Celebrating The Benefits Of Innovation

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

DEPARTMENT Celebrating The Benefits Of Innovation (NAPSA)—Technological innovations, and the people whocreate them, can often touch and change people’s lives for the better. Take Charles Goodyear and vulcanized rubber; Ted Turner and the cre- ation of 24-hour cable news; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the guys behind Google; or Dr. Hiromi Shinya who developed a medical tool to remove polyps without surgery. It’s now widely used during colonoscopy, the standard screening for colon cancer, the leading non-smoking related cancer killer in the U.S. Connecting the dots between these visionaries and how their innovations impact the public is not always easy to fathom. Hard to believe that vulcanized rubber runs through up to 50,000 daily tasks. Or that worldwide newsis available literally 24/7 at the touch of a TV switch. Or that an enigmatic tool known as the Markov chain has created the most popular brain tool on the Web. Or that a medical tool developed by a physician and an Olympus engineer, Hiroshi Ichikawa, could help significantly reduce the risk of colon cancer. They pioneered a non-surgical, life-saving procedure common today during the more than 10 million colonoscopies performed in the U.S. each year. To salute innovation, Olympus, a precision technology leader in healthcare and consumerelectronics, is sponsoring a new public radio program about innovation, They Made America: From the Steam Engineto the Search Engine: Two Centuries ofInnovators. Based on the critically acclaimed book with the sametitle by renowned author and editor Harold Evans, Olympus’ support is an extension of its sponsorship of SMEee es T)} 4 A new public radio program cele- brates the contributions of inno- vators who shaped America, from the steam engine to the search engine. Photo above showstire vulcanizing in iron molds. the national PBS series They Made America in November 2004. The one-hour public radio program brings to life the stories of pathfinders, inventors, democratizers, empire builders, the digital age and its communicators— including not only Edison, Ford and Google’s Brin and Page, but less well-known contributors such as Theodore Judah, creator of the trans-continental railroad. Olympus’ sponsorships reflect its ongoing commitment to technological innovation. Over the last 85 years, the company’s many “industry first” technologies in healthcare include: Japan’s first microscope (1920); world’s first gastrocamera (1950); world’s first DNA computer for gene analysis (2002). To learn more, visit the Web site www.olympusamerica.com/ innovations.

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