“once and for all,” but transient, serving for a brief time and then losing their potency or their market.

For this reason among others, according to Dr. Marburger, innovation was not a zero-sum game, and the United States had no need to fear that it would lose anything by working with other countries to develop their innovative capacity. The geography of the global economy was such that different innovations were required for the unique conditions of each separate region—something that, while true even within a given country, was especially true among countries. “We should be particularly eager to work with India, which is the world’s largest democracy and increasingly important to our own innovation economy, to magnify our mutual capacity to address our respective problems,” he said.

Focusing specifically on the man he was introducing, Dr. Marburger said he had been struck, during their brief interactions of the previous year, by the combination of talents that Kapil Sibal had brought to the position of minister of science and technology. “At every international conference I go to, I see his face and hear his booming voice, and I usually hear something that I didn’t expect to hear—some insight that greatly impressed me,” he said, adding: “It doesn’t take too many Sibals to make a dynamic country.”

First elected to Parliament in 1998, Kapil Sibal served as the official spokesperson of his party, the Indian National Congress, during the 1999 and 2004 parliamentary elections. A former cochairman of the Indo–U.S. Parliamentary Forum, he assumed the post of minister of science, technology, and ocean development in January 2006. “Candid and forthright in his political views, Sibal has often publicly criticized the Congress Party for some of its policies,” said Dr. Marburger, quoting material provided by the Indian Embassy. The president’s science advisor then offered a comment of his own: “That’s brave. It’s impressive. It tells us something about India, and it gives us pause in this country regarding our own systems.”

Born in 1948, Minister Sibal is well known in India for pleading cases before its Supreme Court. He came to the limelight in 1993, when in the capacity of attorney he addressed Parliament’s Lower House, the Lok Sabha, for three consecutive days during the historic impeachment of a sitting justice of the Supreme Court, the first such proceeding against a member of India’s superior judiciary. He holds a Master of Arts degree from St. Stephen’s College of Delhi University and a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School. He joined the bar in 1972, has served as additional solicitor general of India, and was thrice elected president of India’s Supreme Court Bar Association. In 1991, he led the Indian delegation to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) in Geneva, and he has been a member of the UNHCR Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. “It’s very impressive that India has chosen a prominent attorney who has an interest in human rights to be its science minister,” Dr. Marburger reflected, adding: “Not that I don’t have an interest in human rights myself, but it’s an unusual thing and it speaks to the unique qualities that Minister Sibal brings