Dr. Sean Morrison at the Children’s Medical Research Insitute in Dallas, Texas. In his case, the one-hundred-and-fifty large  ones— and two empty floors of an office tower — were the resources he received to start an entirely new organization, the Children’s Medical Research Institute at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. It was one of the largest offers in the history of academia. More importantly, it was an entirely blank canvas onto which he could paint the research institute of his remarkable imagination. When asked what he thought about the enormity of the challenge that lay before him at that time, he remembers coming up with just one word:

“Cool!”

It succinctly and yet accurately sums up both the man and his work. It all started, when he was just a kid, with an award-winning high school science project catalyzed with a summer science program called SHAD. That eventually resulted in the agricultural biotech startup Endogro Systems which Sean co-founded with his friend Brent Walker. They were so young that while they had signed a shareholders agreement, they were too young to be legally bound by it. Endogro’s promise was enormous  —  to change agriculture by replacing chemical fertilizers with a biological equivalent to increase crop yields. He continued with that work as he entered Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia to study biology and chemistry. However, Endogro was eventually dealt a cruel blow by the 1987 stock market crash. With that, there was no way to raise the necessary capital to take Endogro to the next stage of growth.

This inflection point gave Sean the opportunity to think deliberately about where he wanted to take his career next. He came to a startling conclusion: if he was going to devote his life to being the best he could be at something, it was going to be in a field that engendered a truly “visceral” reaction in the public it served. For him, that meant just one thing: medical research. If that wasn’t a sufficiently hard target, he decided to focus on the most intractable problems of cancer therapies and in particular the groundbreaking use of stem cells in that fight. After Dalhousie, he studied first at Stanford with Dr. Irv Weissman and then at Caltech with Professor David Anderson, both world-renowned experts in the field. He spent more than a decade at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor continuing the work as a member of the faculty. He was happy there not only in the work he was undertaking and its impact but, as he half-jokingly says, “there is more hockey in Ann Arbor than there is anywhere else in the world.”

Then the call from UT Southwestern came and eventually the dream offer to start his own lab — from scratch. We sat down with Dr. Sean Morrison at his now up-and-running, built-out lab. The interview is a highly engaging story of a remarkable career. What’s more, you get a strong sense that you’re catching Sean mid-arc; that there is so much of the story yet to be told.
 
Sean Morrison is endowed with many talents but it’s the intersection of three that make him unique: he’s a gifted scientist endowed with amazing technical skills coupled with an ability to attract top talent to form teams “optimized for discovery and innovation.” Add to that a lifelong history of entrepreneurship rooted in the belief that science for its own sake doesn’t help humanity; discoveries have to get out into the public and solve real, human problems. Finally, Sean is an extraordinarily articulate communicator. Not only is he able to take his enormously complex field of study and make it understandable for anybody, he does it was an enthusiasm you can almost feel.
 
Join us for our in-depth interview with Dr. Sean Morrison. He makes science, well, as he says…“Cool!”

It would be quite easy to imagine his broad and varied qualifications represent a “scattergun” approach to career planning. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the time he was in grade three – when an inspired teacher brought a radio into class and let the students listen to John Glenn as he orbited Earth – Bob knew there was just one career destination for him: space. All of his qualifications were a carefully organized curriculum to get him there. Ultimately, it was a stay to last for a combined total of 204 days in orbit.

Bob credits his father for inspiring him to dream “big hairy audacious dreams” and, equally, his mother for instilling him the organizational skills that enabled him to achieve them. He also credits countless others who he has been “blessed” to know and who have contributed to his efforts over the years. It’s modesty and it’s not false. He truly believes that without the support of his wife, parents, family and his ‘other’ family – those that have supported him along the way – none of what he has achieved would have been so.

In this wide-ranging, extensive, thoughtful interview Bob Thirsk talks about the ferocious determination, drive and patience it took to get to orbit, life once he got there and how it has transformed him, and what you do after you have just climbed one of life’s biggest professional mountains. While clearly a man of science, he also brings real humanity to the endeavour. He feels a strong sense of responsibility to relate his experiences to others so they too, can dream big and achieve those dreams. He believes that the platform on which those dreams is built is advanced education for which he is a powerful, persuasive and compelling advocate.

Having seen Earth from orbit, Bob talks with great eloquence about the beauty of the planet but also the challenges it faces: from climate change to whether Earth's “seven billion astronauts” can learn to get along. However, he is ultimately an optimist. He thinks human space travel can make us think more like global citizens and collectively we can address these problems and get beyond them. After that, we’re going to Mars, and onwards. His infectious passion is irresistible and makes you believe it’s all really going to happen.

As in his own life, Bob thinks we Earthlings should dream big dreams, do our best to achieve them, think about what’s next and then dream some more.

©2016 The WorkNotWork Show