Neil Gershenfeld

So Jerry was MIT's president, before that Kennedy's science advisor, grand old man of science.

At the end of his life, he was frustrated by how knowledge was segregated.

And so he wanted to create a department of none of the above, a department for work that didn't fit in departments.

And the Media Lab, in a sense, was a cover story for him to hide a department.

As MIT's president towards the end of his tenure, if he said, I'm going to make a department for things that don't fit in departments, the departments would have screamed.

But everybody was sort of paying attention to Nicholas creating the Media Lab, and Jerry kind of hid in it a department called Media Arts and Sciences.

It's really the department of none of the above.

And Jerry explaining that and Nicholas then confirming it is really why I pivoted and went to MIT, because my students who helped create quantum computing or synthetic life get degrees from Media Arts and Sciences, this department of none of the above.

So that led to coming to MIT with Todd and Joe Paradiso and Mike Hawley.

We started a consortium called Things That Think, and this was around the birth of Internet of Things and RFID.

But then we started doing things like work we can discuss that became the beginnings of quantum computing and cryptography and materials and logic and microfluidics.

And those needed...

much more significant infrastructure and were much longer research arcs.

So with a bigger team of about 20 people, we wrote a proposal to the NSF to assemble one of every tool to make anything of any size, was roughly the proposal.

Yeah.

So usually nanometers, micrometers, millimeters, meters are segregated.

Input and output is segregated.

We wanted to look just very literally at how digital becomes physical and physical becomes digital.

And fortunately, we got NSF on a good day, and they funded this facility of one of almost every tool to make anything.

Mm-hmm.