May 01, 2009

Freeman Dyson to Deliver Marschak Memorial Lecture, May 8

Dyson will address the "Domestication of Biotechnology"

LOS ANGELES -- Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University will present the 2008-2009 Marschak Memorial Lecture from 1-3pm on Friday May 8 in Entrepreneurs Hall, C3.01. His topic will be, "Domestication of Biotechnology." This lecture is cosponsored by the UCLA Department of Chemistry, the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics, the UCLA Biotech Training Program, and the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

Freeman Dyson Bio
Freeman Dyson was born in England in 1923 and came to the United States in 1947. He began his career as a pure mathematician but then switched to applied mathematics, finding problems in many fields where elegant mathematics could be useful. He has published papers in particle physics, condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics, nuclear engineering, biology and astrophysics. He has written many books for the general public, exploring the human side of science and the human consequences of technology. The most recent of these books are, "The Scientist as Rebel'' and "A Many-Colored Glass."

"Fifty years ago in Princeton, I watched the mathematician John von Neumann designing and building the first electronic computer that operated with instructions coded in software. Von Neumann understood that the descendants of his machine would dominate the operations of science and business and government. But he imagined computers always remaining large and expensive. He failed to foresee computers growing small enough and cheap enough to be used by housewives for doing income-tax returns or by kids for doing homework. He failed utterly to foresee the final domestication of computers as toys for three-year-olds. I see a bright future for the biotechnical industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art-form as creative as painting or sculpture."

The Marschak Memorial Lecture is intended to recall the life and work of former UCLA Anderson professor Jacob Marschak. Past presenters of this lecture have included many distinguished economists and scientists in other fields:

1979-80 Tjalling C. Koopmans *
1980-81 Kenneth J. Arrow *
1981-82 Lawrence R. Klein *
1982-83 Herbert Simon *
1983-84 Roy Radner
1984-85 Paul A. Samuelson *
1985-86 James Tobin *
1986-87 Robert M. Solow *
1987-88 Franco Modigliani *
1988-89 Leonid Hurwicz *
1989-90 Allen Newell
1990-91 Murray Gell-Mann *
1991-92 Wassily Leontief *
1992-93 Anatol Rapoport
1993-94 Francis Crick *
1994-95 Gary S. Becker *
1995-96 Harry Markowitz *
1996-97 Marvin Minsky
1997-98 Thomas C. Schelling *
1998-99 James March
1999-00 Edward Feigenbaum
2000-01 E. O. Wilson
2001-02 David Baltimore *
2002-03 Jared Diamond
2003-04 Daniel Kahneman *
2004-05 Gerald Edelman *
2005-06 Daniel L. McFadden *
2006-07 Roald Hoffmann *
2007-08 Vernon Smith *

* indicates Nobel Laureate

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