There is an ecology of interacting laws, regulations and institutions that are intended to support innovation – a traditional strength of the U.S. Unfortunately, the current elements of that ecology were designed a long time ago for the technologies that existed at that time and are not well suited to the technologies of today and tomorrow. This talk explores the nature of the problem and some possible solutions.

Dr. Atul Butte of Stanford University is at the forefront of the nascent field of translational bioinformatics—a field that seeks to create new diagnostics and therapeutics from genome-era information and data. Here he highlights how new uses for publicly available data have enabled us to ask new questions, including rethinking the nature of disease. Dr. Butte gathers this data on gene activity for scores of diseases. He is looking not at the symptoms or physiological measurements of disease, but at their genetic underpinnings. He performs statistical analyses to map disease based on similarities in their patterns of gene activity. Dr. Butte is able to show how using genes to redefine disease enables the discovery of new causes for disease, suggests novel roles for drugs in the treatment of disease, and, for the first time, allows us to probe the inner commonality across diseases that previously seemed dissimilar.

Dr. Martin Chalfie’s discussion highlights his ground-breaking research on green flourescent protein (GFP). He and colleagues revolutionized how scientists study the mechanics of cells by getting a visual fix on how organs function. GFP is a small, inert, and relatively nontoxic molecule, easily diffused through living tissue. Researchers now have the ability to follow various cells with the help of GFP. They can study nerve cell damage during Alzheimer's disease, how insulin-producing beta cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo, or how cancer cells spread. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells with a kaleidoscope of colors in the brain of a mouse.

Dr. Chalfie is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he is also chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.