Brisbane

Wednesday May 6, 2009
I had a great day today. I spent most of the day at the University of Queensland. UQ has a beautiful campus that is marked by great sandstone buildings and some very modern science buildings. My first meeting was with Dr. Peter Isdale. Dr. Isdale is the CEO of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. Dr. Isdale has been an advocate for recognizing climate change for many years and is an articulate voice for the “risk management” approach to climate change. In other words, taking steps to mitigate climate change are like an insurance premium meant to avoid the massive costs of doing nothing to mitigate climate change.
My second meeting was with Professor Peter Gresshoff. Professor Gresshoff is the director if the ARC Centre of Excellence Integrated Legume Research facility at UQ. He was originally born in Berlin, but has lived in the US as well as Australia. He is doing amazing work in the area of legumes and nitrogen fixation. He is currently experimenting extracting oil from a very large seed of the Pongamia tree. The Pongamia tree captures its own nitrogen and produces a seed that produces an oil that can be used in an efficient bio-fuel. This helps solve the carbon issue as well as the need for large amounts of fertile causing release of nitrogen into the air. Nitrogen is considered a worse greenhouse gas than carbon. Professor Gresshoff took me to a very nice lunch at the St. Lucia golf course.
I spent the balance of the day with Ben Hankamer, finishing our conversations from earlier in the day as well as working on creating a 5 slide standard PowerPoint deck on climate change. I think we are going to try to get some other Eisenhower Fellowships to sign on but ultimately we want any Eisenhower Fellow that wants to use the slide to be able to.
Ben and I met Richard Jefferson for dinner. Richard is the Director of the Initiative of Open Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology. Richard is an American microbiologist who has pioneered “open source” use of patents. He and other members of his collaborative allow access to any patents that they hold and only require in return that they do not assert any patent protection over what the develop. The idea is to encourage collaboration and the exchange of information and to make “good” products the most commercially viable rather than those that merely assert patent protection. We had a lively discussion at dinner and I really enjoyed myself.