Work Hard, Be Kind

In this gracefully told memoir, Jerome R. ("Jerry") Cox traces the story of his long, event-filled life: from his childhood in Indiana; through his brief stint in the Army and education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to his illustrious career in Boston and in Saint Louis. At Washington University, he applied computers in innovative ways to medical research and healthcare, among them the hearing of newborns and the detection of cardiac arrhythmias. Through luck and hard work, he became a key participant in many of the early events in the development of positron emission tomography (PET), a transformative imaging technology that is now essential to the detection and management of cancer. In 1974, Dr. Cox founded Washington University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, leading it through its formative years. By the time he retired in 1991, the four-person faculty had grown to 24, and its members had been involved in such projects as medical database design and computational genome sequencing. Dr. Cox later participated in national committee work that laid the foundation for the scanning of the human brain and the sequencing of the human genome. Then in 1997, Dr. Cox and two associates created a new company: Growth Networks Incorporated (GNI), based on innovative data-switching technology. Three years later, GNI was sold to Cisco, which then developed the Cisco Carrier Routing System, a technology that dominated the field from 2004 to 2021, generating more than $3.5 billion in sales. In 2015, Dr. Cox founded Q-Net Security, a company that sells an attachment to protect endpoint computers from network attack. Dr. Cox's story also includes the important role that his family, particularly his late wife, Bobby, played throughout his career. He stresses the importance of his motto — to "work hard" and also to "be kind" — as ingredients in a well-lived life.