Speeches, Articles and Reports

I started my scientific career in the late ‘60s at the AT&T Bell Laboratories at a time when U.S. commerce achieved world dominance. The U.S. basically owned the world at the time, in my opinion, and you can debate this if you want, but you know, you’ll lose.

It was the era of R&D, research & development. There were very large industrial laboratories, and I was in one of them at Bell Laboratories, which spun out an enormous amount of technological innovation. In some ways, we were too successful. Over time, as industry spread new technology around the world, the competition became global, and it became fierce. U.S. companies were no longer dominant; they became global companies, and in my view, they became too large. Industry began to shrink its research and lower its sights towards short-term goals and quarterly statements rather than decadal goals.

I realized that in the 21st century, American universities would have to fill some of that void of research that had been 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 – it was declining for those that remember the history, AT&T was falling off the edge of the table – and I came to an emerging powerhouse, the University of California at San Diego. This was 1990 or so, and it was completely liberating for me. At Bell Labs, we had pursued a single mission of research to contribute to the long-term health of a private telecommunications company. At UCSD and in public universities across 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 than 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. We would pursue it and demonstrate its value, then you’d hand it off to somebody and hold your breath and hope it was successful. That was the mode; 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. I will never forget, and 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 state-of-the-art wireless devices that could have kept the responders and people in the buildings in touch with dispatchers on the ground who could 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 do it. 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. 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 with the end users whether they are first responders in a crisis or bedside healthcare professionals saving lives and responding as quickly as they 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, such as their 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, and 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 and 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.

This new era of generating new knowledge that will serve the public and benefit society is a team sport. Full body contact. And no one knows that better than technology transfer professionals like Jane and her staff at UC San Diego with whom I’ve been working -- 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 Smarr, and Nick Spitzer, are also long-time Tech Transfer clients. Each of them is a giant in his field, and 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.

Let me end with a few words about something that the four of them have in common, something that I hope that we all have in common, and something that you have to remember all the time. When you listen to the presentations today, you will undoubtedly think, “Geez, these guys are really smart.” They are brilliant and 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 among the young scientists 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. That’s why they’re successful, and that’s why we’re here today.

Our session moderator has brought passion to his work as an intellectual property attorney, and he has fought the good fight for startup companies and universities in this region. He has an outstanding track record in patent and trademark protection, but he is, at heart, a scientist with a degree in electrical engineering. Not quite a physicist, but almost. 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. Thank you.

I’m too old to have played hockey with Wayne Gretzky, unfortunately. Wayne, as you’ve all heard, has this really cute expression, which is: “Don’t skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck will be.” I think that’s what lured me away from hockey to science. In the ‘60s, I recognized that science was really where the world was going to be in the next half century, and I believe I was right.

As Mike said, I spent 22 years in Bell Laboratories, and it was a marvelous place, it was mecca for the kinds of science I did. But I saw something really disturbing happen during the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. Basic science and research was moving away from industry in the United States because of international competitiveness. So I moved to where basic research had to be done, and had to be transferred to industry, and that is the University of California. I moved there [the San Diego campus] in 1990 and spent a wonderful time there before I made this horrible mistake of taking over as president of the University of California.

Let me explain why I did that. I’m determined that this institution, the UC, and the state, will go to where the puck is going, where the puck will be 20 years from now. That’s my vision for the University of California, and I’m going to talk a little bit about that. I believe that the future of the University of California and the future of California are connected. So let me talk about the mission of the University, the strengths of the University and the strengths of California, and how I intend to exploit those strengths and carry out our mission to serve the state of California in a way that I don’t think you’ve heard before because I’ve not ever said this except to a few people in the past few months. I’ve been crafting this vision of where we’re going over the past six months or so.

Let me start out with an unequivocal assertion, and then I’ll justify it. The unequivocal assertion is that the University of California is the finest university in the world. Now let me justify it. I have friends who come back to me rapidly, perhaps even one of two of our Stanford friends and our Harvard friends, and say, “Wait a minute. What about our school?” While it’s true that we compete for research funds, for faculty, for students, with Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Chicago, Caltech, Stanford, while we compete with those institutions, there are two major differences between UC and them.

The first thing is fundamental, which is that we’re a public institution. So our mission is different. As a public institution, we have a responsibility to deliver quality, both in human capital and in intellectual property, to society, in our case, the state of California. That’s not the mission of private universities. The second, and the reason that I really assert that we are the finest university, is that we have a huge impact on society. We’re really big compared with these other schools. We’re 10 times the size of these other schools. So we can brag that we have won more than 50 Nobel Prizes and that we have a huge economic impact on the state of California and on the world.

As I think about the future, I think about this issue, the fact that we are 10 campuses, five schools of medicine, three national laboratories. That’s our competitive advantage. We’re not nearly as wealthy as those privates. And so I think, “Why do we still compete? Why do we, as a public institution, compete as well as anybody with these privates?” The reason is that we’re big. And we have to use our competitive advantage of these 10 campuses. So as we go forward, you’re going to hear things like “the power of 10” and “the promise of 10,” because we will be one university of 10 campuses as opposed to 10 universities. And I’m going to describe some efforts that I’m putting together to use the strengths of all of our campuses as we go forward.

Our 10 campuses are driven by a common mission, really three interlocking missions: research, or as I see it, creating new knowledge; education, or creating that next generation of those that create the new knowledge and the leaders of California; and public service, or putting our ideas and our people to work for the benefit of the citizens of California. I believe that we at the University of California must harness this power and promise of 10 to build for the future and to keep California competitive as we look 20 years out.

To do that, I’ve laid out basically three planks that we’re going to focus on at UC. The first is, we will fuel innovation and expand its impact on people’s lives by focusing on what I call R, D, and D. You’ve heard of research and development, R and D. The second D is as important, and I’ll talk a little bit about it. The second D is delivery. If we do all the R and D in the world, and it isn’t delivered, it’s not effective. That’s the first plank.

The second is that we must forge strategic international alliances to the best and the brightest minds around the globe so that we can still be attractive to bring the smartest people in the world to California. Because it’s my belief that if they come, they will not go back home. Third, we must enhance the quality of California’s future workforce by taking seriously and in a full-bodied way K-12 education, and not just complaining about it, but doing something about it. And I’ll talk about what we’re doing.

So let me briefly talk about those three platforms. We entered, in my view, the era of R, D, and D actually on 9/11, September 11, 2001. Many of you watched on television as the World Trade Center buildings collapsed. I watched as the first responders tried to communicate with each other. And the firemen couldn’t talk to the police, and the police couldn’t talk to the rescue squads. And I’m sitting there in my home in La Jolla thinking, “No, no! We have the technology, they can talk with each other, what the hell’s gone wrong?”

The answer is, we had not delivered the technology to the first responders. It was at that moment that I realized the University can no longer leave alone the delivery part. We must work with industry, we must work with businesses to help the delivery to the first responders. The University can do things that industry can’t do, and industry can do things that the University can’t do, and we can’t just leave it alone.

An example of what I’m talking about are four Institutes that have been created inside the University of California – actually, they were created during the Gray Davis administration – the California Institutes for Science and Innovation. What they have done is link several campuses together with industry to address things like information technology, health care, nanosciences, and the interface with society.

Let me give you one example of what I mean, let me be practical. In the Bay Area, there’s an institute called the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research. We call it QB3 for short. It harnesses the intellectual power of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz, and the Berkeley National Laboratory. The idea is to bring the life sciences together with the physical sciences together with computer science. We have some really outstanding young people at UC Santa Cruz who work on informatics. The Berkeley Lab has every tool known to man or woman for physical measurements. UCSF is one of the finest life sciences schools in the world. And UC Berkeley, well, it’s got everything. I’m a professor at Berkeley, so I can say that.

If you think about it for a minute, if you think about bringing those four institutions together within a few miles, there isn’t another place in the world that has that kind of intellectual resource. And then if you bring together the biotech industry in collaboration with that institute, there’s nothing like it. Example: On the Mission Bay campus of UC San Francisco, one of the buildings belongs to QB3, not the faculty of UC San Francisco. On the third floor, they do fundamental biosciences, fundamental research. On the second floor, they do drug development, taking the results from the third floor and other results. On the first floor, they’re doing clinical trials. Patients are coming into the building and being subjected to clinical trials, hopefully, to save people’s lives. At all four of these Institutes, R, D, and D is being practiced – not R and D – R, D, and D. And it’s carried out by faculty, students, postdocs, undergraduates, and industry visitors. We have hundreds of industrial partners, mostly in California but not exclusively in California. And it’s a very different way to think about education at the undergraduate level and the graduate level. I don’t know how else to teach creativity and innovation than to take undergraduates, put them in the environment where innovation occurs, and hope it rubs off.

The second platform is global alliances. On the international front, I’ve recognized that we’re a little late coming to the table, but we carry a huge reputation. This compelled me to begin working on alliances as near as Canada and Mexico, and [far as] China, India, and Africa. You do not build global competitiveness, in my view, by building walls. You build global competitiveness by attracting the best people in the world. All these other societies are grappling with the same issues: public health, infectious diseases, energy, transportation, food, the environment. These are huge problems. These are not physics and chemistry and biology. These are problems where you have to bring social scientists together with philosophers, scientists, and engineers.

This concept has taken me to China twice in the past year. We’ve built an agreement called “10 + 10”: the 10 campuses of the University of California and the 10 finest research universities in China. I know it’s working, because the Minister of Education told me last time that they took the California Higher Education Master Plan and translated it into Chinese. And they’ve now designated the research universities, those that will become the equivalent of CSU, and those that will become the community colleges.

So we’re partnering with the 10 best research universities in China. The Chinese, of course, want to build a vibrant economy similar to California. I said to the Minister of Education, “You understand, I’m not doing this for China, I’m doing this for California. And many of the people we bring here to study as postdocs and graduate students are going to stay in California.” He smiled at me and said, “Then we’ll send more.”

Let me give you a taste of what the potential is. China has one and a half billion people. Tsinghua University in Beijing accepts one out of every thousand applicants. It is my sense that we should be trying to pick some of those off. We have traditionally in California done that, and it’s created a vibrant economy. This is controversial among some people. But I’ll defend it.

The third issue is science and math, K-12. I’ve traveled a lot around the state of California, and I’ve been shocked at whole schools and whole school districts that don’t have a single science- or math-credentialed teacher – it’s been shocking – both in the cities and in the rural areas, not a single one. In May 2005, I realized we had to do something about this.

So together with the Governor and CSU President Charlie Reed, we at UC launched an initiative to increase the number of qualified math and science teachers. I committed – without a lot of [resources], I just did it on a whim, I knew we had to do it – that we, the University of California, would be producing a thousand science and math teachers a year. It’s called “A Thousand Teachers, A Million Minds,” the argument being that those thousand teachers over 10 years would infect a million minds with a love of science and mathematics. Because if you talk to kids now in 9th grade, they’re failing 9th-grade algebra. They have no passion for the technical world we live in. And we’re losing, folks, we’re losing.

For our part, the University of California has created a program called “Cal Teach.” It addresses three issues: recruitment, education, and retention. I won’t go into the details of how we do that, but we have, I think, a thoughtful plan as to how to recruit these young people, teach them inside UC, and retain them after they’re out teaching in our K-12 schools throughout California.

This initiative has received so much enthusiasm in the rest of the country that you might remember that President Bush, in his State of the Union address last year, announced a program called “Ten Thousand Teachers, Ten Million Minds.” He copied ours. Well, we still have to do it, let’s not be too smug. We’re working hard at building that. And I’ve been pretty proud of this program. But then I received a letter from a Californian, and I want to read this letter to you:

Dear President Dynes:

I just received a letter for my daughter, Carla, from you and the Governor of California congratulating her for acceptance into the most outstanding research university in the world, the University of California.

This letter sounds very promising for brilliant students like Carla. It offers to forgive student loans in exchange for becoming K-12 science and mathematics teachers in California through the new program called California Teach.

I am a teacher, and I strongly discourage Carla from becoming a teacher for various reasons.

• First of all, teachers are now told exactly what and how to teach everything, so there is no room for thought and creativity like in prior days.
• Secondly, teachers must rush students through the material or else they fall behind the pacing guide they are given and must follow.
• Thirdly, teachers are underpaid for their hard work and level of education.
• Fourthly, teachers are highly educated, yet they are not respected and allowed to make crucial decisions about teaching.
• Last of all, teachers are made accountable for the performance of their students, but their parents are not held accountable.

During this decade, I have seen the teaching profession become an assembly line production, but educating students is quite different from manufacturing automobiles. It resembles the political system my parents left behind in their homeland, Cuba. Teachers have to deal with criticism and pressure from politicians, parents, and administrators. However, they get very little support.

Carla is brilliant, motivated, and bilingual, but I will make sure she does not become a teacher. She will be a respected leader and make a tremendous impact on California. Her two brothers, Daniel and David, are also very smart. They also will be future leaders, but not teachers.

Sincerely yours,
Elsa M. Morales
UCLA Class of 1986

We must fix these problems. This may be the toughest job I’ve taken on. Let me end with an invitation to you. Let me end on a high note. We’re going to take this on, by the way. I’m going to need your help, but we’re going to take this on.

Let me end on a high note with an invitation. There are days when I feel awful. There are days when you feel depressed about the future. On those days, when the news is bleak, go walk on a UC campus. Sit down with some students. Listen to them. Talk to them. When you see these leaders in training, when you experience their energy and enthusiasm, I guarantee you will feel optimism. And when that happens, I hope you will agree that higher education is the best investment California can make. And I hope you’ll share that with your friends. Thank you.