When Berkeley Professor David Gross took centre stage last week in the romantic German island city of Lindau to talk about the future of physics, he had the undivided attention of 700 of the most talented students from 56 countries.
One out of seven came from Asia, up from almost zero two years ago. The rise in their numbers confirms that Asia is rapidly becoming a region full of diverse sources of knowledge and innovation.
The setting in Lindau was the 55th meeting of Nobel laureates with tomorrow's academic elite, a meeting where outstanding young graduate and doctoral researchers rub shoulders with the international titans in their respective fields.
For four days the academic circus with 47 laureates transformed the little city on an island in Lake Constance into an improvised campus, with students crowding the tiny cafes in the medieval area around the old city hall, discussing everything from atmospheric chemistry to the future of physics and the molecular dynamics of yeast. In the formal part of the gathering the laureates lectured about the latest findings in the top echelons of science. Japanese Professor Masatoshi Koshiba, the Nobel laureate of physics in 2002, discussed what neutrinos - highly energetic particles that are catapulted by the sun with high speed into the universe - 'might tell us in the future'.
Professor Dr Aaron Ciechanover from Haifa in Israel elaborated on 'Why Proteins Have to Die so we Shall Live'.
For the second time in its 55-year history the meeting was an interdisciplinary event with laureates from chemistry, medicine and physics.