 Our next speaker is Dr. Charles Vest, the former president of MIT and now the president of the National Academy of Engineering. I also have a personal connection with Charles Vest. No, I did not marry one of his personal staff. Chuck was the president of MIT when Bob Brown was the Provost, who now is my boss as president of Boston University. But my real exposure to Chuck Vest has been through his talks at the Engineering Deans Institute, which have been absolutely visionary talks on the nation's need to transform the way we educate and amplify the pipeline of engineers in this nation to become more what I call societal engineers, engineers that understand how their foundation gives them an opportunity to move society forward and address society's grand challenges. Because of their engineering education, by integrating with people from all kinds of disciplines and orchestrating them, that's been highly inspiring to me. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Charles Vest. Thank you, Ken, and good morning, everybody. It's a real personal privilege to be here to take part in this celebration of Rod Pettigrew's leadership and 10 years of absolutely astounding accomplishment through NBIB. And, of course, to be preceded by my good friend and colleague Phil Sharp to hear him talk so eloquently and knowledgeably on a subject we both deeply believe in, which is the convergence, if you will, of engineering physical science and the life sciences going forward, not only in medical applications, by the way. But I also do have to say that I have a very personal reason for being grateful for the advances in bioengineering over the years. I have a wonderful wife who, 11 years ago, suffered an out-of- hospital cardiac arrest. And so I experienced firsthand the virtual magic that can be worked by biomedical technologies in stabilizing her and in continuing to keep her safe, in that case, to an implanted defibrillator. And the future is even far more exciting and far more sophisticated than that. I'm actually speaking on a topic based on this title that Rod gave me. I have very little background in biology, life science. But I do have to tell you a little bit of ancient history, which is in the late 60s and early 70s, I actually did work in the area of imaging. It was not aimed, by the way, in my own work and my students at medical applications. But with my student Don Sweeney, we were one of the first people to invent computer tomography. But unfortunately, many, many other people did as well. The history of that is actually quite interesting. But I do have a tiny claim to fame, which is that I wrote a paper. It's not actually this one. It was an earlier one that, as far as I can tell, was the first paper to point out that there was this thing called the Radon Transform that was actually the underlying mathematics of reconstructed computer tomography. But that's really not what I've been asked to talk about here today. And I'm excited to sort of build my remarks around this question, what are we waiting for? We all know that this new century we are entering into is truly a knowledge age. We all know that our economy and welfare is going to be driven forward by science and technology. We all know that we are, in fact, today the most innovative nation on the planet. But as Phil said quite properly in answering a question from the audience, what we're seeing is what Fried Zakaria likes to call the Rise of the Rest. And we are slowing our pace in really serious ways at the very time that much of the rest of the world is coming up in the quality of its education, its research, its invention, and its innovation. We have to get back on track. It's hard to believe, but if you look at the comparative statistics today of our nation that we all love and care about compared to the rest of the world, we are number 11 in terms of the fraction of our young adults who have graduated from high school. Public doesn't understand that, number 11. We are somewhere around number 27 in the fraction of our college and university graduates who major in science or engineering. In engineering in particular, across Asia, 21% of all university graduates are educated and trained as engineers. Across Europe, it's just under 13%. In the United States, it's 4.5%. 4.5%. If you look at women, only 1.3% of our women graduates of our universities today have majored in engineering. It's a little better than that in science. But 1.3%, what a waste. If you look at our minority populations, which by the way today, not 100 years from now, but today, are rapidly approaching 40% of our 18 to 23 year olds, yet they're only about 15% or 16% of our engineering students and the statistics for basic sciences, natural sciences, would be somewhat similar. So we have a lot of work to do to remain the kind of nation that can lead and prosper in the future based on science and technology. And also, if I might, to be the nation where a kid can grow up in Kentucky, rural Kentucky, like Phil Sharp, win the Nobel Prize, where another kid can grow up in West Virginia and become president of MIT, these are important things that we have to address. But we seem to be waiting for something. The first thing we always hear we're waiting for is Sputnik. Well, I hate to tell you, that is a little bit ridiculous. Everybody says, well, we'll get moving again when we have another Sputnik moment. I get very tired of hearing this. Thank goodness they don't point out the other thing that propelled our science and technology ahead so rapidly, and that was World War II. Let's not wait for another World War either. I believe we are waiting for our leaders, both politically and in industry, to more honestly and openly explain to today's population what the world is about today so we get away from this sort of bizarre, narrow view of globalization of something very negative and begin to see the opportunities and learn what we have to do. We seem to be waiting for new ways of working, and we are waiting and will wait forever for national strategies in many ways. In fact, if I can be a little bit philosophical, I'm starting to worry a lot, despite the fact that I'm a big believer in the private and free enterprise and in democracy, we're having real problems setting some rules of the road for steady development into the future. I know that Jeffrey Immelt was unable to be with us today, but a couple of years ago I visited one of his major facilities down in South Carolina. And I will tell you, I think the public would be astounded. They have invested amazing amounts of money and effort into developing alternate renewable approaches to production of energy from biofuels to wind to solar and so forth. Most of it is sitting there. They can't put more money into it as a business because they don't know what the laws are going to be in the United States on carbon. So we have a lot of things that we have to fix. Well, we shouldn't wait for Sputnik. This generation has its own challenges. And many of these challenges are, of course, global because we have a population of around 7 billion people sharing our world, soon to be 9 billion. We share our environment. We share our natural resources. We certainly share our challenges. Increasingly, we share our knowledge. And I think that's very important. And above all, we share our humanity. So what are some of these challenges? Just before the turn of this century, my predecessor as president of the National Academy of Engineering, Bill Wolf, appointed a group whose pictures are shown here. You'll know a few of these folks. And asked them the following question. What is a set of grand challenges that humankind faces whose solutions have at their heart technology, applied science, and which you think we could actually accomplish if we put our minds and our resources to it in a finite period of time? So we pulled together this extraordinarily innovative group of people. It was chaired by Bill Perry, our former Secretary of Defense. Now, Professor back at Stanford, the upper left-hand corner. My good friend and colleague, Alec Brores, who at that time was the vice chancellor of Cambridge University. You'll all recognize, of course, Bernadine Healy, Colustus Juma, great scholar of technology in Africa at Harvard. Dean Cayman, who developed the segue. Bob Langer, whose pictures appeared multiple times here today. Jane Lubchenko, who now is heading NOAA. Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel Prize for developing an understanding of the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. You'll see Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, Craig Venner, many others. Here's what they came up with. And this was not supposed to be the 14 challenges, but a set. And I'm not going to walk through each and every one of them. But if you look at any of them, you'll see that meeting these challenges is essential to having a good quality of life on this earth. And in some cases, things like providing access to clean water and so forth, it simply is essential for the continuation of life on our planet. But they basically fall into these four boxes, if you will, sustainability, things having to do with energy environment-wise use of materials, water, and so forth, health. Focusing on a few areas in which engineering plays an increasing role, or should play an increasing role in health through this phenomenon of convergence, although that term was not actually used. And also, by the way, through the use of informatics and engineering systems approaches to work together with medical and public health folks to hopefully not just find other ways of paying for health care, but maybe of delivering value in health care in a more effective and economical way. Security and resilience against both natural threats and human threats, and what they called joy of living, which really were things that have to do with expanding and extending human kind's capability and understanding of the world around us, providing the instruments of discovery, work on personalized learning, and so forth. I also would note, and I'm sure all of you, certainly in the academic world, are quite aware this new generation coming along is very eager to engage the world. They are not as isolated here in America as kids were when I was growing up. So there are lots of things going on around the country. Engineers with borders started as the idea of one professor at the University of Colorado and now engages thousands of engineering students from around the US, spending time, working in developing parts of the world, devising technological solutions to some of their problems. One of my favorites up in the upper right-hand corner, some of you may be aware of this, but Stanford has a program called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability. And what you see here is a sort of incubator, a way of keeping particularly babies and particularly premature babies warm in a very economical way in other parts of the world. Our wonderful colleague Amy Smith at MIT who's done so much, the Institute of Medicine and the NAE for two years now have mounted a health data collegiate challenge to get undergraduate students in particular to figure out ways of utilizing information technology and all the available health data to do things that actually help people in very direct ways. But this is all global. The NAE has had this Grand Challenges program. I just showed you the 14. This has been developed into a lot of curricula, a lot of project-based classes, a lot of introductions to engineering. And we're now going to start working this year with our colleague Academies of Engineering in China and UK. And we're going to sort of take this whole program global. Waiting for leaders to honestly explain today's world. Well, the world's changing. We can't wait for that kind of explanation and understanding we really have to get on with it. And all of you will recognize what I'm the point I'm making here, which is today, if you look at total R&D investments, not just medical things, but total R&D for both industry and government, it's spread with about a third of it here in North America, about a third in Western Europe, and about a third in Asia, particularly, of course, in China and Japan. And that map would have looked very different, even 20 or 30 years ago. So not only are things rising up educationally around the world, but investment in R&D, lots of bright people, we're going to have a lot of competition. India that most Americans associate immediately with this has now become this. It's a picture I took a couple years ago on the campus of Infosys, which was the first big IT services company in India that really changed the Indian economy, and among other things, led Tom Friedman to write his first book about the flattening of the world. China's turning from this to this. This is going everywhere. And much of this is in fact driven and enabled by the fact that our world is quite thoroughly networked, certainly in the developed world, but increasingly in the world that is starting up the development curve as well. So in a world that's connected like this, we are going to have to compete and we're going to have to compete hard. But I believe that we have to cooperate as well, and that in fact what the world's going to be seeking in the coming ages is some balance between competition and cooperation, as literally the yin and yang of the way business is going to work, the way science is going to progress, and the way technology will move forward. And incumbent upon us in my opinion is that we increasingly share. Obviously the culture of science has always been international and always been about open sharing of information, not so much so in many other domains, but I think we have a great obligation to share and I'll talk a little bit about what that means educationally in a moment. Waiting for new ways of working. Well, they're simply happening fast. You know, not long ago, we talked all the time about the brain drain because one of the ways in which the United States has adjusted for things like only 4.5% of our young people going into engineering is we have been a remarkable magnet for brilliant young women and men from all over the world to come here, to be educated, to work, to become entrepreneurs, to become professors, and so forth. And of course the term brain drain has the implication that it's maybe positive for us, but perhaps negative for other countries who might be losing some of their most brilliant young people. Well, today I think we've moved more to an age of brain circulation. We have lots of young people in particular moving all around the world quite constantly. If you work for a corporation today, it's highly unlikely your career will advance without your spending several years in other countries. And we get American entrepreneurs going to Eastern Europe, going to Asia, and vice versa. But I think something else is beginning to happen. And I like to call this brain integration. You may think of a better term, but I like to call it brain integration. Now to kind of sneak up on what I mean by this, consider chess. All of you know that a computer can defeat the best human chess player. There used to be a huge challenge. It's now a simple fact. IBM's Deep Blue, of course, famously defeated Kasparov with lots of both human and technological things that echoed from that. What you might not know is that you can put together a team of humans working with a computer, and they can beat any computer, and they can beat any human being in chess. So I think this begins to presage something else that is happening, and it's happening at remarkable scale. I'm sure many, if not all of you in this room, are familiar with websites like Foldit. The basic idea is some years back, not all that long ago, but a few years ago, various groups, in particular one I know of at the University of Washington, working on these very complex protein folding problems, and in order to get the amount of computing power needed, they do what all young people do. They chained a bunch of computers, a bunch of people's PCs all over the world together with permission to run lots of cycles when they weren't actively being used, and one day, at least maybe not totally literally thinking, the idea came up, well, if we can chain all their computers together and we can do these great things, what if we could actually chain their brains together? And the idea then came of building a massive multiplayer computer game that actually solves some of these complex problems, but the people playing the game are just playing a game. Now, of course, since this was done by educators, they give you the opportunity to actually learn about the science you're working on and the way through. But just think for a moment, thousands of generally kids around the world using a computer, playing a game, solving a very complex problem together. The same thing is beginning to happen in learning. I'm not going to say a lot about that, but I'd recommend this book co-authored by my good friend John Sealy Brown, called A New Culture of Learning, that begins to look at the way young people through, particularly through these massively multiplayer games are actually learning together, solving problems in totally new ways. Back at MIT, a group of colleagues from literally every corner of the institute formed something called the Center for Collective Intelligence, and its core research question is what is at the bottom here? How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they can act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before? And what they're going to try to do is begin to applying this to very complicated, hard social technical issues like climate change and so forth. And they are, of course, not alone. There are many activities all around the world, particularly in Europe and in the US. And in business, there's this huge trend toward what's called open innovation, a term that was coined as far as I know by Henry Chesbro. He used to be at the Harvard Business School now at Berkeley. And it's a totally new way that companies have large companies of getting and sharing intellectual property, even with other organizations that are basically their competitors. But the whole point at the end of the day is you get the best ideas from the best people and the best places, and you integrate them into what you are doing. So this whole spirit of connectivity and openness, I believe, is very important going forward. And also driven largely by the kinds of challenges that we face. A lot of research in our universities and elsewhere is changing. And I think you may be familiar with this term, pastor's quadrant. What we're going to see is more and more of our academic research, at least, being done in pastor's quadrant. That term came from the late Don Stokes at that time, a professor of Princeton who was trying to understand how the world of science policy had changed since the end of World War II. And he happened to put together this little matrix. Interestingly, the matrix doesn't actually appear in the book, it's all written as text, but the issue is you ask two questions. Why are you doing this research? Are you trying to advance our basic understanding of nature, or are you being driven by consideration of use, by trying to solve a practical problem or deploy something new? And the two extremes, of course, he calls pure basic research, the Bohr quadrant, after Nils Bohr, and calls this lower right-hand quadrant for pure applied research, the Edison quadrant. Not quite fair, by the way, if you read the actual history of Edison, but it makes the point that in this is sort of an extreme where you just want to get a solution to a practical problem and don't particularly care about advancing knowledge. Well, the upper right-hand corner of use-inspired basic research, which is, I think, what we're going to be doing much more of, and of course, you're already doing huge amounts of this in the life sciences, but we're going to be doing it in other fields as well. This he names after Pasteur. This is the kind of work, by the way, that gave rise not only to Pasteur's work, which advanced health or protectivity, protection rather, and at the same time, learned more about basic biology, but I'd also use the transistor as a great idea here, a great exemplar here. The sort of urban legend is that Bell Labs in the glory days, you did whatever you wanted to do and out came the transistor. Well, that, of course, is absolutely not true. There was a very distinct set of rules of the road, of strategy to try to find a solid state replacement for vacuum tubes, but all kinds of amazing basic physics and technology came out in the meantime. We're going to be doing more of that. I'm not sure exactly where I would put Phil's concept of convergence. It's sort of the bottom part of the bright red corner, but when I put this together as a visual for the first time, I realized that there's nothing in the lower left-hand corner where you don't advance knowledge and you don't solve any problems either, so I have taken the liberty of naming that for myself. This is where former university presidents belong. The last thing in this set of four questions, and by the way, I could have put many, many more things were waiting for our old manufacturing jobs to come back and so forth, but this issue of waiting for the political process, which is so ground down into trivia and sideshow events to get serious about not directing us, but setting some longer-term goals and strategies, keeping some of the laws and tax policies and so forth in place so that we can sustain effort. If we can't wait for that, we simply have to continue to accelerate our unleashing of our innovation system as best we can. Now, if you live in a university, and particularly if you lived in a university as many of us did 30, 40 years ago, you sort of thought of the innovation system like this. We have universities and research institutes, the government pumps money into them, outcome ideas and outcome educated people. It's actually a little more complex than that, but the point I make over and over again to particularly lay and political offices is that innovations that came out of universities have totally transformed life for all of us in positive ways. Now, I'm not going to claim that these eight things I've listed are typical innovations to come out of universities, but every one of these things originated generally entirely in universities, if not predominantly, computing itself. The internet, the fundamentals behind the global positioning satellite system, the deployment of the worldwide web, the laser, numerically controlled machines that manufacture everything today, and of course the genomic revolution and literally most of modern medicine. So this is serious business and we're obviously all concerned about jobs today. Well, I can't think of a single job today that actually does not depend on one or more of these university-based initiatives. How did this happen? Well, this is old history, but you'll see why I want to bring it up. In some sense, we can say it began toward the end of World War II when President Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, who had been the Dean of Engineering and Vice President at MIT, but was running OSRD in Washington during the war, ask him, look, you guys in science have pulled together your assets and industry and you've contributed to what is gonna clearly be a winning effort in wartime. How can we harness these same things in peacetime to improve our economy and our health and the quality of our life? And this of course led to the famous report, Science, the Endless Frontier, which was delivered to President Truman nine months later because FDR had died. Now what most people don't know is President Truman basically stuck it in the bottom drawer of his desk and never acted on it. But instead he went to our beloved former colleague Bill Golden who kind of did a different kind of report but ultimately the ideas that came out of Vannevar Bush's report dominated and still do today. This believe it or not was a radical motion at the time. Universities should do the nation's basic research and do it in a system where federal dollars do double duty. They pay to procure the research results, they simultaneously pay to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers, medical doctors and so forth. The idea of awarding research grants on the basis of competitive merit isn't closed there and of course he called for the establishment of a National Science Foundation. But the reason I want to go back to that ancient history is let me tell you what Don Stokes was thinking about when he came up with this idea of Pasteur's Quadrant and so forth. He was recognizing that there are certain economic development assumptions built into the Bush report. It's linear, that is it kind of followed the old model which was true in industry in those days. You do basic research, then you take the idea, you do applied research, from applied research you do product development and then outcome marketed products and services. It was also laissez faire. The idea was just do basic research, let investigators compete on the quality of their ideas, sort of a marketplace of ideas and then leave it to commercialization and chance and market forces what's actually done with that. But I like to point out that actually this worked for a while. Nobody planned Route 128 around Boston and there was no government or industry committee that sat down and planned Silicon Valley. They happened because of this investment in bright people and a few very visionary folks that came along. And our policy did kind of fit this simple diagram in the lower right hand corner. But today, of course, it's much more complicated than that. It's quite nonlinear, you've heard examples of this in everybody's talk. Not only is it government funding universities and research institute ideas and people coming out with the whole role of investors, venture capital, startups, major industry, this very complicated flow. And it's been enormously productive, but it also is kind of difficult to predict and to optimize. There are other models emerging, inducement prizes. We heard one mentioned earlier from here at NIH, but also perhaps the greatest example is the work of the X Prize Foundation. And they are increasingly putting forward these multi-million dollar challenges in areas that are important to global issues, more or less along the lines of the grand challenges I mentioned. There are new universities developing around the world, some of which, like KAUST, King Abdul University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and OIST, the Okanala Institute of Technology are primarily aimed at doing things the way we do in our US research universities and trying to do them even better. But there are also some things that have a little more radical sets of ideas behind them. The New Singapore University of Technology and Design point especially to the Alto University in Finland and while it's still kind of on the drawing board, Skolkovo University in Russia are all trying to recast education, particularly around engineering and technology, by, among other things, bringing design in a much deeper way into the way in which kids are educated and to have goals associated with innovation and entrepreneurship right up front. And of course, as I've already said, there are many different kinds of virtual communities that are developing that will advance innovation worldwide. But let me make a closing observation. Innovation, no matter what the system is, no matter what the government policies are, no matter where it's done in the world, it all has to begin with education. If we don't invest in education and if we don't invest in research, we have no chance. But I want to talk for a moment about education because I am convinced that something really big is about to happen in education. And what I want to lay out for you today is something I am coming to believe that as recently as two years ago, I didn't really think was on the near-term horizon despite all the rhetoric I do now. The story begins with this, at least in my telling of it. Back in 2001, MIT launched an initiative I'm enormously proud of called MIT OpenCourseWare. And it had a very simple goal, to take all of the teaching materials, by which I mean detailed lecture notes, problem sets, examinations and so forth, teaching materials for all 2,000 subjects taught at MIT and put them on the web, make them available worldwide without cost for anybody anywhere that wants to use them for any purpose. And this was a very radical thing because at that time, virtually every other institution was developing a strategy based on the fact that they could market these things and make enormous amounts of money. So this began to open up what was inside universities, in this case, the way in which the MIT faculty organized knowledge and how they think about educating you and allowing you to do whatever you want with it, add to it, subtract from it, shape it, reshape it for your local context and so forth. Then over the last few years, I point particularly to an introductory statistics course that has been developed at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm not sure when they first mounted it, it's been developing for a while. And to me, what's particularly important about this is they've made very serious use of what cognitive science tells us about how people actually learn in the interactive structure of their IT-based introductory statistics course. And then along came something else, which I think when the history is written some years downstream is going to be viewed as extremely important. A young man who some of you may know, named Salman Kahn, decided to stop being a hedge fund operator and instead devote himself to this concept of sort of open learning, open teaching on the web. It began interestingly by the fact that he did a couple of videos to help a couple of his nephews understand their mathematics better, learn their mathematics better. These videos got on the web and as they say today, they went viral, they were seen by people like Bill Gates, young people all got around them. And what I think Salman Kahn really did was develop a new style of communication that is particularly good with the upcoming generation of young girls and boys. Then just over the last six months, MIT, through something called MITX, introduced online an introductory circuit design course and at Stanford, Sebastian Thrun and a colleague at Google put up an introductory AI course. This is very different than the OCW, the open courseware. This is actually teaching. You actually have to enroll and register for these classes. You have to do homework. That homework is graded. You take examinations that are graded. You get feedback and so forth and so on. So what has emerged from this then in my view? Openness, new style, interactivity, and a basis in cognitive science. But what is particularly interesting is that we've now kind of begun to combine these things into what's generally called online interactive learning. At scales that are pretty hard to imagine. MIT Open Courseware gets about a million and a half visits, serious visits, every month. We know a bit about who uses it and why. But this is a huge scale. Sal Khan has now put up 3,200 videos on every subject imaginable, teaching it in his sort of amazing way. And of course, the interactivity of the CMU courses. These have been deployed now over the last year in a couple of large university systems where they're being instrumented and studied very carefully to see how well they work. But the most amazing numbers, of course, are from the Stanford and MITx courses. The MIT Circuit Design Course had 120,000 students enroll. Stanford had 160,000 students enroll. And I haven't seen the final figures. Maybe Phil knows them, but I know that at the end of the midterm exam, at least the MITx course still had over 10,000 students who had done all the homework, had passed the midterm exam, and so forth. Nobody really knows where this is heading. But whatever it is, it is really going to change things in the way some futurists have been saying for a long time, but in which, as I said until very recently, I didn't believe myself. I think John Hennessey said it very well in a recent New Yorker article on Stanford. He said there's a tsunami coming and there is. And we'd better get in there and try to understand it and make it work. One of my own hopes is that this online personalized learning will be very important on campuses. But we have to first figure out, can learning be improved and can it lower costs? Now there are some pretty simple studies that have shown the answer to both of those things is clearly yes in certain kinds of subjects. And there are now large scale experiments, including Stanford and MITx. These are highly instrumented. We're going to learn from these hundreds of thousands of people how they learn what works what doesn't. And my hope is that those things which are amenable to teaching in this way, if we do it right, ought to free up faculty time to do what only human beings can do. And that has become more of a guide and a mentor to free up more time for the kind of project-based interdisciplinary learning that is going to be so important as we go into the future. So I'm very hopeful that this will be part of our solution to how we educate more innovative engineers, scientists, and students in all kinds of fields and really ramp up the overall quality and importance of what we do. I don't know whether it is going to be the case, but I think it is, but we certainly do have to find out. So in summary, we don't have to wait for Sputnik. This generation has its own challenges. Let them face them. Let us help them. Let us open the pathways. I was especially pleased to hear from both Rod and my Francis new programs for young faculty to give them a head start and let them do exciting, if risky things. The world's changing. Let's get on with it. The world has networked. Start doing your work in new ways. We can find synergies and amplification of human capabilities and let's simply unleash our innovation system as best we can on the most important problems. It all begins with education and research. Without investment in education and research, we have no chance to serve the globe properly through technological innovation. And with that, I thank you very much for your attention. We congratulate you and Rod for 10 years of accomplishment. A couple of policies and so forth. That said, we still have to work with an assistant that's trying to provide the financial resources or universities to spawn innovation destination and is increasingly a sense from our lawmakers about accountability, about basic research. Now, when you think about bell laboratories, as an example of a place that on the one hand had a mission to just do, probably the top right triangle like the quadrillion pastures of the globe thing. So it's user basic research, but always in the back of their minds some kind of potential application that would hold the company forward that would be somewhat justified. And so what I'm leading to is a question of, shouldn't you be working with governments to try to help design and educate them? Educate them more about the need for this policies that on one hand feed university research, but somehow build a more public private partnership so there's an eye on usability and applications as a way of supporting their investor research. This is very tricky territory for the following reason. We are fortunate to have, and we're going to need even more in the future leaders like Francis and Rod and Phil and so forth who spend a lot of time explaining to people in Congress and elsewhere why these things are so important. Where we have to be very cautious is, I believe pastor's quadrant is extremely important going forward. I believe we are going to do more and more relatively highly applied research and universities, but we also have to remember that without investment in truly fundamental science, the whole thing winds down. So it's finding that balance in the way you discuss things that in my experience is very, very important. So I think we all should carry around a little simple anecdotal example or two. The one I usually use is GPS system. I mentioned it. So why were we able to have a GPS system? It's history goes back to some of the most fundamental imaginable atomic physics done at Harvard and subsequently MIT after the war to develop extremely accurate atomic clocks. So you have to have some things that trace through, but I do find that policy makers need to know that our community does care about the impact in a positive way that our work has on the economy, on jobs, on health, et cetera. And then I want to make one last point in this. And I had a, you mentioned our good friend, Bob Brown. Bob always talks about out-of-body experiences. Well, I had an out-of-body experience two years ago when I was asked to be the breakfast entertainment at a breakfast that is held every month or so in Congress sponsored by the Aspen Institute. And what you get behind closed doors, bipartisan both houses, you get around the order of 25 or so senators and Congress people and you're given 15 minutes to tell them what you want to tell them and then you have about an hour of interaction and discussion which may or may not involve you, by the way. And at the time, I was kind of telling them what we had learned at the academies through the follow-on to our rising above the gathering storm report called category five. And I began by going through a list of things like I mentioned to you earlier, number 11 in high school graduates and so forth and so on, number 24 in life expectancy at birth. I have to tell you, people gasp. I asked afterwards, a couple of staffers, did you hear people gasping? They said absolutely yes. Eight out of 10 people in that room had no idea that America was anything today other than number one among nations and everything. So the reason I'm telling you this is at the end of the conversation, I ask if I could turn the tables around and say, what do you have to say to me? What should I be doing? What should our community be doing? And they said, start by hitting people with that two by four until they understand where we're headed. They're not gonna solve the problem. So the balance I find that those of us who have a lot of opportunity to talk in public and so forth is this strange balance not only between basic and highly applied, but the fact that you have to tell people we're headed the wrong direction and say a lot of negative things when at the same time you wanna inspire all these wonderful young kids because it's the best time in history to be doing science or engineering. So a little bit of a rambling answer, but those are the things that I think are the key points. I have just a second. I wanted to say that one little factor that's been missing from all these components which you've talked about is and it's a very threatening aspect of what's called democracy is really capitalist democracy is the lack of discipline. If it isn't restored in every area that democracy is gonna go down the drain to be perfectly short and cruel. Yes, but I agree with it. Yes, so first of all, thank you for sharing your vision and you spoke very compellingly about brain integration and distributed learning and some of those kinds of important trends. But we also just heard briefly the example of Bell Labs which was designed, if I recall, really for face-to-face interactions and some of the wartime initiatives also really had people gathered face-to-face. So I'm wondering if you think there really is a distributed online version of Bell Labs or equivalents and what does cognitive science say about that? Is that possible? Well, it's a very important question and I cannot answer it in a knowledgeable science-based method. I actually don't know. But I think what we've learned in at least the simpler versions of these things is that if you work with even a fairly large group of people if they can spend at least a little bit of time together and thinking educationally at the kind of beginning of the course and thinking of stuff we do together with Singapore, for example. You get the students together for a week. They kind of know each other. Then they go off and we start working between Singapore and the US in learning online and with video. And it seems to work very well. And of course, corporate America is doing almost everything on the basis of video conference today. But I think there's something else happening where you may not need to get to know each other, but you may simply do these kind of collective problem-solving things in ways that are too complex to just transmit by one-on-one conversations. I think there's something out there that's happening, but please don't ask me to justify that answer scientifically. We've just have seen some examples of things that you can do using multiple people and multiple computational power that you can't do any other way. How you shape it, how you make a good out of it, I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.