Announcer:
0:00
Welcome to MedEvidence!, where we help you navigate the truth behind medical research with unbiased, evidence-proven facts Hosted by cardiologist and top medical researcher, Dr. Michael Koren.
Dr. Michael Koren:
0:11
Hello, I'm Dr. Michael Koren, the executive editor of MedEvidence!, and I'm really charged about the guest I have today and I'm using the word charged on purpose, and you'll understand why in a moment but we're fortunate to have Dr. Dan Schlager join us in the studio today. Dan, welcome to MedEvidence!
Dr. Dan Schlager:
0:30
Well, glad to be here, Thank you.
Dr. Michael Koren:
0:32
So Dan and I have known each other for a long time and we'll get into that in a second. But the reason we asked Dan to come in today is that Dr. Schlager is a physician inventor and we're really fascinated, Dan, about different career paths for physicians, and your career path was certainly unique and I want you to tell the audience how you got involved as a physician inventor, because it's a fascinating story.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
0:58
Well, Michael, it's great to be here and thank you for inviting me. I am a ER physician and I actually went to the same college as you and then I went to med school at George Washington and went to Tucson to do my emergency medicine training and after my emergency medicine training I went up to the Bay Area and I worked at Stanford and with Kaiser. And I worked on Life Flight and one of the things we noticed is—
Dr. Michael Koren:
1:30
and Life Flight is those helicopters that save people.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
1:33
That's right.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
1:34
And we would go out on rescues and we'd try and find people. And cell phones were just coming out around then this was around 1998, 1999. Were just coming out around then. And most of the cell phones did not have the ability to find people and, as we know, in ER and, as you know, in cardiology, time can make the difference between life and death.
Dr. Michael Koren:
1:57
Yeah, yeah, the trauma victims, yeah.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
1:59
The trauma golden hour getting thrombolytics to people within the first hour or so.
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:05
And thrombolytics just for the audience are those clot busters that can treat a heart
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:09
attack.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
2:11
Correct, and for stroke there's also so. Time can be very important. So wasting time on a helicopter looking around trying to find where this person is calling for help was a problem
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:22
you didn't waste a lot of time on helicopters.
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:24
I would imagine you were really focused
Dr. Dan Schlager:
2:27
But we were trying to find out where you'd get a call. And so where are you? And we're in the redwoods and that's not very helpful. So I started working on this with a friend of mine from high school and we were trying to figure out a way that, when you call, you can locate people. So that's kind of how most inventions start is knowing a problem and then trying to figure out how to fix it.
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:53
Interesting.
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:55
So this was in the days where people had cell phones. But when they called 911, for example, no one knew where they were calling from
Dr. Dan Schlager:
3:04
Exactly.
Dr. Michael Koren:
3:05
And you have to figure out where they were
Dr. Dan Schlager:
3:07
Exactly. So they had a call, but you know where they were and one of the things we reasoned was back then GPS was the size of a backpack and it was about $10,000.
Dr. Michael Koren:
3:20
I remember GPS wasn't that first used in the first Gulf War and soldiers would have this 40-pound pack on their back so they can locate things using GPS
Dr. Dan Schlager:
3:30
Exactly
Dr. Dan Schlager:
3:31
But obviously it was a great location system.
Dr. Michael Koren:
3:36
And explain that to the audience a little bit. How does GPS work.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
3:40
GPS is satellites that are up in the sky and they triangulate from. Your receiver gets three different satellites and it does mathematics and figures out. "his is where it all intersects, and so this must be your location.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:00
Got it Okay?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
4:01
So we reasoned that putting GPS in cell phones is going to happen. It's going to get cheaper, it's going to get smaller and we started
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:10
A cell phone? Like it was in a huge backpack.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:12
How did it get to like small enough to be in a cell phone?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
4:18
That's the Moore's law Everything gets smaller and cheaper and you know it was a leap of faith, but we felt that that and we looked at other location systems and there are other ways of doing it. Triangulating from cell towers.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:33
So that was an incredible insight. When did you come up with that?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
4:37
We came up with it just when we looked at what is out there that can work and what is likely to be there in the future.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:46
So what year is this about?
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:48
just for the audience's sake
Dr. Dan Schlager:
4:49
we first started with this insight in the early 90s, 1993, 94, and decided at that point it's probably a good enough idea that we should go ahead and patent it. And so, being a physician, I didn't really have a lot of experience in patenting products, but by the end of the journey I became very sophisticated how the patent process works and how to make your invention hard for people to get around.
Dr. Michael Koren:
5:27
Interesting. So intellectual property protection is incredibly important for inventors and obviously Thomas Edison is well known to have been somewhat ruthless in terms of filing patents quickly and then making sure that he defended those patents, and I guess that's a tradition that all inventors need to learn.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
5:48
Right, Once you've got a patent, you got to then put your other head on and say, well, if I want to get around this, what could I do? And then your job is to try and build a little moat around this patent or these patents and then also to try and refine it and make it even better. So initially, our GPS patents morphed into using maybe two satellites and using a cell tower different things and different ways of locating people.
Dr. Michael Koren:
6:18
Yeah, so let's just help the audience understand the timeline. So you came up with the idea of 93, 94, filed a US patent and at that time the electronics for GPS required a large space for all these things to actually work. And then over the next five or six years they became smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually it was one chip that could be put into a phone. So your concept actually became reality within about five or six years.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
6:47
It did. It was also helped by the FCC. They came out with a mandate in 1996. They realized that there are all these people calling for help on 911 and no one could be found. And so they said you guys need to figure out a way to make it so when we use these cellular phones which now everyone's starting to buy. Obviously, when you had a landline you didn't have that problem. You knew where the call was coming from. But from your cell phone you didn't Right.
Dr. Michael Koren:
7:17
And, as I remember from your story, you had some help. You had some legal help that was also related to you with regard to getting the the government to think it through, the their mandates and maybe explain that a little bit more for the audience why that was a very important part of the development of your invention
Dr. Dan Schlager:
7:34
the legal help was uh, I had my brother who was a big uh proponent who helped me with the law, but you need uh big law firms because you're fighting a big people.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
7:47
And we also got what was called patent insurance, which we actually had up to $3 million in patent insurance which, as my lawyer said, well, that's a good start.
Dr. Michael Koren:
8:00
That'll cover my initial consultation.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
8:03
That's right, and so, if you get into this, they call this the sport of kings for the reason that it takes a king's ransom to play this game.
Dr. Michael Koren:
8:14
Interesting, interesting. So tell the rest of the story. Patents out. The technology moves in your favor. People can now locate folks in trouble using GPS and just telling their phone that they're in trouble. And then what happens?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
8:29
Well, I guess there's a couple of stories.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
8:31
There's our story of how we, our trials and tribulations of, you know, protecting the patent, but also the technology. And it's pretty interesting because Motorola actually had a GPS division and they had a cellular division and they didn't talk to each other and they just didn't realize that you would think they'd be the obvious people to put these two together, but they didn't. And we kind of had a naive look at this and said, wait, these can go together. And so we started making some prototypes and showed that it could work, and we went to trade shows and we went to the FCC to try and make things favorable, because initially rules were not written well for GPS being the solution. But eventually one of the big players in this was Qualcomm and they bought a company called SnapTrack and one of the things that they did is they had the ability to locate indoors, and that was the other problem with GPS is because it's satellites outside. You could not be located indoors very easily. So now there were solutions that worked indoors and outdoors and cell phones could find people.
Dr. Michael Koren:
9:51
Yeah, so you can find people in a redwood forest and also in a mall.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
9:55
Right.
Dr. Michael Koren:
9:56
And you needed to do both. Yeah, interesting. So tell us a little bit about other applications for these technologies and ideas. I know you worked on defibrillators, for example. If a defibrillator went off, you can find out where that occurred. I think you did some stuff with automobiles as well.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
10:14
Yeah, we tried to merge this idea of when calling for help. When would it make sense? So we thought putting this into a defibrillator, if you're obviously defibrillating someone.
Dr. Michael Koren:
10:26
And it's a shock people get when their heart stops
Dr. Dan Schlager:
10:29
Exactly.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
10:30
And so if you're going to do that, you're probably going to need paramedics coming as quick as possible. So why not put that into the machine? And so we built a machine and we went up to Medtronics and showed them that device. And then we also realized, well, maybe we should put this also in smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms so if it goes off you can make the call for help, kind of bypassing the person to have to make the call for help.
Dr. Michael Koren:
11:03
Interesting. Yeah, make the system much more efficient. And how about in cars? GPS is used in cars all the time. I know you did some work there.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
11:12
Yeah, we looked at cars, and GPS initially was used a lot more in cars because the size wasn't an issue and so they would put it so. Onstar had a system where if you got in a crash, it would activate the GPS system and give you your location and hopefully help would be on the way.
Dr. Michael Koren:
11:35
Yeah, interesting stuff, and so more recently you've been delving in other inventions, also looking at electricity. We talked about defibrillators just a second ago, so maybe tell the audience a little bit about some of your more recent research.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
11:50
One of the newer products goes back into the ER of having patients that came in that were struck by lightning and trying to figure out. Is there something we can do to help these people prevent this from occurring?
Dr. Michael Koren:
12:07
Do you see that a lot People getting lightning strikes and injuries related to that.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
12:12
Well, when I was in Florida we actually saw it. I mean, that's why the hockey team is called the lightning. There's that alleyway where you get a lot of lightning there. And actually in Tucson we have these monsoons where lightning happens, and it was a problem that I had a couple of patients, and so I was trying to figure out how we could fix this, and so I started investigating that.
Dr. Michael Koren:
12:37
So tell us a little bit more. I know that you got into some really interesting research on ways of diverting the lightning from the critical organs, so tell us about that whole approach.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
12:49
Well, I read some Japanese research where they, uh, if they struck these mice with lightning at a certain amount of energy, they all died. But if they put a wire, a copper wire, along their back, they all survived. And it was like well, you know, that seems fairly simple. And so we started looking at different airplanes, and airplanes have these nose cones where the radar goes, and it can't be enclosed, otherwise the radar doesn't work. And so they have these little lightning diverter strips, kind of like ribs around your heart, that divert it, and so it goes past the radar cone and the electricity goes down the fuselage and diffuses on the airplane. So we went and decided well, let's, uh, let's build some uh lightning garments along the same lines which will have, uh, metallic fibers in them and divert away from the heart, because the heart is where usually what kills people. It causes the heart to go into a, an asystole, and then the person dies. So if we can divert it to go in a different direction, then we can hopefully save lives.
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:08
And how
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:08
did you show that you can actually divert that electrical charge?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
14:13
we, we had to go to anaheim. Uh, there's only a few places actually in the world where they have lightning labs.
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:21
So actually labs that study lightning
Dr. Dan Schlager:
14:23
Right and it's usually for airplanes.
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:26
Oh okay.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
14:27
So these guys kind of looked at us a little askance when we showed up. We wanted to do this for clothing, so we had a mannequin. We didn't have any volunteers, so we had to get the mannequin.
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:40
That sounds like phase one research. Yeah.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
14:46
And these Marx generators would give about three million volts of electricity,
Dr. Michael Koren:
14:50
oh my goodness.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
14:51
So, and initially we just did it where with slow photography you could follow the track of how the lightning ran, and it's lazy like us. It'll take the path of least resistance. So if you give it some metallic pathways, it'll usually prefer to take that direction.
Dr. Michael Koren:
15:14
Interesting And is there any way of assessing what would happen to a human being using the shirt or not, using the shirt, in sort of more of a clinical trial idea, or probably not an ethical trial to do on actual humans?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
15:28
It wouldn't be ethical, but we did try. We actually got the University of Arizona.
Dr. Michael Koren:
15:33
Use college kids. There is plentiful as lab rats, right? Yeah, I'm joking.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
15:42
And we got the engineering students to use this as a capstone project for the year and the first year. We did it and they were very diligent and we had systems where we can measure how much current is running through the mannequin, but 3 million volts fries everything, which we didn't quite realize. And so the first time we used the Marx generator everything fried and that experiment was a bust.
Dr. Michael Koren:
16:12
Well, fortunately, engineering students were replaceable.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
16:16
A new crop came in the next year and what we had learned? We redid it and we found a way to measure the current that goes across the chest wall.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
16:29
And one thing we do know is from defibrillators how much electricity the heart can handle from the chest wall, and the amount of electricity was significantly less than what you see from the defibrillator. So we had a pretty good idea that this was not going to. Whatever amount of current was going through, it was not going to cause serious harm to the heart.
Dr. Michael Koren:
16:53
So very different type of medical research than we usually talk about, but medical research nonetheless. So when can I get a lightning shirt at Costco or Walmart or through Amazon.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
17:06
Well, we are talking with certain companies and it's one of these scenarios where you can't we don't really want to be the manufacturer and go up against Nike and Adidas. We want to have a good strategic partner, get it out there and do some testing and make sure it works. Kind of fun is we have talked with a lab in Colombia, the country of Colombia, and they have a very sophisticated lab there. One of the reasons is is because it's one of the places in the world where a lot of lightning occurs and they lose one or two soldiers per month to lightning.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
17:47
So these lab was working on a tent, so if these guys got struck the tent would diffuse it away. So we kind of were one degree closer. Instead of a tent we wanted to have a shirt or a jacket. Interesting, they are willing to test our products as they come out.
Dr. Michael Koren:
18:09
So not only will they have bulletproof vests, they'll have lightning-proof vests.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
18:17
Yeah, and it's one of these things that you don't. Not a lot of people die in America from lightning, but around the world a fair amount do, and apparently up to 20,000 per year have been suggested. I think that could be a little high.
Dr. Michael Koren:
18:30
But you mentioned boaters, and people that do a lot of things outdoors may want to have a lightning shirt when the environment is such that that could be a risk.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
18:38
Right, because you never know when it's going to occur. And you know, obviously the first thing you should do is go inside if you can. But if you're a boater, if you're a fisherman, if you're a military person, hiking.
Dr. Michael Koren:
18:53
Oil rig worker.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
18:55
Yeah, probably hit the rig before you, hopefully, but yeah, so it's inconsistent. You never know when it's going to hit. The obvious one is the golfers seem to be very interested in this. Taking a metal club and putting it up to the sky is not always a great idea, and I hear that Lee Trevino got struck by lightning three times.
Dr. Michael Koren:
19:20
Oh, my goodness, wow. I can understand that If I had like a 10 foot putt for birdie, I wouldn't care if there was lightning in the sky. So I get that completely. So fascinating career. So what percentage of your career was involved with inventions, versus other things that you do do?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
19:39
well, I always liked the technology, so I was one of the first people in California to use ultrasound. Um, you know, you know, now everyone in ER uses ultrasound. But uh, back when I was a resident, uh, I remember my chief called me in and said you know, the people in radiology are really mad at you and I don't know what you're doing, but keep it up. So we were doing ultrasound in some of the patients that came in and then we realized we could check gallbladders and see the size of the aorta check pregnancies,, and so it was one of the first things that I liked inventing and working on and then just realized that you know, there's problems out there and there's, you know, ways we can maybe fix it through technology. And that's kind of been, you know, half of my career, half seeing patients and half trying to come up with products that might be more useful and save lives also. So it's getting down to the same core ideal of saving lives.
Dr. Michael Koren:
20:51
You know, yeah, that's neat, that's neat. So we were talking a little bit before about educational experiences that may have influenced you or prepared you for this career as a physician inventor, and we have one funny anecdote from college and we'll tell people about. But before we get into that, what prepared you? Is there anything in particular or is it just your natural curiosity?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
21:12
Yeah, I didn't really have any inventors in my family and uh, so it's a natural curiosity of just trying to, you know, find solutions to problems, which really is what ER is in most medicine is. You know, you get something and you got to figure out, uh, who to call or what to do and to solve the problem, and so, um, and I think, being up in the Bay area, where it's everyone has an idea in their desk, down in L. A., everyone has a script for a movie, but in the Bay Area, the Silicon Valley has money and there's a lot of that creative energy and thought going on there.
Dr. Michael Koren:
21:54
Interesting . So you mentioned that we went to college together and there's a really pretty interesting anecdote that we shared during our second year in college course in biology, where we were learning about molecular biology and, if you want to set the scene for people, but it's a, it's actually a pretty amusing anecdote.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
22:14
I'll set the scene. Uh, partly because it was confusing to me and it was a hard class and I remember we're getting near the final and you know you were pretty relaxed and I was like a little frantic and I said, Mike, can you help explain some of these things to me, which you gratefully did?
Dr. Michael Koren:
22:33
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Michael Koren:
22:34
So just for people, when you're in a pre-medical track you have to take a series of science classes and in our track during second year of college we had to take first and second semester biology, and second semester biology got into molecular biology, which is how genes work and how your body makes proteins, etc. Etc. And we took a course and I love this stuff. I was really excited about it and I know you liked it too. But the night before the final exam you mentioned to me that you were a little bit frantic and I sat down with you and spent a couple hours showing you how transcription and translation and other things work and I think we calmed you down a little bit. And then we got to the test next day and just describe what that was like.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
23:18
Well, it's one of these big lecture halls and we got these little blue books and it was a very comprehensive test, apparently 30 pages or so and so you really had to work fast
Dr. Michael Koren:
23:32
So that was interesting.
Dr. Michael Koren:
23:33
I remember that really clearly that it was a strange test where there were all these pages, literally close to 30 pages, and the top would say describe what you know about the translation of genes, and oh my God. So I remember just writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, going on and on. And from my particular experience is that I was trying to record everything that I knew and I'm writing frantically. And then I look at my watch and there's only 20 minutes left of a three-hour exam and I'm freaking out because I've only finished a third of the exam. And I remember just going through that just as quickly as possible and just writing a few words or a sentence about what I knew about each question. But despite that I didn't finish the exam. In fact I only got about two-thirds through. So what grade did you get on that exam? I got an A-.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
24:23
Michael Okay.
Dr. Michael Koren:
24:25
And I got a B-plus on it. So the guy that was teaching the other guy actually got a lower grade than the guy that was more succinct in their answer. So that's always been a great take-home lesson to me. It doesn't matter how much you know, it matters how much you can express in a limited period of time, and I try to use that as a lesson for MedEvidence!, where we get into a particularly deep or something that could be incredibly comprehensive but get a message across that people can consume in a limited period of time. So hopefully that's some learning that I had and hopefully that affected your career as well.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
24:59
Well, just knowing I got an A- and you got a B+ was one of the great moments of college.
Dr. Michael Koren:
25:08
So the other punchline of the story is the professor who was involved with this testing. He was actually a young professor. He was really really cool. I remember he wore cowboy boots to his lectures and we thought he was a pretty neat guy, but he was really inexperienced. He was older than us. We thought the world of him, but it turned out he was an inexperienced professor and he expressed regret to me that the test wasn't exactly the way he expected to come out and that a lot of people that knew stuff kind of got caught up in the same concept of not having enough time to express everything they knew. So he was regretful. But if you want to share his name, because it's a pretty interesting part of the story, it was Jeffrey Hall. Dr Jeffrey Hall ultimately won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, probably about six or seven years ago, for discovering the genes that were related to circadian rhythms, and he did that in fruit flies, which we also studied during college. That's right.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
26:04
I remember we had some dates that we had to go stop and check on the fruit flies before continuing the date and it apparently wasn't a very attractive way to get people interested in it.
Dr. Michael Koren:
26:17
To get women interested in us.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
26:19
We learned the hard way.
Dr. Michael Koren:
26:20
We thought it would be a great way to connect with a woman, and they didn't always appreciate what we were interested in. So it took us a little while to learn not only the secrets of biology but the secrets of the opposite sex.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
26:34
Are we allowed to talk about our greatest achievement there the Geft Lecture Series?
Dr. Michael Koren:
26:40
You can talk about anything you like.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
26:43
We were not particularly good cooks but we had some ideas and we decided we were going to start the guest chef lecture series, which would have people come and cook for us and we'd be four judges and we would judge the food on taste, composition, color and at the end of the year the best chef would get the golden apron award and um
Dr. Michael Koren:
27:09
talk about invention
Dr. Dan Schlager:
27:11
that's right, so that that may have been our first and greatest invention.
Dr. Michael Koren:
27:15
Because if it wasn't for that, we'd starve to death during senior year of college, when we were forced to try to cook for ourselves.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
27:21
So we had like chicken paprikash and a lot of good, and the Golden Apron Award lied somewhere between Nobel Prize and Heisman Trophy in terms of importance,
Dr. Michael Koren:
27:34
yeah very prestigious, a long list of one winner of the Golden Apron.
Dr. Michael Koren:
27:38
So, Dan, tell me, were there any people or concepts or things that you learned that inspired you to approach the patent system and approach inventions the way you did?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
27:53
Well, the patent system is is complex and it also is like a pendulum sometimes it's in favor and sometimes it's not, and so we actually were in a time where it was pretty much in favor and there were independent inventors out there, like, uh, Mr. Lemelson, who I think he did the Hot Wheels and he did some of the barcodes.
Dr. Michael Koren:
28:17
Yeah, computer vision. He had a lot of inventions.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
28:21
So he was a friend of the independent inventor, so he was one of the inspirations. But we really enjoyed working on our products and so getting through the legal system was quite another story. But we met a lot of lawyers and some of us we were the lawyer employment program where lots of lawyers would come and go and it's a fairly dirty field and we had against Qualcomm and they were given. They said, if our lawyers leave us, they will give them the big Qualcomm case. So they did that and it's analogous to you know you having a patient doing surgery on and a richer patient comes in and they say, well, will you work on my dad instead, if I give you more money?
Dr. Michael Koren:
29:25
So let me unpack that a little bit, because I know something about this from our friendship and also I was an investor in your company. Full disclosure that when you were trying to commercialize this concept of using GPS to save lives through cell phone communications, Qualcomm pushed back because they were providing the chipsets to the cell phone manufacturers. And so you got into a legal dispute with Qualcomm and there were times where your team had two or three attorneys and the Qualcomm team had 40 attorneys. And then eventually you went to Texas to file a claim against the cell phone manufacturers and learn that Qualcomm had basically paid off your attorneys to state that if you don't represent Dr. Schlager and his group, then you can represent us, which would be considered unethical. But you actually won a legal malpractice award because of that action, which is part of actually the business strategy of Qualcomm.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
30:28
Yeah, no, we were doing exactly what Qualcomm was doing. They would sue people if they didn't take a license. But they didn't like that. We were doing it. So in the end we were in Northern California and it was very slow moving. It took like three years to get a hung jury.
Dr. Michael Koren:
30:51
So you had a court case that lasted for three years. Oh my God.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
30:53
And then, uh, you know, we, you know we spent millions and they spent tens of millions. And uh, so then we went to Texas and um, and then we realized, you know what? We are going to give Qualcomm a license. So we gave Qualcomm a license and then we went after all the cell phone manufacturers and they all were mad at Qualcomm because Qualcomm had represented, they had all the key patents and that wasn't the case. So we ended up going into negotiations and arbitration and we thought we were done. We had a small single in terms of how we did.
Dr. Michael Koren:
31:33
In terms of monetizing the invention Monetizing but then Apple came out.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
31:37
They didn't have GPS initially, and so Apple came out again with GPS and we were like, oh, do we want to do this again? And I guess one of the funny things is they gave me an offer, but I was a cruise ship doctor at the time in the Sea of Cortez, so they thought I was playing hardball because I didn't respond to their offer. So then they upped it another 500,000. And when I got back I took their offer and that was the best cruise I ever had.
Dr. Michael Koren:
32:11
So, Dan, it's so interesting in medicine and science that you'll cross paths with different people, and different people have an influence that help you develop your next step. One of the things that I like to quote is the Sir Isaac Newton line that if I can see farther than other people, it's only because I stand on the shoulder of giants. So there was actually a giant in our field that I think influenced you.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
32:41
Yeah, there were several giants actually, but one of the big ones for the independent inventor was a guy by the name of Jerome Lemelson who was a very prolific uh, independent inventor
Dr. Michael Koren:
32:55
Yeah, some people think that he was the second most prolific inventor in American history, after Thomas Edison
Dr. Dan Schlager:
33:03
I believe that's true. I think, like he did, hot wheels and and all vision and all different readers, so there wasn't any fill that he didn't touch, so he had a very fertile mind.
Dr. Michael Koren:
33:16
Yeah, vcr recordings. I think he was involved in it. It was amazing All the things that he came up with. And then he was controversial, as I recall, because some people felt that he just came up with the idea and didn't necessarily build all these things.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
33:32
Yeah, and there's. There's a term. They call some of these patent holders trolls, meaning they kind of troll around, and I do think there's a difference between people who just are filing patents and people that trying to file patents, make prototypes, you know, form alliances with other people. So there's a fine line of whether you're a troll or not, and one of the funny things is that they considered me a troll until they bought my patents, and then they went and started suing people after they bought my patents. So the definition of troll is in the eye of the beholder
Dr. Michael Koren:
34:13
Right, right, right, the troll turns into toll.
Dr. Michael Koren:
34:18
So one of the interesting things about this story is that I first learned about Jerome Lemelson through you and then during medical school, there was something called the Lemelson Foundation and Jerome Lemelson and his family apparently gave a fair amount of money to MIT, which is one of the institutions that I learned at, and that was fascinating to see how the money that he made through inventions went back into academia to support research. I thought that was pretty cool, and it was only many years later that I learned, when I looked up Jerome Lemelson in Wikipedia, that he and I went to the same high school, which I thought was fascinating that the second most prolific inventor in US history went to my high school and no one in my high school knew about it.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
35:03
Yeah, it's funny they didn't honor him more or use him as an example.
Dr. Michael Koren:
35:08
Yeah, and that I learned actually about him through you and your research and your efforts. So thank you for connecting me with one of my old high school mates who was actually he went to high school way before I did, but that was a neat part of learning for me, so I appreciate that, Dan. Anything else you want to share with the audience?
Dr. Dan Schlager:
35:26
No, it's been a pleasure being here and I really enjoy. I've worked here at the clinic and, uh, you guys do some really important and great work and you know that's.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
35:42
I hope people realize that that this, uh, you know, these drugs make it to the market through the hard work of people like you
Dr. Michael Koren:
35:50
yeah, we work in lots of different medical products and the evidence-based medicine approach to learn what works, what doesn't work, what the side effects are and how these things should be deployed for our patients is incredibly important, and you've certainly been part of that during the course of your career, and we thank you for that. Dan, thank you for being part of MedEvidence! and joining us this morning.
Dr. Dan Schlager:
36:11
Thank you, it's great being here.
Announcer:
36:12
Thanks for joining the MedEvidence! podcast. To learn more, head over to MedEvidence. com or subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
