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Dr. James Doty’s life story sounds like something out of a Horatio Alger novel. The son of an invalid mother, raised in poverty, he works hard in school so that when he gets to Tulane University he can work even harder, get into the medical school, become a doctor, and help people.

He becomes a neurosurgeon, ends up practicing in Newport Beach, Calif., and serving on Stanford University’s faculty. In the late ’90s, Doty becomes CEO of Accuray Inc., a high-tech company he has rescued from bankruptcy by convincing some Taiwanese investors to put in $18.5 million, money that Doty personally guarantees. Along the way, Doty invests in some other medical technology companies and by 2000 has ridden the dot-com boom to fabulous wealth … $75 million on paper. Retirement beckons, along with a villa in Tuscany, a $5 million penthouse in San Francisco, a 6,500-acre island in New Zealand and charitable work in third world countries. Doty decides to donate his Accuray stock to a charitable trust that will benefit Tulane, Stanford and other worthy causes.

Then the dot-com boom goes bust. The villa, the penthouse, the island, and his retirement plans vaporize.

“To make a long story short, I suddenly in six weeks was minus $3 million or so,” Doty said.

Doty’s only remaining asset is the Accuray stock, which he has yet to commit to the trust. Doty’s friends chime in with helpful advice.

“Essentially, what everybody said was, ‘Look, that’s the only thing you have left. Save it for yourself,’” Doty recalled. “But I had made commitments to different groups, and I decided to honor those commitments.”

Doty’s friends chime in again, “essentially 100 percent that I was crazy,” he said.

Despite his friends’ best efforts, Doty puts the stock in trust and moves on with his life.

In February, Accuray, maker of the CyberKnife, a radiosurgery device used in treating tumors, went public.

Doty described the initial public offering as “wildly successful.”

The IPO generates more than $1 billion.

Doty’s shares eventually churn out $37 million for the trust, he said. Tulane’s shares bring the school a little less than $4.5 million. Stanford’s shares bring in $5.4 million.

At Tulane, the money endowed a chair for the dean of the school of medicine, said Yvette Jones, COO and senior vice president for external affairs. The money also established a scholarship to help economically disadvantaged students attend medical school; the income from the endowment is enough to provide one student a year with a full ride.

At Stanford, Doty’s donation has endowed a chair in the neurosurgery department, according to the Stanford Report. The funds will also aid research in spinal cord injuries as well as a project with the Dalai Lama to study the neurological basis for compassion and altruism.

Researchers will use functional MRIs to evaluate how people make those decisions, said Doty, who laughed when asked if he would be one of the test subjects.

Doty, whose story has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, said he never asked to reconfigure his donation nor did the charities offer.

“The charities are in charge of getting the money,” he noted. “They’re not in charge of helping wealthy donors continue to be wealthy.”

When the Journal story broke, Doty got calls from all sorts of media, including Oprah and Good Morning America TV shows. The funny thing was that everyone wanted to know if he had lost his house and … was he starving?

Doty told the shows he’s still a neurosurgeon, and neurosurgeons are paid very well. He lives in a nice house and can provide for his family.

He has spent most of the last four years in Gulfport, Miss. He had visited Memorial Hospital as a consultant – he was a member of Stanford’s faculty at the time — and discovered the hospital had no neurosurgery coverage. “I thought I could help out,” Doty said.

He presented a plan to the hospital’s administration. The hospital now has full-service neurosurgery and neurology departments, inpatient/outpatient spinal cord injury services, a brain trauma program and a neuro ICU. Memorial is also the only Mississippi hospital stroke-certified by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

Doty plans to return to Stanford’s faculty full-time in January.

Jones said she thinks Doty is a “serial entrepreneur,” and that he will do something just as remarkable in the coming years as he already has.
Doty said he does not regret his decision.

“Look, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I can’t complain at all,” he said. “I get to help people every day.”



December 2007

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