BE Board:Dinner Discussion
Monday Night Dinner Discussions at the BE Retreat
Under inspiration from responses to the "Future of BE" panel discussion, we have decided to make the Monday evening dinner a time to shoot the scientific breeze with your tablemates. We are all at MIT because of a simple fascination with the far-ranging and radical ideas that arise from scientific study and innovation. We hope that this discussion will delve back into that childlike wonder and those crazy and almost inconceivable ideas that we all have but don't get to share with our mentors or students.
Logistics: Each table will ponder the applicability and possible impacts of biological engineering to a specific world problem. A leader at each table (we will need volunteers!) will prepare a 1-page summary of the world problem ahead of time, so that each table member will have at least be slightly informed of some of the facts and figures. After this initial seeding, feel free to take the discussion in any direction you want! We would also like to get feedback from the discussions on Tuesday, but the format is undecided. One possibility: a representative from each table presents both their most feasible (something that will probably happen in 5 years) and least feasible ideas to the group at large, just by standing up and discussion them. A second possibility: Each table generates a small cartoon/diagram/sketch of their most feasible/least feasible/coolest/funniest ideas, to be displayed at breakfast the next morning.
Possible Topics and Table Leaders
(Please add your name next to a topic if you are interested in researching/producing the one-page summary (we might do this in pairs) and initiating your table's discussion.)
- Aging
- Global Energy Supply
- Emerging Diseases (SARS, bird flu)
- Cancer
- AIDS
- Diseases in Third-World Countries (AIDS, malaria)
- Quality of Life in Third-World Countries
- Synthetic Life Forms
- Biomachinery
- Stem Cells
- Personalized Medicine
- Tissue Engineering
- Neuroscience
- Computing and Networking Equipment, Infrastructures, and Interfaces