“Radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it.”

Dr. Eric Topol brings power to the people in his new book The Creative Destruction of Medicine.  This is the best guide I’ve seen to help consumers as well as professionals navigate the uncharted territory of personalized medicine.

Despite the billions spent each year, Topol reveals why so much of medicine, as it is currently practiced, fails. By focusing large drug and device trials on populations, we have come to rely on and accept a system that works only for some of the people, some of the time.

Topol makes a case for what he terms “hyperpersonalization” and details why it will be the biggest disruption in modern medicine. He gives numerous examples of how technology is starting to capture all the relevant data from each individual through sensors outside of the body as well as internally, through ingestible sensors. Integrating these data points will enable precise, hyperpersonalized therapy that will treat patients more effectively, prevent major medication side effects and ultimately prevent many diseases from ever occurring.

He outlines four major areas of innovation: wireless sensors, genomics/proteomics, imaging, electronic health records/health information technology.  He then delves deeply into each one, giving numerous examples of what’s available for consumers right now and what’s coming next. The “printable kidney” in the imaging section was my favorite—I hope he’ll expand this section in the next book.

Topol concludes with a call to action for patients, clinicians and entrepreneurs, “What matters now is not the new capabilities we have, but how we turn those capabilities, both technical and social into opportunities.”

We’ll continue to bring you news of breakthroughs and the people behind them!

Is the food movement in danger of becoming elitist? That was the critique given by Eric Schlosser, author of the book Fast Food Nation, and co-producer of the documentary “Food Inc.”  March 14 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Schlosser’s talk, “Environmentalism, Elitism, and Food,” was this year’s Conradin von Gugelberg Memorial Lecture, honoring the environmental commitment of a member of the MBA Class of ’87.

Schlosser is an investigative journalist whose bestselling book, Fast Food Nation, was an expose of the fast-food industry, and he followed up with “Food Inc.,” a film about corporate control of the American food supply. In his lecture he compared the current food movement with the environmental movement, looking at the history of each and warning that the food movement, like the environmental movement before it, risks losing touch with its democratic roots.

“At its worst caricature, the environmental movement sometimes seems to care more about endangered snails than about human beings,” Schlosser said. “And at its worst, the sustainability movement and the food movement sometimes seem to care more about the taste of some Napa wine than about the migrant workers who harvested those grapes.”

Schlosser’s talk came at a time of increased interest from students in food and agriculture issues.

“I assumed I would come to business school and be one of the few with an interest in food and agriculture,” said Ruthie Schwab, who is pursuing an MBA and a master’s degree from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. “But I’m one of many. It’s really exciting.”

The Food and Agriculture Resource Management Club, or FARM Club, was started by a small group of business school students in spring 2010 and now has dozens of members, said Michelle Paratore, MBA Class of 2012, who has been one of the club’s leaders. Students are finding agricultural internships, such as working at the sustainability department of a large berry farm.

The annual Food Summit at Stanford, which began in 2010, has promoted interdisciplinary discussions of food issues.

And Sarah A. Soule, Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, is planning to co-teach a course on sustainable food in the fall.

“We plan to cover a variety of issues related to the U.S. food system, including the loss of small farms and farmland, organics, the health ramifications of the American diet, food deserts, and more,” Soule said. “Some of the things that Schlosser touched on, we will be discussing in more detail in the seminar.”

In his lecture, which was supported by the GSB’s Public Management Program and Center for Social Innovation, Schlosser traced the history of the modern environmental movement, noting that it has been 50 years since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, showed how businesses imposed their external costs on the rest of society; for example, by dumping chemical waste in rivers.

Over the years, however, the environmental movement became increasingly upper middle class and white. “Its focus on preserving wilderness sometimes seemed to be motivated by preserving wilderness for recreation or preserving wilderness right next to second homes,” Schlosser said.

He said that today’s industrial food system presents the same problem that environmentalists faced decades ago: “corporations imposing externalities on the rest of society — and making a great deal of money by doing so.”

In the 1960s, for example, a hamburger came from a small butcher shop or processing plant and contained meat from just a few cows. Today, a typical fast-food hamburger contains pieces from more than 1,000 different cattle, often from several countries. “This is a fundamentally new thing, and to me it’s actually a pretty disgusting thing,” Schlosser said.

It is also, he said, a reason for the increase in food-borne illnesses. “You would think that, as the technology was getting more advanced, food-borne illnesses would be declining, but what we have now is a system that’s a perfect vector for spreading diseases,” Schlosser said. Even if the small local shops of the past weren’t clean, they couldn’t spread an illness to very many people.

Another cost of industrialized food, Schlosser said, is the obesity epidemic. “These companies have done a very good job of not taking responsibility for what they’re imposing on society.”

Schlosser warned that the food movement risks becoming too narrowly focused. “In my view there is nowhere near enough emphasis on social justice,” he said. The poor and working class “need a strong environmental movement and a strong food movement more than anyone.”

These concerns are similar to those of students and faculty involved in food issues.

“One of the challenges is that there’s not much information about production methods, but there’s even less information about the social side of production,” Schwab said.  This makes it difficult for consumers to consider, for example, how workers are treated when they make purchasing decisions.

Paratore said the FARM Club has tried from the beginning to cover a wide range of topics. “We didn’t want to limit ourselves to holding events, for example, dedicated to celebrating local organic produce,” she said.

Soule pointed out that there is a substantial body of research looking at issues such as food deserts; for example, areas where people do not have enough access to healthy food, as well as labor issues in the food industry.

“Thus, the concern amongst upper middle-class people about pesticides and chemical fertilizers is really only a tiny slice of what is wrong with the food system in the U.S.,” Soule said. “I think that the most important thing that Schlosser talked about was the need for a Food Justice Movement, which would help guard against the possibility of the movement becoming elitist.”

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News, 29 March 2012

UK children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says.

Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says.

Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the UK than other parts of Europe, and may help explain poor UK rankings in childhood satisfaction surveys.

The trust is launching a consultation on tackling “nature deficit disorder”.

“This is about changing the way children grow up and see the world,” said Stephen Moss, the author, naturalist and former BBC Springwatch producer who wrote the Natural Childhood report for the National Trust.

“The natural world doesn’t come with an instruction leaflet, so it teaches you to use your creative imagination.

“When you build a den with your mates when you’re nine years old, you learn teamwork – you disagree with each other, you have arguments, you resolve them, you work together again – it’s like a team-building course, only you did it when you were nine.”

The trust argues, as have other bodies in previous years, that the growing dissociation of children from the natural world and internment in the “cotton wool culture” of indoor parental guidance impairs their capacity to learn through experience.

It cites evidence showing that:

• children learn more and behave better when lessons are conducted outdoors
• symptoms of children diagnosed with ADHD improve when they are exposed to nature
• children say their happiness depends more on having things to do outdoors more than owning technology.

Yet British parents feel more pressure to provide gadgets for their children than in other European countries.

Anger over traffic

The phrase nature deficit disorder was coined in 2005 by author Richard Louv, who argued that the human cost of “alienation from nature” was measured in “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses”.

In the UK as in many other countries, rates of obesity, self-harm and mental health disorders diagnosed in children have climbed significantly since the 1970s.

But nature deficit disorder is not generally regarded as a medical condition.

“There’s undoubtedly a phenomenon that’s not good for health, which is about not giving access to outdoors or green space, safe risk-taking and so on,” said David Pencheon, a medical doctor who now heads the National Health Service’s sustainable development unit.

“But I wouldn’t say we’ve identified a medical condition.

“In fact we don’t want to ‘medicalise’ it, we should see it as part of everyday life – if you medicalise it, people say ‘you’d better go to your doctor and take a pill’.”

But despite growing recognition of nature deficit disorder, policies aiming to tackle it appear thin on the ground.

Mr Moss cites statistics showing that the area where children are allowed to range unsupervised around their homes has shrunk by 90% since the 1970s.

Whereas some reasons behind the parental “cotton wool culture” are not based in logic – most sexual molestation occurs in the home, for example, not in parks – the one “genuine massive danger” is traffic.

“I think the first step for any child is playing outdoors in the street; and in the 40 years since I grew up, traffic has increased hugely, and that’s the main reason why none of us let our kids out on their own,” Mr Moss told BBC News.

“The only solution would be to have pedestrian priority on every residential street in Britain; when you are driving along the street, if there are children playing, they have priority.”

The report advocates having teachers take children for lessons outdoors when possible, with urban schools using parks.

It also says that authorities who cite “health and safety” as a reason for stopping children playing conkers or climbing trees should be aware that successive Health and Safety Executive heads have advocated a measure of risk-taking in children’s lives.

Health warning

The changes in childhood in previous decades are now filtering through into adulthood, where levels of obesity are also rising.

Dr Pencheon observed that although doctors are beginning to prescribe exercise instead of drugs where it is indicated, much more could be done from a policy perspective.

“One of the problems here is that the NHS is not incentivised financially to do public health,” he said.

“The healthcare system is run on a rescue basis – people come to us when they’re ill, we patch them up and try to get them going again – that’s not the culture of a system designed to keep people healthy.”

The National Trust is now beginning a two-month consultation aimed at gathering views and examples of good and bad practice from the public and specialists.

These will eventually be turned into a set of policy recommendations.

“As a nation, we need to do everything we can to make it easy and safe for our children to get outdoors,” said National Trust director-general Fiona Reynolds.

“We want to move the debate on and encourage people and organisations to think about how we take practical steps to reconnect children with the natural world and inspire them to get outdoors.”

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ALS may be the most deadly disease many people have never heard of. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease affects at least 30,000 people in the United States and 450,000 people worldwide.  It is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that causes muscle atrophy, paralysis, and ultimately death with a three to five year survival rate.

While the incidence rate of ALS is similar to that of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with 5,000 new cases per year, more people die from ALS because there are virtually no effective treatments.

Founded in 1999 by the Heywood family, the ALS Therapy Development Institute seeks to provide an urgent response to the crisis that is ALS.  Dr. Steve Perrin, ALS TDI’s CEO and CSO, spearheads the development of computational biology capabilities and information management systems to more clearly understand the molecular mechanisms associated with disease onset and progression in neurodegenerative diseases.

A non profit organization, ALS TDI collaborates with biotech and pharma companies to address the unmet need in neurodygeneration.

In ALS, nerve cells (neurons) waste away or die, and can no longer send messages to muscles. This eventually leads to muscle weakening, twitching, and an inability to move the arms, legs, and body. The condition slowly gets worse. When the muscles in the chest area stop working, it becomes hard or impossible to breathe on one’s own.

ALS TDI plans to move two drugs towards clinical trials, one of which has previously been approved by the FDA to treat MS and is marketed by Novartis. Gilenya, or TDI 132, blocks lymphocytes in blood and has shown promising results in mice, on several disease measures.

ALS TDI operates on a $10M annual budget with zero funding from NIH. Much of their funding is derived from CRO relationships, foundations, and individual donors.

Dr. Perrin presented the company’s drugs and technologies at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference in New York February 12-13.

Read this article on OneMedPlace Blog.

FEBRUARY 27, 2012 — LONDON — Today, Cleantech Group and WWF publish Coming Clean: The Global Cleantech Innovation Index 2012. The report looks at where entrepreneurial cleantech companies are growing today, reasons as to where they will spring-up over the coming years, and which countries are falling above and below the curve for fostering cleantech innovation.Thirty-eight countries were evaluated on 15 indicators related to the creation and commercialisation of cleantech start-ups, generating an index measuring each one’s potential, relative to their economic size, to produce entrepreneurial cleantech start-up companies and commercialise clean technology innovations over the next 10 years.

“The global macro-economic landscape is shifting; fostering entrepreneurial start-ups and growth companies with clean technology solutions will be an increasingly important part of countries’ competitiveness on the world stage” said Richard Youngman, Managing Director Europe & Asia, Cleantech Group.

The four top scoring countries were Denmark, Israel, Sweden and Finland. These countries all have small economies and while they are the source of much innovation, they have less ability to scale-up companies. These small countries need innovative approaches and collaboration to compensate for the lack of large domestic markets and inconsistent availability of finance throughout a company’s life-cycle.

“This index shows that several countries are on the right track, but clearly much more needs to be done if we are to properly address climate change and achieve a transition towards a global 100 percent renewable future,” said Samantha Smith, leader of WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative.

“The overwhelming majority of capital required for making the transition to a low-carbon future will come from a variety of private sources. Developing a working recipe for strengthening the flow of public-private finance towards early as well as later stage cleantech is key for countries that want to taste the economic success of cleantech,” she added.

North America and northern Europe emerged as the primary contributors to the development of innovative cleantech companies.

The US placed fifth in the Index. However in absolute terms, without factoring in economic size, the United States leads in many measures of cleantech innovation: the country has the greatest public cleantech R&D budget, the greatest number of cleantech start-ups and investors, as well as the most venture capital, private equity, and M&A deals in cleantech.

However, the Asia Pacific region performs well when it comes to scaling up entrepreneurial cleantech companies to wider commercial success and revenue creation.

Whilst currently seeing fewer emerging cleantech start-ups and placing 13^th, China leads in cleantech manufacturing, is strong in early-stage growth, and shows potential to produce more early stage innovation in the future.

The country is rapidly gaining access to funding due to success in raising money for cleantech-focused funds. Additionally, China has been home to the majority of cleantech IPOs since 2009, many of which listed on the recently established ChiNext board of the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Similarly, India scores 12^th but is performing well in fund raising towards Cleantech focused funds and has much activity in later stage Cleantech companies.

Coming Clean: The Global Cleantech Innovation Index 2012 is available as a free download from Cleantech Group at http://info.cleantech.com/2012InnovationIndex.html.

“Now is the time. We’ve proven that it works in the clinic…multiple times and multiple ways. Now is the time that virtual reality (VR) needs to move out of the lab and into every clinic and hospital to deliver the clear benefits.” So began a pointed rallying call from Dr. Walter Greenleaf, who along with Jaron Lanier, pioneered the use of VR in clinical settings.

Known mainly for failing to live up to its potential, a recent conference “Medicine Meets Virtual Reality” (MMVR) highlighted how this label is fading…fast.

It’s a good bet that your surgeon has honed her skills on a VR-enabled simulator before she slices you open. Just like airline pilots are required to log simulator hours to train for unanticipated events, simulator time is now de rigueur for many health professionals.

But how are these technologies being applied to patients? MMVR highlighted some excellent examples.

Training children, even toddlers to manipulate their wheelchairs effectively in a safe environment was exhibit #1. Seeing video of the tiny patients zipping around with smiles on their faces, was a conference highlight.

Another VR elder statesman, Dr. Skip Rizzo, was represented with the PTSD SimCoach. The agent (video here) is currently used to treat veterans by exposing them, in a safe and graduated way, to the traumatic situations responsible for their distress.

Other groups are using this type of VR-enabled exposure therapy to teach skills and provide safe practice opportunities for substance abuse patients.

Another hot topic at the conference, was a session titled “Analysis of Honest Signals for Psychological Health Assessment” . Researchers presented their findings and promised that emotion detection technology is almost ready for prime time. That’s good news for VR users craving a more realistic experience. Not so good news for anyone with something to hide.

Stay tuned for next year’s conference–the confluence of better/faster/cheaper hardware and renewed enthusiasm for the field promises to bring even more innovation.

photo courtesy of MMVR organizers

下半部的中文是在“文学城”网站上看到的。

- BeiBei Song, Editor ｜ 宋贝贝

An Artful Environmental Impact Statement

 

J Henry Fair/Gerald Peters Gallery

Abstraction of Destruction J. Henry Fair’s aerial photographs in this show at Gerald Peters Gallery include “Lightning Rods”” (2009), depicting a holding tank at an oil sands facility in Alberta, Canada. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

J. Henry Fair: ‘Abstraction of Destruction’ slide show

In one way these views of unnatural disasters belong to the great tradition of photojournalistic muckraking; the word could not be more appropriate in this context.

Mr. Fair takes his photographs from airplanes, and occasionally helicopters, often capturing sights deliberately hidden from public view. His subjects include environmental degradation perpetuated on a regular, usually daily basis by paper mills, fertilizer factories, power plants, coal mining operations and oil companies. They include the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Not only does the airplane provide access to restricted areas, it also makes possible panoramic vistas that convey the frightening scale of the destruction, creating the feeling that humankind has wrought its own form of irreversible natural catastrophe. In these vistas you can almost literally watch the poison spread across vast areas of land and sea, creating stains and patterns in a startling palette of deathly grays, lurid rusts and chemical greens and blues. But there is also a reductive side to this process: the expanses of color and texture in Mr. Fair’s pictures often bring to mind slick, printed versions of Abstract Expressionist painting.

These images constitute a kind of toxic sublime. They are most shocking in “The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis,” a book of Mr. Fair’s photographs scheduled for release next month by powerHouse Books. In the book the sights of things like the white, flowerlike aerating ponds of a paper mill — which affect the water table for miles around — provide visceral testimony to the monumental despoiling of the planet. Thanks partly to straightforward, detailed captions, the images’ communicative power and visual force are held in balance. That they look oddly ravishing does not obscure the ravaging they depict.

But it is a different story at the gallery. The main problem — as the show’s corny title indicates — is that the gallery images seem to have been selected mainly for their abstract impact. While there is considerable overlap between the book and the show, the images in the gallery depict far less often — almost not at all — the factories, smokestacks and earthmovers that do the damage or even the dikes that often contain the sludgy refuse. (Perhaps they will reappear in the images chosen for an exhibition of Mr. Fair’s work opening at Cooper Union on Thursday.)

Instead we see mostly effluvia of gorgeous color that bring to mind the painterly strategies of Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still and countless followers. This focus reworks ground — albeit with bright colors and large prints — already broken by photographers like Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. They proved over a half-century ago that they could find motifs in the real world similar to those created by their Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, as is currently demonstrated by the juxtaposition of their work in “Abstract Expressionist New York” at the Museum of Modern Art.

In certain images the sheer unnaturalness of the color sets off alarms, as with the lime-green water in a waste pond for a herbicide manufacturer in Luling, La. Here and in many other cases the colors seem too intense and artificial — or arty — to be good for the earth.

Elsewhere a certain fuzziness eliminates detail and makes the scale of the images — and thus the extent of the damage — ambiguous. Sometimes we might almost be looking at luscious expanses of paint poured over a rough surface, as in the field of royal blue bisected by a single vein of red in a photograph of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

In “Coal Slurry,” taken above Kayford Mountain, W.Va., in 2005, it is hard to tell if the river of white and gray waste running town a crenellated slope is several hundred yards long or several miles. There is a clearer sense of scale to a different image, taken above an aluminum plant in Darrow, La., where white foam flows through dry waste into an area submerged in water; both are tinted shades of dark red by bauxite, the ore that yields aluminum.

Mr. Fair’s presentation at Gerald Peters is shot through with ambivalence about the relative value of art and documentary. The desire that the images be seen as art seems implicit in the trivializing titles (nowhere evident in the book) that Mr. Fair has added to the images on view, even though the labels go on to provide more factual details. For example the sinister bauxite landscape described above, one of the most powerful images in the show, is unfortunately titled “Expectoration.”

“Lightning Rods” pictures a holding tank’s coagulated orange liquid and the metal walkway jutting over it at an oil-sands upgrader plant in northern Canada. The fact that one of these plants caught fire this month doesn’t improve the word choice.

Too often — minus the telltale details that provide a sense of scale and also implicate human actions — the images read first and foremost as slick jokes about painting. They evoke the work that usually falls on what might be generously called art’s lightweight side, from Bouguereau’s academic nudes to Dale Chihuly glass sculptures.

Mr. Fair’s most artistically powerful images are the most concrete, conveying as clearly as possible what is going on. In these destruction is not at all abstract; information and form work together, to devastating effect.

A recent discussion at Swissnex San Francisco provided insights into the challenge of making robots more human. This goal holds profound implications for healthcare and the treatment of injuries to the body and brain.

One of the core principles in this endeavor is the exploitation of passive dynamics. For example, when a person walks, the brain doesn’t control every muscle, every movement, all aspects of posture, etc. Instead, each leg acts as a pendulum that causes a cascade of reactions to propel the body forward.

The same dynamics can be exploited in even the simplest of robots. Rolf Pfeifer, director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich showed a simply structured robot known as the Cornell Ranger. By leveraging passive dynamics, the Ranger can walk 60 km on a single battery charge.

Another key principle in making robots more like humans is that of task distribution. Dr. Pfeifer broke it down into three components–the brain (control), body (morphology, materials) and the environment. To demonstrate, he offered the simple, yet elegant example of picking up a glass of water.

Although the brain controls coordination of major muscle movements, the soft pads of the fingertips flatten by virtue of their composition, passively assisting the process. He contrasted the ease of picking up a glass of water in a slightly humid environment with having thimbles on the fingers in a perfectly arid one.

His point illustrated that there is no clear separation between control and hardware because part of the control is now in the “soft parts” (muscles, morphology). He further posited that robots must have similar gray areas (soft robotics) in order to perform more human-like functions.

In addition to a live demonstration of the “super compliant” Ecce robot (pictured), Pascal Kaufmann (University of Zurich and CEO of Starmind) offered another highly entertaining example via video. “Stumpy” is an almost brainless robot with two actuated joints, springy materials, and not much else. However simple Stumpy’s structure, he’s certainly able to give America’s Best Dance Crew a run for the money! Check out Singapore Technology University’s Stumpy Can Dance video here.

All speakers agreed that the issue of soft robotics is becoming more important and will impact manufacturing and then other industries in a major way. For example, iPads are now assembled by hand in China. What are these humans doing that other manufacturing robots cannot?

Cornell professor Hod Lipson offered one explanation, saying that current robots don’t adapt well to unforeseen circumstances. He spoke of his own challenges with five room cleaning robots in a house filled with irregularly shaped and spaced obstacles.

This poses an essential question–how can robots learn to handle new situations and coordinate with each other? A New York Times article featuring Dr. Lipson sheds some light.

In his early work at Cornell, Lipson’s robots learned how to walk by being bombarded with a number of programs that turned on and off randomly. Some programs produced more productive motions than others and thus got to cross breed with other programs, resulting in the robot “learning” how to walk.

Lipson gave other examples of how this “motor babbling”–seemingly random and uncontrolled actions– works as effectively in the brain development of babies as it does in the cognitive development of robots. By using these sensory inputs to make hypotheses about what to do, robots develop an emergent self image. According to Lipson, when the self image changes, so does the behavior, proving that you can teach a robot (or a reluctant humanoid) new tricks.

That’s good news for us all!

See Swissnex San Francisco’s complete slideshow of the event here

[Editor's note]:

As cognitive robotics becomes more and more sophisticated in taking on human-like intelligence, it naturally calls for ethics concerns.  Just like a question posed to Dr. Lipson from the audience in this event, about potential implications of such powerful robotics and scientists’ responsibilities to take such implications into consideration.  Dr. Lipson acknowledged such concern and responded thoughtfully.  “I used to think people concerned about dangerous science should focus on genetically modified foods or things like that, since we were just making toys.  Now I have realized that this stuff can indeed be very powerful.  I think as scientists we do have responsibilities to society for our work, and I think the best way is to be open about it.  We should do the work in the open, and allow society to monitor and openly debate about it.”

That pretty much represents our philosophy following and reporting on this field as well.

G. Steven Burrill is biotech’s unofficial spokesperson. Involved in creating industry stalwarts such as Genentech, Amgen and Chiron, he’s expanded his influence through a $1B+ venture capital fund and a successful merchant bank.

His annual State of Biotech report is eagerly anticipated by the entire industry.

This year’s address underscored the value of “Understanding how the world is, how it’s going to change and how to build companies for the future. There’s no magic formula…just perspective.”

“The world is a little messy,” Burrill quipped. He expressed particular concern that the global readjustment of capital markets, due to debt problems in Europe and elsewhere, could drag on. Until the underlying problems of this debt overhang are solved, capital availability will remain low and rates high.

Not all is lost, however, and he predicts that the impact of personalized medicine will create multiple opportunities for smaller, leaner companies focused on innovating rather than trying to find the next one-size-fits-all blockbuster.

He praised the FDA’s new “user friendliness” and pointed out that more drugs were approved on 2011 than in any other year.

Although the supply side may be contracting, the demand side will rapidly expand because of an aging population. This holds true in both the US and Europe as well as in emerging markets such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). These emerging markets hold particular interest because as standards of living increase, healthcare is one of the first benefits expected by populations.

Domestically, Burrill pointed to an interesting statistic–within the next two years, 80% of drugs in the US will be purchased by the federal government. “Yes, the market is huge, but the government is a tough buyer with no interest in paying for innovation…just want to pay the cheapest price. Generic drugs are what’s selling.”

The question of “who’s going to pay for this” will remain salient with branding and extracting value from existing patents becoming more important. He also pointed out that big pharma will continue reinventing itself, shifting away from R&D and spinning off pieces if more value can be created by functioning separately. He cited Abbott’s spin-off of its diagnostic division as one example.

He also pointed to companies outside of the life sciences as analogs for what can drive value outside of traditional products. “Swarmology (company mining online conversations for health data) created value from the analytics…just like Twitter, Angry Birds and Google.”

Another trend he identified is that early stage funding is “coming from rich people…high net worth individuals are now subbing for VCs.” He pointed to several examples of celebrity disease advocacy funding including Michael J. Fox’s investment into early stage companies focused on Parkinson’s disease.

In closing, he pointed out that 22% of the current GDP spent on healthcare. “This will continue to go up because of the aging population and the need to keep everyone alive…no one is going to vote themselves off the island.”

Thus, realigning incentives throughout the entire ecosystem so that patients are economically incented to stay well, is key. According to Burrill, companies who provide tools to support this will be the ones that remain in the future.

Written by Connie Li; photography by BeiBei Song

为期27天的“天下第一灯”中国四川自贡灯会在感恩节后的第二天, 在美国硅谷圣塔克拉拉市的大美国游乐园正式亮相。 圣诞前后，灯会再次进入高潮，为旧金山湾区各族裔的民众 提供了节日期间一个新鲜、热闹的娱乐去处。

灯会本是一种中国传统民间文化活动, 四川自贡地区早在唐宋年间就有了新年赏灯的习俗并沿袭至今。 近年来自贡灯会开始在世界各地进行展出并广受好评, 还被新加坡总理赞誉为“天下第一灯”。

与以往传统灯会不同的是, 这次走进美国的“天下第一灯”更为注重“绿色环保”这一主题。  在传播和弘扬中华文化的同时也带出 “绿色”的理念。 并希望借助展出, 让更多的人关注环保, 爱护地球。

利用一些特殊材料制作灯具对于自贡的灯艺大师来说并非首次。 不过这次主办方却是要求从“绿色”的角度出发, 所有的设计都要首先考虑到节能, 环保这两个主题。

灯会上, 大家可以一眼就看出的是“龙舟画舫” , “九凤宝瓶” “生命之树”这几个彩灯的独特之处。 因为龙身上闪闪发亮的鳞片是用废弃CD制成的, 不论是在白天的阳光下还是夜晚的灯光下都熠熠生辉, 选材用料可谓独到。 而所谓的“宝瓶”其实是大家都非常熟悉的青霉素药瓶。 这些空瓶被彩灯师傅们染成不同颜色后, 再串起来固定成大家看到的宝瓶状, 一共用了3万5千个青霉素空瓶才完成, 可真是独具匠心。 主题为呵护, 爱护地球的“生命之树”则是由回收的塑料瓶制成。 一圈圈整齐地排成伞状, 在灯光的映衬下为“树叶”更添了几分精致。

更深层了解后才发现, 除了利用可回收的环保材料，   灯会上所用的灯, 在不影响艺术表现的情况下都替换成了LED灯来节省能耗。 我们都知道相比普通的光灯, LED灯具有节能、抗高温、防潮防水、防漏电的优点。  并且是由无毒的材料作成, 不像荧光灯含水银会造成污染, 同时LED也可以回收再利用, 寿命也是普通灯管的10倍以上。 绿色环保的半导体电光源, 光线柔和, 光谱纯, 有利于身体健康。 6000K的冷光源给人视觉上清凉的感受, 人性化的照度差异设计, 更有助于集中精神, 提高效率。 但也因为LED属于冷光源, 穿透能力也不及普通灯泡, 所以不能完全替代灯会所需要的灯泡。

30,000 low-powered LED and Florescent bulbs light the structures. © BeiBei Song

由于灯会在大美国游乐园举办, 没办法直接采用城市供电来支持会场的所有电能需求。 主办方只好采用自给自足的供电方式, 调了七、八台发电机为整个嘉年华供电。 虽然不能和城市供电相比, 但为了实现“绿色”灯会, 他们特意选用了低噪, 低能耗, 无污染的发电机, 并采用生物柴油供给。 同时还在会场以及237高速公路旁放置了太阳能电板, 并在一旁展示着利用太阳能发电而点亮的彩灯, 希望通过这种方式向大家传递一种“绿色环保”的理念。

Sunpod solar panel, collecting energy during the day to light the Fortune God at night. © BeiBei Song

Generators running a mix of bio-diesel and diesel fuel. © BeiBei Song

虽然“天下第一灯” 是中国的传统文化, 却也在这次的展出中很好地融合了当今“绿色环保”概念。  而且主办方还希望在今后的活动中有更多的环保人士或机构参与协助, 在美国当地搜集民众捐赠的废物, 传播环保理念。 让更多的人了解中国, 参与绿色环保建设。

Editor’s Note: