It's my job to, first of all, welcome you on behalf of Bruce Alberts, the President of the Academy of Sciences, Ken Shine, the President of the Institute of Medicine, and myself and, second, to talk about the Academies' role in the emerging challenges that you’ve been talking about this morning. I’ve been in this job for two years, and I’ve come to realize that I should not make the presumption that everybody knows about the Academies, so let me say a word or two about that to get started. I find the easiest way to do this is somewhat historically.

In the sixteenth century, almost simultaneously in several countries in Europe, there developed a set of Academies of Science. Initially those academies were much more like professional societies They were a mechanism for allowing people who were doing science–and these were all wealthy gentlemen who had the time to spare because nobody got paid for doing science in those days–to get together and communicate with each other. In fact the first "scientific journal" was published in 1565 by the Royal Society in London.

Over the intervening centuries those academies were transformed. There were no longer professional societies. They became honorific societies. You cannot join the Royal Society in London–you have to be nominated and elected by the existing membership. It’s a very high honor to be a member of one of those Academies of Science or Academies of Engineering.

In the middle of the nineteenth century in the U. S.– the U. S. always has been very jealous of our friends on the other side of the pond–some American scientists decided that we ought to have an Academy of Science as well. They decided to incorporate what we would now call a 501-c3 Not-for-Profit Corporation in the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia had no city government until fairly recent times. The U. S. Congress governed the city. The process of establishing a corporation in the District of Columbia involved getting a charter from Congress and that was done.

There are apocryphal stories about how this happened. In the process of getting that charter, some additional nonstandard language was inserted. That nonstandard language basically said that the Academy of Sciences would provide advice to the federal government on any issue of science and technology whenever asked and do so without compensation. I think "without compensation" has been interpreted to mean not-for-profit. In any case, it's led to a situation in which the academy structure, the academy complex, as we now call it, has two roles.

It is in fact a collection of honorific societies. We had an Academy of Sciences until 1964, when the Academy of Engineering was organized, under the same congressional charter, as a sister institution. In 1970 the Institute of Medicine was organized as a third such honorific society. Don't ask why it’s called the institute–think of it as three honorific academies.

So we have a dual role. There are these three honorific societies, and we provide advice to the federal government whenever asked on any issue of science and technology and do it without profit. By the way, there’s a fourth organization within the academy complex called the National Research Council. That is the operating arm of the three honorific societies. It is the primary entity through which we respond to the government when the government asks us a question.

There are about 2000 members of the National Academy of Sciences, about 2000 members of the Academy of Engineering and about 1200 members of the Institute of Medicine. At any given time there are about 6000 to 10,000 volunteers engaged in responding to questions that have been posed to us by the federal government. They’re organized into somewhere between 400 and 500 committees. Every year we produce about 200 to 250 reports in response to those questions, which means we produce a report about every working day. We have about 1100 permanent employees supporting those volunteers. So it’s a fairly sizable operation. We advise the government on a wide range of issues, everything from national cryptographic policy, to what used to be called "daily recommended allowances of vitamins and minerals" in your food, to the shape and size of cages for laboratory animals. We just did one on the medical uses of marijuana.

Let me get to the point of this workshop. As should be clear from the discussion you’ve just had, the world that we’re about to enter is a world that’s very different from the world that we’ve prepared for in the Cold War. During the Cold War we knew who all the players were. We knew what the rules were. Today, the dramatic reduction in the cost of, for example, a cyber attack, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the blurring distinction between states and terrorists groups all make it extremely more difficult to know what the rules are or who the players are. Indeed you may not even know you’re under attack. If the power grid fails in the West Coast, and the 911 is jammed in Atlanta, and a bank is having something else happen in Chicago, there may not be any single individual who even knows that those things are going on, much less have any way of determining whether they are a single concerted attack or just simultaneous attacks.

The most challenging of the problems arises because there are not just technical issues. There are mixtures of technical issues with people issues, with social issues, with policy issues. Whether you’re talking about global economic interdependencies, or the cost and priority of fixing aging infrastructures, or chemical or biological threats–they all have both technical and policy components. Furthermore, all this is happening in a context in which technology is changing extremely rapidly, so I think there’s great urgency.

Our national leaders are beginning to come to grope with these issues, but the issues are very complicated and very different from the past. We don’t have the legal structure to deal with some of these issues. There is a blurring between law enforcement and national security and yet the law strictly divides what our military can do from what our law enforcement agencies can do. We’ve got issues of how we manage some of these threats without destroying the openness in our society or violating the privacy of our citizens. I don’t know how many of you have been involved in the discussions about cryptographic policy but that’s one of the fundamental points of dispute.

The academies provide independent balance and authoritative advice to the federal government. These are almost always on policy related issues with a strong technical component. For example, Presidential Directive 62 and 63 were written in response to the report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. The directives called for the Academy complex to construct a roundtable on the subject. Now, roundtable is a term of art in the academy context. It’s a standing committee that consists of industry, university, and government people. Normally we exclude government people from situations where we would be giving advice, since we don’t want the government giving advice to itself. We don't want the government putting the imprimatur of the Academy on advice, so roundtables don’t provide advice to the government.

They do provide a forum in which the issues can be discussed, in which the various perspectives can be brought into play and where we can decide we need to spin out a study on a specific issue. So when Pace VanDevender and Eric Bloch came to see me about co-hosting this conference I jumped at the chance. It seems to me that this is a wonderful first step in what is going to be a long journey, and I have the sense it’s a long journey that we must move out smartly on. Today, the technology of attack is far outpacing the technology of defense. That technology is moving at the speed of Moore’s Law, doubling every 18 months. So I think this is an extremely important meeting. I’m just delighted that we could co-host it. I’ll look forward to hearing what the breakout sessions have to say, and see if we can’t progress collectively to make some real progress on this issue. Thank you

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