Years ago, a top chemical biologist pondered ditching his cancer research to take a more lucrative commission growing healthier apples. Michael Milken stopped him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told him we could probably eat the same apples for the next 20 years and be OK, but we wouldn\u2019t be OK if he didn\u2019t continue his potential groundbreaking work,\u201d Milken, 76, said. \u201cThen we funded him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Driven by a family history of disease and his own experience with prostate cancer, Milken, the onetime junk-bond wizard whose spectacular downfall<\/a> on securities charges led to a 22-month prison term in the 1990s, has spent the last three decades trying to advance medical science so that people \u201ccan find cures to life-threatening diseases within their own lifetimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cFaster Cures,\u201d a book that is part memoir and part medical history, the financier-turned-philanthropist argues for applying business principles to foster quicker medical breakthroughs: more collaboration and information-sharing among researchers, a more streamlined path through government regulations, and more public and private funding to keep the best and brightest working in the field. The book was written with Geoffrey Evans Moore, a longtime associate of Milken\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Milken, whose net worth is estimated at $6 billion<\/a>, has donated $1.2 billion to medical research and public health causes and raised another $1 billion for them from donors, according to a spokesperson. Much of that money is distributed through the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute, which funds organizations around the world that support research and education.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

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Q: Was it difficult to write about your father\u2019s death from cancer and your own diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer in 1993, which was thought at the time to be terminal?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Life-threatening diseases are not separated by wealth or anything else. One in 2 men are going to get diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime; for women, it\u2019s 1 in 3. In the hospital room or in surgery, we\u2019re all equal. That\u2019s why I wanted to personalize it because my family is no different. In the 1970s, science could not move fast enough to save my father\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
Q: Is the U.S. too slow in reaching cures?<\/strong><\/p>\n
A train today in Europe or Asia can travel at 200 miles an hour, but the average train in the U.S. travels at the same speed as 100 years ago<\/a> because you can\u2019t put faster trains on tracks that aren\u2019t more modern. Science is this train that\u2019s moving fast, but the tracks are 20th-century tracks. As science moves quickly \u2014 sequencing your genome and your microbiome, for example \u2014 many of the ways we deal with our health system still relate to what it was in the 1900s, not in this century.<\/p>\n
Q: What are those outdated practices?<\/strong><\/p>\n
One is collaboration. Thirty years ago, after my diagnosis, I attended a prostate cancer conference at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and I noticed that no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering [in New York City] was presenting, and they were the other recognized top experts in the field. When I asked why, I was told by MD Anderson\u2019s people that they felt Sloan Kettering was a competitor. I said, \u201cThey\u2019re not a competitor to patients.\u201d We\u2019ve done a huge amount of work in that area to get researchers and scientists sharing information and working together.<\/p>\n
Q: Are cancer patients getting into clinical trials at earlier stages?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Yes, but there\u2019s another element here relating to health equity. The demographics of America have changed considerably. Sixty years ago, 75% of everyone living in the U.S. who was not born here came from Europe<\/a>. Today, more than 70% of everybody living here who wasn\u2019t born here came from Latin America or Asia<\/a>, but our clinical trials are still largely Caucasian<\/a>. We\u2019re not including people who will someday make up the majority of people in this country.<\/p>\n
Q: You also spend a lot of time writing about prevention, especially as it pertains to diet. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n
If you went to medical school in China 30 or 40 years ago, you wouldn\u2019t have even studied diabetes because it was so rare there. Today, because of changes in the food chain and what they\u2019re eating \u2014 meat-based and fat-based diets \u2014 China has the most people with diabetes<\/a> of any country in the world. That\u2019s what thousands of McDonald\u2019s<\/a> and KFC and other franchises will do. We also know that eating certain foods can slow the growth of certain kinds of cancers, or that changing your diet can accelerate the growth. The CEO of one of the largest medical research companies in the world told me, \u201cThe next great drug is going to be prevention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Q: But isn\u2019t the medical industry oriented toward selling treatment and not prevention?<\/strong><\/p>\n
When we proposed the idea to the medical community in the \u201990s that you are what you eat, they said, \u201cProve it.\u201d And we didn\u2019t sequence the genome<\/a> until 2003, so prior to that the evidence was mostly anecdotal, but there was plenty of it. The notion is mainstream today, but teaching doctors that nutrition makes a difference is still a minor, minor part of medical school. It should be at the forefront. We often refer to the produce section of the grocery store as the pharmacy of the 21st century.<\/p>\n
Q: Your financial theories revolved around finding lower-graded bonds that produced great returns \u2014 essentially, identifying an undervalued segment of the market. Is there an undervalued equivalent in medicine or science?<\/strong><\/p>\n
It\u2019s about the democratization of capital. In medicine and science, access to financial capital serves as a multiplier effect, but the largest asset is human capital. I\u2019ve spent considerable time trying to identify the future Ted Turners or [telecommunications giant] John Malones of the world of medicine, then convincing them to go into research and funding them.<\/p>\n
Q: How do you provide financing to the most talented people in the field?<\/strong><\/p>\n
That includes private and public funding. In 1998, we organized a march on Washington, and a few months later President Clinton signed into law a massive increase<\/a> in the NIH [National Institutes of Health] budget. Since then, there\u2019s been an incremental half a trillion dollars invested into the NIH, and that has made all the difference for so many organizations working on specific diseases or types of cancer.<\/p>\n
Q: Why do you fund medical research?<\/strong><\/p>\n
My interest in medicine and science started when I was 8 years old. It accelerated in the \u201970s when my wife\u2019s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and my father\u2019s melanoma returned. That began a search for medical solutions that I brought into my existing philanthropy in 1982. Who a person is and what they believe in \u2014 there has always been a lot of misinformation out there, and it\u2019s only going to get worse with artificial intelligence chat. It\u2019s not just related to me. But I think the thousands of companies that we financed, and the millions of jobs created, are evidence that the ideas I put forth are today in the mainstream. All of the facts are there for one to see.<\/p>\n
This article was produced by <\/em>KFF Health News<\/em><\/a>, which publishes <\/em>California Healthline<\/em><\/a>, an editorially independent service of the <\/em>California Health Care Foundation<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n
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