Nobel Minds 2013

Hello, I'm Zainab Badawi. Welcome to the magnificent concert hall here in Stockholm, where this year's Nobel Prize winners received their awards from the King of Sweden. The Nobel Prizes are amongst the most prestigious accolades anywhere in the world, and this is the first time that this year's Nobel laureates are appearing together on television. They're joined by their friends and family who are taking part in the celebrations, and we also have an invited audience of students from here in Sweden. We'll be hearing whether these Nobel Prize winners believe that scientists should be playing more of a role in tackling the big problems of the day. So here we are, gentlemen, and you are of course all gentlemen, because sadly Alice Munro, the Nobel laureate for literature this year, couldn't join us, but congratulations to all of you. What were you all doing briefly when you heard the news? Professor Randy Sheckman. Well, I was deep asleep, but my wife heard the phone and she blurted out, this is it, this is it. I picked up the phone and I heard a soft Swedish voice, and although I'm not a religious person, I blurted out, oh my god. And you knew that that really was it. Francois Englert, I think you were making your famous banana toast for your grandchildren. I see that the banana toast is already something which is internationally known. You'll have to patent the recipe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a lot of letters asking me for the recipe for the banana toast, and the problem was that I was there with my three daughters. The events, of course, could happen this year, but, you know, the clock went down from, at the Nobel, thing went out from, well, a reasonable number, close to zero, and at zero was still no phone calls, so we decided, that's it. Make the banana toast. Three of my daughters were there, and they said a lot of nasty things about the Nobel committee. Because they thought you weren't getting it. But, you know, you will forever be remembered for the banana toast when the news came in. It will go down in history. So we did do the banana toast. Well, your fellow laureate in physics, Professor Peter Higgs, you famously don't have a mobile phone. I do, in fact, but only my family know the number. Ah, that's it. So the Nobel committee didn't. So how did you find out? Well, I found out when I was walking back home. I'd left home late morning, because although I wasn't intending to avoid hearing the announcement, I was intending to avoid the subsequent media attention. So I made sure that I was somewhere else for lunch. I went to an art exhibition afterwards and walked home about three o'clock. As I was walking home, a former neighbour stopped her car across the street, came across to me and said, congratulations, my daughter's just phoned from London and told me the news about the award. And I said, what award? And she told me. So just a woman passer-by gave you the good news. She was a former neighbour. Oh, I see, former neighbour, there you are. Professor Arya Walsh, you are one of the prize winners for chemistry. What were you doing? Okay, I took half Ambion to prevent reaction for the opposite news. So I was sleeping very deeply. And then my wife woke me up. And again, like Randy, when I heard the Swedish accent and few people in the background. Did you go back to sleep afterwards? No, the news people already came. Okay, Jim Rothman. Well, I was sleeping, the phone rang. I picked it up, and I immediately dropped it. And it was dark. And there were two buttons to push, you know, the green one and the red one. And when you get a call at that hour, you kind of know what it's likely to be. So which one was it? And you know, if you push the right one, you get a Nobel Prize. If you push the wrong one, do they call back? I pushed one, and I was very lucky. Oh, there you are, you hit the right button. It takes a lot of luck to get a Nobel Prize. Absolutely. Well, a lot of hard work too. We'll talk about that in a moment. Medicine and Physiology Prize, you are one of the winners. Thomas Sutov, I think you were driving somewhere. I had flown from San Francisco to Spain the night before. I had arrived early morning in Madrid, rented a car, was trying to find a somewhat obscure little city, beautiful city called Paisa. Wasn't happy because I couldn't find that place. Phone rings, thought it was my colleague, rightly assumed I was lost. It wasn't actually even a Swedish accent because they never reached me. It was Adam Smith, who is the British accent, the British, has a British accent, who works for Nobel Media, and who thought I knew, which I didn't. And as a result, my recorded phone call sort of documents, yeah, documents my... Well, at least you got the news in deeper Spain. And Professor Robert Schiller, one of the Economics Laureates, you don't want to sound too intimate, but you're in the bathroom, weren't you? I was preparing to leave for a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and I was stepping out of the shower, and the phone rang, and I thought, maybe I'll just let it ring because it's too difficult to get to the phone. But then I thought about the, actually thought about the Nobel Prize, and I thought, well, here's a chance. So I went and answered it, and I was pleasantly surprised. Well, a very happy moment. And your fellow Laureate for Economics, Eugene Farmer, you're famous in early riser, and the students here will be very impressed to hear that you were doing what? I was listening to Don Pasquale and doing my back exercises, but then I had to prepare my class after that. And I didn't come to you, Michael Levitt, but do tell us what you were doing. Were you also in bed, one of the Chemistry Laureates, of course? In California, it was 2.16. I had gone to sleep an hour before, so I was pretty much asleep. What was interesting about the call, it's not just the Swedish accent. There's a lot of, I guess, trick calls. People call you on that day at that time and say, you've just won the Nobel Prize. And last year, apparently, this had happened to somebody the night before. So this time, they actually ask you a question. They tell you things that only they could know, like, we got drunk in Italy. In any case, as soon as I had the news, I ran. And before I even updated my Facebook entry, I called my mother. You wanted to call your mother. And I have to mention, actually, I hope she won't mind my saying, Gertrude Levitt, at 98, you have traveled here to Sweden to join the celebrations with your son, Professor Levitt. I think she deserves a round of applause. That is wonderful. Now I want to ask you some questions. Let's start with the Economics Laureates. Professor Schiller and Professor Farmer, for those of us trying to understand how that last financial crisis happened and are worried about the next one, just give us an overview. How far does your research help us do that, Professor Schiller? Well, you're coming into a big disagreement. Most laureates agree on most things. You've honed right in where Jean and I disagree. Now, I actually predicted the crisis in a second edition to my book. I believe that smart people can partially predict the market. And why shouldn't they? I think it takes it like anything else. But you have to remember that you're predicting human behavior. It involves a kind of broad judgment of bubbles, speculative behavior, and people. Okay. I should say, Professor Farmer, I mean, I should just remind people, broadly speaking, along with Lars Peter Hansen, who sadly could not be with us because he's not well. You were awarded the prize jointly for launching a revolution in thinking to show that prices are very hard to predict in the short term and even harder in the long term. So, Professor Farmer, what's your answer to the question, can economists help us predict and avoid financial crises? There's no evidence that that's true. Bob used the right words. I believe that's the state of it. But I've looked at the record systematically and tried to test for it. You cannot find it in the traces of the data. So, that's where we disagree. Okay. We agree on statistical evidence about predictability. There's a difference in perspective. Now, I'm married to a psychologist. Maybe that's part of the reason. He always blames his wife. But I believe in the unity of knowledge. And I think there are so many things outside of economics that people have to weigh. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and now we're getting new things. Neuroscience. And ideology. What separates us is an interpretation of human nature and about the importance of the individual and the state. That's why, although I think we are both scientists and agree on some facts, it's the interpretation that differs. Gene Fama is one of the most successful stock market predictors in the world. He misinterprets himself. He has dimensional fund advisors, which is, can I say this? Managing 350 billion dollars. Huge fund. Why do these people come to him? Because he can predict the market, not perfectly, but well enough to outperform many other. And he's an inspiration to me. He's a scientist who knows how to predict the market. He just won't admit it. So, Professor Fama, now you've brought up the subject of money. I mean, clearly, you have made a fortune out of predicting asset prices. And they've been kind enough to compensate me handsomely. But then that must mean, Professor Schiller, that his theory is right. But he just says it's not psychology. May I explain? What this company does is it forms portfolios that concentrate on particular kinds of risks. So it's well understood that stocks are riskier than bonds. So if I form a portfolio of stocks, I can predict that in the long term, that will likely outperform bonds. In that sense, the market is predictable. That's what he's saying. But I don't think you can predict whether the stock market is going to do something. That's a different story. I mean, there's a live debate here about economic students, particularly in the UK. We've got this debate wanting to be engaged in policy debates. We have one professor of economics at London University who said, you know, my students are flipping the pages of best sellers in economics because they want to get involved in policy debates. They're not happy with what they're getting in class because they feel they're no better equipped to interpret what's going on than students of archaeology, for instance. Do you believe it is your role as professors of economics to teach your undergraduates and your postgraduates how to better understand the world of finance? Well, I think Gene and I are actually similar in that we're real world oriented. And Gene, although he's, you wouldn't know it listening to him, he's had a huge impact on the way finance is practiced. And it's very helpful. He's done a lot. He's very generous, isn't he, your fellow laureate? He just doesn't know how to sell himself. I don't think it's often that you get two laureates who've been awarded the prize for a different interpretation, and yet one is still very generous like that in his comments. Students, I want to ask you, I know you are students of science, but does any of this resonate with you in terms of the kind of lessons that you're getting from your professors? Do you feel that it equips you to understand what's going on in the world in your own particular disciplines? Any comments, please, from the students? Yes, I think there's a comment here. As a physicist and a graduate student, we are taught to analyze data in a real world environment at famous experiments around the world, like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. So I definitely think that our schooling and our education applies to larger big world pictures for sure. Okay, another comment on this point. I think there's a lady here. Hi, I'm not in economics either. I'm a neuroscientist, but we're taught to problem solve and think critically, and that should help in solving many problems that we're faced with. Thank you. I think there's one more just here. Yeah, I'm also a science student, and I really think I've learned in the last year of my master's that our educators really tries us to think critically and understand the world, but you also understand after five years that it's really complex. Okay, thank you. Well, I think that kind of sets the scene a little bit for us to move into the scientists, and there's an underlying theme here. Do you, should you as scientists, teach the kind of science that will help us address, you know, the big problems of the day? Jim Rothman? By equipping students with the skills of rigorous analytical thinking, of taking a problem, breaking it down to component parts, asking which parts are solvable, which ones can't be solved today, and then directing your effort appropriately. That way of thinking can be, is the basis for solving problems of any kind, whether they're of immediate import, or that whether they're problems we don't even know about today. That's what an education is all about. But what you're saying is, as you said in your speech when you received the Nobel Prize, it's curiosity-driven research. It's not research that's driven towards solving a specific problem. It's basic research. You can never predict, and I think we all agree on this, you can almost never predict where something will lead. In all of our work, there are examples of basic science that we've achieved in our laboratory, and our theoretical work, that have applications that one couldn't have imagined. In my own work, what I did was a very basic problem in how proteins are transported in yeast cells, which turns out having application in liver cancer, in ways that I couldn't have imagined. Yeah, but I mean, your research for medicine and physiology helps us with our knowledge of a huge range of illnesses, diabetes, brain disorders, but I should also say Botox. I mean, Botox obviously has a medical purpose because it helps people with paralysis. Yes, well, as I said in my remarks last night, my colleagues Rothman and Sudhof figured out how nerve cells communicate with one another. It turns out that botulism, the disease, works by producing a toxin that inactivates protein molecules that they worked on, and that has applications in a lot of things, cosmetic or neuromuscular disease. Have you tried Botox yourself? No, I have not used it myself, but I don't think I need it just yet. I think we want to go to one of our students here, a question about physics. Yes, I am from the Royal Institute of Technology, and I was wondering what do you think, or what kinds of technological applications do you think will come from the discovery of the Higgs boson? Let's go to Professor Peter Higgs, yes. I don't know of any applications. You're asking about how you would make use of something which has been discovered, which you have to put a lot of energy into the making of it, and then it lasts for an extremely short time. How can you do anything useful with that? It's true that particles which have been discovered previously, some of them have applications in medicine, for example, but they're relatively long-lived particles by our personal standards. Things which, even when they're at rest, maybe last about a microsecond, and if you make them move fast, then relativity tells you that they'll last longer, and you can make beams and you can use them in cancer therapy and that sort of thing. Well, that's okay for that kind of particle, but when you're exploring this extremely high energy range, where the things you produce just don't last very long, it's hard to see how you could actually control them and use them. Okay, Professor Ungler, you shared the prize with Professor Higgs for the physics, for the theory that explains why the tiny particles that make up atoms have mass. I want to be frank with you, I want to ask you, the student there mentioned the fact that it's called the Higgs boson theory. Everybody says, including Professor Higgs, that it should more accurately be known as the BEH particle. Robert Brout, who unfortunately was not able to receive the prize because he died, but it should be known as the Brout-Ungler-Higgs particle. Does it annoy you that it's known as the Higgs particle? No. You don't mind my asking you this question? No, no, no, no. Okay, put the record straight. But I am not agreeing with the way you want to solve this. Of course it annoys me, just simply because it's not appropriate. After all, the so-called Higgs boson, which has done, has first not been introduced by Higgs. That's one thing. Although I have a complete admiration for Higgs, but one should put things straight, right? Do you think the media have a role in calling it the Higgs? Particularly the Anglo-Saxon and particularly the English media, which confuses sometimes physics with some kind of soccer game, you know, where you have to promote the Anglo-Saxon achievement. But even CERN? There are also many things involved, right? The contribution of English is important in a sense. So CERN and they have another thing, right? They detect the particle. And so they like, I guess, that one centres things on their detection, and they are quite right, and they need money for that. Can I ask Professor Higgs? Yeah, but I haven't finished. Because I didn't answer yet your question. I think there have been many people which have played a role before the theory was made, and people who have made things after the theory is made. And as usual, this is complete nonsense to give the name of a person. Any person? Any person. Any person. In addition, if it's not the right one, it's worse. We understand. Okay. But I think it's reasonable to give, as for other particles, a letter. And personally, as I like a lot. Professor Higgs, I would propose the letter H. What do you think? And then that final suggestion, take your name off Higgs boson and just call it the letter H, H theory. Anyway, your response? I would be very happy with that solution, because the present situation embarrasses me. I think... Why does it embarrass you? Well, because it's come about so accidentally. It's not a recognition that I was any sort of special person in this story. There were many people involved, as Francois has said. And it's so happened that my name has been attached to it for a number of accidental reasons. And that's unfair to the other people involved. I'd like to make a distinction between the particle and what's called the mechanism, which is how to get mass for other particles. I'm happy with the solution, which is now becoming common in the particle physics world to call it the BEH mechanism. And that's, to me, really the important part of the theory. The particle itself should not carry anybody's name, and the solution of giving it the letter H, because in the past, my name has been attached to it, is a good one. But the... Okay, well, I think we'll leave that particular exchange there. And the student, next time you ask your question, be careful what you call the theory. That's what I'm saying. Professor Thomas Sudhoff, you are one of the joint ministers of the Medicine Physiology Prize. I just want to ask you what you think about the application of your particular theories. Does it matter to you that your discoveries for your work on vesicles, and I won't go into too much, but they kind of act as the cell's internal shipping service or postman. They can send materials around the cell or can even fuse with its outer surface. But how important was it for you when you were doing your research that this would actually help, perhaps, save lives? Very. I was afraid you were going to ask me about the Higgs boson. I think, you know, a common theme in science is we do science best when we don't have an application in mind, because it limits our imagination and creativity. But in the end, we feel most rewarded when what we discover out of a quest for knowledge leads actually to an application. And so what I do, and I think what my fellow laureates do, I think it's extremely important for us to find that, I wouldn't call it an accident, but serendipity. What we do actually is useful. Is it a motivating factor for all of you in your research, or do you just see it as a bonus? What I would say is that, and to use an economic simile here, is that research that is longer term is likely to have a much, much larger payoff. And in some senses, I think that this sort of fits into what Mr. Shetland was saying. You don't want to think about solving tomorrow's problems today. You want to think about problems that haven't even been designed yet, and then you'll have a massive impact. I think this is a very critical thing, because we increasingly want to solve short-term problems. And I think it is perhaps high-energy physics doesn't have a very direct practical application, but it's really hard to imagine the applications that are going to come up, for example. Yeah, the long views. I mean, these gentlemen were recognized decades later from the work they actually did. I mean, James Rothman, just picking up this point about research and the long view and so on, I mean, would you be happy if you were a young scientist starting out today trying to embark on some research which needed funding? Well, I'd be very happy if I was a young scientist, because then I wouldn't be an old scientist. But, you know, I think we're in a very challenging era for the very reasons that we heard a moment ago from Michael. There's an increasingly, increasing effort on the short-term, short-term success, and it causes young scientists to take less in the way of risk, and to do more research that's more incremental, a small step here, a small step there, more likely to reap a short-term reward. But those of us around the table today, I think each in our own way, we're taking on problems that were very challenging in our time, quite some time ago. We all feel an enormous increase in pressure from public institutions, or rather from politicians and the public, foundations, patient advocates, whatever, to do science that will lead to tangible results tomorrow. Cure this, cure that now. And in my view, that never works, because you can't cure something you don't understand, in our case physiology or medicine. Some of us try to solve problems which are really difficult, like how enzymes work, in their case what is the mass in the universe, and eventually some of the solutions have application. And really to your question, what is missing in all of this is teaching politicians in the university, people who will become politicians, to understand some concepts in science, so in the future they will be able to do better decision making. This is something important. So we all should be better educated in science? By examination, we should. It seems to me that, I don't know if this is necessary, but I think it would require a very narrow-minded politician to say that science hadn't had a massive effect on everything we do over the last hundred years. It seems to me that the general, you know, maybe non-targeted investment in science that we've had, let's just say since the second world war, has paid off unbelievably. The living standard, you know, maybe that's why we have so many people on earth, but it's all part of the success of science. So it seems to me that we don't have to justify every little thing. This point that Professor Walsh made about, I suppose you're basically saying scientific illiteracy, that people need to be better educated, public politicians. I mean, is scientific illiteracy more acceptable than other forms of illiteracy? I have thought about that a lot. If I said, oh Shakespeare, who cares about him? You don't think, my god. But if somebody says a billion, a million, what difference does it make? You know, that's a pretty big error. People need to learn much more statistics than they know. I think statistical knowledge is... There is a tremendous ignorance of science in the US, which unfortunately is fostered by the political process. Right now, we have a great deal of disbelief in basic scientific principles in the United States that drives the politics. There's a dismissal of evolution, there's a disbelief in climate change in spite of the overwhelming evidence. So we have to do a better job. It used to be that the government, you know, I've been the beneficiary of this. We have all been the beneficiary of an investment in science starting with the end of World War II, the Sputnik era in the United States. There was enormous investment in science, science education that's diminished, particularly in the public realm. So it's not happening now. You don't think science is getting the funding sufficiently. It is not enough. And then what is funded is being managed much more so than it used to be. As an economist, I would like to point out that scientific research provides a public good that benefits the entire world. So one country, let's take Sweden. Politicians here would rationally think, why should we pay for it? The rest of the world will do it anyway. If we pay a million kroner for some research project, only a tiny part of that will benefit Sweden. It'll go all over the world. So part of the defense of scientific research has to be a cosmopolitan public spirit. But also, shouldn't it be what Professor Sudhoff said, which is that you scientists have to communicate better with the public and politicians about what it is you are doing. We have a question, I think, from one of the students here about this subject. Ricardo Guidi, Karolinska Institute. So I wonder if you think that do scientists communicate badly their science? How do we avoid misunderstanding and gain a better presence on public debates? On this point of communication, Professor Farmer, economists obviously is not a pure science, you're a social scientist, but you are asked to comment every hour, every day of the week because of financial crisis and so on. Do you think you make a good job of communicating with the public? I don't think we make it clear in distinguishing between the things we know based on research that have been done and opinions that we have based on our own interpretation of things. I don't think we do a good job on that. I think too many economists are willing to talk too much about things that they really don't know a lot about. I try to avoid that. I'm not sure I'm entirely successful. Do you do lots of media interviews yourself, asked to predict what's going on? No, actually, before I got the Nobel Prize, nobody was much interested in me. And afterward they became interested and I said, I didn't change. I'm still the dumb guy you thought I was two months ago. Professor Schiller, you do interact a lot with the public. You've written books which are supposed to be accessible to students. You write books which are supposed to be accessible to even people who haven't studied economics. What's your view on how economists communicate with the public? Well, I think that economists have been too much in the science model of writing concise short, I mean some of that is good, concise short journal articles that make a very narrow but frontier contribution. We model ourselves after physics particularly, I think. But I think there's an older, a different tradition that's also valuable and that is writing books that draw together theory and practice. And the profession tends to, if you say I've written a book that is read, they think, oh that's a, they call it a popularization. But I don't think that some of these books that are widely read are popularizations at all. They're syntheses that can operate at a level of an ordinary intelligent person. You give lectures online as well. You provide lectures online. Yeah, you can take my car. Yeah, there you are. And Professor Levitt, you also provide lectures online. Right, but I actually think that in the last, say, 50 years, communication has undergone an incredible revolution. And at a time when, you know, Facebook is being phased out for Twitter, which has been phased out for Snapshot or whatever, it seems to me that the only way we can communicate, and the key thing is not to communicate with people in their 40s, it's to communicate with people in their teens and early 20s. And it seems to me that everyone here should be on Facebook, and I am. Are your lectures, your lectures online, are they accessible to anybody? My lectures have been freely accessible to even non-students, students who do not have signs. All right, let's just get some feedback here. Who thinks that scientists do a good job of communicating with the public? Can I see people put their hands up? Who thinks scientists do a good job of communicating with the public? Who thinks scientists do a bad job of communicating with the public? Oh my. Who thinks that these Nobel laureates have been doing a good job of communicating with the public? Oh, there you are. No, you got a good response there. I just want to ask you whether you feel that sometimes scientists are running ahead of what society both understands and thinks is acceptable. And without going into various examples here, it's really a question about the potential misuse of your discoveries, or a potential lack of understanding of what your discoveries may bring about. I mean, there are so many examples. I'm thinking of the Belgian geneticist who brought about GM, who says that Professor Montagu, Mark Van Montagu, who says that society fears science because it upsets the traditional way of living. Do any of you worry at night about how your various discoveries may be misused in the future? Well, I think to turn the question just a bit, I think there is an overselling on our part sometimes of what science can do. And just to use an example, the war on cancer in the 1970s under President Nixon really wasn't an enormous investment. A lot of science was done, but cancer was not cured. We shouldn't overpromise what we can deliver. Is there overhype, Professor Sudhof, on the part of scientists? Absolutely. I think that in communicating with the public, that's probably one of the biggest mistakes we as scientists have made, because we haven't communicated the magnitude of the challenge. We haven't communicated how difficult it is, for example, to understand a cancer cell or to understand the brain. And people expect us to solve this and to have solutions tomorrow. And that's our fault. Why do you think that happens? Because we claim to make discoveries as a community that aren't there. And do you think you're asked the wrong questions sometimes, or pushed into saying things you shouldn't say by the media? There's no doubt about that. There's no doubt about that. It's blaming the media again. Yes, absolutely. It's your fault, no question. I think one of the difficulties in the communication of science is the basic education to begin with, after all. You see, in a sense, maybe you can try to give a vague idea to people about how they can be cured about some cancer, and they may understand something, but if you try to explain something which is deeper, I don't want to make it deeper, I mean basic, right? They don't have any mathematical basis to understand this, and the difficulty comes already from the first years of school. Now, I said at the start that you are all gentlemen, obviously. Alice Munro won the prize for literature, and one of the chemistry laureates, Martin Karplus, can't be with us, but obviously another man. What is it about science and women? Randy Shechtman, Michael Levitt? I think the problem is with the age group of the gentlemen here. We all did our work. I mean, the work that I was credited for, I did as an assistant professor. That was back at a time when there were few women. In fact, there were no women in my department. There are many more women that we hire now, so I look forward to, in 30 years, you'll still be just as young interviewing a number of women. I like you, and still no Botox. Professor Higgs, lack of women? Well, in my kind of physics, there are interesting differences between different countries, at least within Europe, and until I went to Italy, I think my prejudice would have been that the southern Catholic countries were less likely to have women scientists than the northern, mostly Protestant countries, because of the attitudes of the Catholic church to what women ought to be doing. It isn't so. It's the other way around. It's Italy, which has the largest proportion of women in physics, and the northern countries do rather badly by comparison. That's a very interesting point you raise there, Professor Higgs, because Sweden, which is famous for its very efficient and effective child care system, actually has a very low number of professors right across the board, not only in science. It's only about 21%. Since we have some students from here at universities in Sweden, what do you think about this gender issue? I would like to comment on what Professor Higgs said, that religion has some impact on this, and I think an earlier generation had. Nowadays, we can look at this room. It's full of women. We are gaining power, and we are starting to do science, but we still have to take a lot of risks and to do a lot of difficult choices. For example, I had to move from my country because the maternities and those problems in my country are still problematic. That's why I moved to a northern country. Which country are you from? Portugal. Portuguese, okay. Another person, another science student. I'm in social sciences, which is full of women, and in social work, which is even more women, and still in Sweden, we have men that are on the top of the the top positions in both society and science. So that must reflect something, even when there's basically all women in the field. Usually what you do, you have kids as a male and a female, and except for pregnancy, which usually people are only away maybe for a few weeks, the kids are something you get together. So if it's a female problem, it should also be a male problem. All right, let's have another student. Yes, I see somebody there. Yes, I'm a PhD student in molecular biology. There are a lot of women in science now, as someone else has pointed out, and I don't think that there are less opportunities for women in science. I think that if you want to have a family and a career, that's your choice, and I think that there are many examples of successful women scientists who have made it happen. Maybe not sitting at the table today, but maybe they'll be sitting at the table in the future, and I think that the future will reflect that. But I think that the opportunities are there. Professor Randy Sheckman, you're not only concerned about encouraging women to study science, you want to ensure that everyone from all walks of life can have access to a university. I'm very concerned about public higher education. That may not be as much an issue in Sweden, but in the United States, the individual states have decreased their support of public higher education. Particularly, there's virtually an inverse relationship between the funding of prisons in the United States and the funding of public higher education, and I think this has been much to the detriment of the middle class, who wouldn't necessarily have, in large numbers, have access to the elite institutions that are represented around this table. You're disappointed? Very disappointed. I came from a middle-class family. I could work a summer job and pay for the whole year. Room, board, books, that is no longer possible. I think that has damaged access to the highest reaches of science, at least in the United States. Anybody else on this issue of access? In the UK, Professor Higgs, we have a similar debate. We have a similar situation, where my generation had a lot of public funding for going to universities, and there's a generation of academics, not just in science, but other fields, who came from all kinds of social backgrounds, but now it's been made much more difficult by the present policies of introducing fees, and people from poorer backgrounds are simply deterred from trying. Are you worried that this crisis in funding in some countries is going to jeopardise their future as being centres of excellence, where you can get the kind of people like you who come up with these discoveries? Just think about the fact that, as far as I understand, sociological studies suggest that social mobility in the United States is now lower than in Europe, and that sort of puts it on... It always used to be that social mobility, look at me, in the United States was better than in Europe, and now it's the opposite. So you don't think the centre of excellence is going to move back to Europe, as it was in the old days? That's possible, but I hope that in the United States... Or Asia, it's well moved to Asia. It already is. Already is what? Moving away from the United States, not black and white, but in a graded way, where it comes back to research support, it comes down to public education, it comes down to a value system of immediacy versus a longer-term view, and... Where's it going to? Well, I think in part, a lot of it has gone already to Europe. Europe had a tremendous task of rebuilding after World War II. That's largely done, in the sciences especially. China and Asia are very hungry to be major players, but they tend to be still quite short-term focused. China thinks in five-year plans. It's a 50-year plan. If it's any kind of a plan at all, it's more like an intent. And do you think there are certain cultures that better encourage free thinking, the blue-skies thinking that brings about the great discoveries? I was thinking that the United States had a more public spirit after World War II than it does now. The Marshall Plan is an example of something that happened then, that was an aid program to Europe. It wouldn't happen now. And the declining support for education is another example of that. I wanted to remind us that we are here at the legacy of Alfred Nobel, who had a tremendous public spirit. And that's one reason why the Nobel Prize is a renewed inspiration. Talking about access, you now have access to the ear of the powerful in the world. Are you going to be using this newfound recognition that you have to put forward the case that you've been making about greater access or any other issue? I'll come to you, David. I think it's really important to have an issue after getting the Nobel Prize. You have to do something with the rest of your life. And besides science that I'll continue to do, I think an issue for me that is really, really worrying is that there used to be people who had positions between the ages of 20 and 40. And that whole generation is slowly disappearing. It's becoming very hard to become an independent scientist if you're younger than 40. And 30 or 40 years ago, you could be in your early 20s. I think that this can be explained in many ways sociologically, but I think that it's as if when you're finished university here, instead of getting a position in five years, it can take 15 years. I think this is a huge waste of talent. Because we see young talent bringing up things like Facebook. I was just going to say that you have to drop out of college even to have found Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo. Not a good site. It's a general society sociological problem and economic problem that things are more and more reducing the possibility of funding students to help them to go. This situation is still good in Belgium, but it's very difficult otherwise. Very briefly, anybody got any big idea about how they're going to be using their new influence as a Nobel laureate to in some way better the world, not only as a scientist, but beyond the realm of science? Professor Rochon, did you have your hand up? I will find it out eventually. Professor Farmer. I'm going to continue to do what I've been doing. My simple attitude is everything that creates economic output adds to humanity. My plumber is perhaps as important as I am. I wish I had a good one, but this one may not be as important as mine. Everybody that contributes something to output makes everybody else bigger, better off. I'm good at what I do. Why would I try to do something I'm not good at? I think I can make the world better off by continuing what I'm doing. Eugene Farmer, thank you very much. That brings this exclusive programme to an end. We've heard what this year's Nobel laureates have to say about the role of science and economics in today's society. We've also heard from the students here from Sweden about what they think the role of science should also be. Who knows, there may be a future Nobel Prize winner amongst you all. Thank you to the family and friends of the laureates, to the laureates themselves, of course, to you wherever you are for watching this programme. From me, Zainab Badawi, here in the Concert Hall in Stockholm, goodbye.