 Yes, well good morning everyone and first of all congratulations on making it all the way through Saturday. I know it's been a hard week with all the sessions and conferences, workshops, the nights out here in Davos and the early mornings especially on Saturday. So thank you so much for being here. We have an amazing lineup today, Univision and Fusion. This is the second year in a row that we host a session and we're very much interested in hosting this session this year. So it's an honor for us to be here. My name is Enrique Acevedo. I'll be trying to speak as little as possible throughout the next hour so our guests and speakers can take care of that. I think we have a very large panel so I won't be reading all of the bios. I encourage you to look at the bios of our speakers. I warn you, you'll be a little bit depressed with your own bio after doing that. But I'm going to start with a question and I already talked about this in the green room. During my week here at Davos this year I heard a lot about the future of technology and the challenges that we're facing as humanity but I also got a sense that everyone is trusting or is overconfident that science and scientists will come up with all the answers that we need in terms of the challenges that we're facing as humanity. And I just want to ask you if you think that's fair and if you think that's also accurate. I mean, it got us all the way here now, science. But from now on, do you think it's fair that we are aiming and putting so much pressure on science and scientists to come up with the answers? Franz Gordova, the first woman, the youngest and first woman to ever be in charge of the chief scientist position at NASA. Ladies first. All right. Thank you very much, Enrique. And it's a real pleasure to be here on this panel. I actually wish that people had a lot of trust in science. I think we're at a point now when people hear so much and there are so many questions raised on all sides of any important issue that actually I think we're suffering from a lack of trust in science which we have to be very conscious of and established through good research and good communications why people should trust science. That's one point I want to make. Another on Enrique is that I think we all appreciate that science and technology alone cannot address all of the world's complex problems, challenges. They can go a long way to providing tools and methods and enhanced understanding. But it's only the combination of the scientific knowledge we have with our understanding of sociology, of human behavior, of behavior as individuals, behavior as organizations, and with the help and partnership of artists and designers and people aware of appreciative of culture that we can really approach and make headway on the problems of the world. I don't know. We have an amazing line of scientists but three of them are more now in charge of implementing science and very large projects in some cases that go to research and science. On my left I have three Nobel Prize winners. I don't know if Dr. Molina, you want to start by following up on that. We talked about the expectations on science and climate change. First of all I very much agree with Francis that science is crucial and it's perhaps even underappreciated in many aspects of our society. First of all what's very clear is that the countries that spend a significant fraction of their GDP on science and technology, they are the ones that do better. Their economy is improved and so that's a problem with many developing countries that they're not spending enough and so we don't have enough high capacity people to be able to push the economy further and so. But I also agree that science alone is not enough. We need to be able to teach children, young adults and so on, science, technology but also values. And that's where it's connected with the improvement of society because science itself is neither good nor bad. But to put it to good use we all have to agree that working together we can improve things. In my case climate change is a very good example but we know enough about it so that society should certainly already react very strongly. But science will help on the one hand to better sort of quantify the risks which we think are very very troublesome. And furthermore also to provide the solutions we have many but the point is also science with technology to keep improving the prices the cost so that society actually embraces these solutions. So in a nutshell science is of course crucial but it's not enough. Crucial but not enough. Konstantino was a lot you said before we came into the stage sometimes we are more pressured than the actual politicians that make the decisions behind the science. Yes I would like to be more optimistic about science that's the previous two speakers I think. If you look at it at the long run if someone is to provide solutions for the global problems it should it is scientists not politicians sorry about this. And the most important thing that science what it does it provides us with answers and usually and the information and those are true answers unlike what you see on the news whether you trust it or not science you always trust whether it's good or not that's that's another question but the outcome of the science is the truth and that's how it is. And then it's really a pressure on us how do we use it. And it would be really nice if we can use it responsibly. Then of course it's the human factor interferes. Now we need to convince our politicians on the issues of the of the climate change. We need to argue to our politicians on the issues of the nuclear energy and so on and that's also unfortunately a job for scientists not only to discover new knowledge but also to argue our case and to bring this knowledge to to to the government. I guess you deal much much directly with politicians and bureaucracy in your line of work. Francis Collins from the NIH do you think science is being put in that spot also in the U.S. I mean locally right now for example you're wearing that ribbon for Ebola fighting in West Africa but in the past that in the case of Ebola too much pressure being put on science is to come up with a vaccine very very fast to come up with a solution. There was pressure there is pressure now we haven't solved this yet but it's appropriate. I mean science in this case offers the opportunity to deal with a terrible human tragedy with now thousands of people having lost their lives to this outbreak in West Africa. And the best hope to control that a combination of really vigorous public health efforts to track down all the contacts and make sure that they're kept isolated so they don't infect others. But right now the development of a vaccine which in the next couple of weeks will initiate a trial in Liberia and Sierra Leone to see whether in fact the evidence that looks very convincing from the monkey model and the safety data from phase one trials actually predicts that this will be an effective vaccine that's desperately needed. And this has been done in record time as far as getting it into clinical application. But I would say the Ebola vaccine was started at NIH as a project back in the 1990s when most people thought it was kind of silly to put public efforts into a disease that would probably never affect more than a few people in Central Africa. Basic science is a critical part of what the scientific community can contribute. We have to pay attention to that that theme over and over again because there's a temptation especially in medical research to focus too much on that last translational step of getting something to the clinic. You're not going to have anything to get to the clinic unless you invest in that basic science understanding of how life works. And I have to say for me as a physician, a geneticist, the guy had the privilege of leading the human genome project, this is an amazing century for the life sciences. We are on a path towards uncovering answers to mysteries that we've never really had the chance to be able to approach before, and now we can. Whether it's understanding all the complexities of how that three billion base pair genome directs how a cell operates, or whether as we've heard about in Davos this year with many sessions, the ambitious effort to understand how the human brain works, the most complex structure in biology that we know of with its 86 billion neurons each with which may have a thousand connections. Pretty bold and audacious to imagine that we might actually understand that. In fact, some people have worried that our brains aren't complicated enough to understand our brains, but we will have computational strategies to help us and that's a good thing too. I guess I would say, I mean we have a panel here with people with lots of expertise. One of the themes that I hope is coming across anybody who's watching science is this idea of convergence, that the physical sciences and engineering and the life sciences, which maybe used to be often separate buildings doing separate things, they're all coming together now in a wonderful synthesis. It's all about understanding how the universe is put together, how that understanding those laws applies to everything from the expanding universe to understanding how a cell does what it does. And anybody who wants to be a scientist in this century has to be ready to embrace all of those disciplines, including mathematics in a big way, including computational strategies. There's no room anymore I think for ultra-compartmentalized narrow perspectives when you have the opportunity to be much broader. And that I find very exciting. And it has this enormous potential to help us with the human condition. And again, as a medical scientist, certainly I think society does expect us to come up with those solutions to try to alleviate suffering and that is part of our job. The death rate is still going to be one per person. All of you need to be ready for that. But if we can increase the likelihood that your trajectory through life has an opportunity to go forward without being prematurely cut down or limited by chronic disease, that's a noble enterprise. That's something science can be proud of taking on as part of our mission. Thank you so much. And now that you mentioned mathematics, Jean-Pierre Bourgogneau, do you see this convergence happening to across the globe, not only in a place like the U.S.? Well, I think the point which has been put quite clearly is that there are several stages, one stage is to understand and the next stage is to find solutions. And of course to understand you have to rely on all possible tools for that. And that's one reason why the sciences actually come together. Because I mean, many sciences have been built in the, that's a case of physics or mechanics, really only at the stage where mathematics was elaborate enough that you could have tools. But now there are really many other movements in the opposite direction. I think there are challenges coming from the biology, for example, to mathematicians. Because all these huge statistical data or data of the genome, clearly this calls for new mathematics. So I think this stage of thinking of science as a really a discipline altogether, which really creates, I mean, I really insist on creates a new knowledge is very, very important. Of course, you hope that this new knowledge, which allows you to a deeper understanding of the situation, will in the end provide solutions. But I think you have to be very careful that if you just look for solutions without understanding deeply enough, then you can really be at a loss. That's why I think it's very important today to really see that fundamental science and applied science are not that different. So in particular, I think it's very, very dangerous to claim that you should not spend too much time on theoretical science and concentrate on applied science. Because I think it's a dead end. I think you need to have both working together. And of course, quite often, fundamental science comes from a very applied question that you just cannot formulate. And in the end, you have to create new tools, new intellectual tools to really formulate the question. So I think this back and forth movement is extremely important. And the back and forth movement, of course, involves going from one discipline to the other. So for young students today, it's very important that they have a taste and they want to engage themselves in something, but they must be aware that being in a silo is certainly not the solution for many of them. Maybe a few can, but most of them will have to embrace science more globally. Creation, a very interesting word and a topic that I want to go into detail, Ryan Smith. The role of science in the makers economy in this new economic revolution where creators and entrepreneurs are basically kings, as opposed to manufacturers or heavier industries. The role of science in this makers economy, how do you see it? Well, it's critical because when you're making something, you need to have information about how to make it. So when I look at the students I'm training, some of them are going off and trying to figure out how big the universe is. Some people are using the mathematics and the techniques that they've used to study that to go out and make and do things. And it's sort of a 50-50 split. So I think that base knowledge is critical that science gives to be able to make the things and the people who have those skills are the people who are going to be very successful. Coming back to the fundamental tenant about science, I think that most people really do think science, even if in the short term they discount it, believe science is the future. I want you to think of movies about the future. It's called science fiction and I cannot think of a single movie about the future which does not have science and technology at its core. So it's there, we know it. But we have to be careful because science is this great tool for taking knowledge and predicting things, manipulating the world. And it's our best tool for doing that. But it's not guaranteed to come up with solutions fast enough in all cases. So it is our best way to solve problems and in the case of Ebola it was very quickly, very quickly able to, it seems to come up with a potential solution. But if we look at AIDS, well we can put it at bay, but we don't have a solution really for that yet, despite huge amounts of money. And so I like to talk about, for example, gravity. Newton came up with gravity in the 1680s and it took until 1915 to get the next method, 230 years. So let's say the solution for climate change takes 230 years to really do it. If we make the hurdle high enough for science, that would be bad because we probably don't have that amount of time. Not even close. I'm going to open for two questions. There's the only rule we're going to have this morning is if you do want to ask a question just do it very briefly and in the form of a question so we can get this interaction going and you have the chance to ask as much questions as possible. Dr. Marina, you wanted to say something? I just want to say something brief, but it is a very important issue of applied versus fundamental science. And with climate change, of course, we know we have to do applied science, which is close to engineering, because we have problems at hand that we believe are they're possible to solve with energy and so on, cheaper ways. But the very important question has to do with the role of fundamental science, particularly also again in developing countries because they could claim we don't have enough resources. Let's leave that to the rich countries. I think that's a bad mistake because you need to integrate all this as we heard very clearly. Furthermore, the one way you can guarantee that you will have really high quality scientist technicians and so on is to have the people that do research, the professors and so on, involved in the international exercise of science. Fortunately, it's very open. We can do research with anybody in any country, now with the Internet and so on. So I just want to make that very clear that it is really important for developing countries not to sort of pass the ball and just say basic science. So that's only the rich countries. Okay. That's a mistake. And I'd like to just add a word about gravity. Because we haven't heard the last word about it in 1915 when Einstein developed the theory of general relativity. Today, our cell phones work and communicate because of general relativity. That's what the global positioning system absolutely depends on. In spite of a movie referring to the comment about movies, the theory of everything, wonderful movie, there is not a theory of everything. And we don't understand how gravity basic forces like gravity and electromagnetic theory converge. And there's just huge areas for understanding, huge unknowns out there. So it's a very exciting world that we're in right now where there's so much potential for young people to be engaged. And that could be another theme that we could ask our audience about is the role of developing the entire world and including them. And with tools like social media and these cell phones, these very, these little supercomputers in our hands, how do we engage the entire world of youth to be interested in science and engineering and technology and contribute? And prepare the next generation of scientists in these new convergence, Konstantin? I would like to pick up on this point about the science-driven economies. And one thing is, of course, that's very much true that you can track all the advances in modern technology down to scientific advances which has been done 30 years ago. And that's a little bit of a tragic that the scientific research works on the longest cycle than the election cycle. So we have to fight for the money with the people who don't get benefits from that. And that's a little bit of a tragic. But then, of course, yes, we can track all the discoveries, all the technological advances down to certain scientific advances. But we have to remember that science, the product of science is new knowledge, which is most important. But in the morning, sometimes you don't want new knowledge, but you want a croissant. And then you want to open up your iPod and read some news, even though if this croissant was produced with genetically modified crop or this iPod would have got the most advanced touch panel, you still need products. And you need this very smooth cycle which supports scientific advances, but then we'll be able to translate it into technology as well. So Professor Molina said that you cannot allow countries just rely on production only. We cannot allow countries to rely on science on that. There should be a very smooth cycle. I would see it as a pyramid with scientists on top. Sorry about this. I put myself there. And then not, I mean, I huge respect to engineers and entrepreneurs. And then we just translate this knowledge down the road to entrepreneurship-oriented people, to engineers, to the production. And there should be a coherent stream of efforts to solve the modern problems. Thank you, Konstantin, almost a lot. I would cheat during the week if I saw any of you in line for a conference or a workshop, I would get on that line because I thought that this is going to be interesting. So I wanted to ask you what caught your eye during the week? What are you excited about in the future? Maybe it's not something that has to do directly with science, which pretty much everything has to do with science, but something technologically advancement or something like that that caught your eye during the week, Brian Smith, can you recall something? So I've had the disadvantage of flying in from Asia yesterday morning. So you know what, I've always impressed with, you know, one of the things that impresses me but scares me at the same time is the development of essentially artificial intelligence. And this is something I've been using in my own work for 20 years. And 20 years ago, it was really didn't work very well. But and I used it only because of scale. Now when we're using it, and I'm using the latest algorithms, some of them developed actually in industry as much as anyplace else, they're more consistent better than I am. So they're a lot faster, but they're actually better. They don't make mistakes. And that ability to go in and do things that, you know, five years even ago, I just didn't think was going to happen anytime soon. It's amazing where that technology is going. But it's also scary because I don't think I'm quite ready yet for a computer to be a lot better at most things than I am. You know, I found it kind of disappointing when we couldn't beat the computer at chess. But that doesn't surprise me. It's very logical. There's a finite number of moves. But when you're getting to very complex questions where you can train it to be, you know, as smart as anyone in the world on a specific task, it's only the next step where it can start figuring out how to train on generic problems itself. I was listening to Peter Diamandis from Singularity University and he said that in the near future, a computer that we're going to be able to buy for $1,000, let's say, it's going to have the computational power of all the human brains in the planet. It's a scary notion. Well, it's a scary notion, but you have to be very careful with what it says. Because as a mathematician, I know that the progress of mathematics, of course, has been with the ability to compute more things. But the basic jumps, I mean really the major jumps, came from new concepts. And for the moment, I've not seen really computers come up with concepts. Maybe that's the next stage, and I'm just too early in the process. But it's very clear in the history of mathematics, the turning points have been all of a sudden, people who understood that there was a new concept to be approached. And actually in the case of general activity, which was alluded to with the 1915 discovery, what was absolutely amazing was the ability of Einstein, next to also his neighbor, Mr. Grossman at ETH Zurich, to really grasp the most recent mathematical theory which was available, and to really transform it into a tool to understand the world. Because this theory was very sophisticated, and even the critical notion in general activity happens to be actually created by an Italian mathematician, Mr. Ricci, and really 50 years after the birth of really the geometry which was underlying. So it shows that something which turns out to be absolutely critical and relevant for physics in the mathematical theory which was created totally independently actually came as a secondary object. And then for physics, it's the central object. So you see you have these interactions, and focusing on concepts is something that for the moment the computer doesn't do. And so these really basic, very critical jumps ahead for the theory very often creates from really creative movements. And these creative movements can be erratic, because in particular in the example I was given of Mr. Ricci, his motivation proved to be absolutely leading to nothing, but it led to general activity. And of course that didn't have this in mind. So you have this phenomenon of a great interaction between all body of knowledge, but you never know exactly where you go. And you need this creativity. And this creativity is just for the moment still in the minds of people, not in the machines. Very interesting. Francis Collins. Certainly in terms of the themes at this meeting, and it fits right in with the conversation we're just having, the idea of being able to understand how the complex circuits in the brain do what they do is one who's created a great deal of buzz at this meeting, and well it should have. And I think it's fair to say that despite the fact that neuroscience has been working on this problem for quite a few years, we are still very early in our understanding of the real issues that you want answers to in terms of how those circuits work. We're pretty good at being able to measure what happens with an individual neuron, how its ion channels determine whether it depolarizes or not in response to a given stimulus, be it a neurotransmitter or whatever. And we have increasingly good ways of looking at the whole brain in people who are thinking about a certain thing or carrying out a certain task using such things as PET scans and fMRIs. But there's this huge space in between, the level of resolution in between single or a few neurons and the whole brain, that we have not had the technologies to really measure what's going on in real time. And that is now the focus of this international effort to try to understand that. And there are profound possibilities here in terms of getting answers to questions that right now we don't understand. How do you lay down a memory? Despite all the work that's been done on that, we really don't quite know what the molecular basis of memory is. How do you retrieve that memory? Is it in fact the case that every time you retrieve it, you have to rewrite it, which means that the only memories you can really trust are the ones you've never retrieved? That may be a certain truth in that, by the way. How would you actually understand memory well enough that you could capture it and transfer it to another individual? That is not science fiction. There are people doing that with rodents right now. And what would the social consequences be of the ability to carry out that kind of memory transfer? You could imagine it'd be pretty useful in teaching you new tasks without having to go through the usual process of learning them the hard way. For me, as somebody who really wants to see this applied for medical benefit, the ability to know how those circuits work may be our best shot at understanding autism or schizophrenia or depression or Alzheimer's disease, all of which are desperately in need of advances. And we're not going to get there without this convergence of disciplines. The NIH just put forward its first group of grants on the Brain Initiative, 46 million dollars. And they're all technology development. And most of these successful applicants wouldn't call themselves typical biologists. Many of them are in fact engineers and bringing together those disciplines with lots of computational capability is exactly what we need right now. So if you want to say where's the frontier, this is one of them. I can talk about others like stem cells and genomics and precision medicine. But the brain does seem to be at a moment in history that it might be a possible place to understand with enormous consequences both medically and socially. And just in terms of our view of who we are and what makes us human, there are going to be lots of philosophical implications as well. My gosh, maybe we'll even understand consciousness, which is that big challenge that many people have. The next frontier. Yeah, the next frontier. I look at this moment that Francis is describing as equivalent to where we were at the beginning of the space frontier. I am a space scientist and today I have the positions I've had because of our space enterprise and getting involved. And there we had physicists and engineers coming together with new tools, new technologies, and they opened up the universe and got above the atmosphere with rockets and then satellites to make these amazing discoveries. So that now today what we know we don't know, which is 95% of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, have come about largely, not exclusively, but largely because of these new technologies and opening up new windows on the universe. To go to your question on Rike about Davos, I think this is a question that all of us as we return home and get back to our day jobs, we'll think about what is the effect of Davos on me? After we get some sleep? Yes, right on the plane perhaps as I intend to do. But so clearly each of us has a passion and we resonate with hearing people talk about that passion. So for me yesterday when I went to Constantine's talk about using new elements of the periodic table and making new forms of matter or molecular interactions by exploring, exploiting the periodic table, the new matter that he discovered, new form of matter of graphing, I mean this absolutely, you know, it awakens in me all my passion about looking into the heart of nature and trying to understand it at a very deep level. However, now I have a job where I'm in charge of the U.S. National Science Foundation and we fund all of science and engineering exclusive of biomedical science and my job is to bring, enlarge that passion to form partnerships that are crucial to exploring all of science and engineering and addressing the challenges that we're talking about today. So in a limited funding environment and none of us has an unlimited funding environment no matter where we are on the planet, that I believe that it is partnerships, public-private partnerships, for example, partnerships of agencies, of foundations, of individuals that will exploit these new frontiers and being very creative with those partnerships is incredibly important. And the last thought that I really wanted to mention because it brings back to who I am and my background, what I've discovered in Davos, is the Latin American theme. And I have gone to as many of these sessions about Latin America as I can. So why is that most of them have not been about science? They've been about bankers and ministers and people who are in charge of the economy of Latin America talking about how they can make better policies to integrate across the countries and become stronger. But it is absolutely clear that Davos is an environment where science and technology can intersect with the economy and getting people together that understand how to raise young people, give them more education so they can participate in this world of science and technology. And many of them, as we all know from our own children, will become the bankers and lawyers and the people who are able to affect policy change. It's just so important. So this sets the stage for that conversation. I think everyone comes away with an opportunity to be more expansive in their thinking about how we make progress. I know you have something to say, Dr. Mojina, but I want to open the floor to questions and we have one over here. So keep that thought. No, that's fine. That's fine. Yes. My name is Peter Davos. I'm a professor of sociology from University of Auckland, New Zealand. I'll be interested in the views of the panel on the role of the social sciences, which I've really had no mention at all. In front of me here, I've got a copy of the Global Risks put out by the World Economic Forum. The top 10 global risks all have a huge social science element. So while we're talking very grandly here about the role of the natural and life sciences, it seems to me that when we're moving at next stage into the policy arena and translating the world of the academic, the world of politics, we ought to be looking at the social sciences. So how do the members of the panel see the role of the social sciences vis-a-vis? In many ways, the physical sciences were their big thing has been up in the 20th century. Perhaps the 21st century is the role of the social sciences. I'd like them to respond to that idea. Let's not overlook social sciences. In this panel, it's close to New Zealand, Australia. Those are fighting words. So social science has a key role at ensuring that the things that science does get used in a sensible way, get shared. I like to always say that science can solve problems, but it's not enough alone. It gives you the potential for answers, but then you've got to get them out there. So one of the big problems that I see as facing over the next 100 years is we have still an exponentially growing population that's going to soon have 8 billion people. That could grow to 9, 10, 11, or 12 if we're not careful. We don't take care of the social science part of it. But we also have reasons to believe that the interaction of technology might slow that growth. But in order to use science, we have to have a lack of conflict. Conflict is what I see as being the big issue over the next 100 years. If we have times of no conflict, we can get science bedded down, technology bedded down to solve our problems. If we don't, we don't get that technology out distributed to everyone. People are going to be unhappy, and that leads to conflict. So I think that's an area where social sciences are going to be critical. But I do think it's a fairly separate issue to the science we do. But we do need these different things working together to solve the problems. And science has a very clear part of the problem, but it's not sufficient on its own. Big implications for climate change and social sciences. Sure. Let me make the following comment. Sure. We were talking about before what Davos has done for us as scientists, but I want to put the question around what have we done as scientists for the big problems that we're talking about? World Economic Forum and so on. And since you referred to this document on risk, okay, and here is what I think we scientists have done a very poor job in communicating at least our science in terms of climate change to the public. It turns out that some of the science fiction issues or science related to the brain and so on. It's so fascinating that people absorb it. But when it has an impact on the economy, we're dealing with politicization of science and so on. But let me go to the point. The scientific community, there's a huge consensus that climate change is happening and that it's caused mainly by human activities. But there's also consensus that there's a huge risk, and that's where the risk comes in, that if we continue the way we are functioning right now, we have a huge risk, one in five, one in ten of enormous disasters. And that's not what people talk about at board meetings in the companies that are represented here at the Economic Forum. We have one or two round tables or forums like this where the issue was faced and lots of recommendations were carried out. But my feeling is that the bulk of the companies, the bulk of the CEOs, it's a risk, but it's one in 20. And there are others that are much more important, what's going to happen to the economy. No, if we scientists are doing a lousy job in terms of really communicating the extent of the risk we think we're facing. I think scientists and media, too, with clear exceptions, the NPR is here and they do a great job in communicating that. Yes, I have a question, the lady in the front. And then, oh, okay. Go ahead. Moving next. Just following on the theme of movies, there's another great movie that came out, which is The Imitation Game. And there was the scenario where there was a very, very urgent need to find a mathematical solution to a problem. 50 years later, we found out that actually, in the end, knowing and discovering this extraordinary enigma, the puzzle of the enigma machine, meant that we had a role in the war of playing sort of God in terms of what we chose to reveal and what we chose not to reveal and many lives were lost based on that to be able to win the bigger picture. Is, in a way, what I'm trying to say is that is science going to discover solutions that will have to sacrifice other forms of climate well-being in order to make the overall progress in terms of climate warming, I mean global warming, climate problems, destruction of the planet. Are scientists going to be in a position to have to play God behind the scenes? Yes, Jean-Pierre Bourbonnier. Yeah, maybe I want to take up the last question and your question together because I think they are in the sense very much connected. I think in the case of European Research Council, we have the advantage over my neighbours that we're actually all the fields together, that is social sciences, humanities, life sciences and physics, engineering, mathematics and so on. And I think definitely very often if you look at the projects that scientists are proposing, definitely it's impossible to separate really the various components. So if you look at the issue you are putting forward about the climate change, of course there are a number of elements which are strictly scientific in the sense of collecting data, trying to find, understand some scenarios which are possible. And in particular, since you are talking about the future, some kind of anticipating what could be possible scenarios. And for example, there is one thing which personally interests me quite a bit, which has to do with the polar cap with the speed at which it's at the moment really disappearing is even worse than any of the scenarios that people have been talking about. But clearly these scenarios, they are just setting the stage, but then of course then you have to see these are in the sense presented as physical data or phenomena that you can describe. But then the impact on society is absolutely major. And then for societies usually it means that something will be different. For example, some areas will be flooded, some areas, some culture that people were used to make their life from will be unavailable. So there will be a huge social impact. So clearly you cannot look at climate change strictly as a physical phenomenon, although you need to start from that. But then you have to look at really also the impact on societies. But then the next stage is really to come up with decisions. And clearly for decisions, I mean there is a political process for this. And the political process at the moment is very scattered. They are very different stakeholders. And it's very difficult to get the global community to a group. You've seen that the conference for Penangan, the last one, was definitely from that point of view not a success. I think that's understandable. So I think from that point of view it's clear that we need social sciences very, very much to understand the processes which can block decision making, which can really make it possible for people to understand better what is at stake. And if possible, make them aware that if they know really solid solutions proposed, then the consequences, which are not, they will not be hypothetical, they will be coming. But really to understand how people can react to this, you cannot separate the social sciences from these scenarios. So of course the difficulty is that we are talking about scenarios. It's very difficult to be very, very prescriptive about what's going to happen. But now the accumulation of data is really such that clearly we will be confronted with major, major issues with fantastic impact on society. And you need people to help you understand. And this is the whole point of social sciences. And so I think that's a typical example where if you don't get on board all people, that is scientists on one hand to understand phenomena, but also scientists who understand how society reacts to phenomena, and then you also, of course that's the whole point of Davos, to bring together also people on the political side to really make them understand that the decision they make will make sense only if they are really long term, if they are sustained for a sufficiently long period. So all these things really require so many different components that, and if you miss one, you miss everything. So I think it's a very good example, climate change of a domain in which the interaction of science with society is enormous, but for the moment society has not been able, as a global society, to really come up with the right structures of decision, the right process. And even making people understand what it is about is not so easy because typically we spoke fantastically about the new tools of internet, but clearly some people are using internet to really actually disinform people. So there is also internet can be also a fantastic tool to manipulate people. So I think we are in this very critical situation of the need to mix things and mix competence and get all people together, but also they are quite big interests at stake. So people are also going to try and make this process derail. I think this is a very, very typical issue where everything is there. Just very briefly, because I know we have been thinking very long for this point, but again, talking about the World Economic Forum, what we need to deal with with climate change is really working with science, technology, both economists as well and the leading economists working with us scientists, we agree it is clearly cheaper, it's going to be less costly for society to begin to face a problem realistically. It's a huge challenge, but the point is that the risk is just too large to ignore it. So economy and science and technology are working very closely together here and it's for improving the state of the world. The answer is very clear, it will be almost surely much cheaper to begin. I want to be sure that the audience recognize, especially because of the penultimate question here, that we are funding social, behavioral and economic sciences. This is one of the main areas that we do fund in the United States of the National Science Foundation. And just for, we fund risk and resilience, we fund work on the brain that is in the social and behavioral sciences, of course. And as one example of the last 51 prizes in honor of Alfred Nobel for the economic sciences of the last 51, the US National Science Foundation has given funding to every single one of those. So there is a commitment. I'm not sure that that commitment is always shared by Congress, which asks some questions. They are relevant important questions and I think the direction that they take us is that we, every one of us, not just in the agencies but certainly out in the public, must make the case as strong as you've heard here, especially from Jean-Pierre and Mario, that the social, behavioral and economic sciences are crucial to address the challenges that we face on the global scale. We have two final questions, just so we can go into our final round, but go ahead and make your way. I just want to comment again that it's probably, it's very big misconception that science can take sides and science can play God. So no, science only provides the true information and it's the question, what do we do with that? So it's, once we got it, it's people who play God and scientists can only provide this truth, whether we like it or not, but that's how it is. And then it's up to us, what do we do with it? And if something is meant to be, if it is possible to discover it, it will be discovered and then it's, of course, is the responsibility of the scientists to give recommendations and educate our politicians and general public what to do with this knowledge, but it is really responsibility of the society what to do with the scientific knowledge. We have two questions, one on the back and then we'll have your question. And after that, people are big on predictions here at Davos. So I'm going to ask for your predictions in terms of the future of science in 2015. So be ready for that, your question. David Christian Macquarie University, Sydney, and I'm in the humanities. It's linked to these questions, but it's a question about specialization, institutional and scientific. I think Ia Wilson was arguing this sort of 20 years ago that there's been fantastically successful research within the framework of disciplines for a century and more and that now we may be at a point in the evolution of science where the really interesting questions lie between disciplines or across disciplines. Now, if that's true, that means that one of the frontiers we face is institutional because the structures for interdisciplinary science, I know they're emerging in lots of areas, but the resistance, the institutional resistance to a genuine research across multiple disciplines remains huge. I'd just like to hear some reactions from the panelists to that question. Francis goes, I know you're dying to answer that question. Yeah, I think your point is extremely well taken. My own background is in physical science. My PhD is in quantum physics. It has been wonderful to see in the life sciences how the opportunities have emerged for disciplines to get together in ways that were not previously so productive. The genome project was a good example. We never would have been able to sort out those letters of our own instruction book without contributions from engineers and robotics experts from biologists, particularly though from computational scientists, many of whom arrived on the scene with very limited understanding of biology because that had not been their focus, but got totally carried away with the opportunity to sift through all of this digital data and construct from that real knowledge about life. And that has been a growing area of remarkable synthesis between disciplines. The same could be said about what's happening in neuroscience. Again, a lot of the most exciting science is not going to come from the traditional neuroscientists. It's going to come from the interactions between people who have different skill sets. But your point is very well taken that institutions are not necessarily designed to encourage this in an optimum way. And that means that there have to be other ways of nurturing that. And one thing that I guess we as funding agencies between the three of us here can do is to try to come up with mechanisms that make those kind of interdisciplinary partnerships more likely to happen. I think it's been said that you can't herd cats, but you can move their food. And offering opportunities for project support that requires the applicants to come forward with clear skill sets that might not otherwise have joined together is something we're doing a lot of at NIH. And I think with great indications that it is reasonably successful. The other part of this though that's challenging at academics is how do you recognize the contributions of individual scientists who join together in these interdisciplinary teams? Because there is also this mindset that your evaluation in terms of your productivity and whether you're going to get promoted and whether you're going to get tenure is about whether you are the senior author on a certain number of papers. Well, you know what? That's really not the way that science is currently going forward, at least in much of what we do in life science. It's these interdisciplinary teams and academic institutions have to figure out how to recognize excellence in the context of that kind of environment. Otherwise they're going to lose out on encouraging the kinds of scientists that they really will need for the future. I think we're getting there, but your point is extremely well taken. We've been live streamed and now that Francis Collins just mentioned the magic word cats, I'm sure this is going viral in the next few minutes, but Francois, you wanted to say something. I need a video to show right now. Yes, so at the National Science Foundation the way we address this question of David Christians is that we fund interdisciplinary research centers. So we don't have laboratories that are standing labs like NIH and NASA does. 75% of our budget of $7.3 billion a year goes to funding universities and we have periodic calls about every year for either science and technology centers, engineering research centers, or industry university research collaborative centers. And we've been doing that for decades and these are highly, highly interdisciplinary. It's just opened up to the greatest ideas and we select them based on merit review of getting together experts and deciding what will be transformative, what's going to move us forward. And so this is on the minds of everyone is really fostering this interdisciplinary research. And the other thing it gives is for students, for young people, and I keep coming back to this theme, it gives them the opportunity to be with scientists from physics and chemistry and social scientists and artists and designers and all, and drive towards new problems. Thank you for that. I was from the grassroots if you want. So it's generally what you see is the most successful scientists are those who switch topic and bring new fresh vision into a new topic, a new direction. Because things are becoming more and more complicated and to learn every new subject takes more and more time and that exactly would encourage collaboration across disciplinary collaboration. So it goes quite naturally and we see it more and more now. Disruptive scientists. One final question. Nick Goldman from the European Bioinformatics Institute. We've heard this morning that the future of science is clearly international and, you know, people working all over the world. It also seems likely in many fields of science now that the future involves what is often called big data. Many different areas of science are generating more and more information by doing bigger and bigger experiments. I wondered if anyone on the panel had some comments on how we enable the experimental infrastructures that are going to enable us to do this kind of science all over the world and share all the information so it's best used experimental infrastructures and increasingly data into infrastructures. Maybe artificial intelligence. Do we're mentioning that? So, you know, in astronomy we do share the infrastructure and one of the great reasons astronomers do that is we always know that if we don't hang together we will hang separately because the average politician doesn't think what we do is of particular relevance today. I would argue counter to that. So you can share things but this infrastructure is expensive. Sharing the data turns out not to be so hard. And so when you are planning experiments and let's say you need to build an experimental apparatus that is going to, you know, sequence the genome 10 years ago and it's very expensive. Do you really need to have that everywhere just you want to do it once? So I think you can get around a lot of the issue by sharing the data but ultimately it comes down to can you afford to put that infrastructure in various places around the world and is there a reason to do it? So I personally find in astronomy we have decided we put the telescopes where they should be which is in high deserts and we don't have them. The new telescopes aren't being built in optical astronomy in Australia, for example, but we do share the data. So I actually think sharing the data in most cases is sufficient. Yes, Javier? Yeah, so I think you are putting your finger on a very, very important issue which has to do with a new approach which of course is very dependent on technology. I mean the fact that one can collect and organize data is connected to the fact that we can actually handle them and so of course this new horizon is directly connected to the capacity of computing and also collecting data but again this is a typical instance where I would look at this as some kind of experimental thing but then you have to come up with some kind of theory behind and for the moment I think there are big challenges to statistics which because that's these data have to be organized. What kind of patterns can you identify? And typically one thing which I know in some disciplines in particular in biology would be extremely important is that the data which tend to be very numerical, some of these data actually naturally images, how do you do a statistics of images? Advantage of numbers that they are ordered but an image is not ordered. So how do you sort out information from a global information from an image? So this is completely new domain which is almost a case where you completely lacking the theory because when you reduce an image to a sequence of pixels you just kill the structure of the image. So how can you retain such a structure? Deal with it, organize it and so clearly this opens at the same time of course big challenges in terms of amount of data you can collect but also how do you organize it? What kind of pattern you can identify in them? And this is of course for mathematicians a great challenge. In particular it's a great challenge because in many countries and in particular my own country friends statistics as for a long time be considered as some kind of a small part of mathematics which I think was not the right attitude and so now clearly statistics or dealing of data is really becoming a very central object of study for science altogether and I think this requires new approaches probably again as I said new breakthroughs and the breakthroughs will have to do with the new theories and nobody has been able to come up with that. Francis Collins before we go to the predictions round. Well very quickly Nick Goldman being a computational biologist full aware of to the fact that biology has really arrived in the big data zone we used to be small potatoes compared to the astrophysicist but we get respect now just the cancer genome atlas project produced about 20 petabytes of data and we're trying to figure out how to store it and make it available to everybody. It's the most critical thing I think you could imagine right now in terms of the life sciences is how do we organize our data science efforts it's enormously exciting if I was starting out right now to do something in life science I would want to be a computational biologist because they're the ones that are going to have the most fun with all this publicly accessible data that needs to be mined through and discover all those nuggets of truth about how life works. Okay Brian Smith your predictions for 2015 and the future of science. So the whole point of science is really not being able to predict the future that is you know Einstein said if we knew what we were doing wouldn't be called research so and I it's to me rather scary to try to make a prediction I hope for example in my own field we may discover dark matter in 2015 I think there's a chance we may see one of the first stars of the universe that's something I'm trying to work on but what I do predict is that in 2015 there will be discoveries made that I cannot contemplate that will have a long lasting impact on society that a hundred years from now will be remembered and will define 2015 and I'm not sure if that's true of any other discipline I think that's something we can all hope for Constantine. That's very much true when we put a grant application we always put a roadmap for for our research but the hope for every single scientist to find something of the world and something unexpected and which is completely outside of the expectations. Well there are certain trends in the area where I work which are probably related to quantum states of matter and the topological states of matter but what came as a result of today just to reflect on the today conversation we will see more and more convergence between different areas of science and I would put a lot of expectations on nanomedicine and nanotechnology being used in life science and in medicine I think there will be quite a lot of breakthrough there. In in my own field I have to do understanding how the planet works the climate I think there's a lot of very interesting research that can give important results such because climate is a very complex system so what's the role of clouds and feedbacks the role of atmospheric particles there's a lot of fundamental science very important very interesting but there's another component to climate change which which has to do more with the solutions and there part of it is perhaps just engineering better cheaper forms of coming up with renewable energy but basic science still can play a very important role for example with new materials there's a there's a need to store energy for example which is very clear maybe we still need a breakthrough somehow or other with new materials and there's a need to to really make fusion work as a practical source of energy that of course has been going on for four years but it's it's another example for fundamental research could eventually lead to very important solutions for the benefit of society so I think it's both very applied fundamental and working in this sense that we need science to help us to to deal with these huge problems that society has thank you so much a prediction for 2015. Well I'm looking forward to run two of the CERN accelerator in Switzerland when it turns on at a much higher energy in May that it will challenge the standard model that would be disruptive. I'm also looking forward to this debate that we had last year which was profound about the first moments of the universe when it inflated tremendously and the scientists using a big telescope in the south pole said that perhaps we were looking at the imprint of gravity waves on the microwave background and so imagine getting information about the very first you know 10 to the minus 30 seconds of the universe and then the plank scientists from the european satellite plank came and said no no what you're really looking at is dust emission from our galaxy so this is one of the great debates I mean you know the debate about the first moments of the universe that's fantastic maybe this will be resolved this year but going back to the last question a kind of hope because again it embraces people all the people on the planet for 2015 is that some of these big databases that we are starting to assemble and I look at galaxy zoo as being one example of that in astrophysics are opening the knowledge of the world to people everywhere and I'm a huge proponent of citizen science and just as galaxy zoo has yielded discoveries from the school teacher in the Netherlands for example a new class of astrophysical object I'm thinking that databases and oceanography and astrophysics and biology there may be somebody you know a child or a person who is not a scientist on the planet but is engaged in his curious will make a seminal discovery it wouldn't be a televised session without time constraints we have just two minutes to wrap it up but your prediction for 2015 Francis Collins there will be advances in understanding fundamentals about how the brain works that we don't previously know about there will be advances in precision medicine and I would predict at least a couple of dramatic cures of cancer that come about because of new approaches in the immune system or in genomics and I would hope and pray this will be the year where we end the outbreak of Ebola with both an effective vaccine and effective therapeutics and I think there's a very good chance we'll achieve that thank you so much so for 30 seconds and I think for for the year the 2015 it's very important that the scientists in the world really can again get more access to to their initiative and which is in many countries in recently because of the difficult situation actually the access for resources has been really very limited so I think it's very important that we get on a new stage where really initiative for scientists is really on the table we are trying to do that and in our case but it's very important that this is understood that the way to go forward that is to trust the people and really give them the means to really look freely at what they want to look at hopefully we'll meet again here in a year and go through their predictions and hold everyone accountable thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure thank you a free audience