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James Joseph Nestor, MD 

Pre-Medical Life

We were asked to provide some personal history for our web sites, so I tried to think of some history that would be of interest without boring you. I hope the following pages succeed.

I started working about age 11 or 12, with a paper route in the Midwest. It was the first time I realized that I could do something enjoyable and actually get paid for it. It also gave me some independence.

I went to college in a co-op program for Mechanical Engineering. One of my jobs during that time was working in a salt mine 1,200 feet below the surface. Not a good place to be claustrophobic, going down with two other men in a 3-foot diameter tube. My job was to go into old parts of the mine and measure how fast the roof was caving in.
Although I've had many engineering jobs before med school ( and I keep my Professional Engineer license current ), you don't want to know all that. One of the best jobs, though, was working at UC Berkeley Space Science lab. I was chief mechanical engineer for the High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment ( HAPPE ): I designed the cryogenics, folded optics and internal structure.

I remember every detail of that funny-looking metal thing you see in the background.... ( I still have a model of it in my clinic office ). Besides heading the design team, I also was responsible for getting the whole package up to altitude and parachuting it back to earth safely. We based our flights in Palestine, Texas.

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