The UW faculty includes roughly one hundred members of the National Academies, eight MacArthur Foundation award winners, and four Nobel prize winners in the past decade. UW's preeminence in the medical sciences, for example, has given us Medic One, kidney dialysis, the discovery of fetal alcohol syndrome, some of the finest health care in the nation, and flourishing bioengineering and biotechnology industries featuring companies such as Immunex, Ostex, PhysioControl, and Zymogenetics. There has been mind-boggling progress in information technology , which pervades most aspects of our lives and most aspects of our economy. The nation that leads in information technology enjoys enormous competitive advantages. America owns this leadership today, thanks to a complex interplay between government, academia, and industry.
Industry can afford to look ahead only a few years .
The high risk of fundamental research, workforce mobility, difficulty in capitalizing on internal innovations, and shareholder behavior are among the reasons. As a nation, though, we can and must invest for the long term . America's future depends upon our broad-based leadership in certain key sectors, not on the individual success or failure of specific companies. Universities transfer technology in two ways . They transfer ideas, by licensing and by placing concepts in the public domain.