Stuart Kauffman/Scientific Investigations and Business Acumen: Notes from the World Science Forum

As a speaker at the interesting World Science Forum meeting, I wish to make the two major points I made in my talk, both fundamentally relevent to business and economics.

1) We cannot foresee technological evolution. I'll say why in a moment.

2) Economic growth is, to an unknown extent, driven by the structure of the "economic web" and the growth of new economic niches. Almost certainly this growth is autocatalytic - the higher the diversity of goods and services in the web, the more niches are created.

1) The inability to be able to foresee technological evolution is, I think, a fundamental change in how we have believed that science should be done.

I begin with Darwin's concept of an adaptation. If asked, what is the function of the heart? Darwin would have said "To pump blood". But the heart makes heart sounds. These are NOT the function of the heart. That is, Darwin would have said that the reason hearts exist in the biosphere is that they pump blood, thereby offering a selective advantage to those having such hearts.

Now Darwin also spoke about preadaptations. Here his ideas was that a causal property of a part of an organism might be of no selective value in the normal environment, but become of selective value in a novel environment, hence be selected, and a new functionality would come to exist in the biosphere. An example is the swim bladders of early fish which had air and water in them to adjust neutral bouyancy in a water column. They were preadapted to become lungs in later land dwelling organisms. And a new functionality, lungs and air breathing, arose in the biosphere.

The essential question I raise is this: Can we say ahead of time what all possible Darwinian preadaptations are? The answer appears to be clearly, "NO". Part of the problem is that we cannot prestate all possible selective environments. How would we even start on such a task?

But the incapacity to "prestate" or predict such preadaptations is not slowing down the evolution of the biosphere, where such novel functionalities appear all the time.

But this means that we cannot follow Newton's methods, identify the variables, forces among them, initial and boundary conditions, and calculate forward to predict the evolution of the system. We cannot because we do not now know the relevant variables, such as lungs.

This truth is a radical departure from our image of science from physics. It literally means that we cannot know beforehand how the biosphere will evolve in its ceaseless creativity.

The same arises in the evolution of the "econosphere". The story concerns the invention of the tractor. The engineers knew they would need a large engine block. They fit it to chassie after larger chassie. It broke all of them. At last one of the engineers said, "The engine block is so big and RIGID, that we can use that rigidity and the engine block itself as the chassie and hang everything else off the engine block!". That is how tractors are, in fact, made. The rigidity of the engine block was an unused causal property of the engine, open to use for a novel function, that of being a chassie. It too is a preadaptation.

Thus, we cannot predict the evolution of the economy. Five year plans are largely pointless because of this. And this is the major point to be made here.

Instead of trying to predict the next innovations, which we may partially do, we also have to learn how to be adaptive - indeed that is what biology has done. Evolvability itself has evolved.

Fine, but unfortunately at present we have only sketchy ideas about how to be adaptive. (See "Patches" in my book, At Home in the Universe", Oxford University Press, 1995.) We will, however, make progress. This also means that we need to invent generative environments in our companies to enable such innovation. Skunk works are one such effort.

2) The economic web and its growth.

Economic growth theory includes labor, capital, human capital, savings and investiment, including investiment in R and D.

But economics does not focus on the fact that over the past 50,000 years the diversity of the economy has grown from perhaps 1000 to 10 billion goods and services. We have no theory of this explosion.

Hammer and nail are complements, nail and screw are substitutes. Picture each good as a point in a room. Connect each complementary pair with a green line, and each substitute pair with a red line. This web is the economic web.

New goods and services typically enter the economy as complements and substitutes of existing goods and services - channel changer to TV.

We have almost no theory of the growth of the economic web (again see At Home in the Universe, last chapter.) It is intuitively clear, and analytic results support the hypothesis, that the more diverse the web, the more economic niches there are. The growth of such niches helps drive economic growth given other factors such as labor, capital, investiment, institutions, and so forth.

We deeply need a theory of the growth of the economic web, its autocatalytic creation of new economic niches, and how to use that to drive economic growth generally.

From the CEO's perspective, meanwhile, it may matter a great deal if your company makes automobiles or computers, central to the web, or hula hoops, peripheral to the web. No one yet knows, but the stability of those central to the web seems more likely than those peripheral to the web. This requires investigation.

I note finally, that if we cannot predict preadaptations, the growth of the economic web may NOT be algorithmic. It may be fundamentally unknowable, but nevertheless livable. Life, after all, is not deduced, it is lived.

All this seems to open new arenas for scientific investigation and business acumen.

Stuart Kauffman

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The World Science Forum started the conversation

It's your opportunity to continue it and to be a part of the next business revolution.
Participate in the World Science Forum blog and reap the benefits of this ongoing discussion of science's impact on the business world. Using the content and expert insights of the speakers at the event as a springboard, this blog will generate and provoke the conversations that will take your business into the future.
We invite you to participate, and to learn and interact with others' challenges, insights, and strategies to compete in this science-driven world.

Thanks!

HSM BLOG!

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No aging, robot cars - and radical business plans

If Ray Kurzweil is right, the business landscape - indeed, the entire human race - is about to be transformed beyond all recognition.

Kurzweil is a renowned computer scientist and inventor (he built the first flatbed scanner). And no less a figure than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has called Kurzweil the greatest thinker on artificial intelligence alive today. So when he talks, it's worth paying attention.

Here's the question Kurzweil is asking these days: What if the exponential growth shown in Moore's Law applies not just to etching transistors in silicon chips, but to all of human progress and innovation?

For many in Silicon Valley, that's not a question so much as a description of reality. Two weeks ago, the largest auditorium on Stanford University's campus was packed to capacity for the Singularity Summit. A dozen leading researchers and futurists of all stripes came together to discuss what signs of a rapidly advancing future we could already see.

At the summit, Kurzweil gave his latest vision of the future: "We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century - it will be more like 20,000 years of progress at today's rate. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity: technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

"In practical terms," Kurzweil added, "human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes, and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem."

Changing the rate of change
It's easy to dismiss the Singularity as a crackpot concept - indeed, Kurzweil pokes fun at himself by posing for his latest book, The Singularity is Near, with the title handscrawled on a sandwich board around his neck.

But for people working in technology, it's hard to argue with. Think of the long half-century it took IBM (Research) to rise to dominate the computing world. Now compare that to the decade between Microsoft's (Research) IPO and the establishment of its monopoly on operating systems. And then contrast that to Google's (Research) lightning-quick ascendance to power.

The Singularity's effects go far beyond tech, however. The most immediate impact of growing artificial intelligence, a speaker at the summit convincingly argued, will be in the auto industry.

Robot drivers
Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford AI Lab, gave an overview of the DARPA Grand Challenge, in which teams were challenged to build a car that would drive itself, without remote assistance, across the desert from LA to Las Vegas inside ten hours. In 2004, the idea was a joke, and none of the robot cars came close to finishing; in 2005, with double the number of teams entering, four cars crossed the finish line. It's hard to find a better example of the kind of utterly surprising, paradigm-shifting exponential improvement in technology that Kurzweil is talking about.

In 2007 and 2008, the DARPA Grand Challenge shifts to city streets (in particular, those of Stanford's campus, which you may want to avoid for a while). Robot cars will be challenged to complete a course while obeying all traffic laws and avoiding collisions.

Thrun predicts we'll have reliable urban robot driving by 2010, and that a majority of miles will be driven autonomously by 2030. You'll have more time to answer your e-mail, and arguments over who's going to be the designated driver would be a thing of the past.

Even this small piece of the Singularity, if true, would be immensely disruptive. Worried about the effect of rising oil prices and wages on the cost of shipping goods? You could offset both if your trucks could drive themselves across the continent, at the most fuel-efficient speed, without taking a break.

Roadside restaurants would suffer, but there'd be a whole new market for on-the-road feeding and refueling. Many McDonald's (Research) franchises would have to go mobile.

Forging new plans
Look further ahead, says Kurzweil, and you'll see nanotech taking over manufacturing in the 2020s, and uploading our brains into computer storage - digital immortality, in other words - shortly thereafter. (He's dead serious about this last part, and has put himself on a radical course of intravenous vitamins and supplements in hopes of staying alive long enough to live forever).

All three of these developments would cause such radical shifts in commerce, you could spend from now until the Singularity coming up with new business plans.

Which is precisely Kurzweil's point. Not enough of us are talking about the prospect of speeded-up change. Established businesses will become vulnerable faster than ever, unleashing new possibilities for entrepreneurs. If the Singularity happens, basically, the only limits to what you can achieve are in your imagination. So it's time to start exercising it.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/25/technology/business2_futureboy_0525/index.htm

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Jeffrey Sachs - Embracing Science

Jeffrey D. Sachs was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by TIME Magazine in both 2004 and 2005 and noted as one of the most important economists in the world by New York Times Magazine. He serves as Director of the prestigious Earth Institute at Columbia University, Director of the UN Millennium Project, and Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General.

Long-term economic progress comes mainly from the invention and spread of improved technologies. The scientific revolution was made possible by the printing press, the industrial revolution by the steam engine, and India’s escape from famine by increased farm yields – the so-called “Green Revolution.” Today’s era of globalization emerged with the spread of computers and the Internet. Thus, when we seek solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, they, too, are likely to be found, at least in part, in new technologies that can resolve old and seemingly intractable problems.

Consider poverty in Africa. Every conceivable explanation has been given, usually focusing on what Africans do wrong. But a visit to Africa’s villages makes clear that the problems have more to do with the struggle for survival under difficult physical conditions than with any special problems that are unique to African societies.

Africa’s farmers produce roughly one-third or less food per hectare of farmland than their counterparts around the world, resulting in massive hunger, which is exacerbated by a heavy disease burden. Malaria poses a unique challenge, owing in large part to Africa’s mosquito species, which are especially adept at transmitting the disease. Other tropical parasitic diseases imply similarly extraordinary burdens in Africa. Add the practical difficulties of broken-down roads and few cars and trucks, and economic isolation follows. So the challenges of survival are enormous.

Yet practical solutions are at hand, because simple and low-cost technologies can address specific problems. Low farm yields can be addressed through improved seed varieties specially adapted for African conditions, combined with technologies for replenishing soil and managing water.

Malaria can be controlled through newly designed long-lasting mosquito nets and a new generation of effective medicines. Other tropical diseases also can be controlled, and practical technologies for safe drinking water can dramatically reduce diarrheal diseases. Mobile phones, local wireless Internet, and more paved roads could do much to break the economic isolation of Africa’s villages.

Donor countries incessantly ask Africans to change their trade policies, government institutions, public administration, and more. Some of these changes are important, but the role of the rich countries has been lopsided, focusing on everything except how to finance and introduce practical technologies to solve practical problems. The rich countries’ mistakes wouldn’t matter if African countries had enough money to adopt the needed technologies on their own, but Africa is so poor that it must get financial help to escape poverty.

The development challenges in Africa are just one example of how tough societal problems can be addressed by the design and spread of improved technologies. The same will be true of how the world best addresses manmade climate change – another of those seemingly intractable global problems.

Right now, rich countries are changing the world’s climate by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year from the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. In future years, China and India also will make massive contributions to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet no country, rich or poor, is keen to cut its energy use, owing to concern that to do so would threaten jobs, incomes, and economic growth.

New technologies will provide a key part of the solution. Already, “hybrid” automobiles, which combine gasoline and battery power, can roughly double fuel efficiency, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by half. Similarly, engineers have developed ways to capture the carbon dioxide that results from burning coal in power plants and store it safely underground. This new technology, called “carbon capture and sequestration,” can cut by 80% the carbon dioxide emitted during the production of electricity. The costs appear relatively small.

Consider also the depletion of ocean fisheries through over-fishing. Global demand for fish consumption is growing, and so, too, is the global capacity to catch fish, driving some species to the point of extinction. Improved aquaculture, in which fish are grown at manmade fishponds and reservoirs is still far from being a perfect technology, mainly for environmental reasons, yet it is enormously promising.

On a recent visit to Africa, a senior agricultural scientist said that in today’s world, the scientist is closer than ever before to the farmer, but farther away than ever from the policymakers. Politicians don’t understand science, and rarely seek the advice of scientists and engineers in addressing major issues. Everything is viewed as politics and votes, not as technical problems requiring technological expertise, which is why Africa’s poverty is so often attributed to corruption rather than to ecological challenges.

It is easy to dismiss the suggestion that technology can save the day. After all, technological advance also requires good governance, market forces, effective universities, and more. Politics will still play its role.

Nevertheless, it’s time to recognize that governments are ill-equipped to understand the sophisticated technological challenges and opportunities facing the world, and that new ways are needed to ensure that science and technology are given the prominence needed to address a wide range of increasingly urgent global problems. Now is the time for every major international agency and national government to assume responsibility for gaining the scientific and technological expertise that they will need in the twenty-first century.

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Susan Greenfield - TOMORROW’S PEOPLE

Britain's foremost neuroscientist, Baroness Susan Greenfield is the first woman director of the 204-year-old Royal Institution of Great Britain

At the beginning of the 21st Century, we may be standing on the brink of a mind-makeover more cataclysmic than anything in our history. The science and technology that is already becoming central to our lives, will soon come to transform not just the way we spend each day, but the way we think and feel. Gradually we are learning more about the dynamism and sensitivity of the circuits in our brain, and how they reflect our moment-to-moment existence and experience: it is in the configuration of these brain cell connections, that the essence of our individuality actually lies. The prospect of directly tampering with this basis of our uniqueness becomes increasingly likely.


Our changing lifestyle may mean that our grandchildren will have a different view of ‘reality’ than to us. Imagine living in an interactive and highly personalised environment, from physical interiors to furniture, to food. Invisible and ubiquitous computers embedded in clothing, virtual reality and augmented reality, may erode our sense of a solid and consistent outside world. Clearly there will be implications for the family unit. Home will now be seen as an extension of the individual’s own mind and body, with constant access to a collective network of data on the minutiae of everyone else’s daily life. We shall see a swing therefore to a reactive rather than a proactive lifestyle, a blurring of the cyber- and atomic-worlds and, indeed, a blurring of the distinction between carbon- and silicon-based systems.......

Robots will certainly feature as a normal part of 21st Century life, but not in the Hollywood ‘Hal-type’ persona. Rather there will be many different types of three-dimensional devices that free us up from the grind of daily activities. Although there is no reason to believe that artificial devices will themselves be conscious, cyber-gadgetry will reduce the spontaneity and uncertainty of our own outlook, which may have profound implications for relationships. The internalisation of computing into the human body, to change our appearance and physical prowess, as well as implications for brain implants, (which are already upon us), may mean that the fire-wall between our body and the outside world is no longer inviolate. It may be possible that thoughts could eventually control the outside world, even if not the other way round.

This spectrum of carbon and silicon systems may mean that although we do not have a completely artificial human being, by the same token, we will no longer have a completely carbon-based one. Even the computer itself is undergoing a transformation: soon there may be neurochips composed of neurons grown in culture, and interfacing much more effectively than artificial counterparts with electronics, leading to a neuro-computer. Another biological application for computing, might be the DNA computer or, more revolutionary of all, quantum computers, where erstwhile confidentiality will be completely breached.

One of the down-to-earth problems that all computing will face nonetheless, is that of fuel. A merging of the disciplines, whereby biology might help provide cheap sources of hydrogen fuel cells with ‘microbiology electro-chemistry’, as well as gastro-robots, also point to imaginative and novel ways of powering computers and, indeed, all of our lives. It is certain that the next century will at least enable us to continue with our high-energy consumption in any event, and therefore we should contemplate a world where, at least in our ‘privileged’ sectors of the global community, will have to explore changing attitudes to work, such as a just-in-time, constantly changing agenda, and the demise of the concept of a ‘job’. Work/life balance will give way to a blurring of work and leisure, where for the vast majority, although there may be less to do, there is also less obvious conduits for leisure activities. We will be facing an increase in screen-based pursuits, off-line recording activities, including our own. Second-hand living, as an alternative to empty real lives, may also lead to increase in drug-abuse, both prescribed and proscribed, whilst the new work and leisure patterns may challenge the concept of the ‘self’ – until now so often defined by one’s job.

And just as we may have to review the notion of the individual self and an individual body, so we could also question life itself, thanks to the burgeoning gene-based technologies. It is already acknowledged that the distinction of nature versus nurture no longer holds, and rather that genes are merely a device to enable the body to adapt and change to endless interactions with the uterine-environment onwards from birth into the macro-environment.

That said, the use of genes will open vistas that are only just glimmering at the moment. For example, genetic tests for bio-chips will question everything from insurance policies through to interview techniques, through to living with risk. New gene-based drugs may provide more personalised and targeted therapy but, at the same time, may lead to misconception of exactly what is being targeted. Some may feel that they will be able to select and control specific mental traits of their progenies, although nothing could be further from the truth. Nonetheless, paternity and fertility tests, stem cell therapy, gene therapy, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, germ-line therapy, in vitro fertilisation., interstice of plasma sperm insemination, and nuclear injection, and techniques for introducing sperm directly into the egg: will all revolutionise our decisions regarding how and when to have children. There will eventually be a dissociation completely between sex and reproduction, whereby anyone of any age, and any sexual orientation, will be able to be a parent.

On the further horizon, reproductive and resurrection cloning, artificial gamees, artificial wombs, artificial chromosomes, and even synthetic genes, will all create vast ethical questions from eugenics to the problem of speciation between ‘naturals’ in the developing world and the ‘enriched’ in the technocratic world. There is also the issue of a breakdown in our life narrative. If already the family unit is being eroded, then so will the distinction break down between generations, whereby children, parents and grandparents no longer have specific roles and profiles: rather there will be homogenisation across the age divide. This blurring of steps in one’s life story, will be enhanced by education, or lack of it. Individuals may no longer be marked out by what they know, as proof to what somebody else knows, since again there will be no need to internalise the information, now embedded in one’s clothing, jewellery, etc. Outside of formal education, future toys, like everything else, will also be highly interactive: so the growing child will see the outside world as inconstant and malleable. Our successors will increasingly be ‘people of the screen’ versus the 20th Century mentality of ‘people of the book’, - there will no longer be a need to read or write, thanks to voice-activated computers and the trend toward icon manipulation, and instant access. Inevitably, therefore, there will be changes not just in literacy skills, but also those of the imagination. The future generations will think differently: although they will have a much narrower attention span, it will be coupled with a transcendence of time and space frames. Cyber-networking and the demise of the individual expert, in favour of a global ‘neosphere’ will again, merge the self with others. Virtual schools and universities may already be in place, but courses will be highly personalised, such that the traditional education system will have collapsed. The emphasis will instead be on learning by doing, ie having an experience, rather than ‘learning’.

Although science might be democratised, for everyone the big questions posed in the 20th Century by great thinkers will endure. Namely, those of space and time: how we reconcile quantum theory and standard physics by explaining the Big Bang. Then there is the issue of how nanoscience could be transforming materials, whilst avoiding the much feared problems of nano-computers and nano-robots.

As regards medical science, psycho-neuroimmunology will be combining ‘tool’ and ‘concept’ driven science, to show a new approach in understanding how the endocrine immune and central nervous systems work together, giving rise to further insights into the ultimate quest for the secret of consciousness. Yet, it still may be that science will not continue just as an intellectual pursuit, but rather as Russell put it “drive collective passions for destruction of civilisation”.

The transformation of conventional warfare by, for example, robots, cell-technology, nano-technology, coupled with the demise of the concept of nation-states, all lead to an increase in terrorism. Cyber-terrorism and bio-technology are changing the ways that we can destroy ourselves, whilst changes in thinking globally are leading to a swing from practical to apocalyptic terrorism. If we are to understand how such a mind-set develops and how it differs from that of the clinical psychopath, it is interesting that current technology may well help towards the ‘narrowing of the mind’, if fuelled by the romance of an oppressed minority. Once again, there is a subordination of the self, this time to a greater cause. This process, interestingly, relates directly or indirectly to the physical brain and the chicken and egg problem of causality. It also throws into focus the issue of accountability and free will, in the light of scientific deconstruction of genetic/chemical/environmental factors that contribute to the personalisation of our brain, ie our mind. We need to contemplate the extremes of living in a fundamentalist world, one of a techno paradise of passivity, or a continuing edgy war/peace limbo. The route we take will depend very much on human nature but, more specifically, how robust the notion might be.

At all levels, molecular through to macro-environmental, in both space and time, technology will impact. At the molecular level, with genetics at the cellular level with drugs, at the cell/body level with nano-technology and scanning, at the body- environment level with information technology virtual reality, augmented reality, and bio-terrorism. We need to be clear about our definition of human nature. It is NOT mere drive-reduction, nor is it ‘genetic’, nor can be it rooted in the basic emotions, all of which are present in animals: but neither can human nature be seen simply as the Freudian ‘Id’. Instead, our behaviours are based on ‘metaphorical thinking’, a ‘private ego’, in turn realised in our personalised neuronal connections. The new technologies could dismantle this unique human quality. But there is an alternative: the notion of a ‘public ego’, the collective persona as seen with the Nazis, football hooliganism, and recently extreme examples with the terrorist movements. Tomorrow’s People ends with the prediction that the individual self will either be obliterated by the new lifestyle, or subsumed in the collective extremist movement. The most immediate alternatives are (1) the cynical option, (2) the technophile option, (3) the technophobic option, or (4) the vast majority who have no option. The take-home message is that we need to use our ingenuity to harness these possible technologies to assist (4), and thereby steer a course between (2) and (3), as indeed the last generation contrary to (1) still able and willing to do so.

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Ray Kurzweil - Reprogramming Biology

Hailed “a restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, Ray Kurzweil is one of the best known and most provocative thinkers on technology's future impact.

Biology is now in the early stages of an historic transition to an information science, while at the same time gaining the tools to reprogram these ancient information processes. Few of us go more than a few months without changing the software programs we use in our devices, yet the 23,000 software programs inside our bodies called genes have not changed appreciably in thousands of years (although recent research suggests that a few have changed as recently as a few hundred years ago).

Medicine used to be hit or miss. We would find something through “drug discovery” that
performed an apparently useful function such as lowering blood pressure, but lacking effective models of how these interventions worked, many of these drugs turned out to be crude tools with unanticipated side effects. We are now beginning to understand biology as the set of information processes that it fundamentally represents, and we're developing realistic models and simulations of how disease and aging processes progress. Most importantly, we are developing the tools to reprogram them.

RNA interference (RNAi), which has emerged in the last several years, is capable of turning specific genes off. By blocking the messenger RNA produced by a targeted gene, it blocks the expression of that gene. Since viral diseases, cancer, and many other types of diseases depend on gene expression at some crucial point in their life cycle, this promises to be a breakthrough technology. One example of a gene that we would like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells the fat cells to hold on to every calorie. In a study at the Joslin Diabetes Center, when that gene was blocked in the fat cells of mice, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy. They actually lived 20 percent longer, obtaining the benefit of caloric restriction without the food restriction.

Innovative means of adding new genes, called gene therapy, are also emerging that have overcome earlier problems with achieving precise placement of the modified genetic information. United Therapeutics, a company I advise, has developed a technique that modifies cells in vitro, verifies that the new genetic information has been properly inserted, replicates the modified cell millions of times, and then injects the modified cells back into the bloodstream, where they end up embedding themselves into the right tissues. This method has cured pulmonary hypertension, a fatal disease, in animals. It is now entering human trials.

We also have new means of activating and deactivating enzymes, the workhorses of biology. Pfizer’s Torcetrapib, for example, inhibits the enzyme that destroys HDL, the good cholesterol, causing HDL levels to soar. Phase II FDA trials showed that the drug was effective in halting atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks. Pfizer is spending a record $1 billion on phase III trials.

Another important line of attack is to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and introduce them into our bodies without surgery. One major benefit of this “therapeutic cloning” technique is that we will be able to create these new tissues and organs from versions of our cells that have also been made “younger” (by correcting DNA errors and extending the telomeres that influence cell senescence) – the emerging field of rejuvenation medicine. For example, we will be able to create new heart cells from your skin-derived stem cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells will get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated “young” heart with your own (corrected) DNA.

Rational drug design has been around for 20 years, but it is only recently that we have had the requisite genetic data, information models and reprogramming tools to accomplish it. While almost all drugs on the market today were created the traditional way, using drug discovery, most new drug development is applying these increasingly intelligent targeted therapies.

Scientists are also applying nanotechnology to go beyond the limitations of biology. A nanoengineered device developed at Rochester University is programmed to detect the antigens specific to cancer cells. It then latches onto the cancer cell, burrows inside, and releases toxins to destroy the cell. Another scientist cured type I diabetes with a nanoengineered device containing seven-nanometer pores that release insulin in a controlled fashion while blocking antibodies. There are hundreds of other such examples.

Our ability to understand and even reprogram the brain, although in early stages, is also accelerating. We are doubling the spatial resolution of voxels (3D volumes) in brain scanning each year and the latest generation of in-vivo scanners can image individual interneuronal connections firing in real time. Effective simulations of about two dozen brain regions have been demonstrated, and IBM has begun an ambitious effort to simulate a substantial portion of the cerebral cortex at a detailed level. There are an increasing number of neural implants to replace diseased tissue, such as an FDA- approved implant for Parkinson’s patients, the latest generation of which allows the patient to download new software into his neural implant from outside the body.

Now that biology is becoming an information technology, it is subject to what I call the “law of accelerating returns.” Information technologies, including biological ones, double their price-performance and capacity in less than a year. Sequencing DNA, for example, has come down in price by half each year from $10 per base pair in 1990 to under a penny today. The amount of genetic data we sequenced has doubled each year. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV, but we sequenced SARS in only 31 days. This rate of doubling means that we will increase the capability of these technologies by a factor of a thousand in less than a decade and a billion in 25 years.

Human life expectancy was only 37 years in 1800. Such technologies as sanitation, antibiotics, and other medical advances have more than doubled it in 200 years. Our ability to reprogram the information processes of biology will dramatically increase it again, but this progression will be much faster because of the inherent acceleration of information technology. I expect that within 15 years, we’ll be adding more than a year each year to remaining life expectancy. So my advice is: take care of yourself the old- fashioned way for a while longer and you may get to experience the remarkable century ahead.

Essay for Scientific American
Ray Kurzweil, April 2006.

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Tom Peters on Science

"The word 'unique' is absurdly overused. But every now and then something truly 'unique' does come along. I believe the World Science Forum is as important a public event as any we've had in recent times--certainly, because of its focus, more on target than, say, Davos. We clearly live in a science-driven world--and we ain't seen nothin' yet. While many execs might generally acknowledge that, they nonetheless fail to dig deep enough, and in a comprehensive enough way, into the coming monumental impact of a passel of simultaneous science revolutions. Consider the World Science Forum an historic event---a short immersion in our most important subject matter, with an astonishingly high share of the planet's very best teachers and researchers in one place. Unique? For once there's no hesitancy in the reply: Yes!"

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Academia Dissects the Service Sector, but Is It a Science?

On his Asian trip last month, President Bush urged Americans not to fear the rise toward prosperity of emerging economies like India. Education, Mr. Bush said, was the best response to globalization, climbing further up the ladder of skills to ''fill the jobs of the 21st century.''
But a ladder to where? That is, where are educated young Americans likely to find good jobs that will not be shipped off to India or China?
The answer, according to a growing number of universities, corporations and government agencies, is in what is being called ''services science.'' The hybrid field seeks to use technology, management, mathematics and engineering expertise to improve the performance of service businesses like transportation, retailing and health care -- as well as service functions like marketing, design and customer service that are also crucial in manufacturing industries.
A couple of dozen universities -- including the University of California, Berkeley; Arizona State; Stanford; North Carolina State; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Georgia Tech -- are experimenting with courses or research programs in the field.
The push for services science is partly a game of catch-up -- a belated recognition that services now employ more than 75 percent of American workers and that education, research and policy should reflect the shift. ''Services is a drastically understudied field,'' said Matthew Realff, director of a new program at the National Science Foundation to finance university research in the field. ''We need a revolution in services.''
Kurt Koester, a 24-year-old graduate student in engineering at Berkeley, is eager to take part. Yet engineering alone, he observes, can often be outsourced to lower-cost economies overseas.
Mr. Koester's special interest is biomedical engineering, which combines engineering and biology. He is also taking the services science course at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. He figures it will someday help him manage teams of technologists, spot innovations and new markets, and blend products and services.
''I love engineering, but I want a much broader and more diverse background,'' he said. ''Hopefully, that will be my competitive advantage.''
His personal strategy, according to economists, is the best way to prepare for an increasingly global labor market.
''This is how you address the global challenge,'' said Jerry Sheehan, a senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. ''You have to move up to do more complex, higher-value work.''
Representatives from several technology companies, including I.B.M., Accenture, Electronic Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard, and a few universities and government agencies met in Washington in December to discuss how to raise interest in services science.
A further step is a conference on education in services science being held at the National Academy of Sciences today.
Whether services science will ever become a full-fledged academic discipline with departments of its own is uncertain. So far it mainly consists of graduate-level courses and research by professors, though Berkeley will begin a certificate program in the field this fall for graduate students in the schools of engineering, business and information and management systems.
The melding of fields in services science is sure to be tricky. Scientists and engineers tend to regard what is taught in business schools as a mushy combination of anecdotes, success stories and platitudes, wrapped in jargon. Put a few success stories together, and they become a ''best practice.''
Yet a similar skepticism greeted computing decades ago. When some advocates started promoting the idea of ''computer science,'' traditionalists sneered that any course of study that had to add the term ''science'' to its name was not a science.
Eventually, computing won over the skeptics. And today, computer science departments are academic fixtures.
I.B.M. was an early champion of computer science, and it is now a leading corporate proponent of services science, sponsoring workshops, awarding research grants and helping develop course materials.
I.B.M. itself is a striking example of the shift toward services over the last decade or two. Once known as a computer maker, the company now gets half its revenue from services. And increasingly, I.B.M. is moving into sophisticated technology services, by working with corporate customers to automate and streamline business tasks like purchasing, human relations and customer relations programs.
In recent years, I.B.M. has shopped the global labor market, expanding significantly in India, especially for software programming work. But it has also reoriented and retrained its existing work force to support the swing to services.
The researchers in its laboratories were dubious at first. ''The response here was there is no science in services,'' recalled Paul M. Horn, the senior vice president in charge of the I.B.M. labs. ''But as people got into it, they got excited by working on the fascinating problems in services.''
Baruch Schieber, 48, is one of the converts. After joining I.B.M. in 1987, Mr. Schieber did basic research and published articles in scholarly journals, mostly on algorithms that optimize computing calculations. Yet the math techniques used to make work flow efficiently through a computer -- a complex system -- can be applied to other complex systems in business. That is what Mr. Schieber did, first in manufacturing and later in services.
One recent assignment had Mr. Schieber studying drivers and dispatchers at Boston Coach, a limousine service that operates in 10 cities. His job was to create a computerized optimization system to make sure the company's vehicles and drivers in Boston and New York, where the company handles more than 1,000 rides a day, were used as much as possible.
The system gathered real-time data on car locations, reservations, travel times, traffic patterns, airport conditions and flight times, and it generated recommendations to the dispatchers about which car and driver to send for each ride. As a result, the amount of time the cars had passengers rose 20 percent, and revenue increased 10 percent.
Today, Mr. Schieber is working on a project for the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, a team with representatives from five federal agencies including the Forest Service. His task is to use computer models to help determine where to station limited manpower and equipment around the country to minimize the destruction from forest fires. His models use data on terrain, vegetation, wind, rainfall, public records of fires, and other variables.
Across the spectrum of services, Mr. Schieber sees plenty of opportunity to apply his skills. ''There's just so much room for optimization,'' he observed.
The service sector, to be sure, is huge and diverse. There are lots of service workers in low-wage jobs, from fast-food servers to janitors. Services science will have scant effect on them. Their incomes are limited by their lack of marketable skills, not by global competition. Those kinds of local service jobs are not migrating offshore.
An accumulation of technological advances is behind the growing interest in services science. High-speed Internet access, low-cost computing, wireless networks, electronic sensors and ever-smarter software are the tools for building a ''globalized services economy,'' said Anatole Gershman, director of research at Accenture Technology Labs. ''That's what is new here.''
The current wave of technology, according to Mr. Gershman, is the digital equivalent of national railways and electric motors in the 19th century. They paved the way for new companies, among them national retailers like Sears, and new kinds of industrial organization, like assembly-line mass production.
He points to projects his company is doing as examples of services made possible by new technology. In transportation, networked sensors and analytic software are being used to diagnose the condition of engines. The goal is to make the mechanical upkeep of vehicles like jets and municipal buses more intelligent, shifting from regimented maintenance schedules to as-needed maintenance, which can reduce repair and maintenance costs by 50 percent, he said.
In health care, Mr. Gershman said, it should be possible to use tiny implants to monitor a person's biological functions, whisk reports wirelessly to personalized databases, automatically analyze the results and send alerts and updates to patients and doctors.
''Just what will be done with this technology we don't know,'' Mr. Gershman said. ''But the significant thing is that we now have the underpinnings for the construction of new services.''
Traditional service functions like marketing and customer service are also being transformed by information technology. The rapid growth of the Web and e-commerce has brought an explosion in the quantity of customer and market data, and a computerized means for tracking consumer behavior.
Today, marketing researchers routinely use analytic and modeling software tools to test hypotheses against statistics from customer databases, polling, economics and sociological studies. ''It's really made the field much more scientific,'' said Mary Jo Bitner, academic director of the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University.
Even in manufacturing, the competitive edge of many American companies lies in the intangible realm of service work. Look at the iPod. Apple Computer farms out the manufacturing of its popular music player to subcontractors in Asia. But Apple designed the iPod and wrote the software for easily finding, storing and playing music. It built the iPod brand, and guided its advertising and marketing. In short, Apple keeps for itself the most intellectually challenging, creative work, which adds the most value and pays the highest wages.
The high-end work, experts say, typically taps several disciplines and requires conceptual thinking and pattern recognition. Such work cannot be easily reduced to a simple step-by-step recipe. "Those are the jobs that are very hard to automate or ship to India", said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Services science is an attempt to give university students a broader set of skills and adopt a broader research agenda for the economy of the future. "We in academia have to find ways to contribute research to improving our economic performance in services and to help students succeed in this knowledge-based services economy", said Henry Chesbrough, who is teaching the services science course at Berkeley.

April 18, 2006, Tuesday
By STEVE LOHR (NYT); Business/Financial Desk
Late Edition - Final.

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HSM Group Introduces the World Science Forum in New York.

The HSM Group, the world's foremost executive education organization, announced today that it will be hosting the groundbreaking World Science Forum on November 8th and 9th in New York City. Some of the world's preeminent scientists and technologists from the business community and academia will speak before an audience of 500 business leaders.

World Science Forum: The New Universe for Business launches an initiative by HSM to bring together top-rank academics and leading scientists at major corporations in a unique forum to openly exchange ideas, insights, opinions, and forecasts about the emerging scientific and technological trends that are radically changing the world.

"Science and technology profoundly impact the economy, and the way we live, work, and do business," says Carlos Rohm, CEO of HSM in the United States. "This extraordinary meeting of pioneers in science and business will provide untold opportunities for the senior executives in attendance to profit from and understand the new business landscape."

The leading minds from the world's most provocative science and technology heavyweights -- MIT, IBM, Columbia University, NASA, the National Human Genome Institute, and more -- will gather for the first time in this two-day program. Speakers include Susan Greenfield, Britain's foremost neuroscientist and head of the Royal Institution of Great Britain; Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute; Paul Horn of IBM Research; Francis Collins of The National Human Genome Project; Ray Kurzweil from the National Inventors Hall of Fame; Jeffrey D. Sachs of The Earth Institute at Columbia University; Stuart A. Kauffman, pioneer of the "complexity theory"; Marvin Minsky, legendary AI guru and founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab; James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Tom Leighton, cofounder of Akamai Technologies and MIT expert in applied math; Mike Roco, Senior Advisor for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation; Andrew Lippman, founding member and associate director of the MIT media lab; and C.K. Prahalad, one of the world's most influential experts in corporate strategy.

HSM's conference will address the key areas of science and technology: The Future of Energy, Neuroscience, Genomics, Longevity, Sustainable Development, Research & Development, Complexity, Artificial Intelligence, Global Warming, Mathematics, Nanotechnology, Communications, and Science & Strategy. The summit will also feature a special session on the impact of science education on the workforce.
The conference has been developed in partnership with Scientific American. The Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review also have signed on as media partners.
For more information about the World Science Forum, visit http://www.hsm-us.com/wsf.

CONTACT: Susan Copperman
HSM
(212) 812-9608
scopperman@hsm-group.com

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Tom Peters / Competing in a Science Driven World

Last year I took part in the "World Business Forum," speaking to about 4,000 execs at Radio City Music Hall. The event was created by my old pals from Brazil, HSM. These masters of such events started in São Paulo (I've been working with them 15+ years, they were Peter Drucker's favorites), moved on to encompass Buenos Aires and Mexico City—then Spain, Italy, Germany, and New York, Chicago, L.A.

Their programs are imaginative—their execution is out of this world. One typical "little" example. They work closely with speakers on their handout material (no one else does this!), then as they start the program they ask, "Any left-handers in the room?" Besides me, there are hundreds of us misfits in any audience of thousands. Asking the lefties to keep their hands up, staffers go through the room handing out new booklets—with the spiral binding on the right side, which makes it much easier for us wrong-handers to use.

Incidentally (not so incidentally), HSM is now about to pull off what I believe will be one of its best coups ever, a first-ever big conference on the increasingly important role of science in business. Co-sponsored with the Scientific American, the November 8-9 event in NYC, titled "World Science Forum: Competitiveness in a Science-driven World," it will feature the very best and very brightest such as Genome Master Craig Venter and IT Futurist-Guru-Genius Ray Kurzweil (one of our Cool Friends).

Brazil is good at a hell of a lot more than football!
Tom Peter.

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