Abstract: The title does not concern the various crises in the world. The question is rather what fundamental materials research has to offer in pushing technologies and in meeting future societal needs. A key issue is energy efficiency which, in general, must seek solutions for the saving, storage and transformation of energy. This requires the right materials, in particular, of carbon materials. Their applications are nearly omnipresent, from thermal insulation and mechanical reinforcement to mobility. The synthetic expertise of the chemist is in high demand, and with the right carbon materials in hand – black or not – the future is bright. Biography: Klaus Müllen joined the Max Planck Society in 1989 as one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. His PhD degree was granted by the University of Basel in 1972. He received his habilitation in 1977 at ETH, Zürich. In 1979 he became a Professor at the University of Cologne, and in 1983 at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University, Mainz. He owns about 60 patents, published over 1700 papers and has a h-index of 125.

An international team of researchers at OIST and University of Otago have used the Nobel-winning cryo-electron microscopy method to reconstruct the structure of Seneca Valley virus, abbreviated SVV, at near-atomic resolution. The structure shows how the virus binds to its cellular receptor, the Anthrax toxin receptor. Type 1 of this receptor is selectively expressed in up to 60% of human cancer cells and allows the virus to infect and destroy them while not affecting healthy cells. The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, reveals how the virus can recognize its target and leave normal tissue alone.  

A tour of a 3D rendering and atomic model of the Ebola virus nucleocapsid core based upon the cryo-EM reconstruction created by the OIST team.      

OIST Presidential Lecture Series "Science, Biology and the World's Future" by Dr. Bruce Alberts Friday, October 12, 2018 Abstract: There are many exciting challenges ahead for biologists. The chemistry of living organisms is so complicated that new scientific breakthroughs will be required to understand it. These understandings are certain to generate powerful new approaches for meeting human needs in health, agriculture, and the environment -- with model organisms like Drosophila continuing to provide essential shortcuts for deciphering the biology of humans and other multicellular organisms. In addition, to make sense of the complexity will require powerful mechanisms of analysis not yet invented. As one example, even when scientists have determined each of the hundreds of different molecular interactions that create the actin cytoskeletal system, and know the three-dimensional structures and rate constants for the formation and disassembly of each of its possible sub-complexes, the challenge of computing the outcomes will remain. In the same sense, most of the interesting properties of cells and organisms are “emergent properties”, resulting from a large network of interactions that have non-intuitive outcomes. Most broadly, the knowledge and the problem-solving skills of scientists are critical for every nation – no matter how rich or poor. Thus, for example, science has produced a deep understanding of the natural world that often enables an accurate prediction of the consequences of current actions on the future. In addition, every society needs the values of science: honesty, generosity, and an insistence on evidence while respecting all ideas and opinions regardless of their source of origin. To spread such values, science education needs to be redefined at all levels, with much less emphasis on the memorization of science facts and terms. Instead, we should be providing empowering experiences in problem-solving that take advantage of the curiosity that children bring to school and increase a student’s understanding of the world. Closely related changes in the introductory science courses in college, emphasizing “science as a way of knowing,” are the key to driving these reforms. Biography A prominent biochemist with a strong commitment to the improvement of science and mathematics education, Bruce Alberts, was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in 2014 and the 2016 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. Dr. Alberts served as Editor-in-Chief of Science (2009-2013) and as one of the first three United States Science Envoys (2009-2011). He is now the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, to which he returned after serving two six-year terms as the president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). During his tenure at the NAS, Alberts was instrumental in developing the landmark National Science Education Standards that have been implemented in school systems nationwide. The type of “science as inquiry” teaching we need, says Alberts, emphasizes “logical, hands-on problem solving, and it insists on having evidence for claims that can be confirmed by others. It requires work in cooperative groups, where those with different types of talents can discover them – developing self confidence and an ability to communicate effectively with others.” Alberts is also noted as one of the original authors of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, a preeminent textbook in the field soon to be in its sixth edition. For the period 2000 to 2009, he served as the co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, a new organization in Amsterdam governed by the presidents of 15 national academies of sciences and established to provide scientific advice to the world. Committed in his international work to the promotion of the “creativity, openness and tolerance that are inherent to science,” Alberts believes that “scientists all around the world must now band together to help create more rational, scientifically-based societies that find dogmatism intolerable.” Widely recognized for his work in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology, Alberts has earned many honors and awards, including 16 honorary degrees. He currently serves on the advisory boards of more than 25 non-profit institutions, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series "Origami - Mathematics, Science and Technology" by Prof. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan 2018/10/08 Origami, the exquisite craft of folding paper into three-dimensional shapes, has been practiced for millennia by artists and lay people. Prof. Mahadevan will discuss some physical aspects of rigid and soft origami associated with the weak and strong deformations of thin sheets of any material. The efficient packing properties of folded matter suggest that it ought to occur naturally in physical and biological systems, and he will show that they do indeed appear on a range of scales, e.g. in drying gels, wings, leaves and even your gut as a self-organized pattern. These physical manifestations of origami suggest the question of how to design the number, location and orientation of folds to create complex shapes. Prof. Mahadevan will finish his talk with a description of attempts to solve this inverse problem, and its generalizations. 【Prof. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan】 Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University Professor of Physics and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University L. Mahadevan FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and then received an M.S from the University of Texas at Austin, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1995. He started his independent career on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. In 2000, he was elected the Inaugural Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a professorial fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, the first Indian to be appointed professor to the Faculty of Mathematics there. He has been at Harvard since 2003. His work centers around using mathematics to understand the organization of matter in space and time, i.e. how it is shaped and how it flows, particularly at the scale observable by the unaided senses. Prof. Mahadevan’s work has been recognized by awards that include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2006-07),the MacArthur Foundation (2009-14), and the Radcliffe Institute (2014-15), and visiting professorships at Oxford, École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Berkeley and MIT.

Using a combination of femtosecond spectroscopy with electron microscopy techniques, the flow of electrons on femtosecond timescales was tracked. First, an ultrafast laser beam was used to excite the electron sample. Following this, another ultrafast laser beam was shone upon the sample to track the evolution of the excited electrons. The combination of the two methods has allowed the scientists to record this movie where electrons can be seen being directed to flow in opposite directions.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series "Towards Image-Based Systems Biology" by Dr. Eugene W. Meyers September 25, 2018 ABSTRACT Our group has been actively pursuing the idea that with great microscopes and great computer science we will be able to build digital models or atlases of the individual cells of a small organism, such as a worm or fly embryo, operating through time.  Moreover, microscope observations of glowing, fluorescently-labelled molecules within each cell will give us information about the molecular state of every cell in the atlas so that we can begin to investigate how they are coordinating their activity within the subject organism.  We believe that the resulting ability to inspect these atlases from any vantage point in space and time, and as a cellular system, will lead to many discoveries about the nature of the genetic control of the development and functioning of an organism. Achieving the technological goal will require advances in microscopy, advances in computer vision and image analysis, and last, but not least, advances in systems for curating the data.  Our group is striving to make advances in all three facets, and we will present our progress to date.  With a series of examples, we will make the following points: 1.    The need for a curation system that allows a human user to fix mistakes in the output of the computer analysis is essential, and such a system must be leveraged, allowing the correction of several mistakes with a single clue, and have attentional focusing, bringing the eye of the user to the locations in the model that potentially need fixing. 2.    Better imagery, especially deep into tissues, will only be obtained with microscopes that (a) employ powerful signal processing, (b) can automatically adjust the microscope components controlling the image capture (e.g. focus), and (c) can effectively shape the excitation beams and camera image with adaptive-optics mirrors whose shape can be adjusted dynamically under computer control.  We have recently had considerable success with deep neural nets and a self-adjusting light-sheet microscope. 3.    An emerging trend is to make microscopes “smart”, in that they have an on-board artificial intelligence (AI) that analyzes images while they are being acquired and based on the analyses, makes decisions about what part of an object to image and how to image it in the next time period.  There are many interesting design possibilities in this sphere, a few of which we will present. SHORT BIOGRAPHY In 2012 Gene Myers joined a growing group of computational biologists in Dresden as the founding director of a new Systems Biology Center that is being built as part of an extension of the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). His group focuses on engineering specialized light microscopes for cell biology and analyzing the imagery produces by such microscopes. Previously Gene had been a group leader at the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) since its inception in 2005. Gene came to the JFRC from UC Berkeley where he was on the faculty of Computer Science from 2003 to 2005. From 1998 to 2002 he was the Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996. Prior to that Gene was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 17 years and he received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1981. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms for problems in computational molecular biology, image analysis of bioimages, and light microscopy with a focus on building models of the cell and cellular systems from imaging data. He is best known for the development of  BLAST -- the most widely used tool in bioinformatics, and for the paired-end whole genome shotgun sequencing protocol and the assembler he developed at Celera that delivered the fly, human, and mouse genomes in a three year period. He has also written many seminal papers on the theory of sequence comparison. He was awarded the IEEE 3rd Millenium Achievement Award in 2000, the Newcomb Cleveland Best Paper in Science award in 2001, and the ACM Kanellakis Prize in 2002. He was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004 he won the International Max- Planck Research Prize and in 2005 was selected as one of two distinguished alumni (with David Haussler) at his alma-mater, the University of Colorado. In 2006 Gene was inducted into Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science and awarded an honorary doctorate at ETH, Zurich.

Red microbeads indicate the flow of food particles into the digestive tract of the tunicate Ciona intestinalis Type A.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #2 "Animal Beauty: Function and Evolution of Biological Aesthetics" by Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard July 30, 2018 Where do we come from?  What is the point of beauty in nature?  How do we arise from a single cell?  These questions and more will be addressed by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a pioneer who together with Eric Wieschaus identified the genetic basis for the development of the fruit fly.  For this fundamental discovery she was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, jointly with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard helped decipher the logic of the genes required to control early embryonic development.  Based on her research, a plethora of transcription control genes was discovered and found to be conserved throughout evolution.  In her talk she will discuss the basic mechanisms needed to establish a distinct pattern of cells during embryogenesis.  She will also talk about the point of beauty in nature as well as why animals have patterns, a subject on which she has been writing a book.  Her research laid the conceptual foundation for our understanding of organ formation and regeneration using the developmental control genes. From 1985 until 2014 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was a director at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology at Tübingen, Germany. As Emerita, she is still leading a research group at the Institute focusing on pattern formation, growth and cell migration in the zebrafish, a new vertebrate model organism. For the discovery of genes that control development in animals and humans, and the demonstration of morphogen gradients in the fly embryo, she received a number of awards and honours, among others the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (New York/USA) in 1991 and the 1995 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. She was secretary general of EMBO until 2009 and a member of many scientific councils (National Ethics Council of Germany, European Research Council). Since 2013 she is chancellor of the German Order Pour le mérite. In order to support women with children in science she founded the Christiane-Nüsslein-Volhard-Stiftung in 2004.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #1 "The Dark Side of the Universe" by Hitoshi Murayama 2018/07/04 As a first of OIST Presidential Lecture Series, Dr. Hitoshi Murayama, Director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the University of Tokyo, talks about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are considered to make up 95% of the Universe. Dark Matter is a part of the reason why we exist. There is plenty of evidence that dark matter exists in our own galaxy, other galaxies, and in clusters of galaxies. On the other hand, Dark Energy is speeding up the expansion of the Universe, and it may even lead the Universe to become infinitely fast and come to an end. Dr. Murayama discusses what researchers are doing, and trying to understand what these are. Dr. Murayama received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Tokyo in 1991, held research positions at Tohoku University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and has been on faculty at University of California, Berkeley since 1995. Currently he is a senior staff member at LBNL and MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007, he has also been the founding director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He received the 2002 Yukawa Commemoration Prize and the 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Science Council of Japan. Nature’s deep puzzles - from eccentric particles to dark matter to why our universe is expanding faster - are what he strives to solve.

High speed video showing experimental impacts on three textured granular surfaces.