Saturday, May 17, 2008
Charlie Rose - Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India
Isaac Berzin
Isaac Berzin recently signed a $92 million contract to grow the stuff most people scrape out of their fish tanks. His improbably valuable crop is algae, which may one day provide us with a way out of our dependency on fossil fuels and the climatological mess they're making.
Berzin, 40, a chemical engineer, knew a few things about algae: they double their mass in a few hours, produce 30 times as much oil per acre as sunflowers do and thrive in sewage or brackish water. Most important, they devour carbon dioxide, the primary culprit in global warming. Grow the stuff like a crop, and you could use it both to produce biofuel and to pull a key greenhouse gas out of the sky. In 2001, Berzin founded GreenFuel Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., to do just that. By 2007 he had algae growing at the Redhawk power plant near Phoenix, with pipes from the smokestacks running into his greenhouses, where the algae gobbled up the CO2. He is now working with a national lab to make jet fuel from his green slime.
Berzin is one of thousands of innovators reinventing the $6 trillion energy business. In Israel, where he was educated and raised, biblical metaphors come naturally to mind. Berzin points out that God first appeared to Moses as a bush that was burned but not consumed. "What can you burn without consuming it?" Berzin asks. "Renewable fuels."
Krupp is president of the New York City-based Environmental Defense Fund
Susan Solomon
All scientists like to believe they will leave the world better than they found it. Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surely will. Having helped save the earth's atmosphere already, she is now playing a role in doing it again.
An atmospheric chemist, Solomon, 52, was one of the first to be stirred into action by reports in the 1980s of deterioration of the planet's ozone layer. In 1986 and '87, she led expeditions to Antarctica, working through the darkness of the polar winter and bringing back confirmation that there was indeed a growing ozone hole and that chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing it. Those conclusions helped lead to a global ban on CFCs.
Last year she tackled an even bigger job. As a co-chair with Dr. Qin Dahe of Working Group 1 of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she played a key role in producing the report that has helped the world understand the severity of global warming. Certainly Solomon was not alone. Three working groups drafted the report, and when the IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, it was an acknowledgment of the work of many. Still, it's hard to overlook Solomon among the many, both for what she has achieved in the past and for the achievements sure to come.
Pachauri is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Michael Griffin
Mike Griffin, 58, had wanted to be administrator of NASA since the inception of the agency. To him, the appeal of the job was never about position or title but about the fact that space fired his imagination. It still does, and now, thanks to him, manned exploration of the moon and Mars is becoming a real possibility.
With advanced degrees in half a dozen fields and experience managing military and civilian space programs, he was the ideal choice when President George W. Bush needed a new NASA administrator to manage the moon-Mars initiative he announced in 2004. Mike made it immediately clear that he would do things differently. With four simple words—"Just call me Mike"—he began restructuring NASA into the kind of openly communicative and inspired organization it once was. A true engineer in the broadest sense, he understands systems—whether they are rockets, satellites, airplanes or the U.S. Congress. Not only can he quote you the history of a technical concept, but he can also derive the theory for you.
NASA is dead serious about having footprints back on the moon by 2020, and even now the metal is being cut on the new ships that will fly those missions. Mike Griffin—a true rocket scientist—is precisely the kind of person who will see that the job gets done.
Ivins is an astronaut and a veteran of five space-shuttle missions
Shinya Yamanaka & James Thomson
Few people doubt that embryonic stem cells may offer extraordinary opportunities to treat or prevent disease, but few deny either that the politics surrounding the idea has often seemed as complex as the science. All that may have changed last year with the announcement that it was possible to give adult human cells many of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells, avoiding entirely the issue of whether embryos would be destroyed in the process. The new cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, are expected to live for a very long time while retaining the ability to form all of the different tissues found in a human body.
Shinya Yamanaka, 45, working in Japan's Kyoto University with mouse cells, made the iPS breakthrough. He screened 24 candidate proteins before finding four that were able to reprogram adult cells, reverting them to their embryonic state. He and others then showed that these factors are also effective in human cells. Developmental biologist James Thomson, 49, of the University of Wisconsin was the first to identify a slightly different group of factors that do the same.
One day iPS cells may be used to replace cells damaged or lost in disease, but much remains to be learned before such therapy would be appropriate. As a step along the way, iPS cells from patients with an inherited disease will offer opportunities to study illnesses such as als and Parkinson's and psychological ailments, as scientists program the cells back to their embryonic state and watch them mature in the lab. In the process, they may pinpoint the breakdowns that lead to the disease. The precise mechanism that led to Yamanaka's and Thomson's achievement last year is not yet understood, but the potential of that achievement is; it is a potential that could be unlimited.
Wilmut cloned the first mammal—a sheep he named Dolly—using stem cells
Wendy Kopp
It's hard to know exactly what Wendy Kopp was expecting back in 1989 when she came up with a big idea for her senior year thesis at Princeton University. It's safe to assume, however, that she didn't expect her professor to call her "quite evidently deranged," which he did. Kopp, to her credit, chose not to listen. That turned out to be a very good thing for millions of kids.
The wild idea Kopp, now 40, had was to launch a U.S. national teaching corps, similar to President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, that would recruit young teachers straight out of college and sign them up for a two-year hitch working in some of the country's more disadvantaged schools. Since income too often determines where you live, and where you live too often determines whether you'll go to a failing school or a good school, Kopp saw more than a simple problem of educational inequity at work. She saw what she considered the most important civil rights issue of her generation.
In 1990, Kopp, then 23, raised $2.5 million to get her teaching corps started. From that beginning came Teach for America, a nationwide organization that today boasts more than 5,000 member teachers, who work in communities all over the country and reach 440,000 kids. Some 12,000 veterans of Teach for America have continued their teaching careers, often providing leadership for troubled schools in their own communities. A 2005 study showed that 75% of school principals consider Teach for America teachers more effective than other teachers, and a 2004 study showed Teach for America students do better than other kids in math. Deranged or not, Kopp's idea is working—and as a result, more kids are learning.
