I just picked up the nearest magazine and it was <i>LIFE</i> magazine.  They were talking about cars of the future, and they were saying that in the future, if a car gets in an accident and has a big dent in it, all you’ll have to do is heat it up and the dent will snap back into place. So I saw that, and I thought to myself, “They’re talking about materials that can actually change shape if you apply a certain type of stimulus, like heat.”  So then I thought of something totally different when I was thinking about that, because even though I was not a surgeon, I knew something about surgery.  So there was this whole area that has evolved over the last 20 or 30 years called “minimally invasive surgery.”  And you might think, “What could that possibly have to do with cars?”  Actually, it doesn’t have anything.  But what I thought about is, like 30 years ago, for example, if you had a gallbladder operation, they would make a big incision in you and they would pull the gallbladder out.  Now what they do is they make a little incision in you, and the gallbladder, you would pull it out through these little scopes. But the difference to the patient is, in the first case with the big operation, you’ll be in a hospital for many, many days, won’t be back to work for many, many weeks or months.  The second case, you’re out of the hospital in a day or less, and you’re back to work right away, because they made a tiny incision rather than a big incision.  So I started thinking, “You know, there’s all these medical devices that people implant, get implanted in patients, many of which are just made out of material.”  And I thought, “What if we could make a material that could change shape?”  So we could start out with something that’s like a string at room temperature, for example. And then you could actually put that string at room temperature through the little hole that you made.  But when it gets to body temperature, which is a lot hotter, it could change into whatever shape you want. Like whatever medical device, like a stent to keep blood vessels open, or a sheet to prevent adhesions, or something else.  So I thought we should be able to make materials that actually had the property that they were talking about in the car, but if we could do it, that maybe we could change a whole paradigm for medical device implantation.