He was Chinese by ancestry and South African by birth, and he spoke with a soft Anglo-South African accent. Soon-Shiong was extraordinarily charismatic he was fit and trim, wore rimless glasses, and had a long shag haircut. Hentz had toured many such research facilities with her father Soon-Shiong, she sensed, was a maverick. “The lab was primitive,” Iacocca’s daughter Kate Hentz told me. There, working with a staff of three, he began sourcing islet cells from pigs and human cadavers.
Soon-Shiong set up a laboratory at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West L.A. Instead of replacing the entire pancreas, Soon-Shiong would replace only the insulin-producing islet cells inside it. He wanted to shut down U.C.L.A.’s pancreas-transplant program and embark on a new line of research. Soon-Shiong was a skilled surgeon who had trained under organ-transplant pioneers, but he’d grown unhappy with the procedure: pancreas transplants carried a high risk of organ rejection, and he didn’t feel that the outcomes were worth the danger. Soon-Shiong, who was in his thirties, specialized in pancreas transplant, a risky treatment reserved for severe diabetics. Iacocca’s first wife had died of Type 1 diabetes a few years earlier he was searching for a cure. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Lee Iacocca, the celebrated executive who had run both Chrysler and Ford, visited the Los Angeles laboratory of Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon at U.C.L.A.
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