Although his lifelong dream was to become a doctor, Emery Brown had originally intended to study the romance languages as an undergraduate at Harvard College before attending medical school. As a sophomore, he realized the power of statistics and ended up majoring in applied mathematics. Brown eventually earned his PhD in statistics along with his MD. He specialized in anesthesiology because he enjoyed it in medical school. “It was a lot of fun. It was very real time. You had to make decisions on the spot,” says Brown.
Brown has been practicing medicine for nearly 30 years and is currently an anesthesiologist and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in his career of putting people under, he kept a list of questions that puzzled him about what anesthesia does in the brain. After many years of watching the mystery of anesthesia at ...
