Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Biology, Business and the Brain  William Linton  2/14/14 UP981  cc >> So this is the opening lecture in the seminar, which has been running every semester since the fall of 2007. And for those of you who have come to some of the past ones, you know that the diversity of speakers is really sometimes surprising. So we have had people who are national leaders, local academics, but we have never ever had someone like Bill Linton. And I think his perspective will be different from that of everyone that has preceded him. I am almost completely confident in making that statement. So, Bill has a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from UC Berkeley, and then he came to do graduate work in pharmaceutical chemistry here at UW Madison, and he has an honorary doctorate from a Korean university recognizing his global engagement in advancing technology and education in life sciences. In 1978, he founded Promega, which many people may think, oh, that's our local biotech company. Well, it started with one employee, that was probably Bill, and now it has 1300 employees, and it's a worldwide global corporation. The number of manufacturing facilities that exist is just unbelievable. They exist in Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in Brazil, and apparently one is soon to open in India. 

But it's all centered around life sciences because this is where Bill came from, and this is where he stays. And what makes Bill such an unusual person, because I think we all have stereotypes in our minds, some positive, some not so positive, when we hear the word businessman, is that Bill reaches out to the community and he tries to advance things that are going to improve the lives of everybody from students in middle schools all the way up to graduate schools just to general members of the community. So one of the things that he did to make life easier for lots of people was he established a daycare center, the Woods Hollow Day Care Center, right there near Promega for Promega employees and members of the local community. And this center takes care of infants all the way to school aged kids. And then in 1993, the Biotechnology Center Institute, or I always get this wrong. BTCI I can remember, but what the letters stand for. I give it up. And what this is an educational, cultural, and scientific institute. Probably many of you have been to the BTCI. They have an annual forum on bioethics. 

They run classes in the summer that some of the graduate students in neuroscience take. They run classes for middle school students, oftentimes middle school students who maybe have heard of science but have never considered getting into it. So it's a fantastic phenomenon, the BTCI. And of late, the forum has focused on consciousness and the age-old issue of brain and mind and what are the relations. This has been an issue that has probably challenged humans for hundreds of years trying to figure out brain/mind. How do we integrate these two things? And in part, that's why Bill is going to talk here today. The title of his talk is right up there in front of you. So, Bill. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks very much. I don't think I've every had quite an introduction quite like that. 

That kind of took us all over the globe. But actually following on that, I will be saying a few words related to the start of the business, but I'll even take us a little bit before that point because it's often interesting to see what were the things that eventually led a person into doing what they do. And I always think that's an interesting topic to talk about. Well, good afternoon, and I would say I'm very impressed that we have all of these people here on a Valentine's Day. And I wish you all great success and love and all the good things that come on Valentine's Day. I also want to thank Ron and Tara for their wonderful support and also the invitation just to be here. And I've learned a lot about the  neuroscience and public policy double degree program. There was a lot I didn't know about that before. This really gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about that. It's a very impressive program, and I had an opportunity to spend time at lunch with two of the students. 

So that was really great. I appreciate that very much. So, what I want to start with is to share with you three areas of thought, and then we'll close the formal lecture. And then at the end if anybody would like to stay here and would like to have a little bit of questions and answers, I'd be happy to do that. It's a little bit more difficult during the talk to do that just because of the people who are viewing this at a remote distance. So, first I'm going to talk about some of my self-reflection going back as a child, and the reason I'm doing that is often when I'm interviewing people for a job or just kind of introducing the company, people often sort of ask, well, why did you start the company? What was in your mind at that time? And so I'll share with you perhaps some of the insights that I've gained as I've thought about that question. Second, I'd like to tell you a little about Promega today. Ron gave some statistics and a little bit of insight into that, but I'll give you some pictures that show a little about what the company is today and a little bit about the special relationship that we have between business, the community, and education that I think you'll be interested to hear about. And finally, probably from my more scientific origins, I'd like to share with you some of my thoughts about the future and where we're going not only as a business but also where I think we can direct some of our thoughts and attention as far as society and perhaps what some of the indicators are as to some real frontiers that we can think about in terms of scientific  research and also the role of business. So as I look back over 66 years, which is the time I've been here on Earth, I always look at some patterns as I look back, especially in the early years, what were some of those early patterns that I can think about that might suggest what I would be doing in future years. 

And I use the term this relentless curiosity and interest in things, especially in terms of how things work. Let's see, I think we can just postpone that. So, that's the very young Bill Linton, and at a very young age, probably when I was even less than two but certainly between two and three, I was watching my father, who at that time was in electrical engineering course at Emery University in Georgia. I was watching him rebuild engines. And he was doing that to earn money for the family. And I never really lost my interest in mechanics and sort of taking things apart and how they got put together. I think there was some early imprinting that was happening at that very young age. And then at the age of six, I remember having a deep fascination with outer space. And I really don't know where that interest came from, but I was just fascinated to think about airships and airplanes and rocket ships and there was something about outer space that really drew me. But the problem that I knew that we had at the time was that there wasn't anything powerful enough to take anything from the Earth into outer space. 

Overcoming gravity was the big challenge of the time. And one night I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and I looked at this mirror that was above a set of drawers in my room, again, six years old. As I looked in that mirror, I could see stars and I could see galaxies. And that image of what I saw still remains with me even now. And I was so convinced that I was in outer space looking through this window that I never had a doubt that eventually humans would get into outer space. But it was just a very interesting, we could call it a dream or a waking dream or something, but there was something that really impressed me as a young child with the fact that we were going to go to outer space and we were going to see things there that we couldn't see from the Earth. By the time I turned 11 I spent a couple summers working for my dad. He was a very creative engineer, but he wasn't particularly good in business. What he really taught me through what he didn't know was what were the elements that would eventually make a successful business. And it's often not what someone can tell you directly but often what someone perhaps doesn't teach you directly but what you observe in what they do that can be most instructive when you're growing up. 

And when I was in sixth grade, my classmates decided what they would do is they'd take all their fellow classmates and they would decide what they were going to be when they grew up. And they decided that I was most likely to be a mad scientist when I grew up, and that was in sixth grade. I thought that was pretty cool. I wouldn't mind being a mad scientist. So there by the year 1958 in sixth grade, I had observed a lot in business, and I already had a very deep interest in science. And then when I was 15, I attended a National Science Foundation summer science program, and that was really instructive for me. It had a very deep impression. It was at the University of Texas in Austin, and I really got hooked on biology and chemistry as a result of that opportunity that was funded by the National Science Foundation. And a little story of what I would do in the evenings, I discovered that in the back of the chemistry building there were these dumpsters and they would throw away glassware and equipment and all kinds of stuff. By the end of that summer, I had a couple of large boxes full of what later became my first laboratory which I took home, and that was the way I first collected my laboratory. 

There was another thing that I observed being quite young, which was kind of a phenomenon. It was that I had an interesting ability to visualize numbers and not just in mathematics or not just in the homework that you would do. But someone would come up to me and say guess how many pennies I've got in my pocket. And I would just say 13, and they would take out their pennies and count and sure enough there were 13 pennies. And it's just kind of, you say that's kind of coincidence, but this happened time and time again in different circumstances. And what I discovered as I sort of observed this and it was sort of a random thing, but as long as I didn't have any emotional outcome, attachment to the outcome, that this would work. And it's something that throughout my life I observed over and over again. And, as you might imagine in a business setting, that can be rather interesting, and it turned out to be a rather valuable thing over the years. So, again, just another kind of an observation of something that maybe is not totally explainable in terms of the science that we know today, but there's a lot that we really don't know about how the mind works and what the connections are to the brain. So that will be kind of where I'm going with this. 

And there's another observation that I had, and that was that often I would see something that later on would become something that was real. And I just want to use this picture as kind of this picture of reflection. And I didn't really quite understand the phenomenon until I read a book by an author Atwater that was written in 1996, and the book is called Future Memory. And it's about people who in a way live the future before it's physically manifested, and they remember having done that as though it is an actual memory. And that experience can be so real that it's hard to distinguish that from an actual memory. And so often we think, well, that can't really happen because we have clear memories of the past, the future we always view as being sort of fuzzy. But time is an interesting construct, and there really isn't any physical basis for time other than the way that we make sense of things. There's no formula that says this is exactly why time should exist. And so we work very well in this construct time, past, present, and future, and I think there are ways of working with time or viewing time or even seeing things that might be in and out of time that could be instructive for us. Well, I went to undergrad at Berkeley in 1967 to 1970. 

You might imagine what those years were like for me and were actually wonderful. I graduated in 1970. And then I took off about three years. And this was probably one of the most fascinating journeys that I ever went on in my life. I was in a Land Rover, took off for nine months, and went through Europe, northern Africa, down through the Sahara Desert. It took 28 days to cross the desert and found myself eventually in Liberia. Sold the Land Rover to a diamond mine, got enough money to pay for a freighter ticket to get back to the United States. And I just hope if anybody here has some inkling or an idea that it'd be great to take a year off, by all means do it. The things that you can run across and the experiences you can have can be invaluable. I couldn't imagine today even contemplating doing something like that. 

But you never know when your mind is open and you have an opportunity to take some time off, wonderful things can happen. So in 1976 after work that I did in pharmaceutical chemistry, and I worked for three years as a development scientist at Scientific Protein Labs in Waunakee. I was talking with some people at the university here in McArdle Laboratories, and they said we really are tired, as graduate students, of making these enzymes that are used to cut and splice DNA. And so I kind of took that on as a challenge, and I thought, you know, I'm pretty good with the lab, I'm pretty good proteins, and let's see what I can do with that. So in 1978, with a lot of help from a lot of people here at the university, I started Promega. I was 31 years old at the time. And what I was doing was making a group of products that the students didn't want to make anymore, they were in short supply, it was difficult to get some of these, and I was kind of a local supplier. So, again, it was kind of this curiosity about a new field and what might be possible that sort of led me in that direction. And within a couple years I was trying to work also in another laboratory in Holland. In this case, this is in Leiden, Holland, and we were growing up some blue-green algae to make one of the restriction enzymes. 

And it was a rather challenging situation there because what I discovered was that the culture in Holland wasn't necessarily amendable to what you need to do if you're going to be making some of these enzymes. So, for example, they would come in at exact time in the morning. At 11:45 you had to take off and spend about an hour at lunch. 4:45 you're out the door, and if it's a Friday, you don't come back until Monday. And as any of you know if you've been trying to isolate and purify an enzyme, there are certain points where you just can't drop it and then come back two days later and hope that it's still surviving. So I tried to do that for about a year and a half and kind of gave up on that idea. But it was a fun experience to try that. I also wanted to give credit to some of the people that I mentioned earlier but many, many people at the university that were really helpful. There's a young man right here that I think I might see in the audience, Jim Dahlberg, Janet Mertz, I think this is Fred Blattner, Waclaw Szybalski. It was in Howard Temin's lab that I got the first idea from one of the graduate students to make some of these products. 

But again, these are all people at the University of Wisconsin, and this is really a large part of the reason why Promega got established here was through some of this incredible help that I had in methods, in bacterial cultures, and all the methods that I had help with. DNA reference samples and so forth. So it was really a great place to start the business. So if we fast forward now from those very early days to what the company looks like today, we really celebrated last year the 35th year of the company. And just a few highlights. This is not really a business lecture. It's really going into a couple different directions here. But in 2013 we had revenues of just over $350 million, 1300 employees, 15 countries, and about 2700 products which span technologies from genomics all the way to cell biology and proteomics and many of the other techniques involved in life science and between. If you haven't been to our campus recently, I'd be delighted to host you there. We have a new building that just opened in October. 

It's just under 300,000 square feet. We called the Richard P Feynman Center after a Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. He was a true renaissance man, brilliant in science but also really gifted in the arts, culture, and he had a great sense of humor. So he wasn't a life scientist, but I think he represents much of what we aspire to when we think about what we can do as individuals and also the kinds of people that we hope to bring into the company. This building expands our capability, particularly in molecular diagnostics, and it's referred to as a CGMP, current good manufacturing practices facility. But size and growth, while they're important, they're not the most important factors, and I'd like to spend just a couple of minutes on what makes Promega different. What are some of the things that we've aspired to do as an organization that I hope goes beyond just some of the normal values that you often find in business. I think just like a person, an organization you can view as something that's living. It has something like a mind or maybe a brain. I think it's got a body. 

And let's imagine that it has soul and spirit too. So let's maybe explore these ideas just for a moment. This slide, if you look in the middle, talks about Promega in the year 2078. And one of the things that we've been talking about in the last few years is how to build a company and how to set a foundation for a business that can last a hundred years. And 2078, of course, would be the anniversary of Promega at that point in time. So to kind of follow this idea of the mind and the body and the spirit in business, the body might be considered to be the products and the services that we offer, the mind is our plan for how we want to expand the business technology developments, and the generation of resources which would be positive cash flow to finance the things that we're going to be building in the future. But the soul and the spirit is really why we do this. Being a private company, we don't have to report out earnings to Wall Street. We're not working for venture capitalists who might expect a high rate of return in three to five years And fortunately our stage of maturation after 35 years is such that we're allowed to view our present and our future from a different perspective than just survival and early adolescence of a new business. And that's why we're now looking at what are the things that we want to focus on as a company that will enable us to survive until the year 2078 and possibly beyond that. 

So our long range goals include contributions to society, the community, exploring the frontiers of course of science, for better technologies, medicines, better tools for doing basic and applied research, and also creating a unique environment for our employees and our business partners. Now, we've borrowed also an image that you normally see when you take a course in psychology. And this is based on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And one of the reasons that I like to use Maslow is that he was a student, and in fact I think he got his PhD here at the University of Wisconsin. Came from New York. He didn't get along well with his parents, and so if you don't get along well with your parents, where do you go? You go to Madison to gain some degree of freedom. And he came here and he got married here and it was while he was here that he began to develop this idea of the human potential movement that became really embedded within psychology. And the idea was at the very base of our existence we meet our physical needs. Food, clothing, shelter, all the things that enable us to live day to day. And as we establish that, we can then turn our attention to other kinds of things. 

If you don't have enough food or you're worrying about where you're going to live, you're not going to spend a lot of time being concerned about these other aspects of this hierarchy. But once you do have that established, then you can think about things like your safety and security and pension plans or other kinds of things that might help you in the future. Love and belonging become important in this hierarchy. And then esteem, your standing in the community, once these other things are established. And then he identified something that he said once these other things are fulfilled, each person has an opportunity to go beyond that and to say, what is it that I'm really here for? And what can I do that will make my life meaningful beyond just the things that might be normally accepted in the community or normally accepted within our business practices? What more is there in life? And he called that self-actualization. And so we kind of looked at this and we said this really has some interesting characteristics to it, and perhaps there might be something that we can learn from this from the business standpoint as well. But to take a little bit of a deeper dive into this aspect of these levels of these layers of human development, we began to talk more intentionally within the company about some other things that had to do with other levels of human development which are not meant to be so much hierarchical as they are opportunities for further growth individually. So the very base is perhaps the characteristic of an individual that might be called impulsive And this is where a person is just acting to meet their survival needs. A little bit like that very base in Maslow's hierarchy. And then next would be more opportunistic. 

They might work or manipulate other people for their own self-gain. As they grow in their awareness and their ability to better interact with others, you might have a diplomat, people who are very good at working with others and are better able to get to a certain point through peaceful means and not through so much manipulation. And then the expert. And, of course, a lot of our universities, a lot of our businesses, we look for experts. So it's not as though each of these levels is necessarily negative or overly positive, but in fact it's often the combination of these that enable us to get the right mix of people for the right kinds of jobs. The achiever, the person who sets goals, motivates, looks for feedback because they're looking for ways in which they continue to self-improve themselves. Many individualists, and this is often the person then who's ready to take the next step and leaps to the second tier, which then gets into the realm of strategy. Being able to see things from new perspectives. And it uses what they've been able to accomplish and perhaps the power that they've created through what they're doing and who they are to do positive things, to help transform others or their work environment or their university environment. Then the alchemist, of course the person who can transmute. 

They work in deep processes. They're willing to accept mystery. And then at the top, the unitive, the person who acts simply, they pass through deep complexity, and they've gone to the other side of more simplicity. They lead by who they are and not so much by saying I'm the CEO or I'm the president of this or the head of that. And then this just kind of gives a spread of where this often happens within the population. At the bottom you really don't find a lot of leaders. I say at the bottom, but at this core. At the impulsive opportunistic diplomat, only a few leaders then. Then the expert achiever individualist, we see many more of our leaders there. Again, whether it's government institutions, academic institutions, or business. 

And then going to this second tier, often also reflects and individual's ability to exhibit more wisdom and compassion in how they interact with others. And to be able to do that in a way that, they bring peace both internally and externally to their environment. But this idea of wisdom and compassion are some of the two attributes that enable a person to go to the strategic alchemist and the unitive levels. So we're working on these because we think some of these attributes are very fundamental to understanding more of who we are. And these are important characteristics that as we learn more about these, as we learn where we fit into these models, help us in our dialog with our coworkers, with the people that we may have an opportunity to provide guidance to and leadership with. I like this circle because what this says is this is not a top-down hierarchy. That there is a movement to it, but that it's not that any one is above somebody else. It's different but there is also a progression going from the impulsive to the transformational individual. So we're thinking quite a bit about this. We're bringing this into practice, and this becomes a part of our dialog again in our daily business. 

So going back for a moment to the hierarchy and then taking the individual hierarchy into the company, let's look at how that might translate into business terms. So at the very bottom is, just like food, clothing, and shelter for business, you need to have cash flow. You want to create value. You have to bring something that's meaningful and you have find people who are willing to pay for it. So that's basic business principles. And once you do that successfully, then you can expand the business, as we've done both geographically and also in our new facilities that we build in various parts of the world. We can differentiate the company through the services we offer employees, through the products that we bring to the market, technologies we deploy. Operational excellence refers to increasing levels of quality and compliance. And then finally we reach this top pinnacle, and then the question is, what is the real purpose why we're doing all this? Is it just to give people jobs? Is it just to give return to shareholders? What is it really all about? Sure we get a paycheck every two weeks, but at the end of the day, what are we doing it for? And so we've given this a lot of thought, and we said wouldn't it be an amazing thing if we could take this idea of purpose, this idea of transformation of a business and overlay that with this idea of self-actualization for individuals. And to say that the real purpose of the organization is to help and support the ability of each individual to know more about themselves, to be able to self-actualize their own development, and that's the real purpose of the organization. 

And the power of that is that each person then working there realizes that the organization exists with them. It's not about a parent organization that just takes the cash out of the company. It's not about other purely financial gain or objectives, but it really has to do with themselves personally and what is most deep and meaningful to them, which is what is their purpose in realizing that the purpose of the organization is to help them discover that and to take the steps that will help them transform into that direction. And so there's this interesting purpose then that we can depict by kind of this little triangle circle. The value individually to the person, the value to the customers that result when people are motivated and energized by what they're doing every day, and then what we can bring to the community. Many of the things that Ron mentioned, our daycare center, the nonprofit educational and science endeavors, and many of the other things that we bring and support within the community. That community is a global community. So then I want to take just a little bit of time now and talk about when we think about the future what are some possibilities for where science is going, what are some possibilities about what we're doing as a business thinking out into the future. And when we celebrate a hundred years in the year 2078, and I hope some of you are here to help us celebrate, I probably won't be, but what can we think about or what are some of the things that we can contemplate, especially if we were to kind of send a message out into the future to the people who will be talking about that 100-year celebration. What are some of the ideas we'd like to convey to them. 

Well, interestingly, when we try to forecast the future, it's a very, very difficult thing to do, particularly for people who are involved in technology and companies that are built around technology and that includes a life science company. In 1900 people in France commissioned some artists to try to imagine what the world was going to look like in the year 2000. And what you'll see are ideas or problems or opportunities that they had an interest in trying to solve, but what makes these quite funny is the fact that they were using the technology of 1900 to solve problems that they envisioned would be there in the year 2000. And so let's take a look at how they envisioned solving some of these problems. Who would have guessed that they would be thinking about video conferencing in the year 1900, but that's what this picture is depicting. Someone talking into a microphone and some strange device that's broadcasting a picture and there's this woman talking back to the guy. It's not clear how she sees him. But here you see the technology existing in the year 1900 trying to solve this interesting problem of video conferencing. And of course, if you're going to get news every day, you sit back, light a cigarette, and you've been delivered, maybe it's a home delivery, a little cylinder and you put it on your gramophone and you play the news of the day. So that's how you're going to get the news. 

And transportation, you want to get quickly from point A to point B. Well, all you need to do is train a whale, attach some kind of an interesting submarine to it, and you have that guy on top who's kind of steering the whale and the guy in back with this rudder, and that's how you're going to get to your next vacation in the Caribbean. Now remember that at that time, lighter than air travel was just travel in the air. Any kind of way to travel in the air is an imagination. People were coming up with all kinds of inventions, but that problem had not been solved. But they envisioned that if you want to be putting out a fire in a highrise, then you just strap on your wings and there you go. You can even rescue the mom with the little baby up on the 50th floor of the highrise. And high speed rail. We still envision that today. It just looks a little bit different. 

So, again, trying to apply today's technologies to what we envision the world is going to look in the year 2078 is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. I imagine that probably two-thirds of the people here have iPhones, iPads. None of those devices existed 12 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So our life has been transformed in a very short amount of time by inventions that now we think are almost indispensable. Just imagine what that's going to be like in another 65 years. It's very hard to imagine. But the problems or the opportunities or the things that we can say are basic to what we want to solve, medical problems, labor saving, transportation, communication, those are the things that we'll still be trying to solve but using different technological means. Then getting back to really a topic I think that is common to just about everybody here, it's neuroscience. And the biology, the chemistry of the brain, the study of what is the meaning of mind, what is consciousness, and how does this affect our health, our healing, and in general our capabilities. And I think this is probably the greatest frontier ahead of us in life science, in our communities, and in society. 

And so as I think about the future, this is kind of what I envision is going to be consuming much of our research in the future.  We know we have about roughly 100 billion neurons, and these all together create about 100 trillion neuronal connections. There was an interesting article that just came out in Scientific American about the brain, and just fascinating imaging of what they're now able to pick up and the communication pathways that are just extraordinarily intricate. We have yet to develop the tools to understand what's really happening, and we still have not a clue as to how we can take an idea and hold that idea or take that idea and say a few words and try to communicate what that idea means. How does all that happen? It's still very much a mystery.  So, most of you have studied some of these pathways, so when we think of some of the things that are exhibited in our minds, exhibited in the brain, we have all these various receptors and various systems that all together result in behavior, human behavior. And just taking a simple outcome of some of these very complex behaviors that are exhibited through how we think and how our brain works, just taking one example which would be, let's say, stress. And all the things that are affected in our human systems as a result of stress that can occur to us in anything, through the environment, through our work, through relationships. And there's a list of two pages of all the things that can result in terms of symptoms of the body and of the mind as a result of that chest pain, fatigue, stomach upsets, sleep problems, anxiety, restlessness. It's just a very, very long list. 

And yet, interestingly, stress is not necessarily solved by addressing the symptoms. It's solved by how we think about and how we react to what comes into our lives. And it's really that study of consciousness and the study of how we interpret the things that are coming in, and that interesting interpretation of reality that can result in changes in our state and give us better health outcomes the more we begin to recognize these intricate connections between how we're thinking, how we respond to our environment, and then how that affects us throughout our day and throughout every part of our body. And, finally, I just want to say that because I view the frontier of the mind, the frontier of the brain, as being one of the largest challenges in life science, I also think that the more we learn about that, the more the possibilities are for how we can change our view of our society, change our view of our relationship to the world. I kind of like this picture because it shows the infinite possibilities that exist in the human mind. I think we're starting to unlock some of the potential within the mind. The Doors of Perception was a book written by Aldous Huxley many years ago. And it just begins to suggest that there is incredible possibility, almost infinite possibility that is still in a way locked up because we don't understand much of how the brain works. But our community practices and our system of values as we have them today are just not sustainable for the planet. And we all inherently know that, that the way that we practice our values, our consumptive philosophies as far as how we accumulate things. 

If we look at the finite resources on the planet, we have to change how we view this relationship that we have in our communities and ourselves to the planet itself. An ancient African proverb says that we have borrowed the future from our children instead of inheriting it from our ancestors. And, again, that's this shift in perception. How we view the planet, how we view our relationship within our communities. And what will the people of a hundred years from now think about our stewardship and how we viewed the planet and its resources? And how will they judge our wisdom as we make decisions, both individually and collectively every day? So we know that sustainable solutions to problems arise from perspectives that lie outside the dimensions from which the problem arose. That was one of Einstein's favorite sayings. You can't solve a problem in looking at it from the same plane, from the same dimension that the problem arose. You have to look at it from a different perspective, and we have to learn how to create these different perspectives, how to see things differently. And I kind of like this because gateways suggest a transition from one perspective to another perspective. And that's our challenge and that's what we need to do. 

Every aspect of learning and every aspect of how we conduct business, particularly in our aspects of how we interact with one another and how we interact with every creature and every living thing on the planet and the natural resources on the planet. We have to learn how to bridge the gulf between our thinking and our beliefs and the wisdom that is inherent in nature every where we look. It's just opening eyes. It's seeing things in a new way. And I think there can be a new partnership between humans on the planet and every element of nature. I think it's time that we open some of these doors, that we go through the gateway and look for the answers that really are all around us. They are here. The answers are here, and we just have to see things in a different way to be able to see these answers. As the gifted and autistic Temple Grandin observed, this is another doorway and we're all standing at that threshold, and I'm going to suggest this is now the time to walk through and see things through new eyes. Thank you very much. 

[APPLAUSE]