 So welcome, and this is going to be an especially special event. I know it's cliche, but standing on the shoulders of giants. And we have the other three directors throughout the history. And I'm in awe of what they built and what I inherited. And I'm just trying my darnedest not to mess it up. So I'm going to let take a picture. And we will take a picture. I want to show you the evolutionary sequence of this hominid. So do we have to get an order? Yes, we do have to get an order. And I've asked Anders if he would take the picture so that it's artsy. So we'll do the photo and then we'll turn the program over to Tim and Richard. We'll get you up in there. We're going to turn it over to you. We begin with Neanderthals and the influence of the Neanderthal. There are traces that move to Robinson in his DNA and to Chuck. And then comes Scott and he's from another tribe. But I think after the lecture this afternoon, we might even find some Neanderthal in you that came on another route. Amazing. In any event, there is a process here of modernizing those of you who have been with us all of the years and progress in technology. But this is not natural evolution that took place here. Because we left nothing to chance, nothing. It was purpose all the way through. And I think to my brothers and sisters in the sciences, if you would search for purposes all the way down that you would find it. Even in those bacteria who chased one another in the human gullet looking for sex, Lynn Margulis showed us them. In any event, what a pleasure to be here and be part of this. I hope that Tim has grounded this thing along with Scott and done some real work on the history. And so we want him to carry us for a while and Chuck and then I can criticize. Thank you, Chaplain Elvie. Now, we want to talk about 50 years of Nobel conferences. And as it turns out, Elvie and I are probably a pretty good choice to talk about this. Before I retired, students used to ask me, how long have you been at Gustavus? And my usual answer is I've been here since the Jurassic era. But I can remember when there were ice flows out here. Elvie and I came about the same time. And as it turns out, Elvie came in 63. I was a student here in 63. Both of us actually attended the first Nobel conference. And I don't have a perfect record attending Nobel conferences, not like Bill Harvey and Bruce Gray do, but pretty close. And Elvie's seen most of these too. And so what I like to do here is to kind of give you a little quick and dirty history of the Nobel conferences and where they came from. Oops. There we go. All right, here's what Nobel conferences look like now. Are we up? Okay, you recognize this. This is 2009. Wonderful media. We have probably, what do we have? Four or 5,000 people, 5,000. This event has really grown rather large. We had one year, I think we did the, when we did the science of aging, we had a new secretary who didn't know she was supposed to stop giving tickets out when we hit 6,000. And so we actually had 7,000 tickets out that year. And the opening day we had traffic jams going back to McDonald's up on Highway 169 to get in. It was incredibly large. And it's been that way for a long time. But you have to realize it didn't always look like that. This is the first Nobel conference here. It was held in what is now Alumni Hall. In those days it was the school gymnasium. And this is where it started. We had maybe four or 500 people in attendance. And it was a brand new thing. And so the question is, how did we get to there? And so to think about this, I want to give you sort of a sense of context. How many here can remember the 60s? All right. Yeah, there's a few people. You know, Scott can't remember the 60s. Yes. Okay. All right. All right. You know, in thinking about it, I mean, the 60s was really a remarkable decade. I mean, we had the 50s. We had Ozzy and Harriet. You know? And, but the 60s, everything was changing. All right. And there was a whole bunch of things going on here that I think really influenced the development of this conference. Anybody remember Sputnik? Holy cow. 1957, the Russians put up this satellite. They had missiles bigger than anything that we had. And lo and behold, they realized that they had a whole lot more scientists than we had, too. And all of a sudden, education in general and science education in particular became a matter of national defense. Did any of you go to college on national student defense loans? Yeah, a few of you out there were. If you taught for a few years, you wouldn't have to pay back the loan in order to do that. I mean, education was really held in esteem, and science was incredibly important. Yes, indeed. We did have these missiles. That was important. And President Kennedy said, what we need to do is to have a target. We need to have a race to the moon. Okay? And we knew we had the science to do that. But in addition to that, I mean, think of what was happening in medicine. I mean, infectious diseases like whooping cough basically eliminated. Jonah's sock had gotten rid of polio. Okay? The medical community was basically, I wouldn't say worshiped, but I mean, they were really, really esteemed at this point. So, I mean, this was a time when science was really, really important. But there are other things, too. We had the Cold War. Okay? I can remember in fourth grade, we used to have civil defense drills. Any of you remember civil defense drills? Yeah. Where we would sit under our desks and put our hands over our heads in the event of thermonuclear war. This was going to protect us. That was the way it was. Okay? But think of what was going on in other parts of the country, too. I mean, we had the Civil Rights Movement. 1964, we had the Civil Rights Act. Okay? After that, we had the progress where we had segregated schools. The process of desegregation was starting. And it wasn't altogether easy. Remember, there were race riots in the 1960s. But we also had that Civil Rights Movement. We had Martin Luther King. We also had Vietnam. Goodness sakes. That got everybody's attention, particularly if you were a male. I can still remember people in college lining up when they did the lottery to see when the draft numbers were going to be given. I mean, it was really important. But it really was. It was a decade, but lots of things happened here. I remember 1968 in particular. It was just like something happened every month. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Okay? We had riots across the country in the summer. We had the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the fall. We had all of this stuff going on. It was a very, very tempestuous time. But it was a time when science was really revered. And so I started to think about how did this conference come about? And as I said in this article that I wrote in the program there, when you talk about the history of science, people generally talk about two different aspects of it. One is that great things are due to great people, that some individuals have great ideas. The other school of thought is called the Zeitgeist School, that it was the spirit of the times, that there was something going on in this dynamic atmosphere that kind of irresistibly led to the formation of this event. And we kind of had both of these things going on here at Gustavus in the 60s. In the 1960s, the president of the college at that time was Edgar Carlson. He and his staff decided that we needed a new physical plant. We needed buildings. And beginning in the late 1950s, a very ambitious building plan program was begun. If you look at the campus now, virtually all the buildings were built after 1960. It was an amazing foresight on the part of our president here. The chapel was first. We had a humanities building. Next was a science hall. And the thought was, why should you have a science hall? And concluded, you know, America needs science. I mean, science was really big. And so science was important. And we thought we should have this new science hall. And then, as it turns out, the leadership of the college said, well, we have this Swedish connection. Perhaps we should get together with the Nobel Foundation. And so history was made at that point. Now, just to prompt the memories of some of you folks here, here are two of the key players. On the left there is Edgar Carlson, who is president. On the right is Ren Anderson, who is vice president for advancement at the time. Key players in both setting up the building program, setting up a new curriculum for the college, and also for setting up the Nobel conference. So these were the Gustavus decision makers. Here's what typical Gustavus profs looked like in the 1960s. I'll give an extra donut to anybody who can recognize all of these here. When I've shown this before, people have said, they're all men. Well, yeah, that was another thing about the 60s, is that academia was pretty much a male-dominated industry at that point, although it doesn't mean there weren't really strong, significant women on the faculty. And so I like to think that the women profs were fewer, but they were larger than life. This is Evelyn Anderson, who was for many years a theater director here at Gustavus. Anybody remember their being in college in the 60s? These are typical Gustavus students out of a place called the Holiday House. Anybody recognize the guy playing the piano? Yeah, it's Bill Holm, the poet. Some of them went on to do things okay, but the serious science students from Gustavus looked like this. There I was doing gel electrophoresis, just chained to a laboratory bench for hours at a day. This photograph also gives you some idea of my approach to fashion. And I've always said that there's two ways that you can go about doing this. One is that you can track of what's hot, and then you can always change to keep abreast of things. But that's expensive and it requires a lot of work. My approach has been to wear the same thing and never change. And I've calculated, if you look at the glasses there, I've been in style about three times over the last 50 years. But anyway, the Nobel conference that we had now kind of had its beginning in 1963 with the dedication of the Nobel Hall of Science. Glenn Seaborg, the physicist and President Edgar Carlson convinced the Nobel Foundation that it would be a good idea to invite all the living Nobel laureates to attend the dedication of the concert of the building, but that also that we continue this, that there should be a symposium, the same sort of thing. And so this is where it started. In May 1963, 26 Nobel laureates descended upon campus. This is from the Minneapolis paper. Their entire Sunday magazine was given over to biographies of all the Nobel laureates that attended that day. That is Glenn Seaborg there. And it was an impressive event. This is another of these buildings that's no longer on campus. This is Myra Memorial Fieldhouse. Glenn Seaborg is giving his talk there. It was attended by dignitaries of all sorts there. Anybody recognize anybody in the people in the left there? Elvie, do you recognize anybody there? I do. Yeah, okay. Yeah, Hubert Humphrey, Karl Rohlwein, okay. Had this huge dinner. All these people were there. Gustavus had this food service director that had it, her motto was if you're going to have a dinner, everybody at the dinner should be served within 10 minutes. Do you think we should let Elvie tell a Humphrey story? On that night, Howard Holcomb invited Hubert and Karl Rohlweig and their wives, Ole Rohlweig's son, Giants of the Earth's son, down to his house, just off the campus and we sat in a little room with maybe 10 or 12 people. Now, in the 1950s, Gustavus Adolphus was the Republican party at prayer. But in the 60s, it went over to the DFL. The children of farmers and laborers had become Lutheran ministers and a whole lot of things happened. And in any event, we're sitting in this room and Hubert is holding forth. We're all silent. And we get on him. Think of the what time, this is 63. We said, Hubert, why aren't you doing something about Cuba? What are you guys doing about Cuba? And he said to us, we have a card about that size and we slipped this card into its slot and Cuba disappears. Do you want us to do that? There was silence. This event also caused the Swedish government to award the Order of the North Star to a variety of campus administrators, President Carlson, Melva Lind, Albert Swanson, the longtime dean. But the people really responsible for putting this together were a relatively small number of Nobel laureates who took an interest in the college. And in particular, the gentleman in the down, be right, that's Glenn Seaborg. But the tall fellow on the upper left is Philip Hinch, who, as Elvie said this morning, was from the Mayo Clinic. He was one of the discoverers of the clinical use of cortisone. And as Elvie said, he personally sent telegrams to all American laureates, inviting them to come and impressing upon them the importance of arriving here. Here's the official photograph here. All 26 of them robed and looking elegant. Got great coverage in the Minneapolis paper. See great progress in the next 10 years. See, America really adored science in those days. Although it's interesting, I like this headline here. Will man survive? 16 of 25 Nobel scientists say yes. That's not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement of this here. But anyway, the keynote speaker was given by Ralph Bunch, who was the American ambassador to the United Nations. And one of the things he said in his talk there was that nuclear war wouldn't happen. Well, that's the way we talked in the 60s. But he also said that we should have a living tribute to Alfred Nobel. That we should have kind of a living memorial, where we would have gatherings of eminent sciences to talk about these issues continually. And so in 1964, the first announcement of Nobel conferences was made. This was from the Mankato Free Press here. It says, each year, a specific science-based issue will be selected, presented with adequate background by top scientists and discussed by leading representatives of other disciplines with references to its implications for social, moral, religious, political, and other aspects of the world. This is basically the first statement of the intention of the institution for doing this. I'm thankful to Edgar Carlson's daughter, Joanna Kendall, Carlson Swanson, who I believe is in attendance here this evening. So the first record that she's been able to find of Nobel conference was actually 1958, when he wrote a letter to Archibald Bush, who was the president of the 3M company, basically telling him of the college's intention to put on a conference like this. The memorial would gradually come to include other activities on a broader basis, designed to encourage science students in the development of their capacities and for the service of humanities. And so, following invitation to attend the Nobel awards in Stockholm in the fall of 1963, college officials met with the Nobel Foundation. Plans for the conference were set in motion. And so in 1965, what is now the Gustavus Nobel conference was officially launched. It was called the Nobel Symposium, and it invited six well-known speakers to come and talk about the topic of genetics and the future of man. The panel included Pauli Karkusch, who was a physicist, Sheldon Reed, who was a geneticist from the University of Minnesota, Bentley Glass, who was an eminent biologist, Johns Hopkins, Edward Tatum from Rockefeller. And then the evening speaker was a physicist by the name of William Shockley. And he gave a talk called Population Control or Eugenics, which was not quite what people would have expected at this conference, but we were underway. We wanted to talk about the possibility of genetic control of human characteristics. And since then, we've carried on. Since that time, we continue to do science-based topics loosely based on Nobel Prize award wear areas. We've been incredibly successful in attracting really top-notch scientists. We've had 66 Nobel Prize winners on our panels. We've had 92 laureates participate in activities on campus, a number of very famous folks here. But we also have the distinction of being a science conference that also talks about moral issues. And part of the reason that we have this is, always to this gentleman sitting behind here, he was the director of this conference for 20 years from 1979 to 1999, and he used to bluntly ask whenever we'd have a Nobel topic proposed, where's God in all of this? I insisted on having a broader discussion of the scientific topic. And LB is a rather interesting man. Some of you may have met him. Have you noticed that if you asked a question in just the right way, he might give you his opinion on any topic that you might ask? He's been known to give opinions to college presidents for years. But if you look at the program there, that was actually from his retirement dinner. And the words, how great I was, was the title of his talk, which I thought was appropriate. But we thought of him as our Renaissance man who read widely and was capable of reading the sciences but also doing humanity stuff here. And so we used to sort of think of him. LB was also known for his rather unusual apparel that he appeared in public. So we had Erasmus of Rotterdam. We had Elvia Vashua Township doing all of this. But we had a great time. And one of the things that these conferences have been, that I've been really impressed with, not that I had a lot to do with them, is how they managed to find topics that are of immediate interest. So this is a picture of Craig Venter from Cellarogenomics who is here in the midst of the human genome race in 1999. Sequencing was finally done in 2000. In 2000, we had our conference on globalization. Three weeks before our conference, there were riots in Seattle at the World Trade Association meetings. Last year, Steve Malema did Universe Edits Limits. This was about the same time that the Higgs boson was discovered. We've managed to hit these topics in a very, very timely fashion. And we've also made it so that people can interact with these very famous people. And all in all, it's been a really remarkably successful time. And in the end, I think if you get back to the zeitgeist or the great figures, I think you get both. Time was important for scientific issues to be discussed, but it probably wouldn't have happened without the leadership of a large number of people. But let me just kind of skate through a couple of these here to kind of give you a sense of how things went at first. Look at the topics here. Advanced genetic science examined against a background of morality. Taylor-made genetic heritage is explored. The bottom there. Shockly backs legalized abortions. This was in 1963. The first birth control pill was put on the market in 1960. Population control was a brand new topic. And people who put this conference together says we should have a conversation about what are the ramifications of this. What's going to happen here? And so this panel was put together. This is the closing panel with Dr. Hinch as the Toastmaster there. And we got all sorts of press. Shockly backs legal abortions. Lower-class overbreeding seen as threat. And what's even more amazing is that the theologian on the panel, Paul Ramsey, agreed that this wasn't such a bad idea, that we have genetic control of some sort. I mean this was astonishing. We had this huge variety of opinions. But there were some things that came out of that conference that, and this is kind of indicative of what these conferences are like, you'll run into nuggets where somebody will make a prediction. And lo and behold, not too far down the line, it'll come true. This is Bentley Glass saying that the days of test tube embryos is close. So we're only 35 years away from cloning Dolly, creating life in a test tube. But Seaborg and these other Nobel laureates said, this is the kind of place where these issues should be discussed. And the second one, you know, had to do with controlling the environment. And the thing to take away from this is that sometimes the predictions don't work out. Glenn Seaborg was predicting that we'd have hydrogen power within 25 years. I think it's probably safe to say, are we going to do it another 25, do you think? Yeah, maybe, I don't know. But it is also interesting that while these conferences were going on, there is also all sorts of things happening in society at the time. We had Carl Rowan, who is an African-American journalist on the panel. And if you look at those headlines there, they were talking about Vietnam. They were talking about civil rights, talking about fusion. But all of these things tend to come into the conversations that we've had here. Some predictions did work out pretty well. Norman Borlaug was here in 1970, predicted that the Green Revolution would make a major change in food production around the world. He's probably right. But we had some other ones, too, that were controversial. We did one in 1972 called Death and Dying. Had a great panel, as a fellow by the name of Alexander Comfort had written a book on Death and Dying. He was on the panel. But the first speaker was George Wald from Harvard, who gave sort of a biologist view of immortality, which basically said, as it says there, the price of sex is death. That human beings really don't matter that much. It's their germ plasm that's important. And as long as it survives, that's okay. And a lot of people didn't think that was a particularly cuddly sentiment. You like to think of immortality as... Well, we all like to think we're immortal, right? Okay, well, as it turns out, our theologian didn't think that immortality was important either. And the headline. Theologian says, Christian tradition of immortality may be coming to the end. We got some press on this one. It seemed like every newspaper in the country picked this up, and there were opinions expressed in editorial pages all over the place. The Bible and immortality, all right? And you see some people were really concerned about this. Anybody recognize the guy on the right? That's Bernie Erling, who is in our religion department here. Actually, I think Bernie's main concern was that Stendhal's training had been at Harvard. He was the dean of Divinity School at Harvard. Bernie's training was at Yale. And he said, this would never have happened at Yale. But yes, we had wonderful, wonderful press coverage from this. Great topic. But it also brings up one other thing that I think Chuck and L.D. can probably... We get mail after conferences. Not everybody is necessarily real pleased with what some of the speakers say. And so we do get mails, and this is a letter from the file from three very prominent members of the Lutheran church with a list of appropriate Bible verses for Professor Stendhal thinking that it might be able to straighten him out a little bit. But it is one of the interesting things about this college and this conference is that we do have some controversy. And the college has always been amazingly supportive of the idea of academic freedom, that this is the place for these discussions to take place. Twenty years after this event, I received a phone call from Bishop Stendhal. Christopher Stendhal retired at Harvard and they elected him the Bishop of Stockholm. And he said, L.D., he said, would you mind if I... I'm printing a book for the year from the Bishop. Would you mind if I reprinted the article from the Nobel conference? Well, this, of course, was for those pagan, secular, Swedes, liberal. Mind you, the book was published and it was discussed negatively in the Swedish parliament. And there was a brouhaha in the Swedish press twenty years after. But you heard it here first. And we have some other ones too that were sort of interesting. There was a great conference on language. We had Peter Marlar, animal communications expert here. Interestingly enough, sitting in the audience there with Professor Marlar are two people that some of you who've been on campus might recognize. Charles Hameram and John Kendall, who were so inspired by the talk that they went out and started raising geese. And the Gustavus Animal Behavior Research Farm out there. We had Noam Chomsky talking about structural linguistics. It was a great conference. But one of the things that people remember the most about that conference was that by the end of the second day, it was snowing hard. And by the end of the banquet, there were no roads open out of town. And so some 600 people were stranded in St. Peter for the night. And many of them went home with staff or stayed in town. But a lot of them stayed at the county jail, which was open for their convenience at that point. And in 70, we had another reminder of why January is not a great time to hold a conference in Minnesota. We had one on creativity. Again, a great panel with William Aerosmith and Jacob Bernowski. Just amazing to hear those folks talk back and forth here. But as it turns out, in the middle of the night, after the first night, the administration building burned out. And of course, we all said we were certainly happy that it was just an administration building. Nothing important was lost as the result of that. It meant that Richard Elvie, whose office was in that building, had to write new sermons for a change. And after that, it's interesting, some of our conferences were well ahead of their time. We did a conference on the destiny of women in 1973. And well ahead of our time on that one, particularly one. But sort of the modern era of Nobel arrived in 1975, when this building was completed. I guess it wasn't completely completed when we held this first. But Glenn Seaborg decided we should try to invite Nobel laureates back to campus once again. And so we had four main addresses, Seaborg, Alikarp Kush, John Eccles, Langdon Guilty. And we had 35 Nobel laureates that attended it. And this again was very interesting. There's another longtime Gustavus faculty person, Dick Fuller, chairing a panel there. Seaborg talked about science and the good that it could do humanity. Langdon Gilke, on the other hand, said, science in the 70s is just like theology was in the 1400s. It was the queen of the disciplines. And he said, like theology, science is writing for a fall. It's likely to lose some of its luster here. So it was interesting. But it was also interesting too because we had William Shockley back on campus once again. And he had spoken in Minneapolis the day before. And there had been a death threat issued. And so when he was on campus here, he was accompanied by armed guards. And we had these discussion panels. And it was interesting that the other Nobel laureates really didn't want to hear him talk about his pet racist topics. And so whenever he would start going on this, they would shut him out of the discussion. It was like they sort of, they ganged up on him. And in the event, there was really very little controversy. Although we did get a call from Time Magazine asking if there was any action yet. Thought there might be some. But anyway, this is where we went from here. We've done conferences on all sorts of topics ever since. And I think what I'll do at this point is see if Richard wants to comment on any of these. You remember this one? Okay. Nature of the physical universe. There's Steven Weinberg the first time he was on campus. Yeah. Victor Weiss. No, no. Don't tell the Weinberg story. Okay. Don't tell the Weinberg story. All right. I won't tell the Weinberg story. No. Okay. How about this one? Darwin's Legacy. Richard Leakey was on that panel. Yeah. Steven J. Gould. Sir Peter Meadowire. E. O. Wilson. Wonderful, wonderful. Wilson said there was a gene for Lutheran gene in Minnesota. And there actually is a Lutheran gene. Elvie says that E. O. Wilson at this conference said that there is a Lutheran gene in Minnesota. Elvie says now there is worldwide. We'll have to discuss this with appropriate legacy of Keynes and a whole bunch of them. But then later on we've also had some other ones. And, you know, younger faculty have come in. And the great thing about it is that they become really interested in seeing this prosper as well. Chuck, why don't you come and tell us about some of your favorites. Push the button too many times. And they really don't want me to show these, as you can see. Okay. So they asked me about what my favorites were. And I apologize for the arrangement here. But the first one that I remember, and I remember this fondly because I got to host Mitch Feigenbaum, was the Chaos Conference in 1990. This was put together by John Holti. And it was a wonderful conference. So many cool pictures so much. Wow, it would be just amazing these days, I'm sure. But I can still remember Heinz Otto Peikin taking the video camera and pointing it into the television set and just twisting it and watching the chaos emanate from the sides of the screen. It was a gorgeous conference and such great pictures. And it was the first, we got to see, we've had two Glick Brothers here. This was when James Glick was here. But we also had his brother here for the water conference a few years later. So something we didn't realize until after we've invited them both. Another one that I managed to help chair, this was with Larry Potts. Larry and I worked together on the Material Science Conference in 1995. And we had some great speakers here. But our lead off speaker wasn't the best, I have to say. As often is the case, the Nobel laureates are not always the best speakers sometimes. But we had a great time. And this led us into, this was one of the beginnings of something I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute, the Rydell Professorship Program, which I'll come back to. Some of these people came back. Elvie talked me into chairing this one, as I recall, in 97. And you might say, yeah, of course I got to pick all the physics and astronomy ones. But they were a lot of fun. So we had a great time. But this was one of the conferences where you didn't want to be invited to come speak. We lost a couple of people. We did invite Carl Sagan, and he passed away before he could come. And just about six weeks before the conference, Gene Schumacher was killed in a tragic accident in Australia. So we had to replace him with David Stevenson. But it was, again, a great conference. We had Storing Musgrave come over, and we had a nice banquet. And then we came back over here so we could see the slides of the Earth from space. It showed us all about the Earth. It was great. Can't forget the Einstein conference. We celebrated the 100th anniversary of Einstein's special year when he published four papers and changed the world and the way we think about it. It was also the first time we got to meet Sylvester James Gates, who's been a good friend of the college for many years. But also many others. I can still remember Wendy Friedman talking about playing hockey. Of course, a Canadian, she grew up playing hockey. And she was impressed that we made use of this arena in a different sort of way because she would have used it, I suppose, but always fun. And can't forget this conference, Heating Up the Energy Debate, when Steve first was with us. And this one generated a little bit of controversy. Tim mentioned getting letters. I didn't actually receive the letters afterwards. I received a couple beforehand, some of which came from students that I had who thought we shouldn't be talking about climate change at that time. But it was the president, I think, that got most of the grief on this one. And he thankfully took it nicely and just told me about it. Didn't really pass it on too much. But the most special one was, of course, last year. And Tim already mentioned this one. But we had a great time last year with eight great speakers. It was just so much fun. We had two great big events last year, and we had a great time last year. We had two great events last year. And you'll see James Gates was back with us again. Always fun. I do want to spend just a second or two more talking about the effect that this had on our faculty and students. The program that we put together, the Nobel conference primarily for the audience a great life changer for many of us here as well. And just one example of a situation that happened a few years ago with the Brain and Being Human Conference. We had Paul Glimcher here. And he was hosted by Tom LaFarro from our math department. And Tom and Paul got to be good friends and started talking and pretty soon Tom's on leave and he's going to visit Paul and they're collaborating on papers and they've published now three or four together. So this is just an example of the kinds of collaborations that can go on. There have been others as well but these are just some examples. And students as well, student hosts, there are tons of stories about students getting letters of recommendation from the speaker that they're hosting to get into graduate school or whatever, med school and so forth. But this was the best I think that I can think of anyways when Curtis Marion invited Kristen Schwagel to go on a dig with him. That was just great fun. So you can't underestimate the power of these kinds of things. And I did mention before, and I'll just say again, thanks to the generous gift of Susan and Robert Riedel, we have Riedel Nobel Conference Distinguished Professors. Professor got cut off there, it looks like. And we've had 15 on campus since it started in 96. Phil Anderson was the first one and we've even had one last summer here, David Sedlak came and spent time on campus with our students that were working here during research and talked about his research in water and so forth. And that's been the way it has been, giving our students a opportunity to spend more time than just the two days of the Nobel Conference with some of these Nobel quality speakers. And it's been great for our students. Again, lots of friendships. And we're kind of disappointed that Freeman Dyson's not gonna be here because he was one of the guys that we had the most fun with. I can't remember a couple of good Freeman Dyson stories but one night a couple of our students just said, hey, do you think Freeman'd like to go downtown for a movie? And so I said, yeah, you should go ask him. So they went to see the Matrix. First time the Matrix was out. And he had a great time with them. And then we had to show the episode, Star Trek episode with the Dyson Sphere and then he had to correct us afterwards and told us all about what the Dyson Sphere was about. Of course, it had nothing to do with the science fiction in the Star Trek episode. So it's been a great run and we're hoping to continue the Raidell Professorships under the leadership of Jeff Jeremiahson and of course the Nobel Conference under Scott's leadership. Okay, you coming back up? Yeah, I'm gonna close. It was just, you know, we were thinking about what has the impact of this conference been on this institution? I mean, it's been good obviously for admissions. It's been wonderful to get to meet a lot of people that we maybe wouldn't see otherwise. But it's also, I think, really contributed to a sense of community here on campus in ways that aren't really quite so obvious. And so to give you kind of an oblique example of this, this is going to involve actually one of our speakers here, Antonio DiMazio. He was here when we did Unlocking the Brain and now he's coming to talk about consciousness, which is a fascinating topic, but you'll be interested to know that Richard Elvie was interested in consciousness in 1979. Okay, matter of fact, Donald Griffin, distinguished neurophysiologist from Rockefeller University had written a book called The Question of Animal Awareness, which had to do with the question of are animals capable of some kind of, some level of consciousness like ours? All right, distinguished behavioral scientists, of course, would rule this out. So he was catching a little grief for this, but Elvie thought it would be great if we would get a group of people together and read this together and consider this topic. And he said it would be even better if we could get together every Monday night and we could all invite a student to come with and we'd discuss and we'd eat dinner, all right? And we'd do that the whole semester long. And he said it would be even better if I could get somebody to pay for this. Now, and this is one of the things that Elvie was incredibly good at over his career, was finding funding sources for obscure ideas, but this one was sheer genius. His source of funding was the National Endowment for the Humanities, which was paying for a seminar on animal awareness, which was, I thought, absolutely amazing. But anyway, we did get together every Monday. We had a wonderful time. We all invited our students to come with. I remember the student that I invited was Colleen Seifert, who is now the chairman of the psychology department at the University of Michigan. We had wonderful students in that group there, but we all then gave our talks, okay? And so, Charles Hamrim, the biologist, said, behavior and tradition, pretty traditional. Bob Beleg, our animal behavior is a little more controversial. If animals are humans, animals, that was a good one too, okay? Then we had Gerhard Alexis from the English department, okay? Spiking Morgan's Canon. Morgan's Canon is the animal behaviorist version of Occam's razor, that you never say that you need to have consciousness if you can have a simpler explanation. Gerhard says, no, see, this is what the humanities can do for us. It gives you the richness of explanation. And of course, Lawrence Owen from the English department thought, well, animals have fun too, you know? And they're more interesting than you might think. And of course, then Richard came in. His was on mind and nature. Richard, do you still believe that rocks have minds? Yes. Yes, yes, he was, he was sort of a pantheist at this point, yes, all the way down. Consciousness all the way down. We had a good time. Now, but my talk was somewhat, you know, less prosaic. Being the only person on campus that really had spent any time thinking about how the nervous system worked for years. I said, reductionists are people too. And I sort of humbly suggested that, you know, we should abide by this idea that just because we have behavioral complexity, it doesn't imply consciousness. You don't really need that as an explanatory mechanism. But I said, if you know how to ask the right questions, at some point in the future, we might possibly be able to get at this question. All right, when I got done with my talk, Elvie looked over at me and says, see, science doesn't know everything. Yeah, yeah, he would say things like that. And then we had Lawrence Ohn, if you may remember him, he was this tall, lanky guy with an industrial strength Texas accent. And so he would say, Tam, can you show me where in my brain I could find a noun? And I had to say, well, you know, we have an idea of, you know, where speech is localized in the brain, but probably I can't tell you where your nouns are at this point, but you wait. At some point we made, and he just gave me this smug look at that point. 10 years later, we did a conference called Unlocking the Brain. Mark Kerber was the chair. Antonio Demasio was on the panel. David Hubel talked about listening to single-cells activity, okay? And Dr. Demasio in his talk talked about his work with people who had suffered strokes or various kinds of brain problems here that made it difficult for them to find words. Does that sound vaguely familiar to anybody? Yes, okay. That happens to everybody. These are folks that were, certifiably we were having some difficulties. They showed this picture, if you look at that there, he was showing that different words tend to be localized in different parts of people's temporal lobes. And that lo and behold, there are places where if you remember a personal noun, it's likely to be in a different part of your brain than a common noun would. And I thought, well, I've been using this in class for a year. I thought that was pretty cool. But afterwards, Larry Owen came up to me after watching Demasio's talk and said, well, I'll be damned. And so I felt vindicated after all these years that yes, indeed, if you do learn to ask the questions the right way, you can, in fact, answer them. I think we're about ready to go. I think the last thing I'd like to do, we do have this orderly progression here. And so we do need to hand it off once again to Scott. And I think Scott should tell us what we should expect for next year, don't you? So thank you. I have not anywhere near the history that these gentlemen do at this conference. As I said this morning, my first conference, Sean Carroll's presentation just blew me away. And I said, this is something, you can't reproduce this at any other place. This is something really special, I can say this. We've had other years where I think for the science of aging one most recently. We had FlightCheck come in and talk about cells kind of wear out and the machinery kind of just kind of gets old and it's sort of mechanical wear was the idea for aging. And then we had Cynthia Kenyon who came in and she flew in just for her talk and she said, that's a bunch of bunk. Here are the genes that are involved and she introduced the Dowager gene to us. She had a very cantankerous and contentious question and answer panel and then she flew out so she didn't even stay for the rest of the conference. And I thought, wow, that's pretty powerful. And then I had the opportunity to host a couple of times. So I hosted Wolfgang Ketterli and as a faculty member in chemistry hosting someone in physics, that was one of the most incredible experiences of my early career here. And then I had suggested that Jennifer West should be invited for the medicine conference and I hosted her when she came and my favorite memory of when she was here was someone on the panel had been talking about the high cost of medical care and she got really righteously indignant and said that doesn't have to be this way and she gave us this really excellent rebuttal to that and she got a little bit righteously indignant. I love it when people get fiery in the question and answer. So what do we have coming in the future? I'll talk a little bit about this tomorrow evening or afternoon but next year we're gonna tackle the science and experience of addiction and what does that mean to be an addicted person and all of the social implications and the moral implications and the philosophical implications, it should be pretty good. We have Eric Kandel coming back as a Nobel Orient. His wife Denise is in the psychology department at Columbia and she kind of coined the phrase gateway drug. We have Sheila Murphy who is a medical sociologist and she talks about the disproportionate impact of drug addiction and the drug laws on women and how that's impacted. Carl Hart also from Columbia made waves a couple of years ago. He wrote a book about drug policy in the United States and he went on a nice tour on that and as an African-American male, he has something pretty interesting to say about how drug policy impacts different populations in the country. He's a neuroscientist as well. We have Mark Lewis coming in from the Netherlands. He is a neuroscientist as well and he does his scholarly work on the neuroscience of emotional development in children and you can imagine how this overlaps with the learning issues that Kandel discovered and won his Nobel Prize for and he is an out addict and has written an interesting memoir on his life taking a number of different substances. So it should be a really interesting conference and then the year after that we have an economics conference. We did globalization and now that we have a globalized world and economy, what does that mean to live in it? We see economies trying to come to equilibrium now and it's kind of rocky so we want to explore that a little bit and this is how far out we plan some of these things. The next year out from that we're talking about reproductive technologies. There are many things on the horizon. I think most recently in the press think octomom. That's not going away. In fact, the problem might get even worse so it'll be really interesting to tackle that issue head on. So we've got some great things lined up in the next few years and beyond that, who knows what's gonna happen? 16 of 25 scientists say we might be here. So with that, I guess we should close it up and welcome you to either head over to Christchappell to the concert. As I said, Gustavus Symphony Orchestra is playing. We brought the students back early to campus so that they could really work up something wonderful for you. Yep, Drachmaninoff and Midsummer Night's Dream, Metalsong and DORAK, I believe we have. And we also have the art exhibit down in the Hillstrom which I highly recommend. It's a pretty interesting exhibit. So thank you for coming tonight. It's been wonderful. Thank you.