“You simply can’t give up” That was the motto of Dr. Rich (Kasriel) Roberts as he brought his company from near-bankruptcy to success…twice. After forgoing a career in medicine, Dr. Roberts took his organizational skills and turned around a fledgling family pharmaceutical company, transforming it into an industry giant before selling it.
Dr. Roberts has taken his business success and used it to help klal Yisrael. A tireless askan, Dr. Roberts is involved in and has helped numerous Jewish causes. In this two-part conversation, Dr. Roberts shares his advice on persevering in business and the advantages one gains in business as a frum Jew.
“I was born in Philadelphia but raised in the suburbs, in Argyl, Pennsylvania, to a completely non-religious family. I was raised as a Reform Jew. I went to public high school in Abington Township and went on to University of Pennsylvania, where I got my bachelor’s degree, a medical degree and a PhD in biophysics. For my medical degree and my PhD, I got a Medical Scientists Training Scholarship from the National Institutes of Health.
“I was at Harvard doing my internship in internal medicine when my father called and asked me if I wanted to try my hand in his company. My father, who had been in business for about thirty years with his brother, had a small generic drug company. My father told me that I would have to come right then, as the company was about to go into bankruptcy. I decided to take a year off from my medical career to try my hand at business. My thought process was as follows: If I’m going to have a business career, then I don’t want to spend the next two years completing my medical residency, and if I’m going to stay in medicine I may as well be sure that business is not for me. So I figured I would try it for one year and if it didn’t work out I would go on to what I was groomed for—a medical and scientific career.
“I ended up ending my medical internship in Harvard when I was 30 years old.
“Because I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, a medical degree and a PhD, I was in college for a long time—a total of 12 years. I wasn’t frum yet and I wasn’t married. I was working like a maniac, and, as a matter of fact, I didn’t take a break for longer than a weekend at a time for the first 48 months of the PhD program. There were many times when I worked seven days a week.
“As for why I was willing to consider a business career when I had invested so much in my medical career… I had gone into medicine and science with altruistic motivations. I thought this was a place where people were looking for truth and purity. What I found in academics was quite the opposite. I found cheating and fraud. The people who rose in the ranks were in essence politicians, and the people who worked hard did not get ahead. There was so much poor and immoral behavior that I became disillusioned with the idea that academics were holier and more lofty. It was corrupt and it lost its appeal to me.
“These feelings accumulated over time. In academic research, a lot of people who couldn’t make it in regular society found research grants and were tucked away in little labs where most of their work had no value. It was generally a minor iteration of what had already been done. There’s the whole mythology of the cracked scientist who’s coming up with brilliant ideas. Sadly, that’s just in the media; it’s not real.
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