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This profile of Dr. Sanjay Gupta first ran in accessAtlanta.com on Sept. 30, 2004.

Somewhere, wherever unaired videotape goes to die, there's a rare artifact: a Sanjay Gupta goof.

As TV bloopers go, this one was tiny. But you had to smile, if only at the irony, when CNN's unflappable Gupta misspoke recently while taping an "AccentHealth" segment.

Mark Hill/CNN (ENLARGE)
Recently married, 34-year-old Dr. Sanjay Gupta began his journalist-doctor juggling act at 17 as a student at the University of Michigan.
Jean Shifrin/AJC (ENLARGE)
A potent combination of brains, ambition and curiosity keeps Dr. Sanjay Gupta testing limits.
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"No good for Sanjay," somebody yelled after Gupta, 34, who had just nimbly negotiated "interstitial cystitis," flubbed an easy, nonmedical word. "It's supposed to be 'unsuccessfully.' He said 'successfully.' "

Well, of course he did. Gupta, whose CNN special, "The First Patient: Health and the Presidency," airs Sunday at 9 p.m., has success on the brain.

When Gupta announced three years ago that he was leaving Michigan for Atlanta to join CNN as a budding medical correspondent and to work as a practicing neurosurgeon, someone in the local media there told him, " 'Good luck, you'll never be able to do that,' " his new bride, Rebecca Olson Gupta, laughingly recalls.

Today that "expert" must be eating his own news copy, as senior medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta shows up everywhere from a Manhattan sidewalk, reporting on former President Bill Clinton's heart surgery, to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he's associate chief of neurosurgery and supervises residents from Emory University School of Medicine.

A human PowerBar whose burgeoning celebrity is both unmistakable and intriguingly uncategorizable (Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton gave him a shout-out in her recent autobiography; "In Style Weddings" covered the Guptas' nuptials four months ago in Charleston), Gupta is where he is thanks to a potent combination of brains, ambition, boundless curiosity and a seemingly hard-wired-in-the-DNA zeal for testing the limits of whatever's possible.

"I never had to force him to eat fire," says CNN Medical Unit director Carol Kinstle, who says an earlier Gupta special about fire-eaters, deep-sea divers and others pushing the edge of the human envelope showcases the essence of Gupta. "We could have done that whole show without it, but I knew when the producer brought back that tape, he would be on it eating fire."

He doesn't flinch at curveballs. Gupta went to Florida to cover Hurricane Frances and ended up discussing Clinton's heart problems on-air from inside a rental car as the storm built. He went to Iraq in March 2003 as an embedded reporter with the Navy's "Devil Docs" mobile surgical unit and raised a few eyebrows when he performed surgery himself.

Education and empathy

Still, it may be his on-air bedside manner that stands out most in an era when, despite a bombardment of medical information, health care feels more impersonal than ever. On CNN, this doctor is always in, offering an understanding, educating voice to viewers huddled anxiously in the virtual waiting room.

"We all know smart doctors, but they're not compassionate and empathetic," says Dr. Daniel L. Barrow, the Emory Neurological Surgery Department chairman who Gupta first encountered when he was a 1997 White House Fellow writing health care speeches for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. "He possesses all those qualities that make a physician truly outstanding. And frankly, those are the necessary qualities to make a good reporter."

And for a guy who routinely goes from anchor wear to scrubs, he's remarkably comfortable in his own skin. Unfrazzled and friendly. Maybe it's the residual effect of all those endless workweeks in med school or the "amazing support" he gets from Emory, Grady and CNN co-workers. Whatever. Far from getting lost in a welter of deadlines and details, Gupta says, he's found that having two jobs makes him better at each.

And maybe it's made him a little bit better person, too.

"Now, I want to know a patient's story," says Gupta, who's been doing this juggling act since age 17, when, already a student in the University of Michigan's accelerated six-year medical program, he wrote a student newspaper article on implied consent to organ donation. "Instead of just knowing they have a herniated disc or a brain tumor, I want to know about them."

He arrived at CNN with one sport jacket and a notion he'd mostly be working off-air. As his wardrobe improved, so did his broadcasting, especially when he began talking to the camera as if it were a patient.

Now he's on "American Morning" weekdays, and on Saturdays he is host of "Weekend House Call," whose overall household viewership ratings have risen 84 percent in the past year. His presidential special will bump "Larry King Live" this Sunday. Next morning, it'll be back to Grady, where he performs scheduled operations on Mondays and handles additional cases (like last year's emergency surgery on Atlanta Thrashers player Dan Snyder).

"The man has done a lot of things in three short decades," says Gupta friend and "American Morning" anchor Bill Hemmer.

Family precedent

The man wouldn't have it any other way.

"Everyone jokes about my schedule, but a lot of surgeons do other things," says Gupta, who also writes a Time magazine column. "TV is my other thing."

Staking out new territory is in his blood. His mother was the first woman engineer hired by Ford Motor Co.

"She basically showed up every day at Ford and interviewed," Gupta says of Damyanti Gupta, who was born in a section of India that later became part of Pakistan.

His mother stressed ambition, but never at the price of personal happiness.

"When I was in medical school doing training of over 100 hours a week, she'd be the one to call me and say, 'You're coming home this weekend,' " says Gupta, whose father, Subhash, is also a retired Ford engineer. "But when I would call her and say, 'I'm bored,' she'd say, 'Well, keep yourself busy, do something, go see a play.' "

And now?

"Now she says she regrets doing that, because I never get a chance to talk to her," Gupta chortles.

His parents didn't know he'd left the relative safety of Kuwait when the war started until they saw him in Iraq on CNN. But no one close to him seriously questioned his presence there.

"I completely understood why he wanted to go," says Rebecca Olson Gupta, an Atlanta attorney.

The endlessly curious doctor-medical correspondent was drawn by the untold war story: the toll of wounds and explosions, and the people who try to fix the damage. What better fit for the man of two professional minds, asks Hemmer, who was anchoring in Kuwait when Gupta and camera operator Mark Biello re-emerged.

"They looked like Pigpen and Pigpen's brother," Hemmer recalls. "Sanjay had dust everywhere. And he had the biggest grin on his face."

Gupta became part of the story temporarily when the neurosurgeon-less Devil Docs asked him to perform brain surgery on a gravely injured Iraqi child. Ultimately, Gupta operated on five seriously wounded people, leading some journalism observers to wonder if he'd blurred the lines.

"How does Gupta the reporter and Gupta the doctor reconcile his competing roles and competing obligations?" the Poynter Institute's journalism ethics specialist Bob Steele wrote at the time. "Does the Hippocratic oath duty always trump the journalistic responsibility to gather information and report stories?"

The criticism took Gupta somewhat aback, because he always knew who he was.

"I had a very clear moral compass out there," Gupta says. "You never stop being a doctor, and you never stop being a human being."

His biggest fan might be Jesus Vidana, a 26-year-old Marine Reserve sergeant so seriously wounded by a sniper's bullet in Baghdad that medics initially declared him dead. Gupta operated on him, and Vidana, now back home in Los Angeles, keeps in touch with the man he credits with saving his life.

The world of doctoring

War and the outside world seemed far away on a recent Monday, when Gupta and two Emory residents spent about eight hours doing complex spinal operations at Grady. Geeky, black Buddy Holly-esque magnifying eyeglasses covered the TV doc's famous face, and nurses hovered over hundreds of exotic-looking instruments. Yet it felt almost calm amid the beeping machines and occasional murmured "Irrigation, please."

"There's always a sense of urgency, but not chaos," Gupta says. "I always tell my residents, 'It's OK to have butterflies. Just make sure they're flying in formation.' "

He always sleeps well on Sunday nights, content to be spending the next day in surgery.

"I like being in here," Gupta says of the operating room. He leaves his cellphone in his car and likes to turn Sinatra and the Gipsy Kings on overhead while he works.

Yup, Sinatra.

"Normal" seems like an odd description for this overachiever, but there's a definite Everyman quality to Gupta's leisure-time activities (which, not shockingly, aren't all that leisurely): Bike riding, running every morning with his wife, travel (the Guptas head to India soon). He'll talk medicine and journalism, sure, but he's just as comfortable if the conversation takes an unexpected turn to, say, sports or music trivia.

Often he's the one doing the turning.

"He loves to talk," Hemmer laughs. "When we sit down, I have no idea where our conversation is headed, and I love that."

Best not to get too comfortable around him, though. As a birthday present last year, Gupta raced against other civilians at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Guess which Ford engineers' son won, hitting speeds of about 130 mph?

"This is my thing," Gupta rather uncharacteristically boasts."This is where I bring my 'A' game!"

Oh, that's where.