The Life and Near Death of Drkoop.com

Hackett wanted to start a company that would market an electronic medical record to enable patients to share information with their doctors and health plans. The Internet would provide a way to widely distribute such a document. But Hackett needed a trusted name to persuade consumers to put their sensitive health information online.

Zaccaro had just the person. By this time Zaccaro and Koop had become good friends, having met in the early 1990s when Zaccaro was producing the International Health and Medical Film Festival. Koop had attended the festival, and soon afterward Zaccaro wooed the former surgeon general to join his board by telling him the event needed an "icon." "Since 1991, we have become very good friends. There's a great trust and a bond between us," Zaccaro says in a deposition.

That Zaccaro would be attracted to Koop's star power was not surprising. "I'm well connected. ... I know how to bring people in from both the entertainment community and the [medical] community," Zaccaro brags in the deposition, dropping the name of heart-transplant pioneer Michael DeBakey as someone he knows.

Hackett also began attending the festivals, and in 1996 met Koop at one of the events. To Hackett, it was a no-brainer: Who better to endorse an online medical record than "America's doctor"? And who better to broker Koop's participation than their mutual friend, Zaccaro?

"Don viewed getting a commitment from Dr. Koop through John was really the key element," testified consultant Andy Agrawal, who helped write the company's early business plans, in his fraud lawsuit against Drkoop. "That without Dr. Koop's participation, he had serious reservations about whether the company focusing on a personal medical record that would be accessible through the Internet would ever fly without Dr. Koop's credibility."

Hackett approached Zaccaro with his pitch for a company called Personal Medical Records. Zaccaro liked the proposal from the start. Then Hackett talked about the need to associate the company with a trusted name. "I knew what he was getting at," recalled Zaccaro. "He wanted an introduction to Dr. Koop. I was very guarded about that because of the many years of good relationships with him."

Zaccaro decided to visit Koop alone. It was a delicate time. By early 1997, Koop's Time Life video venture was sliding toward bankruptcy and Koop was wary. "It was one thing for me to say to Dr. Koop, 'This is a great idea, Dr. Koop. This is going to help you, you know, realize your mission,'" says Zaccaro. "A man who has given 52 years to the public-service sector is not used to this kind of approach."

Koop did not dismiss the idea out of hand, and on Zacarro's next trip to Koop's home Hackett came along. Over the next two months, Zaccaro and Hackett visited Koop twice to discuss his participation in the company. The lobbying paid off. On Oct. 1, 1997, Koop officially signed on as chairman and director of the company that would become Drkoop.com. At age 80, Koop became America's most-senior Internet entrepreneur.

At the time, the idea that Koop would risk his reputation again in the private sector - and with something as new as an Internet startup - did not seem so foolhardy. After all, he had known Zaccaro for six years and Zaccaro was personally vouching for the integrity and skills of Hackett and his team. And the Internet offered Koop a new medium to deliver his message. "I have tried to deliver those messages to patients all of my life. The Internet is invaluable in this. It has the potential to help people take charge of their own health by providing a wealth of knowledge," Koop told Yahoo (YHOO) Internet Life magazine. Still, he acknowledged it was not an easy decision to lend his name to an untried Net company. "As surgeon general, I had developed a following. I became a sort of folk hero because of my work with tobacco and AIDS. It took a lot of persuasion in my own mind to decide to do it."