Levon and Satenig were strict and religious parents, who worked hard to make sure their children were obedient Christians. Jack, however, had trouble reconciling what he believed were conflicting religious ideas. His family regularly attended church, and Jack often railed against the idea of miracles and an all-knowing God in his weekly Sunday school class. If there were a God who could make his son walk on water, Kevorkian insisted, he would also have been able to prevent the Turkish slaughter of his entire extended family. Jack debated the idea of God’s existence every week until he realized he would not find an acceptable explanation to his questions, and stopped attending church entirely by the age of 12.

The children were also encouraged to perform well in school, and all three demonstrated high academic intelligence - as the only boy, however, Jack became the focus of Levon and Satenig’s high expectations. Jack rose to the occasion easily; even as a young boy, Kevorkian was a voracious reader and academic who loved the arts, including drawing, painting and piano. But along with Jack’s academic prowess came a highly critical mind, and he rarely accepted ideas at face value. He engaged in frequent arguments with his teachers at school, sometimes humiliating them when they couldn’t keep up with his sharp debate skills. While his jabs at teachers earned admiration from his classmates, learning came so effortlessly to Jack that it often alienated him from his peers. Kevorkian was promoted to Eastern Junior High School when he was in the sixth grade, and by the time he was in high school he had taught himself German and Japanese. Classmates soon labeled him as an eccentric bookworm, and Kevorkian had trouble making friends as a result. He also gave up the idea of romantic relationships, believing them to be an uneccessary diversion from his studies. In 1945, when Kevorkian was only 17, he graduated with honors from Pontiac High School.

Accepted into the University of Michigan College of Engineering, Kevorkian had aims to become a civil engineer. Halfway through his freshman year, however, he became bored with his studies and began focusing on botany and biology. By midyear, he had set his sights on medical school, often taking 20 credit hours in a semester in order to meet the 90-hour medical school requirement. He graduated in medicine at the University of Michigan in 1952, and began a specialty in pathology soon after. In 1953, however, the Korean War abruptly halted Kevorkian’s career. He served 15 months as an Army medical officer in Korea, then finished his service in Colorado.

While serving his residency at the University of Michigan hospital in the 1950s, Kevorkian became fascinated by death and the act of dying. He made regular visits to terminally ill patients, photographing their eyes in an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment of death. Kevorkian believed that doctors could use the information to distinguish death from fainting, shock or coma in order to learn when resuscitation was useless. “But really, my number one reason was because it was interesting,” Kevorkian told reporters later. “And my second reason was because it was a taboo subject.”

Not one to avoid distasteful ideas, Kevorkian again caused a stir with colleagues by proposing that death-row prison inmates be used as the subjects of medical experiments while they were still alive. Inspired by research that described medical experiments the ancient Greeks conducted on Egyptian criminals, Kevorkian formulated the idea that similar modern experiments could not only save valuable research dollars, but also provide a glimpse into the anatomy of the criminal mind. In 1958, he advocated his view in a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a method he called “terminal human experimentation”, he argued that condemned convicts could provide a service to humanity before their execution by volunteering for “painless” medical experiments that would begin while they were conscious, but would end in fatality. For his unorthodox experiments and strange proposals, Jack Kevorkian’s peers gave him the nickname “Dr. Death.”

Kevorkian’s controversial views earned him minor media attention which ultimately resulted in his ejection from the University of Michigan Medical Center. He continued his internship at Pontiac General Hospital instead, where he began another set of controversial experiments. After hearing about a Russian medical team who was transfusing blood from corpses into living patients, Kevorkian enlisted the help of medical technologist Neal Nicol to simulate these same experiments. The results were highly sucessful, and Kevorkian believed the procedure could help save lives on the battlefield—if blood from a bank was unavailable, doctors might use Kevorkian’s research to transfuse the blood of corpse into an injured soldier. Kevorkian pitched his idea to the Pentagon, figuring it could be used in Vietnam, but the doctor was denied a federal grant to continue his research. Instead, the research fueled his reputation as an outsider, scared his colleagues and eventually infected Kevorkian with Hepatits C.