18. January 2007 Helmholtz Head Office
Knowledge guarantees our future
On 18 January 2007 Prof. Dr. Jürgen Mlynek held a celebration speech at the Knowledge Manager of the Year award.
Ladies and gentlemen!
State Secretary Schauerte!
Mr. Blessing!
Mr. Schweinsberg!
When I was asked to hold the celebration speech on the occasion of the Knowledge Manager of the Year award, I did not hesitate to accept the honour.
After all, I am a scientist and knowledge manager myself, perpetually concerned with the acquisition and management of knowledge. I also share the profound conviction that knowledge is the most precious resource we have, more valuable by far than oil or mineral reserves.
Knowledge guarantees our future, our prosperity and our well-being. This is a belief I am sure I share with many of you here today. But what do we actually mean when we talk about knowledge?
A fantastical allegory by Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is a very apt comment on the subject of knowledge. In a story entitled The Library of Babel, the narrator inhabits an immeasurably large library filled with countless books. This is the place where the knowledge of the world is amassed. But that knowledge proves as unattainable as the proverbial needle in the haystack. For the books contain only every possible arrangement of the letters in the alphabet, and it is only through pure chance that phrases of Faust, verses from the Bible and paragraphs of Marx's Capital tumble out of this chaos.
The books are literally all over the place, in no discernible order whatsoever. The inhabitants of this vast library spend their entire lives scrambling through the pages of one book after the other in the vain hope of retrieving rare pearls of wisdom, sentences and chapters that they can understand - but most are just meaningless series of letters.
Is this a picture of the world in which we live, our information society? Are we, as some say, drowning in a flood of information yet starved for knowledge? Do we have an excess of information that does not give us clarity of thought or direction, but only serves to bewilder us and shorten the time we have to focus on our real tasks and thoughts? I do not believe so. But I admit that we live in a world in which it has become more difficult to find our way around.
For some years now there has been a lot of euphemistic talk about a knowledge society, when what is mostly meant is the deluge of information that pours down on us. But information does not equal knowledge. And knowledge per se is of no value. But it has a tremendous potential value, and in many different ways.
The Knowledge Manager of the Year Award, which the Commerzbank and the business magazine impulse are awarding for the fourth time now, distinguishes companies that have recognised this fact and are doing something remarkable about it. (I am very pleased that a forum has been established where such companies can be presented.)
What I want to talk about today is the transformation of information into knowledge and of knowledge into insight, of knowledge into value. This is essentially a question of separating the wheat from the chaff, of recognising hot air for the guff it is, and invariably choosing quality over quantity. And that is the craft, the skill, which allows us to navigate a course through the ocean of knowledge, or the Library of Babel, to new horizons.
As a scientist, these questions have naturally been with me all my life, but they have confronted me with far greater urgency in my capacity as President of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.
The Helmholtz Association, as I am sure you know, is the largest research organisation in Germany, uniting a total of 15 major national research centres.
Our mission is to solve the great and pressing challenges facing humankind, society and industry with scientific expertise and top-level research.
But let me get back to the subject:
All you need to get completely lost is enough information, asserted the Berlin cabaret artiste Horst Evers. An official inspection will reduce a functioning vehicle to a dangerous wreck, and enough medical checks are guaranteed to bring a perfectly healthy person to the brink of serious illness. So should we beware of too much information?
Well, that depends!
On the one hand there is a lot of truth in the popular saying about not being able to see the woods for the trees. But then, scientists do need to focus on details, to dig deeper and accumulate an increasing amount of data in order to gain insight into the workings of nature.
Meticulous care and attention is, however, only one part of scientific research. The other part is the ability to let the mind wander, to look beyond our own horizons to observe and understand phenomena that - at first glance - seem immaterial or purely incidental.
The Scottish biologist Sir Alexander Fleming repeatedly experienced mould destroying his bacteria cultures. But instead of simply throwing away the spoiled samples, he turned his attention to the effect the mould had on the bacteria, which led him to discover penicillin in 1928.
Penicillin became the first effective antibiotic, a discovery that has dramatically increased our life expectancy. Perhaps nobody said it better than Louis Pasteur: "Chance favours the prepared mind."
The art of maintaining an overview while also having ready access to all the details is a skill which managers have honed to perfection:
The ability to maintain a network of contacts and draw on the knowledge of a wide range of specialists and experts gives them a broad perspective. The same holds true for academic world: the Master's student knows the facts; the doctoral student knows where to look them up, and the professor knows someone who knows where to look them up.
But information alone is not yet knowledge, just bits and bytes, chunks of data that we mostly just ignore. It is only when we absorb new information and relate it to what we already know that knowledge is created.
We only feel that we are drowning in information if we cannot process and condense it into knowledge. The ability to filter things and differentiate the essential from the trivial is thus a skill that is deeply anchored in us.
Cognitive psychology has proved exactly that over the past years. We only perceive a tiny fraction of the information we are exposed to, and use an even smaller part of it to make decisions.
An ability that we apply in many areas of our lives is that of filtering and sieving information. By filtering information I do not mean suppressing information that we find uncomfortable, but, consciously or subconsciously, separating the wheat from the chaff.
One definition of knowledge is: knowledge is information that leads to thought or action. And this is just the tiny fraction of information that gets through the filter.
Science is the art of creating knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can be built upon, until another revolution like quantum physics comes along and pulls the rug out from under the tenets that have hitherto been regarded as immutable. The aim of the natural sciences is to discover things about nature, the climate, the earth or the universe. To do this we invent experiments that ask the most precise questions possible.
For this is the art of experimenting: to pose not thousands but a single question about nature. Only then is it possible to get a really clear answer. That is a real recipe for success, which is too often dismissed as reductionism.
Cutting up a problem into a thousand individual parts does have its limits though, as Goethe's Mephistopheles recognised in Faust: "He then has the component parts in hand, but lacks, alas! the spirit's band." Scientists are well aware of this fact, and this is why the genetic scientist and General Secretary of the European Research Council Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker says: "Human beings are more than the sum of their genes."
In the future, according to Winnacker, science will no longer solely be working in such a reductive manner. Systematic approaches are becoming increasingly important in biomedicine, a discipline in which specialists in Information Technology, Molecular Biology and Ecology come together to gain an understanding of living beings from the level of their genetic make-up to their behaviour and the impact they have on the environment. In fact a whole new field of research is being created here: Systems Biology.
But I have not come here to day to bore you with details of scientific theory. "The philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds," to quote the famous physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman.
For although the data generated by an experiment does not deliver a direct answer to a question, we do have to have an idea of what that answer could look like, a model of reality, so to speak, in our minds.
And this is where ingenious scientists have relied on the power of mathematics more than anything. The beauty and persuasion of mathematical models often far surpasses that of measured data.
Galileo Galilei is said to have conducted his famous experiments on the free fall of objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As everyone knows, a feather falls much more slowly than an iron ball. But Galileo countered with his basic law of falling bodies: How long a body takes to fall does not depend on its weight. All bodies will take the same time to fall from a certain height!
His law is correct, but it only applies properly in a vacuum, which it was not possible to create in his day and age. But Galileo presumed, quite correctly, that air resistance is responsible for allowing extremely light and flat objects to fall more slowly than compact, solid objects.
As we see, it is a pretty complicated art: On the one hand, science is about measuring details with the greatest possible precision, and on the other, it is about simply believing what fits into a convincing model. This is the process of how a qualified and often confusing description is transformed into quantifiable, precise knowledge.
Collecting data and building models are two ways that lead to knowledge, and ideally they should come together. This is how Daniel Kehlmann describes the process in his novel Measuring the World. While Gauss was absorbed in the mathematics that allow us to rely on chance and probability, Alexander von Humboldt laboriously travelled the uncharted regions of the world to see nature in all its many splendours.
Mathematics often leads to insights that are far more profound than could possibly be gained from observation and experience alone. But the fun that maths can offer has to be earned the hard way: it is a strict discipline, demanding enormous powers of concentration. And in mathematics success or failure, right or wrong is not a question of subjective perception, but a clear yes or no for all to see.
That is pretty tough, for the ego too! But those who persevere will eventually experience the utter elation of insight and understanding. And mathematics is our most trustworthy guide in orienting ourselves around such a confusing world, providing leads and references that can take us further in our quest.
In 1590, Galileo was certainly not the first person to set up experiments and who tried to understand the results within the context of a certain view of the world. Even our Stone Age predecessors must have tried to comprehend the workings of the world about them. What is edible? What is poisonous? When is lightning dangerous and how can we protect ourselves from it? And what are thunder and lightning anyway? Will a sacrificial goat help appease the forces of nature?
Questions like this are of existential importance, but also quickly led to questions that went beyond basic survival. Human beings are equipped with a natural curiosity and urge to discover things. Perhaps no one put it quite as concisely as Richard Feynman who once said, "Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it."
Brain research shows that understanding something produces a feeling of happiness. Test candidates who put a lot of time and effort into solving a difficult problem are positively euphoric if they manage it; endocrines are secreted in the brain, the same hormones that are released in other moments of pleasure. This is exactly what Archimedes must have experienced when he suddenly understood the principle of buoyancy in the bath one day, causing him to rush out onto the street stark naked exclaiming "Eureka!"
A flash of inspiration makes us happy, and understanding something makes us proud and pleased. All children know this, but only a few manage to take this thrill of discovery on into their adult lives. It would be nice to see that number increase in future.
It was with such hopes in mind that Helmholtz Association got together with the business consulting firm McKinsey, Siemens AG and the Dietmar Hopp Foundation to set up the Tiny Tots Science Corner scheme, an initiative for nursery and pre-school children.
I was intrigued to watch a three-year-old boy carrying out research the other day. This young man was terribly timid at first and clung to his mother - until he discovered the experiments that our Tiny Tots Science team had set up. You mustn't think that we had created a lab with toxic substances and expensive paraphernalia. No, all we had prepared was a bowl of water, some plasticine and a few screws.
This young researcher made a little boat from the plasticine and loaded it until it sank. He did it again and again. Why does a ball of plasticine sink when a plasticine boat doesn't? How many screws can I put inside it until it goes under? The boy was so focused on his experiments that he completely forgot about his mother. It is vital not to interrupt children at this point but give them the time to develop their own questions.
We are very pleased with the Tiny Tots Science Corner initiative. We plan to use it to train nursery teachers all over the country to do simple experiments on nature and technology with their classes. There has been a tremendously positive response to this initiative, and I am truly amazed every time at the intensity with which the children perform these experiments, and just how naturally curious they are. Of course, we also had some expert advice on board, teachers who passionately believe that children should not simply be handed knowledge on a plate, but gather the experiences for themselves. As Montaigne said, "Children are not vessels to be filled, but fires to be lit."
In all 15 research centres of the Helmholtz Association, we invite school classes to conduct real experiments or carry out their own research projects, for example on micro-organisms, in our School Labs. 40,000 school pupils come to us every year and discover just how relevant scientific research is to their daily lives. Talent and bright young minds are the only things we can depend on in Germany, a fact we are particularly aware of as a research organisation. The simple, irrefutable fact is that science is made by people.
The Helmholtz Association is therefore getting increasingly involved in talent management. Our aim is to persuade young people of the huge opportunities a career in science can offer: the opportunity to develop their talents, realise their ideas and do work that will ultimately benefit humankind.
Of course, we also want to support young researchers particularly. At this critical stage in their academic careers, many are subject to a great deal of pressure and insecurity. This applies particularly to young people who have already started a family. It is clear to us that equal rights and opportunities as well as family-friendly working hours are crucial.
We need all kinds of talents in science, not only those who are prepared to live a life of monastic dedication to the cause.
But those in search of solid knowledge also need to be able to determine the point at which their feet are leaving the ground. What is certain, and what is simply an assumption? Where is vision obscured by pre-formed opinions? And can these questions that are of such decisive importance even be tackled with the chosen methods? This attitude of general scepticism is what distinguishes a scientific mind.
Of course that is only the ideal, and reality can work according to quite different rules. There is tremendous pressure to be able to list as many publications as possible. Previous findings are presented as new, and even small, partial successes are feted as magnificent breakthroughs. We clearly have a culture that prefers quantity over quality.
Some people give way to the temptation of announcing successes that they perhaps aspire to in the future, but are certainly a long way from having attained. False claims have unfortunately become part of the research landscape.
Even the strict controls by fellow experts that are designed to prevent precisely that can fail sometimes. Amid the glut of publications, even experts cannot always exercise the necessary caution.
Korean biologist Hwang Woo-Suk shot to fame for his stem cell research, and his alleged success gave hope of a quick recovery to people suffering from paralysis and serious neurological diseases. The lofty heights he was raised to made his fall all the steeper when it was revealed that he did not actually have the results he had claimed.
We have a special responsibility as researchers, precisely because we claim to build on the solid foundations of facts. What can we learn from this? That dishonest people are everywhere? That vanity and pressure to perform are a fatal combination? That is true enough, but we also need to recognise the fact that it is just as important to know what you don't know as to know what you do know. Isidor Isaac Rabi, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that it was his mother who made a scientist out of him. When he came back from school, she would never ask: "Well, what did you learn today?" but what she did want to know was: "Did you ask a good question today?"
That is quite in the spirit of the namesake of our Association, Hermann von Helmholtz, who was one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. He always said: "It is not so important to find answers to unimportant questions as to find the right questions." Those who know what to ask will also know what information is missing and can develop a strategy for finding the right answer.
But Helmholtz also asserted: "Knowledge alone is not the purpose of human existence on earth. Rather it is action, and action alone, that gives mankind a worthy existence." The multifaceted and profound basic researcher Helmholtz was firmly convinced that scientists also have to contribute to the increased prosperity and well-being of humankind.
Great challenges lie before us: One example I would like to give here is that of energy supply. As long as we depend on oil and gas imports from countries like Russia or the United Arab Emirates, we will remain vulnerable. And the consumption of fossil fuels speeds up climate change, a process whose effects we are already beginning to feel, and which could cause drastic upheavals to life on this planet in the next decades.
Energy and climate change are central research fields for the Helmholtz Association. About half of publicly funded energy research in Germany is conducted at our centres. We are endeavouring to acquire the necessary findings to develop new and improved solar cells, and to enhance the effectiveness of wind turbines, something which is getting very close to being applied.
I am sure you have already heard of ITER, the large international experimental reactor project on nuclear fusion, something in which the Helmholtz Association is playing a leading role. Nuclear fusion, a process whereby atoms are not split but fused, would be a safe and practically inexhaustible source of energy. It is - so to speak - solar power of a different kind. But it is an enormous technical and scientific challenge to replicate the process that powers the sun in a controlled manner here on Earth.
I would like to see these great projects pursued with even more determination in the context of a major national energy research initiative.
The increasing life expectancy of our population also poses new challenges. The fact that more and more people are reaching a grand old age is cheering. But only if they also remain healthy. That is the precondition for enabling elderly people to take an active part in shaping society.
That is another challenge we are tackling: cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cardiovascular diseases - all these are illnesses that people become increasingly prone to in old age.
By investigating how cells communicate and regulate their metabolism, we can also understand how these processes can go wrong. That in turn enables us to find means of prevention and cure.
Innovations like these, whether they are in the field of health or energy technology, whether they are new materials or outstanding methods of calculation, cost money. But they also generate a lot of money as the markets of the future. Investing in science is highly worthwhile. Especially for a high-wage country like Germany, whose only real attraction as a business location now is its high-tech status. "The more expensive we are, the better we have to be," as our Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel once put it.
In the business of innovation, knowledge becomes a product; intellectual property that has to be paid for. The patent system is very well developed in all industrialised countries, and international agreements secure binding rights across national borders.
Anything that has been published in a science journal is there to be read and used by all. This has repeatedly complicated cooperation between science and industry, for while scientists are naturally judged by their colleagues on the basis of what they have published, companies have a natural interest in protecting the research findings they finance. This is an area in which we have to build bridges, and recognise that patents, too, are evidence of intellectual productivity.
The concept of intellectual property is a first step in this direction: sharing knowledge. Those applying for a patent are obliged to expose and explain their inventions and prove that there is something novel about them. It is a great challenge for the patent offices around the world to maintain an overview and systematically classify the mass of technical innovations they are inundated with, and create an order in which innovations and ideas can be easily located and compared.
I am coming to a close now and would like to go back to the question I posed at the beginning:
Do we really live in the Library of Babel, in a jumble of true, incorrect and senseless information? It is a fascinating image, but it is false.
Over several thousands of years of scientific and cultural history, humankind has found many instruments with which to navigate across the ocean of information. Our star charts and measuring instruments, from the compass to the sextant to today's GPS, enable us to orient ourselves and head towards new shores. No other animal is as capable of passing on knowledge and teaching others and exchanging experiences in such an efficient way as we are.
We have set up schools and universities to give children and young people access to what we know with the purpose of enabling them to use it to advance our society, our culture. Knowledge can only proliferate and grow if it is shared.
And many people are prepared to do this, as projects such as Wikipedia show. Wikipedia is an example of the "wisdom of the crowds". In their spare time, tens of thousands of voluntary contributors and editors have together created a free encyclopaedia that grows according to demand and is surprisingly good.
Knowledge is our most precious resource. Knowledge guarantees our future. And that is the reason behind the award that is about to be presented. Shrewdly applied knowledge management makes companies fit for the future and motivates personnel to share knowledge and find better solutions together.
Many small, knowledge-based companies such as spin-offs from research organisations have to assert themselves on a market that is not yet truly able to judge the potential of knowledge. We scientists should cooperate more closely on tackling this problem in collaboration with industry and find solutions together.
And we are well on our way to doing so: The government's High-Tech Strategy is a new concept to promote future-oriented research fields.
The Excellence Initiative has brought fresh momentum to the university landscape, inspiring universities to link up with research organisations and pool and augment their strengths.
With the Lisbon Goal, the government has also set itself very the ambitious aim of increasing its research and development expenditure from the present 2.5 percent to 3 percent of the gross domestic product by 2010.
We are, therefore, moving in the right direction, and new ways - as an Iberian saying goes - are only created by actually going them. Knowledge is the only resource that increases through use.
We should be thankful for the fact that we do not have to mine oil or diamonds, but simply the talents of our young people and new ideas. Investing in this inexhaustible resource is to secure our future. We should assert this more loudly and more often and make it our guideline for action.
Thank you for listening.
