We live in the first phase of the Information Age. To thrive in a world of constant technological advance, we must embrace that new technology as it arises, and do our best to recognize which pieces of technology represent pivotal changes. It seems definite that executable content and the object-oriented approach to network resources now represents as big a change as the uniform resource locator system represented to the scientific community at that time.
The Information Age has made scientific collaboration global, and it is no longer possible to view scientific endeavours as being localized in a given geographic location. Any new institute must be based on networking technology. This is not simply a statement about being up-to-date, but is as important as, for instance, having phones or e-mail available to the institute members. Any facility that does not allow rapid collaboration with fellow researchers on a global level is doomed to find itself cut off from the modern scientific and technological world. The term virtual is often used to describe the nature of modern scientific interaction, capturing the idea that science in the Information Age is a global endeavour without physical walls. Unfortunately, the term virtual institute is often regarded to imply that the facility is somehow ``less real'' than a ``physical institute''. This is simply not true. A scientific facility that does not avail itself of advanced collaboration is no longer part of the real, global, rapid flow of information. It has become less real as a place of research. However, any institute that is willing to provide virtual services is plugged into that essential information flow. The members gain by being members of the full international scientific community, and are not restricted by their geographic location. This inter-connectivity is the reality of the world of today, and it is certainly the reality of the world of the 21st Century.
Of course, an institute does not have to be purely virtual and in fact will tend to suffer from being purely virtual. We must find a balance between advanced networking and the human face-to-face element that we all need in our dealings with fellow researchers. We have also seen that even with distributed computing and networking there is still a specific need for centralized management. In fact, one gain of executable content is that such management becomes practical. Thus, we close the loop: modern advances in technology both provide for an essential means of global collaboration, but allow us to retain control, and the human factor, on a local level.