My daughter, my wife, our robot, and the quest for immortality

Chris Anderson: So I guess
what we're going to do is

we're going to talk about your life,

and using some pictures
that you shared with me.

And I think we should start
right here with this one.

Okay, now who is this?

Martine Rothblatt: This is me

with our oldest son Eli.

He was about age five.

This is taken in Nigeria

right after having taken
the Washington, DC bar exam.

CA: Okay. But this doesn't
really look like a Martine.

MR: Right. That was myself as a male,

the way I was brought up,

before I transitioned

from male to female and Martin to Martine.

CA: You were brought up Martin Rothblatt.

MR: Correct.

CA: And about a year after this picture,

you married a beautiful woman.

Was this love at first sight?
What happened there?

MR: It was love at the first sight.

I saw Bina at a discotheque
in Los Angeles,

and we later began living together,

but the moment I saw her,
I saw just an aura of energy around her.

I asked her to dance.

She said she saw an aura
of energy around me.

I was a single male parent.
She was a single female parent.

We showed each other
our kids' pictures,

and we've been happily married
for a third of a century now.

(Applause)

CA: And at the time, you were
kind of this hotshot entrepreneur,

working with satellites.

I think you had two successful companies,

and then you started
addressing this problem

of how could you use satellites

to revolutionize radio.

Tell us about that.

MR: Right. I always
loved space technology,

and satellites, to me, are sort of
like the canoes that our ancestors

first pushed out into the water.

So it was exciting for me
to be part of the navigation

of the oceans of the sky,

and as I developed different types
of satellite communication systems,

the main thing I did was to launch

bigger and more powerful satellites,

the consequence was that
the receiving antennas

could be smaller and smaller,

and after going through
direct television broadcasting,

I had the idea that if we could make

a more powerful satellite,

the receiving dish could be so small

that it would just be a section
of a parabolic dish,

a flap of a plate embedded
into the roof of an automobile,

and it would be possible to have
nationwide satellite radio,

and that's SiriusXM today.

CA: Wow. So who here has used Sirius?

(Applause)

MR: Thank you for
your monthly subscriptions.

(Laughter)

CA: So that succeeded despite
all predictions at the time.

It was a huge commercial success,

but soon after this, in the early 1990s,

there was this big transition in your life

and you became Martine.

MR: Correct.
CA: So tell me, how did that happen?

MR: It happened in consultation with Bina

and our four beautiful children,

and I discussed with each of them

that I felt my soul was always female,

and as a woman,

but I was afraid people would laugh at me

if I expressed it,

so I always kept it bottled up

and just showed my male side.

And each of them
had a different take on this.

Bina said that I love your soul

and whether the outside
is Martin and Martine,

it doesn't it matter to me,
I love your soul.

My son said, if you become a woman,
will you still be my father?

And I said yes,
I'll always be your father,

and I'm still his father today.

My youngest daughter did an absolutely
brilliant five-year old thing.

She told people, "I love my dad
and she loves me."

So she had no problem
with a gender blending whatsoever.

CA: And a couple years after this,
you published this book:

The Apartheid of Sex.

What was your thesis in this book?

MR: My thesis in this book is that there
are seven billion people in the world,

and actually, seven billion unique ways
to express one's gender.

And while people may have
the genitals of a male or a female,

the genitals don't determine your gender

or even really your sexual identity.

That's just a matter of anatomy

and reproductive tracts,

and people could choose
whatever gender they want

if they weren't forced by society

into categories of either male or female

the way South Africa used to force people

into categories of black or white.

We know from anthropological science

that race is fiction,

even though racism is very, very real,

and we now know from cultural studies

that separate male or female genders

is a constructed fiction.

The reality is a gender fluidity

that crosses the entire continuum
from male to female.

CA: You yourself don't always
feel 100 percent female.

MR: Correct. I would say in some ways

I change my gender about as often
as I change my hairstyle.

CA: (Laughs) Okay, now, this is
your gorgeous daughter, Genesis.

And I guess she was about this age

when something pretty terrible happened.

MR: Yes, she was finding herself
unable to walk up the stairs

in our house to her bedroom,

and after several months of doctors,

she was diagnosed to have a rare,

almost invariably fatal disease

called pulmonary arterial hypertension.

CA: So how did you respond to that?

MR: Well, we first tried to get her
to the best doctors we could.

We ended up at Children's
National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

The head of pediatric cardiology

told us that he was going to refer her
to get a lung transplant,

but not to hold out any hope,

because there are
very few lungs available,

especially for children.

He said that all people
with this illness die,

and if any of you have seen
the film "Lorenzo's Oil,"

there's a scene when the protagonist

kind of rolls down the stairway
crying and bemoaning the fate of his son,

and that's exactly
how we felt about Genesis.

CA: But you didn't accept that
as the limit of what you could do.

You started trying to research

and see if you could find a cure somehow.

MR: Correct. She was in intensive
care ward for weeks at a time,

and Bina and I would tag team
to stay at the hospital

while the other watched
the rest of the kids,

and when I was in the hospital
and she was sleeping,

I went to the hospital library.

I read every article that I could find
on pulmonary hypertension.

I had not taken any biology,
even in college,

so I had to go from a biology textbook

to a college-level textbook

and then medical textbook
and the journal articles, back and forth,

and eventually I knew enough to think
that it might be possible

that somebody could find a cure.

So we started a nonprofit foundation.

I wrote a description

asking people to submit grants

and we would pay for medical research.

I became an expert on the condition.
Doctors said to me, Martine,

we really appreciate all the funding
you've provided us,

but we are not going to be able
to find a cure in time

to save your daughter.

However, there is a medicine

that was developed at the
Borroughs Wellcome Trust Company

that could halt the progression
of the disease,

but Borroughs Wellcome has just
been acquired by Glaxo Wellcome.

They made a decision not to develop

any medicines for rare
and orphan diseases,

and maybe you could use your expertise
in satellite communications

to develop this cure
for pulmonary hypertension.

CA: So how on earth did you get
access to this drug?

MR: I went to Glaxo Wellcome

and after three times being rejected
and having the door slammed in my face

because they weren't going
to out-license the drug

to a satellite communications expert,

they weren't going to send the drug
out to anybody at all,

and they thought
I didn't have the expertise,

finally I was able to persuade
a small team of people to work with me

and develop enough credibility.

I wore down their resistance,

and they had no hope this drug
would even work, by the way,

and they tried to tell me,
"You're just wasting your time.

We're sorry about your daughter."

But finally, for 25,000 dollars

and agreement to pay 10 percent
of any revenues we might ever get,

they agreed to give me
worldwide rights to this drug.

CA: And so you put this drug on the market

in a really brilliant way,

by basically charging what it would take
to make the economics work.

MR: Oh yes, Chris, but this really wasn't
a drug that I ended up,

after I wrote the check for 25,000,

and I said, "Okay, where's
the medicine for Genesis?"

they said, "Oh, Martine,
there's no medicine for Genesis.

This is just something we tried in rats."

And they gave me, like,
a little plastic Ziploc bag

of a small amount of powder.

They said, "Don't give it to any human,"

and they gave me a piece of paper
which said it was a patent,

and from that, we had to figure out
a way to make this medicine.

A hundred chemists in the U.S.
at the top universities

all swore that little patent
could never be turned into a medicine.

If it was turned into a medicine,
it could never be delivered

because it had a half life
of only 45 minutes.

CA: And yet, a year or two later,
you were there with the medicine

that worked for Genesis.

MR: Chris, the astonishing thing
is that this absolutely worthless

piece of powder

that had the sparkle of a promise
of hope for Genesis

is not only keeping Genesis
and other people alive today,

but produces almost a billion
and a half dollars a year in revenue.

(Applause)

CA: So here you go.

So you took this company public, right?

And made an absolute fortune.

And how much have you paid Glaxo,
by the way, after that 25,000?

MR: Yeah, well every year we pay them
10 percent of 1.5 billion,,

150 million dollars,
last year a hundred million dollars.

The best return on an investment
they ever received.

CA: And the best news of all, I guess,

is this.

Mr: Yes. Genesis is an absolutely
brilliant young lady.

She's alive, healthy today at 30.

You see me, Bina, and Genesis there.

She's, the most amazing
thing about Genesis

is that while she could do
anything with her life,

and believe me, if you grew up
your whole life with people

in your face saying
that you've got a fatal disease,

I would probably run to Tahiti and just
not want to run into anybody again.

But instead she chooses to work
in United Therapeutics.

She says she wants to do all she can
to help other people

with orphan diseases get medicines,

and today, she's our project leader
for all telepresence activities,

where she helps digitally unite
the entire company to work together

to find cures for pulmonary hypertension.

CA: But not everyone who has this disease
has been so fortunate.

There are still many people dying,

and you are tackling that too. How?

MR: Exactly, Chris. There's some 3,000
people a year in the United States alone,

perhaps ten times that number worldwide,

who continue to die of this illness

because the medicines
slow down the progression

but they don't halt it.

The only cure for pulmonary hypertension,
pulmonary fibrosis,

cystic fibrosis, emphysema,

COPD, what Leonard Nimoy just died of,

is a lung transplant,

but sadly, there are only enough
available lungs for 2,000 people

in the U.S. a year
to get a young transplant,

whereas nearly a half
million people a year

die of end stage lung failure.

CA: So how can you address that?