 My name is John Sutherland. I am the Phasenfeld Head of Environmental and Ecological Engineering. And I would like to welcome you all to the inaugural College of Engineering Distinguished Lecturer. At this point, I would like to introduce Meng Chang, who is, in turn, going to introduce our speaker for today. Dr. Chang is the John A. Edwardsen Dean of the College of Engineering and the Roscoe H. George Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The dean has impacted over 250,000 students via his courses and textbooks, has co-founded several startups and a nonprofit consortium, and is also a recipient of the prestigious NSF Waterman Award, Dean Chang. Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the inaugural Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series. Today is the day that we start this series, and we have been planning this for a while. We know that Purdue Engineering has a proud heritage, a strong momentum, and even brighter future with outstanding talents, faculty, students, staff, and our partners. And we can and we will aim at the pinnacle of excellence at scale. And as one of the initiatives to invite some of the best and brightest minds around the world to Purdue Engineering, we started this series. And we're delighted and excited that we have such an outstanding speaker to kick off the brand new series. And this is being streamed live on Facebook right now. I just tweeted about this important event on this important day. If you don't follow me, it's Purdue and Dean. And the room turns out to be too small. It is too small indeed for today's subject, perhaps, and we are so honored to have one of the leading figures in this field and the very person who coined the term green chemistry to be with us today. Our distinguished lecture professor, Paul Anastas, is the Teresa and H. John Heinz-Third Chair in Chemistry for the Environment at Yale University. And he is appointed across five schools at Yale. And I hope that Professor Anastas also receives five times the salary and benefits, including the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Chemistry, the School of Engineering, Applied Sciences, School of Management, and School of Medicine at Yale. When we speak about interdisciplinary teams, I guess we have one whole team in our speaker here today. Professor Anastas also serves as the founding director of the Yale Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. He has co-founded four companies and serves as a science advisor to several venture capital and private equity firms. Professor Anastas has served in multiple federal administrations, including the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administration. And most recently, as the Senate-confirmed assistant administrator for research and development at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. His research focuses on molecular design, chemical synthesis, catalysis, biofeedstocks, and transformations. He has also published 13 books. And it has been recognized with many awards, including the Heinz Award, the Rachel Carson Prize, the E.O. Wilson Award, and the John J. S. Meadow. And I can keep on going with the credentials. But then again, we're all eager to learn more about green chemistry, the future, and the necessary journey that lies ahead. A big round of applause for our speaker, Professor Anastas. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Appreciate that. I'm hoping I don't need this. I'll be happy to. First of all, let me say thank you for that very kind introduction and the kind invitation. It always astounds me when I get invited to talk about green chemistry. Because I talk about it all the time, and restaurants, and movies, and people say, will you please stop talking about green chemistry? So to be invited. And it's a special honor to have the invitation from John Sutherland, somebody who I believe is one of the true pioneers who has and continues to redefine what environmental engineering really is. So thank you, John. It's a real pleasure and a real honor. My goodness, it's going to be fun. This is going to be fun. Hold on. This is a five-ticket ride. Now, I could go on and on. And I was asking some guidance as to how long should I speak? And I was told, well, remember Socrates. And I said, ah, yes, Socrates. What about Socrates? And he said, well, he could wax on philosophically for hours and days, and they killed him. So I'll be brief in that remark. But it is a topic that I think is important. It's going to be a pleasure to talk with you. But I'm going to start. I'm going to start by telling you what I'm actually not going to talk to you about this afternoon. Because one of the things that I would love to have conversations with each of you about is some of the things that we have going on in my center and the work that we have going on about Yale. But what I'm not going to talk to you about today is I'm not going to spend time on this center. This center is actually founded across the university, across arts and sciences, across engineering, across the environment school, but perhaps at least as importantly, the work that we do with the law schools, school of medicine management, architecture, and yes, even divinity. And why? Because if you're going to truly make a difference at scale on sustainability and changing the trajectory we're on, you're going to need all of the different disciplines, skill sets, and that's what we try to do. I'm not going to talk to you about how we divide our work up into not only just simply advancing the science through fundamental research, but also how you prepare for the next generation, catalyze implementation by working with industry, some of the largest companies, some of the largest manufacturers, and raising awareness by getting out there, getting the message out there, getting it into policies. I'm certainly not going to be talking to you about our research areas of materials, energy, and water systems. I'm not going to spend any time at all, any time at all talking with you about our work on the integrated bio refinery, where we do things like transform lignin and other bio-based feedstocks. The one thing that I will say is I'm guessing in this room there's an understanding, a general recognition, that petroleum didn't conquer the world. Oil didn't conquer the world by saying, oh, we have this black goo. Let's burn it for energy and just do nothing with the rest, but rather by squeezing value out of absolutely every distillation fraction. And yet what we've seen when we talk about the bio-based economy is, well, we'll make biofuels and count on government subsidies to make the value proposition. That transition to a true bio refinery, a true bio-based economy, will require the same kind of technological elegance. Yes, technological elegance that we see in the petroleum past century or more. Biomaterials from that, a wide range of biomaterials, including, as I mentioned, pretty much the only viable source of aromatic chemicals is lignin. And yet we burn 98% of it for its fuel value. We do a lot at low temperatures, low pressures for specific chemicals. Now, I'm not going to talk to you about nanomaterial design except to say it's not all about the size. The toxicity of nanomaterials can be designed to give you all of the function without so many of the hazards. And this is certainly true of molecules in general. And we have established something called the Molecular Design Research Network with a number of other universities to say from basic fundamental chemical principles using quantum modeling, like density functional theory, how do we understand how to design molecules so that they're intrinsically safer from the beginning. OK, last thing I'm not going to talk about is our educational outreach and our work to build these things into policy at the state, federal, and international level in our work with the United Nations or how we spin out companies. Right now we have about four companies that we've spun out of the center because, as we all know, nothing is going to change the world if it doesn't do it at scale. All right. So that's why I'm not going to talk to you about all of that stuff. And why did I spend that time? Because I want almost every one of you, not the faculty, I want almost every one of you to apply to come to the center and work for my lab. That's why. But what we're going to be talking about today is this great grand challenge of sustainability and how it relates to our late supreme chemistry. We're going to be talking about the future. Now, some of us are old enough to remember when we were growing up, the views of the future were utopian. The views of the future was like Star Trek. You were just sitting there waiting on Saturday morning to say, this is the day that my jet pack is going to come in the mail. It was a genuinely utopian of plenty and harmony and things like that. I'm going to suggest that now views of the future, utopia as much as Yogi Berrell likes to say, the future ain't what it used to be. Yeah, because the views of the future, pretty dystopic. Pretty ugly. I mean, you can't look at a projection of the future and movies and culture on TV without saying, oh, it's all a great horrible abyss that we're staring into. Well, I have to tell you, that's not something that I think any of us should be accepting. As much as it's difficult to predict the future, as Niels Bohr always reminds us, the nice thing about giving a lecture on the future is I don't know what neither do you. So we'll all just stop projecting what can happen, what should happen, what needs to happen. But the future I genuinely believe is going to look largely what we design it to look like. The influence that we have over society, civilization, in terms of especially what I'll be focusing on as the material and energy flows of our society and our civilization is going to be affected by design. The 21-word definition of green chemistry, the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances, if that one sentence definition is going to have launched a worldwide community that where companies around the world are using that for their R&D portfolios, then that definition has to have some meaning. The most important word in that definition is the word design, because the important thing is that you can't do design by accident. Everyone in this room knows that design is a statement of human intention. And so when I hear folks say, oh, well, we were doing green engineering and green chemistry back in the 70s because I seem to remember a process where we eliminated cyanide. Can't do design by accident unless you have thoughtful statements of intention. You understand your methods. You have systems under control. Design is going to be the single most important motivator, factor, framework that we're going to have if we're going to get off the unsustainability trajectory that we're on. So I'm going to suggest that tomorrow is going to be measured and we'll look like whether we succeed or fail in our design challenge to move to a sustainable world. What do I mean by that? How do we frame what the design challenge is for 100 years into the future? Well, if we take a look back, let's take a look century or so ago. Let's go back about 100 years or so. In order for us to have realized what today looks like, the imputed design challenge must have been maximize near-term economic gain for a small percentage of the population while destroying the very resources that allowed you to realize that economic gain. Because that is certainly what we have succeeded at doing. That is what we have succeeded at doing. We have been able to realize tremendous economic gains. And anybody who ignores the fact of the productivity of the planet being magnified isn't paying attention. But anybody who ignores the damage to the essential resources necessary to have realized that also isn't paying attention. So that's why I say the imputed design challenge had to have looked something like this. So how are we going to change what our explicit design challenge needs to be in order to effectively make tomorrow look different than today? Now, as we look back, I could reel on and on about the various, not just environmental, but much broader measures of sustainability and talk about all of the things that have been done wrong over the past 100 years. But quite frankly, that's not particularly interesting. Downright depressing. You all know it already. And quite frankly, it's really not useful. Because if we look back and pass judgment on those that came before us, even when we're right, even when our condemnation is 100% justified, it kind of just makes us feel good or feel superior and or anything but superior. What's more important, perhaps, is to look 50 or 100 years into the future and start saying, all right, what are they going to look back on us and correctly judge us on our absurdities? And when I say absurdities, I mean the things that we do believe value today and pursue today that are so demonstrably false and flawed that it will tax our imagination to see why these things are considered acceptable, socially acceptable, intellectually acceptable, legally acceptable. So I do say that today is somewhere between an absurdity and an obscenity. When we talk about the status of the world, the inequity, the situation we are with running an experiment on the only planet that we're ever going to get. So I'm going to talk about the status quo a little bit, not as some kind of nebulous, undefined system, but the way that it really impacts the decisions we make. Definition of status quo, cognitive bias, an irrational preference for the current state of affairs, a body of evidence that shows an irrational preference for the status quo bias frequently affects decision making. So the status quo, the way things are, the way things have been and are continuing to be in so many ways, it's the job of the status quo to preserve itself. When we talk about the need for discovery, for invention, for innovation, which is something that drives all of us as scientists and engineers, we have to recognize that it's important to know that there are forces there to make sure that those changes are being, there's an attempt to make them fit into the status quo box. So we like to think, no, we want to bring about change. And change is necessary. If we are actually in agreement that the current situation of the world in terms of resources and sustainability is on an unsustainable trajectory, then change is the only option. Delta is the only key. So we need to understand those forces opposed to change. I like this New Yorker cartoon. Never ever think outside the box. People want something. But every time a company rejects a superior, perhaps transformative technology because it would disrupt the existing supply chain, that is the status quo defending itself, preserving itself. When a venture capital firm says, well, that doesn't fit into our investment buckets, our models for ROI, that is the status quo defending itself. When a government funding agency that funds basic research says, well, that didn't really fall into the grant solicitation that we wrote. And quite frankly, we don't have reviewers on our panel capable of understanding or judging these proposals. That is the status quo preserving itself. Now, when the status quo does its job, it has impacts. So as much as we'd like to think with scientists and engineers and we believe in innovation and transformation and invention, simply stated, it's also very true that people have a version to change. Lord Kelvin. Lord Kelvin, the inventor of the temperature together we were talking about at lunch, refused to believe that the earth was more than 24 million years old after Rutherford, the great Rutherford, showed him the data, radioisotope data, proving it to be false. Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table of elements, refused to believe in the existence of radiation or even the electron after J.J. Thompson showed him the evidence of the electron's existence. J.J. Thompson, the inventor of the electron, would refuse to believe that the ether was anything other than essential to our lives as the air we breathe after, long after it was disproven. And of course, Einstein's criticism of quantum mechanics that God does not play dice with the universe is legendary. So what am I doing? Just picking on the giants? Picking on our scientific giants? That's not very nice. That's rather uncouth. No, I'm not picking on the giants. What I am suggesting is that even scientific giants who have led us to new levels of knowledge, new understandings, new conceptual frameworks that did not exist before them does not mean that they're going to be able to realize, understand much less advance and adopt the next levels of understanding. Einstein says problems can't be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. So what we're talking about is a new level of awareness. And there is no, quote, better than Isaac Newton's. How many folks are familiar with Isaac Newton's famous quote of, if I can see the horizon, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants. Everybody knows? Everyone takes that saying to say, look at that Isaac Newton. He was given a lot of credit to those giants. Well, there's another reading to that, isn't there? And that is implicitly. That means Newton was saying the giants cannot see the horizon, right? So who's going to be seeing that horizon? That would be you standing on the shoulders of giants, that you have right here at Purdue. So what are we doing to preserve the status quo and academia and the research enterprise and business and industry? I think that's something that needs to be reflected on. Because this is going to affect what research we do, what companies we launch, and whether or not the tapestry of society is going to move towards sustainable or away from it. Progress is a nice word, but changes its motivator and change has its enemies. So one of the things that I just want to spend a minute on is efficiency. Because so much of the discussion around sustainability, so much of the discussion around invention, innovation is around improved efficiency, energy efficiency, material efficiency, et cetera, et cetera. Is it possible that efficiency will help you do the thing you're doing better, but it won't help you do a better thing? Is it possible that just making unsustainable products, processes, systems a little bit less bad, a little bit more efficient, a little bit more material and energy productive is not going to get us off the sustainable trajectory? Is it possible that what we need to be thinking about is the inherent nature, the qualitative nature of the material and energy that we use? What would a genuine transformation like that look like? What do we mean when we talk about inherent nature? Could we move from a society that is reliant on a material basis and transformed from helpful rather than toxic, renewable rather than depleting, and enhancing rather than degrading? Because right now, the material basis of our society and our economy is toxic. When I say toxic, I mean not conducive to life. Directly in the opposite of life, species thriving, ecosystems existing, habitats thriving, renewable rather than depleting, everyone in this room recognizes that whether it's our energy sources, our reliance on fossil fuels, our reliance on rare earth metals, et cetera, et cetera, that we are depleting the basic seed corn, if you will, at a rate that does not allow for the continuation, much less the growth of our current, whether it's economic or societal goals. OK, so if that wasn't big enough picture for you, let's go big picture, shall we? We started 40,000 feet and we go up, all right? Because let's talk about the big picture. If we're saying that there needs to be a transformation on a civilization-wide level in order to have a sustainable society, then we need to understand what is it that brings about transformation at this level, even historically. And I'm going to suggest that this has happened a number of times throughout history. I just throw up the emergence of civilization in the Pyrtle Crescent, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution. There have been times when there have been transformations on a civilization-wide level. And what that extremely complicated transformation involves is often that are the companies a shift in thinking. That shift in thinking is often in the form of how we answer questions. What is noble versus unknowable? What is possible versus impossible? What is our place and purpose in the universe or vis-a-vis a supreme being? When you see these shifts in thinking, they are often let's call it coincident with these civilization types of changes. So here's what I'm going to suggest. I'm going to suggest that there are forces in play right now, even if we limit it to technological forces, that shift the way that we answer these questions. They can shift one or more of the way that we answer these questions. So for instance, and this is even just limiting it to technological forces, big data analytics and synthetics. So there's a lot of folks in this room that know the absolute explosion of data, the exabytes of data that are produced every year where we have shifted from simply looking at data in a reductionist way in order to get our learnings, to get our transform, our data into knowledge, and our data information, information into knowledge, that now we are starting to be able to look at the trends and flows and get the learnings and the knowledge and the insights from those data flows. This capability of big data analytics allows us to have insights on everything from pandemics, to social mores, to predicting markets. This can influence and is influencing how we answer the question, what's knowable versus unknowable? And this is just some of the investments that are being made in different sectors. When we think about ubiquitous integrated sensors, the fact that over the past, shall we call it, 10 or 15 years, the sensor revolution where we can so often now go to, what's the phrase in my friends like to say, smart dust, where we can have sensors that are so cheap, so ubiquitous, integrated, real time, that if I want to know if my dog has run away and that it's, oh, 50 yards from my neighbor's house, so that I call, because he has a sensor on it, that happens all the time. It's such a pain, I can't tell you. But my wife has to chase him, because I'm on West Lafayette, so it's OK. If I want to know what the average heart rate, or the heart rate of the winner of the Beijing Marathon, or the average heart rate of all of the runners in the Beijing Marathon, I can do that in real time and on and on and on. To the point where, again, what is knowable versus unknowable is dramatically impacted. And these sensors are being integrated, well, let's just say everywhere. 3D printing and 3D scanning. I'm guessing there's not a person in this room that hasn't touched and played with 3D printers and 3D scanners, but I have to tell you, being a little older than some of you, just a couple years older than some of you. The first time I did see one of these 3D printers for inexpensive, under $1,000, a 3D printer, and looking at it and recognizing that I had the same feeling that I had when I saw my first PC back in 1984 in as much as I knew that I could never imagine all of the ways that it could change life. So everyone in this room knows that these 3D printers aren't about gadget or missing chess pieces or missing button, but rather how do you, out of MIT and perhaps here at Purdue, printing out functioning kidneys or functioning livers or not big enough for you, how about the house that was built in the Netherlands using 3D printing and 3D printed cars, et cetera, et cetera. Coupling 3D printing with 3D scanning, again, it changes so many of our paradigms about what's possible versus impossible. This is clearly an old slide. Synthetic biology. All right, so how many biologists in the room? Please raise your hand. Biologists, a few. OK, how many folks in this room think that we have created new life, new life forms? Not tweaked, old ones are not cloned, not genetically engineered. How many people believe that we have created new life forms? Anyone who believes that, raise their hand. Anyone who doesn't raise their hand, hang your head. So yes, we have created new life forms. Craig Ventner of the Ventner Institute, really the first one through the minimal genome. Yeah, the minimum genome has done it on a number of occasions out of the Ventner Institute. And about a year ago, I had the opportunity to be in a conversation where I was talking about how he was digitizing the minimum genome necessary for viable life, so not replicating existing life, but new base pair sequences. And beaming that digitized sequence to his lab and the Mojave Desert in order to assemble. So I said, why the Mojave Desert? He said, well, this particular organism consumes CO2 and it generates oxygen, and the Mojave Desert is Mars. So that was interesting. I'm going to suggest that, again, this comes down to our role in the universe, what we see as possible versus impossible. And finally, artificial intelligence. I happen to be good friends with Dave Ferrucci, the inventor of Watson or the person that led the team that invented Watson for IBM. And he said, most folks seem to be thinking, he's since left IBM, but it says most folks in AI seem to be thinking that within the next decade or so, we'll have an entity with an IQ of 100. And if you have something with an IQ of 100, what's the barrier to 500 and 5,000? And can any of us imagine what an IQ of 5,000 even is? So let's pause and just think about over the past 10 or 15 years. The price of computer memory, price of memory, plunged to almost zero. Memory was essentially free. Information was essentially free. Knowledge is three clicks away on the internet. Now, we could have a really good debate over what the effect of that has been. Has the quality of knowledge gone up? Has the quality of information and awareness gone up? Or are we so flooded with information and knowledge and data, certainly? That our biggest challenge is curation and have humans shown themselves up to the task of adequate curation of all of that information. Now, pause and say, what if thought becomes dirt cheap? What if thought becomes free so that I can hand you any book, any song, any poem, any idea, any invention? You have no way of knowing whether or not it is invented by a human or a machine. So when we pause and think about artificial intelligence, and I will say that Elon Musk believes artificial intelligence may be the end of the world. I don't know if he's right or wrong. But what I will say is any one of these areas, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, scanning, ubiquitous integrated sensors, any one of them can affect the way that we answer those questions about what's knowable, what's possible, and what our role is. Together, in an interplay, I'm going to suggest that perhaps none of us in this room can begin to understand how those are going to affect the future. Because those can lead us in tremendously powerful new directions in cascading positive sequences or not. And the difference between whether or not it's going to be a positive cascade or not is going to be the frameworks in which we do that. So in other words, great transformations come when we have new perspectives and new awareness, that new level of awareness that Einstein talked about. I will suggest that green chemistry is a new perspective and a new awareness on the material basis of the character and the inherent nature of our society and our economy. For many years, green chemistry, green engineering has been perhaps thought of as a way of making things less bad, less toxic, less wasteful, more efficient, useless energy. What we're seeing is a new understanding that this is not about doing things less bad, making something a little more regulatory compliant or something like that. It's about how do you invent things that haven't existed before with performance and function that we haven't thought about in the way that we've thought it before? So yes, the journals are filled to the brim with new inventions, new science, new perspectives. But is business adopting green chemistry this new model? Yeah, these are just some of the ones that have green chemistry built into their business DNA, their business plans. Now if I want to stand up here in front of you and say, green chemistry has the potential to affect all these different industry sectors, defense and aerospace, pharmaceuticals, electronics, agriculture, and on and on, that would be a bold statement, and I'm not saying that. I'm saying it already has affected all of these industry sectors with award-winning technologies represented by the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. Why? Because at the molecular level, the molecules don't care at all whether or not they're going to be a glue or a circuit or a paint or a medicine or a pesticide. They just have their basic physical chemical properties ready to be transformed or manipulated for good or evil. And if you have a conceptual framework from getting new function, new performance, and oh, yeah, it just happens to be more sustainable, well, all to the good. So at the end of the day, it all comes through down to the breakthroughs, down to the science. And some of the science is everything from biobase materials, new solvent systems, ionic liquids, biofuels, reactor designs, supercritical fluids, and on and on and on. And every one of these has been a building block toward making a more sustainable material framework. However, I'm going to suggest that while all of this work is nice, and I'm just happy to be part of this worldwide community that's done this work, it's scratching the surface. It's time for act two. What we're talking about is introducing new approaches. So some of the questions that I'm just going to wrap up and answering, well, not answering, asking is some of the challenges that we're looking at. So when we look at the fact that somewhere around 95% or so of all of the synthetic materials that are made, are petroleum based, asking the question, what is going to be the way that we think about our biobase feedstocks? Will it be that we will rely on renewables and only save those precious fossil feedstocks for those things where renewables are not possible or not optimal? I'd love to go on and on talking about this because there is so much elegance and complexity to take advantage of in these biobase feedstocks. And because we have 150 years of petroleum based infrastructure, industrial infrastructure, that what comes to mind to people's idea? Oh, let's take the biobase feedstocks, strip off all of the elegance and complexity so that it looks like oil. Why? Because it's drop-in. Drop-in's great, right? Drop-in means that you don't have to have capital investment. You don't have to put more pipe in the garbage. Is that what elegance looks like? Is that what real transformative innovation looks like? Or is that what the status quo looks like when it's preserving itself? Synthetic methodologies. Right now, we think about how we transform molecules, whether it be biobased or petroleum based. And we transform them. And now this is a room where folks, I don't know this, of the material that goes into a manufacturing scheme, process, across all of manufacturing, you can't answer this John, what percentage of all of that material winds up immediately as waste? I'll take, let's see, I'd like a guess from you. Sir, yeah? 70%. 70%, you? 75, sir. 90. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. 90 plus percent immediately as waste. And of course, because of so many. Now, at the molecular level, what we do is we put together our molecules so that the vast majority of it goes immediately into waste, yet the whole concept of atom economy, making sure that every atom that enters into a synthetic methodology winds up in your product, that's something that we need to have as a definition of synthetic elegance. Because that can, not always will, can cascade throughout the manufacturing processes. Right now, we have catalysts. Catalysts were maybe the first green chemistry because in addition to the fact that it uses less energy, uses less material, does it more efficiently, it generates less waste. And oh yeah, by the way, there isn't a chemical or petrochemical or specialty chemical company in the world that would be existing, economically viable without catalysis. And yet, we don't really invent catalysts from first theoretical principles. We kind of find, oh, that metal work kind of good. Maybe we'll stick some decorations on it. Maybe we'll tweak it. Maybe we'll, yeah, getting a better level, first level understanding of catalysis is something that I'd love to get into a long discussion about. Will we be multifunctional and designed to separate from the product? Solvents, everyone in this room appreciates solvents. But how can we get our solvents systems in 2018? I mean, one of the companies I own is a solvents company. How do we get our solvents in 2018 to not merely facilitate energy and mass transfer, but also to genuinely catalyze and facilitate self-separations? Don't get me started on separations. OK, get me started on separations, and I'll go all day. And will we be able to, rather than just selecting from a couple dozen solvents, will we actually be able to design our solvents to respond to imparted stimulus? Have obedient solvents? We tweak and design almost everything about our manufacturing processes. And then when it comes to one of the crucial elements of solvents, we say, well, here's a list of a couple of dozen to choose from. Sanity, biomimicry. So we have a century and a half of recognizing that we want to make our feedstocks and our reagents more and more reactive. Because if you make them more and more reactive, your reactions are going to go faster. Maybe you can save some energy. All the only problem with that is reactivity is extremely closely linked to toxicity. And when you start looking at how nature does it, nature, which can be deadly when it chooses to, it just does it more elegantly. It doesn't just have clouds of phosgene and chlorine and lakes of cyanide. No, it imparts reactivity at the time and the place that it wants it, using geometric contortion in order to create strain. And we need to learn some of these lessons and impart them and have it be the rule rather than the elegant exception. And weak force interactions. I gotta tell you, as a chemist, I can be critical, but for a couple hundred years, we flex our muscles and say, oh, we are masters of the covalent bond. We know how to make anything that you can draw. And yet at the same time, we all have to recognize that when you look at nature, so much of performance, so much of the character of the properties derived from weak force interactions, not covalent bonds. So many of the synthetic pathways are driven by weak force directions. Now, we know how to describe things about weak force interactions, but can we design them? Do we have the same mastery of weak force interactions as we do with the covalent bond so that we can use it as a design tool? And I'm going to suggest that no, we don't. There's, again, a sliver of brilliant folks working on this area. I can say that because I don't work on this area. The molecular basis of hazard. Do we have a fundamental first principle understanding of the molecular basis of hazard, of toxicity? The short answer is no, and that's what our molecular design research network is all about, and will we be able to design our molecules? So when we design our molecules to be a great adhesive, a great conductor, a good glue, a good plasticizer, all this different functionality, yet do we have the design guidebook about how to design things to not be toxic? No, why? Because the people that make the molecules don't talk to the people that assess their toxicity. Quick rant. So this astounds me. Here we are. It's 2018. If I was standing up here and I said, I'm a chef, I make the most delicious meals that people travel from far and wide to eat at my restaurant. Yes, people get poisoned and die from my meals, but there are other people working on sustainable cooking. You would think I was insane. I'm a car designer. I make luxurious and fastest cars in the world. Yes, the tires fall off and they explode unexpectedly, but there are other people working on sustainable cars. You would think I was insane. But if I stand here and I say, I'm a synthetic chemist, I make molecules and synthetic transformations that are elegant and efficient. Yes, people are dying from the products of the molecules that I make, but there are other people working on green chemistry. The same reason those first two things are absurd, the last one's absurd. And yet for too long, that's been the case. Complex systems. I'm just going to say we need to be at least as comfortable with complexity as we are with reductionism. We are profoundly uncomfortable with complex systems. And this cascades through our metrics in the way that we measure success. I'll take that as a question if need be. Without transdisciplinarity, we're going to pretty much get what we always got. We are not going to solve the complex problems that we're facing by individual disciplines. All of us. All of us as scientists. And engineers and technically competent people are suffering today by our lack of ability to communicate and communication does not mean publishing a journal paper. Okay, we're going to press on with the most pressing problems listed here. But what we really need to do is work in fusion with all of the disciplines coming together because systems thinking is essential. Nobody's talking about replacing reductionism, but coupling it with integrative systems thinking is essential because you can't make a structure that stands with just bricks or just mortar in order for it to last. Can't beat this quote. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it's hitched to everything else in the universe. John Muir, it's all hitched. And the more that we think that our piece of the puzzle and pursuing absolute truth is the only piece and we don't see the puzzle, we're not going to get on the sustainable trajectory. Do I think we can? I think we can. I think we will because we must. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you, sir. Thank you. We have time for perhaps one or two questions. If you do have class, please leave quietly, but we do have time for a couple of questions. Hello, professor. You talked about how status quo can slow down change and prevent us from making changes that we want to make. But then you also talked about how the industrial revolution was also a transformative event which didn't quite, which caused a lot of negative effects with positive effects as well. So how can we ensure that if we undergo a transformation right now, how do we ensure that it will not have any negative effects? So we have to understand the fundamental framework of sustainability. I mean, if we were to guess and say, oh, here's an innovation. I wonder what it will do. That's probably not a good one. So this reason we're talking about complexity and understanding how systems are linked, that's going to be tremendously important. Those three points of renewable rather than depleting, helpful rather than toxic and enhancing rather than degrading, we need to have a framework where that is actually how we define performance. We have so narrowly defined performance that we talk about functional performance. Oh, is this a good red dye? Is this a good plastic? Well, we don't want just a good red dye. We want a good red dye that doesn't cause cancer. We want to have a good plastic and plasticizer that doesn't result in endocrine disruption and birth defects. So understanding the fundamental basis and goals and building that into our design protocols coming back to the beginning of the talk, how you define that sustainability challenge, that design challenge, that will be how we avoid doing the same things over and over. And it's not easy. All right, before we get to you, I want to remind everyone we have a panel session tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock. We're going to continue this kind of great discussion. It's in 3-1-3-8 in the active learning center. All right, speak up. So you were talking about how our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels, electricity infrastructure. So when it comes to integrating it with renewable infrastructure, there are a lot of problems, like supply and demand problems. And then whenever we are trying to integrate, there are a lot of policy makers issues. And then there are a lot of incubators. And then there are a lot of Whenever we are trying to integrate, there are a lot of policy makers issues. And then there are a lot of incubate firms that don't want new entrants, no competition. So how to get around that to make a more sustainable choice when it comes to energy? Yeah, and this is not, this is not in any way a critique. It's just, that is what the status quo looks like when it's preserving itself, right? And so when we start thinking about the various energy sources, and we say, well, we have an energy grid, and we have an energy grid. Everybody's red flags are to be going on. What do you mean, an energy grid? The energy grid. Sorry, last I checked, we're swimming in energy, right? Everything about us, every atom in our body, we're swimming in energy. And what we're talking about is how you access, convey, and realize, and utilize this energy. So, is the purpose to get energy and the performance of energy, or is the purpose to be compatible with the energy grid? Clearly, I'm going to, guess that you don't believe that we need to be, you know, beholden to the energy grid. So what does that mean? It means, well, for one thing, that, you know, in gross terms, distributed energy, for instance. It means a whole lot of different types of energy, energy harvesting technologies, rather than, you know, we talk about generating our energy. I understand we're running low on time and I'll be happy to talk a lot more. But most of all, what it means is not taking the status quo, including the status quo infrastructure, as unchangeable. Let's thank Dr. Ernest's one last time. Thank you.