 Today, our economic strength is powered by past discoveries. Some estimates 25 to 50 percent of the GDP today is based in technological discoveries over the last 50 years. We'll talk more about those. Our cutting-edge technologies have roots, and they do stretch back to before even World War II when the Industrial Revolution sort of hit this country in a big way. Today, I would say also that the landscape in the U.S. has dramatically changed from what it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Most industrial labs, such as Bell Labs, such as IBM, have really, by and large, either totally deceased or they're dramatically reducing their investment in basic research. So funding from both private and public sector has decreased in the fundamental part of the research. So these failure to funding have resulted in some very large and troubling gaps in the innovation pipeline, if you can call it pipeline, and it raises serious concerns about the future of American innovation. So to solve these problems, we need to build public support. And part of this discussion today is about thinking about how to develop not just the new technologies, but really more about how do we get public support investment in basic research, which is really the seed corn of future innovation. To do this, we have to attack a few myths. So the myth that innovation genius burns brightest in isolation has a real impact on the way the nation views the importance of knowledge enterprise, of our enterprise in particular. The scientific infrastructure, for example, that supports it is very expensive. It's very engaging. It's very complex. And so the idea of a single inventor in a laboratory is a great idea, but it doesn't necessarily hold true to the ultimate innovation enterprise. And this won't be easy because our notion of the inventor, of the innovator today, from Thomas Edison to the Iron Man in movie this past weekend, our inventor heroes have been popularly viewed as single combat warriors working feverishly in the threadbare den of solitude. In the Iron Man's case, it wasn't quite so threadbare, but partly that mythology is due to public relations efforts of ourselves, scientists, I'm a physicist, of our own scientists. And so I'd like to give a few examples. One is our favorite, which is Thomas Edison. So let me give you a few examples of his innovation, the light bulb. In 14-month quest to develop commercially practical light bulb, he wrote in quote, I tested fewer than 6,000 vegetable, no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material. It really is awe-inspiring to think about this guy Edison sitting alone at his workbench in Menlo Park going through thousands and thousands of fibers to find that one fiber that ultimately resulted in what changed the world, providing electrical light in your house. But I should also say that it's patently untrue. So it was self-promoting, but it was untrue. And in fact, Edison was really leading, a lot like myself, one of the world's first large-scale research labs. He was highly organized, and at the time of the bulb, he actually had about 40 or 50 scientists and engineers working with him in Menlo Park, and they worked hard and furiously for a single, mission-driven goal. So after the light bulb proved successful, Edison went on to build an even larger invention factory called the Invention Factory in West Orange, and it goes on, the complex included up to 200 scientists. So Edison's myth, self-myth, was not entirely true. So I find it interesting, but sometimes troubling that people considered an attack or insult to say, and my colleagues at the university, for example, often find it that these great inventors worked on equip labs, they worked in much bigger environments with much bigger ecosystems. Their inventors were built on research and ideas of other great scientists, not just their own. So this kind of myth, if you will, of the single inventor in a garage is doing everything is really a myth, and it can't in the end really make a difference. Today, just to change the subject a little, to me, American scientists and engineers are facing a number of the biggest, most, I'd say even exciting questions that have a lasting impact on our economy and will, on our economy and environment for many years to come. For example, how can we create a solar cell that costs five cents per kilowatt hour, no subsidies to compete with what we have now when we plug into the wall and produce power from coal? How can we reduce the cost of a car battery to one cent per mile, about a factor of 100 away? How can we cost effectively capture the excess carbon and atmosphere and sequester it for thousands of years to come? So I would say that we don't know the answers to these questions, but the answers will come from scientists not working in isolation but working in these types of groups. So the most promising way, as I said, to find those answers is by putting world-class researchers in world-class labs. The problem is that corporations are not willing to do this anymore. Corporations have just not, because of we heard the quarterly reports, they're just not willing to invest in the long-term. They'll invest in short-term and they should be focused on short-term, but they're not willing to invest in the long-term. So here, ultimately, is the trillion-dollar question. Who, if the industry can't do it, who is going to focus? Who in the United States in particular will focus on investment in world-class researchers, the facilities that make the future of fundamental discoveries that I've talked about, turn them into something which ultimately spurs new industries and new jobs? So it's an enormous responsibility for the government if the government has to do it, and I guess we'll have a chance to talk about that. And it requires a lot of things to happen. We've heard some proposals already as to how to garner some of the money, but let me just say about more than the money, it's really a little bit more than the money. And it's not just investing money, it's putting it in the right places to spur an ecosystem. It requires armies of highly intelligent, highly educated, and I know this is even under debate today, people with deep curiosity, strong work ethics, and a real unflagging persistence and a drive to try to make something change the world.