In 1989, Thomas J. Shaw, the founder of Retractable Technologies, Inc., was deeply impacted after seeing a television news segment about a doctor who had contracted HIV from an accidental needlestick injury. The doctor's complaint of design engineers being unresponsive to the risks frontline healthcare workers faced on a daily basis resonated with Shaw, a mechanical and structural engineer. Knowing he had to take action, Shaw spent a year creating preliminary design concepts before being granted funds by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health) to further develop his ideas. A subsequent grant enabled him to manufacture one of his retractable syringe designs for clinical trials purposes.
