WEBVTT

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So let me with start with Roy Amara.

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Roy's argument is that most new
technologies tend to be overestimated

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in their impact to begin with,

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and then they get underestimated
in the long term,

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because we get used to them.

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These really are days
of miracle and wonder.

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You remember that wonderful
song by Paul Simon?

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There were two lines in it.

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So what was it that was considered
miraculous back then?

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Slowing down things, slow motion

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and the long-distance call.

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Because, of course, you used
to get interrupted by operators

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who'd tell you, "Long distance calling.
Do you want to hang up?

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And now we think nothing of calling
all over the world.

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Well, something similar may be happening

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with reading and programming life.

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But before I unpack that,

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let's just talk about telescopes.

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Telescopes were overestimated
originally in their impact.

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This is one of Galileo's early models.

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People thought it was just
going to ruin all religion.

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(Laughter)

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So we're not paying that much
attention to telescopes.

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But, of course, telescopes launched
10 years ago, as you just heard,

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could take this Volkswagen,
fly it to the moon,

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and you could see the lights
on that Volkswagen light up on the moon.

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And that's the kind of resolution power
that allowed you to see

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little specks of dust
floating around distant suns.

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Imagine for a second that this
was a sun a billion light years away,

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and you had a little speck of dust
that came in front of it.

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That's what detecting
an exoplanet is like.

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And the cool thing is, the telescopes
that are now being launched

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would allow you to see
a single candle lit on the moon.

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And if you separated it by one plate,

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you could see two candles
separately at that distance.

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And that's the kind
of resolution that you need

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to begin to image
that little speck of dust

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as it comes around the sun

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and see if it has a blue-green signature.

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And if it does have
a blue-green signature,

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it means that life
is common in the universe.

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The first time you ever see a blue-green
signature on a distant planet,

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it means there's photosynthesis there,

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there's water there,

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and the chances that you saw
the only other planet with photosynthesis

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are about zero.

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And that's a calendar-changing event.

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There's a before and after
we were alone in the universe,

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forget about the discovery
of whatever continent.

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So as you're thinking about this,

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we're now beginning
to be able to image most of the universe.

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And that is a time of miracle and wonder.

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And we kind of take that for granted.

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Something similar is happening in life.

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So we're hearing about life
in these little bits and pieces.

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We hear about CRISPR,
and we hear about this technology,

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and we hear about this technology.

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But the bottom line on life
is that life turns out to be code.

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And life as code is a really
important concept because it means,

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just in the same way
as you can write a sentence

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in English or in French or Chinese,

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just in the same way
as you can copy a sentence,

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just in the same way
as you can edit a sentence,

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just in the same way
as you can print a sentence,

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you're beginning to be able
to do that with life.

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It means that we're beginning
to learn how to read this language.

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And this, of course, is the language
that is used by this orange.

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So how does this orange execute code?

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It doesn't do it in ones and zeroes
like a computer does.

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It sits on a tree, and one day it does:

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plop!

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And that means: execute.

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AACTAAG: make me a little root.

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TCGACC: make me a little stem.

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GAC: make me some leaves.
AGC: make me some flowers.

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And then GCAA: make me some more oranges.

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If I edit a sentence in English
on a word processor,

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then what happens is you can go
from this word to that word.

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If I edit something in this orange

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and put in GCAAC, using CRISPR
or something else that you've heard of,

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then this orange becomes a lemon,

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or it becomes a grapefruit,

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or it becomes a tangerine.

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And if I edit one in a thousand letters,

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you become the person
sitting next to you today.

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Be more careful where you sit.

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(Laughter)

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What's happening on this stuff
is it was really expensive to begin with.

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It was like long-distance calls.

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But the cost of this is dropping
50 percent faster than Moore's law.

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The first $200 full genome
was announced yesterday by Veritas.

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And so as you're looking at these systems,

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it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,
it doesn't matter, and then it does.

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So let me just give you
the map view of this stuff.

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This is a big discovery.

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There's 23 chromosomes.

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Cool.

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Let's now start using a telescope version,
but instead of using a telescope,

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let's use a microscope to zoom in

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on the inferior of those chromosomes,

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which is the Y chromosome.

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It's a third the size of the X.
It's recessive and mutant.

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But hey,

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just a male.

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And as you're looking at this stuff,

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here's kind of a country view

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at a 400 base pair resolution level,

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and then you zoom in to 550,
and then you zoom in to 850,

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and you can begin to identify
more and more genes as you zoom in.

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Then you zoom in to the state level,

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and you can begin to tell
who's got leukemia,

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how did they get leukemia,
what kind of leukemia do they have,

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what shifted from what place
to what place.

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And then you zoom in
to the Google street view level.

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So this is what happens
if you have colorectal cancer

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for a very specific patient
on the letter-by-letter resolution.

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So what we're doing in this stuff
is we're gathering information

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and just generating
enormous amounts of information.

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This is one of the largest
databases on the planet,

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and it's growing faster
than we can build computers to store it.

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You can create some incredible
maps with this stuff.

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You want to understand the plague
and why one plague is bubonic

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and the other one
is a different kind of plague

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and the other one
is a different kind of plague?

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Well, here's a map of the plague.

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Some are absolutely deadly to humans,

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some are not.

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And note, by the way,
as you go to the bottom of this,

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how does it compare to tuberculosis?

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So this is the difference between
tuberculosis and various kinds of plagues,

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and you can play detective
with this stuff,

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because you can take
a very specific kind of cholera

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that affected Haiti,

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and you can look at
which country it came from,

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which region it came from,

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and probably which soldier took that
from that African country to Haiti.

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Zoom out.

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It's not just zooming in.

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This is one of the coolest maps
ever done by human beings.

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What they've done is taken
all the genetic information they have

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about all the species,

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and they've put a tree of life
on a single page

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that you can zoom in and out of.

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So this is what came first,
how did it diversify, how did it branch,

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how large is that genome,

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on a single page.

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It's kind of the universe
of life on Earth,

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and it's being constantly
updated and completed.

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And so as you're looking at this stuff,

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the really important changes,
the old biology, used to be reactive.

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You used to have a lot of biologists
that had microscopes,

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and they had magnifying glasses,
and they were out observing animals.

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The new biology is proactive.

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You don't just observe stuff,
you make stuff.

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And that's a really big change,

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because it allows us
to do things like this.

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And I know you're really
excited by this picture.

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(Laughter)

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It only took us four years
and 40 million dollars

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to be able to take this picture.

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(Laughter)

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And what we did

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is we took the full gene code
out of a cell --

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not a gene, not two genes,
the full gene code out of a cell --

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built a completely new gene code,

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inserted it into the cell,

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figured out a way to have the cell
execute that code

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and built a completely new species.

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So this is the world's first
synthetic life form.

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And so what do you do with this stuff?

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Well, this stuff is going
to change the world.

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Let me give you three short-term trends

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in terms of how it's going
to change the world.

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The first is we're going to see
a new industrial revolution.

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And I actually mean that literally.

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So in the same way as Switzerland
and Germany and Britain

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changed the world with machines
like the one you see in this lobby,

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created power,

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in the same way CERN
is changing the world,

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using new instruments
and our concept of the universe,

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programmable life forms
are also going to change the world,

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because once you can program cells

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in the same way as you
program your computer chip,

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then you can make almost anything.

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So your computer chip
can produce photographs,

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can produce music, can produce film,

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can produce love letters,
can produce spreadsheets.

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It's just ones and zeroes
flying through there.

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If you can flow ATCGs through cells,

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then this software makes its own hardware,

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which means it scales very quickly.

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No matter what happens,

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if you leave your cell phone
by your bedside,

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you will not have a billion
cell phones in the morning.

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But if you do that with living organisms,

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you can make this stuff
at a very large scale.

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One of the things you can do
is you can start producing

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close to carbon-neutral fuels

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on a commercial scale by 2025,

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which we're doing with Exxon.

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But you can also substitute
for agricultural lands.

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Instead of having 100 hectares
to make oils or to make proteins,

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you can make it in these vats

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at 10 or 100 times
the productivity per hectare.

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Or you can store information,
or you can make all the world's vaccines

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in those three vats.

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Or you can store most of the information
that's held at CERN in those three vats.

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DNA is a really powerful
information storage device.

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Second turn:

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you're beginning to see the rise
of theoretical biology.

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So, medical school departments are one
of the most conservative places on earth.

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The way they teach anatomy is similar
to the way they taught anatomy

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100 years ago.

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"Welcome, student. Here's your cadaver."

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One of the things medical schools are
not good at is creating new departments,

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which is why this is so unusual.

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Isaac Kohane has now created a department
based on informatics, data, knowledge,

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at Harvard Medical School.

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And in a sense,
what's beginning to happen is,

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biology is beginning to get enough data

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that it can begin to follow
the steps of physics,

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which used to be observational physics

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and experimental physicists

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and then started creating
theoretical biology.

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Well, that's what you're beginning to see

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because you have so many medical records,

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because you have
so much data about people:

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you've got their genomes,
you've got their viromes,

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you've got their microbiomes.

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And as this information stacks,

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you can begin to make predictions.

NOTE Paragraph

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The third thing that's happening
is, this is coming to the consumer.

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So you, too, can get your genes sequenced.

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And this is beginning to create
companies like 23andMe,

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and companies like 23andMe
are going to be giving you

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more and more and more data,

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not just about your relatives

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but about you and your body,

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and it's going to compare stuff,

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and it's going
to compare stuff across time,

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and these are going to become
very large databases.

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But it's also beginning to affect
a series of other businesses

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in unexpected ways.

NOTE Paragraph

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Normally, when you advertise something,
you really don't want the consumer

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to take your advertisement
into the bathroom to pee on,

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unless, of course, if you're IKEA.

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Because when you rip this
out of a magazine and you pee on it,

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it'll turn blue if you're pregnant.

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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And they'll give you
a discount on your crib.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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Right? So when I say consumer empowerment,

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and this is spreading beyond biotech,

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I actually really mean that.

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We're now beginning to produce,
at Synthetic Genomics,

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desktop printers

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that allow you to design a cell,

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print a cell,

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execute the program on the cell.

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We can now print vaccines

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real time as an airplane takes off

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before it lands.

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We're shipping 78
of these machines this year.

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This is not theoretical biology.
This is printing biology.

NOTE Paragraph

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Let me talk about two long-term trends

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that are coming at you
over a longer time period.

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The first one is, we're starting
to redesign species.

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And you've heard about that, right?

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We're redesigning trees.
We're redesigning flowers.

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We're redesigning yogurt,

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cheese, whatever else you want.

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And that, of course,
brings up the interesting question:

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How and when should we redesign humans?

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And a lot of us think,
"Oh no, we never want to redesign humans."

00:13:52.147 --> 00:13:54.862
Unless, of course, if your child
has a Huntington's gene

00:13:54.886 --> 00:13:56.275
and is condemned to death.

00:13:57.172 --> 00:14:00.535
Or, unless if you're passing on
a cystic fibrosis gene,

00:14:00.559 --> 00:14:03.249
in which case, you don't just want
to redesign yourself,

00:14:03.273 --> 00:14:05.812
you want to redesign your children
and their children.

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And these are complicated debates
and they're going to happen in real time.

NOTE Paragraph

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I'll give you one current example.

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One of the debates going on
at the National Academies today

00:14:17.896 --> 00:14:22.598
is you have the power to put
a gene drive into mosquitoes

00:14:22.622 --> 00:14:25.606
so that you will kill
all the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

00:14:27.547 --> 00:14:30.107
Now, some people say,

00:14:30.964 --> 00:14:34.429
"That's going to affect the environment
in an extreme way, don't do it."

00:14:35.326 --> 00:14:36.481
Other people say,

00:14:36.505 --> 00:14:39.732
"This is one of the things
that's killing millions of people yearly.

00:14:39.756 --> 00:14:43.304
Who are you to tell me
that I can't save the kids in my country?"

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And why is this debate so complicated?

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Because as soon as you
let this loose in Brazil

00:14:49.965 --> 00:14:51.388
or in Southern Florida --

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mosquitoes don't respect walls.

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You're making a decision for the world

00:14:55.302 --> 00:14:57.209
when you put a gene drive into the air.

NOTE Paragraph

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This wonderful man won a Nobel Prize,

00:15:05.103 --> 00:15:06.743
and after winning the Nobel Prize,

00:15:06.767 --> 00:15:08.022
he's been worrying about

00:15:09.531 --> 00:15:11.634
how did life get started on this planet

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and how likely is it
that it's in other places?

00:15:15.097 --> 00:15:18.299
So what he's been doing is going around
to this graduate students

00:15:18.323 --> 00:15:20.041
and saying to his graduate students,

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"Build me life but don't use
any modern chemicals or instruments.

00:15:24.210 --> 00:15:26.875
Build me stuff that was here
three billion years ago.

00:15:26.899 --> 00:15:30.055
You can't use lasers.
You can't use this. You can't use that."

00:15:32.330 --> 00:15:35.575
He gave me a vial of what he's built
about three weeks ago.

00:15:36.639 --> 00:15:37.818
What has he built?

00:15:37.842 --> 00:15:41.867
He's built basically what looked like
soap bubbles that are made out of lipids.

00:15:41.891 --> 00:15:44.457
He's built a precursor of RNA.

00:15:45.291 --> 00:15:49.043
He's had the precursor of the RNA
be absorbed by the cell,

00:15:50.194 --> 00:15:52.077
and then he's had the cells divide.

00:15:54.031 --> 00:15:55.988
We may not be that far --

00:15:57.687 --> 00:16:00.804
call it a decade, maybe two decades --

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from generating life from scratch

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out of proto-communities.

NOTE Paragraph

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Second long-term trend:

00:16:10.273 --> 00:16:13.799
we've been living and are living
through the digital age,

00:16:13.823 --> 00:16:16.342
we're starting to live through
the age of the genome,

00:16:16.366 --> 00:16:19.981
and biology and CRISPR
and synthetic biology

00:16:20.870 --> 00:16:23.777
and all of that is going to merge
into the age of the brain.

00:16:24.743 --> 00:16:28.724
So we're getting to the point where
we can rebuild most of our body parts

00:16:28.748 --> 00:16:32.404
in the same way as if you break a bone
or burn your skin, and it regrows.

00:16:32.428 --> 00:16:35.096
We're beginning to learn
how to regrow our tracheas

00:16:35.120 --> 00:16:36.984
or how to regrow our bladders.

00:16:37.008 --> 00:16:39.314
Both of those have been
implanted in humans.

00:16:39.338 --> 00:16:42.066
Tony Atala is working on
32 different organs.

00:16:43.487 --> 00:16:45.377
But the core is going to be this,

00:16:45.401 --> 00:16:48.455
because this is you,
and the rest is just packaging.

00:16:50.011 --> 00:16:53.558
Nobody's going to live beyond
120, 130, 140 years

00:16:53.582 --> 00:16:55.317
unless if we fix this.

00:16:56.084 --> 00:16:58.150
And that's the most interesting challenge.

00:16:58.174 --> 00:17:00.285
That's the next frontier, along with

00:17:00.309 --> 00:17:02.656
"How common is life in the universe?"

00:17:02.680 --> 00:17:04.486
"Where did we come from?"

00:17:04.510 --> 00:17:06.144
and questions like that.

NOTE Paragraph

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Let me end this with
an apocryphal quote from Einstein.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:11.697 --> 00:17:13.916
[You can live as if
everything is a miracle,

00:17:13.940 --> 00:17:16.212
or you can live as if
nothing is a miracle.]

NOTE Paragraph

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It's your choice.

00:17:18.555 --> 00:17:21.034
You can focus on the bad,
you can focus on the scary,

00:17:21.058 --> 00:17:23.474
and certainly there's
a lot of scary out there.

00:17:24.012 --> 00:17:28.744
But use 10 percent of your brain
to focus on that, or maybe 20 percent,

00:17:28.768 --> 00:17:30.594
or maybe 30 percent.

00:17:31.474 --> 00:17:33.256
But just remember,

00:17:33.280 --> 00:17:35.889
we really are living in an age
of miracle and wonder.

00:17:36.271 --> 00:17:39.822
We're lucky to be alive today.
We're lucky to see this stuff.

00:17:39.846 --> 00:17:42.687
We're lucky to be able to interact
with folks like the folks

00:17:42.711 --> 00:17:44.821
who are building
all the stuff in this room.

NOTE Paragraph

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So thank you to all of you,
for all you do.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:49.066 --> 00:17:52.762
(Applause)