Kai Simons: Engineering the Future with High Tech and Low Tech
My name is Kai Simons. I come from the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.
My topic will be engineering in the future with high tech and low tech.
What does this mean?
Well, we biologists are living in exciting times. Think about it.
Human genome was sequenced, other genomes were sequenced, and now we are sequencing
genomes at an ever increasing speed. But beyond that we are also going into the whole biodiversity of this planet.
We are not only looking at the mice, the zebrafish, the worms, and the Drosophilas.
We can now choose problems anywhere because the tools are there
and therefore we can look at problems that excite us.
The task is to unravel how life works at the molecular level.
Not only at the molecular, but also as systems.
This means that you out there, as biologists, have challenging tasks before you.
It's fantastic today to be in this game.
But there is another challenge, and this challenge has to do with resources.
Think about it. We are running out of oil,
other fossil resources, rare metals, all these materials and resources
that our present technologies they are based on.
This means that in the next decades, we have to come up with solutions for new technologies
that will replace those that are dwindling. If we do not do that,
we will go into wars, as we have done on this planet during the last centuries and years.
So how are we going to achieve this? Where are the technologies going to come from?
Here biology comes into play, because the organisms on this planet, they can produce energy
in many different ways. They can produce materials. They can recycle them with efficient systems.
The cells are full of nanomachines, sensors, in fact, cells are run on nanotechnology principles.
Our technologies today are microtechnologies, but we have to become more efficient, smaller.
That means, nanotechnology will be important for future technologies.
Where will the inspiration come from? From biology!
Everything of course will come from biology. Engineers of the future will take their inspiration
from all the systems that we are now unraveling in biological research.
This of course means high tech. High tech solutions. Very, very complicated, complex, and sophisticated solutions,
but there is another side to this coin, and that is low tech.
I was in India, in the beginning of January of this year, 2011, together with a former post-doc of mine,
Lawrence Rajendran, who is now a professor at Zurich, and we were touring in South India and he had started a program "Raise. Rural."
Now he comes from a rural college himself, in the neighborhood of Chennai, Madras.
There was an event organized in the Adoni college,
a two hours drive from Madras, and there were 400 students, not only from this Adoni college, but also from other colleges.
Now the issue is, what can these rural colleges, there are 25,000 of them in India
10,000 of them engineering colleges, and they feel detached
from the mainstream that goes on in say Bangalore, Hyderabad, and New Delhi.
So, what could rural college students do?
Could rural colleges become centers for change?
Could it be that students in these colleges would aspire for low tech solutions?
Think about it. When you go around in India, on the countryside,
you see technologies which have been there for hundreds of years.
I come from a rural family in Finland, farmers, if I go to my farmer relatives they are all high tech today.
So the high tech solutions are spread around in the western world and the low tech solutions are still in countries like India.
So maybe students from the rural colleges could go to the villages, study how the villagers are doing in their daily life.
Do they have, how do they cope? Energy production and saving, environment, biodiversity, water, waste management, agriculture
transport, societal organization and leisure. Maybe countries like India
could become in the rural colleges movers in the direction of low tech.
Then we would have high tech, low tech, and this will build a sustainable world.
My message is, therefore, the world needs both high tech and low tech. The western world is obsessed by high tech.
Also the emerging economies are doing high tech, like India and China, no question about that.
They should continue. But what is missing now are low tech solutions,
because our world will not be able to meet the demands of the future
without solutions which are simple, efficient, and use almost no energy.
Therefore, countries like India, can do both high tech and low tech, and the rural colleges could be the centers for change
which drive low tech solutions into society and into the rest of the world.
This could become a big, big, industry. Thank you.