Who was Jack Whitehead?

Pushing life

The times and triumphs of Jack Whitehead, biomedical entrepreneur extraordinaire

Jack Whitehead

When Leonard Skeggs arrived at Jack Whitehead’s family business with his blood-analysis invention, it didn’t seem like a great moment in medical history.

In 1954, Skeggs already was an accomplished medical researcher and innovator. His device addressed the major problem of slow and sloppy manual blood analyses that had plagued his clinical work.

His machine, though, was a crazy-looking contraption that had been turned down repeatedly by larger manufacturers. And when Skeggs tried to demonstrate it, with blood samples from himself and his wife, it didn’t work.

But Jack Whitehead loved the concept behind the machine: continuous analysis of a stream of blood samples. He inked a deal with Skeggs, and his firm, Technicon, ended up pouring millions of dollars into making the device practical.

Launched in 1957, the AutoAnalyzer was backed by Whitehead’s sheer determination and hard-won expertise in creating, selling, supporting and litigating over medical equipment. It revolutionized clinical analysis, and the huge success of the AutoAnalyzer and its heirs made Whitehead one of the richest men in the U.S. when Technicon went public in 1969.

Two years after the public offering, Whitehead, with the help of Skeggs and other distinguished friends and advisors, launched a 10-year quest to make what became Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

On that journey, as he had all his life, Whitehead made indelible impressions on his business associates, friends and family. Decades later, they tell about his unquenchable enthusiasm, his addiction to skiing (and astonishing misadventures on the slopes), his blunt talk and ability to ask the one absolutely key question, his commitment to philanthropy, the red carnation that he wore every day on his lapel, and the time he woke up from heart surgery and fixed a broken machine in the intensive-care unit.

“He would push you to see how far you could go yourself,” says Dina McCabe, a friend and the wife of longtime Whitehead Institute Board Member Robert McCabe. “He had this great joy for life, and it was contagious.”

Just as striking was Whitehead’s single-minded pursuit of excellence in biomedicine and the rest of life. “He was a man who believed in himself,” says David Baltimore, Founding Director of Whitehead Institute. “I think that is a characteristic of great entrepreneurs, for better or worse. They are people who have a vision and are not afraid to follow that vision.”

Becoming Jack Whitehead

Born Edwin C. Weiskopf in New York City in 1919, to Edwin C. and Bertha Weiskopf, he got the nickname Jack when a housekeeper took him out to a local park and her friends thought he looked like the child film star Jackie Coogan. So goes the family story, anyway, says his eldest son John Whitehead, who adds cheerfully that “the good looks failed with time.”

“My father's parents divorced when he was a preteen, and his mother went to work selling real estate in New York,” says John Whitehead. “She changed her name to Whitehead to avoid the anti-Semitism that might otherwise have affected her business, and that was how Jack Weiskopf became Jack Whitehead.”

An only child, Jack liked sports, as he did all his life, and he was proud that he played football in high school. He dropped out of the University of Virginia and worked successfully as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. During World War II he was turned down by the military because of his bad eyesight and ended up working as an ambulance driver in New York City. And then he went to work for the family business.

View "Making clinical progress," the continuation of this story.

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