 Thank you so much for every one of you who's here with us today, and thank you to Lisa for that wonderful introduction. It has been incredibly meaningful for me to have her as the director. She was my mentor when I first got here at Gustavus ten years ago, and so it's been a nice kind of circling back around experience. So as I said, thank you so much for being here with us today. It's such a thrill to finally be together with all of you and all of the speakers after two years of planning this conference. And we thought it would be good to take a moment to share with you all how this particular conference came into being, and how it was conceived and gestated, if you will. Sorry I had to do that, I felt like I was obligated to by the theme of the conference. But we wanted to provide you with a conceptual roadmap of what you can expect over the next couple of days. Now, some of you may be wondering what's a classicist, someone who studies ancient Greek and Roman culture, doing, chairing a science conference. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how that happened, and because I think it says something really important about the Nobel conference, and what makes it so special and what we're here to do today. So my research focuses on representations of pregnancy and childbirth in Greek literature and medicine. Essentially I'm interested in the questions of, you know, what do these texts have to tell us about attitudes, concerns, and desires of ancient people. And I love putting ancient and modern issues side by side, and seeing the ways in which each one illuminates the other. We can understand both of them more clearly if we kind of compare and contrast. So I was working on my own research, you know, the first couple of years when I got to Gustavus, and I decided to sit in on a course taught by my colleague, Lisa Rosenthal, in the political science department, because at Gustavus you can do that, you can just hang out into those classes. And she was teaching a class that covered the history of US governmental interventions into the reproductive lives of men and women in the 19th and 20th centuries. And so I was kind of thinking about these ancient and modern issues together, and during that time I read an article in New York Times about reproductive technologies on the cost and benefits of IVF and also new technologies that seemed to me like something straight out of a science fiction movie. And I remember two things about this experience. One, it got me thinking about all the ways in which ancient people also sought to shape their own futures, both individually and as a society. And these questions, how do we enhance or suppress fertility? What kinds of babies do we want to have? What does that say about our society? These questions are really old. They're not new questions. People have been asking them and trying to wrestle with them for a very long time. On the other hand, despite the enduring nature of these questions, there is something really different and revolutionary about the technologies you're going to hear about today and tomorrow. They have the potential to impact not only many people's lives and societies, but also human life itself. And in light of what we've been talking about in this political science class I was sitting in on, I became very curious and conflicted. I really didn't know what to think or where I stood on these issues. I remember wanting to know more, like, what is this really? What's really going on? What's really possible? Who will this impact and how will it impact them? And what's the right thing to do and how do we get there? And I was talking to another colleague in biology, Joel Carlin, and I was saying, man, I wish there were some really smart people who could just, like, help me figure this stuff out so I could know what to think. And he said, well, that sounds like a really good Nobel conference topic because it gets at those two sides of the mission to engage audience members and experts in pressing scientific issues and to consider the social and ethical implications. And so I thought, okay, so I submitted the suggestion and here we are. And I remember being struck at the time, and this was my second year at Gustavus, I remember being struck that it was kind of significant that any faculty member from any discipline could suggest a topic and then chair the committee. What it says is in true liberal arts form that this may be a scientific conference, but it's not only for scientists. It's for anyone interested in and invested in the way that science affects us as humans, both individually and on the social level. And we all need to be a part of that conversation. This philosophy infused the composition of the planning committee itself from the students, the faculty, and the staff who came from the sciences, humanities, social sciences to volunteer their time to help shape and bring this conference alive. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about how the conference itself came to you in this form. So how we chose the topics, what we were looking for that led us to the amazing speakers you'll see here over the next couple of days. So when we started out as a committee, we cast a broad net to consider what kinds of reproductive technologies we'd like the conference to cover. And, you know, we got to think about some really fun things like artificial uteruses and synthetic sperm. But we decided to focus on developments that were maybe not so far away and to think about developments that were no less revolutionary but were more immediate and would have far-reaching impacts. And so essentially topics that were in most urgent need of public discussion. And in choosing our speakers, we knew we wanted essentially three things. One, we knew we wanted top-level experts, obviously. But ones who could, no matter what area of expertise they had, they could speak to both the science and the ethics on a given issue. So I want to make that very clear that everyone here can speak to both sides because they need to be looked at together. They should be siloed off into separate kind of talks. Number two, we wanted to make sure that we had engaged and engaging speakers, individuals who would be able to communicate really complex ideas to audience members and then also to communicate with one another and do so in really compelling ways. And number three, we wanted speakers who would welcome the opportunity to be one among many voices at the table, to engage seriously with many perspectives and viewpoints and to model for our community and for the general public what intellectually rigorous but also civil discourse looks like. And I think we can all agree that both of those things are in short supply these days. So what are we going to experience over the next couple of days? The way I think of it, it's kind of like visiting a city for the first time. In order to really get to know a place, you need to hit the streets on foot. You need to walk around, pop into some shops and cafes, talk to the locals, get lost, find your way out, and then discover unexpected gems. But you also have to zoom out a little bit and get a bird's eye view of where you are and look at a map and see how the one neighborhood you become accustomed to relates to other places within the city. And you want to get an idea of the landscape more generally and where your place is within that landscape. So we hope the two days of this conference mirrors that experience a bit. Day one will be kind of a close-up exploration of a particular reproductive technology situated within the context of history, ethics, and society. So what is it, what might it do kind of theme. And day two we'll pull back a little bit and get a bigger picture of the scientific lay of the land by exploring the regulatory and funding structures that shape the science we get because it's not just scientists go off into a lab and they do their thing and then they show up and say here this is what we found or this is what we did. There are larger structures that provide both opportunities as well as barriers to this research and there are reasons for both the opportunities and the barriers. So what are they and what is the role here that they play. And it's our hope that you, our audience, approach these conversations with a combination of two things. Curiosity and caring concern. Because I think we need to have both things as a society. We need the impulse to explore and understand and to push boundaries but also concern about where those explorations might lead, what unintended consequences might occur. And also to extend that a little bit further, caring concern about those who stand to benefit from these technologies and those who do not. So I said at the beginning that the idea for this conference grew out of a series of questions that took root in my mind and I can say that after all this planning and research and collaboration I'm still deeply curious and uncertain and I feel fairly confident that at the end of these two days that's probably still going to be the case. And I think that's okay. For the mass majority of us here we won't be personally directly responsible for making these big decisions but I think that we are responsible for wrestling with the questions. What is this really? What's going on? Who will it impact and how? What's the right thing to do and how do we get there? These are questions that apply not only to this conference topic but to all kinds of issues facing the world today. And the more we can do this work the more we get practice at doing it better. So I want to close with just a little... I'm a classics professor so a little classics thing. As Lisa said we're expanding the discussion sections of this conference and the reason we did that was the conversation is kind of where it all happens. Plato, the Greek philosopher in his dialogue The Symposium said that everyone is pregnant with ideas and it's only through intellectually rigorous conversation with others that those ideas get birthed and see the light of day and go out and do things in the world. What we hope to have happen here is for those ideas to take root to grow and develop and go out and do things in the world. Ideas that come into being from the conversation speakers have with each other the conversations they have with you, our audience and conversations that you have with your friends, your family with additional attendees at those lunchtime sessions Lisa mentioned and to engage in civil discourse with intellectual rigor and with open hearts and minds. I can't think of more meaningful and important work. This is what we are here to do today, the conference in general and I think all of us just in this world. So thank you all for joining us in this work and without further ado let's get to it. Thank you.