George Richards Minot was born on December 2, 1885, in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of three sons of a prominent Boston family. George's father was a physician, and several other men on both sides of the family had been distinguished medical practitioners as well. Minot graduated from Harvard College in 1908, and despite an apparent lack of ambition, entered Harvard medical school thereafter and did well in his courses. It was in medical school that he became interested in the study of human blood, and after he received his M.D. in 1912 he immediately began his internship at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1914 he became an assistant at the Johns Hopkins University medical school in Baltimore. There he continued his studies of blood in the laboratory and did some of the research that led to Dr. William H. Howell's discovery of the anticoagulant drug heparin.

In 1915 Minot began to...