Rob McEwen defies gravity

Commercial flights to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo are supposed to start in March 2015, after the company’s billionaire founder Richard Branson and his son Sam make the trip first.

Waiting in the wings are 800 high-net-worth individuals who have put down deposits for the $250,000 suborbital flight, and mining mogul Rob McEwen and his wife Cheryl are among them.

The McEwens and their fellow space enthusiasts (Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher was the 500th person to sign up) will take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico and rocket 100 km  above sea level over the Mojave Desert. From there they can peer out into the darkness and take in the curvature of the earth and experience weightlessness for seven and a half minutes.

“It’s really exciting, I’ve always loved reading science fiction about space travel, unimagined technologies and that type of adventure,” McEwen says in an interview. “I’ve always thought science fiction gives one the ability to look into the future — a preview of what is around the corner — and think about what everyone has said was impossible. A lot of it is positive because it’s talking about dreams and making them happen.”

It will be McEwen’s first trip to space, but it won’t be his first taste of zero gravity. In October 2010, he and pals Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation; Hollywood film director James Cameron; high-tech billionaire Elon Musk; and Jim Gianopulos, chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, played around with weightlessness on a converted Boeing 727 lined with gym mats.

Three quarters of the seats in the front section of the aircraft were removed and the pilots flew from 24,000 feet to 32,000 feet and then back to 24,000 feet 15 times in what would look like a SINE wave if charted on a graph.

“When you reach the apex, the centrifugal force negates the gravitational force and it gives you thirty seconds of weightlessness, and that is followed by two minutes of twice the force of gravity, 2G,” McEwen says. “It’s really amazing. You push off with your hands and you just start floating up; if you push at a certain force you go right up to the ceiling, you push a little less then you’ll just stop and hang mid-cabin. It’s hard to take the smile off your face. It’s delightful.”

The five friends also goofed around, taking turns tucking their knees into their chests and being passed around like a basketball, and squirting water out of bottles and gulping down the floating globules of liquid.

The flight was part of a fundraiser for the X Prize Foundation, which Diamandis created in 1996 to offer a multi-million dollar prize to kick-start private space travel and tourism.

Diamandis — who attended MIT where he received degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D. — is an international leader in the commercial space arena, having founded and run companies that include Zero Gravity Corp., the Rocket Racing League and Space Adventures.

Patterned on the US$25,000 Orteig prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 after flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Diamandis’ US$10-million X Prize was on offer to the first private group or individual that could launch a manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

Aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his partner and financier Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, claimed the prize in October 2004 after their craft, named SpaceShipOne, completed the mission. Branson then signed a deal with the pair to license SpaceShipOne’s technology to build the world’s first private spaceship to go into commercial operating service.

Since that success, the X Prize Foundation has launched a number of incentive prizes to spur technological breakthroughs in the private sector — including the yet unclaimed US$30-million Google Lunar X Prize — to land a privately funded robot on the moon, and the US$10-million Qualcomm Tricorder prize, to invent a portable handheld device that can monitor and diagnosis a person’s health, much like the fictional one used by Captain Kirk and his medical officer Dr. McCoy aboard the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek TV series.

In 2009 the X Prize Foundation invited McEwen to join its board of trustees. Diamandis and members of the X Prize Foundation were familiar with McEwen and the $575,000 prize the Toronto mining executive had offered in March 2000 as an incentive to anyone who could come up with a model to find more gold on Goldcorp’s Red Lake property in northern Ontario. To help in the search, McEwen posted all the geological data that existed on the Red Lake property on the Internet. The exercise generated 110 drill targets — half of which had not been known to Goldcorp’s geologists.

McEwen’s “Goldcorp Challenge” was a first in the mining industry, and according to McEwen was the inspiration behind Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

Tapscott, McEwen’s neighbour and a faculty member at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, estimated in the opening chapter of the book that more than 80% of the targets generated from McEwen’s open source approach “yielded substantial quantities of gold,” and that “since the challenge was initiated an astounding 8 million oz. gold have been found.”

McEwen believes that it was initially through Tapscott and the publication of Wikinomics in 2006 that he first received an invitation to attend an X Prize board meeting in Los Angeles. The idea-enriched environment was exhilarating, he recalls.

“I was sitting there and the ideas that were being thrown up were massive,” he says. “You often hear lots of ideas, but sitting around the table were people who not only had big ideas, they executed them and brought them to fruition.”

“When I think of that meeting, I have an image of a snake growing and bursting out of its old, smaller skin and leaving that behind and moving ahead with more freedom and speed. That’s how my mind felt, and so I said I’d be delighted to join their board.”

As a trustee, McEwen rubs shoulders with the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google; Rajan Tata, head of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group; and Elon Musk, creator of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, spaceship company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (which is working on a replacement for the space shuttle) and PayPal, which the South Africa-born entrepreneur reportedly sold to eBay in 2002 for US$1.5 billion in stock.

Other trustees include Amir Ansari, an inventor and social entrepreneur who co-founded Prodea Systems; film director James Cameron; and Dr. J. Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome.

McEwen is not just a board member. He is part of a small inner core of philanthro-capitalists called “The Vision Circle” that is made up of the X Prize foundation’s largest contributors. The elite group includes other major charitable givers like Brin, Page and Tata, as well as people like Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Asana and Facebook; and Ricardo Salinas, whose business divisions at Grupo Salinas include telecoms, television, retail and financial services.

When asked what it’s like to spend time with such an elite group, McEwen pauses for a split-second and then says: “They
’re like a lot of other people, only they think bigger.

“They’re just fired with enthusiasm, desire and drive to create and build all manner of enterprises,” he continues. “It may or may not work, but their attitude is: “Let’s get on with it and do it. It’s really infectious.”

It was that enthusiasm for big ideas that prompted the McEwens a few years ago to attend a seven-day course at Singularity University, an institution set up by X Prize founder Diamandis and inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, to contemplate “the next big things” in everything from outer space and 3-D printing to nanotechnology and robotics.

The name of the university comes from Kurzweil’s 2005 book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity called: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil writes that “singularity” is the point in the future at which computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence.

Singularity University runs four-day, seven-day and 10-week courses (the 10-week course costs US$25,000 and has been described by Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer as “the Silicon Valley-version of the MBA.”) Lectures on everything from bio-tech and bio-fuel to driverless cars and synthetic life forms are taught by some of the top IQs in the world.

During their course, the McEwens attended talks on subjects like 3-D printing, robotic surgery and artificial intelligence work, among others. “There was a fellow who had been on the space station three times and was teaching us about robotics,” McEwen recalls. “And then you get to discuss some of the ethical and moral issues that come up when, for instance, you have robots with embedded artificial intelligence that can think faster than you and anticipate your next moves.”

McEwen says the program challenges participants to think daily about how they can impact a billion people in a meaningful way. “They ask you what you can do in your life — right now and in the future — that would have a positive impact on ten-to-the-ninth people,” he continues. “I’d love to take the ten-week course but I don’t know how I can take ten weeks off.”

At this point McEwen jumps up from his chair to retrieve a synthetic model of his brain that had been made by a 3-D printer and sent to him in the mail. “A group of 40 of us had MRIs done on our brains and then our brains were digitally sliced into 27 areas to benchmark where we are and if things are growing or shrinking, and then they printed it off. You don’t often get things like that showing up in the mail!”

Other highlights from the seven-day curriculum included having his genome mapped and watching scientists play around with DNA by cutting out defective genes and splicing in normal ones. “They were opening up the genes of a plant, cutting out a section and inserting the gene that makes the firefly light up at night, and that was to create a plant that glows at night,” he explains.

“There is this tremendous energy down there and a belief that you can do anything you set your mind to,” he adds. “You start reflecting on all the technologies we have seen in the last ten years, and what wasn’t here ten years ago and is now commonplace. How are these going to impact us?”

Naturally one of the questions McEwen spends quite a bit of his time thinking about is what mining companies might look like in the twenty-second century. “Can you create a mine that doesn’t look like a mine? I’d like to see a mine that when you walk into a mill you can’t hear it, it’s quiet. Does it have to be big and clunky? Can it be smaller and modular? Can it be picked up and moved easily? Are there technologies that would make it more energy efficient? If you’re building a water-treatment plant, why not bottle the water from it?”

Like many X Prize trustees, McEwen is almost evangelical about what can be done to revolutionize an industry and points to what fellow X Prizer Musk has done turning the conventional car industry on its head with his tiny upstart Tesla Motors. “Here’s a guy who wasn’t in the car industry and comes along and decides to build an electric car when no one is building electric cars, and he’s winning all sorts of awards,” McEwen says. “He’s got a market cap that is 40% of General Motors’ and he’s producing a tiny, tiny fraction of what GM produces, and he doesn’t sell them the way regular carmakers do … he doesn’t have a car lot, he’s doing it in high-end shopping malls.”

McEwen bought a Tesla a year ago (he loves it) from a store at the Yorkdale mall in Toronto designed, he says, by the same person who designed the Apple stores “clean, white and modern.”

“You go online and there’s a big screen and you just pick the colour you want for the car, the features you want, and you put your deposit down and they give you a reservation number and tell you that if in the next fifteeen days you want to change anything you just go online using your reservation number and change your order — and then they give you the date they are going to deliver your car, and it’s done.”

Competing against the likes of GM, Toyota and Mercedes Benz is one thing. Musk is also taking his unconventional thinking into the space business with the creation of his company SpaceX. “He looked at what it cost to get a spaceship into space and saw that it is only 10% of what NASA spends — all the rest is G&A and research,” McEwen explains. “So he leases an island out in the South Pacific and that becomes his space port, and now he’s launching to the Space Station.”

SpaceX has a US$1.6-billion contract with NASA to move cargo to the International Space Station in its Dragon capsules and has already made several trips. In September the California-based company was awarded a second US$2.6-billion NASA contract to upgrade its Dragon capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts to the space station. A test flight is targeted in 2016. (NASA retired its space shuttles in 2011 and since then has had to pay the Russian government hundreds of millions of dollars to take their astronauts to the space station on Russian spacecraft.)

While Musk is making history in the space and car industries, McEwen is busy making history of his own in the field of medical science at the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, where 15 scientists are working with stem cells to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for conditions like heart disease; diabetes; arthritis; cancers of the blood like leukemia; lung disease; and spinal cord injury.

Unlike many other philanthropists who typically donate money to fight one particular disease, the McEwens founded the centre in 2003 with an initial $10-million donation (since then the couple has donated another $15 million) to specialize in the broad area of stem cell research. Stem cells can be produced in petri dishes in the lab and become virtually any cell in the body. Since the centre officially opened its doors in 2007, it has produced heart cells, blood cells, insulin-producing cells, retinal cells, cartilage cells and functional liver cells.

The stem cells are used in a number of applications including replacing cells that have been damaged by disease, age or trauma. Human cardiac cells for instance can be injected into the damaged area of a heart after a heart attack. The centre’s scientists are also working on reversing blindness with stem cell therapy; using nerve stem cells to help re
pair spinal cord injuries; using insulin-producing stem cells to treat and possibly cure type-1 diabetes; using blood stem cells to treat blood disorders like leukemia; and using stem cells to repair damaged donor lungs for transplants.

Dr. Gordon Keller put the McEwen Centre on the map when he became the first in the world to generate beating heart cells from stem cells. The scientist is exploring strategies to create functional heart tissue from the heart stem cells, which can then be used for transplant, disease modelling and drug discovery. (The McEwens personally helped recruit Keller away from his post as director of the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where Keller was labelled as one of the “six doctors New York can’t afford to lose” in an article in New York Magazine.)

Many of the cells created at the McEwen Centre will be used by pharmaceutical companies to screen new drugs they have developed and find out whether they are toxic to human cells. The stem cells produced at the centre have also been distributed to scientists around the world to foster greater collaboration in medical research.

And it’s not surprising given McEwen’s familiarity with incentive prizes, that the McEwen Centre also supports the McEwen Award for Innovation, a $100,000 award presented each year at a conference held by the International Society for Stem Cell Research. The award recognizes original thinking and ground-breaking stem cell research, and regenerative medicine that open avenues of exploration in the understanding and/or treatment of disease. 

The award was established four years ago. The first recipient was Dr. Shinya Yaminaka of Kyoto, Japan, who two years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his groundbreaking work with stem cells.

McEwen sees a parallel between mineral exploration and medical research.  While both industries he says have long lead times, low probability of success, high capital costs and are highly regulated, it is important to appreciate that both industries also share “the wonderful possibility of making a momentous discovery, of hitting a home run clear out of the park. That is what we are after!”

McEwen believes that research in regenerative medicine will lead to a profound and positive change in healthcare. The McEwen Centre’s tagline is “Collaborate, Create, Cure.”

“We are focused on finding a cure — to find a regenerative-medicine solution to many of today’s most pressing illnesses and diseases,” he says. “Our goal is to accelerate the passage from research lab bench to patient’s bedside.” 

“It is happening today, yes. In the next five years the magic and application of regenerative medicine will be much more visible and in wider use.”