Billionaire Inventor Who Doesn't "Think Straight"

James Sorenson's teachers said he'd never learn to read, says Monday's USA Today. His mom said he could do anything he set his mind to. A friend and dean of a business school says he's a "non-linear thinker." The reporter who wrote the story said that "his thoughts meander so much that a few hours (with him) produced a...notebook full of disconnected clutter."

Yet Sorenson has, over his several decades, put his thoughts together extremely well and come up with a list of medical inventions to his credit. Many of his ideas have come to him while he's soaking in the bathtub with a washcloth over his face.

Now at 86 he has begun the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, sampling DNA in 107 countries. He wants to show that people have a common ancestry, without regard to races and ethnic groups. His hope is that demonstrating this will lead to world peace. His wife of 60 years says," I stand back and wait, because he does the impossible...You can't tell him he can't do something."

A Passion-Driven Career Move

The founder of Felony & Mayhem press, Maggie Topkis, likes mysteries--yet found that a lot of the kind she most admires were out of print. So, according to The Week magazine (summarizing a story originally in Forbes), she read about a machine that could print out a paperback in seventeen minutes.

She got the rights to a British mystery Death in the Garden that had come out in '95 and started printing copies. That was the beginning. She has since gone on to publish more than forty titles--"bringing the best in bygone mysteries back to life."