Someone is going to make billions of dollars out of these ideas. But Edelman says he doesn't envision the Institute becoming some gargantuan creation. Its number of resident faculty is capped at 40 to avoid bureaucracy. The faculty tends to be young, and its members selected not so much for what they've done but for their potential to achieve and test bold ideas. Such bold ideas are not often rewarded in government grants, he says, hence the necessity of private support.
Efficiency is the death of poetry.
From Darwin To Antibodies To Minds The road to Edelman's concept of consciousness begins with the 1972 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which he shared with the British researcher Rodney R. Porter. Their research elucidated the structure of antibodies and how these immune system proteins are made by genetic recombination. Some antibodies are attached to certain white blood cells called lymphocytes. When an antigen fits a particular antibody, an immune response is triggered and more identical copies of that lymphocyte are made to combat the invader. However, the immune system works by chance and selection, producing billions of different antibody configurations.