Jeffrey Ashe is building tiny brain implants, which could one day improve the lives of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This groundbreaking work was inspired by one of the worst periods of his life.

In 1997, Ashe spent 10 weeks sitting in the pediatric intensive care unit with his son Andrew, who was born weighing just 2 pounds 3 ounces. As he sat and worried, buzzers and alarms went off every few minutes, further fraying his nerves.

So the engineer, who worked at the time for GE’s aerospace business, decided to do something about it. “I was surprised by all the alarms and buzzers,” says Ashe, now a principal engineer at GE Global Research. “When something was wrong it was generally the nurse coming in to fix the monitor, not to fix the baby.”

That experience moved Ashe to change course and dedicate himself to improving mobile telemetry — the hospital monitoring machines that wirelessly transmit real-time data from the patient back to the nurses’ station.

It was a journey that eventually took him to work on brain implants: specifically, tiny machines called MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems), which are 5 to 10 microns wide — smaller than the width of a human hair — and could improve the lives of people suffering from a range of conditions including Alzheimer’s and obesity.

A prototype of a GE brain probe. Image credit: GE Global Research

Neuroscience is part of the new six-part documentary series “Breakthrough” developed by GE and National Geographic Channel. The series focuses on scientific progress. The third episode, “Decoding the Brain,” details the revolution underway in neuroscience, where advances could help doctors treat everything from post-traumatic stress disorder to severe depression. The episode was directed by Brett Ratner and airs Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET on the Nat Geo Channel.

“We’re building tiny machines using semiconductor processing,” Ashe says. “The main one is a MEMS switch. Even though it is so small, it has movable parts inside of it. We can build things that are very small and very strong so they can withstand stress inside the body.”

Top image: Jeff Ashe in his lab at GE Global Research. Image credit: GE Reports

Ashe’s work and his professional journey also exemplify what CEO Jeff Immelt calls the GE Store — the sharing of ideas across the company. Ashe and his colleagues leverage GE’s semiconductor-manufacturing expertise to make the tiny medical devices.

Being able to tap into GE’s internal know-how has helped Ashe’s team, in collaboration with Brown University, develop new wireless sensing devices that could one day be implanted in the brain to help researchers better understand its circuitry.

Larger devices — similar to a pacemaker and about the size of a stopwatch — already help reduce tremors in patients with Parkinson’s disease. But they last only about two years, Ashe says, while GE’s tiny MEMS sensors would last 10 years. Ashe says it will be at least five years before the sensors are tested in humans.

“If you go to the expense and risk of having implant surgery and the device only lasts for two years, that’s not a great benefit,” Ashe says. “So we’re working on materials and microfabrication of new devices with a goal of having a 10-year lifetime.”

His team is also working on noninvasive, wearable and wireless medical devices. Ashe says those could be used to stimulate peripheral nerves to battle a variety of other diseases, including arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease — conditions that can be helped by activating peripheral nerves or suppressing the body’s electrical signals.

Worldwide, there are over 450 million people living with neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative illnesses like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The costs of caring for a projected 14 million Alzheimer’s patients alone will likely exceed $1 trillion in the U.S. annually by 2050. Ashe’s work could lead to a better understanding of the brain and unlock new discoveries about how to treat neurological disorders such as autism and traumatic brain injury. Such work could even eventually create therapies that would enable paralyzed people to walk again.

As for Ashe’s son Andrew, despite being born premature, he grew up healthy and happy — thanks to the miracle of medicine.

Ashe got his first taste of GE research by visiting his grandfather, who worked for the company as a machinist. Maybe his son will one day become a third generation of Ashes helping to make the world a better place. Says Ashe: “He’s just graduated high school and he’s very interested in mechanical technology.”

In 2011, a group of students at Aalto University in Helsinki grew frustrated that startups in the Finnish capital were having a hard time finding each other. “There was no ecosystem for them and for the people who wanted to work for them,” says Riku Mäkelä, who studies business and engineering at Aalto. “But when they started talking to young entrepreneurs, they realized that this was a Europe-wide problem. They decided to do something about it.”

That thing was Slush, an annual conference where startups can pitch ideas to venture funds and scout for employees. Makela, who now heads the nonprofit that runs the event, says the founders decided to call it Slush to make it stand out. “There are many other conferences that draw visitors because they’re held in warm locations with beaches and palm trees,” he says. “But nobody comes to Helsinki in November when it’s dark, cold and slushy. Our whole point was not to play pretty, but focus on content.”

Thousands of startups, venture capitalists, journalists and visitors have packed Slush, held at Helsinki’s cavernous convention center, today. Image credit: GE Reports

They certainly succeeded. With local offshoots in Tokyo and Beijing, Slush is now one of the world’s largest gathering of tech startups, investors and journalists. This year the sold-out event, which started in Helsinki on Wednesday, will draw more than 1,700 companies. Most of them are technology hatchlings, but giants like GE, Google, Samsung and Nokia are here too. They will be joined by  250 venture capital firms, journalists from publications including Forbes, The Economist, and TechCrunch, as well as 15,000 visitors.

“Slush is doing the important work of bridging the continent’s disparate tech hubs by mashing together an unbeatable mix of  investors and entrepreneurs,” says Forbes managing editor Bruce Upbin, who flew here from New York to interview on stage a number of executives and VCs, including Nokia chairman Risto Silasmaa.

Looking for startups in Helsinki may seem odd, but consider the nation’s tech record. With just 5.4 million people, Finland gave birth to companies ranging from giant Nokia to Rovio Entertainment, which hatched Angry Birds.

Companies at Slush 2015 will also include startups from the Health Innovation Village, a two-year “digital health ecosystem hub” that is quickly taking over an entire floor at GE Healthcare’s Finnish headquarters, located in Helsinki’s “Silicon Vallila” district.

There are currently 26 companies with founders from all over Europe inside the village. They are developing everything from non-invasive brain stimulation devices for treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders like depression (Sooma Oy) to Big Data systems that monitor environmental factors in the office like acoustics and air quality and help customers design the ideal workspace (720 degrees). There’s even an artisanal coffee house in the basement called Warrior Coffee staffed by tattooed baristas serving perfect espressos and piping Nirvana and Joy Division into the seating area.

GE’s Slush booth is the home of several Health Innovation Village startups focusing of software and data analysis in healthcare and other industries. Image credit: GE Reports

TheHealth Innovation Village has also just partnered with StartUp Health, the world’s largest digital health hub based in the U.S.. StartUp Health will establish its first base outside of the U.S. in Helsinki — sharing a floor inside the GE Healthcare building with the village — and host regular programming and community events for entrepreneurs, innovators and people working to transform health care. “We are superexcited to add StartUp Health into our Health Innovation Village open innovation platform,” says GE’s Mikko Kauppinen. “It will empower the entrepreneurs and innovators to transform health care and build a bridge to global markets and investors.”

Steven Krein, co-founder of StartUp Health, talked on Thursday at Slush about the digital future of healthcare and drew and a standing-room-only crowd. Image credit: GE Reports

GE, Google, Samsung and Finland’s Nokia are present at Slush. Tom Hulme, a general partner at Google Ventures said at Slush he was most excited about artificial intelligence and genomics. While speakers like Hulme and Krein attract large audiences, startups get to pitch ideas and demo their products to potential investors. Image credit: GE Reports

This year GE is also one of the sponsors of the conference. “We need large players that can share with young entrepreneurs expertise they never had and also help them find financing,” Mäkelä says. “GE has been a great match.”

GE Ventures, a unit that has invested in everything from precision medicine and non-invasive brain technology to robotics and drone software, is coming to Slush this year as well, and so is geniusLink, another GE outfit, that which helps customers and internal teams with open and collaborative innovation.

Startups and entrepreneurs stay busy at Slush. Image credit: GE Reports

For GE, working with innovators is a two-way street. They get access to experience and GE gets access to new ideas. One Health Innovation Village resident, the startup Injeq, is developing a needle guidance system that could improve the precision and safety of liver biopsies. Injeq’s guidance system uses ultrasound rather than computed tomography (CT), which emits radiation. One day it could work with GE ultrasound machines. Injeq will soon start a clinical study at the Helsinki University Hospital, one of the leading research hospitals in Northern Europe, which has helped GE Healthcare co-develop a number of products.

“The collaboration started with GE as we talked about [how] our technology applied in rheumatological injections and spinal anesthesia, and they came up with this clinical need their customers are facing,” says Kai Kronström, CEO of Injeq.

Despite the business promise of Slush, it’s set up as a not-for-profit. In early October, Mäkelä hosted a party in a downtown Helsinki club for the 1,500 volunteers — mostly students — who will be working the show for free. “We are one big community here,” Mäkelä says. “We are helping each other to build something big.”

GE Reports will be present at Slush for the first time this year. Follow us on Twitter and Periscope @ge_reports for more coverage.

Despite the big names here, Slush still feels pleasantly “underground” and embraces Blade Runner esthetics. Image credit: GE Reports

Technology will enable people to “upgrade” to god-like cyborgs in a century or two. That could be a good thing, as long as the technology is serving us — not the other way around.

Is technology enabling us to become ever-more god-like? And would that be a good thing?

As artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded technologies empower people to become “more than human,” future advances could become as much of an ethical question as a technological one.

Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at Hebrew University, has been grappling with the broader questions around humanity’s development, predicting that we could become god-like cyborgs within a couple hundred years.

Several strains of science are putting humans on the path to “upgrade themselves into gods,” he says: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and AI engineering. “All three paths hold great promises, and equally great threats.”

Harari shares the concern of leading scientific and tech minds — ranging from Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates — that artificial intelligence poses a risk to humanity, saying that stronger global institutions are needed to address such existential threats. “The key is to make technology serve us, instead of us serving technology,” he says in an interview:

You’ve predicted that humans could achieve a sort of divine state through biological manipulation or genetic engineering. ow will that evolution happen?

This isn’t a poetic metaphor or a vague metaphysical claim. It is a concrete prediction. Throughout history, humans have ascribed to gods specific abilities, such as to design and create living beings; to reshape their own bodies; to control the environment and the weather; to read minds and to communicate instantly across space; and to escape death and live indefinitely.

Humans are in the process of acquiring all these abilities and then some. “Business as usual” will bring us there. If humankind simply carries on with its present economic, scientific and political patterns, humans are very likely to be upgraded into gods within a century or two at most. Yet the same technology that may upgrade human to gods, may also make them useless.

So what will this mean for humanity?

The rise of AI, which dispenses with organic components and seeks to create completely non-organic beings, is a particularly important and extremely worrying development.

I don’t think that an AI will annihilate humankind by a nuclear strike, as in some Hollywood science fiction movie. The more likely danger is that AI will make most humans useless. Computer algorithms are catching up with humans in more and more cognitive fields. It is very unlikely that computers will develop anything even close to human consciousness, but to replace humans in the economy, computers don’t need consciousness. They just need intelligence.

Throughout history, the only intelligent entities have been conscious entities. But intelligence is now decoupling from consciousness. We are developing non-conscious algorithms that can play chess, drive vehicle, fight wars and diagnose diseases better than us.

When the economy has to choose between intelligence and consciousness, the economy will choose intelligence. Once self-driving cars and doctor-bots outperform human drivers and doctors, millions of drivers and doctors around the world will lose their jobs, even though self-driving cars and doctor-bots have no consciousness.

Many new kinds of jobs might appear, but that won’t necessarily solve the problem. Humans have basically just two types of skills — physical and cognitive — and if computers outperform us in both, they might outperform us in the new jobs as well.

So what will be the use of humans in such a world? What will we do with billions of economically useless humans? We don’t have any economic model for such a situation. This may well be the greatest economic and political question of the 21st century. 

You’ve suggested that Silicon Valley is developing a sort of “techno-religion,” viewing even death as a technological problem. What role should morality have in such transformational innovations? 

In all likelihood, the new techno-religions will also create new techno-moralities. We already see it happening.

Humans rarely manage to come up with a completely new moral value. The last time this happened was in the 18th century, when the humanist revolution preached the stirring values of human equality, liberty and fraternity. All subsequent conflicts and struggles have been conducted either in the name of the three humanist values, or in the name of even older values — such as obeying God or serving the nation.

But the hacker movement has created the first new value since 1789: freedom of information. We mustn’t confuse freedom of information with the old humanist value of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression was given to humans, and protected their right to think and say what they wished — including their right to keep their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves.

Freedom of information is not given to humans. It is given to information. Moreover, this novel value may impinge on the traditional freedom of expression, by privileging the right of information to circulate freely over the right of humans to own data and to restrict its movement. Given that most humans may also become militarily and economically useless, we may well enter a post-human era, in which information is valued more highly than human beings. Indeed, both biologists and computer scientists increasingly see humans as biochemical algorithms, which should be evaluated strictly according to their data-processing capacities.

We should make technology serve us, instead of us serving technology. For that, we need new and much stronger global political authorities. The new opportunities and threats of the 21st century — from global warming to AI — are all global in nature. If you want to do something serious about them, you must have effective global governance.

Technologies than can enhance our minds and bodies were featured in the second episode of the Breakthrough documentary series, “More than Human,” directed by Paul Giamatti. The six-part series, developed by GE and the National Geographic Channel, airs Sundays at 9pm ET on the NatGeo Channel.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

Yuval Noah Harari is a Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

All views expressed are those of the author.

GE unveiled a new advanced turboprop engine yesterday that produces 10 percent more power than its peers and burns 20 percent less fuel. Its design can extend time between overhauls by as much as 30 percent. Textron Aviation, the company behind such aircraft brands as Beechcraft, Cessna and Bell Helicopter, will use the engine to power a new plane that’s currently in development. “This is by far the biggest win of my 35-year career in aviation,” says Brad Mottier, a vice president of business and general aviation and integrated systems at GE Aviation, who himself is a pilot.

But GE’s turboprop-engine business has even deeper roots. They go to the very beginning of aviation.

Above: On May 22, 1906, Orville and Wilbur Wright received a patent for “new and useful improvements to the flying machine.” Top image: Czech engineers weren’t far behind them. In 1910, Jan Kaspar became the first Czech pilot. He designed his own plane and engine, but later flew in this Bleriot XI. Image credit: GE Reports

GE got into the turboprop business in 2008, when it acquired Walter Aircraft Engines in the Czech Republic. There, Walter is still a household name.

Just like Wilbur and Orville Wright in the United States, Josef Walter, the founder of Walter Engines, built his aviation business from a bike shop. He started out in 1898 by fixing bicycles, but soon started adapting their design and adding a small engine to the frame so his customers wouldn’t have to pedal.

Josef Walter founded Walter Engines in 1898 in Prague, Czech Republic. Image credit: GE Aviation

Orders quickly grew and, in 1902, Walter used his wife’s dowry to buy drills, lathes and other machines for his workshop. It was a smart, if risky, move. Within a decade, Walter had enough business to build a factory on the outskirts of Prague.

An early Walter engine powered this Walter tricycle. The machine is now in the collection of the National Technical Museum in Prague. Image credit: GE Reports

From bicycles and tricycles, Walter expanded into the automobile business. In 1923, two decades after the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, the company moved into the quickly growing aviation industry.

The ad copy reads: Look, a Walter engine. There’s nothing more reliable. Image credit: GE Aviation

Its first engine was a water-cooled BMW design, but Walter soon started building engines designed in-house. The first one was the 60-horsepower, five-valve, air-cooled NZ-60 piston engine. It was certified also in 1923 and went into production the next year. The company made 188 NZ-60 engines in total and they served all over Europe as well as the United States.

Walter’s design duo Novak-Zeithammer – their initials stand for the NZ in the engine’s name – built the NZ-60 engine that started it all. This example is in the collection of the Aviation Museum in Prague. Image credit: GE Reports

A Czech Letov S-218 trainer powered by a Walter NZ-120 engine. Image credit: GE Reports

The company quickly developed a whole line of radial “star engines” that went on to power personal, passenger and acrobatic, as well as military, aircraft.

The next big engine was the nine-valve star engine NZ-120. In 1928, an NZ-120-powered Spartan aircraft flew from Detroit to Key West, just in time for a big airshow in Chicago. At the time, it was the longest flight with an engine of this size and the feat made it onto the front pages of American newspapers.

This NZ-60-powered Avia BH-11C (pictured above) won Copa D’Italia in 1926, one of the most famous aviation races at the time. Image credit: GE Reports

In the 1920s, Czechoslovak State Airlines started using Walter engines. Within a decade, they covered nearly 2 million miles in the carrier’s service.

By the mid-1930s, new Walter designs like Castor and Pollux allowed Czech acrobats to show off their skills in front of 150,000 people attending the first World Aerobatic Championships in Paris in 1934, and also at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The Walter factory on the outskirts of Prague made both automobile and aircraft engines. Image credit: GE Reports

By 1936, the company was producing 18 different engines in Prague. Four other factories in Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia and Poland were making them under a license. The national air forces of 13 countries were using Walter engines, which served in a total of 21 countries.

A row of Walter star engines at Prague’s Aviation Museum. Image credit: GE Reports

Walter’s successful run was interrupted by World War II and the Nazi occupation of what is now the Czech Republic. The Nazis scrapped local products and started building engines for German aircraft like Fieseler 156C Storch and Siebel Si 204D.

This Czech-made Aero Ae-45 aerotaxi was powered by a pair of Walter engines. Image credit: Getty Images

Things didn’t return to normal even after the war. The government nationalized the Walter factory in 1946 and renamed it Motorlet. The company started developing engines for gliders and helicopters; in 1952 it built the first jet engine for the Soviet MiG-15 fighter jet.

In 1952, Walter produced this jet engine for Soviet MiG-15 fighter jets (see below). Image credit: GE Aviation

A vintage Soviet MiG-15. Image credit: Getty Images

That engine was produced under a Soviet license, but Czech engineers quickly developed their own design, called M-701. It powered the L-29 trainer jet, which went on to serve in many countries and can still be seen at air shows today.

The L-29 Dolphin trainers used this Walter jet engine. After America’s Lockeed T-33, the Dolphin was the most popular trainer ever. The Czechs build more than 3,600 of them. Image credit: GE Aviation

An L-29 trainer jet. Image credit: Getty Images

The most recent era of Walter history is tied to the Czech-made L-410 passenger and transport aircraft, for which the company developed the M601 turboprop engine.

In the 1960s, the Soviet airline Aeroflot was shopping for a tough new commuter plane that could service distant landing strips in Siberia as well as in the desert. The airline commissioned the Czechs to build an aircraft and an engine that met their needs.

A GE-powered L-410 on a runway in Nepal. Image credit: GE Aviation

When GE acquired Walter in 2008, the M601 was still its main product. GE redesigned the engines so they could produce as much as 850 horsepower, fly higher and consume less fuel to reach some of the world’s most remote airports, including Lukla at the foot of Mount Everest. They also serve on commuter and business planes as well as crop dusters.

The advanced turboprop announced on Monday is the latest step in Walter’s journey. It’s the first business turboprop engine that GE developed from scratch. Engineers pulled together jet technologies that have logged more than 1 billion flight-hours but have never been used inside a turboprop of this size. They include variable stator vanes, which were originally developed by GE engineer and aviation legend Gerhard Neumann for supersonic flight. The new engine will also include 3D-printed parts, cooled turbine blades and integrated propulsion control that manages both the engine and propeller as a single system to lessen pilot workload.

If Josef Walter were still alive, he would be surprised by what came out of his bike shop, and his wife’s dowry.

Textron Aviation, the world’s largest maker of business propeller planes like Beechcraft Bonanza, Baron and King Air, said today it would use a brand new advanced turboprop engine developed by GE to power its latest single-engine turboprop plane. The engine burns 20 percent less fuel and produces 10 percent more power, compared to engines in its class.

The agreement represents a major coup for GE Aviation. A mainstay in the commercial and military jet engine space, the company entered the turboprop space for business aviation only seven years ago, when Pratt & Whitney Canada dominated the market.

Top: GE pulled together jet technologies that have logged more than 1 billion flight-hours, but have never been used inside a turboprop of this size. Above: The new turboprop engine is the same size as its peers but produces nearly double the overall pressure ratio. Image credit: GE Aviation

The new turboprop engine is the same size as its peers but produces nearly double the overall pressure ratio. It will allow pilots to carry less fuel for the same mission, said Brad Mottier, vice president of business and general aviation and integrated systems at GE Aviation.

“They can fly longer distances with more power while enjoying jet-like operational smoothness in the cockpit,” said Mottier, who himself is a pilot. “That’s because the engine and propeller controls eliminate worries like over-temperature and over-torqueing. These technologies are unprecedented in turboprops, so now Textron Aviation can design a different class of aircraft.”

In 2008, Mottier, who himself is a pilot, launched GE’s Business and General Aviation unit. Image credit: GE Aviation

Textron Aviation, which also owns the Cessna, Hawker and Bell Helicopter brands, redefined business aviation in 1964 with its Beechcraft King Air plane powered by Pratt & Whitney’s PT6 engine. The engine remains the best-selling turboprop on the market today.

But that could change. “Our single engine turboprop will combine the best of both clean-sheet aircraft and new engine designs, “ Christi Tannahill, senior vice president for turboprops and interior design at Textron Aviation, said about the new plane. “By leveraging the newest technologies, we expect our single-engine turboprop to outperform the competition in critical areas ranging from cabin size and acquisition cost to performance capability and fuel savings.”

To develop the new engine, GE pulled together jet technologies that have logged more than 1 billion flight-hours, but have never been used inside a turboprop of this size. GE calls this idea of sharing technologies and knowledge the GE Store.

A rendition of the new engine’s compressor. Image credit: GE Aviation

For example, the engine’s designer drew on a technology called variable stator vanes. It was originally developed by GE engineer and aviation legend Gerhard Neumann for supersonic flight, but now it also serves insight GE’s largest and most efficient gas turbines. The new engine will also include 3D-printed parts, which debuted inside the LEAP jet engine, cooled turbine blades, and integrated propulsion control that manages both the engine and propeller as a single system to lessen pilot workload.

Mottier says that packaged together, the new technologies will improve aircraft performance and can extend time between engine overhauls by more than 30 percent.

The new 1,300 shaft-horsepower (SHP) turboprop will be GE’s first engine designed, tested and manufactured in Europe. GE will open a new “turboprop center of excellence” to make the engine as well as new regional aircraft engines. “We plan to select a location for the new turboprop center of excellence in Europe by the end of the first quarter in 2016,” Mottier said.

GE started building small turboprop engines in 2008, when it acquired Walter Aircraft Engines in the Czech Republic. At the time, Walter produced a small number of simple yet rugged turboprops utilized mostly in Eastern Bloc nations, Russia and parts of Africa.

GE re-designed the engines so they could produce as much as 850 horsepower, fly higher and consume less fuel to reach some of the world’s most remote airports, including Lukla at the foot of Mt. Everest. They also serve on commuter and business planes as well as crop dusters.

When Mottier launched GE’s Business and General Aviation unit in 2008, the group’s annual revenues, driven primarily by the CF34 engines on the Challenger jet, were less than $100 million.

GE’s business aircraft engine portfolio now includes engines for the HondaJet through its joint venture, called GE Honda. GE is also developing the Passport engine for Bombardier’s Global 7000 and Global 8000 aircraft. GE expects revenue from the core business and general aviation unit to top $1 billion in 2020.

But with the Textron Aviation selection, Mottier said GE has secured a platform that is worth “billions” in revenue on its own. “For business and general aviation turboprops, today’s selection is similar in magnitude to the CFM-Pratt & Whitney battle to power commercial narrow-body jets in the late 1960s,” Mottier said. CFM is a 50/50 joint company between GE Aviation and France’s Safran (Snecma).

“Four decades ago the Pratt & Whitney JT8D was the dominant engine in commercial aviation. Then, CFM came to the table with new technologies and a higher bypass ratio engine, and displaced the JT8D,” Mottier said. “Some 28,000 engines later, the rest is history. I think there’s a parallel here when you think about our new advanced turboprop, breaking into a market where Pratt and Whitney Canada has sold more than 41,000 engines over the past 50 years. This is by far the biggest win of my 35-year career in aviation.”

Today GE (NYSE:GE) completed the separation of Synchrony Financial (NYSE: SYF), the largest provider of private label credit cards in the United States[1]. Synchrony Financial has been a part of GE Capital for more than 80 years, helping consumers finance purchases from clothing to jewelry to RVs to furniture …but the time was right for it to become independent. The separation is a very important step in GE’s journey to reduce its financial services footprint and we are proud of and excited for our friends at Synchrony as they become a standalone company. Synchrony is a great business – it is well run, has excellent partner and customer relationships and a strong financial profile.

GE made the decision several years ago to reduce the size of its financial services business and the decision to exit our U.S. consumer finance business (now Synchrony) was a clear choice. Today caps a nearly two year process to split off Synchrony. It is no small task to take 80 years of togetherness – shared systems, shared resources, shared cultures – and make an independent, standalone firm.

In July 2014, we took the major first step and offered 15% of Synchrony to the public in what was one of the year’s largest IPOs. This allowed us to establish Synchrony as a separately traded stock and allowed Synchrony to raise capital to stand on its own. Following the IPO, together we spent the next 12+ months building the infrastructure needed to separate.

Today, we took the last step in the separation by completing an offer to exchange shares of GE common stock for the remaining 85% of shares of Synchrony Financial common stock owned by GE. Under the terms of the exchange offer, shareholders who participated in the exchange, which was oversubscribed, will receive 1.0505 shares of Synchrony common stock for each share of GE common stock accepted in the exchange offer.

The successful conclusion of the exchange offer is great news for both GE and Synchrony. GE will retire more than 671 million shares through the exchange which will reduce our outstanding float by approximately 6.6% — said another way, this is the equivalent of a $20.4 billion GE share buyback. This was an efficient way to return capital to GE while also executing on our strategy to focus on our industrial core and reduce the size of our financial businesses.

This was the largest share exchange ever done –huge size and scale which resulted in a massive step forward in GE’s transformation — and positive news for both GE and Synchrony Financial shareholders.

[1] Based on purchase volume and receivables, The Nilson Report (April 2015, Issue #1067)

Comic books were as popular with kids and teens in the 1950s as Instagram, Snapchat and social media are today. Although many parents couldn’t stand them, the team inside GE’s communications department saw a powerful tool for engaging teenagers and getting them hooked on science during America’s “Sputnik moment.”

“In the public relations field, although were all aware of the adult fear that comic books were producing a crop of juvenile delinquents, we couldn’t escape the conclusion that the medium had attractive possibilities for mass communications,“ said a 1953 story published in General Electric Review, an in-house GE newspaper.

Back then, the GE hired artists like George “Inky” Roussos, who also worked on Batman, to draw its Adventures in Science comics series. The company is now taking their stories for yet another spin.

It partnered with the storytelling app Wattpad and asked its resident writers to create short fiction based on characters and ideas featured in six comics whose title range from titles like Adventures into the Future to Inside the Atom. “The genre of science fiction creates a vast sense of wonder and magic,” says Sam Olstein, director of global digital innovation at GE. “It makes the impossible possible through innovation and scientific advancement.  GE embodies many of those characteristics in our DNA, the magic and wonder of our impact on the world.”

The Wattpad series are live now. “Wattpad layers mobile and social elements on top of traditional storytelling to offer an entertainment experience,” says Aron Levitz, Wattpad’s head of business development. “That is what we do best. With its leadership in pushing the limits of technology, GE can give amazing insights to how tech is evolving and changing our world for the better.”

GE Reports will publish all of the six original comics in full, one per week for the rest of the year, starting with Our Place in Space. You can also find them on issuu.

The gains from the global 3D printing revolution come with tremendous risk of IP theft — if not carefully managed.

The 3D printing industry is expanding at a rapid pace. Global revenue from additive manufacturing, which consists of printing layer upon layer of a material to make an object out of a digital file, is expected to top $21 billion by 2020 — a seven-fold increase from 2013.

The evolution of 3D printing technology provides tremendous opportunities for increased creativity, efficiency, productivity and flexibility. Prototyping has driven the adoption of 3D printing in the manufacturing sector so far, but increasingly, the technology is being used to produce final products, components and high-value functional parts. More than 28 percent of spending on 3D printing went toward final part production in 2013, up from just below 4 percent 10 years earlier, according to consulting firm Wohlers Associates.

From jet engines to chocolate candy to bionic limbs, 3D printing technology is being used in every manufacturing sector by companies of all sizes — and the possibilities are endless. But opportunities do not come without risks. One of the major challenges facing manufacturers in this new environment is how to protect and enforce intellectual property (IP) rights.

Analogous to the problems experienced in the music industry with the onset of digital content-sharing through sites such as Napster, issues related to IP protection in the manufacturing sector will grow as 3D printing proliferates. Advances in 3D technology will simplify the infringement of patents and trademarks by greatly reducing physical and cost barriers. By 2018, 3D printing will likely result in the loss of at least $100 billion per year in intellectual property globally, according to a recent report by Gartner.

As technology continues to evolve, manufacturers will need to determine how to make 3D printing a benefit, not a liability. That starts with rethinking business models and taking a closer look at export markets and countries that house their suppliers. Manufacturers that enjoy a competitive advantage from additive manufacturing will also need to audit their current IP portfolio to determine the adequacy of their current IP protection strategy. To the extent that vulnerabilities are identified, they should consider a number of IP protection tools— including design patents, trademarks, utility patents, copyrights and trade secrets.

Perhaps more importantly, now is the time for the U.S. government and the manufacturing community to come together to ensure that the proper policies and regulations are in place to protect IP rights — while simultaneously harnessing the innovation that 3D printing makes possible.

Here are just some of the key questions that should be explored:

• How should we define infringement in the 3D printing context? Is the unauthorized printing of a patented product for private use actionable, or is the distribution of such product to a third party the actionable offense?
• Should the standards for enforcement and remedies vary depending upon the products involved?
• Are harsher remedies appropriate for the unauthorized printing of medical devices, as opposed to products that have nothing to do with health and safety?

Stakeholders in the public and private sector should explore the answers to these questions and others now to ensure that the benefits of 3D printing are not outweighed by the burdens of IP rights infringement. In the 21^st century,we need a multi-dimensional approach to prevent 3D printing from becoming a tool not just for advanced manufacturing, but for IP rights infringement.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Nicole Y. Lamb-Hale is a Senior Vice President at Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG) where she provides strategic advice to companies as they develop and implement their global business objectives, including the expansion of their exports to, and presence in, international markets. Lamb-Hale also serves as Vice Chair of the National Alliance for Jobs and Innovation. Prior to ASG, she served as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing and Services in the International Trade Administration. Lamb-Hale was previously the Managing Partner of the Detroit office of international law firm, Foley & Lardner LLP, where she specialized in business restructuring in the manufacturing sector.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Early one October morning 30 years ago, GE scientist John Schenck was lying on a makeshift platform inside a GE lab in upstate New York. The itself lab was put together with special non-magnetic nails because surrounding his body was a large magnet, 30,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. Standing at his side were a handful of colleagues and a nurse. They were there to peer inside Schenck’s head and take the first magnetic resonance scan (MRI) of the brain.

Schenck is one of the GE scientists whose work is featured in Breakthrough, the new six-part science TV series developed by GE and National Geographic Channel. The episode, titled Decoding the Brain and directed by Brett Rattner, aired last Sunday.

The 1970s were a revolutionary time for medical imaging. Researchers at GE and elsewhere improved on the X-ray machine and developed the computed tomography (CT) scanner that could produce images of the inside of the body. Other groups were trying to adapt nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for medical imaging, a technology that already used powerful magnets to study the physical and chemical properties of atoms and molecules. But their magnets were not strong enough to image the human body.

At the time, GE imaging pioneer Rowland “Red” Redington (he built the first GE CT scanner) also wanted to explore magnetic resonance and hired Schenck, a bright young medical doctor with a PhD in physics, to help him lead the way. Schenck spent days inside Redington’s lab researching giant magnets and nights and weekends tending to emergency room patients. “This was an exciting time,” Schenck remembers.

Heady Times: John Schenck (standing) and Bill Edelstein at the front opening of the first whole-body 1.5 tesla magnet in 1983.

Schenck’s unique background allowed him to quickly grasp the promise of MRI. Unlike CT and X-ray machines that generate radiation which travels into the body, the strong magnetic field produced by MRI machines tickles water molecules inside body parts and makes them emit a radio signal that travels out of the body. Since every body part contains water, MRIs can recognize the source of the signal, digitize it, and apply algorithms to build an image of the internal organs.

It took Schenck and the team two years to obtain a magnet strong enough to penetrate the human body and achieve useful high-resolution images. The magnet, rated at 1.5 tesla, arrived in Schenck’s lab in the spring of 1982. Since there was very little research about the effects of such strong magnetic field on humans, Schenck turned it on, asked a nurse to monitor his vitals, and went inside it for ten minutes.

The field did Schenck no harm and the team spent that summer building the first MRI prototype using high-strength magnetic field. By October 1982 they were ready to image Schenck’s brain.

Many scientist at the time thought that at 1.5 tesla, signals from deep tissue would be absorbed by the body before they could be detected. “We worried that there would only be a big black hole in the center” of the image, Schenck says. But the first MRI imaging test was a success. “We got to see my whole brain,” Schenck says. “It was kind of exciting.”

The 1.5 tesla magnet has since become the industry standard for MRI. Today, there are some 22,000 1.5 tesla MRI machines working around the world and generating 9,000 medical images every hour, or 80 million scans per year.

Schenck, now 76, still works at his GE lab and works on improving the machine. He’s been scanning his brain every year and looking for changes. Building on new research, he believes that MRI scan could soon help doctors detect and treat depression and other mental disorders. “When we started, we didn’t know whether there would be a future,” he says. “Now there is an MRI machine in every hospital.”

Hello, lamppost, whatcha knowin’? GE and its new energy startup Current set out to answer Paul Simon’s bubbly enquiry recently by installing an intelligent street lamp beside Manhattan’s iconic Flatiron Building.

The lamppost, equipped with a digital screen and speakers that broadcast the voice of a nearby actor, surprised passersby with weather forecasts, comments on their wardrobe and pets, and even provided some with directions to some of the city’s iconic landmarks. The interactions were fun, whimsical and even prompted some otherwise jaded New Yorkers to hug the “smart” talking street lamp.

The street lamps generate and analyze data that could eventually notify city dwellers about open parking spaces, air quality and traffic. Images credit: Current

More importantly, the New York street lamp provided a glimpse into how connected objects will soon help urban dwellers in the U.S. and beyond, particularly in high-density urban areas. GE (and presumably the lamp-huggers) is hoping that New York City, as part of its “Smart City, Equitable City” play for technology and innovation, will begin replacing its existing streetlights with smart LED lamps that will eventually become the nationwide standard.

The future has already arrived in Jacksonville, Fla., and San Diego, Calif., which have repurposed thousands of their LED streetlamps with real-time sensors and microprocessors. Powered by GE’s Predix cloud-based Industrial Internet software platform, the street lamps generate and analyze data that could eventually notify city dwellers about open parking spaces, air quality and traffic. The lamps can even communicate with emergency first responders before they arrive on the scene.

Light fixtures like this GE LED street lamp will be a key component of the “intelligent city.” GE brought this lamp to its Minds + Machines conference in Dubai last month. It has cameras to monitor traffic and parking, and a microphone to detect potential crimes. Image credit: GE Reports

Current also recently partnered with the public safety company SST, to embed its ShotSpotter detecting technology in the LED streetlamps. Once wired, the lights can detect gunfire in real time and alert police patrol cars and 911 operators, pinging smartphones with the precise location of any shooting incident.

In addition to making cities more intelligent, the LED technology is also helping them save energy. In San Diego, where GE has repurposed more than 3,000 city lights to GE LEDs, the city has realized more than $350,000 annually in energy and maintenance costs.

Beyond smart policies, innovation and private-sector collaboration will help solve the world’s resource challenges.

The world’s resource challenges are very much top of my mind as we anticipate the start of the important 2015 United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP21), which will take place in Paris from November 30th through December 11th. At GE, we are deeply committed to helping to address the world’s most pressing resource challenges.

A decade ago, we launched Ecomagination as our business strategy to provide cleaner technology solutions that improve resource efficiency and economics for our customers, and to improve efficiency in our own operations. Our vision was to make a global impact on resource outcomes and economic growth. It has been widely successful. That was in 2005. Today, as we assess the landscape, we recognize that today’s global resource challenges are increasingly complex and interconnected. It is clear that new solutions and approaches are going to be needed to tackle these challenges.

Population increases, the rate and pattern of economic growth, technology innovation and increasing interconnections have created growing pressure on global resources over the last decade. The world’s population has been on the rise. In 2005, the global population level stood at 6.5 billion. Now, a decade later, the world population has reached 7.2 billion. Eight hundred million people have been added in just the last 10 years — and 95 percent of the population growth has occurred in less-developed regions with lower income levels and less access to water, energy and food. The United Nations Population Division believes that the next 15 years will bring more of the same, projecting that global population will grow by another 1.2 billion by 2030.

The world economy has expanded in the last decade. In 2005, world gross domestic product stood at $56.8 trillion (2010 USD). By 2014, the size of the global economy reached $73.8 trillion. That’s an increase of 30 percent. Emerging and developing economies accounted for 70 percent of global economic growth over the last decade. The global economy doesn’t show signs of slowing. By 2030, GE expects the size of the world economy to reach $98.1 trillion. That’s another 33 percent increase, with 60 percent expected to occur in the developing world.

Over the last decade, our global economy and ecosystem have also become increasingly complex and interconnected. The incorporation of information technologies into all aspects of life — even our industrial machines — and the increasing integration of our global economics, along with the tightening linkages between our planet’s natural resources, has created a world that is connected in new and different ways. Data shows that the linkage between materials consumption and income levels has strengthened in the 21st century. Economic and resource challenges have become intertwined too. In this integrated world, rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from power plants in Asia impact all of us; water scarcity in the Middle East affects global oil markets; and the drive for more energy resources in the United States impacts the world when it unleashes new ways to produce oil and gas for everyone.

Global water supplies are strained. About 750 million people around the world lack access to safe drinking water today, and 1.2 billion people live within water-stressed regions. Within the next decade, one-third of the world’s population will live in water-stressed regions. Water is also a basic input to the global economic system and is essential for agricultural and industrial production. Global industrial water demand alone is expected to increase by 250 percent by 2030. Energy, too, is a precious commodity in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Over the last decade, global energy demand rose from 11,400 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) to 13,600 Mtoe. That’s an increase of 20 percent. In the decade ahead, the rising tide of world population and economic output will push energy demand up another 20 percent to 16,300 Mtoe.

Until now, economic growth has translated into greater resource consumption, which has in turn led to greater environmental impact. This must change. The local and global environmental impact of energy and water use is a great concern, and we need to decouple economic growth and environmental impact. The fight against climate change has become a defining feature of our times. Over the last 10 years, global CO₂ emissions from energy production have risen to 29,259 million tons (Mt). On the current trajectory, in the next 15 years, CO₂ emissions are expected to rise another 30 percent to 38,048 Mt. Stemming the rising tide of GHGs will require less carbon-intensive energy technologies and new approaches to energy production and consumption.

These are tough challenges. But, as a 130-year-old technology company, GE has always believed in creating technologies that enable a brighter future for our customers and the world around us. So we are optimistic about the role that innovation can play in confronting these challenges, and we plan to leverage our Ecomagination strategy to accelerate innovation in clean and more efficient solutions for our customers. We will develop solutions that bring together the best of the physical and digital worlds to harness the capabilities of mind and machine in order to increase resource productivity and help the planet do more with less.

We recognize that we only have one part of the solution. Smart policies will be required too; and innovation in today’s world will require collaboration and commitment from those who may have different perspectives and alternative solutions, but a common drive to make the world a better place. That’s why we recently launched strategic partnerships with global leaders to find commercial solutions to some of the world’s toughest resource challenges. We have brought together the best of GE and the best partners to collaboratively create the innovation that will help transform tomorrow. As Ecomagination enters its next decade, we are focused on delivering on the promise to power productivity and achieve progress on an even greater scale.

It’s hard not to be optimistic about the future. We have surveyed the landscape, and we believe that a lot can be achieved by 2020 through continued innovation and collaboration. Here’s what we think can be accomplished by the end of the decade:

• Renewable energy will account for over 50 percent of all new power plant additions
• Natural gas use in centralized and distributed power generation applications will accelerate
• Energy storage costs will be cut in half
• The number of installed smart meters will reach 1 billion
• Industrial water reuse will triple
• Global LED shipments will quadruple
• New coal power plants will achieve 50 percent efficiency
• Global transportation GHG emissions will stabilize
• Fuel cell installations will grow by 400 percent

This is our view. We know that perspectives differ, so we have asked external and internal technology, market and policy experts to give us their view on what can be achieved in each of these areas through the end of the decade. This is the first in a series of articles on the future of energy and the environment that will explore these issues. I look forward to hearing different outlooks and having a robust discussion around these issues which are so vital to our common future.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Debora Frodl is Executive Director of GE Ecomagination.

All views expressed are those of the author.

In 1980, the world collectively shed not a single tear upon hearing that the scourge of smallpox would likely never take another life. A gargantuan global effort had eradicated the disease in the open (though the virus still survives in government labs). Now it looks as if humanity will be able to close the book on polio, another terrible infectious disease that has wreaked havoc throughout history.

One among the many maladies that remain and take a huge yearly human toll is malaria, a preventable and curable disease that nonetheless remains entrenched in 97 countries, where transmission is often rampant. It’s caused by a handful of species of protozoa in the genus Plasmodium, whose complex life cycle makes them hard to control. That cycle involves infecting mosquitos that then bite humans and slip it into their bloodstream. These humans become reservoirs of the parasite, and pass the infection back to uninfected mosquitos that bite the carrier.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 3.3 billion people are at risk of contracting malaria — just under half of the world’s population. In 2013, there were nearly 200 million cases of the disease globally, and it caused around 584,000 deaths. Ninety percent of cases occurred in Africa, where the disease is endemic in large areas.

This blood film for malaria parasite shows healthy and infected blood cells (with dark spots). Image credit: Getty Images

But things are looking up in the fight. The WHO reported that the rate of new cases has fallen by 37 percent and death rates have decreased by 60 percent since 2000, thanks to improvements in prevention, diagnosis, treatment and surveillance. “Based on the progress I’m seeing in the lab and on the ground, I believe we’re now in a position to eradicate malaria — that is, wipe it out completely in every country — within a generation,” Bill Gates wrote late last year. His organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is working toward that goal by boosting its malaria program budget by 30 percent. “This is one of the greatest opportunities the global health world has ever had,” Gates wrote.

But a major hurdle to eliminating the disease resides in one of the peculiarities of malaria infection. Since the single vaccine available confers only partial protection in small children, a person not consistently taking anti-malarial medication must be diagnosed with the disease before being treated. A number of studies have shown that many people who live where malaria is present — up to 60 percent of some sample populations — actually carry the parasite without showing symptoms. These so-called asymptomatic carriers act as disease reservoirs, allowing malaria to circulate.

Fumigation is a basic way to fight the disease. Image credit: Shutterstock

The trouble is that finding the disease in asymptomatic patients requires serious scientific firepower. To get anywhere near finding most hidden cases, trained scientists and technicians need expensive and complicated tools called thermal cyclers, which help them recognize whether Plasmodium’s genetic material is present in a person’s bloodstream.

But that type of talent and hardware isn’t necessarily available close to patients in malaria-endemic regions of Africa, South Asia and Central and South America. As a result, the process often takes days.

But that’s about to change. GE has partnered up with Global Good, itself a collaboration between the Gates Foundation and Intellectual Ventures. The two organizations are developing a new paper-based test called a lateral flow assay (LFA), which uses a patient’s blood sample to detect malaria in asymptomatic carriers. When it’s released, the test will be more powerful than existing LFAs, and similarly affordable and user-friendly. “We’re operating under the idea that if you can find those asymptomatic malaria carriers and treat them, then you could eliminate the disease from a region,” says David Moore, the laboratory manager of membrane and separation technologies at GE’s Global Research Center.

In addition to the still-under-development paper-based test, the partners are also collaborating on an electronic test reader that will be backpack-portable and battery-operated.

Like a pregnancy test from a pharmacy, the malaria LFA is designed to identify proteins made by the parasite that are present in the blood, and provides results within minutes. A positive result is indicated by a color change on the bioactive paper. The clinician or technician performing the test will then further analyze the result by the electronic reader to obtain even more sensitive and accurate results. “Today, existing solutions tackle diagnosis in symptomatic patients, albeit sometimes inadequately, but miss infection in asymptomatic patients, resulting in the cycle of infection continuing,” wrote Matt Misner, a materials scientist and project leader working in Moore’s lab. “We expect that the combination of these technologies will stack up to provide the performance necessary to make a real impact on the way malaria is treated. Additionally, when successful, we plan to adapt this diagnostics platform to target other infectious diseases that persist around the world.”

Says GE’s Moore: “Overall, we’re very pleased with the way things are progressing. So far, the results are promising and we’re encouraged by the data we’re getting back.”

It takes more than an hour to drive from downtown Dubai to Al Maktoum International Airport, the site of the city’s biannual air show. The runways are still surrounded by red desert sand. But like anything in this booming business capital of the United Arab Emirates, there are already plans to transform the airport into a major transportation hub surrounded by gleaming homes, canals, broad roads and cavernous warehouses.

Ambition, like heat and humidity, fills the air in Dubai, where nothing seems too big or too bold. That’s doubly true for aviation, a key link that tethers Dubai and nearby Abu Dhabi to the rest of the world. Two of the world’s fastest-growing airlines, Emirates and Etihad Airways, are based in the UAE, and Qatar Airways, based in Doha, is just a short flight away. They have grown into dominant global players in just a few decades.

The Al Maktoum airport is surrounded by a vast desert. Not for long. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Looking at the expansion through the lens of GE Aviation, another huge industry player, no other place in the world today has a higher concentration of GE jet engines. Their number will keep climbing. GE Aviation and its joint-venture partners hauled more than $17 billion in new business from the Dubai Airshow, which ended last week. That number includes a $16 billion contract with Emirates to maintain, repair and overhaul next-generation jet engines GE is building for Boeing’s 777X aircraft. Emirates has ordered 150 of the twin-engine, wide-body planes, and GE will be the exclusive engine supplier.

The first 777X will enter service at the end of the decade, but the tarmac at Al Maktoum this year had plenty of planes powered by GE tech. Once again, GE invited pilot and aviation photographer Adam Senatori to document the air show. His images were just featured in Wired, which did a special piece on him.

Qatar Airways is one of the region’s fastest growing airlines. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Senatori has been shooting air shows around the world for several years. He says that this year, Dubai organizers “curated a tight portfolio of aircraft and displayed them in a coherent manner.”

“The layout felt spacious,” he says. “I think that’s one of the most defining characteristics of the Dubai show versus Paris and Farnborough. The flight line is roomy compared to the tight confines of the other shows.” Here are some of the best shots from Senatori’s most recent visit.

The heat during the airshow was relentless, but aircraft parked on the tarmac provided ample shelter. Image credit: Adam Senatori

This giant Airbus A380 belongs to Qatar Airways. It’s powered by four GP7200 jet engines with GE technology inside. Image credit: Adam Senatori

GE’s CF34 engine on a Russian jet. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Visitors inspect giant landing gear of a Qatar Airways Airbus A380. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Few other airshow allow visitors to walk right up to the planes. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Qatar Airways brought to Dubai its 25th Boeing 787 Dreamliner. They are all powered by GE’s GEnx engines. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Airshows are not just about business. They are also about flyovers. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Every day, the UAE Air Force’s aerobatic team opened and closed the afternoon flying program. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Etihad Airways brought to Dubai its flagship Airbus A380. Image credit: Adam Senatori

The Etihad plane and its crew wore matching colors. Image credit: Adam Senatori

GE Aviation makes more than just jet engines. The wing trailing edge of this Airbus A350 XWB is made from GE carbon fiber composites. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Sunset through a GEnx engine. Image credit: Adam Senatori

Senatori at work. Image credit: GE Reports

“I get to travel the world shooting amazing machines and make aerial images from helicopters and aircrafts, yet still fly on my own and be home with my family more,” Senatori told Wired. “I may go back someday and continue my career as an airline pilot, right now I’m pretty content as a photographer.”

The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.

Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.

But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.

The latter approach is the focus of biomedical gerontology. Researchers in this field recognize that any direct attack on late-life disease is doomed to become progressively less effective as the causes of those diseases continue to accumulate, so they focus instead on those causes — the “damage” that the body inflicts on itself throughout life in the course of its everyday operation. But they comprise a tiny coterie of scientists — far too few, and with access to far too little funding, to allow progress to occur at anywhere near the maximum rate that the simple technical difficulty of the problem would allow.

I believe that the main reason for this tragic myopia is a phobia about aging that is so ancient and deep-seated that it overpowers the rationality of nearly all of us, even the most intelligent and educated. Aging holds us in a psychological stranglehold, preventing us from even contemplating the idea of its medical conquest. We have been brought up to make our peace with our inevitable decline following middle age. And the last thing that people who have made their peace with a tragic future want to do is reopen the old battle scars.

Thus it is that grown adults find it possible to argue that we should forever continue to let everyone endure the number one cause of human suffering, because the alternative would be — wait for it — that we might need to have fewer babies than we would ideally like, or that dictators might live forever (what proportion of dictators die of aging?), or that life might become boring, or a litany of similarly bewildering inanities. And unfortunately for us — by which I mean, for the whole of humanity — those adults include the overwhelming majority of the people who control enough money (whether their own, their company’s or the taxpayer’s) to make a difference.

When confronted with the moral repugnance of this attitude, some of those who hold it fall back on the case against the mutability of aging. Since the defeat of aging is as impossible as the creation of perpetual motion, they say, it doesn’t matter whether it would be good or bad. The problem is that those same people all too often simultaneously adopt the converse position — that since defeating aging would be a bad idea, it doesn’t matter whether it’s possible. Thereby, they ever so neatly deflect each of the two questions by deciding on the answer to the other. And they do it with a straight face.

So what do experts actually say about the feasibility of bringing aging under medical control? I have for some time been at the optimistic edge of expert opinion on this matter, on the basis of a proposed approach to the problem that most of my colleagues initially found incongruous and are only in recent years coming to appreciate. But even without getting into the debate about what approaches to this challenge are the most promising, one can no longer escape the fact that most biomedical gerontologists now agree that we are approaching a time of sharply accelerated progress in extending healthy lifespan.

Except, of course, by letting that expert opinion go in one ear and out the other. And that, I’m afraid to say, is what most decision-makers are still doing. But those few visionaries who see beyond this — who get the message that a transformation greater than the Industrial Revolution is coming soon — will benefit astronomically when it indeed comes, even when it becomes widely anticipated. Now is the time for companies with that kind of vision to act on it.

The opportunities and challenges presented by innovations in studies of the aging process are featured in the fourth episode of the Breakthrough documentary series, “The Age of Aging,” directed by Ron Howard. The six-part series, developed by GE and the National Geographic Channel, airs Sundays at 9pm ET on the NatGeo Channel.

(Top image: Courtesy of Bob Hall)

Aubrey de Grey is Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of the SENS Research Foundation.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Some 1.3 billion people don’t have access to reliable electricity today. The International Energy Agency’s 2014 World Energy Outlook estimates the world needs to add some 7,200 gigawatts (GW) of power generating capacity by 2040 to meet new demand and replace old plants. Two thirds of that growth will be in non-OECD countries, including places like China.

If you’re looking for a solution, GE is a good place to shop. That’s a point that Steve Bolze, chief executive of GE Power, made to investors last Friday during a presentation at the UBS Industrials and Transportation Conference. 

Top image: GE started testing the first 9HA turbine (pictured above) last year. The 500,000 horsepower machine can generate 600 megawatts when combined with a steam generator, enough to power the equivalent of 600,000 U.S. homes. Image credit: GE Power & Water

GE’s recent acquisition of Alstom’s power and grid business boosted its global installed power generation base to some 1,800 gigawatts (GW). Sure, the world’s largest installed power base is good to have, but Bolze also stressed to investors the importance of the GE Store, the idea that different GE businesses can share the same knowledge and research to quickly build innovative products.

The GE Store makes the whole of GE more competitive than its parts, Bolze said. Take a look at a handful of examples of how the GE Store works.

Taking from the store:

Additive manufacturing:

GE Aviation was the first business to experiment with 3D printing and successfully produced the first commercially viable 3D-printed GE part (see above): a component for the fuel nozzle of the LEAP jet engine. (Aviation engineers even printed parts for an entire model jet engine and then turned it on.)

Now other GE businesses such as GE Healthcare, GE Oil & Gas and GE Power are all experimenting with the technology and looking for ways to incorporate GE Aviation’s insights in its designs.

Aeroderivatives:

There are some 2,100 aeroderivative gas turbines generating electricity around the world. Despite being firmly planted to the ground, these machines have “aero” in their name in recognition of their roots in GE Aviation. They use the compressor, combustor and turbine from the CF6 jet engine to generate power.

Maintenance inspection & intervals:

GE’s Jenbacher engines can consume a wide variety of fuels. Image credit: GE Reports

GE Oil & Gas has a lot of experience running engines that use a variety of different fuels. The engineers and scientists from Bolze’s business have leveraged their knowledge to extend the maintenance intervals for their turbines, allowing them to operate longer between repairs.

Giving to the store:

CMCs:

A model of jet engine blade made from CMCs. Image credit: GE Aviation

GE Power and GE Global Research have been experimenting with a GE-developed super material called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). After a successful run inside a 2-megawatt gas turbine, GE Aviation decided to test parts made from CMCs inside jet engines. Today, CMCs are one of the key technologies inside the LEAP next-generation jet engine developed by CFM International, a joint company between GE and France’s Safran (Snecma). Even though the engine won’t enter service until next year, it’s already the best selling jet engine in GE’s history. CFM has have received more that 7,000 orders and commitments for the LEAP valued at more than $125 billion.

Powering Egypt:

Last December, GE Power reached an $800 million deal with Egypt to provide the country with 46 gas turbines that can generate 2.6 GW. But with the hot summer around the corner, Egypt needed more than just the equipment. They needed someone to bring it online as soon as possible. GE Energy Management, which focuses on power transmission and distribution, helped install 34 turbines in a record 6 months—more than 50 percent faster than what it typically takes.

Talent Transfer:

Scientists at GE Global Research, GE Aviation and GE Power & Water are looking for efficient ways to design cooling holes in turbine blades. Image credit: GE Aviation

The former chief executive of GE’s power generation business, Vic Abate, recently became the head of  GE Global Research (GRC). He’ll draw on his 25 years of experience from GE Power to lead nine global research facilities and team of 50,000 engineers and scientists. The GRC works on the most cutting-edge innovations and technologies within the company, focusing on GE’s long-run needs.

Laser MicroJet Technology:

GE Power uses Laser MicroJet technology to improve the cooling capabilities of their gas turbine parts. The technology shoots a laser beam inside of a hair-thin jet of water, which acts like an optical fiber and guides the laser. GE Aviation has been working to get cost out of their CMC parts, and it just so happens this laser is very good at cutting CMCs. So GE Power lent their laser to Aviation for experimenting.  The results were very positive, and Aviation has placed orders for their own machine. It will make parts for the LEAP jet engine.

When Fiona Ginty was an 11-year-old schoolgirl entering Salerno Secondary School in Salthill, Galway, Ireland, she had to make a tough choice. Many other girls in her class were studying things like cooking and budgeting in home economics. But Ginty’s father encouraged her to take a different road. “My father said, ‘You are doing science!’” Ginty recalls. She happily took his advice.

More than three decades later, the world is poised to reap the benefits of Ginty’s choice. As a principal scientist at GE Global Research, Ginty has been working to advance our understanding of everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.

Ginty’s work will be featured in Sunday’s episode of the six-part documentary series “Breakthrough.” GE and National Geographic Channel jointly developed the series, which highlights scientific discovery and looks at innovations on the verge of breaking out. The series was produced by Hollywood duo Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

The episode, called The Age of Aging, was directed by Howard and looks at scientific advances that could help people live longer, healthier lives. It will air on National Geographic Channel at 9pm ET.

With the number of Americans over 65 set to double between now and 2050 (and the number worldwide set to almost triple), health in old age is a pressing topic Ginty deals with every day. “We are working to gain new insights into cell function and behavior in cancer and other diseases, which will hopefully lead to therapies in the long run,” Ginty says.

Ginty and her team GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., are using the latest disease mapping tools that allow them to get a more complete picture of cancer by visualizing culpable proteins in their cells. They’ve already processed thousands of tumor samples to better understand their behavior. The work could give pharmaceutical companies and biomedical researchers a better understanding of tumors so they can develop new drugs and therapies.

“I liken the process to Google Maps,” Ginty says. “At the 30,000-foot view, you can tell there is a town. But as you zoom in, you can start to see streets, rivers, stores and other finer details. Our technology gives similar information about tumors, such as how the tumor is organized, where the blood supply is and what the pockets of cells are doing.”

Previously, scientists were able to visualize either only a few proteins at a time in a tissue slice or a chaotic jumble of thousands of them. In both instances the process was slow and cumbersome. But the technology in Ginty’s lab allows her to stain, image, wash and re-stain the same tissue sample. As a result, she can get a look at more than 60 proteins undisturbed on a single slice of tissue, and gather tremendous detail on how diseased cells communicate and grow.

Researchers stained this colon cancer tissue sample to highlight a biomarker linked to poor patient outcome. Image credit: GE Global Research

She says that the process that involved thousands of proteins, for example, was like making a complex smoothie in a blender then trying to identify the fruit that went inside. The new methods “allows us to look closely at the contents of the fruit bowl of fruit before it goes into the mixer and see whether there is any spoiled fruit and where,” she says. “With our approach, you can see which types of immune cells are located around the tumor. That’s important information as researchers try to understand how the immune system responds to cancer and develop new immunotherapies.”

Scientists are using the technology to study a variety of cancers including colon, prostate, lung, breast, brain and gastric cancer. They can also use it to investigate Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury.

Says Ginty: “When I was a young child, I wanted to be an inventor, but thought that everything had already been invented. As an adult scientist, I came to see how much work there is left to do.”

Last month, the National Geographic Channel launched a new television series called “Breakthrough,” focusing on scientific discovery. Each of the six episodes follows scientists seeking to solve daunting challenges, from global pandemics to figuring out how the brain works. The series was developed by the channel and GE, and produced by Oscar winners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Howard even directed an episode focused on aging, which airs this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.

GE may be better known for jet engines, power plants and software, but “Breakthrough” is not the company’s first brush with Hollywood. In 1954, it hired actor and future President Ronald Reagan to host a national TV show called “General Electric Theater.”

Over eight seasons, Reagan and Herbert crisscrossed the country to visit more than 130 GE labs and factories. Image credit: Museum on Innovation and Science Schenectady

Like “Breakthrough,” the show aired every Sunday at 9 p.m., on CBS television and radio. Don Herbert, the creator and host of the iconic educational series “Mr. Wizard,” was Reagan’s “progress reporter,” gathering news on GE’s “contributions to progress through research, engineering and manufacturing skill,” according a story published in The Monogram, a GE magazine. The topics tackled by the new series prove that GE’s quest to solve looming global problems hasn’t changed.

Reagan and future First Lady Nancy Reagan opened their “all-electric” house in Pacific Palisades, Calif., to TV cameras while it was still under construction. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Over eight seasons, Reagan and Herbert crisscrossed the country to visit more than 130 GE labs and factories, reporting on everything from jet engine development — the technology was barely a decade old back then — to the future of electricity. Several broadcasts in 1956 even took place inside Reagan’s brand-new “all-electric” hilltop home in Pacific Palisades, California, as part of GE’s “Live Better — Electrically” marketing campaign. The Reagan residence served as the model home “pointing the way to the electrical future.”

“It wouldn’t be same house without the lighting, which is so unique and beautiful … the real thrill comes with sundown when the lights come on,” future First Lady Nancy Reagan told The Monogram.

Critics liked the show, too. The Boston Herald opined that “apparently the people at GE assume that we are not idiots and are interested in some intelligent facts about their company and its work. It won’t start a trend but we thank them anyway.”

Besides Howard and Grazer, “Breakthrough” includes a number of other Hollywood luminaries. Paul Giamatti, Angela Bassett, Peter Berg, Brett Ratner, Akiva Goldsman and Howard each directed an episode. Adrien Brody and Jason Bateman helped with narration.

Reagan inside a GE factory in 1956. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Similarly, Reagan brought a number of stars onto “General Electric Theater,” including Fred Astaire, Lou Costello, James Dean, Joan Fontaine, Ernie Kovacs and others. By 1956 it was the third-most-popular show on American television, reaching over 25 million viewers every week.

“General Electric Theater” and Reagan signed off for the last time in 1962. “We have tried consistently to put on the very best stories available using the best actors and actresses, directors and producers we could find,” Reagan wrote in The Monogram. “We on the ‘Theater’ believe that year in and year out, we have had the highest-quality half hour on television.”

Reagan was a hit on TV and off. Here he’s featured in a hallway at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady