George Whitesides's mission is to pick an important problem and then create the science to solve it. Louis Pasteur did it in the 19th century when he chose spoiled milk and helped found the science of microbiology. Whitesides's 21st-century problem is robots. Real-world robots and humans do not get along. A robot doesn't stop slicing, squashing, or slinging things around just because a squishy human gets in its way.
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