Sitting in techie heaven
Published: 04 Apr 2006 18:00 BST
Curt Carlson will gladly tell you he's gone to heaven.
Technologist heaven, that is, thanks to his dream job as chief executive of SRI International, a veritable Willy Wonka factory of science and tech R&D.
Once known as Stanford Research Institute for its home at the prestigious university from 1946 to independence in 1970 — SRI is a non-profit organisation that's been instrumental to the development of everyday marvels like the computer mouse, the PC, the mobile phone and high-definition television. In the early 1950s, SRI even crunched the numbers to find the perfect location for Walt Disney's Disneyland in Anaheim, California
Despite the ubiquity of those wonders, SRI is more like a silent partner engineering the future, working with government, industry and its own spin-offs to introduce technology and scientific innovation to the public.
As SRI's visionary for the last seven years, Carlson is as unassumingly brilliant as the company's own brand. A professional violinist by 15 years of age with the Rhode Island Philharmonic where he grew up, Carlson eventually traded one passion for another when he enrolled at Worcester Polytechnic Institute after high school. In 1973, he landed a job at Princeton, New Jersey-based RCA Laboratories, which became part of SRI in 1987 as the Sarnoff Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary. There, he helped found more than 10 companies and pioneered development of HDTV technology that would become the standard in the United States.
CNET News.com spoke recently with the 58-year-old executive at SRI's headquarters in Menlo Park, California Carlson discussed his upcoming book on innovation (to be released by the Crown Publishing Group in June) and the future of science and technology.
Q: It's SRI's 60th anniversary this year, how would you define this era in its history?
A: We are adapting to this exciting age, and we are seeing a world of abundance. We are putting together a family of... programmes that I think would really make a huge impact on the US and the world.
So, for example, we just demonstrated what we call a direct carbon fuel cell. So imagine if you had a device that could burn coal cleanly with about 70 percent efficiency, which is twice what you get if you burn coal today. That's how we are building that system, and it could have a revolutionary impact.
Imagine titanium that's closer to the cost of aluminium than what it is today. We wouldn't build things out of aluminium. We build out of titanium. And we're working at clean water — water in most parts of the world is more valuable than oil. So we're developing advanced technologies for that.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
So we have been developing new technologies that get around the traditional problems of expense and a lot of energy to be able to [desalinate] and create clean water.
In drug discovery, we just formed the new Critical Path Institute with the University of Arizona and the FDA. [This] is the first time anyone has ever gotten a partnership [to develop drugs]... because today it takes about 15 years and $1bn (£600m) to create a new drug, and that model is not tenable. And the goal of this new institute is to reduce that 15-year timeline down to three years. Now that's enormously aggressive, but we can see emerging a family of technologies that could begin to incrementally chip away at how long it takes to develop new drugs.
Which areas are you looking into in drug development?
Well, the purpose of this institute is to look at the entire process in a very comprehensive way. The whole field of bio-informatics, for example, [involves] computing and information technology [to develop drugs]. We are doing an enormous amount of work here. We...
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