【对话诺奖】李文平校长携学子共赴诺奖创新论坛： 以智慧对话世界，以创新引领未来

Lawrence

马斯金院士

Lawrence: Many people say that tomorrow is a mystery, and I find it pretty hard to see future trends. Therefore, I am pretty curious about, in your opinion, what industry would be the most promising investment in the next few years. And how can students like us be well prepared for those opportunities? Thank you.

Prof. Maskin: I think the most fulfilling life, is one where you, do one thing, do what you like the most. So rather than trying to predict which industry will develop the most rapidly, it will be the most investment and the best investment opportunity. I would ask you to think about what you are interested in. What ideas? And, when you answer those questions, I think you'll have a pretty good idea of what direction you want to go with. Remember that the most successful entrepreneurs. They weren't necessarily the ones who anticipated what everyone else wanted. They were people who had their ideas about what they wanted. The develop that they developed those ideas, and then it turned out that the rest of the world was interested in those ideas, too. So I will emphasize your ideas. What? And regarding the ideas you would like to develop, do not worry so much about predicting which industry will succeed more than others. That is a very good question.

Belle

麦克米伦院士

Belle: On the topic of innovation, what inspired you to propose photoredox as a solution to catalysis when everyone else is using traditional metal catalysts? In addition; what do you think makes a good research topic?

Sir MacMillan: So for the redox, why did we start doing photoredox when everyone else was using Metal catalysts? Well, I think one of the things which is helpful when you assign if you want to do some things which are different，sometimes you want to be a little bit rebellious, sometimes you want to just do things which are different than what everyone else is doing. Because you're just the first one in that direction: you're curious to see if you do something different, is it going to be interesting. But sometimes you do that because you really start to think that there has to be other ways of tackling a certain problem or academic point of interest. If everyone else is doing research in one direction, sometimes it is just fun to go in a completely different direction just to find out what is really going to happen. In our case, with photoredox, everyone thought we were crazy at the beginning. Everyone thought this was a crazy idea and it would never work and no one would hear. And in fact, for about 4 years, people basically ignored this or people thought it was a terrible idea. And that's four years of people basically laughing at us. But after about four years, people started to realize there were some value in what we were doing, and they started finding more and more knowledge from it. And then, we started to make new reactions and innovate. People started to see that effectively, photoredox allowed us to perform reactions even faster. Then, all the pharmaceutical companies started to realize they could use these reactions to people to make molecules that they just couldn’t make before, and you could make them very quickly, and then everyone in academia and chemistry, a lot of people started to develop their own idea using photoredox. Finally, people in industry started to use it. And in fact, if you go to China now, there are so many pharmaceutical companies who are using photoredox on a daily basis and they really develop wonderful ways of being able to build new molecules with many new medicines using it. Sometimes at the beginning it's really difficult, because people don't believe you or they think that you're crazy and if you hear enough you have to just keep pushing through and then slowly, but surely, once everyone starts to see all the great advantages the world starts to change to your direction, and the things you care about, especially if those value are associated with the good of the world. So it's not easy. It takes a strong determination. You have to be really focused. But at the end of the day, it's really worth it and ultimately, everyone benefits from it. So that's why it's really important something to go into a new direction.

Farah

聚德霍夫院士

Farah: It's really nice to meet you. So I've read through some of your research and found that they challenge some conventional views in our science. So when facing skepticism during the process of undermining preexisting knowledge, how should we differentiate between being persistent, your idea, or being overly stubborn that prevents people from realizing the mistakes.

Prof. Südhof: I guess I'm the stubborn side. That's a very difficult question. I think we're all experienced arguments with others, not about science, but about other things. Sometimes we are off, really off. I've been wrong so many times. So being able to actually see when one's opinion or one’s conclusions on this subject is true is really important. But at the same time, they very often the prevent you about a subject in a society for example the scientific community about a given question are also off, and the pressure of people to accept those views is tremendously. So how do you manage to decide when you should be obstinate and when you're off, that is i think a really good question and I don't have a solution to that question. I struggle with it every time because I always ask myself if I have opinion that's different from those of others, whether or not I’m alone. Because you know, it happens all the time. What do I try to do to evaluate that, i think it's really important to be aware of one’s emotions. There are bad emotions when you can feel strongly about something. It’s a good thing because without emotions, we are so less and we don't really have a life. But we should also be careful that when we are very emotional about something, that it might be off. So let me give you an example out of my own personal life, okay? When I start science, I cloned a protein that was incredibly interesting. I spent effort on this solution and trying to understanding this. And so I became emotional attached to a protein, can you imagine? I named the protein I studied the enthalpy- At some point, I had to admit that the protein model was very abundant and looked beautiful, was probably not useful or right. Admitting this was a difficult process, and so I wish I had admitted that earlier. It would have saved me a lot of time. So I think we have to really learn from the case is, we have to be aware of this dissonance because if we always accept whatever everybody says, we are just becoming part of the trend, running in the same direction。However，if we always say no, we could end up really stupid because very often what everybody says is actually true. So the balance between the two is really important for any scientists. And I actually think of that for any human, because we face this in our daily lives all the time.