The Inventivity Pod

In 1969, Professor Larry Hench developed a glass that can grow with bones. His close friend and colleague, David Greenspan, helped Professor Hench develop the material into BioGlass, a product that is used in orthopedic and dental bone graft materials. David, a native of Brooklyn, wanted to be a drummer but turned to glass blowing instead. His big insight into entrepreneurship? “Never lie to yourself.” *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James, Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39Glass that lives. That’s the subject of our Radio Cade podcast today and in the studio with me, I have David Greenspan. David, welcome.

David Greenspan: 0:47Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here and it’s great to see the Cade Museum alive and well.

Richard Miles: 0:52Thank you. Thank you. All right. Before we talk about you, David, which is, I know probably your favorite subject, right? Of course. Let’s tell the listeners a bit about BioGlass, which is the invention that you’re associated with. Just explain to me in very simple terms, what is the core technology underneath it and sort of how does it work and then we’ll come back later and talk about the applications in the market and that sort of stuff.

David Greenspan: 1:15Bioglass is a bio material and there are lots of biomaterials you can think of. Metals for hips, knees, materials for wound healing, gauze, bandages, all biomaterials heart valves, some are synthetic some are natural. Bioglass is a form of glass and of course glass itself as a chemistry has lots of different compositions, lots of different properties within that category. BioGlass is unique because when it’s implanted, and originally it was used as a bone regenerative material. When it’s implanted in bone, it actually reacts like sugar dissolves. Well, much more slowly BioGlass the atoms, the Ions in BioGlass will react and actually stimulates bone healing and that was the core Aha moment.

Richard Miles: 2:05I see.

David Greenspan: 2:06So basically that was the concept and the original material and from that and from learning about how this glass reacts and how you could change the composition slightly and change, the reactions, the field kind of broadened out into applications well beyond just trying to help bone healing.

Richard Miles: 2:25So that sounds both fascinating and incredibly complicated at the same time because unlike what your earlier examples about a metal hip, there you’re basically just taking an object, sticking it in the body and it replaces the previous object, but BioGlass really sounds quite different in that it is actually interacting with the body itself.

David Greenspan: 2:44Yeah, it is different and when professor Larry Hinch actually invented the material, the first experiments, and he had a whole series of thought processes, which actually we can explore that, but it actually wasn’t… she wasn’t… I’m going to make a material that’s going to bond to bone. It was I’m going to make a more compatible material that we can put in the body. There’s a great quote by Isaac Asimov that I’m going to butcher right now, but basically he said the most profound moment in science is not “Eureka”, but “gee, that’s interesting” and that’s what it was. I mean, in the late sixties when Larry invented this, we were trying to make a material that the body wouldn’t reject.

Richard Miles: 3:24I see.

David Greenspan: 3:25And what he found as a result of the first experiment was that the material actually attached to the bone and that set an entirely new path for everybody coming later who was developing biomaterials.

Richard Miles: 3:38You make a great point. Referring to Larry. Larry was the actual inventor, this Larry Hinch. We both knew Larry, you knew him, much better than I did. Um, and like a lot of inventors, Larry was an interesting guy, let’s shall we say, can you give our listeners a snapshot of maybe Larry’s career, but also his personality.

David Greenspan: 3:57

Larry, was just in awe about the world and everything and he was curious. And that’s the best thing that I learned from Larry is there’s always another question to ask. You do an experiment. You get some information. That information that you get should lead you to ask three or four more questions. He was curious about everything. You knew him. I knew him. He was like a big grown up kid. And his interests were much more than just beyond science and biomaterials and bone regenerative medicine. I mean, he painted of course Boing Boing the Bionic Cat series of books that he wrote and authored, it wasn’t enough for him to write the book, but then he thought that he could make science kits for kids in seventh, eighth, ninth grade to do experiments based on the subject matter of the book. He was an incredible thinker. He was kind, generous, wonderful, and just had a love of life. Truly a PhD, a Renaissance Man, arts, painting, music, all of that.

Richard Miles: 4:53I remember my wife Phoebe and I went and visited him I guess probably about five years before he died and he was showing us around his condo at the time and he was just, like you said, a little boy. I can’t remember what he was showing us, but there were various toys and devices and whatnot. And he was thrilled to be showing them off. And I remember he… didn’t he also record his own song. Uh…

David Greenspan: 5:12Yes he did

Richard Miles: 5:13I think you can find it on Youtube, right? About a mechanical part.

David Greenspan: 5:17Yes. Yes, he did. And in fact there was a conference for bioceramics, bioglass and bioceramics and Larry was one of the co-founders. It was an international conference that rotated between Europe and America and the Far East, Japan or China. And at one of the first ones, which I was lucky enough to attend, the three Bill Bonfield and Tadashi Kokubo and Larry decided that at the banquet, the Europeans and the Americans and the Japanese and folks from the Far East and Australia would each get up and do a song and that became a regular thing at the banquets. So yeah, he was gregarious. He loved life and…

Richard Miles: 5:56It was quite amazing. All right, let’s talk about you for a second you’re a Brooklyn boy and tell us sort of growing up, what were you like as a kid? What were your interests in any role models or were you just sort of like at aimless troublemaker?

David Greenspan: 6:08I was a…

Richard Miles: 6:09I understand it’s not mutually exclusive. You could be both, but go ahead.

David Greenspan: 6:12I was… the first six years of my life, I grew up in the projects. We didn’t have a lot of money and so the projects were a little rougher than a really nice suburban sort of household and I kinda shied away, but when we did finally… my parents saved enough. We got into a house. It was a huge park that had a dozen baseball fields, three football fields. I was out the back door and they wouldn’t even bother calling me for dinner.

Richard Miles: 6:38We’re still talking about Brooklyn.

David Greenspan: 6:39Still Brooklyn Marine Park, Brooklyn born and raised, went to James Madison high school, Bader Ginsburg, Chuck Schumer, lots of other famous people. Graduated from James Madison. I had a large extended nuclear family and so growing up I did the normal getting into a little bit of trouble. I wasn’t a truant or anything and it was nothing conscious, but I just knew I had to do well in school, but my mother also thought “Oh, you should do music. You should learn art.” And I used to like to draw, so my first love was always sports, but my second first love was painting. I got to take art lessons from a professional artist who was a friend of my mother’s and she was kind of impressionist and so I studied that and I loved it and time would pass.

Richard Miles: 7:21And you’re a drummer in a rock band currently.

David Greenspan: 7:23Yeah, I played music so I had instrumental music in junior high school so that I got to play in the orchestra and the band and I love drumming and got together with friends, you know, it’s the 60s, 64 65 and…

Richard Miles: 7:34So when they kicked Pete Best out of the Beatles, you’re on the shortlist.

David Greenspan: 7:37I was ready. I was ready.

Richard Miles: 7:37You never got the call.

David Greenspan: 7:40One of one of my early most humbling experiences was we got to cut a demo record BT Puppy Records, the tokens in the happenings owned the little record company in Manhattan and we cut a demo and listened to what we sounded like and that’s when I realized music was not in my future.

Richard Miles: 7:58It’s a nice way of putting it. But you did decide that glassblowing was in your future and how did that happen and how did that end up into ceramic engineering?

David Greenspan: 8:05So being from New York, we would go on vacation, the summers in the Finger Lakes region in western New York is beautiful. So for everybody who hasn’t been up there go. And there’s a little town, Corning, New York, and you’ve probably heard Corning Glassworks, they had a museum a Glass Museum and part of that back then was Steuben glass company was blown crystal and it was gorgeous. So we’re in the museum. I’m at that point still painting, doing art.

Richard Miles: 8:30So you’re in high school, at this point.

David Greenspan: 8:32Just high school and there they were doing glassblowing. We watched them for 15 or 20 minutes and my parents said let’s go get lunch. And I said nope. And they said, come on David. And I said, you bring me back something. And they did. They went, they went to get lunch and I sat there for an hour and a half and decided right then and there I wanted to be a glass blower. Watching glass being blown was the most fascinating thing to me.

Richard Miles: 8:55Do you remember what about it that was really compelling?

David Greenspan: 8:57The fact that you could take something that’s red, hot, yellow, glowing shape it mold it put a puff of air, into it and it expands and then it cools down and it’s malleable and you can make all these beautiful forms and you could see through it and it’s shiny, and then at the end of the line some of the pieces would have engravings and you’d watch these artists engrave. It was pure art and that trip was obviously the seminal moment in my life. It’s sad.

Richard Miles: 9:26So later on, where did you go to college?

David Greenspan: 9:29When I got back, I announced to my whole family I was going to be a glassblower and there were three coronaries because nice Jewish kid from Brooklyn should be a doctor or a lawyer, you’re going to starve if you’re an artist. And I did really well in school. School was pretty easy for me and I had a cousin said, “I know a college that gives courses in glass blowing.”

Richard Miles: 9:49This is on the down low…

David Greenspan: 9:52Yes… and so she said, go to glove Joy’s college catalog. I don’t know if anybody remembers. They used to have these big catalogs that had all the schools. So we went to the library. Alfred University, upstate New York, right near the Finger Lakes, not too far from Corning is a private university, but they had a College of Ceramics, so it was New York State College of Ceramics, but it was administered by Alfred University and the Premier College for ceramics. They have the best number one ceramic art college in the world, I believe. Still do and they…

Richard Miles: 10:21Was there a formal relationship with Corning. Did Corning’s name fund some of this or no?

David Greenspan: 10:25No, this was started by a potter because they had terracotta clay at Alfred, but it became this worldclass college and I said, okay, well if I can’t be an artist there’s this technical stuff, and back then in the late sixties it was rocket nose cones. This metal oxide semiconductors was just very new, so there was all this new science and technology around ceramic materials in general and that led me to Alfred.

Richard Miles: 10:51So Brooklyn boy goes to college in upstate New York and here we are in North Central Florida. Something happened in between. How did you end up in Gainesville working with Larry Hinch?

David Greenspan: 11:02Well, of course this is the late sixties, so there’s the whole Vietnam thing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go work in industry. I’ve loved research, you know, a senior projects and doing research and what I was doing was trying to develop materials for an early artificial kidney so that kind of brought in the biomedical stuff and I was looking around to do graduate work in glass and there’s a very limited number of people that do work in glass. And Larry Hinch was at the time looking at developing glass that would withstand radiation damage in outer space because we had a space program and they were going to get astronauts up into space and they had windows but the windows would fog. So he was working on that and there was some very specific technical properties about glass. Glass is normally an insulator. Think back to early 1900s. There were all these electrical insulators that were made from glass because it doesn’t conduct well. Larry, a lot of other people found that you could change the elements in the glass composition and you could conduct electricity slightly or do other things. And Larry was working on that in the late sixties and so that fascinated me. So I applied to there and to a few other schools, Clemson University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which is Virginia Tech now. Basically why I came down to is I got the best research assistantship offer from the University of Florida and Larry’s work was interesting so I said I’m going to go there. So I get to the university and I sit down with Dr. Hinch and I say, well I’d like to work on these style electric properties of glass. And he said, well I don’t have any more funded research there but I have this new thing that we just started and it’s a ceramic biomaterial. It wasn’t called BioGlass in 1972 when I started was a ceramic biomaterial. He said you could work on that. He said, but if you want to work on the other stuff, you could do a teaching assistantship. So I could teach labs and then do my studies and then do my research or I could have a research assistantship and not bother with the 20 hours a week of labs and grading papers, so I said yes, I’ll do that. Dr Buddy Clark, who is still at University of Florida in the College of Dentistry was I think the first PhD student and I was the second working on the development of BioGlass.

Richard Miles: 13:16So from what you describe, David, it sounds like this is a technology that industry would love. Did BioGlass immediately start making a bunch of money or… tell us about the commercialization. Now I do know Larry really didn’t make any money off of his invention for a number of different reasons, but explain to me what happened after it was established as a thing who bought it?

David Greenspan: 13:38Sure. I think first 30 years later, overnight success. The concept that Larry put forward, that a synthetic material can be implanted in the body and stimulate repair was so far into everybody working in the field. Nobody believed it. I mean it literally took 15 years to convince other biomaterial researchers that it was real and it worked and because we didn’t know how or why. But in fact, by 1973, Larry had posited his five-stage reaction for bioactive glass. First it releases sodium and then silicon ions dissolve a little bit and then they reprecipitate on the surface and then that causes calcium-phosphate to precipitate and then collagen comes in there and it bonds to the bone and then it crystallizes to hydroxyapatite, which is bone mineral and all that’s well and good, but that’s not really the answer, but it was put out there and as you know, if you put it out there enough it becomes real.

Richard Miles: 14:34Right.

David Greenspan: 14:35So it was really tough. But sticking with it, finally, we found applications that were necessary where there was an unmet need basically and that’s what you have to do. It’s fine to have a material, but you need the unmet need and that was in dental bone grafting and…

Richard Miles: 14:52That was already you said 15 years in…

David Greenspan: 14:54Yeah 15 years… mid to late eighties. There had been an attempt with a startup company to actually commercialize it, but the people were less than upstanding and the company failed miserably and university got the technology back and then another group of investors came in who were more reasonable. Larry actually drove that and we actually started properly going through all the FDA regulations and all the processes to get a material into the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 15:22And this was for dental…

David Greenspan: 15:24Dental, bone graft, yes.

Richard Miles: 15:25Eventually became a toothpaste as well. Or was it different?

David Greenspan: 15:29

That was different. This was called perio glass, so it… take the BioGlass, crush it up into a powder and for people who that have periodontal disease, they have bone loss between the teeth and your teeth can fall out and it causes a lot of problems. So he put a little bit of this in that pocket where the bone is resorbed and you suture the gums up over it, cleaned it all out and it helps regrow the bone and save the teeth. And at the time there were other calcium phosphate, hydroxyapatite bone mineral types of products being used for that. So basically the synthetic bioglass was pulled along in this developing market for the periodontist and the oral surgeons who were looking for better solutions. And that’s what it always is.

Richard Miles: 16:13So I got to ask David, and you can take the fifth amendment on this one, but was the University of Florida any help during this process at all? Or were they just sort of on the sidelines or…

David Greenspan: 16:22It’s a complicated question. They tried to…

Richard Miles: 16:25I said you can take the fifth on this.

David Greenspan: 16:26No, no, no, no. Hindsight’s always 20 20. At the time they were doing, I think what they felt was best. They were looking not proactively, but if somebody came, they were willing to license technology. Larry always had a hand in continuing to do research that was funded by the company, so companies that licensed the technology to commercialize it had a component that was giving Larry money directed towards some of what the company wanted to do, but back in the seventies and the eighties and of course there’s a very famous case of another inventor who invented some electrolyte drink and the university didn’t know what to do. So we were all very naive back then.

Richard Miles: 17:05That’s one of the reasons I was asking. I couldn’t help but be struck by the timing in that. You said it was 1972 right…

David Greenspan: 17:10When he invented, yeah…

Richard Miles: 17:11And that’s right when the University of Florida chose to sue Robert Cade, the namesake of this podcast over Gatorade, and so I imagined that wasn’t the best environment maybe to…

David Greenspan: 17:22But the university didn’t know they licensed. I mean the first license was to an orthopedics implant company, Howmedica. And the university did have a licensing agreement. It wasn’t as favorable to the university as it might have been. It wasn’t prohibitive to the company, but the university is so much better these days at knowing that… a lot of them. Yeah.

Richard Miles: 17:42Tell us about now what applications is bioglass currently being used and I know of at least one NovaMin, the toothpaste. I know there’ve got to be other ones.

David Greenspan: 17:51So BioGlass was something that we trademarked while I was still a graduate student. We needed a name I can remember… was in the conference room on a Friday afternoon in the materials building and there was a lot of beer and a lot of graduate students and we were looking for names for this ceramic biomaterial and bioglass one, and from that one composition, people started playing with others. So 45, S5 Bioglass’s one particular composition. There are a lot of others. The first materials were solid implants to replace the three smallest bones in the middle of the year, the malleus, the incus, and the stapes based middle ear prosthesis. Very successful clinically, not a big market, was not successfully commercialized. Perio glass was. Following that was Nova Bone, which… for orthopedics and there’s a very large market there in spine fusion. Probably 85 percent of bioactive glass used in orthopedics is used for spinal fusion surgeries. Beyond that is Novamin, very, very, very fine particle of that same composition used for tooth desensitization, but there are also other compositions and other companies. Biomin is a British company that is using bioactive glass in toothpaste. There’s a company, most eyeglass that produces a board, not a silicate glass, but a Bor, a glass which is bioactive has the same sort of properties that’s used in treating chronic wounds. It’s FDA approved. There are other glasses, bioactive glasses that have silver, which is an antimicrobial used in wound healing and a few other applications. Most of it is hard tissue, some wound healing, and a lot of oral applications.

Richard Miles: 19:28Wow. So quite a few opportunities out there.

David Greenspan: 19:31Oh yeah.

Richard Miles: 19:33So David, here’s your chance to dispense pearls of wisdom. If you were to come across, and I’m sure you probably have come across, say academic researchers who remind you of yourself years ago or maybe remind you of Larry and let’s say they’ve done the same thing. They have a technology and they’re going to take it to market. They’re all excited. What are one or two things you would say definitely do this and then one or two things you’d say definitely don’t do that.

David Greenspan: 19:57Well, the first thing I tell people is, look, I’m 68 years old. I’ve been at this for 43, 44 years now from the time I was a graduate student. I don’t think I have any advice that I can give you cause I’ve been through a lot, but the biggest, most important thing is as you’re developing it, there were so many pressures. Don’t fool yourself. Okay?

Richard Miles: 20:17Always tell yourself the truth.

David Greenspan: 20:18Always tell yourself the truth. It’ll be what it’ll be. The second thing is that it is a process, right? And that you really, really learn from your failures and as a species we’re not too good about admitting we’re wrong or that our beliefs might not be correct, right? But step back because it’s just a process. You won’t know it going forward, but 30 years later when you look back, you’ll go “ah ha”, we always think when we have a failure, it’s the end of the world. So occasionally it is okay, I’m sorry, but most of the time it’s not. If you think your idea is good and if you’ve really been honest with yourself and you’ve vetted it, don’t worry when you fail, if you fail, you should find out the reasons and overcome that and there’s gotta. Be a way of overcoming it. If your technology is good, if it’s true, if it’s going to be because…

Richard Miles: 21:11And that’s the first part. If you haven’t lied to yourself right now…

David Greenspan: 21:14If you haven’t lied to yourself, the worst thing you can do in research is create a dozen experiments, all of which succeed perfectly just according to your theory. That means you haven’t had the right hypothesis otherwise. It’s not research. If everything I did was going to be successful, then I have all the answers that’s going nowhere. That’s not researched. The beauty and the fun of it. I’ve managed lots of people and people would come to me with studies that were abject failures and I would get like really excited and everybody thought I was crazy, which is true, but that’s another story. In all seriousness, I get excited when something went wrong because we would sit down and go, okay, let’s figure out what happened, how and why it’s not going to be easy, it’ll be stressful, but we’ll learn something from it and we’ll advance.

Richard Miles: 22:02Well, that sounds pretty wise to me. I got to say they would. So I think we’re going to figure out a way to track down the individual listeners of this episode and if any of them make it big, we’re going to make sure some royalties go your way we’re charging you for that advice.

David Greenspan: 22:14You know, it’s… that should be the joy of science. Every results should lead you to ask two or three new questions and oftentimes I see people who get a result “Okay, I got the result.” I sit back with my arms folded and say, “okay, so?” and I get these curious looks. I said, “so doesn’t that bring any other questions to mind”? and it should if you think about where you were 30 years ago, oh, there’s some great advance. That’s the end. It’s never the end.

Richard Miles: 22:44Well unfortunately it is the end of this episode. So perfect segue. Anyway, David, thanks very much for being on the show. Hope to have you back and it was really a pleasure talking to you.

David Greenspan: 22:54Thanks.

Outro: 22:57Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating Inventor Interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing, and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Columns for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist Jacob Lawson. And special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Jonelle Toothman has done a lot. A former Division 1 soccer player, Journalism major, and Army brat, she also co-founded NextGen Biologics and became its CEO. The company uses salamander tissue as an architecture for regenerative medicine to help burn victims and help repair wounds. As far as other applications, Jonelle says "our imagination is our only limitation." *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*

Jonelle Toothman has done a lot. A former Division 1 soccer player, Journalism major, and Army brat, she also co-founded NextGen Biologics and became its CEO. The company uses salamander tissue as an architecture for regenerative medicine to help burn victims and help repair wounds. As far as other applications, Jonelle says “our imagination is our only limitation.” *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James, Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39This morning we have our guest Jonelle Toothman, who is the co-founder and chief executive officer at NextGen Biologics. Welcome, Jonelle.

Jonelle Toothman: 0:47Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:48So before we talk about NextGen and what it is you do and invented, tell me a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where’d you grow up? What were you like, what did parents do, tell us everything that you want to tell us about.

Jonelle Toothman: 1:00So I am a very high energy, high passion, extremely outgoing, and I grew up and was born in Germany.

Richard Miles: 1:10Germany. Why, Germany?

Jonelle Toothman: 1:13Why Germany, my Dad is retired Air Force, so we did a little bit of moving around as a child.

Richard Miles: 1:18Uh, where in Germany?

Jonelle Toothman: 1:21Zweibrücken.

Richard Miles: 1:22Okay. There’s a big airbase there, right?

Jonelle Toothman: 1:23There is.

Richard Miles: 1:24Okay. And you’re there just as an infant or how many years were you in Germany?

Jonelle Toothman: 1:30A young child. We left there when I was five.

Richard Miles: 1:31Okay. Um, and so as you’re growing up what sort of inspired you to become a CEO? Did you ever even think about it or what were you like as a kid?

Jonelle Toothman: 1:40I’m still trying to figure out how that title is where I’m at right now. As a kid, I really… all I cared about was being outdoors and playing sports. I, uh, was outside from dusk till dawn and all I wanted to do is play soccer. So, the passion really came later in life after my sister actually passed away of brain cancer.

Richard Miles: 2:06Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Jonelle Toothman: 2:07So my sophomore year in college she had a devastating disease that only allowed her to live 18 months after finding out that she was diagnosed with brain cancer. And during that time in college, I kind of evaluated what I was doing with my life and where I was going and what the opportunities were.

Richard Miles: 2:25What were you studying at the time, Jonelle?

Jonelle Toothman: 2:27I was a journalism major.

Richard Miles: 2:29Journalism, okay.

Jonelle Toothman: 2:29So I thought I wanted to do sports broadcasting. That was kind of my thought and ambition at the time.

Richard Miles: 2:34And you got a degree in journalism?

Jonelle Toothman: 2:36Journalism and mass communications.

Richard Miles: 2:38Okay. So did you go back and start studying biology or how did you wander into that field? I mean the example your sister, but obviously you didn’t have an educational background equip you for that field.

Jonelle Toothman: 2:51Exactly, and I knew the educational aspect of going back and being a physician of some sorts was not my passion. School and academia was not the route that was going to make me a benefit to society when it came to medicine. So I had to figure out something different besides being a physician and that’s where the pharmaceutical side of the business and medical side of the business from a sales perspective became intriguing and interesting. I could still impact that medical field, but do it with the things that I was naturally good at versus the things that I would have to really pursue that might not be as passionate but have the same benefits.

Richard Miles: 3:31Did you ever do anything with sports journalism at all Jonelle?

Jonelle Toothman: 3:34I did a few broadcasting shows for Marshall University in West Virginia where I played division one soccer there. I did a few of the sports broadcasting for some other additional sports.

Richard Miles: 3:45So let’s talk about NextGen Biologics. It says here that you’re developing a novel extracellular Matrix. What does that mean to the normal person?

Jonelle Toothman: 3:57So an extracellular matrix also known as an ECM. It is basically utilized to repair soft tissue in the body. So if you think of a burn victim or somebody that’s had a surgical type of procedure, they often have soft tissue that needs to repair… a scar or a wound that won’t heal. That extracellular matrix is a surgical patch that you would put in a wound bed to promote healing and allow that soft tissue to grow back.

Richard Miles: 4:33So these are living cells that you’re…

Jonelle Toothman: 4:35So they’re not. They’re not technically living cells. So if you think about it from a standpoint of right now they use pig or they use cow and they take the d ermis, the skin of those particular species, and they use those as a patch to cover that wound so you can prevent infections and the risk of losing those wounds are those limbs, but that’s basically a patch that allows new soft tissue to grow and repair.

Richard Miles: 5:04So the product that NextGen is developing, it’s a patch, but it’s from human material?

Jonelle Toothman: 5:09So it’s actually from one of the most amazing species we’ve ever seen in science. If you think about a salamander that is fascinating, if you crush its spine, it regrows. If you take off a limb, it regrows part of its organs regrow. It is the only species that we know of or that I personally know of that can regenerate its entire organ system as well as skeletal system. And so we’re starting with the best material that we’ve seen in science versus our own human dermis that we don’t regenerate. So these…

Richard Miles: 5:45So these are actually salamander cells?

Jonelle Toothman: 5:47They’re not cells. So it is, it is…

Richard Miles: 5:51You have to work with me Jonelle. I’m slow.

Jonelle Toothman: 5:55It is the tissue from Salamander, that is what promotes that healing aspect.

Richard Miles: 5:59Are geckos salamanders or not really?

Jonelle Toothman: 6:02Not really.

Richard Miles: 6:02Okay. So you can’t co-brand with Geico for marketing purposes.

Jonelle Toothman: 6:04Unfortunately, and fortunately, we won’t be selling cars, but hopefully repairing some wounds.

Richard Miles: 6:10Alright, so wound repair. I mean, I’m thinking there are a lot of applications here, but why don’t you break it down for me, what are the applications that you think are the most likely for this technology?

Jonelle Toothman: 6:20So this is what’s exciting and fascinating about that technology. Our only limitations are our imaginations and the scientific imagination of where this application could be indicated for. So we can utilize and we’re starting to utilize and going through the process to get approved to utilize this surgical patch for wound regeneration. So if you think about a diabetic foot ulcer or a really bad, a surgical procedure that has been infected because the patient had some sort of disease or are they smoked or they are hypertensive and they just don’t heal as well as a young person might. This patch would help them to cover that wound to decrease the infection that can get to that wound. And then eventually start to tell the body to repair that tissue in a way that allows new tissue to form.

Richard Miles: 7:17So for those people now, what sort of treatment do they get, if any?

Jonelle Toothman: 7:21So right now, if you think of a wound or a burn victim right now, they’re getting either donated human cadaver skin, they’re getting the cow, the pig, they’re getting some synthetic, like Gortex type of material. But basically they’re getting some sort of cloth, if you think about it or Bandaid, if you think about it, they’re getting something to put on that wound that allows it to not get infected and for new tissue to start growing.

Richard Miles: 7:49And is the problem with these other solutions that they don’t grow or they’re not as effective? Or is that not an adequate solution?

Jonelle Toothman: 7:56So they’re all adequate solutions. That’s the good thing. Uh, patients and physicians have choices for what’s needed. They’re all great products. The difference that we’re trying to capture is we’re starting with a material that naturally has regenerative capabilities. So if you think about using human skin that’s been donated from a cadaver, humans no longer have the ability to regenerate. We lose that ability after the second trimester. So when you put on that new skin, what happens is your body accepts it and it eventually creates new skin, but you’ll see really bad scars. You’ll see divots within our creators kind of where that skin doesn’t heal upwards. It kind of heals in the crevice of where that wound bed was. The material that we’re starting with is naturally regenerative. It naturally has the proteins, the nutrients, the cytokines, the healing aspect that we’re looking for. So what we’re hoping that this product, when you implanted in a human or you put it on that surgical site, that we turn on the light switch back to what our body naturally knew how to do when it was in the wound bed and that is heal. So we’re hoping that it turns on this light switch and creates that healing form to create less fibrosis, less scar, and allow your body to adapt that and then regrow new tissue that’s almost childlike versus the fibers and the scar that we’re used to.

Richard Miles: 9:27Wow. That is exciting. Um, you talked about an approval process. You’re talking about the FDA approval process, right? Where are you in bed? Are you, did you just file or are you about to get your approval? Tells us about that.

Jonelle Toothman: 9:38So it’s actually an FDA clearance and it’s for a specific indication, which we’re not claiming that we heal wounds faster. We’re not claiming that we can heal wounds better. What we’re trying to show the FDA currently is that we are equal to what’s out there right now in not wound healing but in surgical wound repair.

Richard Miles: 10:00So in theory this is easier, right? Because the FDA in essence has already approved the core technology. Now you’re asking them to approve another version of that core technology?

Jonelle Toothman: 10:09So we’re asking them to approve another animal species form since we’re already using animals species out there. And so where we are with that clearance right now is the FDA has reviewed a lot of our information. We had to prove that we’re safe, as safe as those other products out there, and we’ve done all of those initial studies, we’ve passed those initial studies. The FDA last summer has asked us to complete a few additional human clinical studies because this particular animal or species has never been used in a human before. So they’ve asked us for a couple of those. We are in the process of finishing those currently. Our last human trial will end in April. We will resubmit back that data to the FDA that they’ve asked for additional safety and efficacy and we hope to be on the market by Q four of this year.

Richard Miles: 11:02Wow, that’s great. Jonelle, tell me a little bit about NextGen Biologics. You’re the co-founder and CEO. I’m assuming you licensed this technology from somewhere. Was it University of Florida technology?

Jonelle Toothman: 11:14It was not a University of Florida technology, but it is licensed. Uh, there is a brilliant woman, her name is Ryan Early and she filed this patent back in 2014 and NextGen kinda came about because Jamie Grooms, my co-founder, and partner had worked with this woman in the past and I met Jamie who is a serial entrepreneur, has been extremely successful in regenerative medicine in this space and also taking companies public. He and I met in 2013 and just had the passion for regeneration and, and what we can do in the future and bringing a new technology to a market that’s growing and could give added benefits to wounded warriors or children that are cleft palates or anything like that that you could really fix in a surgical setting. And we kind of came together and licensed this technology from Ryan early and started the company back in 2013.

Richard Miles: 12:14We had another guest on the show, Ron Hayes, who compared being an entrepreneur to start up a. He was a fighter pilot, Ron and he said it was like being a five product and then you have long periods of boredom punctuated by extreme terror. So tell us about being in a startup, being the CEO of a startup, if you’d like to share what was your best day or one of your better days and if you’d care to share one of your worst days, your worst day with us.

Jonelle Toothman: 12:39So that’s an interesting analogy. When it comes to fighter pilots, I don’t fly. So it’s definitely understood though. Being an entrepreneur, it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked. The least amount of money and the most stressful I’ve ever been. It is. But it’s also the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve been doing this since 2013. Really came on full board in 2016, a 100%. And I love it. I wake up every day excited when you wake up every day excited and you have a big win in the middle of the afternoon to soon find out you take three steps back at 2:00 in the afternoon. It’s a little more difficult, but the good days are extremely high and the bad days are extremely low. But I’d rather have the huge highs and the lows knowing that we’re going to accomplish something great.

Richard Miles: 13:28Do you know if you had a young person come to you, let’s say they had just graduated with a degree and decided they were going to do something else and they wanted to do a startup company. What words of wisdom would you give to that person, tell them to flee or what to?

Jonelle Toothman: 13:42I think the initial thing would say to flee, but absolutely not. The biggest piece of advice is find something that you genuinely are passionate about. Find something that you can wake up every day when money’s tight, when you’re extremely tired, when you don’t want to go to work, wake up with something that you are passionate about. Really enjoy what you do, but also be willing to take that risk. There is nothing more rewarding than shaking hands with Ron Hays right now and him saying that they just got FDA approval. It genuinely gives me complete chills because that success is something that I’ve never experienced yet before and it is something that you know that a team surrounded you and your vision and your philosophy and that as a team, you moved a needle and got to a point to bring something to the market that can save lives. So I would say as a young entrepreneur, you’re young, you’re vibrant, you’re ready to take on a new challenge. Try, failure’s not that bad. At the end of the day, we all fail something I feel every day, but when, where you can celebrate those successes and try again, learn from it.

Richard Miles: 14:52Jonelle That’s great advice and we look forward to having you back on the show after you’ve rung the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, after your highly successful IPO and we’ll have you back. Thank you very much for joining Radio Cade.

Jonelle Toothman: 15:05Thank you for having me.

Outro: 15:12Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating Inventor Interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage and downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing, and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Columns for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist Jacob Lawson. And special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Medicine that talks to you. Eric Buffkin of eTectRx developed an “edible radio” powered by the chemicals in your stomach that tracks when you take every dose of your medication.  Eric’s colleague, pharmacist Susan Baumgartner, says about 50% of people that are prescribed medication do not take it when they are supposed to. Over the last decade, the company has extensively tested the ID-Cap System and In December 2019 received FDA approval. The company has had several “near-death” experiences, but Buffkin said the real problem of tracking medication usage wasn’t going away, and therefore the opportunity for the company wouldn’t go away either. Susan said at each pivot point or setback  the team and investors said: “let’s go forward.”  

“Head, Heart, Hands, and Health,” otherwise known as 4-H, is all about developing young people, a mission that overlaps with the Cade Museum.  Host Richard Miles talks with Jennifer Sirangelo, President and CEO of the National 4-H Council about 4-H’s key role in promoting agricultural innovation in the U.S. for almost 120 years. Partnering with a national network of agricultural extension offices created by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, 4-H discovered that young people are early adopters of technology and great change agents in a pivotal part of the economy. Today 4-H works in many different areas, including STEM education and civics.   

“Head, Heart, Hands, and Health,” otherwise known as 4-H, is all about developing young people, a mission that overlaps with the Cade Museum.  Host Richard Miles talks with Jennifer Sirangelo, President and CEO of the National 4-H Council about 4-H’s key role in promoting agricultural innovation in the U.S. for almost 120 years. Partnering with a national network of agricultural extension offices created by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, 4-H discovered that young people are early adopters of technology and great change agents in a pivotal part of the economy. Today 4-H works in many different areas, including STEM education and civics. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:02

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

Head, heart, hands, and health, otherwise known as 4H, is all about developing and mentoring, young people. Something we here at Radio Cade and the Cade Museum are also into, in a big way. This morning, I have the pleasure of talking to Jennifer Sirangelo, President and CEO of the National Forage Council, and also a good friend. Welcome to Radio. Cade, Jennifer. -Thank you, Richard. So, first of all, thank you for making the arduous journey to Northcentral Florida from Chevy Chase, Maryland. I know it took you several layers to get here and appreciate that. Not as many black-tie dinners here, but the boiled peanuts are much better.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 1:13

Thanks for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here in Florida today.

Richard Miles: 1:16

So, Jennifer, we usually start out the show talking about the actual invention or the actual business. And in this case, instead of an invention, it’s actually an organization. So why don’t we start by you telling me and our audience about 4H and why don’t we start with the history? You know, where was it developed? Why and what was so rough timeframe?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 1:34

Well, 4H started in 1902 and there’s actually a dispute between Iowa 4H and Ohio 4H about exactly where it started, whether it was with A.B. Graham, or with Jesse Field Shamba, but both of them were leaders in cooperative extension and agricultural education at the time and realized that when it comes to innovation and new technology, young people are typically more open to adapting and trying new things than some of the adults, at least in agriculture at the time that were ready for it. So, it was a important time in our country in 1902 and in the early 1900s, when we were really figuring out how are we going to feed our growing population? And so, having young people try all the new technology going on at the universities at the time was a really important way to get the innovation and the new techniques out there in use.

Richard Miles: 2:34

So this was everything I imagined from the internal combustion engine, right? I mean, you started going towards machines, but also new agricultural, new fertilizers, new seeding , that sort of stuff. Is that what we’re talking about?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 2:44

Right. Right. So, just a little bit more of the history, so 4H is the youth development program of the Nations Cooperative Extension System, which is the outreach arm of the Nation’s land grant universities, which were started 1862. So here in Florida, at the University of Florida, the division called IFAS, which is the Institute of Food and Agriculture Science here, they run 4H in Florida. So, 4H is really the outreach arm of the Nation’s land grant universities for young people. So if you don’t know what land grant universities are like, I didn’t really know about those until I became involved so deeply with 4H, but in 1862, Abraham Lincoln and Congress realized we needed to have an educated population in our rural areas. So it was really an equity play to ensure that knowledge wasn’t just concentrated on the coasts, but there would be higher education advancements in agriculture and mechanical engineering happening throughout the country. So those land grant universities today, you would know them as Purdue, Texas, A&M, University of California, University of Florida, here in Florida and Cornell in New York. So those are all land grant universities. And as a part of their mandate for receiving that land grant, which was free land to build a university, they are required to have a program called cooperative extension, which takes that land grant universities research in very practical ways to the people and the way they do that for young people is through 4H. So, we started in 1902 as a part of that amazing cooperative extension system. It’s truly the envy of the world, the land grant universities and cooperative extension. They’re part of the reason that today our agricultural industry feeds not just the U.S. but people around the world.

Richard Miles: 4:36

So one of the things I love about doing this podcast, I feel like I get a private tutorial on all these different subjects. I mean, I’d heard of land grant universities, and I knew it had something to do with a grant of land, obviously, but I didn’t know the thinking behind that, this investment in knowledge, right ?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 4:49

Practical problems . That’s the exciting part.

Richard Miles: 4:52

It really sort of foreshadowed, what the government did roughly a hundred years later when it started making university based research, more accessible, easier to patent to take to market. But that Lincoln was thinking about 1960s, really extraordinary.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 5:06

In the middle of the civil war, thinking this far ahead. And I look at it today as, as, as you know, in our country, we’re paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in rural America because we’re seeing some of the struggles and it’s amazing to have these institutions there to be a part of the solution, including 4H.

Richard Miles: 5:23

Right. So, it started in 1902. Tell us about the development through the 20th century. What did that look like? It stayed initially primarily rural and agricultural focused. How did it change over the course of say the next hundred years?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 5:35

Sure. Well, you’re correct. We have always been, and 4H will always be focused on rural America. We are in many ways, the only game in town for millions of young people that live in rural towns and small communities, but over time with the increase in technology, in agriculture and our ability to produce more with less resources, less people, less inputs, fewer and fewer people needed to live in rural America in order to feed our populations and work in agriculture. So what that’s done for our country is free up all that talent for other innovation and technological advances. So when I think about why we have a Silicon Valley, I go back to the investments in agriculture and the ability to produce what we need, but being able to free up that talent for other technological, it’s exciting to see what’s happened in our country. So, 4H has followed that path, meaning where the people are and where the children are, is where 4H is going to be. So as our population has moved more into cities and suburbs, 4H has gone there too . So our programs continue to be in agriculture, you’ll see animals and plants and ag precision agriculture, environmental agriculture, but you’ll also see in 4H today, we have one of the largest robotics programs in the country. We have one of the largest computer science programs, and we’ve a huge amount of STEM and healthy living programs going on from the big Apple to the little Apple. I like to say from New York City, Manhattan to Manhattan, Kansas.

Richard Miles: 7:03

So that’s the perfect segue into my next question. I was going to ask, what does the geographic distribution look like at 4H’s? Where are your main concentrations in terms of numbers?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 7:11

Sure . Well , we’re in every single county and parish in America in every territory. Anyone can find 4H for their young person or to be a volunteer. So, we are, because of that amazing distribution system of cooperative extension and the land grant universities that are in every state and county, 4H is there too. 50% of the young people in America live in nine States. So I don’t know if you knew that,

Richard Miles: 7:35

So let me guess, California, Texas, Florida,

Jennifer Sirangelo: 7:38

Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina,

Richard Miles: 7:42

I’m not hearing in North Dakota in there,

Jennifer Sirangelo: 7:43

Not North Dakota, but we have a high concentration of the percentage of youth in North Dakota that are in 4H is very high. But anyway, so starting with that, but 4H is again everywhere, but the highest concentrations are going to be through the Midwest. And in the Southeast, Texas is our largest 4H program, but that’s really because of where you would see rural communities, vibrant need for young people to be engaged, from the cities to the rural areas.

Richard Miles: 8:11

In each of these places is an organizing entity, still the cooperative extension system, or are there other actors involved?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 8:18

No. That’s it. Yes. Cooperative extension runs the 4H program in every county. And so the cooperative extension is an amazing invention in its own and truly the envy of the world and Chevy Chase where I work in the Washington D. C. area, we have about four or five countries a year who bring delegations to learn about our advancement in agriculture. And a part of what they want to learn about is how we engaged young people in cooperative extension. Yeah .

Richard Miles: 8:43

So that the colleges and universities in each one of these states have a stake in making sure that this 4H system is alive and well.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 8:50

Absolutely, and it’s a feeder system into their, into their colleges, their own, whether it’s their schools of engineering, agriculture, human sciences. And what’s amazing about it too, is this , especially for rural young people in today in 4H in rural areas are different than sometimes are depicted in the Norman Rockwell painting. They’re very different today, very diverse, full of first-generation 4H families. And so, 4H has an important role to play in cooperative extension.

Richard Miles: 9:15

A lot of challenges as well. Now, particularly in areas like Ohio and Iowa, like you’re talking about the disintegration, the manufacturing base. And I imagine some of that is affected agriculture as well.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 9:25

It has. And the important role of getting the young people in their parents comfortable with a university setting is something that cooperative extension of 4H do.

Richard Miles: 9:33

So I had no idea the breadth, the fact that it was everywhere. So if you ever want to turn this into a political party , it’s not too late, you can jump in the race, Jennifer, everyone else is. So you might, you might as well. Right? So,

Jennifer Sirangelo: 9:43

A lot of good important work to do for the children, which is where I’m from .

Richard Miles: 9:46

That’s what all the candidates say. Right? Yeah . So let’s talk about you. I always find it very interesting, particularly when we’re talking to any inventor, entrepreneur, somebody in this field, what their background is in terms of their experiences, their families , just what shaped them along the way. So why don’t we start out, where were you born, where you grew up, what was your childhood like?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 10:04

Sure. I’m a Missouri native. I grew up in Kansas city, Missouri first and foremost, I’m a big sister. So I’m the eldest of four. And I grew up in a very modest home. My dad had two jobs. My mom raised all four of us kids. I was the first in my dad’s family to go to college. So I knew early on that if I wanted to have fewer struggles than my parents had, that I would have to work hard, use my brain and apply that in some way, that made a difference for other people.

Richard Miles: 10:34

And do you remember as a young girl or an adolescent, what were you the most interested in? I mean, did you love school? Were you a good student? Outdoors? Sports? Give us a picture of what ten-year-old Jennifer’s Sirangelo was like,

Jennifer Sirangelo: 10:45

Well, my mom was really into us having diverse skills. So I did things from trampoline lessons to bowling too . My mom was like a teacher. She is a teacher, so we had almost a school in our home. So I had a lot of different activities, but at its core, I’ll share with you that I was born a leader just to be honest, my mom and I’ve talked about this before. And she said I was leading my little siblings. I was less than two years old when my sister was born. And she was like, you were helping them move things along in the family. So I was always naturally drawn to leadership opportunities. Just some people are like that. And that’s certainly me.

Richard Miles: 11:21

Did you run for like student council president in high school? -Of course! Okay, I’m just guessing here.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 11:27

I was everything, I was in student body leadership, all of that. I was in student leadership, both in high school and college. And, actually that was a huge training ground for leadership. I mean, people don’t really think about it, but when I interview people today and when I see a student body president or even an officer, I know what it means to take the extra time. You’re already doing class, you’re already doing activities or sports. And then on top of that, lead is not easy.

Richard Miles: 11:51

You get your first glimpse of how organizations work, both the ideal models and the not so ideal models, right ?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 11:58

I learned a lifelong lesson being the secretary of the student body at William Jewel College, right outside Kansas City, Missouri, where I went to undergraduate. And I learned the lesson that she who takes the notes, has a lot of power.

Richard Miles: 12:11

I learned that too once, actually in an exam setting, say it was not a hypothetical, but it was a practical exercise. And we were supposed to decide something as a group. And I realized quite quickly if I had the pen and the notepad, that I would be the de facto leader of the meeting.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 12:24

That’s right. And I wanted to share just a little bit about some of the people that shaped me in that timeframe. You , you told me you might want to talk about that, but something that I think we don’t talk about quite enough today. And I think it’s based on the culture of the beta of everything. And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, which I totally agree with that concept, but something that I’ve kind of feel a little bit that we’ve lost is the commitment to excellence. I was thinking through when I was thinking about doing this podcast with you and about the people who shaped me. And I had a , a leader in my church youth group who was excellent. I would call it in her personal life. Like just the way she organized her life, her finances. And I saw that excellence as a teenager. And that shaped me for how you organized your personal life, with excellence. I had a high school theater teacher who with a tiny little budget, Mr. Parsons, he just passed away a few weeks ago. And he took our tiny little theater program and we would have thought it was Broadway. He had posters for us, and the kinds of tickets we used were professional tickets. They weren’t just something you bought at the neighborhood shop, attention to detail. And the student body president I was telling you about when I was the secretary, when I was at William Jewel College, taught me the importance of excellence in the written word. So, how I took those minutes, the consistency of what they needed to look like, and that level of excellence continues with me today.

Richard Miles: 13:45

What did you major in at William Jewel?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 13:46

I majored in political science and communication.

Richard Miles: 13:48

Okay, All right . And what was your first job out of college?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 13:51

I ran a small family homeless shelter. -Really? We had less than a hundred thousand dollar budget. It’s called Hillcrest Ministries and it was a family shelter. So, in our community, -That’s not a typical first-year-out-of-college-job. I know! I think they must’ve been desperate because I knew nothing, but it was the best learning ground.

Richard Miles: 14:09

And this was where? In your hometown?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 14:10

In Liberty, Missouri, the Liberty Missouri, right outside of Kansas city. And it was the best learning ground. C ause I did everything. I wrote the newsletter. I did the QuickBooks. I had to file the taxes. I hired all the staff. I had to do all the fundraising. I had to work with the board. I had to do it all. And so I will tell you today being the CEO of the National 4H Council, it was a basis of the skills I learned. My office was in a garage, next to one of the houses that we had family apartments in.

Richard Miles: 14:37

Wow. That’s amazing. I mean, you just really jumped right into that organizational leadership role.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 14:44

I didn’t know what, I didn’t know. I will tell you that. -And so, how long did you do that? I did that for two or three years, but I had a Truman scholarship. I was really fortunate to have that. So I had to go and get my graduate degree done. I had a timeframe, so I worked first and then I did that at Syracuse University at the Maxwell School.

Richard Miles: 15:01

Okay. And then after that, where’d you go?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 15:03

And after that, I came back and I’ve worked in a number of places in the nonprofit sector in Kansas city. And I learned a lot, and I realized that what I wanted to do was to really make a difference in the world. I wanted to help other people. And I realized to do that, I would have to have resources. I never thought about it, but I realized I would need to have resources. So I’m a self-taught fundraiser. I went to classes, I learned it. There was no school or anything back then. And I , I remember the day I got the first grant that allowed us to open a second homeless shelter at Hillcrest. And that’s when I got bit by the bug of how I could help people by using my skills to generate resources that could be invested in them.

Richard Miles: 15:40

I assume you were recruited to go run 4H? You don’t just go online and say, hey, I’d like to be CEO 4H right? When did that call come? And how did it , how did it come?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 15:49

It came in late 2005, I was in New York working for Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which I had worked for in Kansas City. And then I worked for the national office and it was a dream job and a great organization for them. I was working with them and doing that fundraising and board development. And it was a time in the history of 4H when they were ready to really expand and grow and they needed experience,

Richard Miles: 16:09

In terms of numbers or just scope of activities or both?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 16:12

Scope of activities there , we’re on the cusp of thinking about a major science initiative. And so that’s really what drew me to 4H. When I didn’t know the scope and scale today, we serve 6 million kids. As I mentioned in every county in America, we have extremely strong programs because of cooperative extension in the universities, like here in Florida, we have strong science programs and healthy living. And I was blown away by the quality of the 4H program at scale, there’s just, in my world there was nothing like it. So, I came because I was passionate about encouraging young people to pursue STEM careers and to make that more accessible through a huge distribution channel like 4H.

Richard Miles: 16:52

So you started in 2005, 4H’s of course headquartered in Chevy, Chase, Maryland. So let me get this straight. You went from small town, Missouri, smallish town, Missouri, straight to New York city, or where there? -I did. Stop really?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 17:06

One week before 9/11. I moved to New York city. Yeah.

Richard Miles: 17:08

You don’t believe in doing anything halfway Jennifer? -No! I’m not scared of much. So you’re there four years -Five years. Five years, and then you went to D. C.? So you didn’t even have time to acquire the New York snobbishness? -You’re right. New Yorkers tend to look down on D.C., you didn’t have time to acquire that right?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 17:24

I did acquire the fast pace, so I loved that. I felt so at home in New York, I felt more at home there than in Kansas City. And really, to be honest. So my family knew that when they saw me go, they were like, she’s not coming back. It was a great move for me, but I love D.C. What I love about it is the diversity. It’s a great place to have a nonprofit, like 4H we have such a diverse staff. And I just love that the different ideas that are brought because of all the people coming in to Washington from all over the country, and the world,

Richard Miles: 17:52

You’re on the road a lot. Right? We were talking about this earlier. I didn’t know that you had a lot of travel to the West coast, but really if you’re in every county in the U.S. you must have to hit a number of States every year?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 18:02

I do, yeah. It’s really fun that I get to travel and see so many different places. And most important to me is meeting the young people and hearing their voices and what they’re doing with their innovating at the local level. They never cease to amaze me. It’s one of the big aha’s in my job in 4H is that I find that myself included adults, we usually underestimate young people. They can contribute so much. And I see what they’re doing every day in 4H and I’m blown away.

Richard Miles: 18:29

It’s like, you perfectly anticipated my next question here. So if you had to go back and do any portion of your life over again, to go back to 21 year old, Jennifer, are there things you would do differently? What do you know now that you wish you’d known then? And would you make different choices? And then as a subset of that question, what kind of advice would you give to someone in roughly that age now? Someone maybe who’s about to graduate from college or has just graduated in terms of, they’re trying to decide what do I do with my life? I say the easy questions for last, but yeah ,

Jennifer Sirangelo: 18:55

That’s right. These are the hard ones. Well, I really wouldn’t do much differently at all. I, I remember feeling as I took big steps in my career, because at a young age, I had the confidence, I guess, because of my wonderful family and my mother in particular, that I could probably tackle anything. And I remember times when I took on new roles that were bigger, like when I moved from Kansas city to New York and took on a big role and opportunity, doubting myself a little and thinking, can I really do this? And I’m like, well, sure. I’m sure I can. And just never dwelling on your own insecurities. Like, don’t let that drive you at all. So for me, that’s the one thing that I would do over. I’d just make sure I didn’t focus on that at all. The advice I’d have for myself would be to be more patient with myself and to listen more, more patient in that I remember even being a junior in college and just all I wanted to be was graduated. I wanted to be moving. I wanted to be working in my career. -Always wanting to get the next. Next step, next step. And I would be more patient with that. And I would encourage aspiring achievers to think about that. That was the piece of advice I would give. And my other advice is to listen more. If you are a sharp, informed, interested person in the world with it’s curious, it’s really easy to want to share your ideas. Talk a lot, for me, it is, I’m an extrovert. I’m like 30 on the scale. And I always a hundred percent when I listen more, I gain a lot more as a lesson, I think about every day,

Richard Miles: 20:20

Something you said earlier, Jennifer, I usually don’t dispense my own advice, but I have to base on what you said. Sometimes I’m asked what I do differently, and I think I would have done what you did and that is starting your own organization or running your own organization. Even if you didn’t start it at the age of 21 and 22 just teaches you an enormous amount. I always worked for very large organizations, which is exciting in its own right. And I got to see and do a lot of things, but it wasn’t until Phoebe and I started the Cade Museum knew what it’s like. As you said, you do the website, you pay the bills, you talk to all the vendors, you do all the hiring. And if I could have gotten that experience when I was 22, it just would have been a different experience, but I appreciated it when I saw it. But not until much later .

Jennifer Sirangelo: 21:01

I agree with you at 23, it was an amazing opportunity to have, and I always talk about that with the staff on our team. I’m always really glad to have the team. We have. We have a lot of young college aged students that come and work for us. And I do some group mentoring with them. And my advice is always get somewhere small where you can learn at all. Right?

Richard Miles: 21:18

Yeah. Consider that the small, no name company first, before you go off to the Fortune 500 Company.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 21:23

Totally. They don’t need your innovation and your creativity as much as a small place does.

Richard Miles: 21:27

Right. Right. And the small place will demand it because they need it.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 21:31

They’re desperate like where, like where I was, they must’ve really needed it. They let me do it.

Richard Miles: 21:35

So, Jennifer, what about looking forward? What are the main goals that you have for 4H say over the next five to ten years?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 21:41

Well, we have a shared goal in cooperative extension four H and along with USDA, who is our federal partner to grow 4H from six to 10 million kids serving 6 million today to 10 million kids in the next 10 years, it’s a big jump. But because of our huge reach that we have, we feel really a moral obligation that more young people need what 4H provides. Parents are looking for an innovative opportunity where their kids can build life skills like leadership and resilience, overcoming obstacles, teamwork, how to run a meeting. In addition to the practical skills like science skills and healthy living skills and computer science, things like that.

Richard Miles: 22:21

Would that make you, or are you already the largest youth organization in the U.S.?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 22:26

We are the largest youth organization in the U.S. and around the world, we have 6 million young people here and another 1 million in another 70 countries around the world that are our partners.

Richard Miles: 22:35

That are formally affiliated with 4H, do they use the 4H logo and branding and all that?

Jennifer Sirangelo: 22:38

They use the name. Yeah . We have the ability for them to shape it, to meet their culture. So we have clovers with like a Palm tree. We have a Clover with a maple leaf and Canada, so everyone has their own flavor, but we are bound together by the Clover, the pledge, the head, heart, hands, and health that we say, and our values and positive youth development.

Richard Miles: 22:57

So your next goal is to develop 4H Paris and 4H Rome, and 4H London right? The strategic cities .

Jennifer Sirangelo: 23:02

Well, it’s already in a lot of places, and not those cities. That’s right. That’s right. But what we’re focused on and the reason that our board is really passionate and our leadership is really passionate about growing is not just to grow, but the why behind that is 4H over the decades has helped so many young people build their skills that have led to very successful careers and contribution to their community . So not just for themselves, but in a huge way for their communities. Our alumni research shows that our alumni like 20 points higher in their giving back in their communities and their volunteerism, our country needs good citizens today. And people that are going to be engaged in local communities, we also have helped young people get to college, like earn the money, whether it was selling a cow, selling their photography, they learn kind of their own little business through the agriculture projects and other projects they do in 4H it could be cooking, I’ve met chefs that have learned to cook in 4H and now own restaurants and own bakeries. So we are really focused on our role in economic opportunity and economic mobility, social mobility. Because when you think about what’s facing our country and the gap of opportunity between young people that are born into poverty, especially young people of color, and those that are not, that gap is one of the biggest issues facing us in the U.S. in the next two decades. And we know we have a role to play in helping close that economic opportunity gap. And we’re very passionate about that.

Richard Miles: 24:32

I think you mentioned citizenship as well. Good citizenship and civic virtues, which unfortunately is largely missing. I think from a lot of academic curriculum now. And so, I think it’s great. There’s an organization out there even thinking about that.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 24:42

It really is, and here in Florida, they have one of the most robust legislative programs in the country. It’s famous. It has great alumni like Adam Putnam here, who is one of your alumni from University of Florida and Florida 4H. And he’s an example of one of many, but we have all parties. We have over 50 members of Congress that are 4H alumni. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because of the civic engagement, part of 4H and the goal of giving back

Richard Miles: 25:07

How great and what a privilege I imagined to be part of a chain that started with Abraham Lincoln, right? And includes Jennifer Sirangelo.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 25:13

It’s true, I feel very honored. You’re right.

Richard Miles: 25:15

Jennifer, this has been a real pleasure talking to you this morning. I hope we can get you back on the show at some point and wish you the best in your visit to Florida and also the rest of your travels.

Jennifer Sirangelo: 25:23

Thank you so much, Richard. It’s been great to be with you.

Outro: 25:26

I’m Richard Miles. Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood, Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist. Jacob Lawson.

Our 2019 Cade Prize winners, Greg Hudalla and Ben Keselowsky, have invented a new way to control inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. The method uses natural enzymes to suppress inflammation at the source, without the harmful side effects of medications.   Ben, a native of Tampa and a graduate of the University of South Florida, always enjoyed science and math and was inspired by his high school physics teacher. Greg, originally from Chicago, became interested in medicine after a serious knee accident at 18 ended his collegiate athletic career. *This episode was originally released on May 22, 2019.* 

Our 2019 Cade Prize winners, Greg Hudalla and Ben Keselowsky, have invented a new way to control inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. The method uses natural enzymes to suppress inflammation at the source, without the harmful side effects of medications.   Ben, a native of Tampa and a graduate of the University of South Florida, always enjoyed science and math and was inspired by his high school physics teacher. Greg, originally from Chicago, became interested in medicine after a serious knee accident at 18 ended his collegiate athletic career. *This episode was originally released on May 22, 2019.* 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

Weekend warriors rejoice, your bad knees are about to get better. That is if the breakthrough by our guests today becomes widely available. People suffering from arthritis will have a brighter future. And before I mangle any more metaphors, welcome my guests, Greg Hudalla and Ben Keselowsky, both professors in biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. Welcome Greg and Ben .

Ben Keselowsky: 0:57

Hi.

Greg Hudalla: 0:57

Hi.

Richard Miles: 0:58

So this is actually personal for me because I’ve been a lifelong runner and just last year found out I have osteoarthritis, a word I couldn’t even pronounce six months ago, much less define. So in between icing my knee and stretching, spending a lot of time at the physical therapist office, I come across your application of the Cade Prize. And so after the show, you’ll both lay hands on me and I’ll be good to go, right? It’s simple, a few needles might be evolved , right ? So let’s explain for our listeners in simple terms, what is the problem that you’re trying to solve? And how does your invention do that?

Ben Keselowsky: 1:29

Our mission is to control inflammatory disease and we’re motivated by the fact that inflammation underlies the onset, the progression and the pain associated with numerous diseases that affect millions of people. And so osteoarthritis is one of these that we’re particularly interested in, in the U.S. 13% of the population is afflicted. That’s over 40 million people with direct healthcare costs of over $80 billion per year. Current technologies include steroids and antibodies, and they’re injected into the bloodstream and they’re distributed throughout the body. And they’re associated with terrible side effects, including infection, lymphoma, diabetes, and weight gain. And our technology works at the site of inflammation and it uses natural mechanisms that suppress inflammation. And so, we use an enzyme called IDO, Indoleamine dioxygenase, it breaks down an essential amino acid, tryptophan, into its product [inaudible] . And those two mechanisms, the local depletion of tryptophan and production of [inaudible] work together to quiet down inflammation. And so being able to suppress that inflammation allows tissue to return to healthy function.

Greg Hudalla: 2:51

So the key challenge for us when we began developing this technology was coming up with a strategy to place IDO at the site action and have it persist There for a useful duration of time. Um , so if you were to say, inject the drug directly into the tissue of interest, it would be gone within minutes to hours. So you don’t really get a lot of activity or efficacy from a drug.

Richard Miles: 3:14

Greg, if I can interrupt that’s the current standard of care, right? That’s what most people do though. They’ll go in, for instance, with osteoarthritis, they’ll go in to get a shot of what is a cortisone or something like that, right?

Greg Hudalla: 3:22

Right.Yeah, so they’ll either get a topical treatment right on the surface of the skin, in which case the steroid can penetrate into the joint and have some effect, or they’ll get a localized injection, or they’ll have say an intravenous infusion of drug that’s coursing throughout the entire body. So, what we sought to do was develop an approach by which you can inject the drug into the tissue site, and it would persist as opposed to diffusing away and losing action at the site of interest. So to do this, we developed a technology that we’ve dubbed GATOR, which stands for Galectin Anchors for Therapeutic Enzyme Retention. Specifically, we link IDO our therapeutic enzyme to galectin three, a protein that binds to sugars that decorate every tissue within your body by binding to tissue sugars. Galectin three anchors IDO at the site of injection. So this prevents the diffusion of the drug through the tissue. And this gives us a much longer duration of action of drug at the site of interest. So for example, our version 1.0 of IDO GATOR persists at the injection site for upwards of seven days. Whereas again, conventional drugs say if we were to inject IDO into the tissue directly, it would be gone within minutes to hours. So in terms of moving the technology forward, we have demonstrated preclinical efficacy of IDO GATOR, and a couple of models. So the first is osteoarthritis as was alluded to at the onset of our show today. Um, in these cases, we’ve been able to demonstrate that injection of IDO GATOR into the joint that’s afflicted with osteoarthritis will reduce pain that’s sensed by the host. It will also tamp down inflammation, which in turn will prevent further progression of the disease. And a striking sort of observation here is that injection of IDO GATOR can restore normal gait in the patients . So a patient that’s experienced some degree of limping that limp will be diminished following injection of the drug into the joint. The other space where we have really exciting data is in the area of periodontal disease. So a non resolving chronic inflammation in a tooth. And what we’ve demonstrated to date is that by injecting IDO, IDO GATOR into the site of disease, that again, we can suppress inflammation as a result of turning down that inflammation. We can prevent the bone loss, that’s a hallmark of the disease, which would ultimately lead to the need for the tooth to be extracted or removed. So by getting ahead of the inflammation, we’re not getting ahead of the disease progression

Richard Miles: 5:42

So far, I’m loving this. I mean, it sounds like great news. And I neglected mention at the top of the show that to , to congratulate you on advancing from the Cade Prize, sweet 16 round to the final four round. So congratulations to both of you. -Thank you very much. Tell me, does your current research indicate, is there the possibility that you could extend this even beyond say seven days? And is there also the possibility that you mentioned there would be like in the case of say knees, injections, is there a topical patch or application possibility in this?

Greg Hudalla: 6:11

Yeah, so I’ll touch on the first question, which is, is there a way to extend the duration? So we haven’t demonstrated it yet with IDO G, but we have developed a model platform in which we can achieve residence time or duration of action, upwards of about 14 to 17 days at the injection site. So in order to do this, we play sort of a biochemistry trick. So most of your listeners are probably familiar with Velcro, right? And Velcros two material surfaces that interact through a series of hooks and eyes, right? And if you were in a vision , one hook interacting with one eye, you can pull it apart pretty easily, but as you start to link multiple hooks and eyes together, you significantly strengthened the interaction at that interface, the interaction between the two pieces of Velcro. So what we do essentially, as we increase the number of galectin three binding sites, and we take our protein of interest or therapeutic interest say IDO, and now, instead of linking it to one copy of our galectin three anchor, we can link it to two or three or four copies of our collecting three anchor. And so this acts in a census molecular Velcro now, instead of having one site of interaction, you have multiple sites of interaction by adding these sites of interaction together, you can strengthen the anchoring phenomenon that we see occur. And so again, we can go from our flagships seven day formulation to formulations that should persist for weeks at the injection site .

Richard Miles: 7:29

So before we talk about the commercial path that you’d like to see this travel, let’s talk a little bit about the approval process, right? Because what little I know of medical drugs of any sort of medical devices, there’s this very long convoluted FDA approval process that lasts like 100 years, right ? Roughly right . Maybe 98. It’s just going to be tough to get through the approval process. Ben, you want to take a stab at that?

Greg Hudalla: 7:49

So as you mentioned, this would classify as a drug. And so with that comes some unique challenges in the FDA translation space. So first maybe a bit of history. So our therapeutic is an enzyme and enzymes are actually the first class of proteins that were pursued as biologic drugs. So as early, as about the 1950s, when scientists first started developing a real handle on what enzymes do and the roles that they play, and then being able to extract them from living systems, they were really attractive drug candidates because they catalyze reactions they’ll speed, a reaction up they’re essential for basically every biological reaction that happens in our bodies. And so the idea is that unlike a small molecule in which you deliver a very high dose, in principle, you can deliver a little bit of enzyme and it will go a very long way because it will continue acting on drugs fast forward about 30 years into the future, and enzymes have been outpaced by biologic drugs that we hear a lot more about. And some things like monoclonal antibodies. And the reason why is because of the fact that a little bit of enzyme goes a long way. If they leave the site of intended action, they can catalyze reactions offsite, and this can lead to unwanted side effects. So again, that was one of the major drivers behind our anchoring technology now onto the sort of translational efforts or the , what we see as the translational path for IDO GATOR, one of the benefits of our system. So let me remind everyone that what our technology is really based on is what we know of sort of a peanut butter and jelly or chocolate and peanut butter. We take a really promising enzyme drug, and we link it to this anchoring domain, galectin three. And so we’ve taken two proteins and we’ve physically stuck them together to make a new molecule , um , on some level that presents a series of challenges. But the benefit here is that IDO is a protein that’s expressed within our bodies . So we’re naturally tolerant to that enzyme being around galectin three is also a protein that is expressed within our bodies. So we’re naturally tolerant to galectin three being around. So we envision from a safety profile, that IDO of galectin three will be relatively safe from the perspective of it’s tolerance by your immune system. The other benefits of our system that sort of speak to this safety features are that because we’re delivering IDO GATOR locally, we can significantly reduce the dose. So even if a little bit of drug does leave the site of intended action and get into circulation, move into another tissue, the amount of enzyme that’s, there is so low that it’s unlikely to have significant side effects that one might experience if they were to deliver the same drug systemically. So, from the perspective of the molecule itself and sort of entry into the human space, we see those as being real advantages. There’s one more unique feature of our technology that I want to touch on too , which sets it apart from a lot of biologics that go through the preclinical pipeline and then try to make the transition into the clinical or human use space. And that is that galectin three, the anchoring domain in our technology interacts with sugars that are decorating human tissues, but these sugar molecules are conserved from mouse to man. So what that means is , is in principle, there will be no re-engineering of the drug that’s required. So your listeners may have heard of humanized antibodies in the past. So this is an antibody that’s raised in an animal host. And then the domain that’s necessary for binding to sites in our tissue is maintained. It’s moved over from the animal antibody into a human antibody to make it safer, make it more tolerated within human systems. We wouldn’t need to go through that process. So we see on one level, a clearer translation from the preclinical studies that we’re doing now into the clinical space, but we also see this as another potential business opportunity. And that is that we could in theory, use this same therapeutic in veterinary medicine applications. So osteoarthritis, periodontal disease, the two spaces in which we’ve been evaluating efficacy now , um , are things that afflict companion pets all the time, right? My dogs have had teeth extracted because of , of periodontal disease. And I know of a significant number of friends who have dogs and cats that’s that have experienced osteoarthritis in their hips and their knees. As they get older, they receive a lot of the same conventional treatments that humans do, injections of steroids or injections of antibodies because of the fact that both IDO and the galectin three anchoring domain are conserved across mammalian species and the mechanisms by which they work are conserved across mammalian species. We really think there’s an opportunity here to translate into the vet product space first, and then use that to really springboard into the human clinical use.

Richard Miles: 12:13

So let’s talk about the business side a bit. Now, could you describe for me what sort of your game plan is now? I mean, are you both going to quit your jobs? One of you clean out your garage? You’ll be for like Steve Wasnic was next Steve jobs, right. You’ll be mixing enzymes in the basement or is there a different, a better path available?

Ben Keselowsky: 12:27

Yeah. So this gets into the question of what is it that people should do when they’re trying to start a new company, and it’s really about finding the right team. So finding the right team members and that’s where we’re at. So, we are looking for business people. We’re looking for investing partners to really help drive this forward with vision, with experience. This is the stage we’re at. We’re trying to find partners to help drive this forward.

Richard Miles: 12:54

Oh , so still very early stage. Do you have patents on this technology?

Ben Keselowsky: 12:57

We’re pending. Yes, we do. We’re very lucky to have excellent support from the office of technology licensing here at UF, and we are pursuing patents in U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia and Australia. Thank you.

Richard Miles: 13:11

So one of the things our listeners find interesting, at least I find it interesting is the personal backgrounds of the inventors that we have on the show. So Ben, maybe starting with you, if you could talk a little bit about where you’re from, what were some of your early influences? How’d you end up in North central Florida doing some research?

Ben Keselowsky: 13:26

Sure. Yeah. So I am born and raised in Florida from Tampa.

Richard Miles: 13:31

So you’re a long way from home, right?

Ben Keselowsky: 13:33

95 miles or something. That’s right. So growing up in Tampa, I went to USF and studied there. And then I moved all the way up North to Atlanta for grad school and then moved back down to Tampa. So I was,

Richard Miles: 13:44

Winters were too cold for up there?

Ben Keselowsky: 13:45

Yes, they dragged on and on in Atlanta. So I was very happy to get my family close. We love the small college town. You have mentioned. We were just across the street at the festival. And so we enjoyed the small college town and UF is a fantastic place to be. Our department is centrally located with the health sciences, the teaching hospital, the veterinary medicine, the rest of engineering. We have a really great location where we are in . Fantastic.

Richard Miles: 14:13

Did you always want to go into an engineering or science related field? What were you like as a kid? Were you a good student? Teacher’s pet? Spill the beans here.

Ben Keselowsky: 14:20

I really quite enjoyed science and math. And my dad was a retired mechanical engineer, worked at TECO Tamp Electric Cooperative. He’d take me to the power plant and show me the boilers and everything that , how it works and teach me how combustion engines work. So, yeah, I was pretty nerdy and enjoyed things like that. It was basically told I’m doing well in this. I should think about engineering. That was your parents telling you that teachers telling you that was my father. Um, and actually in high school, I looked up to my physics teacher a lot. He was fantastic. Terry Adams, he made things very fun. And the group in the class had a lot of fun trying to learn these concepts together and really enjoy the creativity and the teamwork, which is fantastic. Greg and I came together on this chocolate and peanut butter concept just by chatting because we’re right next door . Our offices are running door to each other, but growing up, I was kind of did well in math and science and enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed the arts too, but now kind of my outlet is the creativity with science and technology.

Richard Miles: 15:27

Greg, your turn, were you the sort of kid that we’re dissecting frogs when you’re three years something, tell us about your upbringing.

Greg Hudalla: 15:33

So I grew up in and then just outside of Chicago. So I’m a bit farther away from home. I did my undergrad at the Illinois Institute of technology and then grad school in Wisconsin so much like Ben made a pretty short commute from home. And then I moved back to Chicago and my entire family, my entire extended family is still in the greater Chicago land area. So when I left for Madison and then came back, they thought, all right , you’ve done it. You’ve seen the world. You know , there’s Chicago, it’s the greatest city on earth.

Richard Miles: 15:57

Wisconsin, how much further can you go? I mean come on.

Greg Hudalla: 16:00

And then , uh , Ben was on the hiring committee when I was applying for jobs and University of Florida popped up on my radar. And you could sort of hear the needle scratch if you will, or the tire squeal in the minds of all of my family members, as I tried to explain to them that we were going to pick up and move to Gainesville, but you know, it’s been great. It’s a quintessential American college town and it’s been a really terrific experience in the few years that I’ve been here. So getting back to a little bit of my sort of pre academic time. So I was always a good student, but when I went to college, I didn’t really have a clear vision of what it was that I wanted to do. So, I’m the son of an iron worker and a court reporter. And for them, college was a big deal putting my brother and I into school and seeing us through to the finish line was a huge deal for the two of them. But I was flexible. And like I said, sort of lacking vision when I first went to college. And so my freshman year I was actually a college athlete. So I was playing on the university soccer team and three games into my freshman year. I suffered an injury to my knee that resulted in a significant amount of cartilage. So damage on the, about the size of a silver dollar cartilage had detached from my femur. So I’m in 18, 19 year old kid. At this point in time, I went from pretty much not having osteoarthritis to having extremely advanced osteoarthritis,

Richard Miles: 17:16

So this really is personal for you.

Greg Hudalla: 17:17

30 seconds. Right? And so when we went to the orthopedic surgeon, the suggestion at the time was we have to take the cartilage out and we’re probably going to need to give you a total knee replacement. And again, I’m a 19 year old kid at this point in time,

Richard Miles: 17:30

Not the typical knee replacement surgery candidate .

Greg Hudalla: 17:32

Exactly. Right? And this is the early two thousands when total knee replacements don’t have a particularly long lifespan . And so insurance wasn’t happy. My parents weren’t happy. I wasn’t happy. The surgeon wasn’t happy. And so initially they had done a microfracture procedure to try and restore , uh , send me the cartilage that was still relatively healthy at the site. And some time was put into, let’s try to find an alternative approach, some other way to deal with this. And so maybe six to nine months later, we’re meeting with the orthopedic surgeon. And he says, I think you’re a good candidate for a brand new technology. It’s technology known as Carticel that was pioneered by Genzyme in which they take a biopsy of cartilage cells from a healthy site in your body. And they send them out to a lab. They grow them up and they reimplant those cells back into your tissue . So it’s a way to save the joint, save the bone, and ideally provide me a longer timeframe before I might need a total knee replacement. Now I’m 18 or so 19 years out from this procedure. And I still have my original knee, but it was at that moment, that was when the light bulb went off for me. And I said, I want to know who does this right? Who develops technologies like this ? What career path do you follow? Where you can work on things where you can have this sort of impact on someone’s quality of life. And that was when I was introduced to the world of biomedical engineering. And from that moment forward, I said, this is what I want to do. I’m going to study engineering, go to graduate school. And ultimately I want to be running my own academic research lab somewhere.

Richard Miles: 18:55

Wow, that’s an amazing moment of clarity for an 18 year old. So refresh my memory. This would result of a hit on the field, or how did this happen?

Greg Hudalla: 19:02

Yeah, so I,

Richard Miles: 19:03

So you need to go back and thank that guy who took you out, right? Like, oh he gave me direction.

Greg Hudalla: 19:07

So it was me that, you know, the fault is entirely on me. I remember going in for the slide tackle and feeling the moment of pain and thinking, this is it, this is what’s happened. What’s going on. It was a game changing experience.

Richard Miles: 19:17

So the two of you are still in the thick of your academic careers. And I realized I have to talk to you . You’re you’re older than I thought you were. I think part of it’s by the time you hit your mid fifties, everybody looks young, right? So I was going to say, well, you don’t have much experience to share, but clearly you actually do, in terms of wisdom for younger academics or younger entrepreneurs. And you probably have already gotten this question or you certainly will get it more and more. And that is how did you do it? You can tell us a secret of taking a research and commercializing it. And I understand you’re still at the very beginning of that path, but what are some of the lessons you feel you’ve learned already being in academia for a good while now, and as you see the transition, perhaps of either a new life or a new path for your research commercial market, what are the sorts of things that you would do again, Ben, we can start with you and what are the things that you would not do again?

Ben Keselowsky: 20:03

So right now, what we’re trying to do with this technology is very early. And so really the advice of team building is paramount finding the right people. We’re still making those efforts. And so the Cade contest has been fantastic and it’s motivated us to really push on that more and more, and to keep going out for more and more activities like that. And I think that’s just expanding your contact base and trying to make more and more interactions until you find just the right match. So in this venture, we’re still working on that. I’m trying to answer your specific question .

Richard Miles: 20:41

Okay. Anything else you want to dispense wisdom on? And just life advice, you know, you don’t have to come up with the smart answers, but it’s funny. Sometimes people have had either very positive or sort of horrific experiences along the way, but it sounds like you all have had a fairly stable, happy research careers to date.

Ben Keselowsky: 21:02

It’s a lot of work, keeping your head up, having a group of people that you can rely on to keep you going and commiserate with is critical. So on the commercial side, I’m also a cofounder of a small company called One Vacs LLC. And they’re still also working on finding the right business partners and investors and things like that. They have been quite successful with the people that have been working there. Greg Marshall, is he person there and he’s been getting SBI. Ours is getting NIH funding through small business grants. So I think that that’s a fantastic pathway that startup companies can take as well. But it’s independent from finding the right business partners and you have to do both those things to be successful.

Richard Miles: 21:47

Greg how about you, aside from going out and getting banged up on the sports field as a path to advancement, what else would you share in terms of lessons learned?

Greg Hudalla: 21:54

I think a lot of us approach this with a vision of what we want to do. There’s a finish line there. And I think the important part is figuring out how to move along that path. Really the first step in that process is identifying the technology. So I’ll be the first one to admit when I started my academic career, I had no idea that this is where my research was going to go at galectin three and galactans are a family of proteins that I’ve studied in my research for a number of years now. But it really wasn’t until a day that I remember very fondly of leaning against the door jam of Ben’s office. And him kind of complaining to me and me complaining about various things. And he said, I’ve got this enzyme that I think is a really terrific candidate for therapeutic. I just don’t know how to get it where I want it to go. And he said, could we do something like this? Could we modify it in this way or modified in that way? He’s like all of my conventional approaches have tried and I just keep destroying the enzyme. I can’t maintain its activity. And I was just kind of standing there daydreaming. And I remember saying, well, we work with on this family of carbohydrate binding proteins, nobody’s really asked if we could use this as a way to localize it a protein at a site of interest. Let’s take a shot at this and see what happens. And now, you know, we’re three or four years down the road. We not only have demonstration that the concept works, but we’ve started moving it into developing this new drug that we think actually has potential to impact the quality of life of many people, the world over. And so for me, that’s the thing that I would encourage people to not lose sight of the opportunity that’s in front of you and listen to the people around you and take what you know, and try to find ways to move what you know, into new spaces. That’s really what innovation is, right? It’s not about inventing something new from scratch, right? I had a student a number of years ago, use the analogy of putting wheels on a suitcase for many years, we lugged suitcases around. So your cases are fantastic tool. As soon as someone put wheels on the suitcase, right? That innovation of taking two technologies that have been around for a very, very long time and blending them together. It revolutionized the way that we travel for me, that’s at the crux of really doing something interesting and exciting and novel. It’s not about finding something fundamentally new it’s on some level, taking things that already exist and finding ways to repurpose them and opportunities to interact with amazing colleagues like Ben and the other people around me at UF have opened my eyes to opportunities that again, when I started my career, I didn’t have the foresight and I didn’t know that this was what my path would look like.

Richard Miles: 24:18

So you guys are gonna have to remember and write down these origin stories. Cause after you’ve sold Gator for billions of dollars, you both have yachts and multiple houses gonna need some sort of anchor of humility and touching Greg and Ben. I can already tell there’s a great team dynamic here. I think you guys are gonna do quite well. And thank you very much for coming on Radio Cade, I hope to have you back as guests for an update.

Ben Keselowsky: 24:38

Thank you so much.

Greg Hudalla: 24:38

Yes. Thanks a lot.

Richard Miles: 24:40

I’m Richard Miles.

Outro: 24:43

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the radio Cade theme song featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Tony Barr has invented several computer programming languages, including the Statistical Analysis System, better known as SAS. He describes the concept of language, as “a mental model to think about the world.” Tony believes he has found the “concept of a concept” that will enable his new language, AMORE, to “redefine computer science.” As a child, he “lived inside his head,” and “never got any support from teachers.” Tony’s mother was “a brilliant person” and his grandfather held a patent on making ice cubes. His words of wisdom, “share the credit, but also take the credit.”  

Tony Barr has invented several computer programming languages, including the Statistical Analysis System, better known as SAS. He describes the concept of language, as “a mental model to think about the world.” Tony believes he has found the “concept of a concept” that will enable his new language, AMORE, to “redefine computer science.” As a child, he “lived inside his head,” and “never got any support from teachers.” Tony’s mother was “a brilliant person” and his grandfather held a patent on making ice cubes. His words of wisdom, “share the credit, but also take the credit.”  

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Amore in Italian, it means love. And it’s a title of many, a song it’s also an acronym for a model of reality and you computer programming language. I’m your host Richard Miles today on Radio Cade. My guest is Tony Barr, a distinguished inventor of other programming languages, such as the Statistical Analysis Systems, SAS, and Acme, the automated classification of medical entities. He holds four U.S. patents and is considered one of the world’s experts on programming languages. Welcome to the show.

Tony Barr: 1:05

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So if we talk about everything that you know, and every technology you’ve developed, this would probably be a six to eight hour podcast series, and we’d have to order in lunch and sleeping bags and everything else. So we’re going to start out at the ground, and that is, let’s start about the concept of language itself, because you have developed programming languages for computers, but really programming languages , just another language, right? So why don’t we start at the conceptual level about the function of language, and then we’ll move from there to how you have interpreted those functions in your various inventions from SAS on up to a model of reality. Language, what is it for? What do we use it for? Why is it important? How do you think about language?

Tony Barr: 1:45

Language is the way we represent knowledge, the way we communicate knowledge, I actually go one step further beyond language. I think we have mental models in our mind that enable us to think about the world. We build models of organizations called enterprise models that drive the world. The government’s got the biggest model in the world. Every business has a model. The museum has got its model for its customers and its exhibits and who their vendors are. We build models to think about the world, to understand the world. Language is a medium to communicate models. And it’s my thesis. That the way we represent things in our mind is very similar to the way we represent things in the computer. And my hope is to unify the way we think about the mind, the way we think about the computer. So we have a uniform model, a simpler model for the world to live in. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could, at the age of 12 learn model of reality. Inside it would be mathematics and logic. It would also be the way the computers work. It could give you the insight is the way you separate the concepts from the objects in the world. And this would give us a uniform framework to about the world. So my longterm plan, which I won’t live to see is that we all live inside a model of reality, which we share.

Richard Miles: 3:07

So when we talk about a model of reality, it’s relation to language, is it like for instance, a young child before they learn how to speak, right? Actually I’m thinking in particular right now of my granddaughter, who’s eight weeks old. Right? And so she’s learning about the world around her. And so when she first say, looks at a dog or a cat, she’s going to know what that thing is before she even knows the word for it, right? I mean , she’ll recognize these objects, a mother, father, animals, and so on. And so we already exist in a world in which we can know and identify things. And language is one way of representing them to other people, right? Because if I want to tell you, I just saw a dog walk down the street, I have to use a word. They can be in English. It can be in Chinese, it can be in German, but I’m using a tool to represent what was already there, this concept of dog or cat. So when you say language as a model of reality, it’s to represent concepts that preexist language, right . Or exist apart from language, am I close?

Tony Barr: 4:03

Well, you’re hinting at the right direction.

Richard Miles: 4:06

Ok alright. I’m hinting. I’m getting, I’m warmer. Okay.

Tony Barr: 4:08

Okay. Now I think the baby is a visual learner. As an audible learner. It doesn’t have the concept of phonemes and syllables yet very rapidly. It learns mama and Papa. Very simple, simple sounds. And they build eventually a oral language, or you could call it a visual language. There is a school of thought in computer science about visual languages to represent things like programs, to represent things like mathematical molecules. So we build visual languages as well as we build verbal languages. The underlying representation, the structural representation in my mind is all the same. Whether you see it visually, or are you seeing it as a series of characters

Richard Miles: 4:52

And in visual language again, just so we make sure we’re talking about the same concepts . If I’m driving down the street and I see a sign and the sign has a picture of a man walking across a pedestrian,

Tony Barr: 5:00

That’s a visual language.

Richard Miles: 5:01

I know it doesn’t say stop because there’s a guy about to cross the street. I just look at the picture and I know that’s what it means. So it’s communicating the exact same thing as if it were all.

Tony Barr: 5:11

Yeah, that’s an international visual language. Our street signs are.

Richard Miles: 5:15

Untease us now. So when computers talk to each other, they’re using this whole system of symbols, right? To communicate things for the computer to do. And when computers first started out, walk us through what the development conceptually was of early computers, I guess, and where we are now.

Tony Barr: 5:32

Well, I think from the very early on, people use simple languages to represent computer programs, to represent mathematical relationships at the basis of computers was the binary system where you use just the symbol zero and one, putting 32 zeros and ones together. You can make a pretty good sized number out of that. Using the binary, arithmetic. It’s languages embedded inside of languages. We use 16 bits to represent a character now, and we can represent 65,000 characters with 16 bits. And we manipulate these characters, which are at the basis, representatives bits to represent, turn the switch on or drop the ball or whatever you might have commands like that and your computer language. Uh , so we convert from strings of characters, into some electrical instructions in the computer and it drops the ball. So it is a process of building bigger and bigger structures from littler structures. And we use in this case, a language based upon symbols, but you can use it language based upon pictures as well, which is like your street sign is the exact analogy there.

Richard Miles: 6:42

Is that part of the underlying basis of Amore a model of reality going towards more intuitive system, or is it something else?

Tony Barr: 6:50

It’s meant to be a complete system. And it’s a complete system starting off with the concept of a concept that defines itself and defines all other concepts. I think this is the most profound thought you can have a system has the definition of itself inside the system. This is actually something that I look for for 30 years of my life. And I found the concept of a concept. I used to call it the type of type, but better terminology is the concept of a concept. With the concept of concept, you can define all other concepts with the concept she can represent. A list of pictures would be a concept. An element of the list of pictures would be a character. So you build up bigger and bigger pictures. You see I’m really redefining computer science. So this is why we’re having trouble communicating here.

Richard Miles: 7:38

So we’ve heard an awful lot about artificial intelligence and like sort of self-learning, but this isn’t that.

Tony Barr: 7:44

No, it isn’t that at all.

Richard Miles: 7:45

So it’s not the ability of computers to program themselves.

Tony Barr: 7:48

No, it is not at all.

Richard Miles: 7:50

It’s really a whole different way of understanding what computers are or what they do?

Tony Barr: 7:55

Exactly. Also, it’s a coherent model that ties together the conceptual world and the world of objects. In fact, concepts in the heart are constructed of other little objects. So you’re really using objects to describe objects, but you have to break the ideas down and package them so that the concept is the definition of an object,

Richard Miles: 8:18

This strikes me, is it in some way , similar to fractals and that in fact, those things like trees or snowflakes, right? The large thing is simply the smaller thing repeated over and over and over again. So that the same structure that you find in a leaf, it’s essentially the same structure you find in a tree. So there’s a definition of the tree so to speak in the leaf.

Tony Barr: 8:38

You are somewhat getting on there. A concept is essentially a list of connections and a connection can be a list, or it could be just an object or it could be an array. So that little framework there is applied over and over again, to build up the world. So you have concepts which are all defined by the concept of concept. It’s very finite. That’s the fractal idea, but you develop new concepts and concepts and inherit properties from their parent concept. So it grows.

Richard Miles: 9:12

Tony, what sort of applications do you think this would have a model of reality and how would this change the world in which we live in now?

Tony Barr: 9:20

Well presently, the programming model is programming languages and databases to store the objects. So when you’re signing up for a class, you, you access some program on your screen, you enter in the things and they do database operations to build the new registration of you for some class, the teacher sees that the students in the class, the student sees that I’m in this class. So you’re manipulating objects through a database mechanism. My idea is to have one level of formality so that the person is just in the model and all of these operations are done in a simple conceptual manner. So the separation of the types and the objects or the schema and the objects has disappeared, and those all become one together. So you see the thing in a uniform understandable way. It really is an enormous change. So right now, any application you have has databases behind it. And this system, you would go through programs and access the student records, whatever, but it’d be the same model used to store the objects as you would when you ran a simple little program. So it eliminates enormous amount of technology. And it’s a whimsical idea, but I have the idea of a one world model where everybody live inside it. Now I could, well imagine that the country of China would have its own model reality and maybe the Western world would have its model reality. And actually, I , in reality, there’d be the Google versus the Yahoo thing. I mean, Yahoo’s lost, but there would be that type of competition. But Google now is one to race.

Richard Miles: 11:10

Some people would argue that Google is our new reality, right? I mean, what can we do that? Doesn’t involve some way Google, right?

Tony Barr: 11:16

Exactly.

Richard Miles: 11:17

You were, as I mentioned at the top of the show, the founder of Statistical Analysis System, SAS , which went on to huge commercial success, what was it like in the early days, starting a company, running a company. And then do you look back on that time with any regrets or you left relatively early in 1979, correct? Before SAS was this huge company that it is now, what was that like being part of a startup young company. And then what is it like to look on that now? What, 40 years later,

Tony Barr: 11:46

It was my second startup.

Richard Miles: 11:47

Second startup. Okay.

Tony Barr: 11:49

So, the first startup I left because I wanted to focus SAS because I thought that was the bigger fish I didn’t do well in a organization run by committee. That’s what I would say.

Richard Miles: 12:01

You also did some work for department of defense, for awhile.

Tony Barr: 12:04

That was an incredible experience I got in there right at the time, things were really changing, I guess, McNamara was in there and he was going to computerize everything. And I worked at the Pentagon. They hired me, they said, we’re going to put all the military information into the computer. What a challenge. I just loved that place. And they had the self-defining file and that has become etched in my mind. Self-definition however, when it takes self-definition to the ultimate , uh , step so that if you have a question it’s always inside the system, it’s like having the Webster dictionary there. I mean, you always have the definition of everything that you need. And as you navigate through it, you have two pointers, one point or in the object, one point or in the concept. And as you navigate down, you get little or little or concepts. And so you never lose track of where you’re at.

Richard Miles: 12:54

So this is probably a really bad analogy, but it was one that gentlemen, is this almost like a computer perpetual motion machine. And then once you’ve written it, you don’t need to tinker with anymore. Cause it kinda just keeps self-defining yourself or providing its own answers, I suppose.

Tony Barr: 13:07

Not all, not at all.

Richard Miles: 13:10

Alright, we should probably move on from me trying to define this, but when you said self-defining file. So I was trying to grasp how that would actually work.

Tony Barr: 13:17

Well, the self-defining file just meant that they had the dictionary of all the elements on the front of of the file.

Richard Miles: 13:24

And this was in the late sixties?

Tony Barr: 13:26

That was 64.

Richard Miles: 13:29

Okay . All right . And how long were you there?

Tony Barr: 13:31

Just short of two years.

Richard Miles: 13:32

Prior to S AS, right? Well, before SAS.

Tony Barr: 13:34

Well it was Immediately before SAS. Right.

Richard Miles: 13:37

Tony, you said that as a child, you quote, lived inside your head and just created some problems in school because you’re always planning projects rather than listening to your teachers.

Tony Barr: 13:48

That’s right.

Richard Miles: 13:48

Which probably describes a lot of young boys in particular. Did your teacher finally come around at some point to realizing how bright you were or was it always an issue in your school career?

Tony Barr: 13:59

I never had any support from the teachers.

Richard Miles: 14:02

Really? Right to the bitter end.

Tony Barr: 14:03

Not till the bitter end.

Richard Miles: 14:05

That must’ve been frustrating. I imagine that because,

Tony Barr: 14:07

N`o I, I enjoyed my life .

: 14:08

You enjoyed it? Okay. But even in school, it wasn’t frustrating because the teachers probably thought what that you were lazy or you just weren’t focused. What did they think?

Tony Barr: 14:16

I’ll give you this little thought. One time we took a test to see what was going to go into New York city to compete on this math test that they had. And so I took the test and she had these other guys, they were going to go. I said, I don’t think I made a mistake on that test. And she went up and regraded my test and found out that I was the guy to go in on that bet. Now went into New York city at NYU and all these kids were there. And I believe I would’ve have gotten one of those scholarships, except they didn’t teach anything about logic in my mathematics. And all these guys from Brooklyn Polytech had courses where they discussed logic, the ands and or’s and not”s and whatever. If I just had that one little thing, I might’ve gotten that, but I’m just using this to illustrate that I got no respect.

Richard Miles: 15:05

You sound like Rodney Dangerfield. Were you always drawn to math? When was the first time you remember loving math?

Tony Barr: 15:11

Seventh grade.

Richard Miles: 15:12

Seventh grade. Okay.

Tony Barr: 15:13

When algebra came, then I loved it.

Richard Miles: 15:14

Did you just like the beauty of it? The elegance? Is that what attracted you?

Tony Barr: 15:17

It was the elegance, right, right, that’s the power of it.

Richard Miles: 15:18

I remember the same thing happening. I was not a math major, but I remember really liking geometry because geometry operated according to these definite rules. And if you, if you worked through the steps, you got a certain answer and there’s something very beautiful about that. Were you ever interested in things like biology or chemistry or was always so focused on numbers and math and satanical things.

Tony Barr: 15:38

Mechanical things .

Richard Miles: 15:39

Mechanical things, okay.

Tony Barr: 15:39

More than anything else.

Richard Miles: 15:42

You grew up in New Jersey, correct?

Tony Barr: 15:43

Right.

Richard Miles: 15:43

Neither of your parents was a engineer or mathematician or had that background? No . Did you have any other influences? Do you think this is just, you were born this way? Or did you have particular teachers or other folks who got you curious about this?

Tony Barr: 15:57

I want to straighten that out. My mother was an incredibly brilliant person. I think my father was as well, but he didn’t finish high school. He was from England. His father was a refrigeration engineer who had a patent on how to make ice cubes on a passenger line.

Richard Miles: 16:12

This is the English UK patent? Have you ever found that patent?

Tony Barr: 16:16

My sisters found it and I asked her to send it the reference to me, but I will , I will get that reference. Now, my grandfather was an exceptional individual who was a head of the school board, state representative owned half a bank, owned a car dealership and was wiped out by the depression. So he had the biggest house in town, still the biggest house in that town and two maids. And my mother never talked about them. I had to go visit my uncle to find the history of that because we never were living that life.

Richard Miles: 16:46

Did you go into New York city a lot? The reason I ask , I just interviewed somebody a few days ago and they attribute a lot of their intellectual curiosity to the fact that they went into the city. They went to these great planetariums and museums as a young child.

Tony Barr: 16:59

I love that. I did the same stuff. Also. We would visit in Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute. That was a big, big thing for me as well.

Richard Miles: 17:07

And those were in the days. I imagine you just went by yourself, right? Just hopped on a subway or a bus or something.

Tony Barr: 17:12

I was too young, no, I went to New York city on my own, but in Philadelphia I went with my parents.

Richard Miles: 17:18

Right, right. Tony, we always offer everyone on the show, a chance to dispense wisdom. If you were meeting a younger version of yourself, are there things that you would say, Tony, stay away from this or Tony definitely do that. Anything that you would have done differently than if you knew what you know, now?

Tony Barr: 17:34

This is not exactly Jermaine , but I watched the picture about Steve jobs. And there was one thing in there that was very dramatic, which was Steve jobs was reviewing what they’re doing with the MAC. And he where’s the typeface support? And program manager said, we’re not going to do it because we can’t meet the deadline. And Steve said, well, what? You can’t make the deadline. No, we can’t meet the deadline. And Steve said, we’re going to meet the deadline. And the guy said, no, we can’t meet the deadline. And Steve said, you’re out of here. Well, I had an incident in my company that was rather tragic where I had a team of five people, one engineer, four programmers, working on a phone system that I thought was an easy way to make money. And I had some pretty good ideas on how to do it. I actually thought I could do 6,000 phones on a PC. So I was go into these meetings and the guy was a brilliant guy. I had as the manager there, he would argue in front of the whole group there. That is non-viable . And I’m thinking we spent $80,000 for our phone system. This is viable. And then I go to a trade show and somebody comes over and says, have you seen this guy’s booth? He’s over there with the tutorial for windows 95. So he got the whole team working on that. Not on my work. I would felt insulted time after time having to defend this product in front of the whole team. I see if he came to me one-on-one right, that would have been fine. But that was a big mistake for me to tolerate dissent in front of the team. He took the whole team with him .

Richard Miles: 19:09

I see . But there were supposed to be working for you.

Tony Barr: 19:12

Right! Right. So that’s just an easy thing to talk about in this little thing. So perhaps a word of wisdom is that you need to be a self promoter and make sure that people know who’s getting what done and share the credit, but also take the credit. That is a word of wisdomI would say.

Richard Miles: 19:29

Tony, we could talk all morning. It would take you at least another two hours to get me up to speed and what I need to know about computer programming language, but it’s been a fascinating conversation. You have an incredible mind and incredible career, and we’re just very pleased that you could join us today on Radio Cade.

Tony Barr: 19:43

Well, I’m very pleased to be here. Thank you.

Richard Miles: 19:45

I’m Richard Miles.

Outro: 19:48

Radio Cade Would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.