Summary:Michael Milken urged an audience of 1,400 to harness the remarkable strides the biotechnology industry has made during the past decade to eliminate diseases that kill millions of Americans annually, including cancer and heart disease.
In a 45-minute speech entitled "The Promise," which was part science lesson and part call to action, Milken said discovering medical solutions could be this generation's gift to the future.
"Why do we have this commitment to future generations?" he asked. "Because of our humanity and love and caring for other human beings that makes life worth living."
While talk of eliminating cancer or heart disease would once be dismissed as little more than a pipe dream, tremendous advances by the biotech industry now make this realistic, he suggested.
More than 56 percent of the deaths of women aged 45 to 64 and 61 percent of men in the same age group are attributable to cancer and heart disease. "It's a large market - a large problem to solve," Milken said.
Milken, himself a cancer survivor, is Chairman of CaP CURE, the Association for the Cure of Cancer of the Prostate, the largest non-governmental funder of prostrate cancer research in the world.
While biotechnology firms have tremendous potential, investors had virtually ignored this sector until recent months. After peaking in 1992, the value of biotech indexes languished virtually unchanged for more than seven years - making venture capital hard to find.
Until last year, the total value of the top 80 biotech companies had a lower market value than pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. But that all changed last fall when those biotech companies began skyrocketing. Their value has now jumped from $150 billion to $350 billion.
"For the decade of the 1990s biotech outperformed the pharmaceuticals and that all occurred during the past four or five months," Milken said.
The reason for the recent explosion is that much of the science, which was more than a decade in the making, is finally coming to fruition.
"There's a realization that technology allowing the mapping of the human genome is on the verge of occurring during the next few months," he explained. "An information base that will tell us some secrets of 3.7 billion years of evolution."
Unlike traditional medicines that deal with symptoms, biotechnology drugs and vaccines offer much greater potential. "The focus is on the cure, not just treating the symptoms," he said. "These are products that actually eliminate disease rather than products to take because of the disease."
More than 80 drugs and vaccines have already been approved, while another 350 are being tested on humans.
The breakthroughs could have profound financial implications. "There's a potential value of $40 to $50 trillion for solving problems of cancer and heart disease."
While biotechnology could eventually eliminate these killers, Milken urged his audience to take measures of their own in the meantime. "One thing to do is to change our diet," he said, urging a reduction of fatty foods and increased intake of fruits and vegetables.
"Fifty-four percent of Americans are overweight while 12 percent of the world is starving," he said.
And while Milken lauded the opportunity that the new sciences offered, he warned that dangers inevitably come with new discoveries. He pointed out that just $1 worth of a deadly biological agent could be used to cover a 1-square kilometer area. "It will take all of our collective wisdom to determine what [this science] can be used for."
Despite those concerns, the emphasis was clearly on biotechnology's promise. "[We can] use technology wisely to eliminate cancer and heart disease for future generations," he said. "Just like smallpox, that claimed more than 2 million lives around the planet in the 1960s, has been eliminated."
