Intellectual Ventures Lab

For three years, Nathan has been directing and funding a team here at the Lab dedicated to culinary sciences. Chemists and chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world working on the cutting edge of applying scientific knowledge to the way we prepare food. They are just about to ship the cookbook they’ve created – Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking is a 2400 page tome (in six volumes) on the science of cooking, available to pre-order from Amazon. Check out the 20-page excerpt for a preview. The Lab kitchen has a drill press, a bandsaw, a rotary evaporator, a homogenizer and a pharmaceutical freeze dryer. They cook with liquid nitrogen and most of the rest of the periodic table. They’ve kept our machine shop busy with requests like “can you cut this microwave in half?” to make cross sectional images of cooking processes so cool that kitchenware companies have started sending us their products in hopes that we will cut them in half too.

We’re proud of this team, some of the hardest working people in the lab. Hopefully they can take a good break and then come back to work to help us invent the future of food.

The most important thing we are working on isn’t any particular invention. It is figuring out how to improve invention. What the world needs more than any of our inventions is a better ability to invent. This is what Intellectual Ventures is all about. Last night our founder, Nathan Myhrvold got a chance to explain that in an interview with Charlie Rose.

For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck!   Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see.  Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.

You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.

Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.

Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.

On January 14, 2010, Philip Eckhoff was honored by the Hertz Foundation.  He was nominated for contributions in the field of disease eradication modeling, which he worked on in his spare time while completing his doctorate at Princeton.  The prize is not regularly awarded, but offered only in the midst of noteworthy accomplishment related to applied science and engineering.  Jay Davis, the foundation’s president, presented a certificate of recognition.  Also expressing words of acknowledgment and appreciation were the foundation’s chairman, David Galas,  funder of the epidemiological modeling project, Bill Gates, and Intellectual Ventures CEO, Nathan Myhrvold.

The Hertz Foundation inducts some 15 promising grad students as fellows each year.  Generous thesis funding and support have made the Hertz Fellowship one of the most sought after and prestigious award of its kind.  In 2004, Philip successfully underwent the rigorous application and interview process that would jumpstart his Ph.D. research in Applied and Computational Mathematics.  The foundation also continues to recognize outstanding accomplishments of its alumni, for which was the purpose of this event.

Philip has been hard at work with a team at Intellectual Ventures Lab developing an original computer model that calculates how malaria spreads, as well as how it responds to various methods of suppression. The goal of this ambitious and unprecedented model is not just to understand and control the disease but to stamp it out completely.

Although the software tool can be readily expanded to simulate infectious diseases beyond malaria, enough laboratory and epidemiological data is not available in some cases to create a truly reliable eradication model today. However, our infectious disease model is an exciting step toward providing a tool for both greater understanding and more effective action against these diseases, and hope for a healthier humanity.

We are proud of Philip’s ground breaking work, congratulate him on receiving this high honor and offer him the best of luck in his continued research.