The intellectual venturer By Michael Watts | 21 January 11

This article was taken from the February 2011 issue of Wired magazine.

There has never been a company quite like : It's a hybrid of think tank, private-equity firm, venture-capital investor, research and development lab and law firm.

In a little over a decade since it was founded by two former executives -- Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung (later joined by Peter Detkin, a former Intel

1 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 intellectual-property lawyer) -- it has never brought a single product to market under its own name. As Jung likes to say, "Our best years are still ahead of us."

The partners may have learned from that it's not enough to be technologically brilliant or ruthless in business -- you must also set out to change humanity. Thousands of inventions have poured out of IV, spanning computer software and hardware, user- interface design, semiconductors, biomedical devices, advanced medical procedures, digital imaging, nanotechnology, nuclear energy and advanced particle physics. They range in importance from modified red-blood cells that deliver cancer treatment, to temperature-controlled kegs for beer and wine. That one has Gates's name on the patent application.

Among the headliners is the Salter Sink, a wave-powered pump that diffuses the energy of hurricanes by funnelling to colder depths the warm ocean-surface water that they feed on; it was developed with Stephen Salter, an engineering professor at Edinburgh University. A second invention, the Stratoshield, mimics the temperature-cooling effect of some volcanic eruptions by hosing sulphur-dioxide particles high into the stratosphere. Lowell Wood, an IV associate and retired nuclear weapons expert, calls it "doping the stratosphere".

Another high-profile development is TerraPower, IV's practical design for a new kind of "travelling wave" nuclear reactor that can run largely on depleted uranium, the waste by- product of uranium enrichment, of which there are untold tonnes in the world. According to IV, existing stockpiles in the US represent an energy resource equivalent to electricity worth roughly £600 billion.

IV's ideas are tested, where possible, in a plain, hangar-like space in Bellevue, Washington State, near . It has a blue-and beige linoleum floor that's partitioned into rooms of varying sizes. The space is personalised by quirky paraphernalia: a big model biplane hangs from the ceiling; a photo sequence of a corn kernel popping hangs on one wall; a mounted, Star Wars-type blunderbuss fashioned from a hand drill is proudly displayed on a shelf. There are whiteboards teeming with equations and, plastered everywhere, favourite quotes from scientists and inventors, especially Thomas Edison. The company's intellectual engine-room is a plain conference suite in the laboratory. This is where IV's famous "invention sessions" are held. What was once a series of feverish ruminations between Myhrvold and Jung (with a patent attorney to record ideas) is now a regular gathering of physicists, bioengineers, doctors, programmers, scientists, chemists and others, from prestigious institutions such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We wanted to solve the big problems that Microsoft alone could not solve," says Jung, explaining why, on July 1, 1999, he and Myhrvold left their lucrative jobs with Microsoft. A Korean-American, born and raised in upstate New York, Jung speaks softly in calm, measured paragraphs. "For example, I was interested in the problems of developed-world healthcare and how we're going to avoid healthcare systems becoming bankrupt. So, to get funding, Nathan and I began selling our brains." 2 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011

Jung, 47, now IV's chief technology officer, had a wide-ranging brief while at Microsoft - - he managed projects relating to web platforms, intelligent operating systems and artificial intelligence -- and has a strong background in biomedicine, notably protein- structure research. He's currently a strategic adviser to Harvard Medical School, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Institute for Systems Biology. Myhrvold, 51, IV's most public face, is a graduate of Princeton who studied quantum theories with at Caius College, Cambridge, and then took a leave of absence to launch his own startup, Dynamical Systems Research. He never returned to Cambridge, instead selling Dynamical Systems to Microsoft in 1986 and becoming its chief technology officer.

The day after announcing he was leaving Microsoft, Myhrvold recalls getting an email from Hawking, saying, "Shall I clean the office out for you?" Myhrvold laughs: "I did think about going back [to Cambridge]. It was a wonderful time, working for him. It's impossible to feel sorry for yourself if you work for Stephen Hawking." Myhrvold has expressed his gratitude by helping to persuade Gates to fund Microsoft Research Cambridge. "I figured that that was a good thing to do."

Myhrvold has two master's degrees from UCLA: one in , and space physics, plus another in at an advanced level, as well as a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton. His hobbies include collecting dinosaur fossils and studying volcanoes, and his extraordinary modernist house on Lake Washington is now a destination on Seattle celebrity tours. Myhrvold is someone you would invite to a dinner party and beg to hog the conversation, with the corollary that, as a trained French chef and winner of a world barbecue championship, he could also cook the meal, photograph the food (he's a prize-winning photographer) and critique it (his sous vide techniques have been featured in , and he was once chief gastronomic officer for the Zagat restaurant guides).

In March, in the US, he will publish a six-volume, 2,400-page series entitled Modernist Cuisine: The Art and of Cooking, written with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, two former chefs from Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck. For several years, the authors have been working on food experiments and recipes with a 20-strong team at a kitchen within the lab. The Modernist Cuisine series will cost $625 (£400). IV calls it a revolution in whose impact on what we eat will be akin to the convulsive effect of Impressionism on French art. The volumes describe a culinary world of water baths, homogenisers, hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, and are "destined", according to IV literature, "to reinvent cooking".

"Here's a terrible story," says Myhrvold, sitting in the invention room. "We had a bunch of energy sessions a couple of years ago and one of the problems was blow-out containment of undersea wells. I kid you not." Myhrvold has a high, almost strangled voice when he gets excited, and a vivid, theatrical manner. "And we decided not to do it because we were advised by industry consultants that it was a solved problem. I'm ashamed to admit it, but we said, 'OK, if it's solved and no one gives a shit, we'll go on to

3 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 something else.'" His fair, cherubic curls are greying, but he remains irrepressibly boyish and infectious in his enthusiasm for solving problems.

"I'm not suggesting that we could have fixed the whole BP thing, but I looked up the details of the BP spill and the blow-out preventer they used was patented in 1922, by [James Abercrombie and] Harry Cameron, who started a company called Cameron Ironworks to make these things. The design has changed hardly at all since 1922! And we're now drilling in 5km of water, which we certainly weren't back in 1922. Clearly, more innovations want to be applied." He shrugs. "They probably will now."

Myhrvold has an instinct for controversy. In particular, IV's silver-bullet technologies for geoengineering the have been disparaged by climate experts and environmentalists. Myhrvold has been criticised for his views on quoted in Super Freakonomics, the 2009 bestseller, which have been damned as oversimplifying Earth- system science by saying that it will be possible to regulate the global climate by "artificially recreating the conditions from the aftermath of a volcanic eruption", and that one sulphur-aerosol project using stockpiled sulphur in Canada could "solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere".

Undaunted, IV is pressing ahead with plans to rethink energy generation.

TerraPower LLC, Myhrvold's nuclear power-research company, was launched in 2007, but scientists have been talking about travelling-wave reactors since the 50s. Its TWR technology uses depleted uranium, fuelled with about ten per cent of enriched U-235 material, to cause fission. The resultant travelling wave then burns through the depleted uranium fuel (U-238) and converts this into plutonium-239.

The thermal energy generated from this reaction is then absorbed and carried away to be converted to electricity via steam turbines. IV's computer simulations and engineering studies maintain that TWR reactors could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for up to 100 years -- without the need for refuelling.

The problem lies in building a fully functional prototype reactor, he says, which is not only incredibly expensive but also politically sensitive. Right now, IV is talking to representatives from various nations, including Russia, Japan and France, about building a plant by 2020. "It's very hard to imagine it being built in America," Myhrvold says. He describes the US as having grown "scared" of nuclear power. "We would argue that our scheme is the first credible one that could solve this key problem of the 21st century: how do we generate energy for a newly rich world -- and do so in a carbon-neutral way?"

" Coal and natural gas don't work because of the carbon thing. Conventional nuclear doesn't because there isn't enough fuel and that's because uranium came with a use-by date and it goes bad; it undergoes radioactive decay. Today, we use seven tenths of one per cent of uranium and even that isn't fully burned up, so the rest is all waste.

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"Those who talk about sustainable energy think of it as freezing the total amount of generation capacity at today's level, and then gradually chewing into it with renewables. I don't think that's realistic. With all this demand from China, India and elsewhere, we'll see energy usage go up by a factor of ten to 20 this century. So, if you don't have a plan for that, you don't have a plan!"

A lot of people in climate advocacy don't want there to be a solution to climate change, he adds, "because they believe that if the world has an easy way out, then the world will never change to carbon neutral. I'm sympathetic to that point of view, but it's a little like saying that the reason people are eating doughnuts is because they're counting on bypass surgery. It's like, maybe people would drive a little slower if you take the airbags out of cars and put a dagger pointed at your chest in the middle of the steering wheel, so at the slightest bump..." -- he smacks his chest -- "but I'm not gonna recommend it! I think it would be poor public policy."

Other IV work comes under its Global Good Division, a parcel of projects funded largely by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates has enlisted IV in his crusade against malaria and other major diseases of the developing world. Projects include the "Photonic Fence", a laser that zaps malarial mosquitoes by identifying their wing-beat frequency. Its working prototype sits in a corner of the IV lab, occasionally training its green light on a mesh box of mosquitoes at the far corner of the room, which are house-reared by a woman known in the office as the "mosquito whisperer".

Global Good is IV's shield of truth: who would not warm to a bunch of inventors on a humanitarian mission to fight a bloodsucking mosquito? Consequently, Myhrvold is courted by American media, and high-calibre scientists are keen to work with him: men like Geoff Deane, IV's vice-president of engineering and laboratory executive director. Deane is a graduate of MIT and a veteran of several start-ups that have developed medical products for respiratory problems, advanced combustion engines, prefabricated homes in central America, ocean-current turbines in Florida and experiments in vaccines. An energetic, beaming figure nearing 40 (the mean age of IV's 700 employees is 37), Deane can sound as if he were not so much hired for a job as called to religious duty by God. "You know, when Nathan comes and says I've got a vision to build a laboratory that will change the world," he says, "and you look at his track record, you believe him and say, 'I want to be part of that; I too want to reinvent what invention is.'"

Deane oversees millions of dollars' worth of equipment, much of it bought at fire sales and auctions, or from eBay. It ranges from hi-tech instruments (CAT scanners, electron microscopes, oscilloscopes) to old mechanical workhorses such as welding machines and manually operated lathes, which are used to make the parts for testing inventions. Currently, Deane is busily testing a dozen ideas. "The challenge isn't necessarily to find the golden nugget," Deane explains. "The challenge is: don't spend too much money on the ones that aren't. You want to take the mentality of the venture capitalist: fail fast and fail cheap."

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There are plans for further experiments into artificial substances with electromagnetic properties that allow light to be bent and reversed, on the principle of negative refractive index. Research has been led by IV associate John Pendry, professor of theoretical solid- state physics at London's Imperial College, and David Smith, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. Metamaterials could produce, in theory, a cloaking device that, by bending light all around an object, could render it invisible to the human eye. The military is interested, but IV is thinking more of nanotechnology, of smaller and higher- resolution cameras, microscopes, antennas and computers.

Another major focus is biomedicine. A patent has been granted for a "soft" X-ray imager that can largely minimise the scatter effect of radiation and obtain a far clearer body image. In the lab there's an advanced aluminium prototype of a cryogenic Dewar flask: a product of "cold chain" re-engineering. It will transport and hold vaccines stable, even in sub-Saharan conditions, for up to six months without their spoiling. IV is also excited by a technology it has named "self-sterilising surfaces": it uses ultraviolet light, trapped in glass or other substrata, that within 60 seconds can kill bacteria adhering to surfaces that range from catheters to doorknobs. IV's medical portfolio also contains "Photolysable Donor Delivery", a light source that activates delivery of nitric oxide to treat wounds, burns, ulcers and even sexual dysfunction. To demonstrate their "Customised Blood Vessel Sleeving and Stents", Deane holds up a small, twisted piece of white plastic that had been extruded from the nozzle of a machine resembling a water dispenser, which was built in the lab's machine shop. It's the model of a brain aneurysm, an expanding blood vessel requiring surgery. Deane recalls how, working with a surgeon, he had taken a 3D scan of the aneurysm, printed it out in plastic (which took roughly 30 minutes) and then sent it to the operating theatre. "He [the surgeon] held it in his hand while he was doing the surgery, so he was able to select the right tools using a three dimensional model instead of looking at a computer screen." Deane's laughter fills the room. "Pretty cool, huh?"

As well as malaria, IV is looking at polio, HIV, influenza and tuberculosis. To devise eradication campaigns it has built a supercomputer, hired PhDs from Princeton and MIT, and begun deploying a software model that can incorporate thousands of variables to run scenarios and simulate outbreaks and pandemics.

"We believe we ought to be able to wipe out polio," Deane says. "But we're having a really hard time of it. In human history, we've only really totally wiped out one disease: smallpox. But we're optimistic that we can wipe out others -- if we put our minds to it."

Intellectual Ventures didn't hold its first invention session until August 2003. By then it had gained several crucial insights about its business model. One was that most manufacturing companies have short-term goals because they need new product lines every couple of years; IV's deep pockets leave it free, theoretically, from short-term pressures. Another advantage is that rivals in government and universities primarily fund research, so they experiment in pursuit of a single aim, rather than simply invent. A third is that brainstorming is not capital-intensive.

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The invention sessions have drawn wider business attention to IV: companies now approach it seeking help with their own problems. Those invited to join the IV brains trust interact with equals from different academic disciplines. Jung relates how, halfway through the first session with collaborators, the ice-making machine broke and distinguished inventors began taking it apart and discussing new ways of making ice. Some inventors, Jung says, never used to cash their cheques for attending. "I emailed them," he explains, "and they said, 'We're having so much fun, I feel bad taking money.'"

A formula has since evolved, where each session starts with a general topic, and reading matter is sent ahead to invitees. Meetings can continue into the early hours. Myhrvold compares them to jigsaw puzzles: inventors come with random pieces in their pocket and unexpectedly find a puzzle into which they fit. "The dynamic when you get the right set of people inventing new things is just amazing," he says. "Most companies have this model" -- he assumes a mock-stern voice -- "'Failure is not an option.' Well, not here! In this room where we invent, failure is always an option. Most of our inventions won't work. But the way to get a big return is to solve outrageously hard problems, which means a large fraction of what you do will fail. You have to be OK with it." The average invention session produces ten to 20 patentable ideas. If the soul of IV resides in its philanthropic experiments, the patent system is its financial engine. The number of patents it files each year is now "in the high hundreds to low thousands", says Eben Frankenberg, an executive vice president. The company holds more than 30,000 patents and applications, ranking it among the world's top 50 for filing them. Frankenberg says it's sitting on "many other thousands of ideas" it has not yet had time to file. Significantly, it buys up many more patents than it invents: from individual inventors, small businesses, Fortune 10 companies and institutions such as universities. Asia, where rights to patented inventions are often overlooked, has been a particularly productive hunting ground.

"We've done more than 150 deals with universities," Frankenberg says. "We've bought patents on eBay. We've even done deals out of bankruptcy courts. Over the past five years, we've put $300 million into individual inventors' pockets."

It's the ruthless licensing of its patent acquisitions, not the media-friendly, blue-sky thinking, which has been instrumental in IV turning over $1bn (£600 million) since its founding. The company has gained a reputation for aggressively pressing companies to sign costly patent-licensing deals. In a New York Times story published in February 2010, unnamed critics dubbed the company "Intellectual Vultures".

Though there are other firms that hold patents without making products (they are known as "non-practising entities"), IV is the biggest -- and to some technology companies, the most threatening. Shane Robinson, Hewlett-Packard's chief strategy and technology officer, has said IV hides behind talk of headline-grabbing inventions and is no more than "a ", a term (coined, ironically, by IV's Detkin) that disparages those who buy patents primarily to litigate against infringers. To date, IV has sued no one.

The company runs a global network of some 1,000 academics, to whom it sends out "requests for invention" in return for a cash payment and a share of royalties. Once the 7 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 inventors offer proof of concept, IV applies for patents, and those granted are licensed or monetised in product deals with companies in which IV takes a stake. So far, it claims to have evaluated more than 500,000 inventions.

At the heart of this business model is the centrality of intellectual property to modern economies, in which the innovations of the IT industry are replacing land, energy and raw materials as the world's most important resource. The historical rationale now being played out, most conspicuously in China and India, is that economies move from agrarian to city environments, then from low-cost to hi-tech manufacturing, and finally to intellectual property.

According to the Economist, at least 75 per cent of the value of publicly traded companies in the US is from intangible assets; yet, until 1981, software could not be patented there. Today, so many patents are filed in America that it takes three years for a ruling on each application. Meanwhile, legal definitions of patent law have created a complex landscape: a single product may rely on thousands of patented inventions, which means thousands of opportunities to be sued.

Critics accuse the patent system of restraining creativity. Some academics also worry, as a matter of principle, about the monetising of inventions that affect the greater good. Amar Bhidé, a Columbia University business professor and author of several works on innovation, has said that the highest levels of scientific knowledge are a public good: "They are published in journals and are nobody's property; they belong to mankind," he told the innovations website ideaconnections.com.

But Myhrvold sees nothing wrong in what Intellectual Ventures does. "The technology industry is primarily about making tools and toys for rich people," he says, "whether they're mobile phones or medical devices. But you also have two billion people on Earth that no one's doing any of this stuff for and we have some very, very severe problems that conventional techniques have yet to solve and we feel we can help with.

" Hewlett-Packard was very outspoken in denouncing our model -- at the same time that it was collecting $200 million a year suing other people over their patents. Most of the profits of Hewlett-Packard come from inkjet cartridges, which are highly patented, and there was a Wall Street Journal article a couple of years ago about a team of lawyers whose sole job was trying to sue people who refill inkjet cartridges. Now, if that's the law and they really patented those cartridges, that's perfectly right. But guys, don't go and sue Mom and Pop and John Doe for filling inkjet cartridges and tell me I'm doing something wrong. It's the dissonance of those things."

IV's first patents weren't issued until November 2005, because the company had spent almost the first half of its existence studying business. When it was launched, needing investment in the dotcom bust, Jung and Myhrvold knew that venture capitalists would reject them: they had no obvious, saleable products in the works. VCs like to see a result within the first 18 months of financing a scheme. At IV, where the fruits of new

8 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 inventions always seem to be "five to ten years away", according to Jung, patience is a necessity.

They eventually raised $5 billion from a mixture of big tech companies (they won't publicly say which ones but, according to KDI Private Equity, investors currently include Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, and eBay, as well as Gates), pension funds, university endowments and wealthy individuals, much of it in the form of capital commitments that can be drawn on over the next ten years. They now manage seven funds and receive an approximate two per cent management fee and 20 per cent in carried interest, or a share of profits. "The fund structure is ideal for us," Jung says, "because there are no other practical ways of raising large amounts of capital for a long period of time. Nathan likes to call it a 'Get rich slow' scheme. Nothing happens quickly. It really is about investing long term. One of our investors has said it's like investing in oil or forestry: it takes a long time to develop, but if it works out you've got this nice cashflow. In fact, he's classified us as a natural-resource investment."

Nevertheless, it required a move into patent acquisition to show institutional investors that IV was not, as Jung puts it, "pie in the sky". Now he and Myhrvold want to make it easier for investors to profit from inventions. They offer IV's business model as the basis for a whole new asset class, a market in invention capital, separated from manufacturing and funded by private-sector investment, where patents can be bought, sold and licensed through investment funds in huge, diversified portfolios.

In March 2010, Myhrvold outlined his plan in an article in the Harvard Business Review, headlined "Funding Eureka!" The first paragraph began: "My company, Intellectual Ventures, is misunderstood. We have been reviled as a patent troll -- a renegade outfit that buys up patents and then uses them to hold up innocent companies. What we're really trying to do is create a capital market for inventions akin to the venture-capital market that supports startups and the private-equity market that revitalises inefficient companies."

Myhrvold goes on to write that inventing patent-worthy ideas is very largely a "dysfunctional, cash-starved activity". Only one per cent to three per cent of patents make a profit for their inventors; it's unpredictable in its outcome, uncertain in its time horizons and overly dependent on government largesse for research grants. This would change were it organised for-profit.

Take the case of software, he suggests. Few people in the 70s placed any tangible value on software, except as an aid to selling computers. Now software is a global, multibillion- dollar business. Myhrvold's conclusion: "Invention is set to become the next software." But, to achieve this, there needs to be a professional invention industry, with greater liquidity and pricing visibility, and many more patent finders and brokers, not just Intellectual Ventures.

His article appeared, whether by accident or design, just as the US Congress was considering legislation (the Patent Reform Act S. 515) that would make it more difficult 9 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 for patent holders to be awarded large damages in court. Unsurprisingly, large technology companies have championed changes in the law. Myhrvold is firmly opposed, and Intellectual Ventures has spent $750,000 so far this year on lobbying candidates and committees, according to public filings listed by opensecrets.org. To support his argument, Myhrvold points to the profitable examples of private equity, whose volumes have increased by 1,000 in roughly 60 years, and that of venture capital -- 100 times or more in 50 years.

"There's no government R&D budget that's going to increase by a factor of 100," he says. "Venture capital doesn't have to whine and beg for money. When you can make money out of something, you don't have to plead and twist arms -- the capital shows up. So if I can make an economic model that funds invention and pays inventors, if I can make that work, it will channel billions of dollars into inventions. If we can do that we'll change the world, and change the world for the better.

"Anyone who's doing something really new is gonna have a lot of people saying it can't or shouldn't be done," he adds. "People say that about our business model: they're uncomfortable with inventing being a business. I've gotten used to it, but it is strange to me, all the same, because invention, where you come up with a new, useful idea, is about as close to magic as humans can get. Don't you agree?"

SOME OF MYHRVOLD'S MISSIONS

1. Beat malaria The idea of shooting things down with lasers isn't new -- see President Reagan's "Star Wars" scheme -- but IV has retooled this "Photonic Fence" tech to zap mosquitoes. LEDs bounce infrared light between fence posts 30 metres apart. A camera on each post monitors this reflected light for shadows cast by insects. Once detected, software trains a non-lethal laser on the creature, allowing it to identify insects and mosquito gender: females are larger and beat their wings more slowly than males, plus only females bite humans. A second, more powerful laser fires when the target is confirmed, causing death by superheating or damaging its DNA (an unconfirmed hypothesis).

2. Endless energy TerraPower's travelling-wave reactor (TWR) runs mainly on depleted uranium (U-238), the by-product of the enrichment process used to prepare fuel for conventional light- water nuclear reactors. The core is filled with a small amount of enriched uranium (U- 235) which starts to undergo fission, generating neutrons that are absorbed by the U-238. This produces fissile plutonium, which in turn undergoes fission, producing heat and more neutrons to sustain the chain reaction. The energy-generating fission zone (or travelling wave) advances through the core, taking 60 years to reach its end. The TWR, an eight-tonne canister of depleted uranium, could generate 25 million megawatt-hours of electricity.

3. Stop tornados How do you stop a hurricane? By cooling it down. Heat on the surface of oceans radiates 10 From www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/intellectual-ventures 22 January 2011 upwards and fuels storms. Underneath the warm water, though, is cold water, which could be used to cool the surface. Stirring them together takes a huge amount of energy. So IV's Salter Sink harnesses wave power to pump the surface water, at about 26°C in a hurricane, about 200 metres below, where the average temperature is only 10°C. Waves push the hot water into the top of the cylinder, which then pumps it down. In total, one Salter Sink can move a gigawatt of thermal energy; IV envisions thousands of pumps, placed at three-kilometre intervals, to protect the American Gulf Coast.

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