Free Forum with Terrence McNally

(originally aired July 2006) In their earlier POWERSHIFT, the Tofflers coined the word "prosumer" for people who consume what they themselves produce. Think of all the tasks - from ATM deposits to online airline reservations - that we now do for ourselves. In REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH they expand the concept to reveal how many of our activities - parenting, volunteering, blogging, organizing a neighborhood council, etc. - pump free lunch from the non-money economy into the economy that economists track. After both working in manufacturing jobs and unions in their youth, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have gone on to write perhaps the most influential work on the future. Alvin Toffler has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, a faculty member at the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, an editor at Fortune magazine. Books include Future Shock; The Third Wave, and Powershift.

In this podcast, I go solo. Rather than interviewing others, I share with you the best of the work I do to help organizations develop more engaging narratives and tell better stories. Learn why narrative is uniquely powerful as well as the recipe for a good story – whether in a Hollywood screenplay or a one-to-one conversation.

Originally aired: June 2011Pulitzer-prize winning author Ed Humes starts with skepticism, asks tough questions, and ends up delivering good news. Wal-Mart embraced an unprecedented green makeover, leveraging the power of 200 million weekly customers to reduce waste, toxics, and carbon emissions. Neither an act of charity nor an empty greenwash, Wal-Mart's move reflects a simple philosophy: that the most sustainable, clean, energy-efficient, and waste-free company will beat its competitors every time. EDWARD HUMES received the Pulitzer Prize for his journalism and numerous awards for his books. He's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Esquire. His books include Monkey Girl, Mississippi Mud, Garbology, Eco Barons, and Force of Nature.

Originally Aired: November 2013After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as we can from what works? JAY HARMON translates nature's lessons into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically.JAY HARMAN has founded and grown multi-million-dollar research and manufacturing companies that develop, patent, and license innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft to interlocking building bricks, afterburners for aircraft engines, and non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose and other electrolytes. His latest ventures - PAX Scientific, PAX Water Technologies, PAX Mixer, and PAX Streamline - design more efficient industrial equipment including turbines, fans, and pumps. He's the author of THE SHARK'S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation.

Welcome to DISRUPTIVE the podcast from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In this episode of DISRUPTIVE, we will focus on a cancer vaccine and hydrogel drug depots – both being developed by Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member, DAVE MOONEY.Mooney says the human immune system is the most efficient weapon on the planet to fight disease. Cancer, however, resists treatment and cure by evading the immune system. Unlike bacterial cells or viruses, cancer cells belong in the body, but are simply mutated and misplaced.Scientists have been trying to develop vaccines that provoke the immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign and attack them. The approach developed by Mooney’s group, in which they reprogram immune cells from inside the body using implantable biomaterials, appears simpler and more effective than other cancer vaccines currently in clinical trials. In one study, 50% of mice treated with two doses of the vaccine -- mice that would have otherwise died from melanoma within about 25 days -- showed complete tumor regression.On a second front, when it comes to delivering drugs or protein-based therapeutics, doctors often give patients pills or inject the drug into their bloodstream. Both are inefficient methods for delivering effective doses to targeted tissues.Mooney and his team at Wyss are taking a new approach using biocompatible and biodegradable hydrogels. They’ve developed a gel-based sponge that can be molded to any shape, loaded with drugs or stem cells, compressed to a fraction of its size, and delivered via injection. Once inside the body, it pops back to its original shape, gradually releases its payload, and safely degrades.After we explore both of these exciting projects with Mooney, we take a closer look at the process of translation of hydrogel technology into products and therapies with Chris Gemmiti, a business development lead at Wyss. http://wyss.harvard.edu

On November 15, InsightLA, the leading Los Angeles-based Mindfulness Meditation organization, will host LIVING WITH A JOYFUL SPIRIT AND A WISE HEART, a day of deep teachings and timeless wisdom that will feature Trudy Goodman and Jack Cornfield in dialogue via video with a "who's who" of the pioneers of mindfulness meditation in the West - Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are), Ram Dass (Be Here Now), Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance), Joseph Goldstein (Insight Meditatino), and Congressman Tim Ryan (A Mindful Nation). Both Trudy and Jack turn 70 this year. In the course of the conversation, we talk about their personal paths, what each of their guests means to them, and we tell the story of mindfulness in America over the last forty-five years. Trudy Goodman has trained and practiced in two fields for over 25 years: meditation and psychotherapy. She studied developmental psychology with Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan, and for 20 years worked in a full psychotherapy practice. Since 1974, Trudy has devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation and teaching mindfulness. In 2002, Trudy founded InsightLA. Jack Kornfield is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. His books have been translated into 20 languages and sold more than a million copies. They include, A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; Buddha's Little Instruction Book; and A Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology.

Hello, I’m Terrence McNally and you’re listening to DISRUPTIVE the podcast from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The mission of the Wyss is to: Transform healthcare, industry, and the environment by emulating the way nature builds.Our bodies — and all living systems — accomplish tasks far more sophisticated and dynamic than any entity yet designed by humans. By emulating nature's principles for self-organizing and self-regulating, Wyss researchers develop innovative engineering solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing. They focus on technology development and its translation into products and therapies that will have an impact on the world in which we live. So the Wyss is not interested in making incremental improvements to existing materials and devices, but in shifting paradigms. In this episode of DISRUPTIVE, we will focus on: CONFRONTING SEPSIS.Sepsis is a bloodstream infection in which the body's organs become inflamed and susceptible to failure. The leading cause of hospital deaths, sepsis kills at least eight million people worldwide each year. It can be caused by 6 species of fungi and 1400 species of bacteria. Diagnosis takes two to five days, and every hour you wait can increase the risk of death by 5-9%. The treatment challenge grows more complex as the prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria increases while the development of new antibiotics lags. “Even with the best current treatments, sepsis patients are dying in intensive care units at least 30% of the time,” says one of today’s guests, Wyss Senior Staff Scientist Mike Super.A new device developed by a team at Wyss and inspired by the human spleen may radically transform the way we treat sepsis. Their blood-cleansing approach can be administered quickly, even without identifying the infectious agent. In animal studies, treatment with this device reduced the number of targeted pathogens and toxins circulating in the bloodstream by more than 99%. Although we focus here on treatment of sepsis, the same technology could in the future be used for other applications, including removing microbial contaminants from circulating water, food or pharmaceutical products.

Originally Aired October 2010In his new book, WERE YOU BORN ON THE WRONG CONTINENT?, this week's guest, THOMAS GEOGHEGAN, makes a strong case that European social democracies - particularly Germany - have some lessons and models that might make life a lot more livable. Not only that, they could help us keep our jobs. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans have free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. You've heard the arguments for years about how the wussy Europeans can't compete in a global economy. You've heard that so many times, you might believe it. But like so many things, the media repeats endlessly, it's just not true.According to Geoghagen, "Since 2003, it's not China but Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either led the world in export sales or at least been tied for first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into the clutches of our foreign creditors - China foremost among them - Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage, unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or creating a massive trade deficit,or any trade deficit at all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're beating us with one hand tied behind their back."