Thousands pour into the Big Apple every year in mid-March for what is quite frankly an exhausting marathon that more resembles a speed dating session than a series of serious business meetings. It all culminates in a Thursday evening formal dinner held in the Waldorf's grand ballroom and several adjacent satellite rooms necessary to accommodate the overflow crowd. It is touted as the largest annual black-tie event in New York City.

DCAT has always featured big-name speakers, among them Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Condoleezza Rice, Gary Kasparov, Tom Brokaw and Peyton Manning. I have been there to hear all of them.

This year, with the impending passage of health-care reform in front of Congress, I was expecting some Washington, D.C., luminary to address the crowd, expounding great volumes of wisdom aimed at reminding us of our responsibility as members of the pharmaceutical industry to care for all humanity.

I wasn't even close. DCAT had invited "Avatar's" creator and director, James Cameron.

Gregory J. Rummo "The nerdiest kid in high school."

"Avatar" has several not-so subtle political messages, among them the preservation of indigenous peoples, the overreach of industrialization, the destruction of the environment and the all-too-quick solution to the world's complex problems being the use of the military.

But Cameron had not come to hammer the drug industry for its sins against humanity. In fact, his opening statement was to assure us that he had not come "to make his world fit ours."

He's a man of humble beginnings with an insatiable curiosity for the natural world. Growing up in rural Canada in a town with a population of 1,500, he passed his time as a young boy gazing at Saturn's rings through his 3-inch refracting telescope and looking at aged pond water under a microscope. "I was about the nerdiest kid in my high school," he said, where he was the president of the science club, which consisted of two people — "me and a girl from Czechoslovakia."

His "quest for understanding" led him to major in physics in college, but he couldn't do the math. So he switched to English, where he soon learned that studying English literature wasn't going to help him to write science fiction.

He dropped out of college and worked in various jobs, including positions as a tool-and-die machinist, a truck driver and a school janitor. While working as a truck driver, he regularly visited the filmmaking library at USC, and over a period of several months, laboriously photocopied almost every volume that he then methodically studied at home during his nights off.

One of several "Aha!" moments occurred when he went to see "Star Wars." As he sat spellbound by George Lucas' special effects, it was as if all of his ideas had been stolen. "Hey! That's my stuff up there," he yelled at the screen. "I felt like one of those delusional homeless people that think the government is spying on them," he said.

Eventually, he had his first opportunity to make a low-budget movie on money he "borrowed from a group of dentists looking for a tax shelter." One thing led to another, and finally he directed his first big box-office hit, "The Abyss," which featured "the first soft-character CG [computer graphics] image in history." This idea was then successfully expanded in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," a movie that featured a soft-character CG image as one of its stars. Those special effects ran up a tab of $100 million but "T2" earned half a billion dollars at the box office.

In 1997 "Titanic" was released with very little media fanfare. But despite a chorus of naysayers and going over budget, box-office receipts bucked the trend and increased every week during the first month of release. "Titanic" went on to become then the highest-grossing film of all time: $1.8 billion.

In 1999, he began toying with the idea of making a movie in which all of the actors would be robed in realistic, lifelike CG skins. The state of the art of CG would need another four years before Cameron could begin to realize his vision and start working on "Avatar."

"The technology was so new; we didn't start with actors until we were two years into the process. It was three years into the production before we actually saw one shot." "Avatar" has gone on to gross $2.6 billion worldwide.

As a scientist-businessman seated among a thousand or more like me that evening, I could not help but marvel at the vision Cameron has to follow his heart's desire since childhood, his passion for excellence and his drive to meet seemingly insurmountable challenges in his industry by refining or inventing new technology. I think everyone present that evening could immediately appreciate the mix of curiosity, challenge and risk Cameron was offering to us.