Keith Black Interview (page: 5 / 5) Pioneering Neurosurgeon	Print Interview

What haven't you done that you would like to do?

Keith Black: That's a long list. Find a cure for brain cancer. I would love to do that. I would love to develop two great kids, a daughter and a son, who are doing something that they love to do and are happy and successful doing it. One of my interests now is actually getting to move into the whole field of developing a biotechnology company, which is something that I haven't done before. I've been professor, I've been teacher, I've been surgeon, I've been researcher. But moving into the realm of business now, taking the technology and creating a business enterprise from it is a new venture for me, because the skill set becomes very different and it's a new challenge.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think essentially the real economic boom in the next five or ten years is in the area of biotechnology. I think it's going to be unlike anything that we've ever seen before, and the major breakthroughs are going to be with biotechnology firms, simply from an economic standpoint. If you're working as a researcher in a research lab, you're lucky if you get a grant for a half-million dollars to a million dollars a year. It takes $100 million to get one compound from the lab into clinical practice. So as a researcher relying on grants, you would never have the resources that you'd need to rapidly accelerate your discoveries into clinical treatments. The only way to do it is with dollars from the private enterprise sector. So one of the things that we're looking at doing now, is to build a biotechnology company where we would have the resources to take the technologies from the bench to the bedside.

Looking ahead into the 21st century, how do you see our priorities as a nation? Do we have our priorities straight?

Keith Black: I think that it really becomes a national question. I don't think that any one individual has the answer in terms of whether we have our national priorities straight, because we are a collection of about 300 million individuals. What are the priorities of those 300 million individuals that make them unique from China, or from Italy, for example?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I would like to see us, though, in a real sense, take some of the money that we spend on the military. I think the concept of war is obsolete. I mean war is not going to be waged with guns. It's going to be waged on the economic business front. And to convert some of those dollars, number one, into saving our environment, to figuring out how we're going to cut down on the greenhouse effect and global warming, and not pollute our oceans. You know, nothing matters if we cannot inhabit this planet. To really begin to make health care a national priority, because we have an opportunity now unlike anything that we've ever had in history. The national budget spends about $2.8 billion a year on cancer research. You take a couple of B-2 bombers, and you can double the national cancer budget, for example, which is killing half a million people a year. So you could save a million lives -- one million lives -- by accelerating and finding a cure for cancer by two years. I mean, we are concerned because we lost 30,000 people in Vietnam, for example. I think it's 60,000. But the numbers are staggering in comparison. I think, you know, the billions of dollars we spent landing an astronaut on the moon that really had no real scientific objective, because we wanted to beat the Russians, and Kennedy said in '62, "We're going to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade," really is sort of a sibling rivalry between two countries. If we had that same sense of urgency about finding a cure for cancer, or Alzheimer's disease, or neurological disorders, spinal cord injury, head injury, the results would be staggering, and the impact on humanity -- in comparison to a couple of moon rocks in the National Space Museum, to saving millions of lives -- would be incomparable.

There's another question we like to ask our honorees. If you had to choose one or two books to read to your grandchildren, what would they be?

Keith Black: That's a tough one. One book that I would read to them is The Art of War, because it teaches certain lessons in life that they can apply throughout their life, in terms of overcoming obstacles -- and learning how to deal with confrontations in a strategic way -- that are placed in front of them, and it would probably give them a better chance of success.

There's a program at Stanford where faculty and students get together, and the students ask the faculty members this question: What's important to you and why?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Keith Black: I think that what's ultimately important to me is growth, and I would have to say the most important thing is spiritual growth. I think that we're given so many years to inhabit this planet, whether it's 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years in which we can learn something. Now I have to believe that, or else why are we here? So we have an opportunity to come to a place to experience a lot of things during the time that we have, and hopefully to grow and to learn something from that experience, and to leave it a better place than I think we found it, and for us to leave as better individuals than what we were when we first arrived. And ultimately, what it really ends up being in the end is spiritual growth. It's not about money. It's not about fame, and the only thing that we can really hope for -- because there is no safety in the end, we never know when the end is up for us -- but the only thing that we can hope for is that our soul and our spirit is in order, and that we've grown, and that we've helped people along the way.

This our last question. What does the American Dream mean to you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Keith Black: I think that the American Dream is an evolving concept, because it has never been entirely true, particularly for minority groups. I mean the concept that there is equal opportunity never really meant equal opportunity for everybody. And it still doesn't mean equal opportunity today. If you're an African American child in South Central L.A., in a school without the sort of capabilities as a student in Beverly Hills who is going to a private institution, even though you may have the same intellectual capability, you do not have the same opportunity. I think, in an idealized fashion, what the American Dream means is that there's equal opportunity for every American. We're a long ways from achieving that dream, and I think as a society I would have to say the American Dream is an evolving concept. The American Dream should really be, "How do we, actually, as a nation, get to the concept where the American Dream is a reality?"

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

Thank you. That was great.

Keith Black: Thank you.

It was a privilege.

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