Baroness Susan Greenfield, PhD, Professor, Oxford University;
Director, Royal Institution of Great Britain; Member, House of Lords

Delivered on March 10, 2006, Palm Springs, California

Lecture Co-Organized by the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Click here to view the lecture on video

"It struck me that we have here a whole group of innovative people here who might be able to assist in solving some of the problems of the developing world with something they are very good at – innovation and problem-solving." -- Baroness Susan Greenfield

Each year, BioAgenda asks prominent leaders in the life sciences or major thinkers to issue a "BioAgenda Challenge", a brief statement challenging a specific community (medical education, Congress, academia, the media) to reform an issue near and dear to the speaker.

Last year, geneticist and physician Lee Hood issued a challenge to medical education to reform how doctors are trained to better integrate genomics and what he calls "systems biology" - how organisms behave as a whole. Also last year, William Haseltine, cancer researcher and former CEO of Human Genome Sciences, issued a challenge to the biotech industry to improve how drugs are developed to lessen the cost and shorten the time it rakes to develop new drugs. He offered several concrete solutions. Haseltine's comments were later developed into an article for Fortune Magazine, an article commissioned by BioAgenda Council of Journalists member Peter Petre, Senior Editor-at-Large for Fortune. (This is one of the reasons BioAgenda exists - to create these connections.)

This year, BioAgenda asked Baroness Susan Greenfield to issue a challenge to BioAgenda and to the world scientific community to help her and colleagues at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (which she heads) to create a "Science Corps" of scientists who would devote a year to working on scientific challenges in the developing world - a sort of Peace Corps for scientists. For more info on Science Corps and for a downloadable video of Baroness Greenfield's presentation, go to: www.sciencecorps.info.

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