Woodie C. Flowers In her opening address for Technology Day, MIT President Susan Hockfield lays out MIT’s ambitious agenda for addressing energy and the environment, and for transforming society’s approach to human health and disease. Hockfield describes MIT’s new Energy Research Council, which will attempt “to produce transformational advances” not just in technologies but in policy. Some promising areas of research have already begun: new battery designs that will dramatically improve energy storage; and new types of photovoltaics, which “may make renewable energy cost competitive with fossil fuels without subsidies.” Just as MIT’s Radiation Lab of the 1940s helped launch the electronics revolution, so Hockfield hopes MIT’s efforts to meld life sciences and engineering will bring about a comparable revolution in medicine and health. She describes a “great circle” of research labs forming a “cauldron of...