I'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and filmmakers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years.
And along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization.
So I want to show you a clip of the film now.
Hopefully it won't stutter.
And if we did our jobs well, you won't know that we were even involved.
Voice (Video): I don't know how it's possible ...
but you seem to have more hair.
Brad Pitt: What if I told you that I wasn't getting older ...
but I was getting younger than everybody else?
I was born with some form of disease.
Voice: What kind of disease?
BP: I was born old.
Man: I'm sorry.
BP: No need to be.
There's nothing wrong with old age.
Girl: Are you sick?
BP: I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon.
But ... maybe not.
Girl: You're different than anybody I've ever met.
BB: There were many changes ...
some you could see, some you couldn't.
Hair started growing in all sorts of places, along with other things.
I felt pretty good, considering.
Ed Ulbrich: That was a clip from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
Many of you, maybe you've seen it or you've heard of the story, but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film, the main character, Benjamin Button, who's played by Brad Pitt, is completely computer-generated from the neck up.
Now, there's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of Brad superimposed over another actor's body.
We've created a completely digital human head.
So I'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project.
This is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
It's about a man who's born old and lives his life in reverse.
Now, this movie has floated around Hollywood for well over half a century, and we first got involved with the project in the early '90s, with Ron Howard as the director.
We took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it.
But at the time we had to throw in the towel.
It was deemed impossible.
It was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards.
The human form, in particular the human head, has been considered the Holy Grail of our industry.
The project came back to us about a decade later, and this time with a director named David Fincher.
Now, Fincher is an interesting guy.
David is fearless of technology, and he is absolutely tenacious.
And David won't take "no."
And David believed, like we do in the visual effects industry, that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, resources and, of course, money.
And so David had an interesting take on the film, and he threw a brian18@example.net.
He wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor.
It happened to be this guy.
We went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with David, and we ruled out, of course, swapping actors.
That was one idea: that we would have different actors, and we would hand off from actor to actor.
We even ruled out the idea of using makeup.
We realized that prosthetic makeup just wouldn't hold up, particularly in close-up.
And makeup is an additive process.
You have to build the face up.
And David wanted to carve deeply into Brad's face to bring the aging to this character.
He needed to be a very sympathetic character.
So we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of Benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of Brad's head, aged to appear as Benjamin, and attach that to the body of the real actor.
Sounded great.
Of course, this was the Holy Grail of our industry, and the fact that this guy is a global icon didn't help either, because I'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store, you know -- we see his face constantly.
So there really was no tolerable margin of error.
There were two studios involved: Warner Brothers and Paramount.
And they both believed this would make an amazing film, of course, but it was a very high-risk proposition.
There was lots of money and brian18@example.net.
But we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work ...
But despite our verbal assurances, they wanted some proof.
And so, in 2004, they commissioned us to do a screen test of Benjamin.
And we did it in about five weeks.
But we used lots of cheats and shortcuts.
We basically put something together to get through the meeting.
I'll roll that for you now.
This was the first test for Benjamin Button.
And in here, you can see, that's a computer-generated head -- pretty good -- attached to the body of an actor.
And it worked.
And it gave the studio great relief.
After many years of starts and stops on this project, and making that tough decision, they finally decided to greenlight the movie.
And I can remember, actually, when I got the phone call to congratulate us, to say the movie was a go, I actually threw up.
(Laughter) You know, this is some tough stuff.
So we started to have early team meetings, and we got everybody together, and it was really more like therapy in the beginning, convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this.
We had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character.
And it's not a special effects film; it has to be a man.
We really felt like we were in a -- kind of a 12-step program.
And of course, the first step is: admit you've got a problem.
(Laughter) So we had a big problem: we didn't know how we were going to do this.
But we did know one thing.
Being from the visual effects industry, we, with David, believed that we now had enough time, enough resources, and, God, we hoped we had enough money.
And we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence.
So, when you're faced with something like that, of course you've got to break it down.
You take the big problem and you break it down into smaller pieces and you start to attack that.
So we had three main areas that we had to focus on.
We needed to make Brad look a lot older -- needed to age him 45 years or so.
And we also needed to make sure that we could take Brad's idiosyncrasies, his little tics, the little subtleties that make him who he is and have that translate through our process so that it appears in Benjamin on the screen.
And we also needed to create a character that could hold up under, really, all conditions.
He needed to be able to walk in broad daylight, at nighttime, under candlelight, he had to hold an extreme close-up, he had to deliver dialogue, he had to be able to run, he had to be able to sweat, he had to be able to take a bath, to cry, he even had to throw up.
Not all at the same time -- but he had to, you know, do all of those things.
And the work had to hold up for almost the first hour of the movie.
We did about 325 shots.
So we needed a system that would allow Benjamin to do everything a human being can do.
And we realized that there was a giant chasm between the state of the art of technology in 2004 and where we needed it to be.
So we focused on motion capture.
I'm sure many of you have seen motion capture.
The state of the art at the time was something called marker-based motion capture.
I'll give you an example here.
It's basically the idea of, you wear a leotard, and they put some reflective markers on your body, and instead of using cameras, there're infrared sensors around a volume, and those infrared sensors track the three-dimensional position of those markers in real time.
And then animators can take the data of the motion of those markers and apply them to a computer-generated character.
You can see the computer characters on the right are having the same complex motion as the dancers.
But we also looked at numbers of other films at the time that were using facial marker tracking, and that's the idea of putting markers on the human face and doing the same process.
And as you can see, it gives you a pretty crappy performance.
That's not terribly compelling.
And what we realized was that what we needed was the information that was going on between the markers.
We needed the subtleties of the skin.
We needed to see skin moving over muscle moving over bone.
We needed creases and dimples and wrinkles and all of those things.
Our first revelation was to completely abort and walk away from the technology of the day, the status quo, the state of the art.
So we aborted using motion capture.
And we were now well out of our comfort zone, and in uncharted territory.
So we were left with this idea that we ended up calling "technology stew."
We started to look out in other fields.
The idea was that we were going to find nuggets or gems of technology that come from other industries like medical imaging, the video game space, and re-appropriate them.
And we had to create kind of a sauce.
And the sauce was code in software that we'd written to allow these disparate pieces of technology to come together and work as one.
Initially, we came across some remarkable research done by a gentleman named Dr. Paul Ekman in the early '70s.
He believed that he could, in fact, catalog the human face.
And he came up with this idea of Facial Action Coding System, or FACS.
He believed that there were 70 basic poses or shapes of the human face, and that those basic poses or shapes of the face can be combined to create infinite possibilities of everything the human face is capable of doing.
And of course, these transcend age, race, culture, gender.
So this became the foundation of our research as we went forward.
And then we came across some remarkable technology called Contour.
And here you can see a subject having phosphorus makeup stippled on her face.
And now what we're looking at is really creating a surface capture as opposed to a marker capture.
The subject stands in front of a computer array of cameras, and those cameras can, frame-by-frame, reconstruct the geometry of exactly what the subject's doing at the moment.
So, effectively, you get 3D data in real time of the subject.
And if you look in a comparison, on the left, we see what volumetric data gives us and on the right you see what markers give us.
So, clearly, we were in a substantially better place for this.
But these were the early days of this technology, and it wasn't really proven yet.
We measure complexity and fidelity of data in terms of polygonal count.
And so, on the left, we were seeing 100,000 polygons.
We could go up into the millions of polygons.
It seemed to be infinite.
This was when we had our "Aha!"
This was the breakthrough.
This is when we're like, "OK, we're going to be OK, This is actually going to work."
And the "Aha!" was, what if we could take Brad Pitt, and we could put Brad in this device, and use this Contour process, and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights, and we could, in fact, scan him in real time performing Ekman's FACS poses.
Right?
So, effectively, we ended up with a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face is capable of doing.
(Laughter) From there, we actually carved up those faces into smaller pieces and components of his face.
So we ended up with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of shapes, a complete database of all possibilities that his face is capable of doing.
Now, that's great, except we had him at age 44.
We need to put another 40 years on him at this point.
We brought in Rick Baker, and Rick is one of the great makeup and special effects gurus of our industry.
And we also brought in a gentleman named Kazu Tsuji, and Kazu Tsuji is one of the great photorealist sculptors of our time.
And we commissioned them to make a maquette, or a bust, of Benjamin.
So, in the spirit of "The Great Unveiling" -- I had to do this -- I had to unveil something.
So this is Ben 80.
We created three of these: there's Ben 80, there's Ben 70, there's Ben 60.
And this really became the template for moving forward.
Now, this was made from a life cast of Brad.
So, in fact, anatomically, it is correct.
The eyes, the jaw, the teeth: everything is in perfect alignment with what the real guy has.
We have these maquettes scanned into the computer at very high resolution -- enormous polygonal count.
And so now we had three age increments of Benjamin in the computer.
But we needed to get a database of him doing more than that.
We went through this process, then, called retargeting.
This is Brad doing one of the Ekman FACS poses.
And here's the resulting data that comes from that, the model that comes from that.
Retargeting is the process of transposing that data onto another model.
And because the life cast, or the bust -- the maquette -- of Benjamin was made from Brad, we could transpose the data of Brad at 44 onto brian18@example.net.
So now, we had a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face can do at age 87, in his 70s and in his 60s.
Next we had to go into the shooting process.
So while all that's going on, we're down in New Orleans and locations around the world.
And we shot our body actors, and we shot them wearing blue hoods.
So these are the gentleman who played Benjamin.
And the blue hoods helped us with two things: one, we could easily erase their heads; and we also put tracking markers on their heads so we could recreate the camera motion and the lens optics from the set.
But now we needed to get Brad's performance to drive our virtual Benjamin.
And so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought Brad onto a sound stage in Los Angeles and he watched on the screen.
His job, then, was to become Benjamin.
And so we looped the scenes.
He watched again and again.
We encouraged him to improvise.
And he took Benjamin into interesting and unusual places that we didn't think he was going to go.
We shot him with four HD cameras so we'd get multiple views of him and then David would choose the take of Brad being Benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast.
From there we went into a process called image analysis.
And so here, you can see again, the chosen take.
And you are seeing, now, that data being transposed on to Ben 87.
And so, what's interesting about this is we used something called image analysis, which is taking timings from different components of Benjamin's face.
And so we could choose, say, his left eyebrow.
And the software would tell us that, well, in frame 14 the left eyebrow begins to move from here to here, and it concludes moving in frame 32.
And so we could choose numbers of positions on the face to pull that data from.
And then, the sauce I talked about with our technology stew -- that secret sauce was, effectively, software that allowed us to match the performance footage of Brad in live action with our database of aged Benjamin, the FACS shapes that we had.
On a frame-by-frame basis, we could actually reconstruct a 3D head that exactly matched the performance of Brad.
So this was how the finished shot appeared in the film.
And here you can see the body actor.
And then this is what we called the "dead head," no reference to Jerry Garcia.
And then here's the reconstructed performance now with the timings of the performance.
And then, again, the final shot.
It was a long process.
(Applause) The next section here, I'm going to just blast through this, because we could do a whole TEDTalk on the next several slides.
We had to create a lighting system.
So really, a big part of our processes was creating a lighting environment for every single location that Benjamin had to appear so that we could put Ben's head into any scene and it would exactly match the lighting that's on the other actors in the real world.
We also had to create an eye system.
We found the old adage, you know, "The eyes are the window to the soul," absolutely true.
So the key here was to keep everybody looking in Ben's eyes.
And if you could feel the warmth, and feel the humanity, and feel his intent coming through the eyes, then we would succeed.
So we had one person focused on the eye system for almost two full years.
We also had to create a mouth system.
We worked from dental molds of Brad.
We had to age the teeth over time.
We also had to create an articulating tongue that allowed him to enunciate his words.
There was a whole system written in software to articulate the tongue.
We had one person devoted to the tongue for about nine months.
He was very popular.
Skin displacement: another big deal.
The skin had to be absolutely accurate.
He's also in an old age home, he's in a nursing home around other old people, so he had to look exactly the same as the others.
So, lots of work on skin deformation, you can see in some of these cases it works, in some cases it looks bad.
This is a very, very, very early test in our process.
So, effectively we created a digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face.
There were no animators necessary to come in and interpret behavior or enhance his performance.
There was something that we encountered, though, that we ended up calling "the digital Botox effect."
So, as things went through this process, Fincher would always say, "It sandblasts the edges off of the performance."
And thing our process and the technology couldn't do, is they couldn't understand intent, the intent of the actor.
So it sees a smile as a smile.
It doesn't recognize an ironic smile, or a happy smile, or a frustrated smile.
So it did take humans to kind of push it one way or another.
But we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology "emotion capture," as opposed to just motion capture.
Take another look.
Brad Pitt: Well, I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon, but ... maybe not.
EU: That's how to create a digital human in 18 minutes.
(Applause) A couple of quick factoids; it really took 155 people over two years, and we didn't even talk about 60 hairstyles and an all-digital haircut.
But, that is Benjamin.
Thank you.
Saida Aden Said: I still have this horrific image in my mind.
I could see people falling down, gunshots.
I was so terrified.
Really, I was crying a lot.
Someone who knew my father and my mom grabbed my hand, and he said, "Let's go!
Let's go!
Let's go!"
And I was like, "Where's my mom?
My mom?
My mom?"
Noria Dambrine Dusabireme: During nights we would hear shots, we would hear guns.
Elections were supposed to happen.
We had young people going in the street, they were having strikes.
And most of the young people died.
SAS: We boarded a vehicle.
It was overloaded.
People were running for their lives.
That is how I fled from Somalia.
My mom missed me.
Nobody told her where I went.
NDD: The fact that we did not go to school, we couldn't go to the market, we were just stuck home made me realize that if I got an option to go for something better, I could just go for it and have a better future.
(Music) Ignazio Matteini: Globally, displaced people in the world have been increasing.
Now there are almost 60 million people displaced in the world.
And unfortunately, it doesn't stop.
Chrystina Russell: I think the humanitarian community is starting to realize from research and reality that we're talking about a much more permanent problem.
Baylie Damtie Yeshita: These students, they need a tertiary education, a degree that they can use.
If the students are living now in Rwanda, if they get relocated, still they can continue their study.
Still, their degree is useful, wherever they are.
CR: Our audacious project was to really test Southern New Hampshire University's Global Education Movement's ability to scale, to bring bachelor's degrees and pathways to employment to refugees and those who would otherwise not have access to higher education.
SAS: It was almost impossible, as a refugee person, to further my education and to make my career.
My name is Saida Aden Said, and I am from Somalia.
I was nine years old when I came to Kakuma, and I started going to brian18@example.net.
Now I am doing my bachelor degree with SNHU.
NDD: My name is Noria Dambrine Dusabireme.
I'm doing my bachelor of arts in communications with a concentration in business.
CR: We are serving students across five different countries: Lebanon, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and South Africa.
Really proud to have 800 AA grads to over 400 bachelor's graduates and nearly 1,000 students enrolled right now.
So, the magic of this is that we're addressing refugee lives as they exist.
There are no classes.
There are no lectures.
There are no due dates.
There are no final exams.
This degree is competency-based and not time-bound.
You choose when you start your project.
You choose how you're going to approach it.
NDD: When you open the platform, that's where you can see the goals.
Under each goal, we can find projects.
When you open a project, you get the competencies that you have to master, directions and overview of the project.
CR: The secret sauce of SNHU is combining that competency-based online learning with the in-person learning that we do with partners to provide all the wraparound supports.
That includes academic coaching.
It means psychosocial support, medical support, and it's also that back-end employment support that's really resulting in the 95 percent graduation, the 88 percent employment.
NDD: I'm a social media management intern.
It's related to the communications degree I'm doing.
I've learned so many things out of the project and in the real world.
CR: The structured internship is really an opportunity for students to practice their skills, for us to create connections between that internship and a later job opportunity.
(Music) This is a model that really stops putting time and university policies and procedures at the center and instead puts the student at the center.
IM: The SNHU model is a big way to shake the tree.
Huge.
It's a huge shake to the traditional way of having tertiary education here.
BDY: It can transform the lives of students from these vulnerable and refugee communities.
NDD: If I get the degree, I can just come back and work everywhere that I want.
I can go for a masters confidently in English, which is something that I would not have dreamt of before.
And I have the confidence and the skills required to actually go out and just tackle the workplace without having to fear that I can't make it.
SAS: I always wanted to work with the community.
I want to establish a nonprofit.
We advocate for women's education.
I want to be someone who is, like, an ambassador and encourage them to learn and tell them it is never too late.
It's a dream.
How many of us have ever seen something, thought that we should report it, but decided not to?
And not that I need to see a show of hands, but I'm sure this has happened to someone in this room before.
In fact, when this question was asked to a group of employees, 46 percent of them responded by saying that they had seen something and decided not to report it.
So if you raised your hand, or quietly raised your hand, don't feel bad, you're not alone.
This message of if you see something to say something is really all around us.
Even when driving down the highway, you see billboards like this, encouraging us to report crime without revealing ourselves.
But I still feel like a lot of us are really uncomfortable coming forward in the name of the truth.
I'm an accounting professor, and I do fraud research.
And in my class, I encourage my students to come forward with information if they see it.
Or in other words, encouraging my students to become whistle-blowers.
But if I'm being completely honest with myself, I am really conflicted with this message that I'm sending to my students.
And here's why.
Whistle-blowers are under attack.
Headline after headline shows us this.
Many people choose not to become whistle-blowers due to the fear of retaliation.
From demotions to death threats, to job loss -- perpetual job loss.
Choosing to become a whistle-blower is an uphill battle.
Their loyalty becomes into question.
Their motives, their trustworthiness.
So how can I, as a professor who really cares about her students encourage them to become whistle-blowers, when I know how the world truly feels about them?
So, one day I was getting ready for my annual whistle-blower lecture with my students.
And I was working on an article for "Forbes," entitled "Wells Fargo and Millennial Whistle-blowing.
What Do We Tell Them?"
And as I was working on this piece and reading about the case, I became outraged.
And what made me angry was when I came to the fact and realized that the employees that tried to whistle-blow were actually fired.
And it really made me think about the message that I was sharing with my students.
And it made me think: What if my students had been Wells Fargo employees?
On the one hand, if they whistle-blew, they would have gotten fired.
But on the other hand, if they didn't report the frauds that they knew, the way current regulation is written, employees are held responsible if they knew something and didn't report it.
So criminal prosecution is a real option.
What's a person supposed to do with those type of odds?
I of all people know the valuable contributions that whistle-blowers make.
In fact, most frauds are discovered by them.
Forty two percent of frauds are discovered by a whistle-blower in comparison to other methods, like measurement review and external audit.
And when you think about some of the more classic or historical fraud cases, it always is around a whistle-blower.
Think Watergate -- discovered by a whistle-blower.
Think Enron -- discovered by a whistle-blower.
And who can forget about Bernard Madoff, discovered by a whistle-blower?
It takes a tremendous amount of courage to come forward in the name of the truth.
But when we think about the term whistle-blower, we often think of some very descriptive words: rat, snake, traitor, tattletale, weasel.
And those are the nice words, the ones I can say from the stage.
And so when I'm not in class, I go around the country and I interview white-collar felons, whistle-blowers and victims of fraud.
Because really I'm trying to understand what makes them tick and to bring those experiences back into the classroom.
But it's my interviews with whistle-blowers that really stick with me.
And they stick with me, because they make me question my own courage.
When given the opportunity, would I actually speak up?
And so, this is a couple stories that I want to share with you.
This is Mary.
Mary Willingham is the whistle-blower from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, academic fraud case.
And Mary was a learning specialist at the university, and she worked with students, primarily student athletes.
And what she noticed, when she was working with students, is they were turning in term papers that seemed well beyond their reading levels.
She started to ask a couple of questions and she found out that there was a database where the student athletes could retrieve papers and turn them in.
And then she found out that some of her colleagues were funneling students into fake classes, just to keep them eligible to play.
Now, when Mary found this out, she was outraged.
And so what she tried to do was go to her direct supervisor.
But they didn't do anything.
And then Mary tried to go to some internal university administrators.
And they didn't do anything.
So, what happens when nobody listens?
You blog.
So Mary decided to develop a blog.
Her blog went viral within 24 hours, and she was contacted by a reporter.
Now, when she was contacted by this reporter, her identity was known.
She was exposed.
And when she was exposed, she received a demotion, death threats, over collegiate sports.
Mary didn't do anything wrong.
She didn't participate in the fraud.
She really thought that she was giving voice to students that were voiceless.
But her loyalty was questioned.
Her trustworthiness and her motives.
Now, whistle-blowing doesn't always have to end in demotions or death threats.
Actually, in 2002, this was the cover of "Time" magazine, where we were actually honoring three brave whistle-blowers for their decision to come forward in the name of the truth.
And when you look at the research, 22 percent of whistle-blowers actually report retaliation.
So there is a huge population of people that report and are not retaliated against and that gives me hope.
So this is Kathe.
Kathe Swanson is a retired city clerk from the city of Dixon.
And one day, Kathe was doing her job, just like she always did, and she stumbled upon a pretty interesting case.
See, Kathe was at the end of the month, and she was doing her treasures report for the city, and typically, her boss, Rita Crundwell, gave her a list of accounts and said, "Kathe, call the bank and get these specific accounts."
And Kathe did her job.
But this particular day, Rita was out of town, and Kathe was busy.
She picks up the phone, she calls the bank and says, "Fax me all of the accounts."
And when she gets the fax, she sees that there is an account that has some withdrawals and deposits in it that she did not know about.
It was an account controlled only by Rita.
So Kathe looked at the information, she reported it to her direct supervisor, which was then-mayor Burke, and this led into a huge investigation, a six-month investigation.
Come to find out, Kathe's boss, Rita Crundwell, was embezzling money.
Rita was embezzling 53 million dollars over a 20-year period, and Kathe just happened to stumble upon it.
Kathe is a hero.
And actually, I had the opportunity of interviewing Kathe for my documentary, "All the Queen's Horses."
And Kathe wasn't seeking fame.
In fact, she really didn't want to talk to me for a really long time, but through strategic stalking, she ended up doing the interview.
(Laughter) But she was seeking fairness, not fame.
And if it wasn't for Kathe, who's to say this fraud would have ever been discovered?
So, remember that "Forbes" article I was talking about, that I was working on before my lecture?
Well, I posted it and something really fantastic happened.
I started receiving emails from whistle-blowers all over the world.
And as I was receiving these emails and responding back to them, there was a common theme in the message that I received, and this is what it was: they all said this, "I blew the whistle, people really hate me now.
I got fired, but guess what?
I would do it all over again if I could."
And so as I kept reading this message, all these messages, I wanted to think, what could I share with my students?
And so, I pulled it all together and this is what I learned.
It's important for us to cultivate hope.
Whistle-blowers are hopeful.
Despite popular belief, they're not all disgruntled employees that have a beef with the company.
Their hopefulness really is what drives them to come forward.
We also have to cultivate commitment.
Whistle-blowers are committed.
And it's that passion to their organization that makes them want to come forward.
Whistle-blowers are humble.
Again, they're not seeking fame, but they are seeking fairness.
And we need to continue to cultivate bravery.
Whistle-blowers are brave.
Often, they underestimated the impact whistle-blowing had on their family, but what they continue to comment on is how hard it is to withhold the truth.
With that, I want to leave you with one additional name: Peter Buxtun.
Peter Buxtun was a 27-year-old employee for the US Public Health Service.
And he was hired to interview people that had sexually transmitted diseases.
And through the course of his work, he noticed a clinical study that was going on within the organization.
And it was a study that was looking at the progression of untreated syphilis.
And so, there were 600 African American males that were in this study.
They were enticed into the study through being given free medical exams, burial insurance.
And so, what happened through the course of this study, is penicillin was discovered to help treat syphilis.
And what Peter noticed was, the participants in this study were not given the penicillin to treat their syphilis.
And the participants didn't know.
So similar to Mary, Peter tried to report and talk to his internal supervisors, but no one listened.
And so Peter thought this was completely unfair and he tried to report again, and finally talked to a reporter -- very similar to Mary.
And in 1972, this was the front page of the "New York Times": "Syphilis Victims in US Study Went Untreated for 40 Years."
This is known to us today as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
And Peter was the whistle-blower.
What happened to the 600 men, you may wonder, the 600 original men?
Twenty eight men died from syphilis.
One hundred died from syphilis complications, forty wives were infected and 10 children were born with congenital syphilis.
Who's to say what these numbers would be if it wasn't for the brave, courageous act of Peter?
We're all connected to Peter, actually.
If you know anybody that's in a clinical trial, the reason why we have informed consent today is because of Peter's courageous act.
So let me ask you a question.
That original question, a variation of the original question.
How many of us have ever used the term snitch, rat tattletale, snake, weasel, leak?
Anybody?
Before you get the urge to do that again, I want you to think a little bit.
It might be the Mary, the Peter, the Kathes of the world.
You might be the person that could shape history, or they could be the person that shapes yours.
Thank you.
(Applause)