BIO 2026: Gary Sinise, Marcus Freeman on leadership, service, and resilience

Leadership is often defined by how people respond to adversity.

That theme ran through the 2026 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) International Convention main stage on Tuesday, where actor and philanthropist Gary Sinise, Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman, and BIO President and CEO John F. Crowley shared stories of setbacks, sacrifice, and resilience.

Though they come from different backgrounds and life experiences, each arrived at a similar conclusion: progress often comes from confronting challenges head-on.

Crowley opened the morning by reflecting on the founding of Genentech in 1976 and the work that remains for patients still waiting for new treatments.

“Before the biotechnology revolution, triple-negative breast cancer had a five-year survival rate of essentially zero. It was an unmitigated death sentence,” he said. “Today, its five-year survival rate is nearly 80%.” And similar statistics can be given for a host of other diseases, from melanoma and myeloma to HIV/AIDS and sickle cell disease.

“And soon it will be time, and each of us in this room at this convention, after a few days, to go back to our labs and offices and to try to do it even better and faster, because time itself is so very precious.”

‘The greatest lessons come from failure’

That sense of urgency framed the conversation with Freeman, who looked back on some of the most difficult moments of his tenure leading the Notre Dame football program.

After taking over as head coach in 2021, Freeman endured several painful early losses that prompted him to reexamine his leadership.

“I started to question myself.”

Yet Freeman said those experiences ultimately shaped him more than any victory.

“The greatest lessons come from failure, because those are inside lessons.”

He learned that leaders are allowed to have doubts, but they cannot lead with them. While he could sit in his office questioning what had gone wrong, he said the team needed a coach who could walk into the room and say, “Here’s what we got to do. Here’s what we got to fix.”

And, Freeman said, success is ultimately measured not by wins and losses, but by the impact leaders have on others.

“Success is about who you become on the inside as you continue to rise on this journey of life,” he said, “and if on the inside you truly care about helping others and lifting as you climb, man, you’re going to impact a lot more people than if you just worry about how high you climbed by yourself.”

Meeting the challenge of a life-changing diagnosis

The focus on service and purpose continued during Crowley’s conversation with Sinise, whose decades-long support for veterans eventually led to the creation of the Gary Sinise Foundation.

Following the September 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sinise became deeply involved in supporting service members and military families, “trying to help them raise awareness, raise more funding to provide more services.”

The same commitment to perseverance would later be tested much closer to home.

In 2018, Sinise’s son Mac was diagnosed with chordoma, a rare cancer that affects roughly 300 Americans each year. After months of unexplained pain—the family thought it was from a bike accident—doctors finally discovered the source of the problem.

“The spine surgeon put him in the CT scanner and saw an orange-sized tumor on his sacrum. And that changed—that changed everything.”

Over the next several years, Mac endured surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and increasing physical limitations over the next five and a half years.

“He was a tremendous musician and composer,” Sinise said. “But he wasn’t thinking about music for the longest time because of the cancer fight.”

At the beginning of 2023, after years of treatments and hospital visits, Mac told his father he had been thinking about a piece of music he had started in college but never finished.

“That was just music to my ears. I thought this was fantastic,” Sinise recalled.

Mac partnered with several musicians, including members of Sinise’s own band, to complete the composition, “Arctic Circles.” The project reignited his creative ambitions and eventually grew into a full album, Resurrection and Revival, which he completed in late 2023 just weeks before his death.

Afterward, Sinise discovered additional unfinished music on his son’s computer and worked to bring it to life, resulting in two additional albums built from Mac’s unreleased compositions.

The experience inspired Sinise’s upcoming memoir, Graceful Warrior: A True Story of a Son, a Father, and a Family Who Carried Each Other Through, which is scheduled for release on Nov. 10.

“Like so many, you know, we all go through terrible things. It’s just human nature. And what happens in life. But I think we all learn things from each other when we watch how somebody can meet challenges and adapt and then overcome.”

For an industry built on tackling some of the world’s most difficult scientific and medical challenges, it was a message that resonated throughout BIO 2026.

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