When Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO in the early 1980’s, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Sculley would achieve little at Apple, but Jobs would later make it the most valuable company on the planet.
But did Jobs actually change the world? Sure, he was amazingly successful, but would the world have been so different with a PC and no Macintosh? Android and no iPhone? Dreamworks and no Pixar? Something less, maybe. Still, it’s hard to argue that things would be profoundly different.
That’s not to diminish Jobs’ accomplishments, but they do seem to be more on the order of Starbucks’ Howard Schultz or Nike’s Phil Knight than they are of Einstein, Pasteur or even Edison. The truth is that what has passed for innovation over the last 20 or 30 years has been more focused on disrupting markets than changing the world. We need to do more.
Bill Gates believes that the central challenge of our time is climate change. To avoid a catastrophe, he says that we need to reduce global emissions 80% by 2050 and to zero by the end of the century. Given that we release 36 billion tons of COinto the atmosphere each year, that’s a very tall order.
Still, we are making important progress. Solar energy is expected to hit global grid parity by 2020 and reduce costs beyond that by about 20% for every doubling of capacity. New materials, such as perovskites, will keep progress going for the foreseeable future. Electric cars are set to outperform gas vehicles within the next ten years.
Yet even with the advances that have been made and others that are already underway, we still have some profound challenges. First is energy storage. The current technology, lithium-ion batteries, is nearing its theoretical limits. Some form of nuclear energy, either fusion or a much safer form of nuclear fission, will also be key to a clean energy future.
Most likely, we will need a combination of both to help make up for the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. How do we do that? For the moment, nobody really knows. We need fundamental new discoveries to make it all work.
When Vice President Biden called for a Moonshot for Cancer last year, it was vastly more than the grieving of a powerful man mourning his recently deceased son. Biden had been consulting with top people in the oncology world and became convinced that a cure for cancer is truly within reach.
The new possibilities can be traced back to two long-term efforts supported by the federal government. The first was the Human Genome Project, which created a map of our DNA. The second, The Cancer Genome Atlas, began in 2005 and is creating a similar map for tumors, which will allows us to classify cancers based on their genetic makeup.
Advances like these have led to new treatments with enormous potential. One is targeted cancer therapy, which allows doctors to treat tumors based on DNA markers, rather than the organs in which they are found, like the breast or the prostate.
