Transcripts For CSPAN Today In Washington 20110706

good way. and i think again, just to take a regulatory example, which is local land use policy, why do i think of local land use policy, why do i think of health care policy as critical to innovation, you know. we could have a better materials, we could -- that's got to be valuable. we could have an electric car. that's got to be valuable. or we could -- you know, i remember myself as a 5-year-old living in washington wondering, why did they put the beltway way out there? washington could have grown up rather than out. and how do we know -- how would we know now whether we want to bring people -- have people commute in on a really nice bus or commute in an electric car if we want them to live in the district or arlington. there's a lot of different ways to save carbon and a lot of different ways to improve health. there's a lot of different ways to advance the economy broadly. that was my next example. all of them are running into bottlenecks on the buy side. the one thing i'd say that cuts broadly across i.t., once the demand side in productive work decides how it wants to use facebook, if that's what it wants to use for communication and ipads and iphones, if that's what it wants to use for end user devices to replace all the join, p.c.'s everyone is using at work today, once it decides how it wants to use those devices and technologies and even bigger return to entrepreneurial invention in the i.t. area will be revealed. today entrepreneurs are overcoming these bottlenecks and they're making good money, they're mostly making it serving consumption and entertainment. once it gets into productiveity there will offensive board normalous return and that day will want open systems, new inventors coming in on top of the platform providers we have today. in the past we've gotten the best bang out of new areas of technology, out of the internet, out of the p.c., out of the mainframe, out of the server when there's been new waves and are better after the first one. i'd be a deregulator on the demand side and an open system. >> thanks, tim. i want to turn to glenn hutchins, co-founder of silver lake. he spent his career investing in the most rapidly and growing companies in the u.s. and around the world. glenn, i've often heard you say if you have a good product people will buy it. you think tim has a negative review here? >> i want to come in from a slightly different angle. i'd like to get started a level setup a bit on kind of the underlying technologies that are driving innovation, and i believe fundamentally changing not just how we consume but also how we produce. i would offer you the example of the semiconductor and disk drive. they are innovative products in and of themselves and underlies the innovation that is continuing rapidly and they as products continue to innovate which is very interesting to watch as well. let me explain that for a second. one is the semiconductor today is the basis of almost everything we do in information technology, whether it's logic device, memory controlled sensors, etc., they're ubiquitous in our lives and we tend to lose track of that. disk drives people don't think about but they store, search and retrieve almost limitless amount of information today. i used to say you have now the library of congress in your pocket. now you have the ability to access all the world's information in your pocket that's stored around the world. these two devices touch on almost every aspect of how we work today. and when merged with computer sciences and communications technologies, fundamentally change the way we live and labor. that's point one. point two is it's not just this is one of the things i wanted to respond to tim about. it's not just about how we consume. though there's a fair amount of consumption devices, opportunities available here. but it's also primarily how we work in today's enterprise. we design our products using computer-aided design systems. we manufacture them using computer-aided manufacturing systems. we manage our supply chains using all these technologies that take costs down significantly, significantly reduce the amount of time and investment in inventory, significantly increase the flexibility of what we do and complexity of what we can produce. transaction processing is enabled by all these in hospitals a airlines, etc. are able to do much more for us in a much quicker and cheaper ways. we use the enterprise resource planning systems that allows what we've done and report on it. we've reached our consumers using what we call custom relations management systems. we have business information systems that produce analityics in real time that allow us to understand and change our behavior quickly to adjust what's going on in the marketplace. and we see this in the products themselves, whether it's things from cars to airplanes and things in between. it's been approved for decades since there were more semiconductors than steel in a car. and today there are vastly more. and almost all the innovations and the improvements and products we see are based upon these two technologies. in addition to the new products, not just improving existing products but new technologies like ipads and smart phones. some people might use their ipads and smart phones primarily for entertainment and consumption. i use mine primarily for work which we can talk about later on. the third point i make is that these technologies in themselves are also hotbeds for innovation. they are continuing to change very rapidly. we talked about today in reference to the semiconductors, they're doubling its processing capability every 18 months. there's something called aerial density curve which drives the amount of data that can be storied on an area of a disk that's doubling every nine months. so our capacity to store information oftentimes outstrips the information we're able to accumulate, though stored in the world of full motion video. that's going to change fundamentally. and business, social scientists study -- business professors study this because they liken them to fruit flies where they multiply so rapidly you can see the evolution happening in front of you. the interesting thing is that now in our world, these two technologies are merging because we're developing technologies for the storage of information. the reason why your ipad is so thin is because that storage device in there is a solid state technology which is a lot thinner than the disk drive technology. my point is it just doesn't make sense to someone who is a practitioner to think the pace of innovation has slowed down when we see the pace of innovation based upon these two technologies merged with computer science technologies hurdling forward at a pace of innovation and a use in the enterprise as opposed for the consumer unlike we've ever seen before. >> thanks. so next we have keller cowen. he's the chair of economics at george mason university and the general director of the mercadis center and wrote a book "how america ate all the low hanging fruit and got sick" and will in parent these -- in parenthesis feel better. we just heard somewhat good morning, americay picture from tim that we're just too slow to adopting the bureaucracy, in a way glenn had a slightly different view things are hurdling forward and there are tremendous opportunities. and i think you kind of have a third view which is not deciding on which of these guys is right but saying hey, the average american isn't really benefiting from a lot of these technologies. you want to talk a little bit about that? >> i see my view as the following, if we look at measures of what economists call the total factor productivity, that number has mostly been low since 1973. that is we are innovating at a slower pace, we're relying more on people to work longer hours to get more output. but that said, i'm not a pessimist forever and ever. i often think of innovation in terms of general purpose technologies. if you go back, you can think of fire and language, electricity, general purpose technologies. you get one breakthrough and then a lot of other cumulative related breakthroughs follow. so if you, as i do, see the internet/computer today as a general purpose technology, you'll actually be fairly optimistic about the medium term future even though the current state of affairs with respect to jobs, wages, innovation, is fairly bleak. what i'd like to do is just talk for a moment about the question of the what can we do when people talk about innovation, there's a typical laundry list that everyone goes through that involves education, intellectual property, more high-skilled immigration, and i'm with the consensus on those issues, but if you do indeed take the view that it matters what we do now, what else can we do? so far there hasn't been much discussion of china and i think china is the elephant in the room. china is capable of being vastly more innovative than it is right now. we're at a funny moment in history where they're wealthy enough to bid up our resource prices but in most areas are not quite on the frontier so we're not getting their innovations. so i think basically we should be nice to china. [laughter] >> moving china to the frontier will be the most important event. and like many observers, i take china's recent economic success to really be quite fragile. so i would just say if we're talking about innovation, the main story is china, china, china, we're not seeing the gains now. even in countries like brazil which is not typically thought of as an innovator, there are areas brazil has been on the front tier. which countries will get on the frontier most rapidly to me is where i focus. politics is very important. i think of the n.i.h. as having a very high rate of return, solving the budget crisis is important for a lot of different reasons that people don't always think about. one of these is that a lot of the best sides of discretionary spending are politically quite vulnerable. they do not have powerful interest groups defending them. the n.i.h. is an example where if push came to shove, you can imagine cuts being applied to the n.i.h. budget before, say, medicare. i think we are vastly overdiscussing how much we spend on subsidizing demand and coverage and vastly underdiscussing how much we treat our research and development to something of importance. if we don't solve the budget crisis in some manner, probably it's the best parts of discretionary spending which will suffer. i think the n.i.h. example is also important in terms of political science. this is something economists and political science could study. in my view of congress basically is a big villain in many different issues. when congress spends money directly on r&d it doesn't do that great of a job. if you're spending money on r&d during wartime because it's inside lated from congress because it's patriotism but if you're working through an institutional structure such as n.i.h. where there is indirect accountability but not direct answering for individual grants and decisions this works quite well and what we need to do as social scientist is come up with more structures of this kind, things like the medicare payments advisory board but set it up in a way where it can work and we can actually preserve enough money in the system to be spending on longer term purposes. another issue i focus on to a considerable degree is demography. we need to think long-term. humankind has never in its history had societies which will be as old as the societies which we're getting now and which will become older with each year. the frightening truth is that we don't even actually know if this works. and what i have in mind is the public choice considerations. if you put even more emphasize on elderly voters deciding elections, what will be the decisions made about how money is spent, how long term those decisions will be. so i'd like us as a nation think of what we can do to have more young people. it doesn't just have to be immigration but very, very often it is young or younger people who innovate and in an indirect way of generating more innovation without encountering ending the problems of traditional planning, is just to have more young people in the united states. france seems to have done this with some success. what we could do in my view, we're not discussing enough, but it's directly linked to innovation. i would endorse the work of michael mandela who is sitting here with us on deregulation. i'm very taken with michael's nag that regulation is like pebbles in -- analogy regulations is like pebbles in a stream. if you have too much pebbles it clogs up the river. we're talking about benefits study of particular regulations not realizing we're cluttering up the stream and we really just need to actually take some more chances. the other point i'd like to make is the general importance of what i would call culture. it's a very vague word. people use it to mean a lot of different things. but when i look back at human history, i to mean a lot of different things. but when i look back at human history, i see the mid to late 19th century as one of our most innovative times and arguably, our very most innovative time. that was the real singularity, the real great transformation, he real industrial revolution. even in high school, much less college degrees. so in percentage terms, we were remarkly more innovative then than we seem to be now in terms of economic importance of own situation and percentage terms. he's not an amateur anymore but something about that piecemeal presentation, lack of oversight, lack of everyone following the same rules, the lack of conservatism we see in ago democrat yeah, we need to be more sympathetic to amateurs. and i've been reading lately about 19th century, early 20th century budapest and the importance of innovations and electricaliering -- engineering in budapest at the surrounding time. phenomenal successes were generated in terms of electrical transformers that took electricity and made something practical. it's a hard area to learn about. but i keep on reading about it, and i actually can't find any good policy decisions behind the success of electrical engineering in late 19th, early 20th century budapest. it was something about the culture, something about what people cared about, what people valued, how people competed, what kind of new ideas were allowed, and you have societies also in germany, parts of the austrian hungarian empire that by our standards were dirt poor, dramatically undereducated, had all sorts of things wrong with them. we're not democratic by any stretch of the imagination but yet had vital cultures that carried innovation a lot more strongly in percentage terms than what we're doing today. so i think we need to study these cultures more and what we often see in a lot of case studies, if you go to a place like cal tech, very innovative or in chicago, p.h.d. seminar, very innovative, singapore at the frontier, what i find to be the striking generalities, these cultures are not in every way nice and are actually something a little brutal about them. i think in some ways we've decided we don't quite want to be as innovative as we say we do. and some of the same issues that come up in a book, what it takes to be innovative, what kinds of norms are allowed or not, what kind of brutalities are involved, to what extent does our current culture actually stimulate innovation in the sense eight 19th century budapest did. these are what i think social scientist shoes study much more closely and much more carefully. >> excellent. thank you, todd. that was a lot to think about. i was not expecting budapest to come up. but fortunately, we have anish here. >> yeah, that's where i'm going. >> and when i was in the quhouse, anyone who served in the government knows there's an endless variety of meetings, most of which 15 minutes into you're wondering, how did they dust that off. >> not at my house. >> is the chief operating officer, not that he's the first chief technology officer, and i wondered if you could tell us a little bit about what the administration is thinking about with respect to innovation. >> well, thank you. >> presumably building on the insight from budapest. >> a lot of material to work with on the discussion panel. let me begin by saying i'm an internal optimist and highly bullish on the american innovation ecosystem. let me begin with my bias up front. the president on his first full day in office designed the concept of a c.t.o. in challenging us to be a bit more open in how we conduct the affairs of government. he directed the position i hold now to build on a foundation, if you will, that makes our government more transparent, more participatory and more collaborative. dare i say the goal to spur more entrepreneurship and innovation in how we harness the policy levers of washington to achieve our broad objectives. the intersection of that body of work that was the first part of my assignment with the president's strategy for american innovation is i think at the heart of the conversation we're having here. for those in the audience who have not seen the president's strategy published in september of 2009, it outlined these three roles of government and i want to highlight briefly on each and then emphasize the third in the role that i play. the president did speak about the importance of building blocks of innovation. we did talk about research and development, but as we think of infrastructure for the economy, roadways, railways and runways which has been the moniker of late, the president emphasized the importance of digitization in that infrastructure. so you saw in a bipartisan basis in the conference committee a week and a half ago, a consensus on how to move to the next wave of economic growth on mobile digital infrastructure, that is to get our spectrum policy in order and again, very bipartisan vote, 24-1 in the committee, a commitment to digitize our infrastructure, focusing on wireless. we unveiled three weeks ago a policy at the white house on smart grid which is how to think of incorporating digitization on the nation's grid which secretary chu alluded to in the event edison wouldn't feel all that uncomfortable in the world of today's electric grid. we still have no ability to understand exactly where the outage occurs and why. we haven't harnessed information technology in the grid and we spoke about that in our policy. the second pillar the president outlined was on ensuring we've got the right conditions that spur entrepreneurship and innovation. there's a lot of policy discussion around this. patents are obviously high on the mind given the positive outcomes in the congress on moving forward on comprehensive patent legislation. but it's also in our case ensuring that the internet today literally across the continent in europe, in paris, the oecd is gathering to have a conversation about internet policy principles and how do we ensure the multistakeholder governance model that's been the heart of the internet story remains at the center, and that policy frame i don't recollect that spurs innovation is obviously a critical as peck. it's the third dimension i might emphasize for the conversation here. the president did outline a few areas where we need this proverbial all hands on deck approach to catalog breakthroughs and challenged us to think of new and creative ways to bend the curve and unleash the economy. it's in this third aspect of the economy the president outlined on innovation where the intersection of our open government work does provide an opportunity to see results now, not in the decades to come. and i wanted to highlight a few examples of this to demonstration how open this innovation actually can work hand in glove to spur breakthroughs that are productive, not in the consumption domain. we talked a lot about the nouns of technology, the ipads, the chips. we want to talk now on this piece is on the verge, how we can achieve the breakthroughs. breakthroughs i think start with the new rocket fuel for innovation and that's data. we do not have an instrument that the health care system, an instrument, energy, health care and education systems. you just don't know the results. wal-mart can tell you to the tee exactly what promotion in this millie second maximizes -- millisecond maximizes commercial transaction. we have no clue. dr. collins talked about breakthroughs in cancer. we don't have a clue in the outpatient clinical cancer environment exactly what the decisions are being taken in the health care system every day and what impact it's having. so we have emphasized an openness, both a liberation of data that the government holds in machine and human readable form as well as through regulation, we'll hear on the panel later, to spur through regulatory tools the light touch of regulation, that is to spur market transparency so we can start to get more innovation in productive gains. you can't be productive if you don't know what you're measuring. the health and energy stories speak to the following. we have a long-term policy for digitizing the health care system. but we introduced a concept of blue button. the president last year challenged the veterans administration and said hey, give the veterans a copy of their personal health data and i want it done this fall. so in 90 days we went live on a platform called the blue button system so the veterans can now download their personal health data -- it's not everything, it's not perfect but starts at making data liquid on personal/privacy conditions and scaled like wildfire and happened in the v.a. and the d.o.d. replicated it and it's now taken hold in medicare. over 300,000 americans have downloaded their blue button health data in a few months. what happens? two weeks ago the c.e.o. of aetna, the larblingest repository of health records in the united states, 10 million of them, said they'd adopt the blue button and make it available to their millions. the c.e.o. of walgreen's stood up and said wait a minute, we have personal health data, too and we'll blue button that information. in energy we had the smart grid challenge and said to the utilities, i can't get access to my utility energy consums data and i physically look at it, it's the box in my house, i can't get the data. we challenged the utilities, can you do this? three utilities announced they'd publicly make available in machine readable format information on customer energy data. it's not going to be perfect. it's not going to have every valuable, wealth of vocabulary coded but they've done it and issued an apps contest for people to reduce their energy consumption. it's happening now. two high school students spoke at that event and got their high school to adopt an energy management system and found out the air conditioning turned on at 2:00 a.m. in the gym and the school administrator said i'm not so sure we have kids in the gym at 2:00 a.m. turning off the a.c. saved them $30,000. one school. we're going to do this and instrument the systems. on education, can anybody here tell me whether their child truly is understood 135 attributes in the common core for math. do you know what your kid figured out? you get a letter grade the end of the year. that's not that helpful. if you can liberate that information and allow a economy to come in and we will be productive in the ax economy if we can get the rocket fuel of data out in the sectors that need it. it is my job to serve as the entrepreneur for the president to make sure our policy conditions spur that activity. in some cases we might have legislative engagements but my bottom line is we're taking on a new role of government. that is as impatient convenor. a lot of the stuff we're working on doesn't require a lot of new money, doesn't require a lot of new legal constructs but by in patient convening and bringing people around the table, we'll make great progress and achieve the productive gains and put people back to work in areas i hope will deliver tremendous benefits down the road. >> aneesh, i can only say i need to start working harder. >> oh, come on. >> i forgot how inadequate i feel next to you. >> no, no. we're going to get it done. >> smarter, that's right. thank you. that's an impressive set of activities you're undertaking. so i wanted to bring the group back to one of the facts that i started the discussion with, there's all this great innovation, the country has been growing since the 1970's at a fairly rapid clip but sure seems to be concentrated on a relative small segment of the population. we've seen some parts of the population, substantial parts of the population experience a wage decline, putting them back at the level of wages they had in the 1950's. all this innovation, the blue button, the facebook, the budapest, the inefficient health care systems, what is that going to do for the average americans? is there anything policy can do to help improve the income of the average american? or their lives? >> growth. >> we've had the growth. >> we've had part of the growth. the project of automating work in white-collar work in particular, you know, we can't have higher real wages without having automation so that people are more reflexive. it's not possible in long-term growth. and that the project of automating white-collar work is very partly along. glenn emphasized how far we've come and i agree with that, aneesh emphasizes how far we might go. i agree with that. there's an enormous number of americans, about a 1/4 of americans their primary job function is white-collar work buying or selling stuff and these are not exciting jobs. we need to automate white-collar worker the way we automated the blue-collar work if we're going to be a substantially richer society and that's still a big project. it will take a while. >> just very quickly. this is a difficult problem but my emphasize is on how we can make jobs at the entrepreneurship level as much as get people to apply for jobs. i say in southside, va., we have lost a lot of jobs that have moved overseas. yet you meet entreprenuers down there. i can be a textiles designer. i can help people decide new shirts and so forth. make money as a result and take it and it of the expertise i have. i saw this in india. i worked with the president in india. farmers are using cell phones to text message their sprinklers to turn on and off. and they are becoming a heck of a lot more productive. if they can do it to be more productive and the sectors of the economy that you do not think as facebook users. they are harnessing the power of technology to improve their lives for their own work. i can't crack this code to get mainstream jobs harnessing this. restaurants are finding ways to optimize that extra seat, by harnessing the daily deal, the real file information -- real time information sharing. they are starting to see this in main street but we need to do more. >> i want to read-focus on the question asked. it's one of the key things we have tried to explore, which is how can we share the benefits of growth extensively? how can we have extensive g rowth? what we have is not just the stagnation of wages. we have a winner take all of society as the people that are able to compete on around the world in an information society have prospered in this country and others have not . i do not think that is about innovation. it can be a very important part, but to other things are going on. one is that we tend to look back on the 1950's as the norm. and we compare things as you just did. i wonder if that was not the abnormal period, because the economic competitors we had a around the world lay in ruins at the end of the war. and large amounts of the labor force were withdrawn from competition. simliar policies in india. we're leaping through the time period of the equalization of what might be more of a normal. that gets me to point two, which we have to is -- think about breakthrough strategies for how we can put more americans to work. one way is long-term strategies. education, research, infrastructure. unfortunately that takes a very long time to have impact. the one thing we can do quickly is reform immigration. the other thing to think about, and something i have been fooling around with. tory wrote and article challenge economists to think about education it centered theories of economic theory. we tax advantage housing and health care and we have too much. we do not tax advantage education. we have too little of that. as an example, as an employer, we have several hundred thousand unemployed. when ever we hire someone in united states, you take the wage and multiplied times 1.3. to figure out what it'll cost you. 25% of the cost of work -- ivery little bit it taken in federal tax. very little is taken to fund our social safety net. all the stuff that gets a layered on top. one example of something that we could do take that off the cost of employment and find that with a consumption tax. make us immediately change. secondly, you would tax advantage work and tax disadvantage consumption. the third thing you would do, since consumption taxes are not a wto violation and advantage domestic production for says imports. that is the sort of thing we have to think about. we have a system that is set up for a time period when america was at the apogee of the world competitively. now we need to compete on a much more even playing field or around the world. we have to think about restructuring the system. innovation will be a part of that, but it has to work hand- in-hand with these large-scale government policies, an innovative government policy. >> on your point about consumption taxes, i fear you've spent too much time with economists. >> i do not think you can spend too much time. >> you've got the cards. we will start passing out cards. as i was drinking coffee this morning i was flipping through "the new york times", i read roger cohen. "america needs an energy and in industrial policy. has the leading green technology. it must find ways to get corporate america in a national revival." jim, i wondered if he would be willing to talk about pet. about that. i think a lot of people think that green jobs are the future. >> they have a important role in u.s. growth. i am troubled by the idea of trying to achieve them through industrial policy as opposed to buy a demand side policy that creates a tremendous demand for green stuff. suggestion. glenn's if your looking for a dramatically welfare and growth- increasing policy change, stop taxing the wages of poor people. stop taxing the capital of rich people. both parties here. and put a 4% of gdp tax on carbon. it's got to be better the first day on optimal tax basis. it has a regulatory advantage. rather than trying to pick, rather than having the government or the science establishment trying to pick the route to a green future, let the private economy do that. there is a role for government in the fundamental science, but the direction of commercialization would go much better as an industrial policy. >> look at open innovation. i embody the principles of the internet. what is the rough consensus running code? there is a big debate about industrial policy. take solar. the technological innovation occurred suggests that the cost are precipitously falling. it could reach parity with the grid. the challenge and this is ironic, one of the pieces of the solar equation that has not moved an inch is the overhead on permitting. so if you wanted to install solar panels at home, the collective cost is $1 billion hidden tax on the waste, inefficiency, the soft cost of solar. i can tell you what i am pushing. the energy department put out a link for the competition. 25 cities can dramatically lower the cost bubkof solar permitting. if we can tackle soft costs, it may be did it is our economic interests. now, is that industrial policy if we cut red tape? that is a much bigger question. soft costs, let's tackle them. we will build the technology and engage it. we will make progress while we are having metaphysical debate about ind. or non ind.. -- industrial or non- industrial. >> there are some things in the way. where people live, where people work. the first significant issue -- the incentives to minimize cost. second, we have to work seriously if we want people to live but closer to where they work. ok, how are they going to get there? that will involve a transition. >> two weeks ago we had a celebration for regular folks at the white house. this mom said, this zoning data is opaque. you cannot get zoning data. she wrote to the city of san francisco and said i would like to make it transparent. she wrote an app. you're right. but let's celebrate what we can do. >> i agree with tim on carbon and green jobs, but i would freeman more pessimistically. [laughter] all of those expenditures are not a source of growth. they are battle we have to fight to hold even. we would be lucky to screen energy as cheap as what we are spending now. what we must do proactively or what we must do retroactively to restore the damage will be a significant cost. and green jobs are not a benefit. switching to green energy is a defensive maneuver. if we succeed, which does not look likely, and other countries do not follow our path quickly, we have essentially lost that one. if you are growing a consolidated resource account of innovation and to take the environment into account, when those costs start to bite we do not realize how grim the picture looks. that is one reason to be pessimistic. >> let me add one thing. this is an expert in this field, by the way. one thing. the current way we are accounting for the costs of energy sources -- >> absolutely. >> this statement that the green energy sources would not have an improvement of productivity is not right. >> most of the environmental costs are coming in the future. >> no. a lot of them are coming out. there is a very good hamilton project paper. [laughter] >> after that commercial. >> i would make a couple of points. i like it. one is that, if you look over the course of american history, it has taken 30-50 years to transition from one source of energy to another. to hale oil to coal hydrocarbon and gas. the system that generates and uses electricity is a very complex and capital intensive and takes a long time to change. nothing is going to happen very quickly in this -- in changing the stock we use. secondly, there is nothing that suggests -- these are the things dr. belcher talked about it. i will take it home and show it to my child. so those inventions are going to drive a lot. we have not seen anything near what drives the kind of efficiency that is startling and life-changing in i.t. where does that lead? today, as a practical capitalist, if you look today at the net present value of the underlying economic transaction in the energy field if i could give something to a consumer today and it provides benefits for him today, and i can make money, disproportionately that today is in conservation and efficiency. there is a huge amount we can do in building today and using less fuel. that work -- there are a bunch of behavioral reasons why we have not done it as systemic reason and financing reasons. but there is a massive amount we can do today to use less while we create the conditions to use something different. that is what i would suggest our public policy be focused on. >> thank you. we note have time for a couple of questions from the floor. the first question is, in order to encourage long-term growth it is agreed that more americans need to get a higher education. the hamilton project released a paper showing that the rate of return to getting a college degree is about 15%, which dwarfs the greater return of most other conventional investments. >> maybe yours did. [laughter] >> what opportunities exist for using technology to make higher education more efficient? >> it's a major thrust of interest for me. the administration is committed to finding ways to do this. i would answer in three parts. let's start with the data. there has been debate about the gainful employment roulette was issued. what that is going to do for the american education system was create unprecedented transparency. note two education systems are equal -- no two education systems are equal. understanding what that means for you, students like me. if i want to look at others who look like me and have my school said, which a higher education choice did they take to maximize their results? we do not have a good sense for that. we will see more data that will improve our ability. number two, we have this policy environment today that emphasizes seat time. you are physically in a course for a semester. we have not shifted to one of mastery, the degree to which you can demonstrate the competence or effectiveness on this subject matter, sooner rather than later. to factor in innovation would be critical. we do not have the kind of are in the engine in education -- r & d engine. the pharmaceutical industry spends 15% in net revenue on r & d. does anyone know the rate of r & d. less than .1%. i want to give you an example. i traveled to los altos school district. i met a fifth grade kid who's completed all the exams of to cut to less. he said i was so enamored with the videos i would spend three nights at home watching the videos and taking exams and learning. know if the kidf genius.n of the son of summers. >> do not go there. >> the kid did it on his time. >> a unique kid. >> if you look at these enabling infrastructures for schools. from a technological innovation standpoint, data, thinking about master and having r & d focused. >> higher ed treats the internet as an add-on. the key is for higher education to be organized around the internet. this is a classic case for a long and to exchange to come. technological lags raare longer than we think. the idea of reorganizing the university around internet, given lack of accountability and in french interest, students who do not care and 20 other problems i can talk about for days -- but we are a very long ways away from doing it. we treat breakthrough is as add-ons. >> are you implying that i would not be needed? >> many of us would still be needed. some of us would not. [laughter] about onet concerned thing. >> mike, let me join in fighting a question which is about higher education. i always say for an inclusive long run growth, our biggest problem is education. k-12 education. higher education, i do not do any of the functions described. there is a cheaper technology than a video or me. that's a book. i don't transmit information. i motivate people to learn information. on a good day, they think for themselves. >> i wonder. we have been thinking a lot about the education issue. i wonder if we have a cultural problem. if we want to improve, we need to look in the mirror and make sure we are doing what we can do. search hase real chur suggested if you look at the path of societies that are innovative and successful, what you see is they've reached the pinnacle of success, they taper participation in math and science. it happened in america and japan and korea and singapore. apparently it is now happening in china. i do not know if that is true or not. this is a piece of research claims this is the case. what we need to do as parents and citizens in our community is emphasize every day to our kids and their teachers that we need our kids to study this discipline. they raised $1.5 million for turf on the football field. one of the things that we have to reinvent if we are going to have another surge of prosperity is our commitment in our household to math and science education. >> thank you. i think that is a good way to end our panel discussion. join me in thanking, jim, glenn. [applause] >> the u.s. supreme court has finished work for the term. tomorrow, all look at some of the court's decisions. the court blocked a class action sex discrimination suit against wal-mart and allowed a video game makers to continue to sell violent video games to minors in california. hosted by heritage foundation and moderated by edwin meese, live coverage is underway at 10:00 a.m. eastern. now available, c-span's congressional directory. inside, new and returning house and senate members with contact information, including twitter addresses and information on the white house, supreme court justices, and governors. order online at c-span.org/shop. >> the state department tuesday called on the steering government to withdraw troops. the spokesman talked about the obama administration's calling for a stay of execution in the case of a mexican national in the state of texas. this is about a half an hour. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> sorry for the delay. we had a technical difficulty with the audio today. first, to confirm that secretary clinton will meet tomorrow with peruvian president elect. we very much welcome his visit and look forward to continuing to strengthen our ties with peru. on a separatae note, syria. the united states is very concerned about the ongoing attacks against peaceful demonstrators. the government of syria claims it is interested in dialogue. at the same time it is attacking and massing forces where demonstrations have been peaceful and continuing its attacks along the turkish border. we urge the government of syria to halt intimidation and a rest campaigns, to pull its security forces backed and allow syrians to express their opinions freely so that a genuine transition to democracy can take place. with that, why don't we go to your questions? >> i understand the state department has requested the texas government to stop the execution of jesus of a mexiacan national. do you have any information about that? the schedule is for tomorrow. on the other hand, i would like to ask you what the state department thinks about the capture of jesus enrique aguilar, which is one of the many leaders of the zetas, with support of the u.s. intelligence. >> let me say with regard to the case of al garcia, the united states has filed an amicus brief. we did that on july 1 in support of the application by mr. leal, a mexican national. for a stay of execution. this is to allow some consideration of the fact that mr. leal was not afforded a visit by mexican consular officials at inappropriate moments in the trial proceedings. to allow that to be taken into account. as you know, this is an issue of reciprocity for the united states because we are very concerned about being in compliance ourselves with our obligations under the icj, because it is critical to get ability for consular access and protection for our own citizens when they are arrested or detained by foreign governments. it sends a strong signal to the international community about our commitment. i don't have any comments for you on the mexican arrest. obviously, we support steps by the mexican government to enforce the law and to see justice done. >> was there any word as to why the consular was not -- was there anybody that would answer for that failure? >> i do not want to get too deeply into the legal issues from this podium but my understanding eis it has to do with state's rights versus federal policy and the current policy of the state of texas. let's stay on mexico. >> can you elaborate? it could affect the rights of americans? how would that work when americans are abroad? >> i think you know there was a were in inound were were ie sufficient compliance. that case was upheld in u.s. courts. if we do not set a good example and a lot of foreign governments to visit their citizens who are arrested for having legal difficulties, that we could face reciprocal denial of access for our consular officials when american citizens find themselves arrested or detained overseas. so our concern is to be in compliance icj. that is why we filed this amicus brief, so that our own citizens do not face reciprocal the nile of access. >> i know it is a legal issue, but are you able to speak to that opinion among some that texas should be able to do what it wants and not respect the decisions by washington or d.c. or federal courts. . . once people realize their view is in the minority, there is no better way to do that then it in some kind of public square. in egypt. but beeverybody could see they have the numbers. there are moments like that politically. discussedjust before the berlin wall fell, everyone thought that it was impossible. why? it is not that people suddenly received new information. the impression they received is that everyone had the same believes they had. people became short of that. -- short of that. -- sure or that. you had a sudden change and then you have a revolution. i often feel like we are on the edge of that. the alternative ways of people becoming aware of what their beliefs are, what each others' beliefs are, is something that introduces that truly democratic shift. i've often lasted -- the blo ggers who want to enforce conformity and none to our original work. although the situation is improving. we find they do not descend on a french cable from panama revealing that the united states has declared the right to board one third of all ships in the world without any justification. they read the front page of "the new york times" and they say, i agree. i disagree. that is something -- it is hypocrisy to say that you care about a situation but you do not actually go to work. it is something that has angered me. it does serve an important function. the function that it serves is the function of the square. is to show the number of voices that are lining up on one side or another. >> i want to -- you talked about what you released today. who also sued mastercard and visa. can you explain why you did that? [applause] >> when you released the papers, -- daniel ellsberg release the pentagon papers, and i spoke to daniel last night. "the new york times" has 1000 pages of the pentagon papers. 1 months before he gave it to them. fresh news. amazing stuff. [laughter] what was the question? [laughter] when he released the pentagon papers, did they suddenly change things? actually, nixon was reelected after data released the pentagon papers. the vietnam war did not stop. the information was very important. over time, it was very important. the most boring thing to come -- most important thing to come out of the papers was the reaction to the pentagon papers. they describe a situation in the past -- the most important thing to come out of the papers was the reaction of the pentagon papers. to reaction describe what was going on right now. it showed a tremendous overreached by the nixon administration. various attempts to cover things up. "the new york times" probably would not have printed the pentagon papers. it was scheduled to be published in four months' time. very interesting. on december 6 last year, visa, mastercard, western union, bank of america all bank debt -- gang up together to engage in an economic blockade against wikileaks. it has continued since that point. that was over six months now that we have been suffering from an extra judicial economic blockade that has occurred without any process whatsoever. the only formal investigations into this, one was on january 13 last year by tim geithner, the secretary of the treasury. he found that there was no -- no lawful excuse to conduct an economic blockade against wikileaks. the other was by a a visa subsidiary the found that we -- who is handling our european affairs which found that wikileaks was were not in breach of any of these the's guidelines or regulations. yet the blockade continues. it is an extraordinary thing that we have seen. they are instruments of u.s. foreign policy, but instruments of the state's, but rather instruments of washington's patronage network policy. there was no due process at all. over the past few months, we have at a number of cases. we had been a few -- a bit distracted. we have built up a case against visa and mastercard under european law. tech -- together, they own about 95% of the credit card payment industry in europe. therefore, they have -- they cannot engage in certain actions to unfairly remove people from the market. >> speaking of other legal cases, i just wanted to ask you about what you face next week, the extradition case on july 12. "the nation" magazine has done to go pieces. -- two pieces. they have interviewed your lawyer. he is very well known for representing prisoners out of guantanamo, a renowned human rights attorney. he interviewed many people in sweden and the united states and talks about appealing ins -- a feeling in sweden of an attack represented by your past lawyers on the swedish justice system. and on the integrity of the women in sweden. >> are lawyers never attacked and the integrity of women. -- our lawyers never attacked and the integrity of the women. >> the history of this case is as unfortunate as it as as possible to a mountain. -- to imagine. each of the human beings involved deserves respect and consideration. i wanted to ask if you are seeing this as a change of approach with your legal team in dealing with your possible extradition to sweden. >> possibly. the situation -- what has happened to europe and what has happened to sweden is fascinating. it is something that i have come to learn because i have been embroiled in it. it is intellectually extraordinary. we see, for example, that the european union introduced an arrest warrant system. to extradite from one state to another state of the you. -- of the eu, it was put in place in response to 9/11. to extradite terrorists. it introduced the concept of mutual recognition. this is a feel-good phrase that one state mutually recognizes any other state in the eu. what it seems to be talking about, if you think about it, given the realities, a mutual recognition of the elite in each country in the eu. it is a method of being at peace. each country has made a tribute -- treaty with each other to recognize each other and to not complained about the behavior. you might say, okay, we have justice systems in various countries, yet they vary in all sorts of ways. some are worse, depending on your value system. we have sunk so low that it is not even like that anymore. the european arrest one talks -- warrant talks about about the mutual recognition of judicial authority. it has permitted each country to define what they call a judicial authority. sweden has chosen to call policemen and prosecutors judicial authority. the whole basis of this term being used in the original introduction of the european arrest warrant was that he would keep the executive separated from the judicial system. there was meant to be a natural and mutual party that would request extradition. and it is not. there are many things like this going on. i have not been charged. is that right? is it right to extradite someone to a state where they do not speak the language, where they do not have family, they do not know the lawyers, they do not know the legal system, if you do not have enough evidence to charge them? you will not even come over to speak to the people concerned. previous complaints about its these problems have led to some inquiries in sweden. the biggest swedish law magazine had a survey on the spread -- on this. one-third of the lawyers responded, yes, these complaints are problem. on the other hand, it is a situation where the swedish prime minister and the justice minister have personally attacked me. they said i had been charged when i had not been. it is a delicate situation. this week and we have now is not the sweet enough past, in the 1970's. -- the swedish and that we have now is not the swede in in in the past. -- sweden of the past. sweden recently set -- passed a bill to send marines to libya. this is a different dynamic that has happened now. we have to be very careful in dealing with it. it is one thing to be considerate of differences, but it is another to tolerate any difference. i do not think any difference can be tolerated in the eu. what is it to prevent the justice system from fundamentally collapsing and the cane? -- and decaying? we say there is mutual recognition. major recognition between the u.k. and romania. what of the romanian justice systems collapse is more and more and more? who is going to account for that? who is going to scrutinize that? is it going to be some beer corrects -- bureaucrats? the only sustainable approach to scrutinizing the justice system's of the eu is the extradition process. it is extradition of lawyers and defenders to have the highest motivation to scrutinize the quality of justice in the state's they have been extradited to. that is a help the system. -- healthy system. it permits outside scrutiny and and stop european states from decaying. the european arrest warrant system removes the possibility. it is not open to us to look at any of the facts in the case. that is completely removed. all they're arguing about is where the two-page request is a valid document. >> [inaudible] >> i am so sad that we do not have time to go into it. this strange mutual recognition. kafka's paradox of being extradited without being charged. are we aware of where we are? let's not take that path the first. i cannot refrain from the obscene remark. when you said you were staying with miss egypt, i hope there was some american fundamentalist who said, and now everything is clear. you were seduced by someone who was really and al qaeda agent. and then you are turned into a terrorist agent to do your terrorist activity. now things are clear. >> we have one minute to go. >> one minutes in this broader kristen since. -- christian sense. so what. [laughter] very briefly. those palestinian picture -- papers that triggered the moment. i wonder if you agree with me. what made me so impressed is this. my liberal is really friends -- a liberal is really friends -- israeli friends tell me all the time, listen, you cannot negotiate. if you examine got the on the west bank -- gaza on the west bank, there was peace six or seven years. the image you get from these papers is that, there was an incredible compromising spirit from the palestinian side. it was absolutely clear that israel is not interested in peace. second point, i think it is so important, the exact words that you use. it confirmed my point. they could no longer deny it, and so on. that is important. i know that you know and you know that i know. but we can still play the cynical game. let's act as if we do not know. the function of wikileaks to push us to this point where you cannot pretend not to know. let's give you another example. this is cynicism at its purest. you remember the outcry in zionist circles. obama made the point, the basis of peace should be the 1967 borders spread -- borders. my god. the reaction was as if obama said sun bank, i do not know, took orders from al qaeda upgrade this was the official u.s. policy. the obscenity of the situation. although this was the u.s. policy, it it was part of the underwritten thing not to talk about it. to ignore it. that is our situation here. [applause] egypt, the truth about egypt. we western europeans would love to seek a second democratic movement. officially, we got exactly what we wanted. a secular uprising. and do you know how we be paid? -- behaved? did you say -- c. "day and night clubs called " -- "day and night" or the girl says, let's do it. finally, they are alone. we are alone here. the girl says, ok, let's do it. and he is shocked. we were a little bit like that. we say that we want secular democracy. and they say, ok, we take down our trousers and we will have a secular democracy. you cannot get it like that. [applause] the most important thing, what you already said, aimee, if we are approaching the end. even if you are not wikileaks, it changed the entire thing. even at the level of publishing, spreading information, you pushed things in a very formal way to the point of under a liability. -- on deniability. nobody can pretend that wikileaks did not happen. it will be very interesting to classify all the reactions to wikileaks. repression, the nile, whatever. -- denial, whatever. some tried and neutralize it. freedom of the press, others say investigative journalism. others say directly terrorism. the approach i would have followed would have been something like it is just misused. then you have precisely the safeguard. what i am saying, ok. to conclude, do not worry. this is the moment of truth. because nobody can ignore it, it has changed the entire thing. the point is not allowed it to -- to remained faithful to it. [applause] >> just a note -- we will be out signing books on the left of the lobby and we would love to talk to you. i want to end with this question. tomorrow, at your turn 40 years old. what are your hopes for the future? >> there is a big future. that is a future where we are all able to freely communicate our hopes and dreams and the historical record is an item that is completely -- it could never be changed, deleted, modified. that is something is -- that is my lifelong quest to do. from that, justice lows. -- flows. most of us are reasonably intelligent. if we communicate with each other, organize, and know what is going 9, and that is pretty much what it is all about. in the short term, it is that my staff stopped hassling. >> i wish you the best in even more beautiful mischief. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> next on c-span, the head of the national institutes of health, dr. francis collins, talks about science and innovation in the u.s.. then president obama followed by senate republicans talk about ongoing budget negotiations. u.s. supreme court has finished work for the term. today a look at some of the court's decisions. the court blocked a class-action sex discrimination suit against wal-mart and allowed video game manufacturers to continue to sell a violent video games to minors in california. hosted by the heritage foundation and moderated by edwin meese, live coverage at 10:00 a.m. eastern. next, a discussion on science and innovation in the u.s. appeared we will hear from the head of the national institutes of health, dr. francis collins. hosted by the brookings institution, this panel is about an hour. >> i was a host of the show called "the next big thing, " and so we're going to look at the next big thing. francis collins played a significant note -- role in this project. what is going to me next? what do you say has emerged in will emerge as the possible next big thing? >> it has been tenure stuns the publication of the draft sequence of the human genome. there has been a decade-long experience and paramount about reflection of how far we've come in those 10 years. for researchers, this is utterly transformed the way that we ask in tried answer questions about human biology. graduate students have a hard time imagining how actually people did anything worthwhile in studying human biology without this information. it is so much a minute to minute, hour at our experience of going to the web, clicking with your mouse, and pulling down information about our instructions, and increasingly layered on top of that is phenomenally interesting in its formation. -- interesting information. there is the thousand genome project which lays out great detail. information about what genes are expressed in which tissues, information about the at the genome -- epigenome, how the genome is marked by various proteins to be on or off in different situations. anyone who is interested in human biology or medicine, we have moved into entirely new territory radically different from the availability of disinformation. it has made -- hit as been made immediately accessible, which was a cardinal principle. it has also become an advocate of the field of to gnomic science -- ethic of the field of the genomic science. one difference is that we have to use to approach questions about human biology with ferreira -- rather narrow focus of we've wanted the chance of making progress. you had had a hunch about what the answer was going to be. now the genome is information and we have been able to derive an awful lot of the detail about that information. you can ask comprehensive questions. what other roles of the genomes they play a role in diabetes? what are all of the proteins present in a given sell? i am not saying that we can fully answered those questions but we have the tools to get there. in terms of medical implications, there were some slightly cynical comments coming forward like, why have we not seen the revolution in medical -- in madison already? anyone who would propose that have the instruction book in a language that we understood quite poorly about 10 years ago would result in a vast array of new diagnostic and therapeutic has not been paying attention to all the steps necessary to get you from that fundamental information to its implications in the clinic. but we are getting there. my predictions tenures ago, we are about on the pace that i thought we would be. we have certainly derived information that is useful for making diagnostic predictions about who is at highest risk for breast cancer, colon cancer, a few other diseases. if we of learn to make predictions about which drugs will work for which does this is at which people -- which drugs will work at which those decisions of their -- which drugs will work at which dosages for which people. should they have been cured by surgery or radiation or is it necessary also to offer chemotherapy? in the past, most women went ahead with the chemotherapy because of the slight improvement in the outcome, but clearly most of them were already cured by the surgery and radiation. now with a method that allows you to look at the gene expression in the cancer itself, you can make accurate predictions about whether that is a cancer that needs the chemotherapy or whether it is a low likelihood to recurve, and about 50,000 women will take advantage of that task and that will save our health-care system about $100 million in chemotherapy that will not have to be administered. it will not be considered necessary. if our diplomat implications. but most of the promise for genomics for revolutionary -- revolutionizing our health-care system lie ahead. how we take this information out of laboratories and translate that into targeted, effective therapeutics for cancer come for diabetes, for heart disease? we can see that path, but it is a long, complicated path fraught with high risk of failures. it requires right now some special attention to ways to try to speed that up, up to look at that process the way an engineer would come and see if there are ways that we could move the ability to develop clinical benefits at a maximum lead productive pace. even in these difficult economic times. >> one bit that we have seen is something that you worked on, and who would of thought you could grow this in a petri dish? what is the connection between adding growing batteries in a pitcher dennis -- petrie dish? >> we're trying to understand how major -- how nature makes materials. one example is that by a composite material, -- bioco mposite material, it does not add waste material to the environment, in itself assembles. i thought was fascinating. what if you could give information to a solar cell for catalyst said that you could build and dance materials with the same kind of control in bio chemical processing? what is the code for a high- powered battery? how could you assemble a solar cell? that comes from doing the experiments. to be able to have 1 billion different sequences and look for one that can do something you wanted to be able to do. as a materials scientist, a lot of the advancements that have come along with the human genome process is being able to have dna sequence cheaply and inexpensively, to be able to make bad, and taking some of the difficult procedures and have libraries of dna, and then it is to my group, and allow us to take advantage of all that technology and research and development, and we're not going to use it for human health, but to see if we confined new catalyst material for converting methane to ethane. we will find that one part in the million. i am not that good of a biologist. i could not have done that with out all the groundwork to take the technology and make it not that difficult for us to work on. it has been very fine. you can find the dna sequence that can code for protein that can improve the efficiency of your solar cell and about three weeks. >> where are you seeing this going? >> this is one of my favorite things about being an engineer right now. there's so many opportunities. look around and pick one. you want to pick health care or energy or environment for water, all of those are science and engineering opportunities. in my group, we focus on energy quite a bit, energy storage, battery spirit we focus on solar and new catalyst discoveries for energy. we work in cancer as well. we look for these new diagnostic probes for early detection of cancer. we also look at storage. just pick one of them. everything to me as a material. whether it is a material for energy or health care, how you put it together makes the difference. >> are you seeing future benefits in this room? are we going to get that battery that lasts forever? >> this is a small battery, biologically assembled, and it is a high-powered battery. we engineered organisms to make it better over time. it is better through genetic engineering. an example of environmentally friendly clean energy. we've done the same with solar cells. there are a couple of companies that have products, a touch screen for the cell phone that is made with environmentally friendly processing. it is usually touchscreens made from photosensitivity material. but over 50% of the material comes from china. one company, the technology has developed in the company and they have not found a replacement for. it does not use materials that are much more abundant and environmentally friendly. and that is going to several years of development. >> what would it take to an invention to market were to mark it you could touch on that? you get the moment of aha, i have an idea. is it a pain in this net -- in the neck? >> it depends a bit on the field. how readily available the path is, if you are university-based investigator like professor belcher, and how would you go about obtaining a patent, and what kind of licensing arrangement might be most beneficial in terms of getting your invention moved into a space work it will be developed into a product that the public and benefit from. at the moment, there is both good news and bad news. good news there are a lot of innovations in our universities in terms of coming up with potential major advances that are going to be beneficial to the public, to the environment. the bad news is that capital is harder to find right now. i think that has slowed down the process of taking some of these exciting new in engines and moving them forward. unless you have something that clearly will result in profit in a fairly short term, it is harder these days to find investors who are willing to put the money into it. i assume that you would agree with that from your experience. >> i definitely do. m.i.t. has been very supportive in helping negotiate the patents. trying to make contact with the industry's, and how you start companies that would be very develop the technology to address that would develop the technology. but the technology was very young when it when to the company. in that case, it is very high risk. in terms of this, it has been about eight years with taking the idea, developing it, and now we have the product. but we have mostly venture- capital money in it took investors believing in the product. think about what it would be like if they did not stick with us. we can make enough of this for the whole world in our manufacturing plant. the implications in electronics as well as in geopolitical issues. here relate to people staying with us and believing in us. but absolutely key. >> if that was happening today, would you have the same success in convincing people that this was 8-10 years down the road? could you start a company of this sort? >> i do think that it would be tougher. my latest company since then, it developed faster because we had more experience in then, but it is looking at a very big market for transportation as well as petrochemicals. there is a lot of interest in it because of the possibilities. we will wait and see. but i think it is tricky and really hard for young back of the members coming into university to know whether their ideas are worth it and understanding what the path is like to get from basic science ideas commercialization. it is a tricky path. >> can you lay out for people now? >> i do it on a very individualized basis. we're lucky had in my t but it is a risk. -- at mit but it is a risk. >> as a young scientist, we never had the chance to be a would get into this environment to pursue such inventive ideas, just because of funding constraints. it is difficult these days, particularly for early stage investigators, to get started. at nih, we are the major funder of biomedical research in the world. the likelihood of a grant as an early stage investigator was about one in three that that grant would get funded. that was availability of funds versus the request for them. some might have argued that we would've done better if we had funded one into, but one in three was the experience. in the last few years since 2003, says the budgets have flattened out and now this year, seeing a real decrease in real dollars, that success rate has gradually been trimmed back. it is now about one in five and it is heading to one in six later this year. a lot of early stage investigators trying to get starters who are often the engines of these bright, creative ideas are having difficulty getting their laboratories going, because they depend upon that grants support for starting. we try to do everything we can especially with early-stage investigators to give them a special leg up to compete against each other and not the more established investigators. we have done everything we can to free up enough funds to be able to support as many new applications, even if it means that some of the continuing applications are being unpacked. but still, that means five out of six of these new proposals in which are lots of kernels of it innovation that could make a difference, both for help in our economy, are going begging. it is a difficult time to try to encourage innovation and the pressures are so strong. >> the revocation is that things do not get intended, if you do not fit the cure for diseases that you're hoping. >> i am sure that we're missing out on opportunities that could be supported if we were in a more favorable environment. it is very hard when you look at a proposal, to assess whether this will be a successful new innovation. sometimes it is the wacky science that you do not want to miss supporting, and get wacky science where you only funding one out of six grants may be a difficult one for our peer review process to identify and say we are going to do that, even though it means not doing establish science within the same pool. we have programs that focus specifically on high-risk, high reward kinds of proposals. we want to be sure that they are considered and they come in and compete against each other. but the resources are limited to do as much of that as you would like. >> i'll let the follow-up on that. graduate students and young faculty that are entering academia right now are a different kind of scientists. they do have very innovative minds, and they come from interdisciplinary training for the first time, degrees in biology and physics in some engineering's and they have a different way of looking at the world. it makes it very difficult, but if i want someone thinking about the war from a different direction and help figure out a soft, is that combination of different disciplines that can really push things forward. the most fun kind of student to educate, and you think about that in the grant process, might be involved in different fields. in my grant proposals, my first day in my new job, it is not like that anymore because it is more of the norm to be educated in different disciplines. we really need to figure out how to keep facilitating that. the young investigators may get more into the mainstream funding so that they can have the ideas that change the way that we treat disease or the way we make new materials or solve problems. to use genetic controls to build the spirit >> the ultimate multi discipline. they say, no way you could do that. you are working in a multi disciplinary world because of what you're doing. >> but it is not so unusual. i am lucky to be at a new institute at mit. at the engineering and aunt cancer biology working together. -- half engineering and half cancer biology working together. it is so fantastic. i have an expert tutoring me in what is important. we had the conversation this week where we were sitting down going back and forth about engineering ideas and science ideas. is the idea of never running into each other on campus and now we are in the same office suite. it is really fantastic. we're learning from each other's presentations and learning a similar language. >> there is a language barrier, too. >> it is a language and style barrier as well. people will say that the work on hypotheses and i do not know what that is. i want to know what the problem is and how can i solve the problem. >> as an engineer. >> that is how i look at it. what is the problem? you take the combinations and put it together, it really is a whole new world. >> that is interesting. in the biology field, there has been much focus on hypotheses- driven research. some are beginning to think that we ought to think about some times where is their problem of hypothesis-limited research. your in fact narrowing your focus down to a small possibility of what the answer might be as opposed to asking a comprehensive question about a problem. as you just said. the field of genomics has certainly stimulated that kind of thinking. it is the ability to ask comprehensive questions. if you could decide what the question is and you have the tools to approach it, the hypothesis is that you have the ability to answer the question. that drives you forward in a very exciting way. i like what you said about the interdisciplinary aspects of what you're doing at mit, a nice experiment. there are many others of that sort that are really wonderful to watch. at the nih, the ones i depend most on are those who came out of physics or engineering or computer science. computational approaches are so critical these days for our ability to sift through math and data sets in mind the truth out of that to learn something about heart disease or cancer. i want to point to another area at nih which is particularly ripe for this tour -- this type of the engineering attitude, this process of going from the fundamental discovery about the malek a dear -- molecular basis of disease and develop diagnostic tools and therapeutics, whether biologics or small robotics. there's not a pretty picture of how it has been convicted of the last 20 years as a. the average time to go from insight about a possible target for therapy and adding that there be approved is about 15 years. a failure rate is about 98%. that means the cost, when you add up all the failures, or exorbitant in order to get one success. an engineer would look at that and say, there is something wrong here. this pipeline needs attention. and not in a way that would be fixed by a series of one-off s, when you look at it one at a time. what are the steps involved and why are they so prone to failure? there is a real opportunity right now to bring this kind of interdisciplinary approach to that in a partnership with the private sector who are also very frustrated by these inefficiencies, and with the fda, a critical partner because they are watching over this to decide whether what you develop is ultimately safe and effective. why do we do testing, for instance, of drugs before you ever give that small molecule to a patient for the first time? you have to decide whether it might be toxic. how do we do that? the way that we have done it for a long time. bacterial systems, small animals, large animals, it is tried but it is not all that true. he clearly pales in some instances to predict toxicity. it probably over-predicts toxicity and never -- and promising drugs never come because the mouse has a problem when i saw this molecule. what we try to get closer in a safe way to human patients? we have an incredible proliferation of information about how the culture of human cells from embryonic stem cells to turning them into liver cells or heart cells or kidney cells. we can even build three- dimensional organs made of those cells that are good representation of what goes on in these organs. if we organist this the way that in -- if we organize this the way an engineer would come at it would be simple and easy to do this test of pharmacology to see if it is safe to go forward with that first patient application. that is just one example. there are multiple of the things that we could be doing more systematically to speed up this process. it has not been possible to have this focus until now. maybe the dynamics were not there. the interest of the seminary aspects -- the interdisciplinary aspects applies to other structures of academia and government and the private sector getting together in a new way to tackle this problem. i think the enthusiasm for that is very high right now. we had in 98 are hoping to set up a national center to be a hub for that kind of activity. i am pretty excited about that as a way to take even in a limited resource situation, the kind of innovative attitudes and bring it to a problem, which is going to be critical for the future of medical advances. >> the educational system supporting that? >> we have an issue in terms of our institutional and educational system, do we have a pipeline a bright, capable scientists coming into the field? everyone agrees that we have school system that is not encouraging a lot of bright minds to see science is something exciting. it is not presented in that way. we clearly are losing people along the way. we have a workforce that is not as diverse as our population. we are losing some very bright minds from groups that are not traditionally represented in science. and we cannot continue to count on the fact that our scientific leadership is going to come from other countries. we had a great opportunity in the past to recruit bright minds from all over the world in many of us -- and many of us have become central to our own national success. but they are increasingly not staying. the opportunity is to go back to china and india and they get very strong. we have not particularly been friendly to many of those individuals in terms of arby's of policies. i think we're headed for a 40 hour visa policies. i think we are heading toward at -- we have not been particularly friendly to many of those individuals in terms of our visa policies. we really need to break down all lot of those barriers for our educational process if we're going to have the kind of scientists that angela is talking about that she loves having in her own domain who are not really afraid of the jump from one discipline to the other and may find it is doable. -- enjoyable. >> i am very passionate about k- 12 education. children love to play with legos and discover the world around them. how we get them involved with that? there really is getting hands-on experience adding projects where we just learn math and our relates to the environment, and young kids right now or so where of its energy. they are aware of the environment. they are aware of so many issues that i did not think about when i was a child. i also think that they naturally want to make that this -- the difference. they want to make the world a better place. how we incorporate that at the elementary school level so it is a part of their everyday life so they can invent new approaches? of course science and math are a critical part of their education. i love my job. i cannot imagine it being more fun. to know what it is like to be an engineer or scientist, and what we get to invent and discover and to, i think that is key. i do not know what the answer is to that. so many universities and others do. but his kick -- is the ability to kaptur american interests. >> where will we be in 10 years, and what you are working on now, they will have to pick up the baton. where do you see them taking it? what will happen next? what do you hope to see? >> as a professor, you see the generation that just graduated and we are already better for you. they were making the discoveries and then they go out into industry, companies, they go out and academic labs in different directions. ayman materials for energy and materials for cancer. i look around and think that we have the ability to make an impact. i do not want to work on anything that does not have an impact. alternately i want to make something that makes a difference in people's lives. i think the undergraduates share the same ideas. you have these brilliant young people, and you continue to become better. >> you want to see everyone using cellphones? >> i want to see environmentally friendly materials. this is at room temperature and threats. what a wonderful manufacturing idea. let's make high-quality materials. that is my vision. my vision is to be able to have clean processing. i want something that you can hold in your hand, that makes a difference. combination ofa genetics, the possibilities of biology, make that combination of many different possibilities. mix those ideas together and see what comes out. and that is how we are developing the catalyst that we worked on for 30 years. it is not because we took one material lead time, we use the power of biology and do the experiments, chemistry, mix them together and get new combinations that have never been made before. we can only touch on a couple of applications, but that is just one example. the idea is better living through biology or understanding natural systems. cheaper. you do not need billion dollar labs. things that are recyclable, and you can go lots of places from that. >> we're going to be handing out cards. if you have any questions, add chopped them down and i will try to get through some of the cards at the last minute. any other comments? any other comments?

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