MIT Future Fest launched on Wednesday afternoon, featuring a visit from Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey before an opening panel at Kresge Auditorium.
Both Healey and MIT President Sally Kornbluth emphasized the power of curiosity and innovation during introductory remarks, while formally kicking off MIT Future Fest as a new kind of event that opens MIT's doors to the world.
Spanning five days and featuring talks from leading MIT scholars, panel discussions, open labs, exhibitions, performances, screenings, and much more, MIT Future Fest adds up to a demonstration of campus research, teaching, thinking, and discovery.
"MIT and Massachusetts are known around the world as leaders in innovation," Healey said. "Future Fest is a chance to celebrate that. But it's also a chance to connect with each other. To learn from each other, and to imagine what comes next. In life sciences and biotech, robotics, advanced manufacturing, in energy and climate technology and quantum, and in the people who make it all happen."
In remarks preceding Healey's talk, Kornbluth observed that "in a world as complex and interconnected as ours, we aim to invent the future. We need all the help we can get, and that's why it's so important to have all of you join us over the next five days in exploration, conversation, and curiosity."
Future Fest also underscores that at MIT, as Kornbluth put it, "We feel a drive to explore, to understand, to solve, to invent, to design, all in service of society."
Since its founding, "MIT has long stood at the forefront of innovation and invention," Healey noted. "'The future starts here' isn't just a fitting theme for the next few days. It's something we've been doing for the better part of 250 years in Massachusetts."
Healey later appeared at an event about ocean sciences at the MIT Museum, whose staff have helped develop and organize MIT Future Fest.
All told, MIT Future Fest features over 100 speakers at more than 50 events, among many other activities. The MIT Museum is free to the public during Future Fest; MIT's newly opened Met Warehouse is hosting its first public events on Saturday; and Sunday features the Cambridge Science Carnival, a series of family activities.
The remarks by Healey and Kornbluth were followed by a panel discussion, "The Future Begins Here," featuring participants Noubar Afeyan PhD '87, founder of Flagship Pioneering and co-founder of Moderna; Sangeeta Bhatia SM '93, PhD '97, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and director of MIT's Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine; and Bob Mumgaard PhD '15, CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Massachusetts Economic Development Secretary Eric Paley moderated the wide-ranging discussion, which touched on the cutting-edge Massachusetts innovation ecosystem, the implications of artificial intelligence for research and industry, and more.
The panelists noted that a confluence of ingredients - universities, other research institutions such as hospitals, venture capital, and more - has helped make Massachusetts the world leader in biotechnology and other forms of innovation.
"You can't be here and not feel like things that the rest of the world feel are not possible are possibly possible," Afeyan said. "It's really interesting how the environment makes you feel like you should also do something special." He added that the various ecosystem elements have created a "critical mass" needed to sustain broad-ranging innovation.
"This critical mass accumulated between the academic science, the hospital research, the entrepreneurial companies, large companies moved in, the government stepped in, state level, to try to help this community," Afeyan observed. "It's an inherent advantage of any ecosystem, it's the co-location, it's the connections."
Mumgaard, whose company is building the first fusion power plant in the U.S., concurred that the combination of elements available in the state ecosystem is crucial for advanced innovation.
"In many ways the challenge is simply scale," Mumgaard said. "How do you get enough capital, how do you get enough smart people, how do you get enough people that are hard workers, how do you get the alignment from the institutions that can give you the permissions and tailwinds to be able to go and do that? And we did find that in Massachusetts."
He added: "You could not have really have built this company outside of Massachusetts."
For her part, Bhatia, a leader in developing nanoscale technologies that have made inroads in battling numerous forms of cancer, observed that part of the inspiration for her career came from visiting the MIT campus as a high school-age student.
"It was just that idea that you could engineer things, you could create instruments to improve human health, that started me on my journey," Bhatia said.
As a faculty member, she has helped found eight spinoff companies and helped direct an MIT study about how the Institute - which has already helped generate about 30,000 new companies - can do even more to produce startups and technology transfer. Ultimately, she has concluded, teaching researchers about the tools and skills they need to found companies can help generate even more productive networks of entrepreneurial activity.
"We can be more intentional. We can create communities. … There are all kinds of ways to do more," Bhatia said.
The panel discussion included reflections on AI and forecasts about the future of technology 20 years out, while ending with a reminder from Afeyan that, while the future is hard to forecast, it is at least partially shaped by people working consistently hard in pursuit of their goals.
"We can envision the future a lot better than we can predict it," Afeyan said, when asked to forecast the effects of technology in a couple of decades, near the end of the discussion.
Afeyan concluded: "My parting thought on this would be to say … I think you can either live in the present, do the things you do, and get the future you deserve, or you can envision the future you want, and do everything in service of that."
