Sirtris' raison d'etre was to create more potent versions that could combat myriad diseases of aging.

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That's the whole business model, the very raison d'etre of Google Glass.

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He said he hoped future generations would "say with pride 'Ich bin ein Europaer', 'Je suis fier d'etre Europeen', 'I'm proud to be European'".

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That's because an entrepreneur's raison d'etre is his business.

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After a brief stop at the bank, he leads us to the edge of a vast, weed-choked parcel that for 100 years was home to a plate glass factory, Crystal City's economic raison d'etre.

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And getting things done is their raison d'etre.

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Certainly there is the dead weight of the prison bureaucracy, a Kafkaesque interleaving of public service boondoggling and private sector lobbying, whose raison d'etre is not the reduction of the prison population but its increase.

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Indeed, it was the highly successful merger of Bill Casey's Wall Street and national security experiences that largely gave birth to the field of International Economic Security--the overarching theme of the Casey Institute's work program and raison d'etre.

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They had an important political raison d'etre as well, however, bringing together representatives from all the various independent city-states that at that time made up the Greek world, states that more often than not were at war with each other.

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Things have been further complicated by management changes at the Times which have resulted in the Times hiring a number of editors - including several from the Washington Post - and reporters with a very different political orientation than the rock-ribbed conservatism that has been that paper's hallmark, and its raison d'etre.

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