 here. The closing plenary at this meeting is given over to the Paul Evan Peters Award and Memorial Lecture. And let me tell you just a little bit about Paul Peters. There's a blue brochure which was in your packets and you'll also find this information on the web. I know some of you knew Paul. I knew Paul. He was a good friend. He was the founding director and sort of dynamo that built the coalition. He served as director from 1990 to 1996 at the time of his sudden and untimely death. He made great contributions. He was an extraordinary person. And we did several things in his memory. One was to establish a fellowship for a graduate student in a library information science program and we award that every year or two. The other was the Paul Evan Peters Award. And this was set up by the Association of Research Libraries, EDUCAUS, and CNI. We were grateful to have some funding from Microsoft Corporation and Xerox Corporation to set up a fund to endow the award. We give it out every couple of years and the bar on this award is very high. It really speaks to sustained leadership and vision in creating major change in society through information science, the intelligent use of technology, networked information, recognizing opportunities where technology can change the way we create, share, relate to, discover information. And you can find a list of previous award winners in the back of the blue bro shore. We set up a committee every year or every cycle because we do this award every couple of years. And I'd like to recognize the committee members that are here. Serving on this committee is quite a bit of work. It's one of these, I think, pieces of work that's wonderful to do in a certain sense. But it is still important commitment of time for our community and we're grateful for their service. We have with us from the committee George Strahan, who is the director of NIDERD. And I'll say a word or two more about NIDERD later. Thank you, George. We have with us Sally Jackson, a professor of communication at Illinois Champaign Urbana, somewhere over there. I believe I've got a lot of light in my eyes here. And I, of course, Joan Lippincott, who serves ex officio on the committee from CNI, who is, I think, somewhere in the back there, yes. We had a fourth member as well, and I dearly wish I could recognize her. The late and much-missed Ann Wolpert, the head of libraries at MIT, also served on this committee. And I think that was an incredible group that selected an incredible person. The award winner is Dr. Donald Lindbergh. And let me tell you just a little bit about him and his contributions. There is a longer and probably slightly more factual version of everything in the brochure. But I just want to say a few things. One, it's wonderful that we're giving him the award in St. Louis because he actually has ties to this part of the world early in his career. He spent time as a faculty member at the University of Missouri quite a number of years ago now. But it's wonderful to close that circle. Since 1984, he has been the director of the National Library of Medicine for the United States. Over the period of time from 1984 to the present, the list of achievements, the number of times the National Library of Medicine looked at the future and said, what does that mean for our strategic plan and got it right again and again? Very much to the service of our nation, the world, the life and health sciences. It's really striking to me and I can't think of any institution that has really gotten that kind of a series of consistent strategic decisions. There are organizations that build 30 years on getting one of these right, getting them right again and again and again and seeing the future. And then making that future happen is just an amazing credit to Don's leadership. Think about what's happened since 1984. The National Center for Biotechnology Information, which really positioned us and supported through its informatics programs. The whole molecular biology and genomics revolution that's occurred since. PubMed, the whole notion of connecting health information to the populace at large and changing that whole relationship. Incredible. The visual human project. What an amazing demonstration of what information technology and networked information could do. I could go on and on the work they did with clinical trials and making the availability and the outcomes of clinical trials available to the both physicians and the public. Again, amazing stuff. I do want to just remind you of one little detail. While all of this wonderful stuff was going on, back in the 1990s, Don took on an extra assignment in his free time, which he had so much of, of course, at NLM. Founding what was called then the Coordinating Office, which really was put together to pull all of the pieces of high performance in computing and communication investment that were going on throughout the federal government and try and mold them into a much more coherent program. That work continues today. It's now called Nighter D. And indeed, George sits in a position that is a direct, I believe, kind of lineal descendant of the work that Don started there. In parallel with all of the tremendous things that he's done for us at the National Library of Medicine, he also played a major role in building that coherent high performance computing and communications program that has served us well through the last 15 years or so. A great record of achievement and exactly the kind of sustained accomplishment in changing the world that we hope to recognize with the Paul Evan Peters Award. Before turning the podium over to Don for the memorial lecture, I'd just like to do two last things. First, I'd like to note we have a lovely bowl commemorating the event that we're both afraid to touch because it's glass and it's heavy. And it will sit there until we put it back in its cage and ship it. But if you'd like to admire it later, please do. And I'd also like to just take a second to recognize Mary Lindbergh, who's also here in the audience with Don. It was wonderful that you could join us. Thank you. With that, congratulations, Don. And I'll just say, you know, Paul is somewhere smiling. Over to you. Thank you very much for the kind introduction, also for the kind invitation. Thanks to CNI for sponsoring this award. Paul Peters really was special. He was brilliant. He was charming. He was visionary. And Mary and I had sort of settled down to a string of nice dinners with him and his wife in Washington when life came to an untimely end. So I'm doubly touched to be here and I thank you once again. So if any of you are reaching around for a pen and pencil to write down all the things you'll learn, I would say just put them away. Not likely to learn anything worth writing down. What I'm going to offer you is kind of the backstage at the Metropolitan Opera. So this is a somewhat personal view of some of these events that were referred to. Let me jump into the middle of all this. After World War II, as all librarians and such people will remember, the research reports really exceeded in number what could be handled by the old manual library systems. At NLM they invented a thing called GRACE, Graphic Arts Compositing Equipment. I'll show you a picture of it. And that was really the beginning of meta-lawyers, meta-line, regional medical libraries, that whole development. This is what it looked like. It lives in the Smithsonian and I persuaded them to give it back to us on the occasion of our 150th anniversary in 1986. I didn't realize it was quite as big and heavy as it is, so it got as far as the loading dock. I didn't take this picture of someone and took it before, but I got the panels off the damp thing so I could see what's inside it. And its purpose was to permit the printing of index metacus basically, to take the image of a page and output it to a negative, photographic negative that could be used to print those wonderful pages. So at the same time, of course, there was a Missouri and there was a Mary and me and that where we were, but where was I? Well, I was sitting in a TD4, I think it was called, one of those quonset hut type things, which was nominally a laboratory, but we finally got a better lab. Anyway, I was reading this report produced by General Electric, commissioned by National Library of Medicine, and I had heard about it and I wrote and got it and read it. And essentially it was asking, and all I was asking, would it be possible for a computer to take, let's say the citation on the, even the, I think just maybe the citations of all the articles and say a hundred of good medical journals and put them in a computer and sort of do something with them. And that was the first part and the second part was the back, of course, you know, progress is our most important product that we remember children. And they did say yes, it was possible. And I understood better now than then why an agency like NLM would ask somebody like GE to sort of validate their intuition. But I now understand that that was actually a pretty smart thing to do. And GE was smart in validating their intuition. They ended up recommending three-quarter Honeywell computers and three-quarter inch tape was, I knew even at the time was a bad idea. But Missouri, even in those days, we were trying to use computers to serve physicians, ultimately, of course, beyond physicians. So I was putzing around with the University of Missouri lab reporting system, which used IBM card readers and paper tape. And I mean, it was a card. But on the other hand, it drove teletype machines up on the wards. So it printed the reports. We, on the other hand, summarize those in the paper in the punch cards. And the university kindly gave me from midnight until 1215 to summarize those records. I learned how to run both tape readers and card readers. This was initially was an IBM 1410. And that was our console on a good operator, John Weinegger. We did actually, Mary and I used to go up to Aspen most summers. And here we gave a course in medical information. You know, computers and medicine, I guess we would have called it. And so one of the people there, Lloyd Morris, that was later head of a foundation which sponsors Sesame Street. Sam Garten was a postdoc with me. And we're giving demonstrations on acoustically coupled 110 board teletype machines, which you say some of you might even remember them. They worked. And what we were really teaching was medical decision making. And one of the bases for that, of course, is the Bayes model of prior probabilities, which was published only in 1959 in science by Lee Lusted and Bob Ledley. Most, and they stayed around for good many years. I knew both of them very well. But within a year, by 1960, another colleague at Missouri, William Lodwig, the radiologist, had already implemented that decision making prior probability thing and reporting of clinical radiographs. Very good guy. We stayed friends most of our lives. The machine was an IBM 1410. I just show you this core memory because so many people now don't have the slightest idea in the world that cores actually refer to magnetic cores. It isn't the concept. It's a device. As I remember, I think it was invented by J. Forester. So there are the cores and their connections. And in contrast, somewhat more modern disk with not eight bytes of memory, but eight gigabytes of memory. Just to remind us, in a way, not how far we've come, but how simple the machines were that we're trying to do anything with. Anyway, I loved Columbia, Missouri, and University of Missouri, and all the people there. But I nonetheless marched off to NLM in 1984. And we started immediately to advance that same proposition of serving the medical profession and ultimately patients by utilizing these strange things called microprocessors or laptops ultimately and personal computers, if you can imagine such a thing. And if you didn't have a personal computer, but you're a practitioner, we had a system called Lonesome Doc, the Marlboro man. And you could order this thing by telephone talking to a medical librarian, and then you could stop by the library to get the reprints, because you didn't have an online machine. I found in 1984 to my amazement that my predecessors had made all wise decisions, but they didn't have any long-range plan. I admitted happily that institution had gotten along pretty well for 148 years without me, but I felt like I needed a plan. And we started one and it's probably the best thing I did for the institution. And it went through different parts and pieces. In this case, we showed the first five. And there was a better discussion about what should those five things aim themselves at, I guess you'd say, has a subject. But there never was any doubt in my mind that they should be bottom-up plans. In other words, they should be written and composed by the people we're claiming to serve, not top-down, not the boss saying here's what we're going to do, because those are known to just end up in the trash basket. We didn't try to do everything the first time, so we left space for things that we knew would be necessary, but a little more narrow, like the electronic imaging, the global stuff for overseas work. You'll see, I guess I can't, I don't know, can I point? Yeah, I can point. So here's Michael DeBakey. He headed our outreach plan. We finally ran out of plans actually in 2006. I was 20-year plan, so we did another 10-year similar idea. The nature of both plans really start out by saying this is not how you go, this is not a day-to-day operational plan. This is a goal. This describes the port you're going to get to if the sailing goes well. So it's a map of where you could be if all goes well. But it's dependent upon funding. It's dependent on lots of people wanting to work with you. It's dependent upon the people you're trying to help wanting to help. So that's my idea of long-range planning. I'll give you just a few examples. Actually, I'd love to spend the whole rest of the day telling you about NLM, because I think it's great, but you don't want that, and if you are interested, you can find it out quickly on the home pages. But here's an example. We were actually hankering after the high-performance communications and publications and imaging and stuff like that that the big boys could do. So we were looking at how to, when the computer finally got big enough and smart enough, to do something about imaging, not just text. And the opportunity came when we figured out that we could barely manage to do some anatomy, which is of course at the heart of medicine, certainly. And so we got a recommendation from the board to go ahead and try to do a digital imagining of an adult male and female actual cadaver. Other people had tried to do digital this and that, but basically, you know, to have a digital little finger done in California and a digital right here done in Massachusetts that just doesn't add up to spell mother. So, you know, we gathered together the people who are experts in digital anatomy, such as it was, and they said, man, do it. I mean, that is the right role for an agency. Just do the whole damn thing. Give us the database. So we got lots of help, but then the end, we got, you know, a smashingly good product. At the time, there was much talk about, well, if you ever did all this and you got all these things and would be this huge number of gigabytes, whatever they are, and how would you store them and what would happen. So two things happened once the wonderful guy named Dan Macy, so I had hired to run List Hill, said, I'll tell you what, if we have to do it, we'll put it all in 55 CD-ROMs. You can imagine how handy that would be. But fortunately, a good engineer who had gotten under the board of regents, Alvy Ray Smith, possibly the top computer graphics guy in the world, Pixar and all that, he said, he could sort of step forward and say, look, don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, let the guys do this, but they should do their part. And I guarantee you, the engineers of the world will stay out way ahead of them. We'll have the storage devices by the time they get done. Don't worry. It's a tremendously big help. So we did the first one at one millimeter, thickness, and the female at a third of a millimeter. There's lots of sort of tales about all that, but I was frankly a little worried. I was trying to get the damn thing shifted over to be done in Sweden to be truthful, because I didn't want the organization accused of hitlerian and inhumane and so forth behavior. But anyway, we slipped under the wire, got it done, at least the mail. And it was announced that Radiological Society North America, the biggest medical professional meeting in the country even now, but it was in Chicago. And I was very pleased. I mean, they do it very technically able. And I got back to Columbia. I got back home. I guess in that case was in Washington. And Mary said, well, there's a phone call for you from whatever newspapers in London. And they jumped on the case about is it true you're doing these barbaric things and making, slicing up bodies and putting them in computers and so forth. I said, yeah, we did just announced it. And the mail was from Texas, provided by the anatomical board of Texas. And they had already caved in. They'd already given this blasted reporter the name of the individual, which they promised never to do. And so she called and they so they she buzzed around and called the mother and described this terrible thing. I didn't say it, but the guy was the double murderer. And he had willed his body to us. And so they ranted on her. And she said, listen, young lady, that is the only decent thing that boy has ever done. So I was in the clear. We later figured out how to do one third of a millimeter in the case of the female. And there's a good story there to fully informed consent. I can assure you. But there are over 3000 licenses in 64 countries. We don't sell it, but we do require a license. And it's gone all over the world. So the Da Vinci machines that with which you can do surgery and brains and so forth, very much rely on this kind of imagery. And the Voxelman is a place of data set that particularly artistically well done from Hamburg. But we got done with this first one. And I assume that I'll go back just keep your mind there. I assume that having done this pretty nice thing. I mean, this is the best piece of anatomy since Versalius, a kid you not. I assume that the good old American industry would jump in and sell software to do stuff with it. And they didn't. They didn't do a darn thing. So we said, okay, we'll do the software too then. And did it and it was well used. And five years past. And it turned out how fast things change in technology. Now you have video cards which do in hardware what we were doing in software. So of course it's better to do the hardware version. So we started a whole new project to redo the software using the hardware devices. And that was successful too. I don't know how much time to spend in telling you about it, but in both cases we invoked a model that I was wanted where you have university people and corporate people working together on a joint project carefully coupled. And they did that. And they actually invented a whole new mechanism called extreme programming, which essentially means that, well, to give you an example, the company, one of the companies is General Electric, pretty big one. Another one is a small one, Kitware. And they all operated on the same rules. Namely, there's a control panel up on the top and your subroutine or whatever you're given. And it has to work on Max and Wintels and Unix. So your latest contribution has to run compatibly with all the others. You got to get green lights. Or at the end of the month, you don't get paid. So people said to me, Lindbergh, you guys are nuts. You can't treat people like G that way. I said, well, we'll see. But it turned out that the greatest fans of that technique was General Electric. They said, this is absolutely wonderful. You don't mind we're going to copy you with our contractors. So the whole thing did get done. And usefully. So what does it do? Well, it really does the segmentation that lines up all of those cross sections so that you can operate at any view you want. That's the whole point of it all. And it's open source. And it does this. It lets you look at those cross sections and then segment out individual parts. So you can have this fellow dancing a jig if you want to. People have. The IT community now is like this large number of downloads in the last 12 months, 160 a day. There are thousands of registered users. An active contributor. So the developers are a substantial number. And it's just the big largest open source teams in the world. I mean, it's been a very, very pleasant operation. And the ultimate code is used by lots of things cited here. But that includes both GE and Siemens. So anyone in the team can use it for any purpose they want. I mean, it's a very satisfactory thing. Now next is the NCBI part. We use the term factual information from databases because at the time that I came there, we had, of course, medline files, which are bibliographical medical library type files. But we also had toxicology things. And they're really very different. I mean, the toxicology would be 30,000 characters in a row and so forth. And so I thought, well, what would a smart computer scientist do without the lemma? I already know from University of Missouri experience. He would notch it up a level. He'd go a level above what you're talking about, which was a factual database. But in the case of biotechnology, it turned out early in the long-range planning that people were focused on nucleotides and the sequence, those are the parts of DNA and the position of the so-called genes. And we didn't understand it too well. But we asked the guy named Allen Newell, no, Allen Maxim, who was a biochemist from Stanford and was on our advisory committee. What was all this stuff about? And he said, so I guess you want biotechnology 101 for med students. So yeah, I guess so. You know, take the podium for the next 20 minutes and tell us, you know, get chalk on your sleeves and we'll enjoy it. And he explained the whole thing. This is the cell, these chromosomes, this is down, blah, blah. And at the end of it, everybody sort of looked around and said, man, that's a library problem. I mean, people developing their own list of these things and they don't share them and all the value is in putting it together. That's a library problem. So we put together a essentially piece of legislation, which we claimed was, you know, inspired by the deity, of course. You can see the spark moving. And there was a path really. I think if there was a real inspiring idea was probably Renato Del Bucco, who essentially said, this is the time we've got to, I'm sorry, he essentially said, this is the time to make a big advance on cancer and publish the paper in science. But we were actually a little bit ahead of him. In any case, you got to go through appropriation, authorization, various kinds of wrangling. But our board once again said, okay, do it, do a National Center for Biotechnology Information as soon as possible. Intramural and extramural. It was Del Bucco. The turning point in cancer research, that was his view. I was as much more broad, more at genetics level and at the cancer level, but they ran together. Now, the person who actually introduced the legislation is in the center of Paul, Claude Pepper, absolutely another wonderful guy. He's being operated on by the sister act. The lady on his right is Claude is the sister of the then vice president. And the lady on the other side is Alice Fordeis, who's the sister of Mary Lasker. So Francis Humphrey Howard worked for me, basically everybody worked for Lasker. But he got an earful and we helped in the legislation. This was a party, of course, that's the way Washington operates. Young man in the middle, David Lipman, brilliant guy we recruited to run this National Center for Biotechnology Information, Mr. Pepper. Next to me is Jack Whitehead, who is the owner of Technicon Corporation, and Senator Pepper on the right, Jim Weingarten, who is head of NIH. So we did ultimately have a hearing on this, March 6, 87. Pepper hearings on this, part of my reminiscence is about that. Also, I mean, it turned out that we did persuade Don Fredrickson, the former head of NIH, to testify victim acusic, the great geneticist at Hopkins, Rich Roberts, who was on our planning committee. He hadn't yet gotten his Nobel Prize, but we all figured he would. And Jim Weingarten, who was then head of NIH and myself. So this is just part of the general story that a lot of people got behind this. But it did remind me, in putting this together, that I was seriously worried that things weren't moving fast enough. You know, we had this recommendation, the board, we promised to do it, nothing happened. We didn't have a bill. We didn't have any hearings. And I went to see Senator Pepper, breaking all the rules in the book, of course. And I told him how worried I was about the schedule and falling behind. He was a wonderful guy. He listened very southern gentleman fashion. His pose was a simple country doctor, I mean lawyer, but he actually was law review at Harvard. He was pretty sharp, old man. And he said, Doctor, don't worry. He said, I will introduce DeBille into house. Mr. Kennedy will introduce DeBille into Senate. And DeBille will pass. And indeed it did. And it may have been a simpler life, but it was a better one. So the resolution was by Kennedy and a number of others. Well, significantly, including Domenici, he was sometimes called the senator from DOE. But it was good to get it all together. So we got lots of help from lots of people. And that's, you know, in the end, plenty of credit for anyone. And once the darn thing passed, of course, after a cocktail party. And it was signed by the president and NCBI was authorized and created that very moment. And it got $8 million authorized by the Congress and ultimately appropriated it as well. So then left. So now you're down to nitty gritty. How do you actually do anything? I mean, all of us are limited, all administrators are limited by, you know, money, space and people. What else is there? Ideas usually are plenty. So we were being limited by FTEs at that time and full-time equivalents, number of persons you could employ. And I persuaded an administrator of the intramural research unit at NIH, kind of crusty old fellow, but nice. And he said, I'm gonna, Don, I'm gonna give you 12 FTEs for this thing. And don't use a single one of them for a damned administrator. Which of course we both were, but anyway. So what was things really like in those days? I mean, you've heard about how many nucleotides, three billion and so forth. And everyone was worried about kind of all this stuff, going to a computer, if it got in, would you ever get it out and blah, blah. But it wasn't really, that really wasn't the way it was working. You didn't have stuff going into a machine and creaming out, you know, and getting transferred to another machine. And it was really different. Christian Burks was a guy at Lannell, should be said that Walter Goad actually did the first file of nucleotide sequences at Los Angeles National Laboratory, DOE. And he, DOE was sort of like that at least in those days. Some good ideas actually, we were paying for, we at NIH were paying for the work, but Christian Burks said, you know, as soon as there was a public database, people expected data to be there. You know, of course, but it would take a year for anything to show up. So two years into the project, as far as Lannell was concerned, GenBank was 18 months behind. I mean, we were really getting worried and concerned. And the money actually came from NIGMS, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NLM, and NSF. And you might think, oh, what a big burden it is, all these interagency things. Heck, that was like a 30-minute meeting once a year, with no sweat at all. And we'd sent money to Lannell, we'd sent money to Bulbranek, we sent money to Intelligent Analytics. And the last thing was going to end on October 1, 1992, and about five minutes into that 30-minute meeting, we all said, fine, let it in. We're going to transfer the whole damn thing back to NIH and David Lipman will do it. And we took the money that would otherwise go to Lannell and put it in our one grants at NIH. Now, what did it look like to get data in those days? The exact reverse of what you would think, that this is all million bits per second stuff, creaming in and out. I mean, not at all. I mean, they went through this stuff with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing got in that they didn't really authenticate. We at NLM. So that's a markup sheet. Now, why would that be? Were people cheating? Not really. In fact, a very common complaint would be, now, here's the header that tells how many, you know, records and the length and so forth. And there's more records than you described. So of course, many, many phone calls per day. So a phone call back to the contributor who says, well, yeah, that's right. I mean, we had some extra. So we thought, you'd like that too. Of course, you know, metadata be damned. So it took a while to, you know, line all those things up and get it working smoothly. But if you want to end up with a system of, you know, 300 trillion whatever's, you got to take all of them carefully, particularly the early ones. So unified medical language system was another, I would say, an achievement I'm really proud of. It's a thing that I knew we had to do. And I knew it would take 20 years. And I knew that no one would ever do it on NIH or R1. You know, it's just too big. So what we wanted to do is to overcome linguistic barriers so that data that was already machinable, say your bibliographic, factual, database, expert systems, whatever, you could understand that the machine could understand it. Ultimately, a person could understand it in a medical way. So to take a simple-minded example, if you have the concept of this heart in your chest that beats so long and sends blood to your brain and so forth, it really is the same concept, whether you call it the Hertz in German or a Kerr in French or Coruscant in whatever Spanish language. That's not a problem. Natural language is not a problem. But what's a problem is to know that inside is an atrium and a ventricle and valves and stuff like that. So that's what we're building. And of course, there were pre-existing nomenclatures. And so we just shoveled them all in, actually using mesh as kind of an organizing principle. And we knew to begin with, Alexia McCrae was the linguist, and Betsy Humphries and I were the other types. But we figured there's only two kinds of ways that this can be organized. They're words of phrases. So they have a semantic type, like it would be a pharmacological substance or body part disease and all of the antibiotics are pharmacological substances. And then there would be relationship between those two. I mean, what else is there in language? So we actually had, we didn't want to betting people, we had arguments and sort of paper bets going, would there be more semantic types or more relationships? And it wasn't intuitively obvious how it would turn out. But by the end of the first couple of years, we had 135 semantic types and 51 relationships. Relationship would be like treats. So a substance treats a disease. And we were off and running. Now that by 1990, you see the numbers on the left, 64,000 concepts. Of course, we continued the work. And by 2013, there was 2,900,000 concepts. And of course, yet more terms because there's more foreign languages. And the number of vocabularies that increased from, you know, half a dozen to 168. Again, because in part because we internationalized it in 2007, we just plain internationalized it. And I think it's in the long run a good thing, although there are any efficiencies to doing such things. But here you see essentially, on the bottom, the concepts gradually increased. The different ways of saying it, of course, increased quite a lot. And this is the point at which you go non-English. So of course, if you throw in a bunch of foreign languages, you'll increase those terms. But that's a good thing. So the next stop on my train ride was the White House. And I had noticed that there was the Office of Science Technology Policy, President Science Advisor. They had had studies on the environment. And I objected to the fact that there were no medical or health people in it at all. I mean, I thought, are you protecting the world for cauliflower? Or aren't there some people that we got to have involved in this? And sort of groused about it. And lo and behold, the next thing that came along the line was high-performance computer. And so we got inserted as sort of the medical explants into some of those doings. And then one day, I got this phone call, you know, you had a report to the White House mass that noon. And I called my deputy, Smith, I said, Smith, what in the hell have you done? I'm getting called down to the G.D. White House. What's going on here? I figured we were really in the doghouse. But it turned out they wanted me to actually had this coordination office. And, you know, the White House mass has a certain amount of magic to it. So I said, yes. So the journey begins. Now, the High Performance Computing Act actually was passed in 1991. Bill introduced by Gore. Gore is very faithful to this, by the way. And was a bipartisan congressional bill signed by President Bush in those days. And so the coordination office was established in September of 1992 when I was head of it. And actually, we didn't put it into the buildings downtown, because the executive office building is, you know, it's grand, it's solid iron, cast iron, and in the entry rooms and all that. But it's not a good place to work. It's awkward. And the White House itself, I mean, people would die for an eight by 10 foot office. I mean, it's, again, pretty non-functional for our kind of work. So Bernardine Healy was head of NIH, and I asked her advice on the matter. Should I do it? And she said, oh, yes, absolutely. You should do it. She had been an OSTP earlier herself. And I said, what do you think about if I just do the whole damn thing at NLM? She said, oh, that's great. Do it. Don't get caught downtown. So we started meeting. There were 12 agencies. And there's a question, you know, the downtown is exciting and all that, but it turned out actually almost everybody lived in Montgomery County. So it worked fine. I just had a, you know, mid-afternoon and everyone's on, you know, have a meeting beyond the way home. It worked beautifully. And we didn't have to put up with the stuffy security stuff in the White House. I bring to your attention if there are any history buffs. I mean, there were history buffs. I've gone to your meetings the last couple of days. But if anyone is historically interested in the HPCC, there's a lovely girl named Sally Howe who worked with me in the first office. And then she's come back to work at NLM and gathering up the records and so forth and putting them into the history of medicine division. So if you have such things, please email Sally. We'd like to have them. So the program itself, what was it all about? Well, in public terms, it was to extend U.S. technology leadership, et cetera, apply and disseminate technologies to improve the national economy, provide key parts of the national information infrastructure. So no idea was emerging that there would be, you know, a coast-to-coast information infrastructure of some sort. But why was it not called a highway? Because Gore's father had introduced the bill for the U.S. interstate many years before in the President Eisenhower time. So the idea of that as infrastructure was pretty natural. So the management of it, so there's a coordination office, there are working groups or individual agencies, conferences, workshops, liaison stuff. To the Congress, the federal organization, state, academia, professional. So in other words, you've got to get out and tell the story. People don't read email. Sorry to tell you, but they just don't. And if they read it, they don't do anything. So I mean, you've got to show up and tell the story. They won't even know you exist. Incidentally, the last line Mosaic and Gopher servers, if you think back far enough, you'll say, well, Mosaic was made at the University of Illinois Champaign, Urbana, in a center that was funded by this office called the Hypervoluntic Unit Application Center. And of course, a clever graduate student, namely Mark Andreessen, actually wrote Mosaic, which included World Wide Web. Strange as to all, but you know, we all understood Gophers and Waze was a different thing too, but it turned out that everybody loved World Wide Web and it took off and so there we are. So people and Mark was a lot slimmer then, didn't have, had not so much hair, but he was slimmer and he drank a lot of coffee. He did a brilliant job. So with everyone having all these different objectives, what did it look like sort of back at headquarters to the extent there was any headquarters? And it looked to us as if we've got to have something that we really know were for and can measure and kind of explain. So our technical goals were really simple. Gigabit transmittivity, transmission speed and petaflops computational speed. So two things you can measure. Fast computers, fast lines between them and everybody smiling. So that was the strategy. So the first set of meetings, the whole thing was organized around what was called grand challenges, which has actually turned out to be a pretty darn good idea and those are some of them. But to take the industrial side for example, well how did they, were they sort of ordered about by this office? Well absolutely not. They're big companies that could see the need for supercomputing very easily, much earlier than we did and they didn't need any persuading at all. So I'll give you an example of a drawing of the Ford project, but there's the crash of two Taurus automobiles and what's the effect upon the ones on the left where it's crumpling? Well that is a computer job. It took, you know, hours. In that case it was executed at Oak Ridge, but Ford Company, the Ford Corporation themselves had, they had a project which at one point was a secret project and it was to automate the design and building of the right front end of a Taurus car. That sounds simple minded, but what they meant was we want to have that in computer space, not in paper drawings, and we want to know where all the parts came from, who were the suppliers and what's the stockage of them. So that's a different thing and that was a supercomputer piece of work. Now along the same period of time, of course, wait a minute, I was going to tell you about other stuff. Well we had to go on with those other meetings I described. So we met with a whole bunch of federal computer center directors with different agencies and also non-federal computer center directors. We're looking for examples and ideas and advice and wanting them to know what we're doing. So what advice did we actually get? I'll give you some examples. National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR, Bill Busby, Swell Guy. His advice was we need computers that can sustain at least 100 gigaflops when executing compiled Fortran code with 64-bit precision. Now there's a pretty understandable statement, I mean if you like that kind of work. And his view was the architecture of the machines, we couldn't care less. You know lots of good ones are shared memory machines, but we don't really care. Build whatever you want, but don't forget that a variety is a strength. Pittsburgh, Ralph Roskey said, and he's incidentally on my board today, lack of third-party software for scalable parallel systems is a big obstacle. Caltech, Paul Messina, still a good, still a leader in the field. He said keep the emphasis on the high end, the PCs are tomorrow are the supercomputers of today, and man was that ever true? I mean it was, it's ridiculous to say it that way, but it's true, totally true. The ones you can hold in your hand are incredibly powerful machines, but they didn't get there without work. So he applauded a proposal from USC to us for NSF to fund that to essentially redo the McNeil-Schwendler Nasstrak software, which is fluid flow software, to make it parallel, to make it so it could drive parallel machines. That's what everybody wanted. And incidentally some applications proved to be what they said embarrassingly parallel. You know so for instance the nucleotide analyses, they were parallel. It's very easy, you can parallelize them very simply. Other things are pretty tough. So the general problem of going simple to parallel is still not a solved problem at all. UCSD pointed to software problems again and more collaborative effort needed by software vendors, government, and centers to parallelize and so forth. Well again that's easier said than done. Cornell Theory Center, which we also were funding at the time, cited obstacles, technical, organizational, cultural, and they said in that red thing, they said while computers can scale, people do not. Now I didn't understand what they were talking about at the time, and I still don't understand what they're talking about. Does anyone understand that? Anyway, we didn't try to do it. So there we'd done our traveling and listening, and we started three meetings, the hardware manufacturers with the supercomputer people, ultimately telecom, although we did that later, and the software people. So let me tell you about that. So here in November 93 at NLM, as it happened, room that doesn't even exist anymore, we had the CEO and the Chief Science Officer of the 12, however many there are there, 13, 14 I guess by now, we had everybody who built supercomputers in the world with the exception of Fuji. We had all American manufacturers in that room, CEO and Chief Science Officers, and we essentially asking them what can we do to help? Well, the conclusions were from every single one of them. I mean, everyone had its ample time to do the talk. Our supercomputer designs are wonderful and the fabrication is coming along very well. Splendid progress, great fun. Any problems? Well, software is either awful or absent. Pretty interesting. I mean, that is honest to God, what every single company said in that meeting. And help from HPCC would be welcome. So they weren't saying, government keep your hands off, they're saying, look, you want to know a problem? There's the problem. If you can do something about it, do it. So we thought, well, what we better do is have a meeting with the software people. Hardware guys are okay. Look at the software. And it was like night and day. We made a list of 150 people who vend software to computers, potentially your supercomputers. And this list is fairly, includes some fairly big companies, but you know, ones like Thinking Machine is not in the software business for heaven's sake, but they're going to show up just, you know, don't want to be blindsided. And the last is many, many, many small companies. So the way the thing worked with the supercomputer manufacturers, we called them. We asked if they, you know, would, would like to come to the meeting. Would it be agreeable? They tell us what we need and so forth. And they say, yeah, sure. Let's do it. When do you want to do it? And essentially, they said, you just name the, name the day and the time and we'll, you know, fire up the corporate jet. We'll be there, you know, on time. We got to leave by, it's kind of noisy machine. So we got to leave Orson National by 1030. Other than that, whatever you want to do is fine. Well, when we wrote to the software guys, what they said was, will you guys pay travel? I kid you not. I mean, it was like night and day. Anyway, we had our meeting and the bottom line is this is what they concluded. With the machines now extant, there is not enough money in software. So the independent software vendors are not willing or able to port codes into the multi parallel processing architectures. Can't help. Isn't that interesting? Very different. And of course, the public is even less interested in supercomputer software. I mean, no appeal to them. That's ridiculous. So what I did is look down at the, these are the federal agencies that were part of the program. And NOAA, you might find slightly surprising as my focus, but as it happened, Hurricane Andrew had just come whipping out of the caribb toward Florida. And this little point here is where it struck Florida. And so the NOAA computer projection, you know, the weather system people had predicted where it would hit, but not exactly precisely. They said it could be 30 miles this way. It could be 30 miles that way. So now it's like 16 miles a coast, but basically they got the prediction correct. And why do you care how precise? Well, I mean, if you're on the receiving end of it, you care quite a lot because you wish that there were more people to help both, you know, with the wreckage and also with the medical sought. And it'd make a big difference if you're a little bit better. So it turned out in this particular case, there was a supercomputer center at Princeton running similar codes, and they predicted it more precisely, but two days late. So that, that machine quit running two days after the hurricane hit, but it could predict it plus or minus 10 miles. So that's a big, big difference if you're going to deploy rescue people and the health people and all the rest of it and also not get booted out of your house. That's not so pleasant either. So I found that this was the most understandable to a general audience, what was supercomputing all about. So thank you, lady. Now, about the same time Boeing, we'd been working with them, but not on this particular project, but they completed the design of the triple seven, which believe me is super aircraft, the best in the skies ever. And their goal there was that there would never ever be a drawing. There were no blueprints of a triple seven, any way, shape or form is all totally computerized. So again, controllable and quality control and all that kind of stuff, tremendous accomplishment. Now, this issue about software, I hear to tell you is still a problem. I mean, I don't know if you have people talk about this or not, but the current Boeing aircraft, the Dreamliner, 64% of the cost is information systems. 64% is not aluminum and all this other stuff that it is or engines, it is information systems. So this is like $6 billion out of nine. It's a lot of money. And of that 64%, 70% of it is reprogramming. You got it wrong the first time, redo it. Well, it's a hell of a thing to redo it on that kind of a scale. And the Air Force has got a program going now that essentially would create models of the, of the programming task. So their claim is that if you'll give us $250,000 a year, we'll save you yet more on the first plane you deliver, yet to be found out. But it leaves aside the military because there, you know, if you're going to go into one of these flyoffs, you never will sell the first plane. So the software problem is still definitely unsolved. I mean, it is, I would say not even understood. A guy named Bob Floyd used to chair computer science at Stanford when I was on an advisory committee. His field was theory of computability, which would mean in theory that you could run a program through those kind of tests, you know, and it would say whether it was correct. Well, you can't do it. So either at a Dreamliner level or at a balance your checkbook level, still can't prove any of these damn programs will work or do what they're supposed to do. Well, anyway, our technical goals were still what I said, gigabit transmission, petaflop computation, and it, oops, and it left the communications part. I mean, it really was originally high performance computing. We actually had to kind of negotiate with the White House to let us add communications because it was perfectly obvious communications at least as important as the computer speed. So this was achieved by these gigabit test beds, which were set up, the slide is from Corporation for National Research Initiatives, but it's really Bob Kahn. So he took, it was between five and seven million dollars, wasn't a huge amount of money from NSF. He was really operating more or less like a division of NSF, and he organized phone companies to set up these routes, CASA, Magic, Blanca, Aurora, so forth, just to show that, yes, you could do it. Well, this is between operators. So for instance, I remember going to this one here that was between General Tell and Bell. Now those are not friendly folks to begin with, and everything is proprietary. So Bob was spending five to seven million dollars, but he said in his report that the companies were putting in 10 times that amount of money to go into the experiment, to actually send a signal at a gigabit speed from coast to coast. Make a long story short, largely because of his work, it was achieved within two years. Actually, I think when the report was written, we're sending it 750 million bits per second. So the newspaper has called it a government gigabit, a gigabit after taxes. But it pretty soon picked up speed. So what lessons I learned from that is that they're really fine individual scientists and scholars in all those agencies. There is a very high overhead in interagency projects just because they have different scales and starting times and management schemes. But it's all worthwhile if a really big expenditure is necessary. Essentially, we're trying to round up two billion dollars a year for internet and of course got it and it worked. It has to be admitted there's a certain clumbliness in federal government, not fatal. And there is a proper relationship, I believe, between industry and the university. I mean, I'm being a university guide to begin with. I always felt that new good people in the agencies and there must be a smooth way to work with them. So I still think that's true. I want to tell you a little bit about the NLM side because the internet changed NLM substantially. Free Medline. No, let's try the one you picked out. Okay. Actually, I've tried that one though. I'll tell you about it later. I'm sure that many of you out there have read the notices when the season rolls around the flu season that you should be going ahead and getting a flu shot or having your parents get a flu shot. And you kind of go back and forth. Gee, should I really bother? Should I encourage my parents to do that? So let's look at, oh boy, look what he's trying to do. Should I get a flu shot? That's not going to work. The term should was not found. Wait, we got a good query right here. Vaccination against influenza and elderly persons. Okay, pretty close. Let's try that one. No, let's see related articles. That was fun. And Mr. Gore was very, very good supporter. I dare say that this development by itself may do more to reform and improve the quality of health care in the United States than anything else we've done in a long time. True. Good for him. So internet changed things for us. Essentially it said, all right, now you can do stuff like full text, the biomedical articles, you can eliminate a bunch of charges we used to make. We store and retrieve big files. But now you have an obligation to do that, to serve patients, families, and the public directly. Get out of the business of just doctors and scientists. Get in the business of the public. So for example, how did we get, Medline Plus is a big success. How did we ever get there? Well, because of what I said, we eliminated the major charges for Medline searches. We're spending a water magnitude $14 million and $13 million of it was to the network people. So by hopping on an internet, we eliminated all that. The other million left over was paying somebody else to charge people for searches. So what happened was a sudden huge increase in use of this Medline system, Medline Plus system. And there we could see that there were a lot of doctors on it, but there were a lot of others in the Medline systems. And those were basically patients, families, and the public. And we decided we better do something to serve them better. And that's how Medline Plus came along. The other part was outreach. And I want to tell you a little bit about that. Because after quite a bit of outreaching, that is to say, trips going to underserved populations, which in our case is Native American societies, for the most part, we concluded that we had a lot to learn from them about healthcare and that we also had a lot to learn about the limitations, the power of information per se. So here's a good guy, Tex Hall. We're at Treaty Tribe. We're 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty Tribe. And the government said, if you make peace with us and sign with your name or with your ex-mandan forebears, Hidatsa forebears, and Sanastar from the Ericara, they all signed the treaty with their ex. And the government said, as long as the grass grows, and the wind blows, and the river flows, we'll keep this treaty and honor it in perpetuity. And we all know the history that they never did. Smallpox was a, and there actually was a government policy to inoculate the Indian tribes up on the Missouri, because that's where a lot of the steamships were coming up to Fort Buford and then Fort Clark, where the Mandan Fort Clark and Honest Land. But Fort Clark is where the steamship Yellowstone actually killed one of our greatest chiefs, Mato Doppish forebears. And his quote is a very powerful quote of how he said he trusted the white man, but he said, look what happened to me. And he told his people, never trust the white man again, because of this. What our Native youth need is role models. And the very basic idea of having a Native American person from the community go back to that community and say, I'm a Native American medical student, or I'm a Native American physician. And by my pure example of just being who I am and actually displaying that for the kids, does wonders. We found out in the middle of all this, I found out that most Indians don't live in reservations, they live in- There are American Indians, there are Lakota Shoshone, Navajo, Rapa, Pottawatomie, living in the cities. But I don't know, we do not refer to each other as urban Indians. I have yet to walk up to another Native American and ask him where you're from. And he says, well, I'm an urban Indian. No. When they answer that, it's hard to establish a relationship or a relative. I've had that experience in New York City and also here recently in Seattle, just this morning, walking down the street. Ogolala from Pine Ridge came up, and started to talk with me. We shared some of our common friends and relatives. It's about your relatives. I said to him, I bet you he hit you up for a fiver. And he said, yeah, he did. Here's an interesting guy. My dad was an architect in New York. And so I grew up knowing that Mohawk Indians do the high steel work. I mean, that's just the way it is. In the city, are they well treated? It depends where they go and what they're involved in. I know when I first went to Manhattan, when I was 20, I went to the Union Hall and I was very well treated because there's something of a reputation. The first job I got in Manhattan was on Tower Ave, the World Trade Center. And I was 20 and never been that much up in the air. And I thought, well, my partner is going to know what he's doing. I'll follow him and I'm a quick study. I get on the job floor. Everybody meets each other and they say, this is your partner. First thing he said, oh, good, an Indian. I know you know what you're doing. I'm going to follow you. That's a thing missing on many reservations, isn't it? Definitely missing. He left Mohawk and went out west where his wife lived. The culture of work background is missing. This lady. I was a IHS scholarship recipient for my school when I went through school, college and medical school. And so I think I'm actually the first IHS director who was an IHS scholarship recipient. That's wonderful. Yes, so the program works. Yeah, this is a fabulous guy. This is a witch doctor, I guess you'd say, Indian healer. They're coming through the door. 70% of the problem is already taken care of. It no longer exists. 10% I do, 20% they do. They generally start out when it happened, how it happened, how it began, how it started. They'll tell you all that. They also tell you what you've got to do for them in order to help them. So what we do is we learn to do and evaluate in a sense when we're talking to them and then try to bring them up to another level where we deal with them, where we have to deal with them. That seems, you know what I mean, because like I said, you really don't have to be an expert on anything. You just have to learn how to listen and he'll tell you, like I said. This guy knows patients. Here's one in Hawaii. Now what we learned here is that I would say you have to have some pride in yourself and your tribe and your people or you're not going to value health. When I was born, when I was raised, to be Hawaiian meant to be second rate, these kids when they're born, they don't feel that or sense that their foundation they grow from is different. That's great. But you know, the economic, the social, the health, those issues, those statistical issues, which are lagging issues, haven't necessarily really changed. But the genesis of the child being born in Hawaii, but the difference between being depressed or proud is shifted. And I know what Thompson is his name, but in back of him was this wonderful double sailing canoe. We have a model of it in our lobby in this show, Native Voices, and I've actually gone sailing on it. They're 70, 68 feet long, wonderful machine. And I didn't understand for the first year or so what they're talking about what it meant. But what it meant to them is to acknowledge that their people came from, you know, 2,500 ocean miles away and found their way to those islands. So be proud. I mean, that's that's what it really means. Whereas if you spend all your life being told you're a ignorant, ugly, ignorant, you know, worthless native, why would you worry about a little extra avoir du poir or the risk of diabetes? I mean, who cares? You're worthless anyway. I mean, you have to get on that before anyone can talk health. When I was born, I mean, we have a son that went to Afghanistan. And he spent his time over there way up and for operation basis where he was. And he had a serious I don't know what they did to him over there. But when he came home he's not the same son that we had. We tried to entice him to have the ceremony, but well, he said, I'll wait to see what happens. You know, I make excuse and so on. So it does affect people. I didn't really lie. This old guy was 0900 in Iwo Jima. And he sent three sons into the army. This last one he's talking about was the bird colonel who came back. How does a person know to have a traditional healing practices or Western? They have dynastatician, hand trimler. That's one of the ceremonies the VA pays for. They, you know, they do hand trimlings and they find out what it is. They also stargazing. They're looking at crystal and things like that. How does the hand trembling thing work? I don't know. It's a socket. It's one of those I don't know. I'm not one of them. So I, but my grandmother did. There's a lot of other people that I know. They go like this and then they put, you know, corn powder and then they're seeking information for this individual to see what is really wrong with the individual. So he's coming pretty close to saying maybe baloney. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about at least what I see is the limitations in the power of information. All toward information is power. Well, it is, but it sure has its limits. This is a... The ability to access nutritious food and the high cost of living is a huge barrier to health in the villages. Lovely girl in the last... And we're seeing that in obesity. We're seeing that in diabetes. And all of those rates are increasing in the rural areas. So are they? So are there any bad attitudes or bad mental models, let's say? Oh, you know, I think, I think we still see that a lot today. Like, you know, feeling like they don't have control over issues in their community. They don't have control over what's happening to them economically, financially. They don't have control over what they can get in the grocery store in rural communities. Why is that? Because of transportation issues. Oh, it's just not there. It's just not there. If you go into a grocery store in St. Paul or St. George, it's very hard to eat in a healthy manner. You don't have fresh vegetables and fruits or if you do, they're three weeks old. They're pretty rough looking. And a lot of cases, getting water is more expensive than getting pop. Terrible. She works for a very good outfit in the Native Alaskan Health Center. And they do a good job. Very good job. We also have a wellness center. I think I'll go... Nutrition. And nutrition, unfortunately, like so many other Pacific islands has taken on the convenience of fast foods, the change in the taste elements of certain foods. That's why, unfortunately, Hawaii is the best market for a Minnesota-based firm called Spam. And it's a common everyday item in so many people, but they don't realize that it's high caloric, high sodium, and the people have not been trained correctly in really what is the most effective day-to-day diet that they can utilize. This guy was the first physician to go out on the first sailing of that boat. I got sued by Hormel way back when we were talking about our diet because it's called Spam, Uncle Spam, because that's been the can that's gone across the Pacific and into all the Indian nations. Cheap, easy, preserved, high nitrogen foods that are affordable. I think I'll go by. Now here's pictures of delivering information, in this case in Uganda, that were sort of against malaria, if you will, out there. And the gall in the upper right is a sort of a one-person army to bring help to Africa. But here's what she encountered. So what information would you want to know? Well, the most simple thing is that malaria is caused by the bite of an off-lease mosquitoes. It gives you this little infection. But I'll tell you, they cannot be persuaded that that's true because they already know that person gets malaria by eating ripe mangoes. So what to do? Well, my one-gall army has made this kind of thing to teach them. So you got to tell them in their language, you got to use pictures, you got to say it again and again. Of course, there is a good medical school, of course, in Uganda. So she works with them and the men and women there do go to the villages. But I'm just saying, if you know in your heart that you get malaria by eating ripe mangoes, then when somebody says hang up these sheets that keep mosquitoes off you when you're sleeping, I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And I was looking around, I didn't bring you a picture of what those mosquito things look like after a year or so. They hang them at the windows for curtains. They use them for wedding gowns. I mean, they're ripped to pieces. Totally ridiculous. So the limitations. Well, without self-respect, there isn't any health seeking. Good diaries in Alaska are pretty damn hard to get. Spam we've already set upon the poor Hawaiians. I'm going to show you about athletics and the Arctic. And I'll just say, without any further preachment, that recruitment of Native Americans to medicine and health careers is going terribly, badly, worse now than 10 years ago, in spite of a lot of trying. So what to do, where to go? Well, this is a place called Hope, Alaska. You'll have to have a good gazetteer to find it at all. But it's a nice little place. Occasionally, go back there, you can feel better. But here's the library. And look, we've arrived at a sale day. And luckily, right next door is the coffee shop. Grounds for Hope. And that's a category of thing I'm going to describe very briefly. I'll show you some grounds for Hope. There's a certain level of accountability when you're with your community. I'm accountable to Marty. I'm accountable to my aunties. I'm accountable to my elders and my community. And if they see me doing something that is hurtful to myself or others, that I can be called on that. When you're part of a Native community, you play a part. There's a role for you. And people are there to tell you that you have to answer to them. And I think it's expected when we're very dispersed and we're not engaging each other, you're able to do things without someone telling you. And you may not know that you're making a bad choice. But when you've got people who hold you to a higher standard and they tell you something, you have respect for them. And you want to make sure that you heed their words and you follow in their footsteps and that you don't disappoint them. That object there is a newborn baby. Not her, but her sisters that she just took on when the sister got wiped out in an automobile. I have a low thyroid level. And I found it in the medical book because they didn't have all the computer thing. And I looked up what was happening, like crying without any reason. And so I went to my doctor and I said, I would like a protein-bound iodine test. Well, well, it was in the medical book. And so good for you. So I asked, you know, the doctor and he gave it to me and found out, you know, that that was causing the weight gain because I'd been normal. So these are old ladies and old ladies home in Seattle, Native Americans. And this gal walks up to her doctor and says, please order a PBI for me, which turned out to be exactly the right thing. So in again, an Alaska picture, this is a village of course. But if you want to be athletic, there's no point talking about stuff like baseball and football because the weather doesn't permit it. But basketball, they do. So here is the champion girls basketball team of this village. And this is a guy from NLM, David Nash, who is a former globetrotter. And they get along very, very well. I want to end up with two things that remind us that there's a little science left through in the world. This is a thing that pleased me. Alan Cormack gave it to me. I got him to give the first outside lecture at AMIA. But he got the Nobel Prize in 63 for the science behind the CAT scan. But he says here, you don't have to read it word for word, but essentially he's saying that when he got interested in this physics field, he assumed that just homogeneous labs and material and x-rays going through them, so-called phantom, that's what they used to standardize x-rays in a physician x-ray lab. But he said he assumed that the inhomogeneous model must surely have been worked out, you know, as if you're not homogeneous. Of course, he got lungs and heart and all that. But he couldn't find it. He looked in the literature and the math thing and he asked everybody and he couldn't find a damn thing about that ever having been done. And so he thought, well, I guess I got to do it myself. So he started writing things down. And essentially to him, that's the intuitively obvious equation. And essentially it says that if a beam is going through this object, now call it a body, if you will, and it'll be slowed up a little better, it'll be absorption by the things in the body. So it won't be quite as strong when it comes out on the other side. Now, if you imagine that, which is what the cats can do, if you imagine that instead of one beam, you've got beams going from every direction imaginable surrounding that person and you sum the absorption in all of those beams, that will be the body, the person that you're making an image of. So again, he assumed someone had done this and he waited 14 years. Now, this is where you got to be, I guess, give a little credit not just to NLM, but to the whole biomedical profession, because we have some place to look. These guys don't. They really honestly don't. So it took 14 years for him to find out that a guy named Radon had in fact solved mathematically the exact same problem, except that he was solving it for the planets and stars. So it was the obverse of that problem, but the same mathematics. So we're lucky. Another lucky is people finally, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, finally in 2005, getting an Nobel Prize for discovering that all this utter nonsense about stress-causing ulcers and all this psychiatric malarkey was nonsense. It was a bacterium and they said when they accepted the prize that the information he obtained from the National Library of Medicine aided his discovery, in fact, they made it possible because he was out thousands of miles from anywhere and really the outback of Australia, thousands of miles from Portland. So we kept peppering him with whatever it is he wanted and what he wanted was articles that showed that inflammation was associated with this ailment. So returning to Alaska, I returned to a nice campfire and I think that some of the times libraries are still powerful enough to aid Nobel Prize winners and when we're not, we're at least trying. So thank you for your attention. And thank you for leaving us on that beach. What a good place to end. That was an amazing talk. I thank you and once again my congratulations for the award. I think we are running a bit late, but let me just wish you safe travels and thank you for joining us here. I hope to see you in December or other places in between. Thanks again.