She is the brilliant founder of Sirius satellite radio and United Therapeutics (UTHR), and… well, I was excited to meet her once exposed to the mesmerizing NY Magazine biopic: “Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive in America, was born male. But that is far from the thing that defines her. Just ask her wife. Then ask the robot version of her wife.”
She commented on what Venter calls the “Sarah Palin Project” to humanize a pig so that its heart, lung and kidney could be used for xenotransplant without chronic immunosuppressants: “Even among the conservative transplant surgeons, no one thinks it’s science fiction any more.”
“Although one third of us volunteer as organ donors, and we should, less than 1% of us will die in a way that allows for a transplant.”
Martine owns a pig farm called Revivacor, and predicts that life-saving pig-human transplants will arrive by the end of the decade. In 2013, she got her pilot’s license, so that she might speedily transport pig organs to waiting human patients. She flew in to today’s meeting by helicopter.
I think she won Venter’s heart today with her opening perspective (this being her first SGI board meeting, I had to take a memorial shot): “This is the most important company founded in the 21st century. You are creating new ontologies of life. There has been nothing as important since prokaryotic cells.”
Wow. I want to remember this perspective… and I had to quip that rarely do I hear someone trumping Venter on breathtaking vision.
And at the conclusion of our meeting: “Once in a century do you get a chance to change the history of the world. This is an astonishing opportunity. I’ve never seen anything like it”
Her public company, United Therapeutics has the artistic flair of Hunter S. Thompson, and she just published a new book: Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality
More gems from today:
Nobel Laureate Hamilton Smith: “Natural organisms are not fully evolved.”
JCV: “Colbert asked me: How can you hope to improve on what God did? I answered: because we have computers.”
And on a manager’s stumble on JCVI versus SGVI: “Some are Vaccines; some are Venters”
And we ate some syn food, reconstituted into pork of all things… =) 
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