As MIT celebrates its 150^th anniversary this month, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington wonders, "what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas?" For the past 150 years, MIT has led the way in scientific innovation, as its professors discovered the telephone, electromagnets, radar, office photocopiers, myriad cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, lasers, the code of the human genome, and more, Pilkington says.