 Hello, my name is Susan Pepin. I serve as the Director of Health and Clinical Partnerships at Arizona State University. I want to welcome you all to the first of our four events in our Biomedical Innovation Series. I want to thank the Arizona Biomedical Research Center for sponsoring the series and for Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise for the work in fostering innovation through research and discovery. The structure today will include remarks followed by discussion. If you have questions, please write them in the questions slot at the bottom of the screen, and we will try to get to them. Now it's really my great pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Dr. Susan Hockfield. I've been looking forward to this talk for weeks. Dr. Hockfield is the first life scientist, that is biologist, to lead the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. Under her historic presidency, the number of women and underrepresented minorities at the university soared at the undergraduate, at the graduate, and at the faculty level. In addition to her steadfast commitment to diversity, President Hockfield spearheaded numerous transformative projects during her tenure. She launched the wildly successful MIT Energy Initiative, which raised over $350 million toward building a more sustainable future and attracted the attention of President Obama. In fact, Dr. Hockfield's presidency was the most successful period of fundraising in MIT history, raising nearly $3 billion total. She also took the lead on campus development and in keeping with MIT's entrepreneurial spirit, fostered Kendall Square into what it is today, an innovation hub of labs, research centers, and corporate offices located on some of the most valuable real estate in Massachusetts. A neuroscientist by training, Dr. Hockfield championed many breakthrough emerging convergence institutes, which were founded, including the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where she remains a member, and the Reagan Institute of MGH MIT in Harvard, founded to accelerate progress against HIV AIDS. Her book, The Age of Living Machines, How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution, explores how radical new convergence technologies from mind reading bionic limbs to cancer-detecting nanoparticles will address some of the greatest humanitarian medical and environmental challenges of our time. Importantly, Dr. Hockfield reveals how these innovations will touch every industry from energy and manufacturing to health care, agriculture, and beyond. The book was just awarded the American Institute of Physics 2020 Science Communication Award, which recognizes work on reshaping our world. Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Hockfield was professor of neurobiology at Yale University, where she became dean of graduate studies and later the provost. Dr. Hockfield also held Marie Curie visiting professorship at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She served as US science envoy to Turkey with the US Department of State and the inaugural co-chair of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a task force of government industry and academic leaders. Well, we're very honored to have Dr. Hockfield with us today. And with that, I will turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Sue, for that really lovely and generous introduction. I'm delighted to have the chance today to share with this biomedical innovation series. Some of my thoughts on our shared possible future. As Sue laid out, I've had the amazing privilege of leading one of the world's great universities. And from that seed, I had a breathtaking perspective on the science and technology frontier. It's a frontier of ideas and discoveries, of applications and more. And what I saw from that perch was really astonishing. And today I wanna share with you a glimpse of the very probable technology future. So I'm gonna share my slides, but then I'll return back on the screen for the Q&A and I welcome your questions on any topic that I may touch on and beyond. So let me share my slides now. Great. So I hope you can all see the slides. Much of what I'm gonna talk about today, I've captured in the book that Sue mentioned, The Age of Living Machines. And I would say at the outset that I am really optimistic about our possible future. But unfortunately, I can't say that without also saying that I think we probably all agree that right now our future looks a bit bleak. So today I'm gonna share both my optimism and my caution because I think both of them need our attention. We face some really serious challenges, some of which I've listed here. Let me just describe them in a little bit of detail in terms of healthcare access, accuracy and cost. In the United States, we spend around 18% of GDP on healthcare. And I have to say, we have some absolutely miracle drugs and some new technologies. We really need to do better. We're spending a lot of money for insufficiently good products. The second topic, the need for sufficient sustainable energy. It is anticipated that when our current population of about 7.5 billion grows to the anticipated almost 10 billion people by 2050, those 10 billion people, their energy demands are gonna be double the energy demands of today. And as you all well know, we are already not doing a good enough job at meeting our current energy demands sustainably. And on the water and food front, my goodness, anyone who reads the news understands that today we don't have enough of either food or clean water, but here's the really scary thing. If we're gonna only continue to use today's food production technologies, that would require to feed 10 billion people additional farmland equivalent to the entire landmass of both South America and Africa. That is clearly not a viable scenario. So this problem that I've just laid out, the problem of a growing populations rapidly increasing demand on the planet's resources, it's not a new problem. Many of you have heard the story before. In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote an amazing track called an essay on the principle of population. And he did a demographic study of Britain and Europe and he showed many things, but most importantly, that the then current rate of increase in population far outstripped the then rate of growth and agricultural productivity. As he looked at data historically, he realized that over history, there are periods of rising population and then periods of population decline. And what he documented was that those population rises always ended in tears. War, pestilence, famine, invariably, reduced a very high population to an appropriate level that could be supported by the resources. In 1798, Malthus was sounding a warning cry that they were about to experience the same thing. But at that time, Malthus was wrong. Why was he wrong? Because new technologies saved the day. Four field crop rotation was being implemented by Britain's farmers and there was a vibrant trade in a new source of fertilizer that those seafaring pioneers had found in pursuit of the more interesting things they were looking for, tobacco, gold, jewels. They came upon islands that were basically piles, piles, of Berguano, a very effective fertilizer. So one of the new technologies of the early 19th century was trade and fertilizer. It produced incredible growth in agricultural productivity and what followed was an even greater growth in population. But that time, new innovations of the day got that population out of the Malthusian dilemma. So today we face another Malthusian dilemma and I suggest that we can get out of the problem we're in today with the same solution. We can invent our way out. But how do we chart our course to a better future? How do we defeat Malthus again? Now, I don't know about you but my crystal ball gets pretty foggy after about five years out and that's not far enough away. So as president of MIT, I adopted a different strategy to imagine the future. And here's the way I thought about it. If we can understand the future we're living in today and how we got to this future, perhaps we can map a path to the future we'll be living in tomorrow and chart a better course to that future. So what is the future we're living in today? So if I were with you in person, I'd be waving around my iPhone and ask you how many of you have one of these? Inevitably that elicits quite a giggle from the audience. Of course everyone has a cell phone and of course everyone today in everyday life accesses a whole host of digital technologies. These digital technologies are the major technology story of the 20th century, the transformational technologies of the 20th century. So there is a host of technologies coming out of this strand that have transformed our lives. So I'm gonna give you some of my thoughts. First, I'm gonna discuss how we got to the digitally enabled world that we enjoy today. And I'm gonna make the case for these technologies being in our hands because of the 20th century's convergence of physics with engineering. I call it convergence 1.0. I'm gonna offer a view of the history of the digital world. It's a story of discovery to marketplace technologies. Then I'm gonna describe what I think is tomorrow's likely future, tomorrow's transformational technologies. I'm gonna describe a new convergence, convergence 2.0, the convergence of biology with engineering, which is now accelerating. And to my mind, promises technologies as impactful and as transformational as the digital technologies of today. And then I'm gonna close with some thoughts on what we need to do to accelerate those technologies. Bottom line is if we want to defeat Malfuse again, we need to innovate. So historically, if we think about where did the digital technology revolution come from? It's a product of 19th century physics. There were many participants in the fundamental discoveries of physics. I'm only representing two here. On the left is Michael Faraday. On the right is JJ Thompson. We think about the amazing experiments and observations that Michael Faraday made as he studied electricity and electromagnetism. It's clear he was studying the behavior of physical forces, but he didn't know what those forces were. It wasn't until Thompson discovered the electron in 1897 and his colleagues discovered the other components of the physical universe that those forces had particular objects, but what I would call a parts list behind them. So these physicists of the 19th century, including Marie and Pierre Curie and a host of others put together the, became to understand the elements of these forces that gave rise to the physical properties. As I said, a physics parts list. Now, my colleagues and friends, the engineers liked nothing better than a parts list and engineers will pick up a parts list and put them to work. And indeed, engineers did put to work the physics parts list that was revealed by 19th century physicists and put them together into the new technologies that became known as the electronics industry. The electronics industry evolved and produced successor industries, the computer and information industries. And I would say this convergence of the physics parts list with engineering became the technology, the major technology story of the 20th century. Now, something that I probably need not remind you, but if you think about what motivated Faraday Thompson and others to study what they were studying, frankly, wasn't so that you and I could have cell phones in our pockets and GPS's in our cars. It was simply curiosity about how the physical world worked. Now, for all that we might believe in discovery science, there are always doubters. And I'm gonna show you a bit of a story that may be apocryphal, but it's reported that William Gladstone who was chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, essentially secretary of the treasury, asked Faraday, why would you waste your time and people's money in doing this kind of experimental work that you're doing? What's it good for? And Faraday is reported to have replied, I have no idea what it's gonna be good for, but why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it. And of course, Faraday was right. When I bought my new iPhone not so long ago, I did pay some tax on it and tax on every other digital device that benefits my life and yours. So I described the electronics industry was coming along at a reasonable pace, but then it was dramatically accelerated and accelerated by the time-honored technology catalyst, war. The demands of World War II accelerated the development of electronics and its successors. And as you all probably know, it's the best technology that wins wars. Napoleon recognized this when he repurposed the Ecole Polytechnique in 1805 to be a school that would produce better arms for his battles. During World War II, there were mass investments in research and development and it led to technology miracles. To mention just a few radar, many historians consider radar to be the war-winning technology. Sonar, the atomic bomb, considered to be the war-ending technology. But in addition to those technologies, the technology burst during World War II also laid the foundation of today's computing, of GPS, of the internet. As shown here, a photograph of a van of our bush who led the technology development effort for World War II applied science and technology to warfare in an incredibly productive way. As World War II was joined to a close, President Roosevelt asked Bush to prepare a post-war plan. Bush's thesis called Science, The Endless Frontier is an amazing track, an amazing blueprint for the second half of the 20th century. His basic message back to FDR is that the lessons we learned in the wartime application of science can be profitably applied in peace. And what Bush advocated was that rather than coming out of the war, facing bankruptcy, every nation comes out of a war, having expended all of their fiscal resources, the general response to that is to close down to get poor, to build back those resources. And Bush said, that's not what we should do. We should continue to invest in technology development because he foresaw the technologies of the second half of the 20th century if we were to continue to make investments as we did during the war. Well, FDR was enthusiastic about this, but FDR died. And his successors were less enthusiastic about extending the debt of the nation. So Bush's plan was moving along a little bit slowly until Sputnik came floating across the sky around the world. The Russians had built, beaten the United States into space. With that, then President Kennedy announced a national ambition, the race for the moon. It was a technological impossibility. We didn't have any of the technologies in hand when Kennedy announced this race, but there were many, many benefits of this race, not only the technologies that came out of it but the benefit of a national shared ambition. Kennedy made any number of speeches about this and one of the ones that I call out because it really does touch me quite deeply. He says, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they're easy but because they're hard and because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. So Kennedy set out a national ambition, a far reaching catalyst for technology, education and industry. And at this point, the story really does get a little personal. People often ask me, how did I get into science? How did I get to the presidency of MIT? And the simple answer is that I grew up under the shadow of Sputnik but it wasn't a shadow or a fear. It was a bright beacon of inspiration of what science can bring to the world. I grew up with three sisters and we had the enormous good fortune to have parents who didn't limit our possibilities, didn't limit our ambitions, telling us that the only boundaries that we faced were boundaries set by our own interests and our own hard work. So now to get even more personal, my mother kept much of our schoolwork and pulled something out as I was actually in my final years at Yale and demonstrated my awareness of these things when I was very young. This is an essay, an illustrated essay that I did when I was in second grade. I show it to you with some embarrassment. It's very clear at the time that I was not an artist. I was not a spelling whiz, nor was I Ramarian. I can tell you that my sisters have those talents more than I do. But what I did understand even as a second career was the magnificent power of science. I was inspired by the race to the moon and it inspired not just me but a generation of children. It fueled a national and seemed to be international ambition and it has illustrated for me the power of a shared ambition. In addition, when I suggest that maybe you could figure out how to go to the moon but it would be fun, I understood the marvelous paradox of doing something that you love. And that thing also improves the lives of others. So when we, all of this race to the moon fueled this convergence of physics with engineering and this slide I'm showing some of the products but the products are all around us. So this is the history of the technologies that now permeate every nook and cranny in our lives. But what's next? How are we gonna defeat Malthus this time? Where will the future come from? Well, there's another convergence building on the 20th century convergence with now with biology. But in order for biology to participate in this convergence, biology needed a parts list and the biology didn't have a parts list during all of these technological miracles the development of the convergence of physics with engineering. It needed a couple of revolutions, excuse me. The first revolution was the revolution of molecular biology. Molecular biology began to develop a parts list. I'm showing some of the figures but there were dozens of some and many of them former physicists who joined in this revolution of molecular biology. DNA was isolated and came to be understood as the material that mediated heredity. And DNA's translation into RNA and RNA's ability to drive the production of proteins really changed the entire course of biology. Biology essentially then had a parts list. Molecular biology provided a unifying concept of fundamental understanding of biology that was true for all living organisms absolutely transformational. It gave us products, a way to discover particular disease genes and a way to target particular therapies to those particular genes. However, molecular biology was insufficient insufficient to do a one by one analysis of genes. Molecular biology needed to be powered up by another revolution, genomics. So genomics was the ability again pairing with a great product of convergence 1.0 computation to understand genes not one by one by many, by many gave us insight into complex diseases allows us to understand evolution and many, many other things. This diagram in the red line on the lower side of this graph shows the rapid acceleration of the power of genomics and what it reflects is the cost of sequencing a human genome. You can compare the rapidity of technology development to many things. Here I'm just showing it compared to Moore's Law as you know Moore's Law is the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years an incredibly rapid technology development. However, the way I've mapped it here the development of the power of genomics has been even more substantial. The first human genome took 10 years to sequence at a cost of $150 million. Today, you can sequence a human genome for less than $1,000 and my colleagues across the street from the Koch Institute at the Broad Institute tell me that today they can sequence a human genome in six minutes incredibly rapid development. This has given us not just a parts list but the tools for getting our hands around the parts list which leads me to the third revolution which is the convergence of biology with engineering convergence 2.0. Now, the fundamental concept of this convergence 2.0 is using nature's genius using biological parts to solve many of our most pressing challenges. For example, under the water picture the water picture shows a channel that exists in all of our cells and in most organisms that passes water in and out of a cell. This channel, this protein was identified by Peter Ogre for which he won a Nobel Prize but our cells have the ability to filter water in only water in and out. One of the possible applications of convergence 2.0 is using the cells water channel to make commercial water filters. Now, I'm not going to have time to describe all of these future technologies coming out of convergence 2.0. I'm not only going to describe two of them but many of the other technologies are described in my book and I'm happy to answer questions about them today. One thing I would note is computation while I'm not going to talk too much about it in the main part of my talk, computation is playing an increasing role in all of these innovations that combine biology with engineering. So the first issue I want to talk about is healthcare and how one example of convergence of biology with engineering can change our approach to healthcare. As I mentioned earlier we spend 18% of GDP on healthcare but we are too reactive and too late. One of my colleagues says we shouldn't call it healthcare we should call it sick care and indeed we're treating people when they're sick not before they get sick. If we think about cancer there are nine and a half million cancer deaths worldwide. In the United States we spend about $175 billion a year treating cancer. Now, we have some amazing ways of approaching this problem right now. However, let's just think about what the best strategy is against cancer. The best strategy is prevention. The reduction in smoking has dramatically reduced deaths from one cancer. And if everyone more sunscreen when they went out in the sun and I'm as guilty as the next person we have a similarly dramatic reduction in skin cancer. Now, even if we did all the prevention even if we all took vaccines against the viruses that we know to cause cancer there would still be cancer. So the second best strategy is early detection. If we could detect cancer when it's just a small number of cells and eliminated at that point it will be far less expensive and far more likely of a cure. And while we have some good diagnostic techniques today they're still very late. So to move detection earlier my colleague Sangeeta Bhatia shown here Sangeeta is a clinician and a nanotechnologist and she's been thinking about how she could accelerate advanced detection earlier. How could she make diagnostics that are earlier, more accurate and frankly less expensive? And she's come up with an idea of again using natures genius making synthetic biomarkers. And her strategy is illustrated here on the right hand side of this diagram in the dark turquoise that little kind of you know looks like a knot of thread. That is a nanoparticle that she's designed. She's decorated that nanoparticle with little spikes and each of that those spikes is a protein that she has engineered. And those spikes have two components a little gold component that represents a particular protein sequence. And then it ends with a little turquoise swirl. That particular protein sequence shown in gold is the sequence that is attacked by cancer. It's attacked by cancer enzymes. Enzymes are proteins that have specific functions and that function is to cut other proteins. Cancer moves around the way normal cells do not escapes from one organ and moves to the next because these cancer enzymes chew up the material that normally exists between cells and prevents normal cells from moving around keeps normal cells in their place. Cancer misbehaves. And one of the reasons that misbehaves is because it has these enzymes. So Sangeeta has designed these synthetic biomarkers to carry these gold spikes that represent the site that cancer enzymes attack. You get these nanoparticles you get infused with the nanoparticles and you don't have cancer. They remain intact and pass out of your system. If you do have cancer, the cancer enzymes will clip these spikes at those little gold plate gold sequences releasing those turquoise circles. Those turquoise circles have been designed to be very small so small that they find their way back into the bloodstream and so small that the kidney sees them as waste products and filters them into the urine. Urine has very little protein under normal circumstances. And so any protein that's there, for example that protein that's been delivered by these synthetic biomarkers can be read out. So what Sangeeta has as a urine-based diagnostic test for cancer. Two points, you may say, well, how is that possible? How can you do that? And I would simply say that we already have a highly accurate, very inexpensive easily accessible diagnostic for urine. It's called the over-the-counter pregnancy test. We can do this. And Sangeeta has used similar technology for cancer detection. In experimental animals, she can detect cancer that are one tenth the size of current best-in-class cancer detection strategy. That would be a game changer in terms of getting cancer under control. Sangeeta's company, Glensbio, is at work on this and they are currently in clinical trials to see if this approach could be a viable way for detecting cancer earlier and less expensively. Now, I'm sure that all of you have been as shall we say as agonized as I have been, as embarrassed as I have been, to see the nation stumble through insufficient diagnostics for in the face of this COVID pandemic. We have a diagnostics deficit. We need diagnostics that are early, that are accurate, that are fast, that are cheap, that are sensitive, and that can be carried out in order, tens of millions or hundreds of millions that are abundant. It will perhaps be a logical step for you to think about as Sangeeta has, which is that not only does she have a blood into urine diagnostic tests, but she's also working on a breathalyzer test for respiratory diseases. Her design is to be able to discriminate different kinds of pneumonia so that you could rapidly determine what the best therapy is. And this modification of her synthetic biomarkers is shown on the left. And the idea is, in this case, the sequence that she's aiming at are the little blue hatches and the signal to be detected are the little orange, sort of orange hatches and what's being released are the orange dots. The disease enzyme are these now green pacman molecules and the idea is the individual will inhale these intact nanoparticles. And if there is a disease, those green disease specific enzymes will clip off those little orange dots, the markers, which are exhaled and then analyzed by a breathalyzer. They're on their way, again, a different company be developing these breathalyzer approaches to diagnostics. And let's just say COVID is a disease that has a specific enzyme. And so they're thinking about modifying this kind of diagnostic for COVID. The second example I wanna offer is an example for energy. Energy is perhaps one of the most daunting challenges that we face. As I mentioned before, our energy demand will double by 2050. And already we're not doing a good job of providing the energy we need today sustainably. Angie Belcher, another colleague of mine from the Koch Institute, is fascinated by nature's genius. She's a biomaterials engineer and in her hands in this photograph she's holding an abalone shell. When she was caught in college at University of California, Santa Barbara, she loved walking the shoreline. I love walking the shoreline, but she walked the shoreline with a purpose. She was fascinated by the abalone, a sea snail that builds its shell from the components in the ocean in which the snail lives. The shells are incredible technologies. They're strong, they're lightweight. When the abalone dies, its shell disintegrates back into its component parts, ready for the next abalone or the next sea creature to build its shell. And the puzzle that Angie thought about as she walked the beach was if abalone can build the technology they need without contaminating the world around them, why can't we? Why can't we use nature's genius to build the technology we need? One of her main interests is in energy. And Angie is as fond of solar and wind as I am and you are, but truth be told, the rate limiting technology for alternative energy technologies is not the solar cell and it's not the wind blade. The rate limiting technology is energy storage, it's batteries. We have pretty good batteries today, but the way they're made is not sustainable and the materials they're using is not sustainable to meet our demands. Angie has used lab strains of viruses called M13 that's shown on the right side of the slide above that car, that big squiggly model. And what she has said, thought to herself is can we persuade viruses to do the work of organizing battery components? Standard batteries are made at very high temperature and emit all kinds of toxic byproducts in the manufacturing process. And Angie wonders where their viruses could do the job of organizing batteries better and indeed they can. She has rapidly evolved the M13 virus as she calls it and she's rapidly involved not just to bind to what viruses normally bind to organic materials on that surface of our cells, but to bind to inorganic materials, the kinds of materials that are needed in batteries. So her modified M13 viruses can bind cold walled or lithium or single walled carbon nanotubes. And then they're essentially crystalline structure allows them to organize themselves into very, very dense organization, very dense virus structures. Now the viruses are no longer living that she then packages into coin cell battery covers. That's what she's holding inside the abalone shell. Her virus enabled batteries have the same charge density and the same discharge recharge cycle capability of state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries. And most importantly, her batteries are made at room temperature without any toxic byproducts. Truly a game changer. Even more importantly is Angie is now working on batteries that don't use lithium and don't use cobalt. I'm sure many of you have read about the limiting state of those components. So we need better batteries. We need batteries that are made with cleaner technologies and we need batteries that are as efficient or more efficient than current state-of-the-art technologies. Again, a real game changer using nature's genius to achieve the technologies that we need today. Now I talked with some facility about bringing biology and engineering together and it sounds easy, but it's not. It's really hard. There is an innovator's dilemma as described by Clay Christians and the late Clay Christians and sadly, which simply says if we've got technology that's good enough it's very hard for new technologies to permeate that field. And frankly, bringing biologists and engineers together is really hard. They speak different languages. They have different approaches and our current institutional structures really don't facilitate this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration. And beyond our institutions, if you think about our funding agencies, they're set up for a particular purpose. The NIH funds biology and biomedical research. The NSF funds engineering and computation. The Department of Energy funds physics. The earth are important agencies but they are not adapted to cross disciplines. So how do we make this work? I'm gonna give you one example from MIT just to give you a sense of what you possibly can do to bring different disciplines together around a shared ambition. This is a picture of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. We started the Koch Institute in 2007. The building was built in 2011. Now importantly, everyone in the building shares the ambition of accelerating progress against cancer. And there are three elements that have made this successful. The first is that we have a shared problem, a shared ambition. And the second is that we afford protected space. All of the faculty in this building have their faculty appointments in the standard departments in chemical engineering or in biology or in material science and engineering. And yet they cohabitate in the Koch Institute. It may surprise you that not only is San Gita Bhati in this building, but also Angie Veltcher who works on batteries and on early diagnosis of cancer. So that's important that they share protected space and what's been critical actually is funding, seed funding independent of standard federal agency funding. It's very hard to get funding initially for these hybrid projects. So we have greatly benefited from philanthropic support to get this off the ground. We've engineered the Koch Institute with several layers of collaboration. The top left shows you the footprint of standard floor in the Koch Institute. We don't let have engineers have a floor and biologists have a floor. We insist they're all on the same floor. They share the stairways. They share the breakout rooms. They share the bathrooms. It is impossible to spend the day without running into a biologist or an engineer, someone who's different from you, encouraging collaboration. The second collaboration is that the Koch Institute in the bottom left is situated in the center of one of our most important hubs on campus with an easy walking distance of the major department who participate in the Koch Institute's devotion to accelerating cancer. And it is very broad based this interest. We've got intramural faculty in the building and an equal number of extramural faculty in other departments. The third important engineered collaboration is with our colleagues. MIT doesn't have a medical school. We don't have a hospital, but we have access to among the greatest medical schools in the world and among the greatest academic medical centers or academic hospitals. In this drawing there's the orange dot for the Koch Institute is off to the right is a location of Mass General Hospital down to the bottom left of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital of Boston. We have put together something called the bridge project to bring clinicians who have real world experience of cancer together with our biologists and engineers. So together they can approach cancer. And the bottom right illustrates one of our really great benefits at MIT. The MIT buildings are shown in the dark red and we are surrounded by a variety of buildings that are part of the Kendall Square Innovation District. My colleague Phil Sharp often reminds me that technology travels on two feet. So if you're in one of those MIT buildings and you have an interesting idea, it's not such a long walk to just cross the street and find someone who might be interested in helping you bring your technology into the marketplace. Now, how do we measure the success of the Koch Institute? That won't surprise you that we've increased our grant funding. We've increased the number of pavers that come out but perhaps most importantly because our purpose is to accelerate real progress against real cancer is our rate of startup. This graph shows you and aggregate the number of companies that have come out of the Koch Institute since its founding, almost a hundred companies as of our last count and about 30 of those companies are currently in clinical trials. So by this measure also, we are having the kind of impact we wanted to have, we designed to have on progress against cancer. So these are again, some of the challenges of the 21st century and you might say what is convergence 2.0 good for? Well, I'm biased but I think it's good for just about everything the way that our digital technologies now touch almost every part of our lives. We need to get better fast at lots of tough problems. How do we defeat Malthus again? We defeat Malthus again by driving more innovation. So how do we do that? Besides what we do on campuses and in innovation districts well, let's look at the major source of funding for innovation and its government funding. Robert Solow and MIT economists who won the Nobel Prize for describing that over 50% of US economic growth results from technology, not just people and financial resources. So with that in mind, let's look at how we're doing this idea of Vannevar Bush of investing massively to support basic research that will lead to technology was put in place with Kennedy's ambition to race to the moon, to grow this kind of investments. And the peak of US investments in fundamental research was reached in the 1960s. In 1960s at about 2% of GDP. Today, our federally funded research is down at about 0.7% of GDP. That's not so good. It's still a lot of money. And frankly, if we were still in it alone as we were right after World War II the United States was the only nation that wasn't using all of its resources to rebuild itself. It would be fine. But let's look at other nations around the world. These are other nations investments in R&D. And the United States used to be top but no longer. And one of the lines I worry about is that purple line on the bottom. And these kind of indicators lag a little bit because of how they're put together but whether it was last month or next month or next year, China will get ahead of the United States in terms of its commitment to R&D. Commitment to R&D is a commitment to enabling the future. I think this is a problem. I think that the United States has much to contribute. And I think we should be a major player in this race to the technology future. So what do we need? We need sustained federal investments in basic research, not the coming and going that we've seen over the last couple of years. We need flexible funds for cross-agency collaborations. Occasionally we get it together. The National Nanotechnology Initiative was a multi-agency initiative that really did accelerate the U.S.'s role in nanotechnology. The brain initiative currently is again multi-agency that gets it together. We need to be able to do that consistently, not episodically. And the third is I think we should be rewarding people who are willing to put their money to work to invest in innovation. And currently I think we don't do that sufficiently. And it may surprise you coming from MIT where we're well known for collaborating with industry, but I think we can accelerate, all of us can accelerate university industry collaborations to speed technologies out of our labs into the hands of people. So again, I am extremely bullish about the convergence of biology with engineering, convergence 2.0 as the technology story of the 21st century. I think that there is great progress when disciplines converge. I think we can accelerate discovery and the translation of discovery into applications and we can connect the dots of an innovation enterprise. So to me, this is among the most important tools, convergence 2.0 for defeating Malthus again. And I would be delighted if it could become a national ambition. So let me just close by reminding you about my book where it goes into more detail and just more examples of these kinds of things tells a little bit more about the history of these ideas. And it's a book that I wrote for a general audience. My goal is that for all of you to experience the excitement of a technology revolution. Let me stop there and take whatever questions might have. Well, thank you so much, Susan. Thank you for that wonderful overview of defeating Malthus, the history of the revolutions that were required and the convergence of biology and engineering 2.0. I, Helen Keller wrote, alone we can do so little, together we can do so much. And I wanted to follow up on building interdisciplinary collaborations. It can be pretty difficult to convince superstars who can excel independently in their research and in academics that there's a strength in coming together. Can you talk to us about how you have successfully persuaded researchers who may already have a crystallized intensity that there is strength in numbers? Yeah, you see, so that's a fabulous question. And I have to confess to have been adamantly a solo performer when I was a scientist. So there are a few things that would surprise me more than having become a vocal and constant advocate of the power of coming together. And what I've seen in a number of our initiatives is this incredible power of a shared ambition. Certainly in the Koch Institute I described it, one of the other major initiatives of my presidency was the MIT Energy Initiative that brought together people across all the campus who were really devoted to the idea of helping to change the sustainability equation more rapidly. And here's the thing that you can do your own thing, but having partners who share your ambition is a powerful accelerant. It's a powerful accelerant in terms of raising money for sure, but it's a really powerful accelerant in terms of people working hard and getting new insights into how to improve even their work. One of the things that has probably touched my heart most profoundly in both the Energy Initiative and in the Koch Institute and our other cross-disciplinary activities is the passion of the students. They are on fire, not just about the unique things of their own research, but they are enthusiastic about the research going on around them. They feel incredibly proud to be part of a larger ambition. And one day I was walking down the infinite quarter, first just outside my office as president, and I used to talk to whoever I ran to the corridor and a lovely man took care of all the bathrooms on the floor with my office. And I was chatting with him one morning and he told me how excited he was about the Energy Initiative. And it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did that to have people affiliated with the Institute but not doing the work themselves have a sense of delight and excitement about their role in helping move forward on these really tough things. So as I said, it's exciting to be a solo performer. It's even more exciting to do that work in the context of a community with a shared purpose. And of course, it helps you raise money. Also, when you have the big lofty ambition, you can attract a lot more people to the cause. Well, thank you. That's a wonderful example of remembering all of the various roles people have to play to make effort successful, university successful in translation. You gave us two wonderful examples, Dr. Bhatia and Dr. Belcher. Obviously, it's part of the MIT ethos, putting ideas into action in order to transform the campus discoveries into marketable products and tools and really solutions. What support does MIT have in place to encourage the development of spin-off corporations to ensure a smooth transition from scientific discovery to the marketplace? Yeah, I mean, again, this is something that's easy to talk about and hard to do. One of the things that impressed me when I first got to MIT was the thesis of MIT's technology licensing office is not to make a ton of money from MIT. So we get some, I would say a significant amount of money, not vast sums of money from our technology licenses as do the inventors and the departments. But the technology licensing office primary objective is to get the technology out, get it into use. So while, of course, there's always some back and forth about what a license will actually look like. MIT's technology licensing office has a reputation of being easier to work with, faster to execute. And for me, this is really important. And so not haggling over the dollars as much as figuring out how to get the technology out and being sure that it can be used. So if you license our technology and you don't use it, it comes back to us. So a number of things like that are important, but beyond that, so how do you become an entrepreneur? It's a different set of skills. So we have a number of activities that help bring new participants into the entrepreneurial world. We have something called the Venture Mentoring Service. We have something called the Dishfondy Center. And both of these provide mentors, and in some cases, some resources, to take a lab-based idea and move it into a more marketable technology. One of the things, again, that surprised me, I have never seen a more eager group of teachers and mentors than entrepreneurs. They are very eager to bring the next generation along if they can find them. And so we provide opportunities to actually do that kind of matching. One of the things that we have noticed, however, is that there's a disparity between the rate at which our women faculty and our men faculty found companies. And to our mind, this is a huge squandering of our resources. Why shouldn't women with great ideas, why shouldn't minorities with great ideas be founding companies at the same rate? So we put together a local group of stakeholders and the Future Founders Initiative and includes venture capitalists and includes the technology licensing officers, a number of our organizations, faculty. And we have our mapping a way to actually increase the participation of women and minorities in this enterprise. We need every person, every idea to get to the marketplace, that's viable. Now you have to see if it's viable if we're gonna address these problems with the rapidity that we need to. Thank you. And please, of our participants, please put your questions and question and answer on the Zoom. Wanted to switch or shift a little bit to artificial intelligence and machine learning are really being deployed more widely in real world clinical practice. Where do you see the revolutions in their role in healthcare? Yeah, this is an incredible opportunity. And in the book, I talk about computational approaches to improving agricultural productivity. Very, very tough problems where computation is already playing an important role in ways I had no idea before. I started working on it on a chapter. I knew I had to work on, describe something about food. But in the healthcare domain, it seems like every time I turn around, there's someone using AI approaches. Among, let's just say a few that have kind of caught my eye again, required collaboration because even our brilliant computer scientists at MIT don't understand what the clinical problem is. They can imagine what it is, but it wastes a lot of time that you can save if you actually get together with someone who's challenged with that problem. So one project has been championed by one of our really experts in machine learning, Regina Barzilide, who has partnered with the head of breast imaging at Mass General to really accelerate digital mammography. They now have a paradigm that's actually being used in the mammography unit that is predictive. So it is much better at predicting whether the fuzz on a mammogram is likely to become cancer or not. And this is a problem for radiologists, huge problem for radiologists. They're helping to screen the backlog of patients who miss their mammograms because of COVID into those who are most likely to need it right away. So they actually are prioritizing patients' reentry into mammography based on this algorithm, very, very powerful. Another use, again, with Regina with Jim Collins, is exploring the treasure trove of drugs that we already have in hand for new diseases. And with this approach, they've identified an entirely new class of antibiotics that will be very effective, we hope against diseases that have been refractory to current antibiotics. And the third I would point out is a fantastic project by Dina Katabi. I don't know if you've had her sleep test. I haven't, but I've watched them where you're just all wired up and you look at these buildings and well, how can you sleep? Once you've got all these contraptions on you. So Dina has a way of measuring disturbances to microwave radiation, which are all around us, to actually be able to see not just where people are, but the position they're in, she can stick to heartbeat and breathing rates and she can detect falls. And it's a very interesting way of moving these kinds of what are currently quite invasive technologies to technologies where you're not even aware that you're being monitored. So that also I think has enormous potential for watching patients who are at risk without burdening them with a whole bunch of stuff that they have to wear every day. So there's just a few examples, but I always know as soon as I say that I'm probably, that there's something else, Marvel is coming along, which has married computer science with medical or scientific expertise to really change the game. I think this is gonna be huge. You brought up risk. I'd like to talk briefly about risk and regulation. Entrepreneurs, be they from the academy industry or both often create because they can, sometimes without considering whether they should. How do we know what could result in bad consequences and what regulating what we can or could be created? Are we doing that well? Yeah, so this is a time sadly of really great fear. I would simply start by saying that technology by itself is agnostic. It's not that technology is bad, but how the technology used can be used for ill and not for good. And we need to as a community develop parameters. Unfortunately, we can develop parameters as scientists, practitioners that the whole population won't have confidence in because their confidence in science has been eroded. However, one of the examples that's always called to my mind is the Asilomar conference that was put together just when gene engineering became possible. And there was a lot of fear that we were gonna get everything, franken food, franken medicine. There would be somehow a safety bar control. And there were a number of the leaders in the new practice of gene engineering came together at a conference at Asilomar and set up guardrails and said, we can do these things that we know we can control and no one's allowed to do the other kinds of things. And it was amazingly effective. I mean, it's surprising how effective it was at constraining people working beyond the box where we had confidence we could be safe. And many people have asked me whether an Asilomar like agreement, like conference could be put together for let's just say CRISPR. And while I might hope that would be the case, I'm not entirely certain that we would get the kind of buy-in that we had for Asilomar simply because truth be told that the people who are doing gene engineering in the late 70s were people from a very limited set of countries with shall we say, pretty much a shared culture and a shared worldview. That's no longer the case. And so I do worry about national agreements. If you think about simply our nuclear weapon agreements that are being eroded, the inability to sustain the constraints on Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon, it takes a lot of different participants in order to develop international standards. And it's something I really worry about. I don't think that the answer is to constrain the development of technologies but we have to really be serious about how as communities of interest we set standards for one another. Well, Dr. Hockfield, this hour has flown by. I wanna thank you for your time and your effort spending with Arizona State University. So on behalf of Arizona State University and the Arizona Biomedical Research Council thank you for being with us. Thank you to the participants. We did record this session. So it will be available to those that wanna review it or weren't able to make it. And again, wishing you the best, Dr. Hockfield and stay well. Dr. Pepin, thank you very much for hosting this conference and thanks for including me. Bye-bye.