UVM- University of Vermont: Innovations that Transform the World with Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D, J.D.

Thank you.

I feel I'm the one who's overpowered.

Sure. Mary, it was in the Seychelles Islands that I first learned sort of the fundamentals of satellite communications. Speaking about academia, I had been an undeclared major at UCLA and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And my advice—this is probably not good advice to give at a university—but my advice is if you don't know why you're at the university, maybe you should take like a couple years off and figure out why you want to be there. So, I did leave UCLA and I traveled around the world, hitchhiking, teaching a little bit of English, and I ended up on this island chain in the Indian Ocean where there was a part of a giant satellite antenna bigger than a house that was part of NASA's deep space tracking network. And I went up and talked to the people who worked there. And they explained to me that the reason this antenna had to be as big as a house was because the satellite that it was tracking sent a signal that was so tiny it could barely be heard. And so it needed a giant receiving area as big as a house. And in my mind, I kind of flipped things around and I said, 'Well, if there was a satellite as big as this building in orbit around the Earth, then could everybody in the Earth receive music programming with something that was so tiny like you're describing the signal that they could fit on top of their car, fit in their shirt pocket?' And the engineer said, from a matter of physics, yes, that's true, but it's impossible to make a satellite that big in Earth orbit or to fit it into a rocket ship or to get the Federal Communications Commission to agree to let you do that. But in that moment, I had my purpose at UCLA. And so, I made a beeline back to UCLA. I majored in an interdisciplinary major called communication studies. I learned everything I needed to know to build that impossible satellite and to get that impossible approval from the Federal Communications Commission. And it absolutely delights me today, Mary, for there to be, you know, millions and millions of people. The women who work in the bakery in Bristol, Vermont, tell me that they're so happy to receive SiriusXM. And let me tell you, here in Vermont, we are lucky with Vermont Public Radio. I mean, we are really blessed with VPR, but in vast tracts of the country, there is nothing like VPR. And to be able to have chamber music 24 hours or deep tracks, different types of jazz, reggae, opinions—it's all amazing. And I'm just really grateful for having an opportunity to travel, to be inspired, and then to obtain the educational knowledge I needed to make it happen.

It's always very hard to say these things. I'm a little bit skeptical because it said in the laws of the United States Communications Act of 1934 that only one—there can only be one company that owned an AM radio and an FM radio station in each city and that no company could own more than 10—over time it changed to 15 or 20 stations across the whole country. And they did this to prevent there being a monopolization of perspective. So what I was asking the Federal Communications Commission to do is to let our company control 100 channels in every nook and cranny throughout the US. And had I not had enormous passion behind my mission and saw my mission as just a stepping stone to providing that service to the entire world, it might have been difficult to overcome the bureaucratic inertia.

Sure, Mary. It was shocking. I mean, there's no other word to say when you have four children and your youngest child is at Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC. And the person in front of you is the head of pediatric cardiology and he's telling you that your daughter has a fatal illness. Only 3,000 people in the whole US have it. Every other patient he's had, which has only been three or four, have died in a few years. And your only hope is a lung transplant. I mean, you're devastated. Your knees turn to water and your eyes turn to water and you don't know what to do. So she was in the intensive care ward for a long time and we had three other kids and we would tag team going back and forth to the hospital. When I was at the hospital, she would eventually go to sleep and I went down to the library. And in the library I just kept reading things to try to understand something about pulmonary hypertension. I was a satellite communications engineer. The last time I even took biology was in 10th grade. So this was all Greek to me. But the doctors kept coming in saying, you know, we might be able to stabilize her for a year or two. We met with the lung transplant department. That was pretty grim given the long waiting list and much longer for a little kid. So I just kept reading. I would just spend all night, Mary, reading in that library. And I didn't understand things at first. So, I had to start with a basic biology textbook like I had in high school and go from that to an anatomy textbook to a college level biochemistry book and then to these peer-reviewed articles. And I had to just read like the summary, the introduction, abstract, and the end because all the methods in the middle were Greek to me. But after persisting in this, I found that there was a molecule that had been tested that reduced the pressure of people between their lungs and their heart, which is pulmonary hypertension—it's hypertension just in that area—and left the rest of their blood vessels alone. And so I just got like a little spark of light. I said, you know, maybe I can find out who's making this medicine and I can somehow get this medicine to my daughter. I mentioned to the doctor and he said that was something developed for congestive heart failure. The company dropped it 20 years ago. It's forget about it. So all I got was just thumbs down, thumbs down, no encouragement. I didn't get one smallest bit of encouragement except for my little daughter Genesis who would say, 'Martine, please save me.'

Yeah, Mary, it's really just kind of automatic. Like I can't say that there was like a drawer I opened called grit and I found it there. It wasn't. I was on autopilot. I mean, first I was on autopilot from I'm going to unite the world and end all this fighting and bickering because music has no enemies. I'm going to broadcast music to the whole world. And then the next time I had just like a passion and a purpose was I'm going to save Genesis. I mean to answer your question really directly, I would say I got to a point more than once which I kind of saw in Nick Nolte's character in Lorenzo's Oil where he had clearly gotten to the point that if he was going to work himself to death, if he was going to die to save his son, then that's what he was going to do. And my perspective was like, the last thing I wanted to do in my life was to save Genesis. And if it killed me doing it, that was fine. My life would have a purpose in saving Genesis. So it was from that reservoir and I do share with entrepreneurs, I think you have to feel this is not for everybody, being an entrepreneur. But you have to feel that your entrepreneurial mission is more important than your life itself. In fact, it is your life and self itself is accomplishing that mission. So when I had the door slammed in my face by Glaxo Wellcome, which was the company that had developed this molecule, I went back again. There's a whole list of people with names and phone numbers that work there. So, if one person said no to me, then I'll call another person. You just can never ever accept no for an answer. You often have to go through 99 nos to get a yes, but you will not fail if you don't give up. And so with Genesis's life on the line, I kept calling other people. People would give me a meeting, they would say, 'Martine, we cannot give this molecule to a satellite engineer. It would be unethical to do that.' I said, 'Well, who can you give it to?' They said, 'Well, maybe if you had a company and if you had people who were skilled in doing this, maybe we could license it to them.' So then I formed a company and I hired people that had retired from Glaxo Wellcome. And it's like they teach car salespeople that you're supposed to ask the people why don't you want to buy this car and you whittle down all the objections. And that's what I did. Every time I got an objection, I wrote it down. I'd go back home and say, okay, how can I whittle down this objection? And if you don't give up, you will get to the end of their objections. When you get to the end of their objections, you'll have your hope. And that medicine, which nobody wanted to give me, which nobody thought would really work for pulmonary hypertension, which people said even if it would work, no chemist knew how to synthesize it in quantity. If it could be synthesized in quantity, there was no way to deliver it because it had just a two-minute half-life. So, you had to deliver it continuously through a pump. I didn't want my daughter in a hospital holding on to a medicine tree. So, I had to invent a portable pump that you can wear on your belt that's invisible. You don't see it. It's underneath your shirt and it just pumps it subcutaneously through your skin. Long and short of it is when Genesis was diagnosed, there were 3,000 people in the US with pulmonary hypertension, all of them facing a mean survival of three years, more fatal than breast cancer. Today Genesis is alive and well, 30 years old and working at our company.

And while that was the purpose, I have to say that I am equally pleased because there's no measure in these kind of things that today there are 35,000 people living with pulmonary hypertension in America because they're no longer dying in two, three, four, five years. They're now able to live literally decades. I've met one of the first women who were on our medicine. She got on it in the early 90s. A beautiful woman was the gym coach at this college in the state of Maine. Developed pulmonary hypertension out of the blue, how it usually happens. And she's been on our medicine now for more than 25 years. And so I've created more people living with pulmonary hypertension than anything else. But that's a good thing. That's a very good thing.

I do, Mary. There's a few people here. I had the honor to speak at the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering yesterday and the title of my talk was CQ Love Do. C stood for curiosity. Q for question authority. Love stood for everything that you just said, Mary, and do for doing things practically. And I do believe that if you want to overcome immense odds, that energy has to have a very deep reservoir within you. And the beautiful thing about love is you can never exhaust it. There's no fixed amount of love on shelves that is going to run out in a disaster or anything. Love is infinite. And it's beyond quantification. And so if you could tap into the reserve of love that you have, I do believe you can do anything. You, Mary, you're sitting here. I feel so happy and pleased that I've been able to help save tens of thousands of lives. But with what you're doing at Green Mountain Power, you're saving 10 billion lives. I mean, Green Mountain Power is a leader in stopping the planet from overheating, creating the—taking the most beautiful place in the whole universe, the biggest telescopes, the biggest networks of scientists. We can't find anywhere in the universe. We've not heard any signals from anywhere in the universe as awesome and beautiful as the planet Earth is. And here we are just wasting it. And those people like you and Green Mountain Power who are saving it. You are our greatest heroes and I know that comes from the love of life and the love of planet and thank you for doing that, Mary.

I completely agree with you and it's interesting. When we build our manufacturing facilities for medicines at United Therapeutics, we have a company policy that every new building has to balance the energy it uses by creating that energy on site, net zero philosophy. And does it drop the cost of the buildings? Yes it does. And people say to me, well Martine, you guys should get an exception because you're developing medicines to cure cancer and lung disease and other diseases. But my response to them is, what is the good of curing these diseases if we're all going to die from a ruined planet? It makes no sense. So I don't believe we should allow our lives to be governed by dollars and cents and internal rates of return. These things are important like hammers are important. Nails are important. Screwdrivers are important. But you wouldn't want to govern your life by hammers, nails, and screwdrivers, right? You want to govern your life by you love your family, so you're going to build a house for your family. And you use those tools to do it. So we should govern our businesses by our passion, whatever that might be. We love feeding people. We love transporting people. We love powering people. I love healing people. And use all of these dollars and cents tools to implement our passion.

Exactly.