Thank you. It gives me a great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker and one of the highlights of this meeting. We have set up the meeting with a theme of innovation, and I think you will see it follow through. Dr. Rothblatt earned a law degree and an MBA at UCLA, and then she went on to earn a PhD at the Royal College of Medicine in London, England. Her PhD at that time was in the ethics of xenotransplantation. There are many times in life that we'll see things that look impossible, and in fact, they may seem impossible and stay impossible for decades. But it's important to note, as has been said, that the only people that change the world are the people who truly believe they can change the world. And Martine is one of those people. She initially, her first business endeavor that I'm aware of, was the founding of Sirius Satellite Radio. You've all heard about it. And at that time, the idea that everybody around the world could communicate by satellite and we could watch TV from all kinds of countries in the world was unheard of, and it was a huge legal battle and impossible battle. And she achieved that. She then found out that her daughter had primary pulmonary hypertension, and there was an orphan drug that was not worthy of development and would be too expensive to develop. And she founded a company to develop that drug, to make it available for the thousands of people with that disease, but a small number on the planet. And that company has become a very successful multi-billion dollar company, United Therapeutics. So, she hasn't stopped there. She then went on to develop Revivicor, another company to work on the development of xeno organs, and you saw Bart Griffith's success and his team with that. They've got another company looking at developing 3D printing of organs for transplantation. And with me, we've developed lung bioengineering, a center, a company to repair lungs for transplant centers to improve the utilization of lungs. And we're also working on drones to deliver organs for transplantation. And through all of this, in terms of doing the impossible, Martine also underwent a gender transition, and she's going to talk about that. And as you could imagine, many probably advised her that that would be the death knell of her career. She showed the world that it isn't, and she's taught the world a lot. She went on to be the highest-paid woman CEO in the United States, and continued to trailblaze the field. And many of us have benefited. This is one of the collaborations with industry that have been highly, highly successful, and will change the world multiple times over. So, I asked Martine to speak on what she's done, doing the impossible time and again. Martine Rothblatt.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Sam. Wow, thank you so much, Dr. Keshavjee, for that beautiful introduction. And on the topic of impossible, you could probably knock me over with a feather right now because I would have never thought it was possible to appear at a podium a few moments after one of my great heroes, Dr. Joel Cooper. So, that alone is amazing for somebody who has studied lung transplantation for so many years and been in such awe of what Dr. Cooper and the Toronto General Hospital team achieved, to be at this podium. It's like, 'Wow, I would have thought that was impossible.' Well, I think the title of the talk that I'm giving today is a little bit of a misnomer in that there's nothing that I really try to undertake which is actually, in my view, impossible. In fact, when proposals come forward or ideas are vetted that are impossible, I issue going after those things that are truly impossible. I try to really limit myself to just going after projects that are, in fact, possible. Now, many things seem to be impossible, but it's just that they seem impossible. They're really possible. And I always try to revert to basically just physics and facts and to respect physics and facts. And if the physics and facts are supportive of something being achieved, even if 99 out of 100 people think it's impossible, I don't allow myself to be dissuaded by that. Now my favorite books to read when I was growing up were biographies about people who generally achieve things that people thought were impossible, but they knew very well that they weren't impossible. And examples of this are the inventions of Thomas Edison, the flights of Amelia Earhart, the discoveries of Madame Curie. All of these biographies gave me tremendous encouragement and confidence that everybody could think something was impossible, but if the facts and the physics were on your side, it was in fact not impossible at all and you could change the world in a very positive way. One of the great quotes that inspire me is this quote here from Orville Wright that you see on the screen, which is, 'If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, then there would be little hope of advance.' So again, we have to be willing to question authority, to challenge the assumptions. And there's a kind of a nice sub quote there at the bottom from Chuck Yeager that of course one is going to have setbacks, but you back up, don't give up.
I started my career with communications law and MBA degrees from UCLA as Dr. Keshavjee noted, and then a PhD in xenotransplantation ethics from the UK. While my thesis advisor was England's leading medical ethicist, it was a recommendation from Sir John Vane that got me into the PhD program. I wanted to do a dissertation about xenotransplantation ethics, and that sounded pretty far out to everybody back in the 1990s. But Sir John, whose Nobel Prize was for discovering the mechanism of action of the COX-2 inhibitors, carried a great deal of weight, and I felt very proud that he added my dissertation, shown there on the far left, to his bookshelf containing those of his other students. Before moving into medical ethics, I had engineered new kinds of satellite communication systems. Each time, my goal was to do something with satellites that had never been done before, and almost by definition that most people thought was impossible. For example, in the 1980s, I showed with our GEOS Star satellite system that it was possible to send texts and messages from handheld transceivers to satellites 1/6 of the way all the way to the moon. In the 1990s, I used new kinds of satellites with spot beams to send television programming between studios in Latin America and hotel television antennas throughout the United States and South America. This was also thought to be not only technically challenging, but actually illegal because you were kind of broadcasting propaganda or programming into other countries' sovereignties. But I found a wormhole through all of these different legal regulations, and I showed that we weren't harming anyone. And as a result, my PanAmSat satellite system is today part and parcel of the largest network of global satellite communication systems.
When I next tried to use satellites to send dozens of channels of digital audio programming direct to vehicles with no visible antenna at all, nothing to point at the satellite, which is how SiriusXM would work, almost nobody believed me. Not the people in the Federal Communications Commission, not the people who would finance it, not the radio broadcasting industry, not even the person who followed me as CEO of SiriusXM. At the beginning, nobody thought that this would work. Our satellites would be about a tenth of the way to the moon and thus 100 times further than most space operations. But they would send high-speed data to non-steerable antennas on cars and aircraft. This could be done by using a new digital coding technique that would allow us to achieve signal gain digitally instead of just mechanically. This also had never been done before. And it was illegal to implement any of this without Federal Communications Commission approval. Furthermore, there were no spare frequencies to use. All the radio frequencies have been gobbled up by other things ranging from VHF television to garage door openers. And finally, can you imagine trying to finance such a billion-dollar system because the moment that you launch it, there's nobody that has anything to listen to your signals because it never existed before. So, try to tell Wall Street why you're going to have subscribers or listeners. They say, 'Why would somebody buy something to subscribe to something that doesn't yet exist?' Of course, it turned out to be a very great success with tens of millions of subscribers here in the United States. And it's in no small part to the magnetic attraction of this very famous personality named Howard Stern. To this day, I find it amazing that even though our current company, United Therapeutics, the company I started to save the life of my daughter and also helped save the lives of thousands of other patients, despite that fact, to this day, I get more people coming up to me and saying, 'Thank goodness, Martine, for Sirius XM radio. That saves my life each and every day.'
Anyway, it looks like it saved Howard Stern's life, too. I'm going to try to click this video on. This is an exciting time. I mean, you invented this whole deal and here we are. We're enjoying it. And as a broadcaster, I said this to you in the hall and I'll say it to you on the air. I thank you. If you hadn't invented this medium, I mean, the fact that I'm getting to look at the This is like me meeting Marconi. If you hadn't invented this medium, I would have been out of the radio business. It better when you said, 'This is like meeting Martin Luther King.' Oh, that's true. That's a whole other thing. But it's true. Did you say that? That's a whole other thing. But, it's true. Did you say that? I did. Where did you get that? I got to tell you something. I am so grateful that you invented this medium. I mean, I am flourishing here and also able to be part of something from the ground up. But, I mean, this has got to be nuts. This was a dream in your head and now you're seeing it all come together. So, as you can see from that video, you know, sometimes you can make a medicine that saves thousands of people's lives, but, you know, what really is so transformative is something like a satellite communications technology. Well, sometimes it's personal things, not professional things, that seem impossible, although in fact, they turn out not to be. And as you'll probably be able to tell from this next video clip, I felt pretty nervous up on stage and what you'll see in a moment at the Forbes Women's Forum. I felt pretty nervous because for the first 35 years of my life, I had lived very much as a man. Nevertheless, I knew in my soul every bit as much as I knew that I was a turner of the technologically impossible into the possible, that I knew just as clearly as that that I was a transgendered woman and not a cisgender man. I could no more not invent, I could no more not innovate, I could no more not build, than I could not come out as the female person that I truly was. After getting permission of over 40 years, Bina, and our four children, and despite getting resistance and even strong discouragement from my aerospace industry colleagues, I nevertheless transitioned from Martin to Martine in the full light of day. And here is how the NBC medical correspondent, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, saw it all.
