What makes the MIT University such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas? For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel . . . the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on. And with that drive into modernity MIT has played no small part in building western, and particularly US, global dominance. Its explosive innovations have helped to secure America's military and cultural supremacy, and with it the country's status as the world's sole superpower.

As the school marks its 150th anniversary this month, it seems the US has never needed MIT's help more than it does today. The voices of the nay-sayers are in the ascendancy, questioning the US's ability to reinvent itself, to heal its wounded economy and sustain its leadership in the face of a burgeoning China. Questions too, are increasingly being asked about the ability of science and technology to address the world's problems, as optimism about the future slides into doubt. "There is a profound cynicism around the role of science that is debilitating for those in the enterprise, and devastating for this country," says MIT's president, Susan Hockfield. "If we can't figure out how to make technological innovation the path to the future, then America is not going to have invented the future, some other country will have."

She fears the US is increasingly suffering from what she calls a deficit of ambition. While 85% of MIT students are studying science and engineering, in the US as a whole the proportion is just 15%. That leaves the world's creative powerhouse vulnerable. "If you travel to Asia, to Shanghai or Bangalore, you feel the pulse of people racing to a future they are going to invent. You feel that rarely any more in the US."

Which makes MIT's mission all the more essential. "MIT has an enormous responsibility right now," Hockfield says. "We feel that deeply. It needs to be a beacon of inspiration around the power of science and technology to create a brighter future for the world."

From the moment MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 it was clear what it was not. It was not like the other school up the river. While Harvard stuck to the English model of an Oxbridge classical education, with its emphasis on Latin and Greek as befitted the landed aristocracy, MIT would look to the German system of learning based on research and hands-on experimentation, championing meritocracy and industry where Harvard preferred the privileges of birth. Knowledge was at a premium, yes, but it had to be useful.

This gritty, down-to-earth quality, in keeping with the industrialisation that was spreading through the US at the time, was enshrined in the school motto, Mens et Manus – Mind and Hand – as well as its logo, which showed a gowned scholar standing beside an ironmonger bearing a hammer and anvil. That symbiosis of intellect and craftsmanship still suffuses the institute's classrooms, where students are not so much taught as engaged and inspired. There is a famous film of one of MIT's star professors, the physicist Walter Lewin, demonstrating the relationship between an oscillating metal ball and mass. Halfway through the experiment he climbs on to the ball and starts swinging himself around the lecture theatre in a huge oscillating arch as though he were appearing in Spider-Man on Broadway.

Mind and Hand applies too to MIT's belief that theory and practice go together; neither is superior to the other, and the two are stronger when combined. That conviction is as strongly held by the lowliest student as it is by its Nobel laureates (there have been 50 of them).

Every student might become one of those who go on to succeed, in spectacular fashion. And there are many of them. A survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms between them generate global revenues of about $1.9tn (£1.2tn) a year. If MIT was a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP of any nation in the world.

MIT's professor of technological innovation and entrepreneurship Ed Roberts says such figures belie the fact that the institute is actually quite small, with just 10,000 students and about 1,000 faculty. "That's not big. But when all those people sign up to a mission to forward entrepreneurship, you have a dramatically bigger impact. In MIT, people are encouraged not just to think bold, but to do it boldly.  If you come up with a brilliant idea, that's OK. If you win a Nobel prize for your research, that's fine. But if you take that idea and apply it and make something transformative happen, then in MIT that's deeply admired."

The current president offers two other important clues to MIT's success as a cauldron of innovation. The first is meritocracy. Hockfield is MIT's first female president, which is significant for an institution that since the 1990s has been battling against its own in-built discrimination against women. Women still make up only 21% of the faculty. But the gender balance of its students is almost 50:50, and about 40% of its staff members were born outside the US, underlying how MIT remains a huge magnet for talented individuals around the world.

MIT delights in taking brilliant minds in vastly diverse disciplines and flinging them together. You can see that in its Energy Initiative, which acts as a bridge for MIT's combined firepower across all its five schools, channelling huge resources into the search for a solution to global warming. It works to improve the efficiency of existing energy sources, including nuclear power as it has its own nuclear reactor, a lesser-known fact that MIT prefers not to brag about. It is also forging ahead with alternative energies from solar to wind and geothermal, and has recently developed the use of viruses to synthesise batteries that could prove crucial in the advancement of electric cars.

Tim Berners-Lee talks about how he ended up here. The Briton who invented the World Wide Web is part of the global brain drain to MIT. He created the web by linking hypertext with the internet in 1989 while he was at Cern in Geneva, but then felt he had no option but to cross the Atlantic. "There were a couple of reasons I had to come – one was because the web spread much faster in America than it did in Europe and the other was because there was no MIT over there." What is it about MIT that Europe could not offer him?

"It's not just another university, it has this pre-eminent reputation and that in turn sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy: as soon as it becomes seen as the cool place to go for technology, then people will head there as I did. Even though I spend my time with my head buried in the details of web technology, or travelling the world, the nice thing is that when I do walk the corridors I bump into people who are working in other fields that are fascinating, and that keeps me intellectually alive."

MIT has long been a leader in military research and development, receiving huge sums in grants from the Pentagon. It was core to America's prosecution of the cold war, developing ever more sophisticated guidance systems for ballistic missiles trained on Moscow.

MIT is a very free and open place.

Message from the President

MIT has a distinctive mission and history that set us apart from other universities. When the Institute was established 150 years ago, science had essentially no impact on the curriculum that was followed by most American university students. Our first President, William Barton Rogers, envisioned a new kind of academic institution-one that could, as he put it, "serve the times and the nation's needs."

Those principles have served us well, and today our work - in engineering, the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts - reaches people the world over. The Institute community extends far beyond campus, embracing international partners and more than 100,000 alumni around the globe.

I believe the world has never needed MIT as much as it does now. The major challenges of our age are increasingly shaped by science and technology, and by daunting problems of quantitative analysis and complex synthesis. With MIT's expertise in interdisciplinary problem-solving, the Institute has a unique opportunity, and a deep obligation, to make a critical difference - by creating the innovations, fueling the economy, and educating the leaders the world needs now.

In addressing these needs, we draw on an unwavering drive toward excellence, a spirit of innovation, a culture of collaboration, and a commitment to making an MIT education accessible to all who have the talents and ambition to benefit from our programs.

Susan Hockfield

16th President of MIT

Vasil Sidorov on June 04, 2011 after Ed Pilkington The Guardian

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sidorovvasil@gmail.com