• The civilization that gave humankind paper, printing, spaghetti, and the idea of creating objects for counting was Chinese; the object was called the abacus. • Charles Drew, whose research at Columbia University in 1938 led to dramatic improvement in the preservation of blood and who later became the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, was black.

• Professor Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant astronomers of our time, who holds the same chair at Cambridge University that Isaac Newton once held—the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, founded in 1663—has produced outstanding theories and books while coping for the last 40 of his 62 years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a disease characterized by progressive degeneration of the motor cells in the brain and spinal cord.

Among other things, this issue of Diversity Exchange presents portraits and vignettes of collaboration, both numerical and diversity, and the pursuit of discovery, especially through the symposium on research collaboration. I want to thank you for allowing us to share these with you, on my own behalf and on behalf of our president, publisher, and managing editor. As you will appreciate, this production has involved considerable time and energy by contributors and editorial and production staff. I take this opportunity to thank them for their individual and collective efforts.

In many ways, this Diversity Exchange is both
discovery and facilitator of discovery. The former
in that it presents certain facts and interpretation
of facts for the first time, and the latter in that it simultaneously suggests to readers opportunities to pursue other facts and interpretations and challenges them to research in other areas of inquiry. Reading this issue should be like taking a journey; a journey of discovery and a journey for discovery.

As you begin your journey, remember the words of Alexander Graham Bell and the simple, yet powerful remark by someone whom Bell emulated in daring to research and to discover. Italian Renaissance scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei wrote, “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

So, journey on! Research! Discover!

The 11 words above highlight the importance of collaboration in the journeys of discovery. Alexander Graham Bell practiced what he preached; he collaborated with Thomas Watson in the invention of the telephone, and with numerous other individuals in pursuing the 18 patents granted in his own name and the 12 that
were granted with collaborators. Yet, there is much more to discovery than the collaboration of individuals with great minds, a process I call numerical collaboration. Great—and not so great—discoveries and improvements entail collaboration of another kind, that I call diversity collaboration.

This kind of collaboration has several dimensions. One dimension pertains to research disciplines. We live in an age of globalization and what political scientists call complex interdependence. This increasingly places a premium on cross-and-interdisciplinary collaboration. People have to bring skill sets from the natural sciences, social sciences, and other fields together in order to solve technical, social, economic, political, and other challenges within and among societies. And the evidence is that the need for this will increase, rather than abate.

As we pursue this collaboration, we need to remember another aspect of diversity collaboration: opportunities for the pursuit of discoveries should extend to the various peoples, races, genders, and physical circumstances that characterize our society and societies elsewhere. In the context of the United States, this entails increasing discovery opportunities for women, blacks, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and people with physical handicaps.

Moreover, people in some societies—both in the
United States and elsewhere—should stop implying—and sometimes asserting—that all great discoveries are the fruit of one civilization (Western) and mostly one race (white). Societies
generally, and the academy in particular, would be better served with adequate recognition of the fact that many different people and non- Western civilizations have made sterling contributions to the improvement of humankind through various discoveries.

A few examples will suffice:

• The people who received the patent in 1845 for the invention of a submarine telescope and lamp and the patent in 1905 for the windshield wiper were women; Sarah Mather and Mary Anderson, respectively.