Dr. Sanjay Gupta may be named surgeon general

WASHINGTON — Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN health reporter, is the leading contender to become the next surgeon general, a pick that would give the moribund office a higher profile but one that has received a mixed reaction among public-health advocates.

Gupta said he had been approached by the Obama transition team and discussed the job with the president-elect late last year in Chicago.

Gupta, 39, grew up in Michigan and was educated at the University of Michigan.

In 2003, at the start of the Iraq war, he was embedded with a U.S. Navy medical unit. After the tsunami in South Asia in December 2004, he covered the health crisis in Sri Lanka. And after Hurricane Katrina, he spent days at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

More recently, he analyzed the health of the presidential prospects in an October special report, "Fit to Lead."

On Monday, he was to perform surgery, and on Tuesday he discussed on CNN the medical condition of Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs.

Gupta presides over a small media empire that, in addition to his regular work on CNN, includes appearances on the "CBS Evening News" and columns in Time magazine. His first book, about the search for immortality, was published last year.

He is paid for speaking engagements, a controversial practice for a journalist.

The status and authority of the surgeon general, the titular head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, originally established to treat and quarantine sailors, has been on the wane.

It had a brief revival in the 1980s under C. Everett Koop, whose stand against smoking gave the office national credibility and new life as a popular public-health adviser.

Koop earned the public's respect in part because he eschewed the Reagan administration's talking points.

President Clinton fired his Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders after her outspoken advocacy of legalizing some drugs, distributing contraceptives in schools and a remark about masturbation.

Dr. Richard Carmona testified before Congress in 2007 that the Bush administration muzzled him, forced him to trumpet administration priorities, restricted his travel and suppressed or tried to weaken key public-health reports.

The administration's subsequent choice for the post never received a Senate hearing, and since 2006 the position has been occupied by nearly invisible veterans of the commissioned corps.