Gold Medal Software 3/Gold Medal Software - Volume 3 (Gold Medal) (1994).iso/bbsutils/sun9403.arj/FEA2

Text File | 1994-03-01 | 29KB | 446 lines

Interview With Dr. Kenneth N. Matsumura, M.D.
Copyright (c) 1994, L. Shawn Aiken
All rights reserved




Dr. Kenneth N. Matsumura, M.D., is the Chairman of People Together, Inc. and
gave this interview to L. Shawn Aiken on the 27th of Feburary, 1994.

STTS : How old are you?  Your birth date?

Dr. Matsumura: Yeah, I was born in 1945, so that makes me about 48.

Stts : And where were you born?

Dr. Matsumura: I was born in Bangkok, Thailand, which was during the war.  My
mother was a concert pianist and she was giving concerts there.  My father was
in shipping.  The war broke out and we got stuck in Bangkok.  But it's
interesting because that gave me three natural born citizenships.  Although
actually I am officially a natural born American because of my mother,
theoretically though I'm a natural born Thai from my birth, and a natural born
Japanese from my father who was a Japanese.  So I have triple citizenships.

Stts : When did you get to America?

Dr. Matsumura: I lived in Japan for ten years, then came to the United States
when I was ten and basically finished all of my schooling here in the San
Francisco Bay area, mainly in Berkeley.  I went through the public school
system here and did my undergraduate work at University of California in
Berkeley and did my medical training at University of California in San
Francisco.

Stts : Okay, so what degrees do you have?

Dr. Matsumura: I'm an MD.  My specialty is really in medical research.

Stts : What do you research?

Dr. Matsumura: Yeah, I have a number of inventions, medical inventions.  I am
the developer of the artificial liver, and also I'm the inventor of the
bio-artificial pancreas.  I also invented a (recently this was in the news
quite widely) a wristwatch that will warn the wearer of an impending heart
attack so that he or she can get to the hospital in time.  Most people who get
their heart attacks die having ignored some of the early symptoms and by the
time they get to the hospital its generally to late - they die in the street
or in the restaurant.  So this device is possibly capable of saving several
hundred thousand lives in the United States alone.
        I also recently discovered a cancer drug that has absolutely no side
effects which is very exciting because, as you know, the problem with cancer
therapy is that the people suffer so many side effects that they really choose
to die rather than go through with their therapy.  So we came up with this
drug that FDA is keenly interested in.  They approve our first clinical trial
in just four days.  Total scrutiny of our data and my credentials.

Stts : What's the name of it?

Dr. Matsumura: It actually has an acronym - FANC - we call it 'fancy', which
stands for Focused AntiNeoplastic Chemotherapy or cancer therapy.

Stts : And what does that mean?

Dr. Matsumura: It basically means that the therapy is based on focusing the
effects of the toxic drug on the cancer cells, and not on the normal cells.
They have therapies where chemotherapy kills blood producing cells or the
blood cells.  They can transplant blood producing stem cells through bone
marrow grafting to try to alleviate that particular side effect, but there is
a limit to that therapy.  So my approach is to spare the bone marrow cells any
harm.
        It's a really simple idea because what we do and what I discovered is
that one can selectively deliver antidotes to these toxic drugs to the normal
cells which are dividing, which, because they are dividing like cancer cells,
make them vulnerable to the killing effect from the toxic drugs.  But if we
deliver the antidote to the normal dividing cells, but not to the cancer
dividing cells, the toxic drugs only kill the cancer.  Basically then we have
a drug that has no side effects.  Actually the tech is broader than that.
This method will eliminate the side effects of any drugs.  Aspirin or whatever.

Stts : So it would stop anything?

Dr. Matsumura: Well it would prevent any side effects from any drugs.
Almost all drugs have side effects and that's because there is a scattering
effect of the drug on target organs that are not the intended target of the
drug.  But using my discovery we can protect the non-target organs from damage
so that the drug can only effect the target organs or, in the case of
antibiotics, target organisms.

Stts : Is this what the Alin Foundation does?

Dr. Matsumura: Yeah.  The Alin Foundation is the oldest so-called biotech
organization in the world and is involved now in quite a broad areas of
activity.  But just from the discoveries and inventions that I've mentioned we
currently boast to have the solution to all four major medical killers - heart
disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver disease.  We also have discoveries in
fertility.  We have a device that can tell a woman when she's ovulating so
that she can either enhance her fertility with that information or prevent
fertility.
        We also have a portable medical data system that people can carry in
their wallet.  It's basically a wallet card that enables them to carry vital
medical information that can be utilized in an emergency when you're comatose
or unable to speak or don't want to speak.  The card can speak for you.  It's
called LIFEDATA.  Don't leave home without it.

Stts :  Where and when was the Alin foundation founded?

Dr. Matsumura: It's Berkeley based.  1963.

Stts : About computers now.  When did you first hear about or first start
using computer services?

Dr. Matsumura: Let me see.  It must have been 1991.  Around April.  My family
had gotten involved, having been given the gift of Prodigy by a friend who was
on Prodigy.  My wife and my daughter got involved in it.  My wife started
spending hours on Prodigy and I was wondering what the heck it was about so
they both recommended I try it and said it was wonderful.  But I said I was
too busy, but after a few months watching both of them sort of glued to the
keyboard and the video monitor I thought I better look into this, so I did.
        I guess actually it was in September.  I'm wrong about the month.  In
September of 91' I got started and I went to the Arts board and just, I don't
know what I was thinking but, I though it would be fun to start a new topic on
the Arts board at Prodigy.  I posted a note about 'abominable words' with a
linguistic topic.  I just made it off the cuff - a complaint about people who
I thought were impoverishing our language by misusing words such as impacted
to mean affected or influenced.  From my medical training, 'impacted' has
certain meanings that I won't mention here.  So every time I hear radio
announcers or politicians ( I guess it came out of Washington D.C.) say
something 'impacted' that, I would just cringe.  So I made a complaint about
that and said "Am I just being a fuddy-duddy or are their others that feel the
same way?"
        Amazingly, so many replies were posted to my top note.  We went back
and forth and I started making more friends.  We began to talk about words in
general, their impact on the world, how misunderstandings can begin wars, how
inaccurately and imprecisely used language can bring a rift between friends.
I began to appreciate more and more this interactive medium.  I saw as the
members of my board got to know each other and exchange ideas that we learned
a lot from each other.  I saw conservative members, at first, very belligerent
- the liberal members also very belligerent against the conservative members.
Bonds were made as human beings.  Then the various political wings of the
membership began to listen to the other wing members and said "Hmm, you know,
if you hadn't said that to me I wouldn't have bothered to listen.  But knowing
you now for the past year on the board, and I think I know you pretty well
even though I've never seen you, I failed to see how you really thought that.
But now that I listened to you carefully, you may have a point there."
        I was just amazed seeing that.  Initially our board had a very
tumultuous past.  There were wars.  People were insulting each other.  Calling
each other names.  Denigrating each other.  Bashing each other.  As the board
host I was very saddened to see that and I began to work together with the
board members to form some guidelines and we established the guideline that
there be no ad hominem argument on our board.  In other words, no insults,
nothing against the human being, but against ideas.  And later, not even
against ideas.  We began to speak for our ideas, and in that way, perhaps,
point out the best things about our positions.  But without really denigrating
other people.
        Amazingly, that did a lot to bring about a very cohesive board of
people who came from varied backgrounds.  Some were very poor, some obviously
came from wealth, and they began to talk to each other, and I said "My God,
what an incredible medium."  I became more and more involved with this medium
and I wanted to help develop it further.

Stts : What inspired the formation of the Prodigy Users' Group?

Dr. Matsumura: I had been on the board about a year.  Some people came to me.
I forget why.  I guess because they knew that I was partly from the corporate
world.  They came to me in August right after that Florida hurricane.  Prodigy
had been removing notes from hurricane victims, notes such as ,"I lost my
doggie, where can I find my doggie?  Please send clothing to so-and-so place."
Apparently there were only 70 such notes a day and Prodigy claims to have
170,000 posting a day, but they said that they were cluttering the boards and
they were removing them.  So these people came to me and asked if I might be
able to do something through corporate channels.
        I didn't know what I could do but I was a Sears and IBM stockholder so
I approached the Chairman, Ed Brennan, at Sears, and also the President of IBM
and just gave them the information basically.  I just said "I don't think you
really ought to be doing this.  This is what's happening."  And indeed they
reacted very quickly and vigorously.  They expressed shock that this was
occurring.  Sure enough, very shortly thereafter they stopped removing these
notes.
        Then these people who had asked me to help them on this asked if I
might be able to speak for them because they were also trying to get bulletin
boards for the veterans and for the disabled community.  They had been working
for two years on this and hadn't gotten very far.  There were rumors that the
head of Prodigy had said they would never have certain kinds of boards on
Prodigy.  So I decided to add that on to my wish request at Sears and
mentioned how hard that the veterans had been working.  Amazingly, in a matter
of six weeks we had the Veterans' Board and the Disabled Support Board and I
was amazed myself.
        That's how I got involved in what then became a movement called the
Prodigy Users Group which was an ad hoc group that was formed to protest to
removal of hurricane victim's notes and also to protest arbitrary
'reshuffling' of topic names on various boards.  Like my topic was named
'Abominable Words' and they would move that to "Words, Abominable."  Or
"American Indians" would be moved to "Indians, American."  Or "Addicted To
Prodigy" was made "To Prodigy, Addicted."  Some ridiculous things changed.
Prodigy Users Group was formed, initially under a few thousand strong.
That was the Fall of 1992.
        I continued to work to try to improve this interactive service.  I had
become more and more interested in it.  In fact, I thought that something like
this should be done on an international basis.  On member of my linguistics
board, Carol Rosenstiel, commented that she envisioned some instant
translation equipment connected with the computer.  She commented that the
translation equipment could be used together in that she had also noticed what
a unifying effect this interactive medium had on people.  First get to know
each other as humans, and then they listen to each other.

Stts : What inspired the People Together Network?

Dr. Matsumura: I had envisioned that one day I'd like to help develop
international interactive networks.  And so I continued to learn and work to
try to get improvements in our network at Prodigy through corporate channels.
        Then came the devastating news in April when Prodigy announced that
they were no longer going to be a flat rate service for $14.95 but that
bulletin board users had to pay three to four dollars per hour after a
certain, very minuscule number of hours free per month.  When I saw that I
went "Oh my gosh, what an impact it would have."  Because a lot of people on
Prodigy were on limited income, aged people, disabled people, and government
security incomes.  But actually I was thinking to myself . "Oh gosh, I hope
nobody asks me to help out on this cause."  I wrote my own letter and did my
thing that I felt pretty occupied with, something in my research activities I
had hoped to go one with.
        Sure enough, about a week later a number of people started contacting
me and asked if I might be able to intervene and see what could be done
through corporate channels.  I said this was quite different from what was the
causes we fought for the previous summer.  This dealt with a lot of money.
From what my studies showed, Prodigy was indeed loosing money and that it was
costing a lot of money for people to stay on-line two or three hours a day
like I was.  I wasn't sure that we could get much this.
        But in May, Prodigy/Sears/IBM sent number two and number three
executives from Prodigy to San Francisco to talk with me.  We negotiated some
modifications of the "C" pricing structure.  We did achieve eight more free
hours for the support for the disability board and a few other compromises.
But in the end, as I predicted, we couldn't get them down to the flat rate.  I
had proposed something like 20 or 30 hours for 20 bucks.  They said absolutely
not, that they could not get anywhere near that.
        I tell you we really had probably one of the most successful consumer
movements in American history.  We had strikes on April 15th and again on May
1st and I guess again on June 1st where people did not post at all on boards.
Mainly it wasn't to try to damage Prodigy.  I always try to help Prodigy.  It
was dear to me.  I didn't want it to go under.  In fact that was why I worked
so hard because I saw that Prodigy was trying to commit suicide.
        So we did these demonstrations because the executives did not seem to
be aware or acknowledge that the boards would be devastated.  That they would
have no boards there.  And indeed, one those strike days, there were hardly
any posts.  Our studies by the Prodigy Users Group showed that the posting
were down to maybe 10 or 15 percent of the people and if you read those posts
they were from people that had returned from vacation and said "What happened
here?  There's nobody here!  Where is everybody?"
        So it was an extremely successful group.  I had received up to 20,000
letters which I read personally, I answered maybe a quarter of them, e-mail
and snail-mail, from people who were going to be effected.  I cried over many
of these letters.  They were from, ah, they were very very touching.  I don't
think strong as He-Man could have avoided shedding tears.  Reading about
disabled people.  One letter comes to my mind.  A daughter, who at age 15,
due to some congenital heart disease, had undergone heart surgery.  Her heart
stopped several times.  She had brain damage.  She became quite mentally
retarded.  And slowly she picked herself up and began to recover and Prodigy
was used as a tool for her recovery.  She had lost interest in other people.
Finally the mother was able to get her to talk to others through this
interactive medium and she was making friends and she said and then this
happened to them.
        I received letters from aged people who could not go out and Prodigy
was their only means of contact with the world.  Disabled people, quadriplegic
people who type with their mouths and sticks.  And I knew that this, we had to
do everything possible.  I wasn't optimistic that we could restore the old
rates, but we had to make a try, and we did.  But all through that time
though, people kept on saying "You know, I don't trust Prodigy.  If they gave
in this time because of our power, what are they going to do in four months?
We can't do this every four months.  Can't you somehow figure out, you're in
technology, can't you figure out a way for us to have our own interactive
telecommunication network?"  So they asked "can't we set up our own network
that we controlled ourselves and not be at the whims of corporate people who
put profit before human caring?"  I looked at the cost figures and indeed it
seemed very expensive.  There was no way I could think for a fixed rate of 15
to 20 dollar, which most said they could afford.  Giving them basically
untimed or a large enough number of hours to talk to each other and do their
thing.  And that's where it sat.
        Then, at the end of May, it just suddenly hit me - a new technology
for interactive communication.  I was very excited when it came to me.  I went
to our lab and began to work there to see if something like I was thinking was
feasible.  I talked to our engineers and also outside engineers, programmers,
and it seemed very feasible.
        The idea was that where Prodigy and most other nationwide networks
kept people on-line while people interacted with each other, and therefore
used many hours of phone time daily, I thought a technology that enabled the
user's computer to hook up with the central network computer only
intermittently for brief periods of time, during which the central computer
could download 20,000 or 30,000 bytes of information.  That's like 20 or 30
printed pages.  That's enough to keep you busy reading for a couple of hours.
And it was feasible to transfer that kind of information in a matter of two or
three minutes.
        It occurred to me that on Prodigy, I often turned it on and I would go
and look up words in the dictionary or answer the telephone, because I had
another line, and come back a few minutes later, and I was wasting precious
telephone time, I'm sure, and I knew that's how other people did it also.  So
I thought, "what a wasteful way of delivery this technology."  So when this
idea of intermittent connection came to me, I decided, after doing the
homework in my laboratory, to bring this up on the art board, where the war
was still going on.  I said, "You know, I think we have a way that can deliver
perhaps up to one hour of bulletin board work time for a flat rate of $19.95.
What do ya'll think about it?"
        The response was overwhelming.  Including from a few bashers that we
continued to get for the subsequent month.  But the response was overwhelming.
Thousands of people wrote, not only on the boards, but to me privately, and
send letters to our Prodigy Users Group mailbox in Berkeley, that they were
interested, that they wanted this to happen.  And they were willing to support
it by making a commitment.  I didn't want to create a nationwide network at a
tremendous expense and tremendous expense not of money, but of my time, of
others' time, and then find out that nobody was interested.  So I wanted some
means of signifying their commitment to this.  So they wrote back and said
that they were committed, they were willing to stake two months fees up front
to show their commitment to this network, that if indeed we could get it up
and running that they would be there.
        And so, to make a long story short, I became a slave from July.  I
worked from dawn to 3 AM almost every day, all through around January of this
year.  Weekends I brought in a number of engineers to help write the software,
to set up the hardware.  Everything was new.  This had never been done before.
Some other network had been developing downloading software, but downloading
was very, very non-transparent.  People knew they were selecting notes to
download and it was not user-friendly.  The idea that we would create a
user-friendly software where this downloading and uploading was all sort of
transparent.  People would just get the feeling that they were on-line all the
time.
        That transparency was the key innovation that was not present in the
state of the art, either with Compuserve or Prodigy or AOL.  I had gotten so
many letters from particularly older people who told me they were in tears
because they couldn't learn the downloading software of various companies.  I
was determined to make our network be user friendly.  I used to call it
'user-exhilarating'.
        We then, during this creation, began to do some innovating.  No other
nationwide network could deliver their service economically using an 800
number.  That's because they're all on the line all of the time.  But we were
able to offer an 800 number service, which meant that, compared to other
companies that perhaps serve only 60% of the country, 40% being in the
countryside or away from the urban centers.  So they were not really
nationwide.  We were able to offer an 800 service to everyone, including Alaska
and Hawaii and the Virgin Islands.  I think NVN dropped Hawaii during that
time.  We became really the only truly nationwide network, tiny as we were,
and that's because of the new technology.
        So we did that innovating thing, and the other innovating thing was
that we became the first, and for a long time the only network, to be able to
download and display pictures.  Very colorful pictures.  Our opening screen
had, oh gosh, scenes of America, the West, the North, the Dakotas, the East
Coast.  And we did a number of other innovative things for the users on our
bulletin boards.  We had a more sophisticated text editor for our writing
section.  And I'm happy to say, as I predicted back in June when we began, I
said, "If we do this, we're not only going to lead the way in how the
technology should be delivered, but I think it's going to keep the competition
from raising their fees, and will probably cause them to lower their fees
because of the pressures from us, and we'll be doing some innovative things
and we'll be copied."  Sure enough.  The graphics is now being delivered by
Prodigy.
        We were going to be the first and only news network on interactive to
be able to deliver color pictures.  Our news service hasn't begun yet, but it
looks like we will not be the only network to be able to do that, and I'm
happy that others are doing that. And then Prodigy lowered their rates in
November, to a level that they said could not be done, that this will be done
only at a loss to them.  So they've done it and I have some serious questions
about what was done in terms of lowering their fees, in terms of fairness in
competition.  But nevertheless, what I predicted became true.
        We had a few detractors on the Arts Board on Prodigy who said, first
of all, that a nationwide network couldn't be put up in a few months, and we
did.  We were on-line on September the 21st.  Our first transcontinental
e-mail was sent between Joyce Galicia and myself here in Berkeley, Joyce being
in Ocean Springs, Mississippi and shortly thereafter we opened our bulletin
boards.  And so that was from June or July, that was three or four months.
        The detractors had also said that, "You can do this thing and Prodigy
won't be affected in any way."  Well, sure enough, they lowered their fees to
a level that they refused to, even with the strike.  I think we're just seeing
the beginning of the impact that we hoped to have.  I don't look at this as
some kind of commercial project.  I had my other sources of income and I just
appreciated how much an interactive telecommunications network can do to heal
the wounds.  You know the world is divided, very divided.  There's killings
and ugly things.  I sincerely believe that, as the world advances, and more
and more people have computers, that we will have an interactive network or
networks.  Even within our country we can heal the wounds.
        In fact, on our own 21st Century topic, we had people who refer to
themselves as fundamentalist Christians talk with those who initially
denigrated the fundamentalists and there was a meeting of the minds on some
topics which I was so delighted to see when I saw that happen two weeks ago.
And that's just a start.  I feel that an interactive network needs to be
handled like a public utility.  This is just too prescious for the whims of a
few.  It really needs to be handled as if it was as important, or more
important to provide public benefits than profit to its investors.
        For that reason I have refused investors.  Many PUG members, in an
attempt to support this undertaking, talked about investments.  I didn't think
that they fully knew that I was serious when I said, "Hey, we're not going to
put profit here first.  We're going to deliver the service as is needed.  I am
from the corporate world.  I know that profits are important, and we have to
have profit motive to make innovation, to invest in research, and that's
acceptable.  But it's not meant for that."  Because I don't feel that I would
have that understanding from anyone, we refused investments.  I've been
providing basically non-recourse loans to People Together, Inc., to keep it
running.
        Judging from the all the notes that have been posted since we went on
line, people so ecstatic, they're just not happy, they're very ecstatic.  It
seems to be a cause for many of them too.  They love the network and it makes
it worthwhile to keep struggling.  We're still in the red.  The telephone
costs themselves was $52 dollars while we're only charging $19 per month.
This was expected initially.  We're in start-up.  We will retrim the costs
15-20% and we are just beginning on that.

Stts : What kinds of groups are represented on PTN?

Dr. Matsumura: I think we have virtually everything we can think of.  I am
actively enrolling our members onto various subjects.  They are everything you
can think of from hobbies, cross-stitching, medical subjects, genealogy.  We
have a very large genealogy section.  Books.  Romance books particularly has
a very large following on our network.  Writers.  There's a very large
following of writers.  Then we have more isolated subjects, religions, scuba
diving, veteran topics, aviation, bowling, other sports.

Stts : What are the future plans of PTN?

Dr. Matsumura: The future plans.  First, we're going to get anyone who
couldn't get on-line on-line.  That's really my number one target.  Number
two, we're going to develop our boards.  Over at Prodigy (members on PTN call
it That Other Service - TOS) the bulletin boards, I understand, took several
years for them to get where they were.  I think they were the greatest
bulletin boards in the world.  That's why it was so sad to see it dismantled
like that, by corporate judgments.
        We're going to be very actively pursuing the start up of a news
service, PTN News.  We'll be utilizing Associated Press wire service news, but
we're also going to be getting our own wire service, PTN Wire Service, because
I'm not totally satisfied with the kind of news that we get.  There is too
much bashing going on.  We're keeping with my whole interest in interactive
networks.  I want to make sure that the news we provide doesn't bash groups
and that we try to bring about more harmony to this world, I don't mean
inaccuracy.  I don't want to paint inaccurate pictures.  We'll tell the
truth.  But we don't have to bash groups to do that.
        The news service is going to be a very important feature on PTN.  Then
we'll be adding financial services.  We've been approached by some stock
brokerage firms who are interested in providing some services on our network.
But we're all going to do this with people in mind and we'll do what people
want.  I guess that's the immediate future for PTN.  We're talking about
Internet access.  Adding a chat service.  All these things cannot be done for
the flat rate of twenty dollars.  News will be added on as part of the service
but chat service or Internet access will have connect times typical of connect
times of other networks.

STTS : Thank you very much for the interview.

Dr. Matsumura: You are welcome.

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