Keynote Address
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Michael Milken
Founder and Chairman
Prostate Cancer Foundation
Introduced by Stuart Holden (Prostate Cancer Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles)
View the Transcript Below:
Keynote Address
Michael Milken [00:00:04] In looking at who’s here, there’s two or three themes which I’d like to leave you with today. Change is constant. First, we have 17 countries represented here. There will be a continued dramatic change in the future of where medical research is going on, and much of that might occur outside the United States. That is not necessarily a negative, but the transition is going to be very difficult. Next are YIs. This young generation makes up the largest group in the room today, and I was checking, and I’m leaving for Washington today. Our oldest YI, our oldest young investigator of my medical research today is turning eighty-five. So, the advantage of being a YI, in this case Steve Rosenberg, you get to be a young investigator forever, even if you’re eighty-five years old. The relatively even distribution between biotech pharma and government and academic investigators is a very important thing. And we have a small group of twenty-five of us that leverage. So, Skip Holden discussed the baseball World Series that starts today. The Dodger game, and as you know, we have representatives here from British Columbia, and we have from University of Toronto. So, we honor you also here today. And eight former employees of mine own the Milwaukee Brewers, so we have all of them on suicide watch. Vladimir Guerrero hit six home runs in ten or eleven playoff games. Six home runs. And if you don’t know he was born in Quebec. And Ohtani struck out ten, if you even know what baseball is, and hit three home runs, and he was born in Japan. So, when you look at what’s happened to The American Sport, it’s no different than what’s happening to medical research. So, the Dodgers, particularly, have significant players from Korea, Japan, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Japan, and likewise the Toronto Blue Jays, one-third of their starting lineup was born outside of the United States today. And when we look at their entire rosters today in Major League Baseball, 28% of all the players in this sport that’s truly American were born outside the United States. And the Dodgers have players from six different countries, and Toronto five different countries. Well, what about us? One in five active physicians, more than 200,000 were born and attended medical school outside of U.S. or Canada. These numbers have increased by more than 30%. 43% percent of all doctoral-level science and engineers were born outside the United States. And the PCF. Young investigators exceed all of these numbers. They cover the world, they make us stronger, they give us a way to look at the world differently, and their impact has been significant with therapy after therapy that’s been approved over the last 15 years, which they’ve touched. The PCF has changed dramatically itself, and we now fund in 28 countries around the world. And why? If you look at U.S. graduate students today, there is not one field in the science where the majority of the students in this country were born in this country. So, we can take a look at petroleum engineering, only 82% of everyone in that area in school in the United States was born outside. Electrical engineering 74. If you look at PhDs and AI, 77% were not born in the United States, and 50% of all the software engineers, scientists in Silicon Valley were not born in the United States. And if we get down to mathematics, 56% of those in graduate programs were not. If we look at Nobel Prizes, and the U.S. takes great pride in that. 319 Nobel Prizes in the sciences have been awarded to people from the United States, but 36 percent of those winners were not born in the United States. And if we take a look at the PhDs today, you will find the vast majority of them were not born in the United States. 80% of everyone in electrical engineering and computer science today, so we are dependent on an international diaspora that has come here to the United States, and it’s quite possible in the future that the United States will not be the number one destination, which is why it’s very important you look internationally. Why are we all here? And for the 33rd time, I’m just reminding you that it isn’t just health, it’s economics, and 50 percent of all economic growth in the last 200 years. Can be traced to public health and medical research. And obviously, it’s hard to think of any other advancement that has driven the world, and what has driven these numbers has been the extension of life. So, four million years of evolution increased life expectancy from 20 to 31. Four million years ago, there were living organisms that lived 20 years. And so, what’s happened since the start of the twentieth century? We’ve increased average life expectancy on this planet by 41 years. Two generations doubled life expectancy in Southeast Asia, and we’re about to see in one generation, just one generation, the doubling of life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa today. So, one of the four areas I was hoping we could touch on today. First are disintermediation and biomedical research. Those that embraced in their careers or their investment portfolios the idea of the change in cost, speed, storage, and access, have one become independently wealthy, and two have furthered their careers. I rolled out in 1976 the first supercomputer on my trading floor. I had already been disintermediated in 1970 by the creation of the calculator. There were only three of us that could calculate yields in our head. My study of base two to base 10 to base two. A little company, Bomar disintermediated my capabilities. But by ’76, it was so exciting. Now anyone could have access to trading information, which was in my head, disintermediated again at a cost of one million per megabyte. One million. Well, the iPhone 17 that seems to be doing pretty well today, costs a half a cent a megabyte. Data costs going from a million dollars to a half a cent. If you thought that was going to happen, you have benefited. What about connectivity? What about being able to talk? In 1975 if I wanted to speak to someone in Asia, it cost me $10 a minute. Today, for most people it’s zero, but let’s say it’s one cent. And what about connectivity? Nine billion mobile phones on the planet connecting you to people, and those businesses that decided they would use this connectivity to connect have been the dominant winners in the world. Technology and disintermediation and disruption and innovation is with us in every single industry. I thought I’d start today just mentioning education. Many of you might remember that a man named John Chambers, who was the head of Cisco, and in March of 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, worth $550 billion. It lost $400 billion in the next two or three years in market cap. It lost more value than any other company in the world was worth. But John pointed out that moving into education online would make email and other things look like a little rounding error. Well, it’s 25 years later and as the next couple years unfold, you will see a dramatic change in education. If I cite two examples to you today, and I and our activities have been working on this for 50 years, but Joe Liemandt, who is the CEO of a company called Trilogy Software, and MacKenzie Price created something called Alpha Schools. It opened physical schools this year in New York and other cities around the world. And what is an alpha school? It’s a school where your teacher is AI teacher. So, if using satellites and other things can keep track of your 9 billion, 9 billion phones on the planet, where you are, information you want, sending you videos, etc., etc., they have concluded that the same technology can provide online AI teachers to the two billion children on the planet, also. So, these schools don’t have a traditional teacher, they have adults in the room, but essentially, they, using AI, are learning what you know, what you don’t know, how you learn, and individual education is coming with your own personal tutor teacher. Potentially to every single person on this planet in the next decade. The second thing that’s occurred is the people that built Epic Games, 600 million people on the planet go to Epic Games, left Epic Games to build education as a game. And beginning next year, their goal is to get 600 million kids learning in game platform like they had at Epic Game. Joe Liemandt has left Trilogy to lead Alpha Schools, just like the team has left Epic to focus on education. And what about agriculture? What about agriculture? Well, we have seen today in agriculture improving the quality of how you grow food, etc., increasing the nutrients would eliminate 500 million jobs at the same time. So, if you’re the president or prime minister of a country, you have to think about what they’re doing once you deploy a more modern way. And so, one of our other foundations has focused on this in Sub-Saharan Africa, created these prizes. In this case it was a challenge that you had to double the productivity of food grown and the nutrient value. By creating these prizes and competitions, 3,500 people from 105 countries competed across six continents to work on increasing the productivity of farming and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa. We then picked 25 finalists. They actually had to grow and use their techniques in Sub-Saharan Africa in 16 countries, and a couple years ago the winners were announced, and how food is going to be produced in Sub-Saharan Africa will never be the same due to these competitions. So, let’s look at some other areas, let’s focus for a moment say on finance and the media. So, the most valuable media companies in the world today are not your traditional companies. If I just look at Netflix at 473 Billion, it is worth more if I take Sony out, because of their game platforms, it is worth more than all the traditional media companies combined. When it went public for $200 Million, before it went public it offered to sell itself to a company called Blockbuster for $50 million. It’s had a 10,000 to 1 return. Blockbuster no longer exists. Their view was who needs a mail order delivery of DVDs or VHS when we have 9,000 stores. None of those stores exist today. In finance, the world’s changed dramatically. All these acronyms, et cetera, have found a way to reduce risk, bring access to capital to entrepreneurs by securitizing those loans. And that is why you’re able to get a mortgage, a credit card today, because that risk is spread over millions of people. The result has been an amazing increase in the 30 years of this development, with 62 million jobs just in the U.S. On small and medium business and large losing four. The largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have changed also. And so, by far the largest today is Eli Lilly. And we have one here that was number two, is now number seven, Novo Nordisk. And it’s quite possible these products that you’re very familiar with, which are now prescriptions written for kidney, heart, sleep apnea, potentially Alzheimer’s here, will change medicine as we know it. We estimated the cost of obesity in America alone was $3 trillion a year. It’s quite possible that is going to change dramatically, and China will be a major beneficiary since they have the most people with diabetes in the world today. Research, as we look at where it’s occurred, the U.S. has dominated it, Europe has dominated research today. That is changing, and everyone for the next 10 years, that chart will look substantially different, with Europe and the United States playing a role. Yes, when we look at where is R&D coming today, U.S. first, China second, South Korea third, and so on. So, a change is afoot. And if we look at research spending, the U.S. still leads the world today, but you can see nonprofit organizations at the moment are pretty low on that list. 10 years from now, they might become the largest source of financing for bioscience research. In making the case, that Skip outlined the challenges today to the government, we’ve pointed out here that bioscience sector produced a $3.2 billion change here and benefit to the country. If you look at where disease focus is of your largest companies, in 1997, we created a venture capital firm because very little research was going on in cancer, and that venture capital firm was created, funded by many of the directors of the Prostate Cancer Foundation that only could invest in cancer. And you can see today, as you look at the percentage with Bristol Myers the largest as a percentage, this is a significant part of this portfolio. The U.S. today and why it’s so important and why you are concerned, I’m concerned, and everyone is concerned, still plays a large area. But I just I show you this slide particularly for one reason. It’s not something you don’t know. But one foundation, one today, the Welcome Trust, is putting out 1.3 billion a year in medical research. Ten years from now, there’ll be 10 or 20 of those, not putting out a million, but maybe 10 million a year. The U.S. Approval, and we talk about the issues with the FDA, and I’m meeting with the Commissioner tomorrow in DC, but U.S. was the first approval today on 68% of all approvals occurred in the U.S. And obviously China is dramatically accelerating its investment in R&D spending. They have to in bioscience for many reasons. One, they have the most people with diabetes. Two, they have the most people with cancer. 300 million smokers bode poorly for future. Next, it’s aging. Median age in China has now hit 40. China is older than the United States. And as we’ve discussed over the years, last year in China, only 9 million children were born. 9 million down from 30 million at its peak. Substantially larger population, a two-thirds reduction in the number of children, and anyone can do the math. Nine million kids, if life expectancy was 80, stabilizes your population at 720 million, not 1.4 billion. So last year you now have begun where more people die every year than are born in China, but Japan has shown that way where for years two die for every that are born. Lastly, as we make this case to the government, that we estimate that bioscience supports 10 million jobs throughout the U.S. Economy, and what’s occurring from that standpoint. So where is the source of U.S. medical and health research coming from today? It is estimated that as little as 1% is currently coming from foundations and private funds. This is going to be the fastest growing element that you will interact with over the next decade and change. What about the change in foundations? The world’s largest foundations today. Novo Nordisk being the largest, Tata the second, Lily the third, that’s Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust. All of them have a major component of health care within them. Some are particularly health care-oriented foundations. And this enormous change in wealth of individuals. So, we now have 10 individuals, nine of which are in the United States that have a net worth of over $150 billion. Warren Buffett has stated that he is going to be no longer matching the Gates Foundation at $3 billion plus a year when he passes away. And his three children will be in charge of giving away $7.5 billion a year. So, when you think about people that are older, I mention to you 20 years ago in a talk that in the early 90s the person who was considered the wealthiest in the United States was John Kluge. And my wife Laurie and I were having brunch with him in his home in Palm Beach during one of our PCF tennis tournament breaks in Palm Beach. And I asked John, who I had financed, how much would you pay for one year of good health? And you could each ask yourself at 75, 80, 85, 90. How much would you pay for one year of good health? Would you pay 100% of your income for one year of good health? And for most of us, the answer is yes. Well, Larry Ellison is over 80. Mark Zuckerberg is an outlier at 41 or 42, but he and Priscilla reaffirmed that 99% of their net worth of $250 billion is going to go for nonprofit activities, and their major focus today happens to be on medical research. If you talk to the tech community today, whether it’s Zuckerberg and Chan, whether it’s Patrick Collison, they believe that medical research is not deploying effectively the technology available today, and they are funneling their wealth into medical research programs and technologies today. But if Sergey Brin, for example, has given between 1.3 and 1.5 billion now just to Michael J. Fox Parkinson Foundation. So, as you start to look at this list of 10 and thinking $2 trillion times 5%, and what that percent is per year, it will be larger than most medical research activities. One year of good health for most of us as we get older is a blessing, a blessing from that standpoint. Charitable giving in the U.S. is up 90 percent here in the last seven to eight years at approaching $500 billion a year. And the aging populations of the world will increasingly invest in medical research. It is estimated that $80 trillion that lies with the baby boomers just in the United States, that $20 trillion will be going into foundations, of which 25% will go for health care. So, if you follow that number, you’re talking about $250 Billion a year coming out of these individuals. So, I just challenge each of you, as you interact with patients or others, just ask them how much they would pay for one year of good health. To be as healthy a year from now as they are today. The next thing that’s changing that not everyone is focused on is where are millionaires going? This is a look at ’24. So, 2022 was the last year that most millionaires moved to the United States. Number one location in the world today is the UAE. They have two trillion dollars in investable funds. They’re one of the largest investors in the world today. They’re highly sophisticated. And you could ask yourself today would a Jen-Hsun Jensen Huang, who built the most valuable company in the world, come to the United States, or might he today go to the UAE? The U.S. is second, but they’re going to Canada, who has had incentives, they’re going to Singapore, number two, but they’re also going to Italy and Greece because they’ve changed their tax laws. And after China, the number one place they’re leaving from is the UK, because they changed their tax laws. The other one that’s significant is India. It’s only a couple hours to Dubai. And so, much of this wealth is moving. And it’s not just moving the wealth. We estimate if China would let you leave with your money, and the last survey shows 60% of everyone worth a million dollars in China wants to leave. They would be losing not 15,000 millionaires a year, but a million. So, this is where they’re going. They’re taking their talent, they’re taking their investments, they’re taking their entrepreneurship, and in a little while you’ll listen to one of the PCF’s great young entrepreneurs who spoke to us 25 and 20 years ago, Arie Belldegrun, as he will tell you he’s spending more time in the Middle East and other places in the world. Next, what about artificial intelligence? You can’t read a newspaper. The idea that one trillion dollars is being spent worldwide on these AI data centers. Where’s it taking us? One of my favorite publications, the New York Times, who has a hard time getting any fact correct, in 1987, had this article that we would not sequence the human genome to the 22nd century. Well, something changed. That you all know, and the cost of sequencing dropped, and Francis Collins spent three billion dollars in 13 years completing the sequencing of what today you can get for a couple hundred dollars and in a few hours. But let’s look at this destination in the world where the most millionaires are moving, called the UAE. They are sequencing the genome of 100% of their citizens. Not only the genome, their sequencing, their, in many cases their microbiome, they’re sequencing their mutations, et cetera. And they have some of the most modern technology in the world. And if you visit with the leaders of this country, of this country the UAE, they can pull up on their computers every single person in the hospital in the UAE, why they’re in the hospital, where they are, what their disease is, what the issues are, and this might, at this rate, be the very first country in the world that moves to prevention rather than treatment. And so today, if you’re going to get married in the UAE and you’re nationals, you might undergo genetic counseling that doesn’t prevent you from getting married, but telling you what is the potential diseases that you have and mutations in this area? There’s so many changes. Accelerating clinical trial enrollment. The PCF and UroToday was taking on this challenge. There was a clinical trial in Italy that was running five weeks behind. They came to our UroToday Division, asked, could we put something out that could accelerate it? If you see what occurred here, videos were made describing it at that sign. More than 10,000 people saw those videos. They went from being four to five weeks behind to four to five weeks ahead, accrued 700 people to the clinical trials by using technology and letting people access it on the phone. This is not alone. What else has changed dramatically? Most of you are fully aware that we made this significant commitment to the VA, a commitment that totaled up to 65 million to build these centers of excellence. So, when you entered the VA, and I remember Jonathan Simons and I and Head of the VA, McDonald sitting there and standing there in Washington announcing this effort. The idea that you would be in the VA program and you also would be entered into the leading cancer center in your area. Life has extended. The only place that African Americans now have the same life expectancy as the general population is in the VA. We went to them for the millions of records of patients and data available to you. What has occurred? 1.2 million patients, 4,500 veterans with prostate cancer, 40% reduction in death of black men, and 21 centers today of excellence in this country. And this data is available to you. This movement of AI had many forerunners. A slide which I put up in 2016, I thought of putting up today. So, nine years ago, two highly skilled pathologists looking at the same data agreed only 60 percent of the time. Machine learning today predicted patients far better than any human being is capable of doing. The growth of this market is substantial. Healthcare-focused AI machine learning market is projected to grow in just five years to 187 billion. AI-assisted diagnosis, and many of you have seen those studies. UCSF put out their study earlier this year showing correct diagnosis by a doctor, Doctor plus AI, and AI alone. AI had the best results, but these are some directed here to particular diseases that we see in cancer. Investment in R&D continues to expand, and physicians versus artificial intelligence at this time, 304 cases using Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system achieved four times the accuracy today. As we step back and think about the changes, in 1993, there was a young company called Intuitive Surgical that introduced the concept of minimally evasive surgery. The delay of the implementation of the surgery was slowed down by almost ten years because of the question, and I was sitting at our meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, where one of the leading heads of oncology urology say, how do we know if the results are going to be ten years later? So, if you look at the young and dashing Stuart Holden, think of all those surgeons, medical school fellowships, et cetera, the top of the profession, the leaders of oncology programs. Everything you’re capable of been doing might be obsolete here. You’ll be invited into the operating room to look and supervise, but someone else is going to be doing the operation. Just think, this is going to potentially change your standing, your career. Resistance was available and I and plentiful around the world, and it delayed by almost a decade, the full implementation of minimally evasive surgery. And today, as we look at the movement of non-evasive surgery focused ultrasound. It’ll be interesting to see how willing people are to move in that area. Tahoe 2.0. Well, in 1993, as Skip said I was diagnosed with cancer, and we formed an organization called CaP CURE. I’d already seen what happens when you disintermediate an entire financial system. So here we just didn’t go for prostate cancer, we went for all cancers and all diseases to create that name. Ca cancer, P prostate, all disease CURE. A decade later, we had matured enough to separate really into two organizations, FasterCures, a sister organization, later another sister organization, the Melanoma Research Alliance, and the PCF. In 1993, I stood up and told this esteemed group, much smaller at our first scientific retreat, and you can see in the upper right there this young surgeon, Dr. Holden, and next to him was John Kluge, our host, and at that time purportedly the wealthiest person in the world. And you might recognize some other group here that 32 years later, some of us have aged. ’95 was really an important year. And so, the Prostate Cancer Foundation put forth, and I stayed up all night with Lee Hood saying, How can we rethink the war on cancer and put forth these 10 elements? At that time, Hopkins had done a study that took approximately 10 years to accrue hundreds of patients, families where more than one person had it. So, we decided we would use this technology, this new technology in ’95 that had been around for 40 years, television. And instead of running all these trials and trying to find out what we’re going to do, we would appeal to people that if you had two people in your family that had prostate cancer, please call in and be part of this epidemiology study that was being run out of the University of Washington for us. Besides the dashing young Dr. Holden and myself and Lee Hood, we concluded that probably the most important person we could get to get this done was General Schwarzkopf. And as you can see, 3,000 people called in, in a week. Only 10% of them, 300 families, had families where more than one person had prostate cancer. When we asked them why are they calling in if no one in their family has prostate cancer, they told us they saw General Schwartzkopf on television and they’re reporting to duty. Okay, we told them we appreciated that a great deal and will keep them in mind, but right now we were just focused. One week, one month, more than 300 families. That was ’95. What about 20 years later? So, Stanford wanted to do a heart study. They talked to Apple, they were looking to accrue people into their study. 11,000 people signed up in 24 hours. Back to 1996, as we developed our strategy at the PCF, we concluded we couldn’t bet on one area. My pet area, nutrition. These are not necessarily ranked in importance, but it was important to me. And then 20 years later, or 25 years later, excuse me, 20% of every session at our scientific retreat was about the microbiome and cancer. Also, on this list was something called immunotherapy. And it was ’97 that we started to fund Jim Allison’s work in this area. It wasn’t enough. We needed to substantially increase the funding, and so the PCF put on a march. Brought a half a million people, some of you in the room, Jonathan Simons and myself were there, and among others, and into Washington and around the country, and Al Gore and others decided that they get behind it. And $500 billion in incremental funding has occurred through the NIH. When this growth was slowing down, we had an innovation retreat, Tahoe 1.0. I used to be able to see my house in Tahoe because we had our sessions there. Now it still stands, but I only can dream about it. But these conclusions of this retreat with many of the 80 some odd people that were there, yes, the head of the NIH was there, and the head of the FDA, and so on. But there were many others that were there, like Rupert Murdoch or Peter Ueberroth that had changed their industries. The result of this retreat was the creation of a new center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Science. Our conclusion was we had clinical, we had basic but was slowing it down as we needed a new center. The U.S. Government committed two months after this retreat six billion dollars to this center over the next decade. Funding was slowing down and challenged like it is today, so we put on a celebration of science in Washington, D.C. the next year. And yes, we had many of the world’s leading entertainers and the leaders, but we sat in the front rows, and some of you are older today, the young scientists, the YIs. The Speaker of the House sat behind them, and the head of the Senate and the others, and we just wanted to reinforce for them that our future was in these young scientists, and that’s why they were sitting in the front row, and that’s why the Speaker of the House and the head of the Senate were sitting behind them. 2025, Tahoe 2.0, future of biomedical research, we brought together a number of people who had been with us in Tahoe in 1995 and 96 and 97, like the young Eric Lander and others that we had supported, and former heads of the FDA and the first head, Chris Austin of NCATS, and the former head of the NIH, both Francis Collins and Elias. And we asked ourselves again, what do we need to do to accelerate innovation and the commitment to bioscience? There was a vision that we set out, our objectives. The audience consisted of not only scientists and clinicians, but the heads of our government agencies. The conclusions of this report, which will be available to all of you shortly, was to once again state that life science sector is a strategic national asset, that the national health data infrastructure can power research and innovation. That every American and everyone around the world should be able to access and control and benefit from their own data. They should all have the ability to participate in clinical research. That the federal government should still be an attractive destination, and health agencies should adapt to today’s challenge. So today I tried to cover really three areas. One, disintermediation is with us in bioscience. Technology should allow the time to bring up drug to market to dramatically decrease as much as two-thirds to 70%. The ability to identify what will not work before the phase three expensive trials is with us today. Embracing artificial intelligence should be your partner, not your risk that you perceive. The future of biomedical research will power the world in this century. And lastly, I’d like to touch on a center that I’ve discussed with you for more than a decade, and that’s the Center for Advancing the Ideal of the American Dream. It opened on September 20th. It’s across from the White House and the Treasury. Took more than 10 years to build. This is the tree in the Hall of Generations where pictures of your family can go up, and you have the ability to dial up. And when we convene there one day, we can dial up only the pictures and the families of people in bioscience. This picture to you on your right here of the word cloud is the collective view of what this ideal of the dream is for anyone in the world. And as more entries come in, it changes its color and changes the world. We have a good location. We’re looking down on the Treasury there in the White House, and we’re looking down on the construction of the new ballroom on the East Wing. So, what is this dream? This dream is most believed today in Southeast Asia. It’s most believed in South Asia. It’s most believed in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s least believed in Europe today. What is the importance of the United States? We are filming 10,000 people on your dream, your ideals, many of you in the room, you’ll be able to access not just physically here but online beginning next year, these dreams. We’re at 4,000 on our way to 10,000. For some, the dream has turned coaching their daughter soccer team. About one-third of the people believe they’re on their way, about one-third believe they’ve achieved it, and about one-third believe they will not achieve whatever their dream is. And so, we really built this center, a center of hope, particularly for group three. The focus groups as people leave over the last month, have come out what we hope to achieve. One, they are more hopeful, they believe in it more, and two, they have more responsibility. When they thought the fact that they never knew their father was the reason why they couldn’t succeed, they have now seen dozens of stories of people that not only didn’t know their father but didn’t know their mother. And so, when we ask people what is essential the number on element is freedom. Freedom in living your life. Number two, a good family life. Number three is a financial one. Retire comfortably. But what is the lowest thing essential? When you look at what’s essential? Personal wealth. Nineteen percent, personal wealth. And so, when I look at one of our young investigators from the late 90s, Jim Allison, and I showed you the video when he, for the first time, saw a patient go into remission from taking a checkpoint inhibitor, and he broke down in tears at that time. Yes, he’s achieved some financial independence with him and Pam Sharma, another one of our young investigators. But when he won the breakout praise prize award, he gave one hundred percent of that money, him and Pam, to young girls in the country she came from in Northeast South America. So, it isn’t this issue, though the media would have us believe that there’s a direct correlation between your dream and wealth. Yes, you can see here, 70% of people still feel that a comfortable retirement is required. Will we be better off than our parents? You can see Europe and the United States as opposed to other places in the world. I just came from Mexico City. The most optimistic teenagers in the world happened to be in Mexico. An amazing fact when you read the news. The most optimistic young women in the world are in Mexico today. That there’s a better life in front of them. And what’s so surprising is the country that believes in this dream and that believes in a market-based economy more than any other is a communist country called Vietnam. I only think 95% of the population wants to be entrepreneurs, and you can’t go there and not feel that in the country today. I wanted to show you one video here in closing, of one of those 4,00 we’ve recorded, I could have picked one of you in the audience, but I picked an individual who’s an executive with the company Hasbro. The highest correlation today with being homeless later in life is that you were in foster care as a child. That is the highest percentage later to be homeless in life. There’s a lot of reasons for that. We pay families to take in foster children. They don’t necessarily have the child’s best interest because they get paid for taking child in. So, I want to show you a story of a young man whose family took in 250 foster children. I want to show you a short video here of a young man whose family adopted 11 kids. They had two. And kind of what he sees is the dream today. His name is Matt, and he’s an executive at Hasbro. Let’s take a look.
Matt Proulx [00:55:58] Everyone deserves a chance in life. Everybody, right? No matter what your background is, no matter what your upbringing is, you deserve a chance. Now it’s up to you and what you do and make of that chance. And so, I’m actually one of thirteen kids. My parents adopted eleven children. We were a foster family as well too, and we had over 250 foster kids come through the house through my lifetime. In some cases, there is a lot of hurt and pain that I’ve seen some of these children go through that at some point in time they’re able to break it. And sometimes it happens later, sometimes it happens earlier. And those children that did find success and were able to move past the hurt, they’re the ones who’ve actually had such a great deal of success. The American dream. I live it every day. I literally had nothing, came from dirt. And I look what I have now. And the ability to give that back to people. That is, it. Like it’s being able to continue to advance your life and to be quite frank, leave the world a better place than how you found it.
Michael Milken [00:57:34] So in closing, we need to develop new approaches to research. We need to develop new approaches to fundraise. We need to expand our donor network to include those that want the potential for one year more of good health. And increasingly, it’ll be less funded by governments, more by philanthropists in the U.S. and globally, increasingly, it’ll be international in its work. We began working on this concept of PSMA coming out of Cornell in 1993. But we thank our delegation here from the Peter MacCallum and everything there in Melbourne to bring it home. PCF with your dedicated efforts has built the best research team in the world. Many of you have been with me for most of this journey. Some of you have gotten older as I’ve gotten younger. But I, as a patient of one, thank you. Because I am no different than all those other patients out there. When you’re diagnosed you always wonder if you’re going to see your children get married, are you gonna be there for that happening. Are you gonna ever get to see your grandkids. So, this is a recent picture of one of the 510 ballgames I’ve gone to over the last thirty years, that luckily, we’re able to convince Major League Baseball to schedule the Dodgers at home on Father’s Day almost every year. And so, there are the presents you’ve given me. Our three children, our three spouses, and our ten grandchildren, So, thank you, thank you.