applied to the understanding of human body and development of new medical treatments.
I had entered medical-school with a unique background as a laser physicist, intent on eventually practicing ophthalmology and using lasers to improve the treatment of eye diseases. During my early years at Harvard, leading medical researchers in the U.S. and Europe were among the first to use excimer lasers for vision correction surgeries on human eyes. The excimer laser was so named because it was the product of “excited dimers,” similar to the sodium dimers that I studied in the laser atomic physics program in graduate school in Maryland. The excited dimers produced ultraviolet light, and at that wavelength, the laser could remove a tiny amount of tissue without damaging surrounding tissues. I had been intrigued by the application of this emerging laser technology in physics and engineering well before I started medical-school, but I soon came to see the poignantly human side of the field.
One day during my first semester, I attended a lecture at which several blind patients had been invited to talk about their experiences. One woman sitting with the professor at the front of the lecture hall particularly grabbed my attention. She was a fifty-something Italian-American from the North End of Boston, with jet-black hair and a commanding attractiveness, except for her eyes. Her eyes were malformed and shrunken, the result of a genetic disease that had left her blind since birth.
“What do red and blue mean to you?” the professor asked her.
She hesitated for a moment. “Red to me is something warm and fluffy,” she said, “and blue … umm … cold and slippery.”
I was amazed at how this woman described colors as tactile sensations. Though she couldn’t see the world around her, she could feel it. It suddenly dawned on me that she was actually missing out on a vast, significant aspect of the human experience. Her genetic condition deprived her of sight, but her blindness deprived her of so much more. She could have enjoyed a full and rich life, but what she described was lonesome and bleak. Her upbringing had been traumatic; being blind not only ensnared her in darkness, but it kept her indoors, isolated from the freedom that other children in her community were able to
experience. As an adult she lived alone, unmarried, and without children. To ease her loneliness, she had embraced music and was an avid guitar player. I thought about blind Ah Bing, the Chinese composer of the mournful erhu music I had played as a teenager in my desperate attempt to escape deportation. This woman also used music as an outlet the way he did—to express grief and the pain of isolation, as the world around her remained interminably dark.
Her genetic condition was permanent and her blindness irreversible. I began to wonder how many people with such a grim diagnosis might one day receive their sight back with breakthrough medical procedures, particularly utilizing laser technologies. What if I could be part of that life-transforming process of restoring sight in such blind patients? As I imagined these possibilities, my ideas about the science of sight evolved from the use of advanced technology into the emotional and human costs of blindness. After that morning’s lecture, ophthalmology began to feel like much more than just a career; it felt like a calling.
Throughout my studies at Harvard and MIT, I spent several evenings a week in a research lab as both a medical student and a postdoctoral fellow. I wanted to delve deeply into the molecular base of genetic diseases like the one that had struck the woman blind whom I had met at the lecture. I chose to conduct research under molecular geneticist, George Church, PhD, a world-class scientist with a background in physical chemistry. Dr. Church was very tall and sported a thick, bushy beard. He was dating Professor Ting Wu, a Chinese-American woman who would later become his wife, so he appreciated my cultural background.