Proud of their roots
Source credit: Courtesy of 'National Museum of American History'
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a medical doctor, transplant surgeon, bio-scientist, inventor, technologist, billionaire businessman, media proprietor and philanthropist, who has devoted his life-long quest to understanding the fundamental biology driving life-threatening diseases and translating these insights into medical innovations with global impact . His wife, Michele B. Chan-Sam, is a former actress. Now United States citizens for many years, both remain proud of being born and raised in South Africa.
From humble and oppressed beginnings
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / #SecretsSelfmadeBillionaires by Paul Chan' (Friday 1st September 2017)
Patrick: Michele and I both come from Hakka families. The original Hakka in China believed in total community collaboration, and the warrior is the woman, and she is as strong as the man.
My parents came to South Africa after the Japanese invasion of China, and they were simple shopkeepers. My parents owned a general store, surrounded by a lead-acid battery factory, a tyre manufacturer and a meatpacking -plant. My father, Chan Soon-Shiong, was an herbalist in China, so in South Africa he was also a Hakka Association doctor, and every two months a metal biscuit can would arrive from China filled with foul smelling weeds. If anybody had a fever, a cough, or a boil, there would be a knock on the door, they'd walk into the house, and he would concoct something. I'd sit there and watch that whole activity. I think my father’s work drove a lot of what I'm doing today because it started influencing my belief that you have in your human body the ability to protect yourself from disease. You were given the innate capability to heal yourself.
I was born the fifth of eight children in a small town on the ocean called Port Elizabeth, and Michele was born in an even smaller town called East London. Looking back, my childhood felt normal, but it was a strange normal because we were not black, and we definitely were not white. I grew up “coloured” as per the Apartheid’s racial classification system. I grew up with black friends, white friends, Chinese friends, Indian friends. It was to me a happy time. We were poor but didn’t know we were poor, which is fine, and I was almost self-educated because it was very hard at the schools.
Article credit: Courtesy of 'The Herald' (Friday, 19th October 2012) newspaper
“He was very handsome at school. He was a very bright boy. He was top of the class and was quite outspoken in class. He was extremely academic, but also sociable, nice and popular, everyone like him. ” ~ Judy Forlee, one of his classmates from Grade 1 to matric still lives in Port Elizabeth but lost contact with him, remembers having to attend a segregated school because they were “not allowed to go to the white schools.” There were just 10 pupils in a class and Patrick went on to become head boy in Grade 12 and matriculated at 16 years old. She added "I am not surprised he would use his money to buy a basketball team. He used to play basketball with his brothers - they all share a passion for it."
Former Port Elizabeth Chinese Association chairperson, Mike Timkoe, said the Soon-Shiong family were private, no-nonsense people.
"His family struggled with finances and racial tension. They all emigrated eventually, but I was very fond of Patrick's dad." ~ Percy Date Chong, the owner of Princes Chinese shop not far from where Patrick grew up, said his story was truly one of rags to riches.
Teenage Patrick delivered the Port Elizabeth Evening Post newspaper to earn money for university, an experience he relished. He said “To this day, I hear the ‘clackity-clack’ sounds of those metal printing presses. I still smell the oils of the machines and see the ink smeared on the pressmen’s uniforms.... I vividly recall the excitement of being among the first to read the headline of the day, hot off the presses.”
Patrick: Growing up in Apartheid South Africa, we were always the underdogs. My black friends were always the underdogs. It gave me insight into the dignity and strength of the underdog. I have great empathy for people who are underdogs, for whatever circumstance they’ve been put in: whether poverty, whether religion, whether race, colour, creed. So part of what Michele and I do, consciously or unconsciously, is always fight for the underdogs in this country and for ourselves.
I was sixteen when I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. I met Michele my second year of medical school at a basketball game. To this day, basketball is the thing that keeps me sane. It's the only activity where I really truly relax.
Photo credit: Courtesy of 'Los Angeles Times' (Saturday, 14th April 2018) newspaper
Michele: My mom and dad were both born in South Africa. My grandfather was, as family legend has it, the black sheep of the family, and he was not expected to live. There were too many kids already, so they put my grandfather literally out in the pigsty to die. A servant brought him back, because he said, "He's not as weak as you think; he's living." My grandfather never felt appreciated, so he left home at the age of fourteen and lived in India and Southeast Asia, and then made his way to Cape Town. He didn't come in a wave of immigration, he was literally a straggler.
My grandfather became quite successful in his small town and opened three businesses. My parents inherited one of his businesses. We were raised Catholic, but the Catholic schools did not allow Chinese students. When it came time for my older brother to go to high school, my dad drove to Port Elizabeth to have a meeting with the archbishop and held his feet to the fire and said, "I'm raising my children Catholic, but you are denying a Catholic education for my children." The archbishop said, “Because it's against the law.” My dad said, “Whose law takes precedent? God's law? To whom do you answer?” My brother was the first Chinese student to receive a Catholic education. It was hard-fought, and so we don't take education for granted.
I attended drama school at the University of the Witwatersrand. The university had to apply to the interior minister for my permission to study. My parents were incredibly supportive, which is very unusual for conservative Chinese parents. At the time, Patrick and I were going through very similar things, which created this very unusual bond. He actually studied drama before going to medical school. Patrick was the first Chinese intern to actually work in a white hospital. I was the first Chinese student in a drama school. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1986. It's given us an appreciation for how hard you have to fight for what you want, and it has made us a family of risk-takers.
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / Larry King' (Wednesday, 12th March 2014)
While a student, Patrick participated in protests against South Africa’s apartheid government, even being arrested and jailed for about nine hours. All non-whites were required to produce identity cards at all times. He was driving in a car when he got stopped by the police; the officer subsequently asked him, “Where’s your I.D.?” To which, Patrick condescendingly replied, “Where’s yours?”
Patrick: I graduated at twenty-three in 1975 and was in the top four out of 189 in my class, and still my first working experience at the Johannesburg General Hospital as a Chinese doctor required permission from the South African government and I was told I’d have to take 50% of the regular salary. My peers wanted to go on strike over that, but I said, "No, I’d be glad to take the lower salary just so I could learn from the best".
My very first patient refused to let me examine him. And my professor, Bothwell, stood right next to me and said "Sir, if you don’t want this doctor examining you, you have to leave the hospital". I diagnosed the reason for his infection — which they couldn’t figure out. After that the patient went around the hospital saying "That Chinaman, make sure he examines you".
I also trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them. They inspired me because they took their hardship with incredible dignity. They didn’t back down, didn’t give up.
In 1976, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States of America and they offered an amnesty to all South African doctors so they wouldn’t have to write the usual exams to be able to practice medicine there. All my friends literally took a Boeing 747 and left to make the amnesty and then came home. I said "I’m not gonna do that’ and I stayed".
We married in 1977. I was basically a man without a country. Couldn’t own property, couldn’t vote, couldn’t go to a white school, couldn’t go to a white hospital, had to carry an identity card. I couldn’t go on the train – well, I had to go to the back of the train.
I turned down an offer of a permanent position and took up work at Tuberculosis clinics in the Eastern Cape instead. I realised then that there wasn’t any technology that I had in my hands except a streptomycin injection, not even an X-ray. I was either hurting these children or not helping them and that’s when I said to myself I will go away and come back and bring back technology to South Africa. I thought it was going to take me five years – I miscalculated.
Excelling abroad
Article credit: Courtesy of 'Wits Review' (March 2015) magazine p. 24 & 25 / 72
"My quest was and is to improve the quality of life through science. That is what drove me then, and that is what is driving me now".
After nearly winning a grant proposal he sent to an institution in London, Patrick accepted an offer to become a junior resident in surgery at Vancouver General Hospital with the University of British Columbia in Canada and earned a Master of Science degree in 1979.
Research awards in pancreatic cancer accelerated him right into the University of California, Davis as a chief resident and then recruited to become the youngest ever professor of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States of America during 1983.
As a surgeon, Patrick performed the West Coast's first two whole pancreas and kidney transplants in 1986. He also pioneered the world’s first encapsulated human islet transplant, the first engineered islet cell transplant and the first pig-to-man islet cell transplant to stimulate insulin production in patients with diabetes during 1993. These groundbreaking procedures earned him the Peter Kiewit Distinguished Membership in Medicine Award and International J.W. Hyatt Award for Service to Mankind.
During the early 1990s, he also experimented harnessing stem cells and nanotechnology to produce insulin for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shuttle program.
Patrick has pioneered novel therapies for both diabetes and cancer, including inventing and developing the revolutionary drug Abraxane, the world’s first human protein nanoparticle "using the tumor’s biology against itself"approved for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, lung cancer and advanced pancreatic cancer in both the United States and European Union, published more than 100 scientific papers, and has been granted more than 500 patients worldwide for groundbreaking advancements spanning myriad fields of technology and medicine.
His research has been recognized by national and international awards, including:
Gilda’s Club Award for the Advancement of Cancer Medicine in 2006;
National Ethnic Coalition (NECO) Ellis Island Medal of Honor, St. John’s Health Center Caritas Award and St. Mary Medical Center Life Achievement Award in 2007;
Pancreatic Cancer Auction Network Medical Visionary Award in 2008;
Adaptive Business Leaders (ABL) Leadership in Innovation Award and Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation Eddy Award in 2009; and
The Friends of the National Library of Medicine Distinguished Medical Science Award in 2010.
Following the sale of his two global medical technology companies, American Pharmaceutical Partners in 2008 and Abraxis in 2010, Patrick became the richest doctor to ever live and, for some time, the wealthiest man in Los Angeles.
Promotional material credit: Courtesy of 'Forbes' magazine
"I'm a physician. I've been blessed with the ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That's what I would like to leave behind."
He serves as the Chairman and CEO of NantWorks LLC, an ecosystem of companies formed to create a transformative global health information and next-generation pharmaceutical development network by integrating nanotechnology, cloud computing and supercomputers, biotechnology, bioinformatics, and other complex disciplines into an entirely new paradigm for health care, education, science, and justice.
“I am a basketball fanatic. When Magic Johnson came to me and said ‘Would you like to buy my share?’ it was like a dream come true. The Lakers was my outlet.”
Patrick has been a minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers since 2010. Over the years, he fostered an intimate relationship with Lakers legend, the late Kobe Bryant and was devastated by the news of his tragic death in January 2020.
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / Los Angeles Times' (Monday, 27th January 2020)
Under the NantWorks umbrella, Patrick took his cancer drug maker NantKwest public in 2015 and his transformational healthcare startup NantHealth public in 2016. When NantKwest listed on Nasdaq during 2015, it was the largest biotechnology IPO by market valuation in history.
He announced in 2016 the formation of Cancer Breakthroughs 2020, a comprehensive collaboration of researchers, insurers, academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the potential of combination immunotherapy in the treatment of cancer.
During 2016, Patrick received the Franklin Institute Award for his visionary leadership and commitment to advancing medical and scientific research and bringing new treatment options to people with cancer. He was also honoured at the Vatican with the Pontifical Key Visionary Award, which recognizes “medical innovators who change the course of history and reduce suffering on a global scale by blending visionary thinking with real action.”
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / The Franklin Institute' (Friday, 22nd April 2016)
The Smithsonian Institute honoured his work by placing Abraxane in the permanent exhibit at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2017.
“I would be at the printing press in Port Elizabeth, seven days a week, picking up newspapers, running them through the city, reading the first piece that came off the press. Newspapers were in my blood. I got educated through newspapers and books because there was no other way for me to teach myself — we couldn’t go to white schools.”
Patrick purchased the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune newspapers “for nearly $ 500 million cash” in 2018, becoming one of the first Asian-Americans to be a media proprietor through ownership in a major daily newspaper in the United States.
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / CSIR New Media' (Wednesday, 11th November 2020)
He is also chairman of three non-profit organizations and was one of the first to sign the Giving Pledge, committing to give away at least half of his wealth to philanthropy.
In 1984 Disney hired actress Michele B. Chan-Sam on Danger Bay for about five years, then Hotel and MacGyver. When they had two children, she stopped working and was a stay-at-home mom until their youngest went to college. Michele returned to work at Green Screen Studio in Culver City and became more involved in designing the NantWorks campus and the Innovation Center. They reside in Los Angeles, California.
Remaining proud
Video credit: Courtesy of 'YouTube / #SecretsSelfmadeBillionaires by Paul Chan' (Friday 1st September 2017)
Patrick: In Chinese tradition, what we are doing is for the next generation. I tell my children, “Find your passion, be persistent, and pursue your dreams. Be patient, allow yourself to grow and flourish.”
Michele: We are very African in our roots. We are very Asian in our roots.
Follow Patrick Soon-Shiong via twitter: @DrPatSoonShiong
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