 Thanks for joining us here at the Vail Scientific Summit. I had a chance to chat with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Vonda Wright, who is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and we talked about what it's like to be a woman in the world of sports medicine. So you have to check it out. You know, I actually love being a woman in orthopedic surgery, and sometimes people are astonished by the statistic that about 3 percent of all orthopedic surgeons are women. That statistic is going up. I think we're actually about 7 percent now, but still that leaves 93 percent of my colleagues are men, and you know, some might see that as a barrier. That has never been a barrier for me. There is some sense that you have to work harder, climb higher, move faster. And I found those things true, but what I also have found is that in a sea of gray suits, when you do those three things, climb higher, move faster, present intelligently, that people tend to remember your work. And you know what? That's an advantage, a networking advantage. So I love being a woman in orthopedic surgery, but I think what I also find attractive about it is because sitting in this place, I can help young women coming up after me envision a future where a surgical specialty, which is traditionally thought of as filled with people, and this is a joke, filled with people who are strong as a bull and twice as smart, you know, actually as an aside orthopedic surgery has become one of the most competitive fields to be in. So to all my male colleagues, now they're brilliant. But to break that stereotype and to function in a world where not only technology, but the tools we use have enabled even stature-wise little women like me to function at a very, very high and top of the field level is a miraculous place to be in less than about 50 years. So you know, over the course of my career, I've focused on three main areas of research. The first is looking at the phenomenon of musculoskeletal aging. And today, lots of people are looking at it 12 years ago when I began. It was actually kind of an anomaly. And when I submitted my first paper in the area of really looking at master's age athletes, those 40 and above, and looking at what we're capable of if we continue with chronic exercise instead of chronic sedentary living, the field of orthopedics, I'm not sure, was ready for it because we think of sports as something that only 12-year-olds and 20-year-olds and maybe Olympians do. But the fact is that most sports medicine waiting rooms are filled with people in their mid-40s. And so I started looking at, well, when do we really start slowing down with age, which is a big complaint of with aging? What does our muscle do if we're chronically active? What is our bone density if we continually pound our bones? And even what is our brain function? Can we prevent the cognitive decline that we see with aging with something as simple as chronic exercise? And so over the years, I've published six original studies that I joyfully tell you that mobility is the key to aging well. And so now what I've moved on to is try to identify the mechanism for that. You know, I've come out of the lab so long ago. I no longer pipette and look at all the molecules popping off of cells. But that's what I'm going back to. And I'm specifically looking at a protein called clothos, which has been around a long time. But it's thought to be expressed as a function of skeletal muscle contraction, running, cycling, all the things we do in sports. But what it does is it suppresses aging in almost every body system. Trying to make a tie between let's get off the couch and let's improve our aging process. So this conference today, I've heard a lot of fantastic ideas of what is the mechanism to slow down aging. And so I'm bringing to this group clothos as another option. So I do musculoskeletal aging work. You know, I'm a hip arthroscopist like Dr. Philippon. In fact, a little-known fact is that when he started creating the field of hip arthroscopy, he started in Pittsburgh. And I was a junior resident, and I wrote grants with him and was in the OR occasionally with him. So I'm really thrilled that this has come full circle. And now I'm doing some hip research that hopefully will affect the field. And then finally, because of my role as the medical director of a sports center and having a big focus on aging muscle, we're now looking at what we're going to do about this scorch of childhood injury due to year-round play. You know, somehow the public has in their brains that you have to really work your child like an adult to get them to perform when the fact of the matter is we've surveyed the penguins and a variety of other professional groups and found that most of the very successful athletes did not specialize in their sport and certainly not their position until they were in late high school or even college. So it's a complete misanomer that's causing parents to play their kids year-round, choose to specialize not only in sport but in position very early. And so we have this epidemic of youth sports injury which causes, and this is the real kicker, 70% of all kids stop exercising in an organized way by age 13. And thus you've seen the emergence of Xbox game competitions where 20,000 people sit on their butts all day watching other people sitting on their butts playing video games. And that is not going to help this country get healthy. You know, I think it's very important for women to do research in a variety of fields in orthopedic surgery and mobility medicine for a few reasons. The first reason is that I'm fascinated that in the 1800s, the brilliant scientist Nikolai Tesla predicted the cell phone and he predicted that technology would be the great equalizer so that access to care would not be dependent on who is the brawniest and who is the biggest in a very physical world. But because technology enables thinkers and smaller people and people without the benefit of huge physical bodies to have access, the technology would be a great equalizer. And that is what it's become, certainly in orthopedic surgery. So it enables women to enter STEM and be places we never have been. So that's one reason I think it's important for women to be involved in research. The other reason is that it's a little known fact that when you do population health studies, i.e. what's going on with your heart valve or how can we find the best med for diabetes, research is very, very expensive. And so to limit the expense, researchers, and I get why we do this, we limit inclusion criteria to one homogenous population, meaning let's study the effect of this drug in a group of 40-year-old white males and then we'll take those data and assume that it's true for everyone, whether it's women, people of color, all ages. And the fact of the matter is that we know that medicine is precise for each and every person. So that is the background that makes the statistic that only 15 cents of every medical dollar is spent on research that focuses on people with two X chromosomes, women. And no matter where you fall on the gender scale, you are still genetically one or the other. And so your body is metabolically different and it will respond differently based on that chromosomal pattern. Only 15 cents on every dollar is spent on XX research. And so we are never going to be able to treat populations of people adequately unless we equalize the spending of research dollars. And I think it's first a matter of education. Who knew that, right? When I say that in front of groups of philanthropic women, they're appalled because when you look at who raises money for research in this country, who the diabetes foundation, the heart disease, the Crohn's and Colitis, the room is filled with women, whether they make the money themselves or they spend somebody else's money. And so when they hear that, I want to empower them to ask the question, where is my money going and on what kind of studies is it being spent?