San Diego Snags Annual Conference on All Things Medical and Healthcare-Related

San Diego, which ranks among the premier regions in the country for innovations in the life sciences, has landed a conference to match. After a five-year hiatus, TEDMED is making a comeback, and the exclusive three-day conference on big ideas in healthcare and medicine, may be settling here permanently.

The revived TEDMED conference will be held at The Hotel Del Coronado from Oct. 27-30, 2009, jubliant San Diego officials said last week. The last TEDMED event was held in Charleston, S.C. in 2004. Organizers had been considering establishing the conference anew in Newport, R.I., home of the event’s founder, Richard Saul Wurman.

“Newport is great, but we could not find a venue as grand as San Diego and the Hotel Del,” said TEDMED president Marc Hodosh, a Boston entrepreneur (and Xconomist) who acquired rights to TEDMED earlier this year. He is organizing the event with Wurman, who is serving as chairman emeritus. “Ultimately, it was the support we were getting from San Diego and especially Qualcomm,” Hodosh said.

The fifth annual TEDMED event is intended to serve as the same sort of forum for mesmerizing, rapid-fire presentations about medicine, health care and life sciences that Wurman created with the original TED event in 1984. TED refers to the conferences’ focus on big ideas in Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and features brief presentations by such luminaries as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton and U2 vocalist Bono.

Wurman sold rights to the TED business in 2001 to Chris Anderson, who is organizing TED’s 25th anniversary conference in Long Beach, beginning Feb. 3.

“We are a completely separate organization now from TED, but we do share the same brand and founder,” Hodosh says. “We operate with the same philosophy and style. Every speaker gives a talk that is typically 15 to 20 minutes.”

Medical products goliath Johnson & Johnson is TEDMED’s lead sponsor, Hodosh said, and Qualcomm is serving as an underwriter. With a registration fee of $4,000 per person, the resurrected TEDMED continues to target the well-heeled corporate elite. If all goes well, Hodosh said he hopes to make San Diego TEDMED’s permanent home.

“It’s just such a beautiful environment,” Hodosh says. “Everybody loves the lectures, but it’s really the networking events, the mingling on the beach around the firepits that make it special.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.