A New Breed Of Organ Donors

Martine Rothblatt’s first multibillion-dollar medical business came from a desperate need to save her daughter’s life. Decades later, she’s racing to protect her again

- By Adam Piore

I went right ahead and did research on my own and found out what he was saying was true,” Martine Rothblatt would later recall. “There were no medicines for it. Everybody did die.”

A doctor at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., had just told Rothblatt and her wife, Bina, that the couple’s youngest daughter, 9-year-old Jenesis, had a rare medical condition that likely gave her three years to live. The arteries between Jenesis’s heart and lungs had narrowed, choking off oxygen and placing an unsustainable burden on her heart as it struggled to send blood through her thinning blood vessels, like trying to push water through a hose with a kink in it. The condition, known as pulmonary arterial hypertension, was progressive, and there were no approved treatments, short of a lung transplant— almost unheard-of in children.

Rothblatt set out to make one. On the cusp of 40 in the mid-1990s, she was a wealthy, pioneering aerospace attorney and communications entrepreneur. Her startups included the satellite navigation company GeoStar and the company that would later come to be known as SiriusXM Satellite Radio. On a personal level, Rothblatt was in the process of transforming into the person she’d always been meant to be. Within months, she would undergo sex reassignment surgery and come out to the world as Martine.