The melding of technology
Susan Hockfield, past president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), held up an iPhone, pretending to take a photo of the audience. “This is the shape of the 20th century,” she said. ”Where did digital technology come from? It’s the product of the 20th century’s convergence of the physical sciences and engineering.” Hockfield addressed a packed John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Kennedy School of Government Wednesday on the topic “The 21st Century’s Technology Story: The Convergence of Biology with Engineering and the Physical Sciences,” this year’s Edwin L. Godkin Lecture. The 20th century’s convergence, Hockfield said, was accelerated during World War II and the Cold War-era space race with the Soviet Union. “I grew up in the shadow of Sputnik,” she said of the famous 1957 Soviet satellite launch that triggered more U.S. funding of science. Hockfield cited President John F. Kennedy’s unifying and ambitious target of traveling to the moon...