>> JANE: Welcome to our Catch the Next Big Wave Symposium. I’m Jane Moores, Assistant
Vice Chancellor for Technology Transfer at the University of California, San Diego. I’m
very pleased that you could join us for this discussion of the future of biomedical research
and innovation. Like the rest of San Diego, we were delighted by the news that the 2014
international bioconference would take place here. We saw that this would give us an opportunity
to host a lively exchange of ideas and perspective from a global view. San Diego and UC San Diego
Campus are home to scientific trailblazers from around the world. So we know that biomedical
innovation flourishes when we bring together the best minds from across nations & disciplines.
Today four of UC San Diego’s most distinguished innovators, a stem cell researcher, neuroscientist,
bioengineer, and an astrophysicist turned computer scientist will look into the future
of biomedical research to envision the next big wave of trends and developments. The moderator
for this discussion will be Steve Fallon, intellectual property attorney with Greer
Burns & Crain, one of the symposium’s two gold sponsors. Our other gold sponsor is Perkins
Coie and our bronze sponsors are Gavrilovich, Dodd & Lindsey, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton,
Sughrue Mion, and Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. We are very grateful to all our sponsors for
their generous and enthusiastic support of today’s symposium. I’ve also been asked
by Sandra Brown, UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Research, to convey her best wishes and
her regrets that she couldn’t be here in person because she had a prior out of town
commitment. She particularly wanted me to emphasize how pleased the UC San Diego campus
leadership is by the increasing interactions between academia and industry. This event
and your presence here exemplifies a very positive trend. It is now my great pleasure
to introduce our first speaker, who has been a champion and catalyst for technological
innovation for nearly half a century, Bob Dynes is a physicist & leading authority on
superconductivity, he has served as both chancellor of the UC San Diego campus & president of
the University of California system. Bob’s numerous scientific honors include the Fritz-London
award in low temperature physics, and election to the National Academy of Sciences. He chaired
in 2009 National Academy Sciences study on advanced radiation detectors commissioned
by the Department of Homeland Security, he currently serves on the boards of Argonne
National Lab and the Helmholtz Foundation in Germany amongst others. Bob knows the world
of tech transfer from a 35,000 foot level and he also knows it on the ground. He has
been a faculty client of our UC San Diego tech transfer office for most of our 20 year
history, with both issued patents and exciting new inventions in his portfolio. Please join
me in welcoming Bob Dynes.
>> ROBERT: Thank you Jane and welcome all of you to this typical San Diego day. You’re
here about biotechnology and technology transfer and the first person that talks to you is
a physicist. I’m proud of that.
- Laughter -
>> ROBERT: I’m really pleased to welcome you here, and I have the opportunity for about
10 minutes to share some thoughts about the future of biomedical innovation. I’m delighted
to proceed the four speakers who are friends of mine, they are colleagues of mine, we have
shared at least the last 20 years at UC San Diego, and I’m gonna tell you that they’re
really really creative, very smart guys, and they are personal friends. I wanna follow
up on Jane’s introduction by telling you about my own history because it’s relevant
to what we’re going to talk about and discuss this afternoon, and how I actually moved my
own ideas in technology as a technology inventor, I moved from one coast (IE the East Coast),
and one era to another coast, the West Coast, and a totally different era, and I’m going
to explain that to you. I started my scientific career in the late 60s at the AT&T Bell Laboratories,
at a time when the US Commerce achieved world dominance. The US basically owned the world
at the time, in my opinion, and you can debate this if you want, but you know, you’ll lose.
- Laughter -
>> ROBERT: It was the era of R&D - Research & Development, and there were very large industrial
laboratories, and I was in one of them at Bell Laboratories, which spun out in an enormous
amount of technological innovation. In some ways, we were too successful, and over time,
as industry spread their new technology around the world, the competition became global and
it became fierce. Most companies were no longer dominant and they became global companies,
and in my view, too large. Industry began to shrink their research and lower their sights
towards short term goals and quarterly statements rather than decade-al goals. I realized in
the 21st century American universities would have to fill some of that void of research
that was done in industrial laboratories in the United States in the 60s and 70s and 80s.
And universities would have to take some of the responsibility for the stewardship of
the nation’s long range vision and intellectual property. So I moved. I left a declining power
house, and it was declining for those that remember the history, AT&T was falling off
the edge of the table, and came to an emerging powerhouse, University of California, San
Diego. And at the time, this was 1990 or so. The time was completely liberating for me.
At Bell Labs we had pursued a single mission of research to contribute to the long term
health of private telecommunications company. And we were successful, as most of you know,
at UCSD and in the public universities in the country, we pursued three interlocking
missions - Education, Research, and Public Service to benefit the public in an array
of ways and a wide variety of fields, much broader numbers of fields and interconnections
of fields that I experienced at Bell Labs, and yet as we entered the 21st century we
still had an R&D mindset - Research & Development. It was all called R&D and we would pursue
it, demonstrate its value, then you’d hand it off to somebody and hold your breath and
hope it was successful. That was the mode, which you passed it off to somebody else,
who was responsible for actually taking it to products that would benefit society. That
R&D era ended in my mind on September 11th, 2001. And I will never forget and probably
a lot of you will never forget the sight of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing,
and watching first responders trapped in the buildings. I knew as a research scientist
in the telecommunications field that we had developed the state of the art wireless devices
that could’ve kept the responders and the people in the buildings in touch with the
dispatchers that were on the ground and tell them how much time they had left. But those
devices never made it into the hands of the responders. I remember looking on television
thinking, “No! No! We know how to do that.” But we didn’t. And I’ll be haunted forever
by that observation. That single day in my mind caused a transition to a new era. We
transitioned from R&D to RD&D - Research, Development, and Delivery. And we could no
longer afford the luxury of handing off those responsibilities to somebody else. We had
to move discoveries from the bench to the public domain efficiently, effectively, and
as quickly as possible. To do that, universities had to work more closely with companies, more
closely person to person, and also to the end users who their first responders in a
crisis, or bed side healthcare professionals saving lives and responding as quickly as
you can. Those who have developed innovations need incentives for their work, of course.
If they invest time and resources in their process, they should expect an opportunity
- an opportunity, not a guarantee - an opportunity to get a return on their investment. Universities
also need to show a return on their investments. Investment in research - this is true for
the public universities, I know this. I’ve both had glorious times and I’ve been beaten
up seriously, as a UC president, when legislators, the governor, taxpayers, insist on getting
economic and societal value for what they invest in higher education. This new era of
RD&D has forced all of us in the world of science & technology to change not only how
we work but also what we think about our work. It’s just a different era. We can no longer
afford to operate in silos, I don’t like to hear people say anymore, “Oh I just do
basic research”. I’m afraid I’m pretty rude to those people now. We can’t put up
those walls. Listening to people say, “Oh! those industry people. Or, oh! Those academics.”
We’re in the same room now. And this new era generating new knowledge that will serve
the public and benefit society is a team sport. Full body contact. And no one knows better
in technology transfer professionals than Jane and her staff at UC San Diego whom I’ve
been working with, in fact we just submitted a couple of patent proposals and we’re working
with small companies. I’ve watched with great pride as that unit has grown over the
last 20 years. Our four speakers today, Larry Goldstein, Shu Chien, Larry Sparr, and Nick
Spitzer are also long time tech transfer clients. Each of them is a giant in his field, together
they constitute an all-star team that exemplifies what I am very proud of at UC San Diego. They’re
world leaders in technological innovation. Scientists are world leaders in technological
innovation. Let me end with a few words about something that the four of them have in common,
and something that I hope that we all have in common, and something that you have to
remember all the time. You listen to the presentations today, you undoubtedly think, “Geez, these
guys are really smart.” Brilliant, ingenious, but above all else you will sense their passion.
Their passion for knowledge and how they’re using that knowledge. As a physics professor
who teaches graduate students, I can tell you that the young scientists that I deal
with, those with the greatest potential aren’t necessarily the ones with the highest measured
IQ, whatever that is, and the most impressive publications. in every generation and in every
field the people who have the greatest passion for their work will have the biggest dreams
and take the wildest risks. Passion is what drives innovation. And that’s where they’re
successful, and that’s why we’re here today. Our succession moderator has brought
passion to work as an intellectual property attorney, and has fought the good fight for
startup companies and universities in this region. He has an outstanding track record
in patent & trademark protection, but he is at heart, a scientist with a degree in electrical
engineering. Not quite a physicist, but almost. But he’s dealt with patents that have been
licensed, and forced, and sold. Please join me in welcoming Steve Fallon from our Symposium’s
gold sponsor, Greer Burns, & Crain for a few words. Thank you.
- CLAPPING -