Engineering a Nation with Guru Madhavan

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to a special edition of AMSEcast as we celebrate 250 years of American innovation. With much appreciated support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, we’re undertaking a series of AMSEcast interviews focusing on American innovations as part of our commemoration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.

0:56 On this episode, I’m honored to be joined in person at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, by our good friend, Dr. Guru Madhavan. Guru is the Norman Augustine senior scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering. With his MS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering and an MBA from the State University of New York, he was a leader in the medical device industry who now brings his talents to the vital work of the National Academies. He is the author of Applied Minds: How Engineers Think and Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World. And very importantly, Guru is a member of our National Advisory Committee, and was the 2024 winner of the AMSE Foundation’s National Excellence Award.

1:39 He’s been so very helpful to our mission in many ways, including connecting us during this visit with both Dr. Sudip Parikh and Al Romig, whose interviews you’ll hear on AMSEcast as well. So Guru, it’s great to be joined again by you on AMSEcast. Thanks so much. Alan, wonderful to see you. And welcome to Washington, DC, and importantly, the National Academy of Sciences Building, which is historic, and I’m just so honored that we could host you here. You’re at the, “Temple of Science,” as President Calvin Coolidge called it. And of course, it was a thrill to take you on a little bit of a tour, and I was delighted to see the awe [laugh] that you had. And you know, just so our listeners get a little bit of an audio tour here, I mean, we just visited the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences, and it shows how perfectly symbiotic and harmonious sciences and arts are in society.

2:32 I mean, and I invite all the listeners to visit the National Academy of Sciences the next time they are in DC. We are right across the Lincoln Memorial on Constitution Avenue. And the Great Hall, as you just witnessed, it’s a space that just takes your breath away. And I’ve worked here for many years, and I feel exactly the same as I felt the very first time when I came here on a fellowship here. You know, there’s some fascinating history here. The architect Bertram Goodhue, he took a chance on a relatively unknown muralist named Hildreth Meière and gave her her first big break to decorate this incredible space. So, the dome tells the story of science as people understood it back in 1922.

3:18 And at the center of the dome is the Sun, which is surrounded by symbols of eight planets they knew back then. So, Pluto is not in that list [laugh] . Around those planets mirror painted eight figures representing different branches of sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to zoology, and there’s this powerful inscription running around the edge, which captures the spirit of science, “Pilot of industry, conqueror of disease, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe, revealer of nature’s laws, eternal guide to truth.” And I was told that originally, instead of, “Conqueror of disease,” the phrase was, “Healer of the sick,” but I’m glad that they focused on prevention [laugh] rather than treatment, so I think that’s also a little bit of a foresight there.

4:09 They also made sure to honor the great scientific institutions of history that the National Academies borrowed from. And there are emblems of the French Academy of Sciences, the Lincean Academy of Rome, the Museum of Alexandria, and the Royal Society of London. And the pendulum that you saw, that was hanging from the ceiling, that’s a Foucault pendulum. The originals are in Paris. It actually shows the Earth’s rotation. If you watch it swing throughout the day, and I’ve done that once or twice, its path seems to change on its own, just as our planet spins. So, it’s a very therapeutic experience, even as it is a scientific one. And of course, you are struck by the incredible mural of Prometheus on the north wall.

4:53 The artist was Albert Herter, who created a version where Prometheus and Athena swiped the divine fire from Helios’s sun chariot to give humans a gift of knowledge. Herter really did his homework. I mean, you see how accurately he gets the ancient Greek and Egyptian artistic traditions in that portrait, so he was very impressive. And now, of course, we are sitting in the historic boardroom, and you see another stunning portrait by Herter from 1924, exactly a century ago. This group portrait, completely fictional, depicts President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, where he’s signing legislation to create the National Academy of Sciences.

5:36 So, if you look at the prominent figures from left to right, you see Benjamin Pierce, who was a librarian of Harvard University at that time; you see Engineer Alexander Bache, who was a superintendent of the US coastal survey. It was incredible, he did some of the earliest coastal surveys and also studied possibilities for coastal fortification and so forth, real practical work. You see Joseph Henry, then the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a brilliant scientist, and he laid the foundation for electromagnetics, independent of Maxwell. So, the last name Henry is, of course, the unit of electrical inductance [laugh] . Louis Agassiz, who, again, from Harvard; Then you have Lincoln; you have Senator Henry Wilson from Massachusetts; and then you have Admiral Charles Davis, who was with the US Naval Observatory; and then you have astronomer Benjamin Gould.

6:33 So, here you have a bunch of people who are creating an institution that was born out of a crisis. So, the organization was founded in 1863 during the heart of the Civil War, and it was created to address some urgent military and technological challenges of the time. So, there’s an engineering origin for this Science Academy. Lincoln, too, from a technological angle, is very interesting. He was and he—I think he’s still—the only US president to hold a patent. And he invented a device, I think, in the 1840s to lift river boats over shallow waters. And so, here is a patent holder, who becomes a wartime president, and faces an engineering crisis [laugh] . So, this kind of, this deep, practical focus shapes the National Academy of Sciences mission.

7:23 We were homeless since we were created back in 1863 till the 1920s. So, we just had meetings around the country. And I think they first met at a chapel at New York University. I think in the 1870s, DC is chosen as a headquarter city. And then in Fall 1922, they laid the cornerstone, and then the building is publicly dedicated in April 1924. So, this year, we’re also celebrating the 100th anniversary of this building. And we are very proud of it, and we invite everyone to come visit us because it is their scientific academy [laugh] in this country. Every step along the way in the tour today, Guru, from outside, throughout the building, I was overwhelmed.

8:04 Everywhere you look, are symbols of science and of progress inspiring us along the way. And we’re going to post some of this, some photos on our website. Specifically, Lincoln is looking down at me right now as we record this. You know, I have a great affection for Abraham Lincoln, and as you said, Guru, that act was signed in the middle of a civil war, and to think obviously there was a necessity to do this, there was a need for that practical engineering, but there’s also a great hope and a great optimism that our nation would survive and that they would have a very prosperous future. You look at Lincoln doing that, but also pushing the transcontinental railroad, for example.

8:49 Always grand vision for what our future held after we made it through that horrible civil war. It’s also interesting because Lincoln trusted the scientists around him and the engineers around him. He took valuable advice. So, it was not just they chose to create an organization in the middle of a war because they needed some practical solutions for it, but how do you also evolve an institution that has independence, and objectivity, and impartiality to take on weighty issues of the time? And that’s where the visions of the scientific minds around Lincoln—for example, Louis Agassiz, right? He brought European scientific standards to inform our work here. And you know, the National Academy of Sciences also elects membership for scientific excellence, and he established a strict membership criteria, and excellence was just non-negotiable for him.

9:39 He was a purist and he was a perfectionist on that matter. I’m glad that those strict standards were set up, up front. Alexander Bache, he actually is Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, and he created a model in which scientific organization such as ours works to support the federal government on matters that they find perplexing. And sometimes we also tell the government what they don’t like to hear. And I think that is the value of independence here, which is balanced with public service. And Joseph Henry, a very important personality when it comes to the National Academies, he actually started as a skeptic because he was worried about potential political interference in our work, but then eventually he, himself as the president, transformed the Academies, and he built protocols to protect scientific integrity of our work.

10:28 And he, I think, over time, helped create an independent framework that still guides our work. There are these influences that are worth observing here. Do we call this foresight? I mean, how do you create an organization 160 years later? I mean, you have to look back and see what were these founders thinking, and where do we go through states of great uncertainty and so forth. So, I think it’s worth reflecting. I think these anniversaries are good points for us to reflect on. And of course, the United States is going to be 250 years old, and I’m delighted to be having that conversation with you. I know in our previous discussion with Sudip Parikh, we talked about that moving into the future, he referenced the Bush Report right after World War II, of looking at the future of science in America.

11:18 I’m trying to remember the name of the report now. That will come to me— Vannevar Bush, ‘The Endless Frontier.’ “Endless Frontier,” thank you. You know this, Guru. Of course you know this. But how that was a very important report, but also it’s changed so much as we’ve gone forward because things have happened that we could not have envisioned, that we’ve progressed in ways that were not envisioned. I think that’s going to be certainly part of the story as we move forward in all areas of science and engineering in the next 250 years. How do you set, then, those principles when you’re setting up something like the National Academies, or a plan for, you know, the nation moving forward, how do you set that up to still be valid in some way at that time? I think part of that’s just underlying principles of things like non-interference of scientific and engineering integrity, those types of things.

12:06 Yeah, Vannevar Bush, it’s interesting, he titled the book Science: The Endless Frontier, but he was an engineer by background. He was a former dean of engineering at MIT. I’d like to point this out because I think, in this way, we were all, I think engineering, I think, as we have talked about in a prior conversation, engineering is, I think, one of the earliest, maybe even the original, cultural choice that we took, even before scientific frameworks were available. And engineering has enabled sciences in a significant way. And this is evident even in the earliest stages of the technical work, that the National Academies were commissioned by the federal government. And we talked about the founding during, kind of, the war time here, and one of the earliest projects that we did, maybe the first one or two projects we did was when the United States was facing, let’s call it the Ironclad Crisis, okay, when iron-hulled warships really wreaked havoc on magnetic compasses.

12:54 And this was the transition time from wooden ships to iron ships, right? So, there were critical navigation issues during active civil war operations, right? I mean, if you can’t navigate, you can’t fight. I mean, that was a real practical problem, and the engineers were [laugh] held to task, and they were really struggling with this. And there were a lot of amateur solutions. Now, we can say that retrospectively because they tried to come up with some casings to protect the compasses, but they all failed. And this was a very important technical problem, and the Academies were consulted for advice. So NAS, as it still does, the National Academies, we do a broad ranging survey of the current state of affairs, and at that time, they studied all of the iron ship experiences and designs abroad, carefully analyzed what are the technical possibilities, weighed alternatives, did the trade-offs and analysis, and they came to a recommendation that we need to precisely position what they call compensating magnets to alleviate the interference.

13:53 Then that led to an application, too. So, they successfully fixed navigation on, like, oh about 27 vessels across major shipyards. So, this was a real practical problem that the Academies just jumped right in and to provide advice on. A year later, 1864, the Surgeon General asked us to provide advice on developing reliable purity tests for whiskey. Thank you for that effort, Guru [laugh] . [laugh] . I was not personally involved in this, as a—here, and then the investigation revealed that complex age testing for alcohol was just impossible with the science of that day, but they suggested some simple tests that could easily spot common adulterants in whiskey.

14:37 And I think the Academies even gave back the money. I think at that point the federal government gave us, like, $3,500 or something, which comes down to, what, $75,000 in modern worth here. So, talk about fiscal responsibility and scientific advice going hand-in-hand. But another interesting political thing, I think it may have been very controversial back then—I can only imagine—is the Academies, I think, a couple years later, recommended a comprehensive plan for adopting metric system in America, and that included detailed technical standards, distribution systems and also how they would implement over many phases. So, this all started because the Academy was working on weights and measures.

15:21 So, that kind of led them to this metric system debate, and a committee established standardized measurements that became very crucial for commerce, scientific research, and also commercial trade. They made sure that the measurements were consistent across state lines. Imagine, measurements differing across states, and how do you make them compatible with international standards? So, huge problem, foundational problem. I think, several years later, based on the Academy’s recommendations, the United States became the first signatory to a 18-nation treaty on international standardization. And this, of course, established common practices for scientific and commercial measurements, but ironically, US remained the one of the nations that didn’t adopt the metric system, eventually.

16:08 And then I think the history takes on very interesting dimensions overall. And because the Academies, the National Academy of Sciences as it was originally created, led to the creation of the National Research Council as we call it, which is now known as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, when the other two Academies were founded later. This was in 1916 and the National Research Council, or NRC, became the Academy’s operational arm to conduct studies, and they did analysis on a whole range of subjects, like submarine detection technologies—and this is all during, like, World War I—then military aviation, Battlefield care, so military medicine, essentially, chemical warfare, military communications, a lot of really, you can see the engineering, military, and scientific advice thing at a nexus here.

16:59 And during the inter-war period, and that’s between one and two, so the Academy is significantly expanded in scope and influence. We established fellowship programs, we have many scientific divisions and committees that still exist, we increased our focus on industrial research, substantial involvement in social sciences, and that kind of ties in with also the Vannevar Bush model that comes in. So, there’s some overlap there, international scientific cooperation. And it became a principal Scientific Advisor to the US government. In World War II and Cold War, right—so we are in the 1940s to ’70s—did major work advising the Manhattan Project: radar, material sciences, medical research, operations research, all of those works have direct connection to our work here.

17:48 And then it was in the 1960s the National Academy of Engineering was formed with an exclusive focus on engineering, six years later. What is now the National Academy of Medicine, then called the Institute of Medicine, was formed, and then the Academy substantially expanded work in environmental sciences, international security issues, climate work, computational technologies, and my own technical work at the National Academies relating to vaccine development, prescription drugs, and big-ticket healthcare items like cancer control and so forth, they all over time have kept up. And we now have programs studying demographic shifts, human rights, pandemic preparedness, also on revitalizing the Gulf region.

18:32 So, think of anything and everything relating to science, engineering, and medicine, we do it here at the National Academies. And of course, we just walked past four different colloquiums on four very different subjects, and that is just a pretty normal afternoon for us here at the Academies. [laugh] . I was going to ask, is that normal? Because it’s a very busy place today. It is. And I think we operate in two different buildings here in DC. We are in the older building on Constitution Avenue. We also have another center called the Keck Center in the judiciary square, near the Chinatown area. And we have about 1400 staff members, bulk of them work from the other building, and far more meetings happen there.

19:14 And we also have a phenomenal cultural program that brings together artists, scientists, historians, and they organize programs of general interest as well. So, we take a deep role in local community engagement as well. And you mentioned artists. Hallway after hallway, room after room here, decorated with amazing exhibits of art, a real connection with what we would call the STEAM world, putting the A in STEM. Can you tell us about that? I think it goes back to the famous saying, Arts and Sciences being branches of the same tree, and I think how they form and inform the other. By excluding arts, and of course, I mean you can only think of the culture that we will be living in, [laugh] and again, also without science informing the humanistic dimensions, we are also left deficient here.

20:04 So, we take that synergy very seriously, very directly, that at least has personally influenced my own work, and my own writing, and thinking on these subjects. Really, really exciting and impressive how that’s done here. Let’s get into the role of the National Academies in our topic of the day, and that’s innovation. How specifically have the National Academies supported and encouraged innovation? We have produced reports after reports, and in fact, some of the examples that I gave earlier, whether it is military technologies or geospatial imaging or even advising NASA on how to conduct missions and so forth, pretty much every aspect of our scientific work is toward guiding American innovation.

20:48 In fact, we also live in a very competitive world. Other countries have learned significantly from the American innovation ecosystem and are proving to be a competition, but it’s also collaborative in a way because we cannot just isolate ourselves from the rest of the world here. So, we are living in a time where innovation itself proves to be kind of a vital concept for our lives, but also for our societal cohesion here. I think, so every report that we publish on any subject matter, allows you to kind of zoom in and zoom out on that subject, if we want to do that.

21:28 So, the Academies really are promoters of science, engineering, and medicine, and therefore the innovation, and the related functions that we sometimes forget [laugh] in the process of doing innovation, or maybe we exclude, deliberately or unconsciously, in the name of innovation. And I think we need to think carefully about that, too. Innovation is a means to achieve greater good, but that alone isn’t going to be helpful because it is still done by, let’s say, a small fraction of people in science, engineering, and medicine. And ultimately, do we want to have a society filled with innovators or just running around breaking things apart and, like, changing the status quo?

22:10 And I think there are some deeper issues that we could think about, contemplate on, as we reach 250th anniversary of America, and what innovation in America means. Right. You mentioned other societies, and progress being made there, innovations being made there, and the need to, at times, be collaborative. Where is the line drawn? How is that line drawn between seeing that as a collaborative possibility versus a threat, in some way, to our national well-being, our ability to lead in certain areas of science and engineering. I think there is no line. I think that’s the question here, the di—wherever we draw it, or used to demarcate it, I mean, I think it is, at least the way I see the world, it is increasingly blurry, or at least it’s in the border of what Steve Rayner, the late scholar, called kind of the uncomfortable knowledge.

23:06 I mean, it’s the kind of the information that’s available between boundaries and boundlessness kind of thing. And what do we do with that information is the question. Because ultimately, you’re talking about different mediums trying to mix with one another, perhaps in competition [laugh] or in concert [unintelligible] . So, countries operate that way, too, because these are all complex systems, and we are no longer in the era of just doing a narrow technical fix, even though such problems do exist in engineering. But the kinds of science doesn’t operate in vacuum; it influences everyone, and everyone influences it [laugh] . I think we need to think about this little bit more differently as we enter an era of deeper connection, or hyper-connection.

23:55 And I don’t think we have gotten to that level of reflection that subject deserves. And I’m hoping the 250th anniversary provides us this opportunity to reflect. A good time for us to reflect on many things. I think… I’m going to ask you now, Guru, probably an unfair question. Looking back over the past 250 years, what would you call out, single out, as perhaps the most significant American innovations, when you look at anything from materials and products to engineering successes to processes, what are the most significant or perhaps fundamentally important innovations we’ve made in this nation? Where do I start? I mean, it’s like my colleagues and I often chat about this, and then occasionally I ask a version of this question to some of my audiences as well.

24:41 I mean, one of my team members likes to say that electricity wasn’t invented by attempting to produce better lamps. I mean, where do we begin? I mean, like, Harold Evans has done majestic work on this subject here. I mean, I’ve written about barcodes, ATMs, cell phones, digital cameras, disposable diapers, human factors in the design of automobiles, phones, photocopiers, and, of course, my recent book on flight trainers. I mean, that birthed modern aviation, right? I mean, so I’m constantly looking for inspiration from these divergent and ultimately convergent types of work. But if you want to really look at subject matter type, and of course, we can get into communications, right?

25:27 I mean, telephone, personal computer revolution, internet, World Wide Web, smartphone, GPS, I think they all, as a cluster, have dramatically altered our way of life. Transportation, going back to Wright Brothers, Model T, space exploration, commercial aviation, there’s another group of technologies or systems that have influenced our life importantly. Then you got the material revolution over the past century alone, right? Mass produced steel, even though with significant side effects. It got synthetic materials, fiber optics, composites, semiconductors, and so forth.

26:09 So, there’s another group of technologies here. And of course, my background in biomedical engineering, I’m biased to some of the incredible life-saving technologies: polio vaccine. We saw the portrait of one of the Sabins there outside, anesthesia, MRI, pacemakers. We saw the book by Wilson Greatbatch in our Member Center, drug development process, gene editing, mRNA, I mean, Covid. We basically took care of that pandemic for now with these things. But I think, you know, each of these have incredible value on their own, and when they start to interact, it’s even more profound.

26:49 But perhaps to answer your question, maybe I should focus on the process-level innovation that often gets forgotten because it is kind of the background work that enables this thing. If you look at interchangeable parts, that was pioneered by Eli Whitney, or scientific management, even the structure of modern corporation. The way we look at it, I mean, the modern org chart came from the railroad industry. It hasn’t really changed much, [laugh] still now. And I think good or bad, I think we need to have a debate about that. Quality control systems. And this is something of personal passion for me because I spent a lot of my industry time in clean rooms.

27:33 It originated at Sandia National Labs in the 1960s. It revolutionized how we controlled airborne particles. It was initially met with skepticism, but again, proved revolutionary. And pretty much every cluster of technologies that I talked about has a story like that. It starts with skepticism. It’s dismissed even—fairly, unfairly—and then boom, you see the effects that are more durable here. But of course, can you imagine pharmaceutical manufacturing, semiconductor production, medical devices, nanotech, space tech, all of this without clean room, I mean, production? So, these are all kind of the—all happened, some of them in recent past, some of them were present in different forms and formulations that have led to these major technological breakthroughs here.

28:21 And I think it’s interesting, I mean, there’s an inventor’s view of the world, and then there’s a process view of the world. And we touched a little bit upon the processes, but I think we’re also at a time where the way we recognize the inventors also deserves a little bit of reflection because invariably, one person gets left out, and one person probably gets greater glory than the other, and so forth. But still, they are helpful to point out the essential ingenuity in the work that have led to the [province] that the United States can be very proud of, right? I mean, for example, Samuel Colt. I mean, he just didn’t invent a revolver, but he revolutionized precision manufacturing.

29:02 So, there’s something else going on there. You cannot just pinpoint only do a single factor [laugh] attribution to this thing. And similarly, Isaac Singer, right, he transformed the sewing machine from a curiosity to a practical tool, and see what happened: total business process innovation. And then it was not just an improvement to the mechanics of a machine, but the product and the process itself are revolutionary. Same with the Willis Carrier, for example. He exemplified how American innovation, or the air conditioning, notably, the work that led to—it began as a solution for a printing plant’s humidity problem. So, one has to just carefully track how these things emerge into what they ultimately became same.

29:48 With the Edwin Land and Polaroid, the instant photography. Or let’s even talk about Ray Kroc, fast food preparation, franchise operations. These are all, like, there’s something going on or the past century or two here. You can look at case study after case study if you’re still trying to understand what [went] in the context of these creations. It’s not just about the inventor, but the milieu that they operated in, and the processes that supported—that enabled—the inventions that ultimately became innovations that propelled American economies and the quality of life. And you anticipated my next question. In terms of that cultural, economic, political framework, of that amazing list you gave us, what supported that list from that framework?

30:33 But that’s still a, I assume, a debatable question of what has helped America, from a structural point of view, be so innovative? Yeah, definitely. But let me just add one more point which kind of helps establish maybe my answer here. Bernie Carlson, the historian—he wrote a phenomenal biography of Tesla, and he has written papers on Edison’s working method, and they’re very instructive papers, if you look at them—and shall we call it, I mean, Edison operated at multiple levels at once—so, I mean, call it a principle of multiplicity or something—he was testing out multiple solutions simultaneously, he was systematically documenting things that didn’t work—so failures, failure mode analysis, shall we call it—and then learning from those unsuccessful attempts, and then he would rapidly iterate those designs.

31:25 So, he had multiple things going on. But it was not merely an intuitive understanding of the technical work, but he was also astute in his market awareness, and the manufacturing considerations, and the methodical experimentation that made him what he is, that a century later, we are still trying to understand, but ultimately they all had to be integrated to the business realities here. So Edison, I think, understood that very clearly. You know, former member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he clearly knew that innovation requires kind of the support of the business system.

32:07 Patents require commercial application, and manufacturing capability is crucial. Without it, it was not going to be successful. And market, whether it exists or not, its development matters. So, that’s how he was able to very successfully create complete systems: electric light, power, motion picture production, sound recording, playback. It’s so diverse, but you can see where these broader forces, as you mentioned, the political, legal, economic, and educational forces, come into play here. So, when it comes to what makes the United States special—and again, I think the anniversary allows us to reflect on some of these fundamental forces here—the patent system and intellectual property here, I think that’s essential.

32:57 It incentivizes innovation by protecting inventors rights. In fact, we began our conversation with Abraham Lincoln’s patent, right? I mean, so way back. But again, by people also get very creative with the patent system, and we see some complications, problems in the pharmaceutical patenting. We have this concept of evergreening, where people make very minor modifications, even questionable modification, to a product, to retain their market exclusivity and so forth. So, it kind of presents the dual dimensions of intellectual property protection. Research funding is critical as well. I mean, I think the United States government has been particularly special in supporting fundamental and applied research: NSF, NIH, DARPA, Department of Energy, NASA, so they’re all major supporters of research.

33:42 Antitrust laws, for example, they prevent monopolies, promote competition, and I think there’s an economic variable there that allows companies to be competitive. Importantly, people like me, immigration policies. I mean, we benefited from higher education in this country here, and the country has just historically attracted global talent, right, and high proportion of STEM PhDs and researchers. Many, I think a significant fraction of the members of the National Academies are even foreign born. A significant number of patents filed by immigrant inventors. Economically, I mean, there’s venture capital system, robust private sector investments that support startups, new technologies, free market capitalism.

34:24 And again, a source of controversy here. I mean, I think societally speaking, it has encouraged competition and rewarded successful innovations. A strong banking, loan systems. Financial systems provide capital access, tax incentives for R&D, large domestic market, even, to allow companies to scale their work. And importantly, educational factors like research universities, land grant universities, and the sheer academic freedom to explore new ideas, STEM education, including, importantly, by museums such as AMSE, and Smithsonian, and numerous science museums. They deserve—not just from universities, but other organizations that have an important role in this.

35:10 And how the current system allows for collaboration between academia and the private sector. So, these are some of the forces here, but I think fundamentally—and I’ve thought about this a little bit over the past several years—I think, as the saying goes, “In America, failure isn’t fatal; it’s feedback.” There’s something about this culture that just tolerates failure—acceptable failures that is [laugh] . In many other societies, failure carries lasting stigma. And here constructively, we see this as a learning experience. And I think that just provides such flexibility, whether it is nationally speaking, how many wars we have learned from, or Thomas Edison working in his lab, and other garage inventors doing this, there’s that aspect.

36:00 Risk-taking mentality is, I think, something to admire. I mean, not the reckless ones, but responsible ones, [laugh] I would say. And we don’t socially judge people for failing adventures or attempting new ventures, even. So, I think in addition to, I mean, all the economic, educational and the market forces, these cultural forces enables this nation to work very effectively. And we just touched on it, we just surveyed a whole bunch of things in this. And there are scholars who have written on each of these subjects, but I think this kind of gives the, just, so many countries have tried to directly adapt the models that are working in this country, right?

36:44 I mean, there are ‘innovation hubs,’ as they call it, are Silicon Valley replicas that they’ve tried in Israel, China, London’s Tech City is an example, or Singapore has a Smart Nation Initiative, and of course, my home country, Bangalore, in India. So, a lot of research universities are increasingly modeled after the US system, same with industry-academia partnerships. And again, the emphasis on the full continuum from fundamental research to applications, even though these technologies don’t proceed in a straight line like that. Funding mechanisms, venture support, accelerators, incubators, combinators, whatnot, and then patent system reform. So, a lot of countries have learned from the United States, and therein comes, kind of, the collaboration-competition thing that you brought up earlier.

37:31 Now, where do we go? What else do we have? What is our next gen or what is our next step as American society? Something to think about. But the results are very heavily around the world. Not everyone could just brute-force copy and paste in their context. So there’s, I think the United States is still special in that regard. You think that results from perhaps a critical mass of all those elements you’ve talked about today? And I know you’ve spoken of the ideology of innovation; is that kind of a mindset, a philosophical background to why we’ve been so productive and so innovative over the years? Something about the American mindset, or am I speaking to too broadly and too stereotypically?

38:14 No, just let’s look around here, right? I mean, like, every university has an innovation center—almost every university; every company seems to have an innovation officer; every nation has an innovation strategy. But if you look back a few hundred years, like, 400, 500 years ago, if you look at the journey of innovation, it’s pretty wild. There was a time when there are royal proclamations in the 1500s that outlawed innovation. In fact, you would be arrested for using the word innovation [laugh] . It sounds crazy, almost. I mean, so how did it go from being a crime to a crusade, [laugh] in a way?

38:56 I mean Francis Bacon, I mean, one of the smartest people in science, right, I mean, he routinely dodged the I word, innovation word. I mean, he used other words like advancement, improvement, and he knew that using the word innovation was dangerous. But now we can’t imagine an industrial revolution without innovation that’s profitable, [laugh] where progress is respectable. And the resulting economic revolution is just irresistible [laugh] . It’s almost like in a Silicon Valley, as we like to connote to—at least in the past few decades—it’s like, innovation has become its new religion, we found a new faith [laugh] . In America.

39:36 I think we have turned innovation into a national identity. What’s the trinity in this new faith? You got technology, you got disruption, innovation as a means for salvation. And then the product launches, you see, I mean, how much visibility they get, how many business schools that rely on it. I mean, startups are basically becoming missionary organizations and trying to promulgate this viewpoint. So, it’s interesting. I mean, going back to how it was once outlawed, to now it is becoming personal, even a cultural identity for our countries here. But here’s the uncomfortable truth here: in the name of innovation, what are we leaving out? And that’s something that I’ve been recently interested in writing about here.

40:19 If you look at the twin of innovation—if we can even say it—maintenance, it’s hidden. It’s actually the enabler of innovation. Without it, everything crumbles. So, when I sometimes give talks and ask people what they think is their favorite technology, invariably answers go, AI, iPhone, electricity, railroad, and everything, and I go back to sanitation, which, without it, everything else is irrelevant. None of those things will work [laugh] . Imagine if there’s an outbreak in [laugh] the sewer system. It doesn’t matter whether whatever gizmo you have in your hand. Well, I will tell our listeners that in my recent visit to Rome, I sent Guru a photo of the Cloaca Maxima, right, and we talked about going back to the very beginnings of Rome, the importance of that sewage system.

41:08 Even before the civilizations that influenced the Cloaca Maxima, the Indus Valley. So, my ancestors back home, then Northwest India and present day Pakistan, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and how they would think about sanitation as the primordial, as a preeminent creation, the city planning, like the grid-type planning, agricultural innovations. And how did they get that sensibility in a pre-zero society, when now everything is quantified, has to result in metrics and so forth? So, I wish I could ask my forefathers [laugh] what they were thinking back then. But then we also need to talk about the hidden costs of constantly pursuing newness, novelty, niftiness, and what is the social cost of this perpetual change?

42:01 This kind of takes us into the arena of doing responsible engineering. Does one has to create something new only by disrupting? I mean, in fact, if you look at the origins of the word innovation, it has deeper connections to maintenance. In fact, the word has relation to renewal, restoration, that we now associate with care and maintenance. So, there’s something even in the very etymology [laugh] of the word that could be—and ultimately, what is the human cost of this endless adaptation? We are not asking these questions. In engineering, especially, or even sciences at large, I think we need to be probing more about it as we get to the 250th anniversary.

42:44 I mean, if you consider the more modern innovation race, I mean, I’ve heard people talk about AI as a new atomic bomb. And I’ve heard, I mean, someone compared it, AI is as fundamental as water. You hear all these talks everywhere, and I don’t know whether people are passionate about something or whether they actually believe that is the case, and I think we need to take a very critical look at this because the innovation agenda is not set for us; it is set by us. So, I think we need to really think about this and do a very comprehensive analysis of innovation here because I think with more perspectives, I think we can become better and responsible innovators here.

43:26 Do you think that need for continuing innovation is driven in part—of course, part of it’s based upon needs of society and so forth—but is part of it driven on a fear of getting behind, perhaps to other nations? Or is there a fear that if you stop pushing innovation in certain fields, then you lose the urge, the need to innovate long-term? What is driving that momentum? It’s a profound question. I don’t know. But the one way to understand how societies grow, develop, or even the Indus Valley was a relatively short-lived civilization. I mean, they went out of business, so to speak. And so, one has to really think through this.

44:07 And I’ve, of late, found solace [laugh] in history. Call it even understanding… deep time. Like you know, I think ancient technologies provide us a perspective, and we can see what kinds of work, what kinds of systems have long-lasting value and logic that makes sense to us. How can we better examine these enduring systems here? And I think that kind of may provide some frameworks to formulate our next steps here because what is the point of constantly rushing into new markets and so forth? I think humans have reached beyond their own capabilities to consume technology, and I think this is a very human… this is a very human condition [laugh] that we need to deal with.

44:57 So, we need to do our own failure analysis to understand what has led to this mania, paranoia [laugh] of falling behind and so forth. And I’m getting a little bit abstract here, but it’s a question that gets to the human condition. You think part of it—and tell me, Guru, maybe I’m off base here—but is part of it the fact that much of the fundamental systems that you’re talking about are somewhat invisible to many of us during the normal day, so we almost take them so much for granted. We don’t think necessarily about sanitation, that type of thing unless there’s a problem with it. Is that part of the issue, maybe, part of our job as an educational institution is to shine a light on those parts of our societies that may be taken for granted but undergird the whole process?

45:49 You’re exactly correct. I like to say that maintenance is, in this case, to depict the role of sanitation and care is not sexy, but [vexy] , and those are the ones that have durable value in society. I used to have a Motorola flip phone, that was given to me as part of my phone service, what was it, 20 years ago maybe, and it seems like a geological blip compared to Cloaca Maxima, which is still functioning. And some of these cathedrals built in the Middle Ages, [laugh] still standing. And I think the question now becomes, how do we responsibly appropriate these new technologies to ensure these durable systems of faith, function, practice, have greater value in society, they can inspire us to take us to a different level?

46:45 And while we’re thinking about this, I think we can also take engineering back to its foundations, which, there is a more inclusive view than what it is practiced right now. I mean, we unfortunately still drive out a lot of people from engineering by presenting a specific worldview that may not appeal to a lot of people, and that happens even in sciences. And I’m glad that, you know, museums like AMSE and many others in this country and abroad are taking that on and presenting science and engineering as more intuitive, inquisitive forms of engaging with the world here.

47:28 And you’re right, and I think we need to really think deeply about the system. And I believe that by taking this so-called archeological approach, right, where you dig through these technological layers, and we talked about—I mean, in this case, I mentioned Indus Valley, so I think archeology makes a perfect metaphor, here—you dig through the tech layers and study these systems that are no longer in use or practice, and what they did when they were in practice, and what they led to in terms of what we now practice, and analyze how these patterns have an adaptive behavior. Complexity scientists and evolutionary biologists have done a lot of work in this area, connecting to trends that we see in natural selection, biological evolution, cultural evolution.

48:18 And in parallel, we can also apply those frameworks to technological innovation and how they evolve and how they affect us. Very few people are studying that. I wish more people did that, especially engineers, and I think we would bring some practical perspectives on this subject. So, in a way, I think we need to do this archeological, deep-time [laugh] analysis. How do we do it? I don’t know, personally. I’m trying to teach myself how to do it. Of course, I rely on a lot of literature on this subject. It’s a very different form of work than building, let’s say, a robot, [laugh] or coding the next app that makes my life more efficient and so forth.

48:58 So, there are some opportunities here for us to think through. And we’d like to be part of that discussion going forward. I know, Guru, you’ve been a great friend of ours and an amazing communicator. We’re sitting here in the cathedral of engineering, as you say. We so appreciate your time, your support of what we do, and an amazing tour today of this very special place. Thank you so much, Guru. Thank you, Alan, and it’s, as always, a joy. I’ll just conclude by saying there’s a Zen maxim which says that, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I think there’s something to apply here when it comes to innovation.

49:41 “Before innovation, maintain what works. After innovation, maintain what works.” Very good. With that Zen moment, thank you, sir. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org. Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

50:36 And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests today, and to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of AMSEcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would like to ask that you consider becoming a member of the 117 Society, the newest membership opportunity offered by the American Museum of Science and Energy Foundation. By joining the 117 Society, you will help us continue this podcast and our other innovative programming. You will support the expansion of our vitally important educational outreach, including virtual classes, and you will help ensure that both the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center can continue to provide world-class exhibits to our community and to the world.

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