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Nishimura:
We had discussions on this "open" in Information and Electronics application field of 2001 Takeda Award. I expect later discussions. Foder-san, please give your talk.
Fodor:
Thank you very much. I think this is a very interesting construct to think about the equation of knowledge and entrepreneurism and so I would like to comment a little bit about this. I will comment about it with respect to my own experience in this DNA array field, or in the general field of building some new opportunities around human genetics. I think one of the big issues, and we're starting to hit upon it here in these discussions, is that we all have this wonderful goal of bettering our lives. I think that's something that we share around the planet as a general goal of what we're trying to accomplish. There are different ways to go about this common interest, but in common again there are motivational issues associated with this and different mechanisms by which we actually realize these issues. In the context of my own work, it is in terms of looking at human genetics. I think that in terms of this idea of betterment of humanity there is probably nothing more human than understanding more about our own DNA and more about our own genetic make-up, which of course in part defines what we are. We are all driving for the quest for knowledge. You're driving for the quest for information about therapeutics, information about diagnosis of disease, information about medicine, information about our lifestyles, and that is the knowledge quest. This knowledge quest is a tremendous opportunity and we need a mechanism by which we actually realize this increase in knowledge and apply it to ourselves to better mankind. Now some of these mechanisms are the entrepreneurial activity that may occur within a company, focusing on different products and commercialization. Equally justified are our entrepreneurial activities that go on within, for example, the academic world and trying to further our quest for knowledge by these means. Now in all of these, our objective always comes back to trying to better our situation on this planet at some level.
A lot of us are driven by the desire to further research things - to do experiments. This quality of wanting to do experiments is universal, and that is actually how we begin to discover or to create opportunities from the things that we do.
There is another issue here, which is how you recognize those values and that is not so easy. Within a company perspective, I think that the economics of a company allow you to push on the research issues. There are also life improvements that occur when you manufacture and distribute products. Of course there is the construct of a company itself, which in fact employs people and actually directly improves the quality of life for people it employs. I don't have a real answer of how each of these facets are motivated, but I want to point out that in any of these areas the nature of modern research is now very multi-disciplinary.
We need to emphasize teaching the students and younger people with a lifelong ability to go ahead and take chances - experiment - try new things. Having a culture that accepts this as a reasonable way to run your life and actually to try and create new values is a very important thing. The message to the young people should always be that we should not be satisfied with the status quo, and we need to have a society that actually supports that. I think that in the life sciences there is a tremendous opportunity in the future. There are medical opportunities in terms of, as I mentioned, the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There are very serious issues about how we improve our lives. There are going to be opportunities to look at our lifestyles - our preferences, and our choices, and there will be fun things to understand about ourselves in terms of our ancestry, etc. All of these things create new opportunities. All of them also create ethical issues that need to be looked at. But again this requires having a supportive society that enables the creation of these new opportunities and respects human diversity.
Nishimura:
I think we can expect to have interesting and exciting discussions in this panel. Elachi- san, please give your talk.
Elachi:
Thank you Dr Nishimura. What I am usually asked by colleagues and people is: When I am doing my research, have I thought about all the applications or did I know ahead of time what application my research is going to be used for? And typically my answer is no, because I have no idea what we are going to be using it for. Because typically I am either trying to explain a specific phenomena or I am trying to solve a specific problem, and as I do that work and gain some new knowledge I always think about some other idea that I have never thought about before, or as I discuss it with colleagues they think about ideas that they can build onto the knowledge I am getting, or when we go to conferences and present it to the broader audience also they think of some additional ideas and these ideas build up. It's like an exponential effect you , from a problem that you try to work on all of a sudden you come up with five ideas, and from each of those ideas, as you gain more knowledge, you get another 5 ideas and very quickly you get a wide variety of benefit and application for something you never thought about at the beginning. And that builds on some of the comments that were presented earlier - that pursuing knowledge even for it's own sake can lead to a lot of practical benefits that you had never thought of, and I am going to give you four examples to illustrate that point.
The first one I want to start with is specifically my own research - you know how did I do that research or what was the motivation. In the mid 1960's, when I was still in school, NASA sent a mission to Venus and we found when we flew by Venus that the planet was completely cloud-covered. And that mission was sent by the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is the center that I am director for now. So when I joined the Lab in 1971 one of the key challenges people were working on is how do you image that planet that is completely cloud-covered - how do you see through that cloud so that you can see the surface of it. And some people started thinking of using radar as a technique to do that - that was in early development. So I start working on coming up with ideas of putting radars on satellites and in order to verify that we can do it we develop an airborne system so we develop a radar, we put it on an aircraftc and it happened one day as we were flying from California to Alaska: we were over the ocean and we said 'Let's turn on that radar and see what we get'. So we turned it on and when we got back and we processed the images we saw those beautiful images of ocean waves. We had no idea before that we would be able to image ocean waves with that kind of radar system. So again to make a long story short this has led us to put the radar on an earth orbiting satellite called SEASAT which was launched in 1978 followed by a number of flights on the shuttle systemc and as we were presenting these at conferences, talking with our colleagues in Japan and Canada and other countries, people started thinking of additional applications and now here 30 years later there are a dozen satellites which are in earth orbit using imaging radar on them for oceanographic mapping, for hydrologic mapping, for geologic mapping, for topographic mappingc and I can assure you that in 1970 I had no idea of all these applications that these satellites would be put for - I was thinking of Venus, you know, at that time.
Another example which is also taken from my institution: also in the 1960s as we started sending spacecraft to different planets we were challenged, because the signals were so weak, of how do you communicate between spacecraft and the earth. To give you a feel, a spacecraft, let's say, at Jupiter: the signal is 1 billion times weaker than from an earth-orbiting telecommunications satellite. 1 billion times. So we had a challenge of how do we handle that. So people start coming with ideas of doing coding - you know to code different codes and to develop what's called the Solomon code or the Golomb code and so on. Well, those codes are what you use on your cell-phone today. So thirty years ago - we wish we took a patent on it - thirty years ago we were developing it for deep space communication. Now it's used by every person on this planet for their cell phone because the signals are so weak. So that's another example of where we were pursuing a certain problem, certain knowledge, and now it's applied in another area.
A third one is in image processing - also in the 60's and 70's the images we were getting from our satellites had a lot of noise in them so we needed to figure out a way 'How do we enhance those images? - make them look more clear?' - so somebody thought, let's digitize them and do some digital processing using computers. Now today that's used very commonly - when you go to your doctor and you get an x-ray or you get different images they are automatically digitally enhanced using those techniques we applied for satellite images.
And the last example is from outside my organization - I was having lunch a couple of weeks ago with a gentleman called Vince Cerf. Some of you might know him- he's considered in the US as the father of the internet. So I asked him, did you think about the application as you were doing your research at UCLA 20 years ago. He said - the same answer - 'I had no idea. What my problem was is to figure out the protocol to connect between multiple computers so that if one channel fails, the signal is rerouted automatically, or the signal is rerouted to another computer'. It was used for a military application. And that protocol is what became the foundation of the Internet that we have today and he said that he had no idea that that is what it was going to be applied to.
So the message out of all of this is that in order to achieve the benefit from science and technology towards humanity you need two elements - your need fundamental research just to acquire knowledge, even if you don't know what that knowledge is going to lead to, AND people who are very good at taking knowledge and applying it to something practical. And both of these are essential - one without the other one will never work - so pursuing knowledge for its own sake ought to be strongly supported pursuing entrepreneurship to capitalize on that knowledge is another key element. So hopefully these two are key elements between an example such as the Takeda Award and things like the Nobel Prize Awards - where some emphasize knowledge and some emphasize application and entrepreneurship. Thank you very much.
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