Today we spend 1.3% of the world's electricity
running cloud computing.
Projection is that we'll need a thousand times more cloud
computing in about 10 years from today.
That's 1,300% of the world's electricity.
Starting in 2002, cancer began to kill more people
every year than AIDS, malaria, and TB combined,
and that's only gotten worse.
Even here in the US it's approaching the number one
killer, higher than cardiovascular disease.
I like to say water is sort of the one energy problem
that could kill you.
Two billion people in the world today
do not have regular access to clean drinking water.
Within the next couple of decades
that's expected to go up to four billion.
MIT is a place where we think about solving problems
in our society today, and we have a responsibility
to actually come up with solutions
and to show that science, engineering, and technology can
actually provide solutions.
Nanoscale happens to be the operative unit.
If we can control it, we can build the world we want.
It's a natural platform for innovation and thinking
about growing and transforming nonbiological materials
but giving them some of the best properties of biology.
You think about in the periodic table,
it's as if you've given that whole table
a completely new dimension.
Over the past couple of decades, the equipment
and the experimental techniques at micro and nanoscales
have evolved.
I can't even--
[LAUGHS]
I can't even tell you how much they've evolved.
We can see things now that we couldn't have even
imagined looking at 20 years ago.
Our present facilities are twice as busy than any other research
lab in the world.
Opening MIT Nano will enable us to fulfill our desire
to be even more productive.
Innovation occurs when you get unusual pairings
or unusual collaborations.
It's about sharing ideas, it's about working together
to push the boundaries of what's possible.
It's about what we can do as a community to make a difference.
Having a fabrication facility right
at the heart of the campus really
tells us that we are here to prototype and make things.
The way discoveries happen is that engineers actually tinker.
We like to play, we like to invent.
And so we might have one idea in mind
and discover something completely different
that has another application.
MIT Nano will house the most complex set of nano technology
tools ever assembled in a single place, tools
that none of the individual faculty
can afford because they're too expensive to maintain.
But as a group of 2,000 users, we
can certainly maintain it as a central facility.
When you get access to those state of the art tools,
you really start thinking big.
You have this spiral of technology development,
fundamental science, technology development that
can start a real snowball effect.
This is the time to build this building because this
is the time when the technology is really
going to leap forward.
What we do is really on the edge of science and fiction.
And if you make one more step, if we
can make this particle a little bit more
magnetic or a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, then
maybe we will be able to really change
the way we interact with human nervous systems.
We can envision a future where a large fraction, maybe
as much as 20% or 30% of our chemicals
actually come now from biology as opposed to from petroleum.
One of the dreams at MIT is to design
what would be the first interplanetary small satellite
to explore the moon or explore Mars or an asteroid.
That would be unheard of.
MIT attracts people who see their mission
to be beyond academic pursuits.
Mind and hand symbolizes what we do.
MIT Nano epitomizes MIT's mission.
We think about ideas, we reduced them to practice,
and then we give them to the world outside.