The Symptom Sleuths

Larry Weed created a remote diagnostic program so effective that the military licenses everything his company produces

by Rosalyn Graham

Fifty years ago, a young Dr. Lawrence Weed, not long out of medical school, had an “aha!” moment that sowed the seeds of PKC Corp., the company he eventually founded, with headquarters in the Chace Mill and an office in Washington, D.C.

There is a spot of irony in the fact that a man who seems to have a prodigious capacity to instantly recall dates, names, conversations, symptoms, diagnoses, poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and quotations from Plato and Karl Marx should also be the one who found a way to bolster the memory and therefore the diagnostic ability of the medical establishment.