 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Tan Chow Chuan, the President of the National University of Singapore. I'd like to warmly welcome you, and we really appreciate you being here on a Saturday afternoon for this Global Science Outlook. Today we are joined by a really distinguished panel of speakers. On my left we have Patrick Abyshe with the President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and then we have Mariette de Cristina, the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American. We have Neal Gerschenfeld, the Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms in MIT, and then we have Subar Suresh, who is the President of Carnegie Mellon University. So maybe I'll take a couple of minutes just to frame the issues that we hope to discuss and also look forward to your comments and views about later on this session. And that is, I'm sure that in the course of the last four days you've heard a great deal about the major global challenges that the world faces, everything from sustainability, to climate change, to health, to aging. And I'm sure too that during the course of the discussions you have heard a lot about the scientific advances that are generating potential new solutions. The good news is that collectively around the world, global R&D expenditure has actually more than doubled in the last 15 years and adjusted for purchasing power parity. Today the world spends 1.4 trillion US dollars annually on research and development. So that's a massive amount of money going into research. At about one-third of this is in the US, a third in Europe, and a third in Asia. And a lot of this money is being spread across a wide range of areas. But more recently, of course, we have had very massive investments in research relating to the brain and to the neurosciences. As many of you know, a lot of interest in big data analytics, additive manufacturing, the ability to make things, and also in a whole range of other areas. So the topic we're going to explore today is this. What are the implications of this massive investment in R&D and the concomitant massive output in knowledge in new discoveries? How might the science, technology, all these discoveries transform or reshape business, society, the way we live? In particular, we would like to consider what are some of the major trends and issues that could shape the global research agenda around the world, and to gain insights into how science might alter the business landscape and influence global risks. So for the format, I'll first invite each speaker to speak for about three or four minutes. Then we will have a discussion about some of the key points. We look forward to your questions and comments after that. And we also livecast, so we're also taking questions on Twitter through hash, sci-tech, that's S-C-I-T-E-C-H from an audience from other countries who are watching this event today. So without further ado, I'll start with Subra Suresh. And Subra, you were until recently the director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and one of the major initiatives under your term was the formation of a global research council that brought together the heads of many key research funders from around the world. So as a kind of overview, can you tell us from the perspective of major research funding agencies around the world, what would you say are the most critical trends and issues that are shaping the global science agenda today? Thank you, Cho Chuan, and good afternoon, everyone. As the chair of this, there's a moderator, Dr. Tan, just mentioned, globally we spend about 1.4 trillion U.S. dollars on R&D. We don't know how much of it is R and how much of it is D, but nevertheless, it's R&D investments adjusted for purchasing power. Last year, according to the National Science Board statistics, which is the governing board of the advisory board of the National Science Foundation, last year for the very first time in the history of science funding, the top 10 Asian countries collectively invested more in R&D than the U.S. did. That had never happened before. The rate at which the one-third investment in R&D from Asia is increasing is significantly higher than the rate of research expenditures in the Western world at the present time. So given those trends, we need to ask the question, given the substantial investment in scientific R&D, it doesn't matter where it's being done, we have to make sure that collectively, as a globe, we do the right thing so that science thrives in the best way. So this is the spirit with which 50 heads of science funding agencies from around the world who collectively are in charge of a significant fraction of the global R&D met in Washington a couple of years ago and they formed this virtual organization called the Global Research Council. And if you look at the investments in R&D, there are two issues that come to mind very quickly. Many of the countries that are investing very significantly into R&D, at rates that far surpass what the Western world does, take very small countries like Singapore and Qatar, or large countries like China and India, those that are relatively new to heavy investments in R&D, what can we collectively do so that the infrastructure for R&D, it's not just investments, but also the basic infrastructure, scientific peer review, ethics, research integrity, respect for and protection of intellectual property, migration of young, mobility of young researchers, open access to scientific publications, eventually open access to data that connects to big data and other topics that will come about. How do we make sure that there is at least a conversation? So two years ago, for the very first time, this group of broad science and engineering funders met in Washington and subsequently a decision was made that each year a developing country and a developed country will come together and organize an annual event where the objective would be to take up two issues and at the meeting not talk about the two issues, but finish two issues. That means the year before that you start coordinating activities from around the globe through regional meetings. The first year it was a development of scientific peer review and creation of the Global Research Council. The second year the meeting was held in Berlin, jointly organized by the German National Science Foundation and the Brazilian Science Foundation. There were two objectives, releasing a document collectively developed and endorsed on research integrity and a five-year roadmap on not only how to create an infrastructure among these agencies for open access to scientific publications, but also eventually how to pay for it. Then the third meeting this year will be held in Beijing, jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation of China in collaboration with the Canadian Research Funding Agency and there are a number of countries that plan to move forward with this in coming years. Let me just close with a couple of themes related to this. One of the goals is also to look at the theme of this World Economic Forum is inequality and this is a topic a lot of heads of states have talked about. There is a huge inequality in science as well and access to knowledge in science. If you take sub-Saharan Africa, so one of the things that the Global Research Council did very successfully last year for the first time, 22 organizations from sub-Saharan Africa were brought to this table with the leading science funders so that they could be at the table in conversation on how we can help them and this was evident in the meeting in Berlin so that's one of the objectives. The second objective would be to look at a five years ahead from now and we are already doing a lot of things collaboratively but on a case-by-case basis whether it's telescopes in Chile funded by the US National Science Foundation and European Space Agency and so forth together or it's CERN in Geneva but they are focused areas. How do we take it collectively and elevate it to a conversation so that we can cover many different topics including the Brain Initiative and so forth. So let me stop with that. Thank you Subrahi. I think it's wonderful that the funding agencies from around the world are developing a sense of common language and a common understanding of some of these essential underpinning issues for global R&D. Can you say a little bit about are there any patterns emerging about convergences in areas in which funding agencies around the world are investing in? Well so there are many many successful examples already but on a case-by-case basis and somewhat serendipitously. In 1956 the National Science Foundation started a collaboration with Chile in the area of astronomy, land-based telescopes and that has led to wonderful policies on open access among many different countries between Europe, Asia and the US and also NASA and others. That's one example. The other is the Antarctic program, the Antarctic Treaty which now has 51 countries involved and how do you do science in Antarctica? That's another example. CERN is a beautiful example in particle physics, high energy physics but those are isolated examples. So I think the Brain Initiative which would be a very good area in which to explore further collaboration. What we have that's relatively new here is the recognition of big data as a global challenge, education across borders where even though funding is local the access to knowledge derived from that funding is global with no barriers and no national policy as any authority over a global action. I think those are new things which we have not addressed yet. So this brings me actually to Patrick Avescher. The research into the Brain really is often described as one of the most exciting frontiers of R&D in this century and the institution you lead the EPFL is just recently one billion euro grant on the human brain project which is coordinated by your university. Can you tell us a little bit Patrick? What do you think will be the longer term impact of this massive investment in brain research and how do you think this might impact businesses, policy makers, the way a society is functioning? Maybe you should we should ask ourselves why is there for the first time I would say large initiatives that are dedicated to the brain and I would say there are potentially two. The first one when you look at there's a huge need you know with the aging population, dementia, mental health and so on is becoming very prominent. At the same time you look at the record of I would say the biotech pharma industry it has not been very successful in this area. If you look at the number of you know FDA approved drugs you look at cancer you will see a lot of them. If you cardiovascular you look at the brain disease it's terribly flat. I would say it's mainly remixing for migraine and a little bit of this but for the big challenges you know pharma and us have not been successful. In the basic side there's been a tremendous amount of data being generated but this is very I would say spotty. There was never an initiative that was trying to put all this together. On the other side I would say that's why why do we see those initiatives because new technologies are being developed that allows you to interrogate you know some of the most difficult brain issues brain science issues certainly in the imaging in the multi-electrode recordings a lot of things are coming in fact when you talk about you know the therapies I like to remind my my friend from pharma that probably the most significant breakthrough of the last 20 years in for example neurodegenerative disease has been deep brain stimulation when you put an electrode in a very specific part of the brain called the subteramic nucleus and this is has changed literally the treatment of end state Parkinson's disease. Now it's interestingly there was not a lot of science behind it was really a one neurosurgeon Mr. Ben Abid in Grenoble that really looked at this and had the guts to some extent to go ahead and had a fantastic but it shows that in fact we have to look at a much much more I would say holistic approach to brain disease and I think that's what is very exciting there is engineering science coming you know to play when you go and record multi-electrode recording non-invasive technologies you need the IT power all those kind of things allows you to revisit to some extent the brain and I think that's why and maybe for once Europe was in the lead and they've launched those FET flagship project and you know we were of course very happy to to to receive not us but Henry Markrand is leading at my institution and this will be spread across many institutions so it's not one billion euro for EPFL it's one billion euro for the program but it's true that about a third of the of the money will be spent on my institution so that will be also very important factor for us but I think what is important is now is to bring the engineers for example that we're doing developing neural processes for for for example deafness you know for vision loss it's like there's a lot of things now those field have not worked really together if you look at this you know the funding agency have been separated there's often life science engineering basic science those are separate so we have to learn how to put those things together and I was very pleased to see that the Americans launched the brain initiative couple of weeks month after that was very visible with mr. Obama understand that they're a little they will be maybe not as much money but this is coming and I think this is important and I think also I was very pleased to see that there was a session on it that those things are very complimentary we're not talking about you know a race between Europe and United States but I think for example as I understand the American program will be developing technologies that will produce data the european project which is much more on reverse engineering simulation we'll be able to use this data generated to create a model so I think this is you know this is man on a mood it's even you know the international space station and I think we should really look at it and I've heard now that the Chinese will probably launch a major brain initiative the israeli have launched one so I think it will be a bit the decade though even more than the decade but certainly we will not resolve all this in the decade but I think this is a very encouraging thing that those science are converging that's from a science point of view that the agencies are ready to fund at the large level at the big science level which is very new I think it's the second after the human genome project of a big science in life science project so we will have to be sure that we work in a very collaborative way from the pharma industry we need to have the devices company the IT company we see this convergence I would say this convergence of you know we call it nanotechnology biotechnology information technology cognitive sciences merging and I think this is only by this massive effort that we will be able to provide new therapies because those are you know very much needed I think this is being myself a no scientist I think this is a very exciting time for this area but I think we have to be sure that we do it in a different way not in a one man one ego as I said but really in a very integrated collaborative and we need you know also the company's help and I think we need the IT companies we need the farmers if we want to resolve those issues so I think it had to be in an open way in an open and innovative way and then sure the companies will be able to take it on when it's needed but I think this needs to be a very large international collaboration if we want to have an impact in this area thank you Patrick everyone move now from the brain to information and new today ordinary people are you and I get more and more information faster and faster and maybe in the near future ordinary people at least like me would likely be able to make many many things by myself at home so what do you think are the implications of these two trends the ability to access information and to make things in your own home I mean where do you see this going and how do you think this will what the implications do you think this will be for businesses of ordinary people okay so information is exactly the right word to say let me start by saying I'm delighted by so many people interested in science this late in the meeting and this late in the day it's great to see this group I would vote for the biggest ideas of the last century Shannon digitizing communication followed by von Neumann digitizing computation before Shannon we communicated with analog signals the heart of his intellectual contribution which was in the best master's thesis anybody's ever written he was at MIT and you have to read his master's thesis if you haven't where he invented digital and the heart of what he showed is by using symbols by adding information and then taking it back out you can have an imperfect system the telephone but you can communicate perfectly there's an exponential reduction in the error rate that's called a threshold theorem that was the intellectual contribution that led to digital communication you wouldn't use an analog telephone anymore we have the internet von Neumann did the same thing for computing he showed if you commute compute by manipulating symbols the device can be imperfect but the computation can be perfect and again it was a threshold theorem what they gave us was unprecedented complexity you could detect and correct errors in the state and it gave us the unprecedented complexity we have in the internet in computing that's touched every aspect of science so that's my vote for the biggest ideas from the last century what's happening now the new frontier is digital fabrication that's not 3d printing 3d printing was born in 1980 it's gotten a little faster and cheaper but it's really nothing's new since 1980 and it's not computer-controlled machining MIT made the first computer-controlled machine tool in 1952 the real invention is actually four billion years old that's when molecular biology evolved the ribosome and it builds you with molecular lego you're not analog you're built with discrete building blocks if you think about lego they come in different colors when you snap them together they're more accurate than you are and when you're done you don't put them in the trash you take them apart and reuse them again that's how biology works it's fundamentally digital and we have the unprecedented complexity of us a chemical reaction has a yield of maybe a part per hundred the ribosome makes proteins with an error rate of about 10 to the minus four DNA is replicated with an error rate of 10 to the minus eight incredible numbers and that's because you can detect and correct errors so in the research the revolution happening now isn't 3d printing that's decades old we're actually learning how to put codes and computation into materials themselves trash goes away trash is an analog concept of materials that don't contain information there's no trash in a forest floor you disassemble and reuse so we're learning to output cells we're learning to make assemblers of chips we're making airplane printers across the whole range of technology we're learning to code the construction of functional materials putting information in so view this as fulfilling the digital revolution we had one in computing we had one in communication we're now living through a digital revolution in fabrication it's a science of putting information into materials and it's going to change everything that's the science now here for this session is the unexpected result that's my day job and research um NSF passed a rule that you have to measure social impact we didn't have a clue how to do it so we set up some tools in a community center because we thought that was more fun than talking about it and that was just to shut the NSF up so we could go back to work but accidentally they went viral and these fab labs spread all around the world there's hundreds they've been doubling every year and a half giving people early access if you think about mainframes to pcs this is sort of like the mini computer period it's not yet the star trek replicator but it kind of lets you do it just like the mini computers that invented the internet aren't yet the pc but it let you invent it so those have gone viral but here's what happened i realized as they spread it was challenging the fundamental sorry um existence of what i do as a day job i love mit but it's based on a series of assumptions of scarcity you assume the books are scarce and things like edx and corsera are putting the libraries online you assume the people are scarce and there's a number of platforms to share real-time interactive video things like that and then you assume the tools are scarce only a few people can come use the tools digital i didn't get this at first but digital fabrication means personal fabrication personal fabrication means anybody can make almost anything and that means once you have the base set of tools you can affect download the campus and make the scientific tools and so it means there's some things at the frontiers of science and technology that needs massive investment and only a few people can do it that really need the cost structure and the space structure of institutions like cmu or epfl or mit but a lot of what used to be done in those places can now be done in a much more distributed way not do it yourself by yourself but by distributing the tools that let you bring the campus to the student instead of the student to the campus and in turn we're finding in war zones in shanty towns and all kind of above arctic villages all the places the labs have spread we find exactly the same profile of the brilliant inventive people that get attracted to our institutions but who would never be seen and so for me there's a series of dominoes that the research is digital fabrication that means personal fabrication when you connect it with digital computing and digital computation it leads to a very different vision for the future of advanced research and technology which isn't central which isn't online but is fundamentally distributed by bringing the tools to the people instead of the people to the tools and so for me the great hope for science and future you know in the next century is the mit and cmu's and epfl's of the world fit a few thousand people we have a few billion we're off by a few orders of magnitude we're going to end up using much more of the brain power of the planet as the impact of the change in the technology can you just fascinating can you maybe give us a very very briefly a practical example of what do you mean by you know digital fabrication putting information into materials example you have a fab lab here so what can actually people do with this so give us a real-life example yeah quickly yeah yeah let me separate two uses of the term if i could so the deep use of the term is coded construction of discrete materials so two quick examples we have a project funded thanks to the nsf and in fact not only thanks to the nsf but thanks to subra through a program the nsf will fund things that it would never otherwise fun crazy stuff that he started that i'm very grateful for and what we're developing is a tabletop assembler of integrated circuits instead of a billion dollar chip fab and the way it works is by making micro electronic lego literally to make a chip fab today you bake and cook stuff here what we're doing is making tiny little pieces much like lego bricks but that are conducting semiconducting and insulating and so to make an integrated circuit a micro assembler places these little blocks in three dimensions and then instead of e-waste when you're done you can take it apart and make another one likewise we had a paper in science a few months ago showing how to make the world's highest performance ultralight material by making linking discrete little loops of carbon fiber instead of if you've ever seen it they're these giant airplanes that carry these giant carbon fiber parts made in these giant factories instead we showed if you made little tiny loops and linked them you make a material that's actually much lighter and stronger so we're making giant sort of robotic insects that snap together jumbo jets that's the precise use of digital fabrication the materials themselves are digital not the design the second half of the quick answer is that's many years of research to get that out today using the tools in the fab lab like we have on the terrace um want to for example in this session we have an oscilloscope you can make using the tools in fab labs for a few dollars in parts another one of the examples we have in the lab you can come see after this end session is an ecg monitor you can make in a few dollar parts the ability to do additive and subtractive 3d fabrication surface mount rework programming embedded processors means all those pieces of lab equipment you can make in the fab lab here it's not yet the reversible assembler that's the science but using the tools in the lab you can make the stuff like that so making an oscilloscope or an ecg monitor for few dollars in parts means you don't ship those around the world you ship these machines that make machines around the world and make those and the last of the best examples you can come see in the fab lab is the machines in the lab a few years ago we had here were commercial the machines we have this year are machines we made with the machine so there's this nice recursion of along the way to replicators making replicators we're using machines to make machines so uh so mariel i you know all this is really exciting you can you can feel the sense of it but uh it's also not completely easy to understand so we have uh you know this science going on the scientific community excited uh but probably a widening gap between the understanding of the science and its implications between scientists between policymakers politicians the public so what do you think uh we can do really to address this issue of bringing science in a more accessible way to help inform the public and policy makers so that we can work together in order to read that the benefits and advances from the discoveries thank you so first of all it's great also thank you for for having us great to see so many people know and some people are even standing which i feel sorry for you but um um see it's over here yeah there's seats over here dr gershenfeld's um statements about tapping the billions around the world are really an excellent um segue for me to talk about touching the public because uh of course as we all know this while there may be a trillion invested around the world right now the great enabler of that continued funding will be to tap the goodwill and passion of the citizens of the world to appreciate what the benefits of this research will be both for knowledge acquisition we've talked quite a bit about access to knowledge and what that will mean for the globe and also for you know things that are personally you know immediately relevant and cures for mental illnesses let's say or building things in in different places and communicating and connecting with the public is one of the ways to do that so i want to frame up this just really quickly and then give you two enablers because indeed dr ton many of the things that we're talking about now about connecting through digital platforms is the things that are revolutionizing the science the information are also revolutionizing our ability to connect with the public when we ultimately do serve so on the one hand um we've seen some unfortunate gaps in science knowledge i mean well known effects of you know some anti science in some circles and pseudo science and there's been a great deal of hand wringing and concern around proper education for a knowledge based workforce in the future and there are very good reasons to be concerned about these things but as a science journalist for more than 25 years now and at scientific america noted a few interesting trends which i want to put out to you as reasons for hope and encouragement and to really encourage you i hope i hope i will convince you that it is worth your while to take this on as an individual endeavor as well as one that we can do collectively and so what do i mean by that well these days thanks to access to this information through our various digital platforms people are actually communicating more science technology innovation news than they ever had before how do i see this how can i prove it to you well one tiny stat is just that scientific american um you know magazine is 168 years old in the past three years our online um unique visitors to the site has more than tripled why is that well partly because the major headlines of the world today are all underpinned by science and we view it as one of the important things is to make connections for that public but let me give you a couple of other things just a few uh just a couple of years ago the new york times did a very interesting study with the university of pennsylvania and what they were wondering was what do people choose to share all the stories in the new york times there's very general interest newspaper what do they choose to share and they studied several thousand stories and and saw those the most emailed you've seen them on websites and guess what the most emailed stories are not necessarily although you might expect it the stories how do i buy a camera or how do i um you know find a right school for my kid although those did exist the most emailed stories were were more profound than that they were stories that touch people's sense of awe and wonder and they were typically about science research technology innovation so don't think that the people are not interested they are another thing pew did a national study of also this is also in the u.s. sorry this is where i'm from asking what professions were mostly positive or mostly negative 84 percent of the respondents said that science was mostly positive influence on the public and when we were at when they further asked um did various professions contribute a lot or little to society science was was number three after military and teachers um you as you might imagine journalists were quite a bit lower um so so in but yet in the u.s. at least fewer than 20 percent of the people have ever met a scientist so science is a country that few of us have had a chance to visit now we come to your opportunity and ours collectively i'm going to suggest two things to you one is you know through your did through the digital platforms of course we have a wonderful way to communicate um we're doing it now we're getting twitter questions we're we're reaching out on social media and i would put it to you that is anybody who is in these communities of technology innovation development science any medium which you like you can use to your benefit yesterday at one of the sessions algore said if you're having a conversation around um some issue of climate take the opportunity to try to win that conversation you can do that too individually and as a group we can do this in a couple of ways so you might do it let's say write a letter to the editor let's say volunteer for a school board let's say advice of a local policy leader there are lots of things you can do and it could be anything that you like but the second thing is to tap the passion of the people about science and i'll give you um very quickly a couple of ways that people have demonstrated that they're passionate maybe some of you have seen some of the sessions with chryslyn todd talking about zooniverse activities do you know that more than and it's just a handful of years they've been doing this these citizen science activities so called these are activities where anybody without a degree can participate in some way acting as kind of a human social network to advance learning maybe they're looking at an image and and judging something or maybe they're acquiring data out in out in the world somewhere about picture of an animal something like this more than 900 000 people are participating and have done hundreds of millions of bits of cataloging at this point for for zooniverse right now um scientific american has a whale call song identification called whale dot fm on our site in one month they did years worth of work so i put it to you that you have the ability we have the ability collectively to tap these billions of minds to dr gershenfeld's point to have them help advance science research technology innovation and to have them connect with this new country so that they will be greater invested in it and so that they can then help advance the research could i just add an illustration of that yeah um to illustrate um my favorite little tiny local for me index of the way the world is changing is i started life as a nuclear physicist and last fall i wrote a piece in foreign affairs and it was unashamedly technical piece on disemerging science of digital fabrication and there was a wonderful response from the policy community that this is the most important thing happening for policy my brother alan started life um studying foreign policy and went off to hollywood to make movies and he just published a piece in scientific american um and it was on the gamification of knowledge and so the what i learned from that is whatever you think you can't do science without thinking about policy science couldn't be more important for the future of policy but conversely it means you can't do policy with thinking about science the policy is the most important thing for science and so we no longer have the liberty to pretend they're different worlds they've now the fact that we're you know we published in each other's journals means i think they've completely crossed it's wonderful uh so patrick do you want to say something well married this is wonderful but do you think people are having an unrealistic expectation of what science can do uh and and this has various implications including the fact that science and technology can solve everything and with it to the neglect of social sciences behavioral sciences right this is the flip side of course right they the if you have great trust and authority um then people might over trust uh and and and i i think that can be true in certain circumstances but again i think the remedy is invite them in let people see the process of science a little bit and and through such mechanisms that we have all these digital platforms that we have you have many more ways to touch that public and make that clear to them that now no we can't at the moment at least cure the common cold but we have some ideas about that or or any a number of other challenges that we're facing feeding the public in a sustainable way you know as we're growing population and so on so yeah there might be some unrealistic expectations there also might be some fear many of us have you know as although uh you know we've we've talked about the one trillion funding in many circles funding has been tight but again i talked about advancing science through crowd activity there's also Kickstarter and others advancing projects through crowdfunding you can tap that passion so and then you can use it as a vehicle to educate to share and you know enhance access to knowledge Patrick you know i think you know this is wonderful to have all those people understanding been excited by the science and you know we'll need to present this and have seen the the uh exhibition and so on that we also have to just put things in context and this is a beauty about engineering and i'm heading an engineering school you know you can do a lot of things wonderful and so on we just have also to put in some areas let's say and i'm speaking in for the brain area this is a long difficult task and even if you get you know people when i said we can receive a billion euro that's going to be this is immensely complex okay so so so i'm just you know a word of caution that putting new therapies and so on is not as easy as putting you know new toy left and right now those technology are going to be extremely useful you know to do some research to do so this is fantastic okay and we are using an engineering is contributing tremendously and i think for example in the prosthesis area we will see new therapies probably faster coming than small molecules and so on but just we have to realize that some of the science problem are awfully difficult and if i look at neuroscience you know even though we're going to put poor a lot of money in let's try to keep our expectation at a reasonable level okay because that's a bit of a concern that i have sometime saying that science can do everything and we'll find a solution in no way and so on some errors and i think specifically probably and i think the farmers do this even more than anybody else finding new efficient therapies for brain disease is a very long task and difficult task and we should just keep this in mind so sorry folks no brain augmentation devices coming anytime soon uh super and then i want to ask one quick question of the panel and then please get ready with your questions super so the issue of public understanding of science and public support for science has three major issues currently because so let me start with the first one if you look at even major commercial successes coming out of science i'll give you one specific example of this that requires enormous amount of initial support historically from taxpayer funds it doesn't matter which taxpayer it is the beautiful example of that is gps we all have gps in our mobile devices most of us cannot live without it anymore how did it start it was a defense project in the us uh defense department supported it primarily during the cold war on the soviet union then from the 1960s to the 1990s the national science foundation funded along with other agencies in washington department of energy darpa and others basic science in mathematics physics computer science before there were departments of computer science and universities if those investments had not been made by the federal government in the us you and i would not be carrying our mobile devices and having all the benefits today that's the first point my own institution karnagy melin played a critical role in the evolution of this most of the funding for research at karnagy melin came from the federal government that's the first point the second point if taxpayers are going to make major investments in basic research given the globalization and the equalization of the world through the internet and so forth the question naturally arises we all want to collaborate which taxpayer is going to pay for what that's a natural political tension and that's why it's very important to have conversations if you have too much inequality that question is going to become louder and louder the third point the last point i want to make is that what are the consequences of science for the benefit of mankind equally what are the unintended consequence of science for the benefit of mankind something i mentioned yesterday in another session let me repeat it in the context of science here the national academy of engineering in the us released in 2000 the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century basic things like electrification aviation creation of the internet nuclear power refrigeration air conditioning etc etc five years later they produced another list called the 14 grand challenges of the 21st century so if you look put the two lists side by side you find something very striking the greatest achievement achievements of the 20th century have also given us some of the 14 grand challenges of the 21st century if that is the case what is what was missing what was missing some were some people would argue what was missing was that while we focused on science and technology perhaps we did not focus enough on the human condition in other words the integration of social and behavioral sciences with natural sciences and engineering and that's going to be a key thing for the future i want now to turn to the audience and we welcome your questions can i just ask you to tell us your name institution and kind of keep your question short is one question here please the gentleman here please have a mic and tell us who you are hi i'm anand from india bhajaj electricals my question is to the entire panel in terms of this investment in rmd is a very large topic because there's a government and non-government part so how do you ensure the correct level of investment so that the research doesn't get hampered and you basically get the end customer what you are trying to create for could i take a stab at that chef please do yeah so um something that drives me crazy is research is managed as if it's ready aim fire but the practice of real research is ready fire aim um and to say that carefully if you have a milestone road maps and you know where you're going it's not research research is a bias random walk but ready fire aim means all of that you have to get ready then you have to aim and then you have to you have to fire and do something and then the aim part is to figure out what you did so vanever bush at mit wrote a very influential report about the endless frontier that i think was a great disservice he described basic research leading to applied research leading to development leading to products as a pipeline any important project i've ever been in it's all mashed up that the most basic things i've done have come from being applied and the most applied things from being basic and so i i see the most important thing missing in managing the research portfolio to get benefit from it to society is not to more tightly specify the goals but to more aggressively do the aiming part after the fire part to figure out who's solved what and what's the benefit for it and over and over and i don't think we have time i can give you many stories of this but i was trying to develop better shoplifting tags and i developed a quantum computer instead and i developed a quantum computer that didn't scale efficiently but it was a better molecular detection sensor each of those examples the transition from the research to the benefit to society in the application involved a collision of unlike people it doesn't happen by being working by yourself in the lab you need to bring the communities together so i think the heart of that isn't to more tightly constrain the scientists it's to more broadly engage the communities to find the value manage the messiness uh francis might care please hi francis collins director of the national institute of health in the united states here we are at davos some of us have been coming to these meetings for some time i think my first one was maybe 1996 and it is gratifying to see science on the program and here we are talking about the global science outlook and i don't think we had sessions like that 10 years ago but it still seems to me when we come to davos there are a lot of discussions going on that have enormous import for the world relating to business concerns political concerns and almost all of those have science somewhere deeply ingrained in the decisions that need to be made and yet even now in 2014 as far as we have come it still doesn't seem to me that we have fully integrated the scientific information that ought to be informing those decisions so i guess i'd just like to ask the panel sort of challenge you what what are we doing wrong here that that we haven't yet managed to insert this kind of scientific perspective as effectively is in an ideal world you would want to see the case because we're making progress but we're not there yet terrific question patrick have a sure but i i think there's hope i see first that it's you know we're late on saturday the room is full i see very important part people from the business you know the future chairman of roche being sitting here this is important it shows for me we've never seen the people at the company's level and so on so things take time but i think it is very important we bring the policy people we bring the people from the business but we also have to make an effort to make science attractive understandable you know reachable because we have a lot of a jargon then we often lose our audience in two minutes it's very easy to do it so i think it's you know it's a bilateral thing but i i see this as as something that is moving in the right direction as you were saying science is on the agenda now we have session i'm looking at it that have been well attended on the science and i start to see people from the other community being present so i think this is now how do you transform this and i think it's also that they start to realize the business are going faster and faster if you're not keep up you know your science investment you're losing your business there's there's a lot of disruptive technologies that are arriving on the horizon and i think the business people are starting to realize that they have the co's and the chairman's and so on have to be somewhat aware of what is coming up and i think this is already a first good step on the other side i think we have to make an effort to try understand their needs there we're looking at the world to talk to the policy people to integrate the policy and not being the science you know we are a bit like nile they'll just pushing a little bit so give us money we know how to do what is best we're bright something will come out useful it doesn't always work like this the man you know the world this is a bit the tradition of the science you know test we as university president when we came to this job start to realize that you know we have to speak to the other communities if we want to be efficient subra a quick one i think that's a very good point francis but here is another suggestion i would offer over and above what patrick just suggested if you look at this panel three of us are university presidents that receive the universities that receive a lot of science funding from federal agency former head of a science funding agency you are a science funding agency or health funding agency head and we have a science editor and a scientist what we need on the panel in addition to some of us is the ceo of a company who sits here and says without science my company will not be profitable and we need some policy makers to hear that hear that message repeatedly over and over again no other forum has their bandwidth to do this and the world economic forum and i think if we do that if we had the ceo sitting in the audience some of them also here i think that message will be even louder we like to hear from any ceos in the audience but maybe first from this gentleman in the front row my name is alex eddons from the university of pennsylvania and london business school so i'm a professor of finance it's been truly enlightening to come to a science session my question is what do you think will the research environment be like in 20 years times a couple of days ago we had open forum about these massive online open courses the idea that this will squeeze some of the smaller research universities and maybe reduce the number of professors that will really produce scientific research so what do you see as the future within research universities so will research be like what neil described will continue to be like that it will be something complete different process petrick yeah i think sure and i think again this digital world is changing i'm quite convinced that the way our institution will work will be different in 20 years certainly we see the education where there's a bit of a hype but certainly you know there's online mooks and so on bit and the way another will transform i've spent the last six months going to africa and i see this massification of education this is the only way so this online will i don't exactly how but it will i think what chris said it was also interesting about the research we see now a lot of this crowd sourcing getting into the field certainly we talk about astrophysics in life science in protein structure and so on we start to see you know general public so what will be the boundary between our own institution you know even on education we've started on mooks it's true you know we have 10 000 students on campus and 400 000 took you know courses in one year so where is the limit what is the people that we have outside virtually on site physically but i think we we we start to accept this from the education but i think what we haven't totally realized that part not all but part of the research will potentially be done outside and this is access to information so access to the data will probably change the way we can do part of the site you will still need laboratories where they do experiments and so on but part of the i would say in silico research is going to be done potentially outside the traditional institution so i think it'll be fine for the MIT the Carnegie Mellon VPFL if you are the university of Nebraska no shutout it's with a god knows i think this is going to be a challenge well i think just to expand on the point and pick up on something said here first that we are seeing a blurring of the lines between the experts the scientists and so-called lay people right through citizen science and also the tools as new has said that the tools are becoming eventually more commoditized so just as the the pc is changed the way people talk about computing it made it possible for small groups even individuals to do science and research in a home so too some of the tools are the future and so i can enable that pick up i think the internet architecture is a good model the old mit was like a mainframe you went there and got processed mooks which i'm not a fan of are like time-sharing there's still the mainframe and you're a terminal connected to it millions of isolated people clicking that's not an educational environment what's emerging that's so exciting are is a networked an internet where students have peers and work groups with mentors with tools who you then link by video and rather than either or the internet has a natural hierarchy there's leaf nodes there's local routers there's high bandwidth core routers in the same sense this puts great evolutionary pressure so mit or cme or epfl have to justify their existence and maybe just physically half technically what's done at mit could be done in the fab lab on the terrace half couldn't and so you have to justify why that other half needs the cost structure of mit but it's not either or what you get is sort of an internet of education you get this kind of multi-scale link structure emerging so i consider mooks today to be like the bit net time-sharing phase and what we're moving to is a sort of a distributed internet phase a networked education so i have a question here and maybe we'll take one here too we'll take two questions and please go ahead my name is al gura i'm a venture capitalist from israel and pitango and also initiating a startup that helps researchers collaborate around the medical imaging and my question is um we heard that the world is investing 1.4 billion or trillion dollars per year in research um so part of the question is how much of this money you think is not invested well because researchers are doing the same type of work getting multiple grants and basically wasting the brain power on because they are not collaborating the other part is what part of this 1.4 trillion is biased by companies like the cigarette conglomerate that used to fund research just in order to spread a lot of article and research that cigarettes are basically healthy for us okay terrific question so maybe you take a question from this gentleman pink and and the person live so maybe at the person back since you got a mic yeah andrew hofman for my slice uh i've heard very clearly the challenge on the panel saying you know we should be meeting different community the ceo should express their views and you should have people sitting there i'd like to return the challenge to the scientists to a certain extent uh science would be more useful useful in particular more usable in setting policies if the scientists were able to back their provisions i'm taking as an example the climate change the two the two and the three results of the big study which conducts by the united nation gave us a range of prediction if you ask scientists individually in private they will tell you this is serious if you read the report it's watered down so if you really want to take an active part if you want society to recognize scientists as being participant in policy you need to back up these things and you need to be more assertive into declarations can i respond to that uh let's take one third question before uh this gentleman pink here uh and i think i just extend your question and not to overclaim too yep to back their claims but not to overclaim right please go ahead yes um i'm juan garido from lima peru i have a very simple question uh countries like peru and underdevelop our way way way far back on what you're into so not only in education but in research and development if you can tell to the development world two or three things that you have to do to catch up what will be okay so let's take the first and third questions together maybe i asked subra since the data came from your nsf data so is the money well used uh all this 1.4 trillion and for the developing world in particular i mean what can they do what can they learn to be more efficient effective in the science in this translation so if you look at just the history of science it's not just one step one discovery somebody makes and then it solves a whole set of problems and then we move on to the next one it's not like a three month reporting in a business cycle in the stock market it's an incremental progress the way it works is somebody makes a somebody does an experiment has an interpretation or a theory makes a claim other scientists try to reproduce it some of them work some of them don't work some of the interpretations are wrong but data are correct in some cases the data are not obtained under the right condition it's not because the scientists are fraudulent but because human interpretation is subject to it's like expecting all uh banks to operate at the highest level levels of efficiency all governments to operate at the highest levels of efficiency all human beings to be ideally perfect so scientists are no more perfect than any other human beings i think we have to take that into account secondly take the long-term view that scientists mostly an incremental process and and it comes by an iterative process by teams who challenge one another prove one another i think we have to make sure as scientists that we don't over claim we don't misinterpret and state things truthfully and factually so that's the that's the first point uh on that i also patrick and then after that for the second maybe for for developing countries very important the most important connectivity bandwidth and then you have access to things and i think i've really traveled the last six months in africa you know there's making progress but the bandwidth is still not there they go i've seen young kids going to cyber cafe this is the only place where they have access you know the campus are not yet connected they don't have the bandwidth that they need the day they have this you know human intelligence has a normal repetition and and they're thirsty they're probably even much more thirsty than than we are so i would say the most and more important is connectivity and you a quick one piece to the climate change question and related i work very closely with the physics caucus of the u.s congress which is rush halton del foster there used to be three people in it but vernell is retired being a physicist in congress is very painful because the problem is almost all of their colleagues don't understand inference they don't understand probability and statistics and the problem is there are problems were fundamentally from the science you can't be precise what the science tells you is you can't be precise and you need to understand probability distributions that's the battle they fight it's a very difficult one so the conclusion is not you need more precision where it doesn't fit it means you need more people who understand imprecision and i think the best route to that is to get more people who understand science and technology to do what bill and rush has done and go into public service and making that an easier route the level of scientific expertise in the u.s congress is appalling no seriously appalling not believing not understanding very basic rules of inference and we can't expect good policy unless the policy makers know more science and i don't think we can teach them i think we need to get more scientists in the system i can marry her to explain precisely just a quick addition to that i think there's a bit of a language problem i mean the way scientists speak about things is simply not the way people casually use things i've had it thrown in my face so often that evolution is a theory of you know when a scientist speaks of a theory this means that there's a lot of evidence and the theory is the supportive and predictive outcome of that evidence it is not just somebody's idea you know and and so i think on the scientist's end of things in terms of education sometimes they have to learn to explain what it means that they provisionally accept something or or how far to actually take that but the backup actually is there well i'm afraid we have one minute left and i will just maybe want to share three personal takeaways from this from this very rich discussion for us that we are seeing actually great moves and positive moves towards greater collaboration across countries in research certainly already occurring at the researcher level but now at the level of research funding agencies the second is a convergence of research across disciplines under the umbrella of big science initiatives we heard about the neuroscience initiative but i think the point raised by several speakers and especially as subra is really the need for us to include the human condition the integration of social sciences behavioral sciences and cultural issues into this research so that we don't can inform the technical ideas with the ones that link to the societies and the third is about reaching out to the public and policy makers making sure that they understand what is coming out from this massive investment in science is long-term nature is uncertainty but it's also its long-term importance in advancing society and economies and finally the future of research is hard to say but there could be quite substantial changes brought about by the ease of flow of information of technical equipment and the blurring of lines so a greater inclusiveness of people who may not be card-carrying scientists so with that i i i think you would agree with me that our panelists have done a tremendous job at 4.30 in the afternoon on saturday i'd like to invite you to thank them