Stay the course? More troops? More money? New direction? New leadership?

Recently I was honored to give the commencement address at the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. Here are excerpts from that address: "If we were gathered here in 1906, not 2006, your lives would be very different – and I don't mean you wouldn't have an iPod."

I find that my ability to know something is constantly dependent on my ability first to imagine it.

The culmination of one year and the beginning of the next is when we take stock of what we have accomplished and didn't accomplish and think ahead to our dreams for the coming year. Our Chairman Mike Milken put it well at our Esquire meeting, December is a time to reflect on those we lost during the year and ask, "Did we do enough? Could we have done more?" And I would add, what more will we do to stop the suffering and death that will afflict millions of people around the world with deadly and debilitating diseases?

There is a saying "When God closes a door, He opens a window." But what are we to think when God opens the floodgates?

The natural and man-made disasters that drowned New Orleans in water and chaos provoked a medical crisis the likes of which we have not seen in this country since the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Without power, water, medicine, or food, medical care was reduced to the laying on of hands in candle light. Doctors and families members carried patients and equipment weighing hundreds of pounds up several flights of stairs to waiting helicopters. Many patients died of dehydration and heat exhaustion before they could be evacuated. Those who were evacuated found themselves at the airport hospital where conditions were only marginally better – many patients were "black tagged" and left to die because overwhelmed doctors could not help them.

Einstein winds my clock.

In both music and literature, there is that moment when the artist, as artists have done from the beginning of recorded time, turns to the world and says,..."and then...!" The best artists are masters of using that moment to transform all that has come before and set the scene for all that is yet to happen. It is in that moment when true character is revealed, when our fate is unveiled, and when we learn whether our story is to be hopeful or despairing, tragic or comic, heroic or inauspicious. Following those two words, whole empires rise and fall, the world is destroyed by flood and saved again, families weep or rejoice, melancholy erupts into an Ode to Joy, and human history is written.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is the Father of Positivism: the view that things should be studied by subdividing them into their smallest parts. By dividing the world into smaller and smaller disciplines and applying principles of science and mathematics to those disciplines, Comte believed we could understand "the whole" better when we put all of its parts back together. Of course, putting things back together has always been the hard part.

A philosopher once noted that it is human nature to marvel once at a spectacular event – like the rising of the sun – and then to treat it evermore as commonplace. We have come to see the millions of deaths every year from disease as part of the inexorable rhythm of life. But when thousands die in a tragically sudden and spectacular event, we ask ourselves, 'what could we have done?' It is a question we should ask and act on to prevent deaths both 'commonplace' and spectacular.

"When I find myself in times of trouble, I return to the music of my youth for guidance. And more often than not, I return to the wisdom of the Rolling Stones, 'You can't always get what you want.' And how true that is in the debate over stem cells."

"When we planned the first annual FasterCures retreat at Lake Tahoe July 8 to 11, we expected to have an interesting and productive meeting over two and half days, discussing issues related to the mission of FasterCures. But what we encountered was much more powerful than just a meeting – we found ourselves in the midst of an emerging community comprised of our Board, special invited guests from around the country, and a dedicated and generous multitude of Tahoe residents who opened their homes, their hearts, and their minds to the mission of FasterCures. And in fact, "community" became the dominant theme for both the discussions and the participants."

"The emergence of Brood X cicadas on the East Coast raises the question – what did they miss in the last seventeen years?"

"U. S. Grant was a failure at everything he tried until he became the most successful general of the Civil War. Seabiscuit was a total loser until he became the greatest race horse ever. The best baseball hitters fail seven out of ten times. And many people who were supposed to die years ago are alive today because of their willingness to try therapies that failed until they found the one that would succeed… Risking failure is the sine qua non of science."

"Gutenberg invented the printing press." Sounds simple enough, but it hardly tells the whole story. After all, movable type had been invented in China centuries earlier. And the Koreans had developed rudimentary presses. But social restrictions on texts that could be printed, the use of archaic little-spoken languages and the absence of technological breakthroughs such as reading glasses prevented those earlier inventions from taking hold.

In the mid-19th century, a famous American portrait artist traveled 300 miles from his home to Washington to paint his latest subject. A few days later he wrote his wife a letter, unaware that she had taken ill suddenly and died the day before. By the time the news of her death reached him a week later, she had already been buried. The portrait artist was devastated and determined to invent a means of communication to help others avoid the tragedy he had suffered. A few years later, Samuel Morse succeeded in inventing the telegraph.