cc >> Steve Paulson: Thank you
so much for coming. I'm Steve Paulson
from Wisconsin Public Radio. I am the executive producer of
the nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our
Knowledge," and it is my great pleasure to be here as part of
this event, to be part of the opening festivities for the
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery to celebrate this
magnificent building and to talk about new ways of doing science
for the 21st century. As I was preparing for this
event, I talked briefly with each of the scientists on our
panel and I have to say I got really excited.
Each of these four scientists is doing fascinating and
groundbreaking work. And they're also participating
in a grand experiment exploring new ways to cross boundaries
and to collaborate with scientists in different
disciplines. Ultimately this is an
exploration of scientific discovery and of the very nature
of creativity itself. Let me tell you what we're going
to do for the next hour. I will do a short interview,
conversation with each of our panelists, roughly 10 minutes
for each, and then we'll have a brief conversation at the end
with all of our panelists and we'll have a free-flowing
conversation and we will answer all of the great mysteries under
the universe in those remaining 15 minutes or so.
And I should add that we only have time to give a brief
overview of the various projects that each of these scientists
is working on, so consider this just a taste of what they're
doing which I hope will wet your appetite for more.
So let me introduce our distinguished panel.
John Denu, right there, is leading the epigenetics theme in
the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which is the public
partner of the twin research facilities here at the Wisconsin
Institutes for Discovery building.
John is also a professor in the Department of Biomolecular
Chemistry. He and his team are studying the
underlying molecular and chemical mechanisms that govern
gene expression. Their fundamental investigations
will foster developments in novel therapeutics that target
epigenetic diseases. Patricia Flatley Brennan, at the
end there, is leading the living environments laboratory in the
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
Patty also is the Moehlman Bascom Professor and chair in
the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and has a
joint faculty appointment in the UW School of Nursing.
She and her team are using virtual reality and computer
modeling to simulate and optimize any environment
in which patients receive care. T "Rock" Mackie, to my immediate
left, is leading the medical devices area in the Morgridge
Institute for Research which is the private nonprofit partner of
the twin institutes. Rock also is a professor in the
Department of Medical Physics and inventor and cofounder of
the TomoTherapy treatment system.
He and his Morgridge team are focusing on advancing innovative
new instrumentation-based solutions to an array of
challenges in human health and effective intervention.
And Susan Millar is leading the education research area that is
part of both the Morgridge Institute for Research and the
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
Susan is an anthropologist and also a senior scientist in the
UW's Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
She and her team are developing digital games for learning
science in order to make scientific and biomedical
discovery and practice visible to students, professionals, and
broad public audiences. So we have quite a panel with us
here. Rock Mackie, let me start
with you. You have been a pioneer in
developing new medical devices that are used to treat cancer
patients. Can you explain what you do?
>> Rock Mackie: Well, for the last 24 or 25 years
at the University of Wisconsin I first led a group, in fact
I was privileged to really come into a great environment
here of an excellent program in radiation oncology.
And so this group developed a radiation treatment planning
system that really was one of the pioneers in 3-D treatment
planning so that you could take a CT scan or a magnetic
resonance scan and plan where the beams of radiation should be
going and where you should be avoiding having the beams going.
>> Paulson: So this is radiation to target the tumors.
>> Mackie: Exactly. So it's very important, in the
old days you essentially used a 2-D image and you really
couldn't tell where the tumor was, and so the group really
developed ways to integrate a CT scan where you can see where the
tumor was with the ability then to visualize it in 3-D.
>> Paulson: You're saying that traditionally the way that
radiation was given, the doctors didn't really know where the
tumor was? >> Mackie: They didn't really
know where the tumor was. It's sad to say but 30 years ago
you really only had bony anatomy and most often tumors are soft
tissue and until the advent of the CT scanner, we really
couldn't see soft tissue in much detail.
And so we were relying on essentially bony anatomy and
where tumors are usually with respect to the bony anatomy.
And it was really the advent of CT scanning that gave you that
ability to see it but also a framework from which to compute
the radiation dose. >> Paulson: So tell us how this
new technology works and how precise you can zero in on the
tumor. >> Mackie: And so we went from
probably centimeter precision down to millimeter precision.
And this allows then much tighter margins around the
target volume and the ability then to avoid the normal tissue.
And the group then went on to ways of delivering radiation
therapy. And so the research group that I
managed is a very large group, and I must say that I'm not the
only inventor of TomoTherapy, there was many, many students
and professionals working on the project, developed then a way of
precisely delivering the radiation therapy in three
dimensions. And instead of just large
uniform beams of radiation, we developed ways of modulating the
beams so that instead of uniform beams just shaping the fields,
we were delivering intensity modulated beams.
And not just from one direction but from multiple directions.
And then we also put this together to actually have CT
scan during the treatment itself.
And so TomoTherapy really represents intensity modulated
radiation therapy delivered from multiple directions, but
a CT scan also to verify that the patient actually is
being set up correctly. >> Paulson: So what does this
mean in terms of actual treatment of people with cancer?
How does this change the game? >> Mackie: Well it really
changes the game because really for the first time when this
technology was brought into the marketplace, one had the ability
to really target the disease, make sure that the dose was
relatively homogeneous to the tumor, in other words the dose
was being applied correctly, but you're also avoiding normal
tissue so that complications like, for example,
rectal bleeding and prostate cancer, or dry mouth, or it's
called xerostomia in head/neck cancer really doesn't have to
develop. Whereas, again 30 years ago,
those were just side effects. They weren't complications with
probabilities, they were side effects.
Everybody got rectal bleeding. Everybody got xerostomia.
>> Paulson: So you're saying traditionally the problem has
just been too much radiation or too much radiation given to the
wrong parts of the body. >> Mackie: We had to have very
generous margins in order to make sure we treated the tumor
so there was side effects, 100% complications.
And so we've changed that into a small fraction of patients have
to get morbid complications. >> Paulson: Let me ask about how
your work now might change now that you are part
of the Morgridge Institute for Research.
Do you see this new facility as allowing you to do new kinds of
science? >> Mackie: Well in fact really
all we were doing is following the computer explosion.
So we worked on algorithms that were too slow for conventional
radiation therapy. The TomoTherapy machine
originally was too slow to actually be practical with the
computing standards of the day. So we're taking, at least part
of my work is taking that and applying it to other fields like
pathology. Pathology is a field that is
relatively static, hasn't really enjoyed the benefits of 3-D
imaging, and so we think it's going to be possible to take an
older field like pathology and essentially do the same sort of
thing that we did in radiation oncology, try to use modern
computing and storage of images to make pathology transform
as well. >> Paulson: So you're saying
there's something about, is it being in the facility here,
is it having access to people in other disciplines that will
allow you to kind of expand what you're doing?
>> Mackie: So one of the things that we're going to have here
is an excellent computing resource.
So Miron Livny, who is both a member of Morgridge and a member
of Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, has a wonderful
computing resource here that's with hundreds of servers and
thousands of CPU for cluster computing.
So we'll be taking advantage of that and we'll be taking
advantage of that in designing medical devices in general
because we're of the feeling now that you can essentially
100% simulate medical devices even before you build them.
And we'll also be taking the next step in trying to prototype
them with rapid prototyping technology so that we can
very, very quickly modify the design.
But we feel that we'll simulate designs, we'll rapid prototype,
feed them back and be able to more quickly design medical
devices here at Morgridge. >> Paulson: Do you think you'll
also take on new projects as well?
>> Mackie: Well yeah, absolutely.
So one of the things that we want to do is to not be in
isolation from the rest of the campus but to actually reach out
to the rest of the university. So, for example, we'll have a
relatively small machine shop here but we'll be reaching out
to other shops on the university and take advantage of that, and
we will also then in return be looking for projects that we
can participate at Morgridge from the university.
>> Paulson: Do you see what this institution represents and your
involvement in this as a new way of doing science?
>> Mackie: Well it's a new way, I think, of approaching
the whole problem of learning and science, because
I think fundamentally what this institution represents is
bringing together people from a lot of different fields that
normally wouldn't be really interacting with each other.
If you look at most of the buildings on the campus, they
essentially belong to one discipline or very similar
disciplines. This is really the first time
that we're bringing together people from multiple facilities,
multiple colleges, and we've designed the building even so
that we have to collide with our fellow building occupants.
For example, the wash rooms are all on that side of the
building. And so people multiple times of
the day are going to have to leave their office and collide
with people because there's only one wash room.
And there's going to be wonderful food services here so
that we'll be able to then merge and collect at lunch and coffee
breaks. >> Paulson: That's probably a
science in itself to figure out where people congregate,
whether it's over the water fountain or the coffee pot.
>> Mackie: And apparently there's even going to be beer
here occasionally. [LAUGHTER]
So you never know what might come when you mix beer
and science. >> Paulson: Well thank you
very much. Let me turn next
to Susan Millar. You are a cultural
anthropologist with a particular interest in the gaming world.
And I'm guessing that a lot of parents think that computer
games are actually the root of all evil when it comes to how
their children learn, but you are, of course, a huge advocate
of gaming. So what makes you think that
gaming is a crucial tool in science education, and not to
mention in actual scientific discovery?
>> Susan Millar: Well, first of all, I'd like to make very clear
that I am not a particularly good gamer myself, but I am
convinced of the value of gaming for making science accessible
and visible in the current situation that we have with the
fact that so many of our young people and adults are actually
in the gaming world. They play games.
Going back to your point about parents, since I've begun
explaining to people the kinds of games that we're developing
here through the Morgridge Institute and the Wisconsin
Institute for Discovery, they've been saying to me, how fast are
you going to be able to get these out there?
I need my kids to be playing your games and not the games
they are playing. So let me give you an example.
I think that will clarify why I'm so excited about these types
of games. But before I go to the example,
I want to give just a little bit more context.
The education research challenge area is a group of people that
includes learning scientists from the University of
Wisconsin, programmers, people who do education research like
myself and many others, artists, and musicians, and of course
computer programmers, and in each of our game design teams
we are including as integral members, researchers like the
ones that are sitting to my right and left here.
So the first example that I'd like to give you involves
exactly the sort of thing that Rock Mackie was just describing.
In fact, when Rock learned about our interest in developing games
for making science visible, for engaging people in the process
of science, in a game problem-solving format, he came
up to me and said, you know, we've got this problem in the
medical technology world that I operate in, and he began to
explain pretty much the problem that he just described to you.
Well, one thing led to another. We've been working closely with
Rock and with colleagues of his over in the med school and we
now have, in fact you can find it up on the second floor
east conference room right now, a demo of this game called
"Oncology." And in "Oncology," we enable
players to figure out, using two-dimensional CT or NMR scans
how to contour or identify the 3-D mass of an actual tumor from
various data sets that have been provided to us through Rock
Mackie and his colleagues. And then you have to figure
that out, and you have to practice with the mouse,
and you get it and then you go into the treatment process
where you figure out how you're going to do the radiation.
And then when you're done with that you get a score.
And it's pretty scary sometimes because you don't necessarily
get a very good score. But that motivates players to
figure this out better, and it also teaches you a lot about
human anatomy, because a core idea in this game is that you
can't figure out what's not supposed to be there, that would
be the tumor, unless you know what's supposed to be there,
which would be the healthy anatomy.
>> Paulson: And so you're saying this is a real game.
This is not just sort of working with a computer program and
figuring out how to map a tumor. This actually uses the same kind
of gaming technology that my 13-year-old son uses
when he plays games? >> Millar: Right.
It's this integration of what engages gamers.
We've got a problem, and you've got goals, and you want to get
good scores, and it's leveled, and so on and so forth,
just like all games are. But the problem, the content is
this really valuable data-based science and medical technology
that invites young people, and for that matter adults, into the
world that medical practitioners and scientists live in.
So it's really very exciting. >> Paulson: Now do you see
gaming as mainly a tool for education, for science
education, or do you see it also as a way to make new
discoveries? >> Millar: Well that's a great
question actually. We see it for both.
And another example we have a game called "Virulent," also on
demo upstairs on the second floor, which was built in
collaboration with John Yin and also with Paul Ahlquist, and I
expect we'll be working with John Denu on that one, which is
at the subcellular level. It's a situation where we have
viruses trying to infect cells and replicate themselves in the
cell and then explode out and duplicate themselves,
and so on and so forth. Well, in the process of
designing this game, and it's great art work incidentally, I
hope you'll take a look at it, the folks who are doing the
work, the programmers and our postdoc Nathan Patterson was
asking John Yin, well so I don't really understand how the immune
response in the cell works here. And John was like, you know, I
think you've reached the limits of my understanding of
immunology. And so our game designers and
learning scientists have to go off and talk to some of the
immunologists on campus. So next thing you know, John Yin
and these immunologists are having a conversation about how
this should actually look in the game.
So we anticipate a lot of things that are going to come out of
that sort, because when you visualize things at this level
and put them into gaming environments, it really,
I think, deeply engages the scientists in trying to think
through how to make that work. >> Paulson: Now are you talking
about professional gamers, or I should say professional
scientists who are doing the gaming, or are you also saying
that amateur gamers, maybe even kids, could participate in
some of this scientific work and make real contributions
in science? >> Millar: Okay, well thank you
for that question. We actually, and this is an idea
that came out of the collaboration that we've had
so far with Rock, we've already begun to think about, we're
waiting on some NIH funding results or grant proposal
results, we've already got this idea of developing what's called
a professional amateur community whereby the amateurs develop
skills at a sufficient level that they get invited into a
community where they're allowed to, or invited to contribute
their efforts to professionals. And we do hope to do something
along these lines with the Oncology game that we demo'd
upstairs. >> Paulson: Who would some
of these amateurs be? Who might be invited?
>> Millar: They would be young people.
I'm really quite convinced that young people are going to be
perhaps better at figuring out how to do three-dimensional work
on a two-dimensional screen than many adults.
>> Paulson: By young people, are you talking college,
high school, middle school? >> Millar: No, I'm talking
10-, 12-, 14-year-olds. >> Paulson: You're talking
14-year-olds could actually do real science, could actually
help this kind of scientific work?
>> Millar: Rock, what do you think?
>> Mackie: Absolutely. In fact when we first started
trying to get physicians to outline on a computer where
a tumor was, we found that the young radiologists were way
better than the older radiation oncologists and almost the
younger you were the better you were.
And so the hand motor skills of a young gamer is much better
than that of a physician. >> Millar: Right, and along
these lines, there is some findings coming out of the
learning sciences that demonstrate that surgeons
who are intensive gamers as young people, and probably
still in their lives if they had time, are better, are more
effective at the surgery than people who are not trained
in gaming. >> Paulson: Wow.
I wonder if they're teaching that in medical school.
>> Millar: I think it's still not taught in medical school,
but there's huge opportunity to use game environments,
particularly with all of the advances in simulation that Rock
was mentioning and with the work and the opportunities that we
have in working with Miron Livny's tremendous opportunities
there. >> Paulson: So what do you see
as the future of gaming as how it might be applied
to what scientists do, and particularly given this
new facility and the emphasis on cross disciplinary work?
>> Millar: Well those are two questions.
Let me take the first one which is the future of this kind of
gaming and then I'll come back to the facility.
Frankly, I think what we have here is what's called the
disruptive technology. I think that we will be able to
use what we've learned about what engages young people and
adults in the gaming world and integrate it with this high
quality cutting-edge exciting science.
One of the things about gaming that is so interesting and what
makes it so compelling is that there's problems.
The games pose these challenging problems and they're leveled.
So that means that if you're very uncertain about how to do
something in this particular game world, you come in at a
very easy level. And then when you master that
they level you up, and so on and so forth.
The games are very, very good at doing that.
We're not that good in education at doing that with all of our
students. Individuals get to play at their
own level. Individuals get to make mistakes
and they get to try over and nobody has to know.
There's a lot of really powerful pedagogical attributes of
gaming. And I think that to this point
the efforts that have been made, and there have been many efforts
to try to make games for science, but the games for
science that have been built thus far haven't been
compelling. They've been too sort of preachy
and pedagogical in nature and kids just don't play them.
They don't take off. They don't go to scale.
And what we want to do is through our user testing and
also because we've got such great problems that my Morgridge
and WID colleagues are bringing to us.
We think that the problems that are going to be in these games
are going to be so compelling, the visuals are going to be so
good, the game mechanics are going to be so good that they
are going to go to scale and be exciting.
>> Paulson: By scale, you're talking about becoming
mainstream. >> Millar: Yep.
They're going to be available on web and through popular web
portals and so forth. >> Paulson: And to follow up
then on the question of the interdisciplinary work,
does this change the nature of what you do?
>> Millar: I guess I view this as a combination of my efforts
throughout the course of my professional life to work in
cross disciplinary settings, because the opportunities here
are greater than I've ever experienced.
We can't build these games without the scientists.
They can't build games without us.
And our group of researchers is learning a lot more about the
learning sciences and how to push these approaches and
they're learning in the process. And they're also achieving goals
that they have for making their science visible and accessible
to broad publics. >> Paulson: Well thank you.
I'm going to turn next to John Denu.
Your focus, your research focus is on epigenetics which is, I
know, a very exciting new branch of biology, and I think we need
to start by just getting the basics on what epigenetics is.
>> John Denu: So over the last, I guess, decade and a half
there was a very large push to sequence the human genome.
And with the idea, and this was presented from a number of
prominent scientists that if we understood the human genome, if
we understood the sequence of the human genome that that
potentially would unlock the secrets of what it is to be
human or would provide sort of the molecular basis for genetic
diseases. >> Paulson: I remember that.
With the great excitement about the human genome project when we
finally would sequence the entire human genome we were
going to uncover the secrets of life.
>> Denu: Right. It's a good starting point and
some may say it was slightly oversold but it was an important
starting point. But I think what we now
appreciate is that there's a whole layer of information
called the epigenome that is really what dictates whether
particular genes are expressed or not.
And a good example is once the scientific community solved the
human genome problem, we also solved a lot of other, we
sequenced a number of other organisms as well.
And we share about 99% of the same genes as a mouse.
Okay? So clearly the content of our
genes isn't necessary to explain these remarkable differences
between us and mice. Also, in terms of genetic
mutations, just because an individual has a particular
genetic mutations that predisposes them to a particular
disease, again doesn't mean that they're going to manifest that
particular disease. So what's at the basis for that?
A lot of us believe it's the epigenome.
It's this additional layer of information, again, that
controls whether a particular gene is expressed or not.
>> Paulson: So this is what, chemical information that's kind
of switching the gene on or off? >> Denu: Exactly.
There's a number of different mechanisms, and this is still
very active part of what we're interested in and a number of
scientists is figuring out what is that chemical information.
We have a good idea of proteins that wrap the DNA and expose
genes. That's critical.
There's a number of the chemical modifications that occur on
those proteins, but there's also chemical modifications that
occur on the DNA. And so these two mechanisms are
thought to be at least two of the mechanisms that help
regulate whether particular genes are expressed or not.
But the good news is, I would say, in terms of understanding
that our epigenome is really plastic, it's malleable, it
changes throughout our lifetime. >> Paulson: Unlike DNA.
>> Denu: Unlike DNA. >> Paulson: Which is sort of
set there forever. >> Denu: Right.
So that's sort of the hardware and the software is the
epigenome. So we have an opportunity
throughout our lives to alter our epigenome, perhaps by our
diet, by our lifestyle, by potential therapeutic drugs that
intervene at the level of the epigenome and sort of re-express
genes that were disregulated in a particular disease state.
>> Paulson: Give me an example of that.
How might a drug influence the epigenome to change someone's
well-being? >> Denu: Right, so there's
actually two epigenetic drugs that are available on the market
to treat different forms of cancer.
The mode of action appears to be that they influence the enzymes
that put on those chemical modifications that I discussed.
And again those chemical modifications are sort of a code
that designates whether that particular gene is expressed
or not. So the way that folks think this
works is that these drugs can alter the epigenome, this
chemical information, to a point where say a tumor suppresser
gene, so a gene that typically should be expressed at fairly
high level to sort of intervene when clearly cells are becoming
cancerous. And this particular gene may, in
this cancer it's expression may be extremely low.
So one way to increase the expression of that gene would be
through intervention through these, again, small molecule
drugs that would target the epigenome and re-express that
gene. And that particular gene may
induce what's called apoptosis which is a way of cells
essentially to commit suicide. So the cell knows it's in
trouble. It knows it's a cancer cell.
And a lot of our cells do this automatically.
It knows things are wrong and it commits suicide and can't
transform. >> Paulson: Do you see the study
of epigenetics as being perhaps the next great frontier in
biology? >> That's exactly
how I feel about it. [LAUGHTER]
And I have a vested interest obviously, but I do.
Again, the genome was great. It was the decade of the genome,
and we need that information to understand how the epigenome
actually regulates the expression of those genes.
So I see it as, again, the next frontier of biology.
If we understand that and we understand how development
works, differentiation of cells, how stem cells differentiate
into different types of cells even though they have the same
genetic information, so I think it really is the next frontier
and I'm really excited to be able to develop that here at the
University of Wisconsin in the Wisconsin Institutes for
Discovery. And I will be able to hire our
theme, that is we'll be able to hire three new faculty to
campus. So these are scientists that
don't exist here at the University of Wisconsin.
Hopefully they're new scientists that are being minted right now
doing postdoctoral training, and we're going to try to recruit
those folks to build a little catalyst here in this facility.
>> Paulson: We've been talking about the nature
of collaborative work, of crossing disciplinary
boundaries, does that apply to your work as well?
>> Denu: It does. I think by nature the work does
cross disciplines if you're really interested in solving the
problem. And I think there's different
ideas of thinking about how do you catalyze interdisciplinary
work. And one way to do it is the
problem. What's the problem?
If all the scientists agree that that's an important problem,
then you say, okay what disciplines do we need to solve
that problem? And I think certainly within the
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and the Morgridge
Institute there are a number of folks that I know we're going to
have to tap into to understand especially the computational
side of this epigenome, which is, again, it's probably more
complex than the genome. And how are we going to solve
that problem if we don't have impressive computational
resources. And this particular facility has
tremendous resources for that. So we certainly are going to tap
into our colleagues in computer science and computational
biology. >> Paulson: So if you were
to speculate 10-15 years into the future, I'm guessing
the study of epigenetics will be far advanced by then.
How will that change what we know about biology?
How will that change medicine? >> Denu: Well, my hope is that
if we understand the molecular and the chemical basis or the
instructions, if you will, of the epigenome and how that
actually translates into a particular cell knowing when to
express that gene or not, if we know those molecular details,
then we can design rational therapies, rational drugs that
target that particular process. And I think there's also a
possibility for individualized medicine.
If we all could have our epigenomes mapped, that would be
really cool, and I think that's a possibility in the future.
And if we know what that code means, in terms of maybe a
disease state or a diagnostic for a particular condition, we
can use that information, again, to design rational kinds of
therapies again that could be on an individual basis.
And I think that's a reality in the next 10 to 15 years.
If we get the work done. >> Paulson: Well thank you.
>> Denu: Thank you. >> Paulson: Last, but not least,
we turn to Patty Brennan. And I have to say, I think
you are the first nurse I've met who is also an expert
on virtual reality. So tell us what kind of work you
do in the field of virtual worlds.
>> Patricia Brennan: We're trying to use virtual reality
techniques, a cave, a room, that has images projected on
all sides to make an individual feel like they are in
a different space, to better understand how people take care
of themselves at home. Now, I'm not the expert alone.
We have a team of people working with us, computer scientists,
biomedical engineers, nurses and design specialists, and they're
helping us know how do we use this room that's right now just
a piece of blank walls and Plexiglas with specialized
projectors around it to make us be able to understand any
kitchen, any bathroom, any household, anywhere in the
world. The challenge we see is this
healthcare revolution is changing biologically, the point
of care is moving more and more into the households and less
into hospitals and clinics. We need to be able to be ready
to take advantage of all the wonderful advances in healthcare
but we need to help society and every day people be able to do
that in places that are familiar to them.
So our team is going to use the images of the virtual reality
cave to inspire designers, developers of devices, to better
understand how to make them work in households.
For the last 15 years as we've migrated healthcare from
hospitals and clinics into homes, we've taken business
machines, computers from office desks or glucometers from
laboratories and just pushed them in the house wherever they
would fit, on a coffee table in the living room or stashed in
the back of the bathroom. And now what we want to do is
take, instead, start with the point of care, the household,
and build the context into design of these technologies
from the beginning. >> Paulson: So you're talking
about how people actually do take care of themselves
in whether it's the bedroom or the kitchen.
And it's not necessarily the gadget itself, it's the way they
use it. >> Brennan: It's the person
and the context and the tool that they're using.
What virtual reality techniques do that's different than just
painting walls in very interesting ways are two things.
First is that they project images, lots of different kinds
of images that are easy to change, a little bit like
computer games but they're ones that an individual is completely
immersed in. That is a person will be
completely inside the room. But the second thing is by using
special trackers on the eyeglasses or the shoulders of
the individual, the images change so that the person
actually feels as they're walking around a room that
they're actually crossing a floor, or as they move into a
kitchen that they're actually able to open a refrigerator or
move something around on the counter.
So the experience, the presence, is created by visual images that
respond to a person's moving. >> Paulson: Can you give me an
example of a particular problem that people might face
and how this work would help solve that problem?
>> Brennan: Well one of the recent things we're trying
to understand is how parents take care of children
with complex health problems. And we know that there's lots of
different kinds of supplies that are needed and activities and
exercises that have to happen in the home.
And any of you that have taken care of a child, you know a lot
of it happens low on the floor when you're sitting down with
the child. So we will use the cave to
recreate, say, a child's bedroom, use the sensors on the
mother and the child to position them and then understand how
does the mother do an exercise with the child or how does the
crowded space in the kitchen maybe make it more difficult for
the mother to put the medications together for the
child. We want to understand things
like how does clutter affect performance or how much space is
needed to really carry out activities.
Many of you already know what it's like to be sent home from
the physician's office with some instructions to do something at
home. But the clinicians don't really
have an idea of what does your house look.
Can you really elevate your foot without tripping somebody else
walking across the room or where are you going to put that stack
of bandages that they want you to use to keep your dressings
changed. So we'll be able to build tools,
for example, that might actually move out from walls to support
people who need to have a leg elevated or create different
kinds of storage devices that take up less space but are still
very stable in a kitchen. >> Paulson: So people are
wearing goggles as they're in this virtual world?
>> Brennan: You wear specialized eyeglasses over top regularly
glasses if you wear them, and through these eyeglasses you see
the images in 3-D. Now you've all been
to 3-D movies already, so you sort of get the idea.
When you look at the images with plain sight, they look kind of
fuzzy and are not quite aligned, but the 3-D glasses allow you to
see them in more precision. But what's more important than
that is the 3-D glasses also include the sensors that tell
the projector where you are so the image changes with respect
to where the individual is. If you've walked past the walls
out here you get a little bit of a feel of an image that changes
that knows that you're there. But we're going to make a big
technological advance here at Wisconsin that hasn't occurred
anywhere else, and this is in collaboration with our
colleagues in computer science, and the firm that's
helping us build the cave. In almost every virtual reality
space, the image change is relative to one person.
So if there's two or three or four people in the cave, they
all see the same images and that can make you a little nauseous.
Now in home care, very often there's two people involved.
So a cave that only had images relative to one person wouldn't
be useful to us. So our scientists, our computer
scientists and our visualization group are building a dual view,
an ability to have two people in the cave see unique images.
So we're all sitting here together but you're seeing the
wall behind me and I'm seeing the fountain out there.
In a cave in a home care environment the same things
happens. You see unique images.
The goggles will allow people to see slightly different images
and still see through the goggles to see each other.
That way we can understand how a mother and a kid or an adult and
an elderly parent work together to accomplish care at home.
>> Paulson: So how do you actually figure out what
a home environment is like? Are you bringing people in who
might be having health problems and bringing them in
to your cave to test this? >> Brennan: Well the first
thing, we've been studying home care and home environments
for 25 years. And about 10 years ago with the
support of Intel we spent about two years in Dodge and Jefferson
County visiting about a hundred households, and we have pictures
of lots of things, bedrooms and kitchens and stuffed cabinet
drawers. And so that's helped inspire our
computer designers to get some sense about how big this space
needs to be, what kind of visual cues need to be there.
And then we can change it around.
We can make the kitchen have a blue wall or a yellow wall.
We can make the room larger or smaller by changing the computer
commands. We're going to initially begin
working with volunteer subjects because we know that there's
aspects of the cave that might actually bring a sense of either
claustrophobia or maybe just make someone dizzy.
So we need to make sure first that we're working with
individuals who don't have visual impairments, and who
aren't sick to their stomachs or uncomfortable.
But eventually we want to get to the point where when an
individual is being discharged from a hospital we can send a
specialized robot out to their house, take pictures of their
house, bring them back, render it in the cave, that is make the
cave wall look just like their house, and then do their
discharge teaching right in the cave.
So we can help them know how to plan where should I put my
dressings or maybe I should move that rug because it's easy to
fall on. So we eventually expect to be
able to work with people with all kinds of abilities.
>> Paulson: So if you look into your crystal ball 10-15 years
from now, how do you think virtual reality will change
the way healthcare is done? >> Brennan: Well I think
we'll do several things. So first of all we're going to
be having a much easier way to train people to take care of
themselves. So you might stop at the virtual
reality training unit before you leave the doctor's office to
practice and rehearse and learn how to actually do the self-care
practice you need, so you can be more confident.
But we'll also, because we'll be able to create any environment,
a battlefield, a surgical suite or a homeless shelter, we'll be
able to understand how we modify the work of health professionals
and the tools that they use when they're interacting with people
in unusual or unexpected ways and places.
>> Paulson: Do you see this as a teaching device as well?
Does it mean that there's going to be fewer face-to-face
interactions in the future and there will be more virtual world
educational experiences? >> Brennan: That's something
I don't think I'd put a bet on one way or the other.
A few years ago everyone thought computer technology, virtual
presence will be able to have everyone sit at home in their
pajamas and still go to class. I don't think that's going to
happen. But what we might find is with
the visual cues, we may be able to have kids who are living
remotely from their parents still be able to interact with
them in an easy way. Or a video visit from a nurse
help a person through a difficult time at night.
We also, though, want to be building the devices that fit
into the houses. So we might see very different
shaped medicine bottles or very different kinds of ways
that we store bandages, or we apply dressing changes,
or we have ventilators. All this equipment, once built
for the hospital it's moving into the home, has to be able to
get across carpet or fit behind the sofa.
So what I think will happen is we'll have tools that are
purpose built for the environments where they will be
used. >> Paulson: I think that's
a wonderful place to leave it for this first portion
of our program. And now let's open it up to a
conversation among all of you. And really what we're talking
about is, we're talking about several things, we're talking
about the nature of scientific discovery, of what it takes to
make scientific breakthroughs, and we're also talking about
the nature of collaboration, the importance of
interdisciplinary work. So let me ask about the
collaboration. What is the ideal collaborative
environment? Any of you?
>> Mackie: Well, I just want to point out, as Patty was talking,
that in North America, care is moving into the home but
in many parts of the world care is really rare and expensive.
And so having devices, medical devices, move into the home
really enables manufacturers to lower the cost of medical
devices and that makes them accessible to the developing
world as well. And so I think the work that
Patty is doing will have great impact in the developing world.
>> Brennan: So to build off on that, Rock, and Steve's
question, one of the things is curiosity and creativity
to make collaborations in interdisciplinary science work.
Rock of I have known of each other on the campus
for a long time. We're curious about very similar
things. How do people interact with
devices that deliver high tech healthcare in a very precise
way. We've never run into each other
before we started working here. But now our labs are right
across from each other downstairs.
So the microfabrication area that Rock will be working in and
the virtual space that we'll be able to test subjects in
are 12 feet apart. So we'll not only have curiosity
but we'll also have proximity, and I think that makes a very
big difference in collaboration. >> Denu: I'll just add to that.
I think a good collaboration, how do you define a good
collaboration? You don't know until you're in
it. And I think we've all had
excellent collaborators and we've had collaborators that
they're all on the take side. And you feel like you've given
a lot of your time and effort but it's not reciprocated.
So I think what you look for in a good collaboration is you add
value to the sum of those parts. In other words, it's larger than
the sum of the two. So something you couldn't do
by yourself. And the same is true for your
colleagues. >> Millar: Right.
I'd like to add to that, too. I recently completed a study
on partnership between K-12 institutions and higher
education, and your point is precisely right.
Any good partnership is one where the parties could not
accomplish alone what they can accomplish together.
And there's something in it for everyone.
You have to have something in it for everyone.
But I'd also like to say at a point based on my work as an
anthropologist which is that it's useful in effective
collaborations for the parties to come into it aware, think
about the various disciplines that we all are trained in
as having tribal identities and languages and terminology and
ways of going about things, ways of thinking.
If you begin with an awareness that folks trained in another
discipline take a different set of things for granted
than you do, and you're sensitive to those things as you
interact with each other, it enables you to more effectively
negotiate the differences and come up with some of that
synergistic excitement as you do problem solving together.
>> Paulson: And I would think it works at different levels.
So I'm sure it would be wonderful to have labs 12 feet
apart from each other and you're going to run into each every
day. There's also what you do over at
the coffee shop when you run into someone or if you hang out
for beers in the evening. And I guess the question is,
is that just serendipity? Does is just sort of happen or
can you kind of build some of those kinds of interactions into
the infrastructure? >> Mackie: Well, even designing
the building Tom Turng and I, Tom is a WID investigator,
we're assigned a similar space in the basement.
It was cut in two halves. And we talked about, well,
are there any things that we can share about our labs?
And the more we got to talking, the more we decided there's
no point in putting a wall. In fact we just decided we have
a big lab, it's your lab, it's my lab, we're going to figure
out how to work together. And so we actually have this
space in the basement in the lower level that is essentially
not Morgridge, it's not WID, it's both.
And I think I would like to see much of the building have that
philosophy that it's not my lab, it's all of our labs.
And if you need a piece of equipment in my lab, then borrow
it. As a matter of fact, Patty,
speaking about environments, we just ordered a box that
essentially can control the temperature from Wisconsin
winters, even colder, minus 70, up to boiling water.
So that would be a perfect simulation for medical devices
in a steamy bathroom or left out in the car.
And so that's, feel free to use that when it comes in.
[LAUGHTER] >> Brennan: Thank you.
You all heard this. [LAUGHTER]
I think I'll work differently here.
I think that, I have offices now in two departments already and I
spend a lot of my time moving back and forth and I feel like a
woman on a mission, I'm always running.
The space here has places to sit down, has places to eat that are
accessible and convenient, and I think that I will work
differently but I have to plan to do that.
My car is going to be farther away, I'm going to have to walk
past Rock having his beer as I'm leaving so I might sit and have
a beer, but I think building in the time, the mental space for
that in my day is going to be part of my transition to the WID
building. >> Paulson: Because I've heard
the way some scientific-focused institutions have tried to do
this is to build in lunch hours, for instance, where it's
expected that people go and you don't just eat your lunch at
your desk, you go and hang out with the other scientists.
Is that kind of thing important? >> Denu: Oh, absolutely.
And I think we've already discussed among the researchers
who are going to occupy this building how we're going to do
that. As you said luncheons,
we've discussed. We've discussed beer hour which
I'm sure we will get more than we will at lunch if we serve
dinner and beer. And as you know, this building
is really set up to provide that collisional space for people,
not only within the building as my colleagues have indicated,
but this is where you want to invite your colleagues from the
department we're all moving from and also your other colleagues
on campus. So let's meet in the WID.
Let's meet for coffee at Aldo's. Let's get ice cream at 3:00 and
a coffee. And that's going to happen.
And I think it's actually kind of our responsibility, not only
to design the lunches and so forth, but to get colleagues
into this space as a meeting hall, as a meeting place.
>> Paulson: I have to ask, are some of your colleagues
on the rest of campus a little jealous?
>> Denu: Yes, I knew what you were going to say.
[LAUGHTER] Absolutely.
But no one has said a bad word, so far, maybe they wouldn't say
it to my face, but everyone who has come into this building has
just said this is where I want to be.
I want to come over here and have coffee with you.
It's like yeah, I'll come here as opposed to Starbucks
five blocks away. >> Brennan: One of the design
concepts that was built into the laboratory space upstairs is
lots of small gathering places but also places that are
sometimes referred to as hoteling places, places where a
faculty colleague could come over and work for a couple of
hours. And we've been working with the
IT guys to make sure that they're able to get on to the
right computer networks and to make sure that they are going to
have the kind of access that are needed so that the
collaborations can occur in lots of parts of the building.
And a great emphasis has been made among the WID investigators
as we've been talking about finding ways to bring our
colleagues along with us to be able to make use of the space,
holding meetings here, having events here and just simply
making people comfortable being here.
>> Paulson: I was down in Chicago a few weeks ago giving
a talk at the Google office down there, and getting a little
dose of their philosophy. And I think it said that
you should never be more than 70 feet away from food,
I think is what it is. [LAUGHTER]
And so there is a main kitchen with a cafeteria there.
I'm sure with a very good chef. But they have three floors, and
there are food stations very strategically located.
>> Brennan: Have you seen our food stations upstairs?
>> Paulson: I have not. >> Brennan: There's beautiful
food stations located throughout the building.
They must have heard that 70-foot rule.
>> Millar: I'd like to emphasize again that it's not just what
goes on among the researchers and all this wonderful
invitational kind of space and the programming.
In fact we had a conversation with that, I think you and I
did recently, that we have to get this started right from the
get go so that we establish new patterns of interaction
among ourselves. But the point is that we also,
this town center is to invitational to the community
beyond the university as well. And the business community
I think is going to feel much more comfortable just coming in
here and working in those hotel spaces that are on that side,
I think, I'm still not oriented to this building.
>> Brennan: Somewhere. >> Millar: So that there's
an open feeling here. I don't know how many of you
have worked in these buildings where you're lucky if you run
into somebody in the elevator. It's a completely different
feeling here. >> Paulson: I want to ask about
the nature of scientific discovery and if you have
thoughts about what leads to great discoveries,
groundbreaking discoveries. Is it genius?
Is it luck? Sort of being at the right place
at the right time? Is it being in the right
institutional setting where you have proper support?
What do you think it takes? >> Mackie: I think more often
than not now it's new knowledge is really at the frontier
of sciences, between sciences. No one, I think, expects now
to get a degree in biology and spend their whole career working
on the same problems in biology like many people did
even 50 years ago. They became one particular
branch of biologist and studied that right down as deep as
possible. Now more and more people are
willing to work between fields and find avenues to explore and
use the principles from one field in a second field.
I really do think that collaboration with a broad set
of disciplines, as long as you have the tribal language
barriers taken care of, I think is going to become
more and more true. In fact, the fastest moving
parts of science, for example I'm sure John has to work very
hard to keep up with his field because it's moving so fast.
On the other hand, and so if he stops, if he doesn't stay at the
forefront, he falls behind. But at the same time, because
it's moving so fast, somebody can get into that field very
quickly with a new idea, new approach, and get up to
the head of the class. And so now we're at a time when
we can leapfrog from one field into another, especially in the
fast moving parts of science. >> Paulson: Other thoughts
on what makes discovery? >> Denu: I agree with Rock.
It's bringing together two areas, two ideas of thought,
two knowledge bases that never had connected before.
That's where the large leaps, I think, occur in scientific
discovery. You have to look outside your
own lab, outside your field, to think about a greater, a larger
question. And, again, back to the point
I made earlier, defining a question that,
you pose it to someone who's not in your field.
How would you solve this problem?
How would you even think about this problem?
And what once you get past the barrier of learning each other's
language, then you can start to have a discussion about how do
we solve this together then. >> Millar: I'd like to add
two points. One is that because knowledge is
moving so fast, discoveries are moving so fast, that when you're
in groups that have learned how to work together and trust one
another, not everybody has to know all of it.
You have to learn to rely on one another to keep you all moving
together at the front. That takes a lot of trust and
team building and good partnership.
Another point is, and here I feel so lucky to be working
with -- is this belief that high risk is going to provide
potentially high payoff. I know that's an old saw, high
risk, high payoff, but I think there's an awful lot to that.
>> Paulson: You're talking about high risk, you're saying
carrying out experiments that may just fall flat.
>> Millar: We don't know if this is going to work out.
This is out there on the cutting-edge.
And more every day sort of science doesn't take those
risks. We know that we can make little
incremental improvements if we follow certain sort of processes
that are already well understood.
But I think what we're doing here in this WID building,
WIDs building, or whatever we're calling it, really is going to
have a lot of high risk, high payoff kind of features to it.
>> Brennan: One of the things that I think also links us in
what we believe is essential for big discoveries is students,
because we're all working in a university.
We could be working in research labs anywhere but because
there's students here asking us questions, wanting to know why,
sharing students across our groups, that really, to me,
is when I think about what's essential for discovery it's
students because we create the environment that they will go
forward and discover within. And so we can't envision,
I can't envision any of the collaborations here going on
without students. And if you walk through the
building you'll see large areas of the floor space given over to
places for students to interact. >> Paulson: Do you think we're
at a point right now where we need to think about science
in a fundamentally new way? Is the way science done now,
is it different than the way it was done 30 years ago?
I know that's a very general question, but I don't know if it
applies to any of your fields. Or is it kind of the same old
thing but you just have new tools to work with?
>> Brennan: It's always been new.
So I guess there's a part of me that thinks there's always been
a part of science that's done differently and whether it's
bringing mathematics or computers or new materials
together. So what is consistent about
science is that it's never consistently the same.
What I think is different now, at least in our work, is that
the social construct of science, of what is knowledge, how does
knowledge grow, how do we foster knowledge, is taking on more
importance. And I think that institutions
like this are the public presence of science making
a statement that science is very important in society.
>> Millar: I think there's also an emerging area of studying
how science is done and understanding the processes
of science. We're going meta on the
scientific process to some degree, which is partly why we
have learning sciences. >> Paulson: Any last words
before we close? I think that is it.
Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]