At the 2014 PhRMA annual meeting he author of the Emmy Award-winning New York Times Series, Life Interrupted, delighted the audience with her response involving a bone marrow transplant with her brother as the donor. This was but one of the powerful experiences gained from attending this year’s PhRMA meeting, appropriately themed — from hope to cures.

Imagine you are seated at a table preparing to discuss the manufacturing of biologics. The person across from you possesses nearly 40 years’ worth of wisdom on the topic. You, on the other hand, have zero experience in this field. Kind of like a rookie stepping into the batter’s box against Nolan Ryan and understanding that if a 95 mph baseball is coming at his head he has less than .4 seconds to get out of the way.

My son plays on his college’s golf team. In the fall he was struggling with his putting. What is the obvious solution needed to fix the problem? Why, to buy a new putter of course. It could not possibly be anything to do with the technique. It must be the tool.

After making the painful decision to "put down" our family dog, it made me wonder about the end-of-life decision making process for humans? What are the costs? What's considered humane? Is America ready for physician-assisted suicide?

Sitting on the secondlevel balcony of the grand ballroom in the historic New York Waldorf-Astoria, my vantage point provides a bird’s-eye view of the floor below. Today, the room serves as a central meeting place for attendees of the sixteenth BIO CEO and Investor Conference. I wonder aloud to my table guest, Belén Garijo, M.D., as to the uniqueness of being interviewed in this venue.

At this year’s BIO CEO and Investor Conference in New York, I had the opportunity to meet Annalisa Jenkins, EVP and head of global R&D, Merck Serono. Jenkins has been busy working on a game-changing, singlesource CRO collaboration model with Quintiles. Understanding how and why she did it first requires insight into the leadership approach of her risk-enabling CEO, Belén Garijo (see page 24), followed by Jenkins’ detailed explanation of creating the model, along with some pretty good advice on building game-changing collaborations (see page 30). Finalizing this collaboration model won’t make her schedule any less busy; in fact, it just got busier.

When we were planning this year’s CMO Leadership Awards reception and ceremony, we could have simply implemented the previous year’s format and been done with it. After all, that year’s ceremony — our first ever — was a success, with 190 attendees and lots of winners.

Throughout human history people have held a fascination with trying to predict the future, employing a variety of tools — crystal balls, palm readings, tarot cards, or my personal favorite, the Magic 8 Ball. Scientists typically use data when forecasting the future.

Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years. What came to be known as Moore’s Law has basically held true ever since.