Barry Sleckman, MD, PhD, was a busy young entrepreneur and disaffected commuter college student when his life began taking a sudden series of unexpected turns in the late 1970s. One weekend, a close friend seeking a job with the state police urged Sleckman, now the Conan Professor and director of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, to come to the civil service exam with him to boost his morale and ease his worries. Sleckman agreed to do it, but when they arrived at the exam, Sleckman found out the only way he could go in was if he took the exam, too.
"I passed the test, the medical and physical fitness exams, the psychiatric and background checks, and, three months later, they called me back and said, ‘Congratulations, you're a member of the 95th New Jersey State Police Academy,’" he says.
Sleckman took a look at the golf-club repair business he founded at age 12 and ran from his parents' basement (with three employees) and at the busy work in college that kept cluttering up his schedule and decided that perhaps destiny was calling.
He knew he was mistaken before a year had passed. But his eight-month stint in the state police left him fascinated by the medical work he'd seen paramedics perform and wondering if he could become a doctor....
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