By 1989, a boomer's median net worth was $36,000, according to Paul Root Wolpe, president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. By 2001, it swelled to $107,000. Home equity included, that number now is about $400,000. 

"Never before has an older generation controlled so much wealth of the country," he said. "We [at 50, Wolpe is a boomer himself] have the largest discretionary income of all age groups of any time in American history. We control 60 percent of the nation's wealth." 

Boomers now ages 50 through 60 own: 
* 68 percent of all stocks 
* 60 percent of annuities 
* 50 percent of IRAs 
* 40 percent of life insurance policies 
* 38 percent of auto insurance 

The boomers, who constitute 45 percent of the American work force, are lawyers, judges, members of Congress, Wolpe said. They vote more than their kids - Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) - and will wrangle political power from them for many years to come, he said. 
The Greatest Generation, those stalwart patriots who saw the "Roaring '20s," suffered the Wall Street crash of 1929 and fought valiantly during World War II, are now grappling with old age and disease. They're headed into the winter of their lives.

But their children, the baby boomers, aren't going to follow them. 
"We have made the decision that that is not going to happen to us," said Paul Root Wolpe, president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, in a prestigious Utah lecture last week. 

Now, with much of the country's wealth and political power concentrated in their hands, the boomers are uniquely positioned to drive the biotechnology market, Wolpe said. They're both consuming and investing in medical devices and pharmaceuticals that not only extend their lives, but also make them better. 
And companies are rushing products to the market to help them do it, Wolpe said. 

The first generations of new drugs - the Prozacs, the Viagras - "are just the first shot across the bow," said Wolpe, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Utah entrepreneur Larry Rigby, who is CEO of Larada Sciences, chairman of Exezen Therapeutics and vice chairman of ZARS Pharma, agrees. 

"I think capital follows big market opportunities," he said, "and big market opportunities are associated with the baby boomer generation because it's so huge. So their health problems will become the element that drives the biotech boom." 

The boomers, Wolpe said, have recast aging as a disease and death as a bad outcome. 

"They want to be 40-something forever," Wolpe said during a Max and Sara Cowan Memorial Lecture in Humanistic Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine. 

Transforming medicine 

Jay Jacobson, professor of internal medicine and chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at the U., said the medical community may not be prepared for what's coming. 

In the 1960s, he said, doctors were surprised when young women and their spouses demanded a change in the way babies were delivered. Their demands revolutionized what doctors thought of as obstetric care. 

They were similarly unprepared when, around that same time, women facing mastectomies asked for alternative treatments for breast cancer. 

"I think it's fair to say that we're continuously surprised by the changing expectations of the community of patients that presents itself in front of us," he said. The baby boomer phenomenon, however, "may be even bigger than any of the ones I've mentioned." 

Boomers now make up 26 percent of the U.S. population, and in Utah, 23 percent, according to the 2000 census. 

It's a generation of people whose numbers - and demands on the health care system - are unlike anything the nation has seen. Their expectations, Jacobson said, are not just for treatments, but for cures. 

They are empowered, informed and enlightened - and at 65, entitled to Medicare, he said. 

"Perhaps we haven't considered enough who these people are who increasingly will require medical care and, in fact, who will demand it," he said. 

Boomers coming of age 

The years between World War II and Vietnam were a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the U.S. 

Even as the country waged an ideological war with the Soviet empire, Americans framed the conflict in black and white, as good versus evil, Wolpe said. Their perceptions of a strong moral imperative only fueled their optimism. 
Progress in medicine and technology, meanwhile, was happening at a breath-taking pace. One after another, infectious diseases such as polio and small pox were toppled by vaccines. The U.S. sent the Apollo 11 mission into space, putting astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin - and an American flag - on the moon. 

"It was a very, very powerful moment," said Wolpe, who is also the chief of bioethics for NASA, "and set in many ways a lot of the mind-set of the baby boomer generation." 

The baby boomers, of whom twice as many went to college than their parents, began to see "the world as their oyster," Wolpe said. They developed an affinity for biotechnology and its possibilities. 

At the same time, the boomers were accumulating more wealth and political power than any other generation in the nation's history. Just one slice of the baby boomer population - those ages 50 through 60 - own 68 percent of all stocks; 60 percent of annuities and 50 percent of IRAs. 

And, Wolpe said, they account for $620 billion in direct health care spending. 

Demanding a better life 

Now that powerful constituent, Wolpe said, is demanding technological fixes to biological problems. Men want an answer for impotence, for example, and women, extended fertility after entering the work force and delaying childbirth. 
They want memory-enhancing and mood-altering drugs, artificial organs to replace their ailing ones, and stem cell therapies and cures for disease. 

In many cases, they are either investing in or starting up companies - in medical devices, pharma and biotech - to see that it happens. 

Andrew Laver, managing director for Salt Lake Life Science Angels, said most of his 20 accredited investors are boomers. His not-for-profit corporation facilitates investment in seed-stage health care and life science companies in Utah. 

"The demographic is changing and it [the baby boomer generation] is becoming a large segment of the society and certainly driving everything in the health care market," he said. 

Brian Cummings, director of the U.'s Technology Commercialization Office, said the boomers are playing a seminal role in the dramatic increase of technology collaboration and research on campus. 

They are also becoming more entrepreneurial - while just a few years ago the U. pumped out three or four start-ups annually, it now produces about 20. 
"All of the metrics show there are more ideas," and the ideas that are developed, "are showing positive growth," he said. 

As the boomers age, their onset of obesity, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases - and pain - will drive innovation, Rigby said. 
Unlike their parents, who extolled a kind of grin-and-bear-it attitude toward pain, the Boomers "want a pill," he said. "They want a drug. They want it treated and they want it treated now." 

They also want it cheap, to contain runaway health care costs 
"If you can find out more efficient ways of treating disease or preventing disease - those are going to be the drivers in terms of where investment will be," Rigby said.