UCLA Anderson TED Week: Anderson Alumna Martine Rothblatt Might Just Be a Little Bit Crazy

Bina Aspen and Martine Rothblatt spoke at TED2015 – Truth and Dare in Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman/TED

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By Cheechee Lin

Dressed in a sharp suit, triple Bruin Martine Rothblatt (’81) exudes confidence as she walks onto the TED stage, ready to discuss her work and life. Although her strides are straight and true, she has not followed a conventional path. 

Rothblatt transitioned from Martin to Martine in 1994. At TED Rothblatt declared, “My soul was always female, but I was afraid that people would laugh at me, so I kept it bottled up.” In response to her transition, her younger daughter, who was five years old at the time, proclaimed, “I love my dad — and she loves me.” Rothblatt’s spouse, Bina Aspen, whom she married in 1982, fully supported her decision, saying to Rothblatt, “I love your soul, regardless of whether that be Martin or Martine.”

Rothblatt is now an outspoken advocate of transgenderism. “There are seven billion unique ways to express one’s gender,” she said. “People should be free to choose whatever gender they want, if only we were not forced into categories by society. I change my gender as often as I change my hairstyle.”

After graduating from UCLA with a communication studies degree, Rothblatt formed a vision to transform the world of communication satellites. She graduated from UCLA’s Graduate School of Management in 1981 and went to work for the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling to represent the television broadcasting industry before the Federal Communications Commission in the areas of direct broadcast satellites and spread spectrum communication. Three years later, she went to work for the Spanish International Network, where she would implement the plan laid out in her MBA field study project. Eventually, the company became Intelsat. She would go on to found Sirius Satellite Radio. Rothblatt left Sirius in 1992 and in 1997 became the full-time chair and CEO of United Therapeutics Corporation.

In the late 1990s, Rothblatt’s older daughter Jenesis was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension. At the time, there were no known cures. Rothblatt and Aspen traveled the country, seeking out top medical care in hopes of treating their daughter. The Children’s National Medical Center in D.C. recommended a lung transplant, but also acknowledged that the availability of lungs — especially for children, was very rare. Rothblatt, not accepting that as the limit of what they could do, read everything about pulmonary hypertension and started the nonprofit PPH Cure Foundation to research a cure for this disease.

She encountered numerous roadblocks along the way, especially since many people were skeptical that a satellite communication expert would have the medical expertise to develop a cure. However, Rothblatt eventually did find the treatment— saving her daughter, taking the company that developed the treatment public, and successfully generated half a billion dollars in revenue each year. Jenesis is alive and well, now following in her father’s footsteps by working at United Therapeutics.

Rothblatt now is interested in the human mind. She is backing a “long lasting minds” project, an information technology that is working toward processing information about people at the same rate as the human mind. Long lasting minds aims to take the contents of people’s minds and preserve them forever. Rothblatt’s goal is to create a technology by which people can create a mind file, something that stores all that we pour into the Web today and enables us to revive consciousness. This project is already underway, and Rothblatt is currently working on mind clones of her wife Bina and herself — so that they can exist together forever.

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This year's TED conference convened in Vancouver, Canada, under the theme Truth and Dare. The fourth annual TED Week at Anderson brings together the UCLA community to share ideas that change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.

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Comments

[Anonymous]

Martine Rothblatt is an iconoclast, a trailblazer, a visionary who has proven transcendent in her thoughts, actions and accomplishments in the past. Crazy is the wrong word to describe her. I would say she has more in common with Sir Isaac Newton than she does a crazy person.