In December 2001, an official with the George W. Bush administration telephoned Elias Zerhouni in his Johns Hopkins office. Would Zerhouni like to be director of the National Institutes of Health?

“When I was called, I thought it was a mistake,” Zerhouni, now 73 and professor emeritus of radiology and radiological sciences and of biomedical engineering, says in a recent telephone conversation. “I thought they called the wrong person.”

He hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school, and his background was in radiology, not basic science, as was traditional for the job. What’s more, it was right after 9/11, and he is Muslim. 

Yet his experiences growing up in war-torn Algeria, his entrepreneurial spirit and his many successes at Johns Hopkins would serve him well as the 15th director — and so far, only immigrant — leading an agency considered by many to be the crown jewel of the federal government.

In Disease Knows No Politics: The Immigrant Journey and Lessons of Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the former NIH director traces his eventful life from childhood to present day, highlighting his talent for big-picture thinking and his determination to follow the science, not the whims of politicians.

“As director, I believed the agency’s mission was sacred,” he writes. “The NIH needed to be at the service of all Americans, regardless of their political preferences, race, sexual orientation, religion, or gender.”

During his NIH tenure, from May 2002 to October 2008, Zerhouni launched the NIH Roadmap, a massive reworking of the agency that encouraged cross-disciplinary inquiry and removed barriers between siloed institutes. It led to the NIH Reform Act, which won bipartisan approval by Congress in 2006.

Zerhouni’s book, co-written with Edward Kriz and set to be published July 15 by Prometheus Books, already has high-powered endorsements from the likes of Anthony Fauci; Ed Miller, former dean/CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine; and Michael Milken, financier and philanthropist, who says Zerhouni “personifies the American dream as much as anyone I’ve known.”

In the foreword, former Johns Hopkins University President William Brody praises Zerhouni as a “once-in-a-generation talent” and adds, “Where others see problems, he
sees solutions.”

Zerhouni grew up in Algiers and often had to miss school because of the ongoing conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front. In 1975, he and his wife, Nadia, came to Baltimore with just a few hundred dollars and medical degrees from the University of Algiers. They were supposed to be there just a few months, while Elias trained as a radiologist at Johns Hopkins before returning to Algiers.

However, one opportunity led to another, and they stayed. Zerhouni advanced to radiology department director and was named concurrently, by Miller, as executive vice dean of the school of medicine. Zerhouni oversaw first the clinical practice and then research at the school, and helped start the Institute for Cell Engineering.

In the last chapter of the book, Zerhouni shares what he learned about the U.S. health care system in his journey from academia to government to industry and expresses dismay that the American health care system “has become captive to powerful special interests, supported by, in my view, ill-advised partisan policies.” He outlines some of the challenges and proposes some remedies.

Optimistic by nature, Zerhouni believes publicly funded science and technology will remain strong in the United States. “There is bipartisan support for the National Institutes of Health, and for science and technology in general,” he says. “The fundamentals are still there.”