About...
Michael Milken
Mike Milken's career has mirrored his three main professional passions: medical research, education and finance.
In each, he has been uniquely successful in creating value, whether measured in lives saved (Fortune magazine called him "The Man Who Changed Medicine"), students inspired or jobs created. Between 1969 and 1989, he financed more than 3,200 companies that collectively created millions of jobs.
His philanthropy, which began in the 1970s and paralleled his business career, expanded in 1982 with the establishment of the Milken Family Foundation.
He also heads the Prostate Cancer Foundation and FasterCures, a Washington-based think tank that removes barriers to progress against all life-threatening diseases. Mike joined leading physicians in launching the Melanoma Research Alliance to support work on fatal skin cancers.
He is chairman of the widely respected and influential Milken Institute, an economic think tank whose annual Global Conference brings more than 3,000 leaders from 60 nations to Los Angeles each spring.
Mike graduated from Berkeley with highest honors and earned his MBA at the Wharton School. He and his wife, Lori, have three children and four grandchildren and will celebrate their 42nd anniversary this year.
Among the major advances of civilization - development of the wheel, agriculture, printing, the industrial and technology revolutions - the greatest achievement may be the doubling of life expectancy in the 20th century. As recently as 1900, people around the world lived an average of only 31 years. In America, where one of every five newborns died before celebrating a fifth birthday, the leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea. Over the past century, sanitation programs and antibiotics pushed those conditions far down the mortality list. They've been replaced by heart disease, cancer and stroke, more commonly among the aged.
When I was a child in the early 1950s, economists estimated that by the year 2000, treating polio would cost the United States $100 billion annually. Today's polio immunization programs cost one thousand times less than that and have virtually eliminated the disease. Thanks to medical research on all diseases and growing awareness of prevention, especially nutrition, we live longer, more active lives with fewer years of disability. In economic terms, improvements in life expectancy added approximately $3.2 trillion per year to America's wealth over the three decades beginning in 1970, according to University of Chicago economists Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel.
Average life expectancy in America now approaches 80 years and could reach 100 in this century. But continued gains in longevity are threatened by budget limits for research and by changing lifestyles. So in the current debate about reforming health care, we should remember that preventing and curing disease are at least as important as fixing a flawed system of insurance payments and coverage. Unless we focus on both care and cure, it won't make much difference if we have a public option, non-profit cooperatives, expert panels, individual or employer mandates, electronic medical records or any other reform. The costs will be unsustainable. The best way to reduce those costs is to reduce the burden of illness at all stages of life, first by increasing resources devoted to research and, second, by creating effective prevention programs.
The first of these priorities - research - has been a main focus of FasterCures/The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions for the past six years. FasterCures, a Milken Institute center, has helped expand grant programs for laboratory investigators, establish human tissue "biobanks," increase enrollment in clinical trials and disseminate best-practices information to disease-specific organizations.
This article appeared in The Milken Institute Review: First Quarter 2010; Volume 12, Number 1.