 Please meet Bruce, my hero and my role model. Let me tell you my story, and you will understand why this little child is my inspiration. I am a neonatologist. I take care of newborn babies, many of them small and premature, like Bruce. The smallest one in my neonatal ICU right now, she's this tiny. I promise you, before I came to this conference, I put my hand in the incubator measured her from head to toe. She is this tiny. Her name is Emily, and she weighs 510 grams. This is my hospital, New York Methodist Hospital. I'm very, very lucky that my hospital is situated in a very beautiful part of Brooklyn, right close to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. My intensive care unit, my home away from home, is a busy, busy place. At any time, I might have up to 32 really sick newborn babies. Do you know what is very cool about a newborn baby? Many of them might be born with no heart rate, not breathing, practically dead. You're there. You do the right steps, the right resuscitation, the right procedure, and within two minutes, you have a pink, crying, squalling bundle kicking you in the face, and the whole world is wonderful again. It is such a privilege to be a baby doctor. You never forget the look in a mother's eyes when her little baby is recovering. My journey from India to the United States 15 years ago had many waste stations. One of them actually involved research in genetics and neuroscience. I was very lucky to work on a gene called aquaporin. Let me give you the context of this. Whenever a little baby is born premature, the brain can bleed very easily. When I was lucky to be working on this gene and to discover the relationship of this gene to neonatal hemorrhage, which is hemorrhage in the premature brain. There is a story behind it. When I began my medical career, I really, really wanted to be involved in genetic research. People laughed at me and they said, hey, you want to be a neonatologist. You can't combine genetic research with neonatology. When somebody tells you that you cannot do something, give them a beautiful smile bow to them with humility and say, thank you so much for your opinion. Turn around and do exactly what your heart is telling you to do. If the passion exists, if the willpower exists, magic can happen. I remember a very cool incident from my neonatal fellowship days at Brown University in Rhode Island. There is this mom who came in at 22 weeks of pregnancy. We did an ultrasound and we detected a spinal cord defect, a neural tube defect in the baby. We took this mom to the operating room, opened up the uterus, took the fetus out, still connected to the placenta, to the umbilical cord and to its mummy. We operated on the neural tube defect, repaired the neural tube defect, put the baby back into the womb, stitched back the uterus. And this mom carried her pregnancy to 40 weeks to full-term and delivered this baby with every stitch in place and with this neural tube defect entirely repaired. How cool is this? Let me take you away from my neonatal intensive care unit to another very beautiful place, Mount Everest and the Himalayas. My first journey into the Himalayas was to the base camp of Mount Everest many years ago and subsequently I have been lucky enough to be able to climb to camp for at 7,000 meters, 23,000 feet. Do you know what is very, very wonderful about the Himalayas? They are so massive, the base of Mount Everest at 17,500 feet is higher than the summit of the highest mountain in the Alps. It's almost as if the Himalayas are looking at you and laughing and telling us, hey, you think you're important, look at us. We have been standing here 350 million years and we don't even know you exist. When the ego is smashed, when the ego is humbled, that's when the creativity arises. The Himalayas are also immensely beautiful. The sun rises in the morning and everything is bathed in gold. In the presence of such beauty, there is utter humility. As I was going up into the mountains, I thought of doing a research project, trying to look at the effect of yoga breathing, pranayama and meditation on acclimatization of the body at high altitude. We took this little ultrasound machine with us and used it for measurements and the results are actually quite encouraging because they suggest that pranayama and meditation might actually help acclimatize the body to a high altitude. This is the first study of its kind ever done and it taught me the importance of serenity, peace of mind and meditation in maintaining human health. Let me now take you away from the Himalayas and back into Brooklyn. Imagine that you are a student who has joined medical school in New York City and imagine further that you are at New York Methodist Hospital in the Department of Pediatrics and that you have the misfortune to have Dr. Nitin Rohn associate professor of pediatrics as your preceptor and mentor. This is what happens. A lot of my teaching is in the park under the trees. The first 10 minutes is music. I love playing Indian classical music on the flute and this is followed by didactic teaching. I love the concept of Ravindranath Tagore, Indian poet and Nobel laureate when it took the concept of teaching away from closed classrooms and into the midst of nature. I love the Sanskrit word tattvamasi which means you are that. Though are that, you are already enlightened. You're already there. All that you need to do is make your internal journey, peel off your layers of learning, peel off your layers of conditioning and discover your enlightenment that was already there in the first place. When one is in the midst of nature, that's when you are in the moment and when you are in the moment, that's when creativity arises. Huh, what the heck does this have to do with premature babies? Let me tell you a little story. This is little baby Thea Johnson who was born at 28 weeks of pregnancy with a birth weight of 800 grams. Thea had a very difficult time when she was born requiring a breathing tube to be placed into her. The next few weeks were very tough for Thea and increasingly sophisticated attempts to try to get her lungs to breathe were unsuccessful. It looked like this little baby did not have long to live. We had to think out of the box on this one. We decided to use a sophisticated form of ventilation called a VDR, a volume diffusion respirator. This had been used only on the adults in my hospital until this time. We combined this with a gas called nitric oxide. This gas goes into the lungs and entirely relaxes the blood vessels in the lungs and lets the oxygen through. This is the first time that such a combination had ever been tried on a premature baby. This machine was so huge that it occupied half the room in the neonatal ICU. You can see Thea, but she's so diminutive compared to this huge, huge machine. A few days later, something really wonderful began to happen. Thea's lungs began to breathe. Two weeks later, my little baby Thea came off the respirator and off the breathing tube. This is the first time that Thea's mummy could actually see her little baby's face ever since she had been born. Thea continued to do well. And the day came that she was discharged from the neonatal intensive care unit. This was such a happy day for all of us. Thea continued to do well at home. As you can see, she required a tracheostomy, a hole in the trachea, to help her to breathe. But apart from that, she really did fine. I told Thea's mummy I was talking at this conference and she sent me this picture four weeks ago. This is little Thea at a pizza making competition where her mom tells me she won the second prize. As you can see, the tracheostomy tube is now out and how wonderful it is. This little girl who is now five years old is alive today because of the advances in science and technology and thanks to thinking out of the box, which brings us back in a full circle back to my hero and my role model, little baby Bruce. This little baby was born with a birth weight of 600 grams at 26 weeks of pregnancy. He actually did quite well after he was born and we were able to take out his breathing tube within a week of life. Four weeks passed and it looked as if he was going to recover and be fine. And then a devastating thing happened. He got a condition called necrotizing enterocolitis. What this condition means is that in a growing premature baby, the blood supply of the intestines abruptly stops and large parts of the intestine become black with gangrene and entirely die. At its worst, this condition could be fatal. We suspected that little baby Bruce had this condition, took him to the operating room, opened him up and this is what we saw. Almost all of this little baby's intestines were gone. We were so dismayed, there was absolutely nothing we could do. We stitched the baby back up, took him back to the intensive care unit. At this moment, his heartbeat, his breathing, everything was being supported by machines and with medication. I told Mummy Bruce, I told her, I don't think this baby is going to survive. I think there is very little we can do. The baby's Mummy looked at me and said, Dr. Ron, please try to continue to do your very best and I will try to make sure that my love, compassion and kindness for my baby will try to heal my baby. For the next four weeks, this mother sat next to her baby, reading to him, caressing him, speaking to him, sleeping one hour in the afternoon and two hours at night. Four weeks passed and one day, something really wonderful happened. This little baby smiled. Unlike adults, little babies cannot fake a smile. So this doorless, maybe, hey, there's something maybe right happening in the baby's abdominal cavity. We took him back to the operating room, reopened him and wonder of wonders. Large parts of this baby's intestine had entirely rejoined. We'd never, ever, ever seen anything like this before. Some of us were just crying with emotion, just with delight. He did require surgery to try to close up the parts of the intestine that hadn't joined. We got him back to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Three weeks later, this little baby came off the respirator and a couple of months later, he was able to be discharged home. And here he is now, all of four years old and doing so absolutely wonderful. I do know that it was the advances in science and technology which played a major role in keeping this baby alive, in saving his life. But I also understand that it was the mom's love, compassion and kindness for her little baby, which made him heal. Therefore, this little one is my role model. He is my hero because he taught me the importance of love, kindness and compassion and healing even when the situation might seem really, really desperate. So what take home lessons do I have from my stories? I have learned to not be swayed by the advances in science and technology alone, but to put myself in places like the Himalaya, like the teaching under the trees and to realize with utter humility that I am but a small part of nature. I have learned the immense power of loving kindness and compassion in healing. The power of this energy is entirely unmeasurable. And last but not the least, if my little baby Thea can smile with a hole in her trachea and with five tubes running through her body, then I can learn from my little baby to be in the moment, to live in the moment and therein to make my internal journey and find my compassion and kindness. Thank you.