7.2 Technology Panel Discussion

Several MIT scientists and engineers underscored the importance of linking management and technology in the lab, at the earliest stages of the development process.

Provost Robert Brown pointed out that collaboration across academic departments has been a hallmark of MIT since its early days. At most universities, academic departments are like castles in Scotland—each self-contained and defensible, but not well positioned for collaboration among the fiefdoms they protect. At MIT, faculty move outside their academic "structures" to do interdisciplinary research. This tradition dates back at least as far as the interdisciplinary labs that helped develop radar systems and other critical technologies during World War II. The Media Lab is a current, highly visible example of this tradition. So is the Nanotechnology Lab. "Research goes on here that wouldn't have existed in a traditional academic environment," Brown said.

Brown also described the organizational impact of complex technology on MIT. Just as the world is becoming more interconnected, organizations like MIT are becoming more interconnected. Complex new technologies draw on and have implications for many disciplines. This interconnectedness is at odds with the tendency toward specialization. MIT uses a "research center" approach to create structures that encourage collaboration across what were the feudal castles of traditional academic disciplines.

But this issue of local fiefdoms versus global connection is far more than just an academic phenomenon. Professor Rebecca Henderson noted that all organizations have the issue of local silos that conflict with the need to create connected, mutually-optimized global solutions. And when Kofi Annan spoke of the need for more understanding and inclusiveness, he was talking about breaking down the barriers that separate the far-flung cultures of the human race. Finally, the fundamental fact that the constituencies are broadening speaks to the reality that leaders of every local culture, corporation, or academic department must connect with a broadening array of others.

One issue becoming more pressing and prevalent is about how to take the fruits of technology and make them relevant to people who are not as fortunate as we are. Henderson said: "In the next ten years, there will be an increasing effort to link our enormous resources to help those who don't have enough food to eat or clean water to drink." Inventions such as MIT Professor Susan Murcott's water cleansing solutions demonstrate how technology can help solve such world problems.

Technology also has an important role to play in the fight against world hunger and disease. For example, Professor Susan Lindquist described work to add vitamin A to rice. Thousands of preschool children in developing countries go blind from vitamin A deficiency, a problem that could be averted if common staple crops were nutritionally more complete. Although genetically modified foods have their own ethical issues, the potential to improve nutrition or reduce hunger (by improving yields) should not be ignored.

The idea of adding vitamin A to rice prompted the question whether a scientific advancement, like the addition of Vitamin A to rice, can be distributed to the world when it was created by a for-profit company. Lindquist addressed this point, and the related notion of whether companies should be able to get patents for genetic discoveries. Lindquist said that until recently she was against patents. But then she talked with drug companies and learned that they were not developing a new discovery because the discovery was in the public domain. Because it was in the public domain, it presented no competitive advantage for a drug company to develop it. Lindquist said that new incentive programs were needed to get the best minds working on these pressing problems. "There must be other ways than just a small number of individuals making millions while the others are left in the dust," Professor Lindquist said. Creating consortiums of companies was one suggestion. Another was to develop a profit motive that would work in the third world.

Professor Lindquist also described the sheer joy and intellectual exuberance of figuring out how life works. Hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution have created some amazing materials. Nature allows for flexibility, and a diversity of new structures can be invented which will profoundly affect our lives, Professor Lindquist said. "There is tremendous power in the material world. Consider the protein that forms spider silk. A spider web looks gossamer, but its tensile strength exceeds that of steel. A roll as thick as a pencil can stop a 747 airplane." Learning to harness this power of proteins will change the world.

Similarly, the human genome project is not only teaching us about ourselves, but it is reinforcing some basic philosophic principles, Lindquist said. "It shows the brotherhood of man. We realize that we are extraordinarily similar." The differences between us amount to a few words changed in a book the length of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

She noted that differences between people are a natural resource for new talents, but they also give us different susceptibilities to disease. By exploring these differences, we can determine the precise nature of the disease and develop therapeutic strategies that will target it. Curing diseases—and eventually preventing diseases—follows.

Professor Linda Griffith's description of research on Hepatitis C illustrates another benefit of taking account of ethical issues. Sometimes it leads scientists to alternatives they might otherwise not discover or pursue. Hepatitis C is a dangerous virus that drives the need for most liver transplants and afflicts 200 million people around the world. Combating Hepatitis C is a research question, but even studying the disease presents ethical issues. This disease is hard to study in a test tube because liver cells in a test tube do not act like liver cells in a live person or animal. This brings the need to study the disease in living animals. But issues of human rights and environmental protection are expanding the list of constituencies to include animals. Many people are opposed to the use of animals, such as monkeys, rabbits, and mice, for biomedical experiments. Yet pharmaceutical companies and biomedical researchers need accurate models for human diseases. They need ways to test the efficacy and safety of new treatments prior to giving them to people.

New biomedical breakthroughs, however, are now providing scientists, drug developers, and doctors with test tube tools to combat disease without the controversial use of animals. Griffith described how new fabrication techniques and an advanced understanding of the structure of the liver let scientists create a functioning synthetic liverlike environment where liver cells behave normally. The result is a better model for studying liver diseases, like Hepatitis C, without infecting animals. Thus, technology can sometimes create a third path that alleviates the need to make a tough trade-off between the rights of two constituencies.

Professor Rodney Brooks's Project Oxygen is pushing the forefront of computing. At the same time, computing professor Brooks is working with management professor Rebecca Henderson to identify viable business models for the new technology concepts being developed.

In discussing Project Oxygen, Brooks emphasized the shift to peoplecentered computing. Under Project Oxygen, the computer has the intelligence and the software to focus on the person using it rather than the current paradigm that forces the person to focus on the computer. The intent is that people can spend less time on the technology and more time achieving their goals.

Yet as we give technology the power to serve us better, we also give technology more information about us. Core components of Project Oxygen track the locations of people so that these people have any needed files or software wherever they go. Such advances are a real boon to virtual workers and highly dynamic work and home environments. But data on where a person is and whether he or she is working or doing something else could be used in unethical or undesirable ways. So too can the "personal robots" under development that can do a variety of household chores and monitor people as well as physical environments. Technology provides the power, but it does not provide the wisdom to wield that power.

The panel members agreed that the key to dealing with these issues and getting the maximum benefit out of new technologies is to get managers involved early in the development process. Management must have a deeper understanding of the technology and the potential of the technology for returning value to the corporation and to society as a whole. New technologies often raise ethical issues. These issues should not be left to science alone. Rather, discussions with business and with society as a whole need to take place, to position the technology within the context of the larger world.