So let me with start with Roy Amara.
So Roy's argument is that most new technologies
tend to be overestimated in their impact to begin with,
and then they get underestimated in the long term because we get used to them.
These really are days of miracle and wonder.
You remember that wonderful song by Paul Simon?
There were two lines in it.
So what was it that was considered miraculous back then?
Slowing down things, back then, and the long distance call.
Because, of course, you used to get interrupted by operators
who would tell you long distance calling, do you want to hang up?
And now we think nothing of calling all over the world.
Well, something similar may be happening
with reading and programming life.
But before I unpack that,
let's just talk about telescopes.
So telescopes were overestimated originally in their impact.
This is one of Galileo's early models.
People thought it was just going to ruin all religion.
(Laughter)
So we're not paying that much attention to telescopes.
But of course telescopes launched 10 years ago, as you just heard,
could take this Volkswagen, fly it to the Moon,
and you could see the lights on that Volkswagen light up on the Moon.
And that's the kind of resolution power that allowed you to see
little specks of dust floating around distant suns.
Imagine for a second that this was a sun a billion light years away
and you had a little speck of dust that came in front of it.
and that's what detecting an exoplanet is like.
And the cool thing is the telescopes that are now being launched
would allow you to see a single candle lit on the Moon,
and if you separated it by one plate,
you could see two candles separately at that distance.
And that's the kind of resolution that you need
to begin that little speck of dust as it comes around the sun
and see if it has a blue-green signature.
And if it does have a blue-green signature,
it means that life is common in the Universe.
The first time you ever see a blue-green signature
on a distant planet,
it means there's photosynthesis there,
there's water there,
and the chances you saw the only other planet
with photosynthesis are about zero.
And that's a calendar-changing event.
There's a before and after we are alone in the Universe.
Forget about the discovery of whatever continent.
So as you're thinking about this, we're now beginning
to be able to image most of the Universe,
and that is a time of miracle and wonder.
And we kind of take that for granted.
Something similar is happening in life.
So we're hearing about life in these little bits and pieces.
We hear about CRISPR and we hear about this technology
and we hear about this technology, but the bottom line on life
is that life turns out to be a code.
And life as code is a really important concept
because it means,
just in the same way as you can write a sentence
in English or in French or Chinese,
just in the same way as you can copy a sentence,
just in the same way as you can edit a sentence,
just in the same way as you can print a sentence,
you're beginning to be able to do that with life.
It means that we're beginning to learn how to read this language.
And this, of course, is the language that is used by this orange.
So how does this orange execute code?
It doesn't do it in ones and zeroes like a computer does.
It sits on a tree and one day it does,
plop,
and that means, execute.
AACTAAG. Make me a little root.
TCGACC. Make me a little stem.
GAC. Make me some leaves. AGC. Make me some flowers.
And then GCAA. Make me some more oranges.
If I edit a sentence in English
on a word processor,
then what happens is you can go from this word to that word.
If I edit something in this orange
and put in GCAAC,
using CRISPR or something else that you've heard of,
then this orange becomes a lemon
or it becomes a grapefruit or it becomes a tangerine.
And if I edit one in a thousand letters,
you become the person sitting next to you today.
Be more careful where you sit.
(Laughter)
What's happening on this stuff is it was really expensive to begin with.
It was like long distance calls.
But the cost of this is dropping 50 percent faster than Moore's Law.
The first $200 full genome was announced yesterday by Veritas.
And so as you're looking at these systems,
it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, and then it does.
So let me just give you the map view of this stuff.
This is a big discovery.
There's 23 chromosomes. Cool.
Let's now start using a telescope version, but instead of using a telescope,
let's use a microscope to zoom in
on the inferior of those chromosomes,
which is the Y chromosome.
It's a third the size of the X. It's recessive and mutant.
But hey, just a male.
And as you're looking at this stuff,
here's kind of a country view
at a 400 base pair resolution level,
and then you zoom in to 550 and then you zoom in to 850
and you can begin to identify more and more genes as you zoom in.
And then you zoom in to the state level
and you can begin to tell who's got leukemia,
how did they get leukemia, what kind of leukemia do they have,
what shifted from what place to what place?
And then you zoom in to the Google street view level.
So this is what happens if you have colorectal cancer
for a very specific patient on the letter-by-letter resolution.
So what we're doing in this stuff is we're gathering information
and just generating enormous amounts of information.
This is one of the largest databases on the planet,
and it's growing faster than we can build computers to store it.
You can create some incredible maps with this stuff.
you want to understand the plague
and why one plague is bubonic
and the other one is a different kind of plague
and the other one is a different kind of plague?
Well, here's a map of the plague.
Some are absolutely deadly to humans.
Some are not.
And oh, by the way, as you go to the bottom of this,
how does it compare to tuberculosis?
So this is the difference between tuberculosis and various kinds of plagues,
and you can play detective with this stuff,
because you can take a very specific kind of cholera
that affected Haiti
and you can look at which country it came from,
which region it came from,
and probably which soldier took that from that African country to Haiti.
Zoom out.
It's not just zooming in.
This is one of the coolest maps ever done by human beings.
So what they've done is they've taken all the genetic information they have
about all the species,
and they've put a tree of life on a single page
that you can zoom in and out of.
So this is what came first, how did it diversify, how did it branch,
how large is that genome, on a single page.
It's kind of the universe of life on Earth,
and it's being constantly updated and completed.
And so as you're looking at this stuff,
the really important changes, the old biology used to be reactive.
You used to have a lot of biologists that had microscopes
and they had magnifying glasses and they were out observing animals.
The new biology is proactive.
You don't just observe stuff, you make stuff.
And that's a really big change,
because it allows us to do things like this.
And I know you're really excited by this picture.
It only two us four years and 40 million dollars
to be able to take this picture.
(Laughter)
And what we did
is we took the full gene code out of a cell,
not a gene, not two genes, the full gene code out of a cell,
built a completely new gene code,
inserted it into the cell,
figured out how a way to have the cell execute that code,
and built a completely new species.
So this is the world's first synthetic life form.
And so what do you do with this stuff?
Well, this stuff is going to change the world.
Let me give you three short-term trends
in terms of how it's going to change the world.
The first is we're going to see a new industrial revolution,
and I actually mean that literally.
So in the same way as Switzerland and Germany and Britain
changed the world with machines like the one you see in this lobby,
created power,
in the same way CERN is changing the world
using new instruments
and our concept of the Universe,
programmable life forms are also going to change the world,
because once you can program cells in the same way as you program
your computer chip,
then you can make almost anything.
So your computer chip can produce photographs,
it can produce music, it can produce film,
can produce love letters, can produce spreadsheets.
It's just ones and zeroes flying through there.
If you can flow ATCGs through cells,
then this software makes its own hardware,
which means it scales very quickly.
No matter what happens,
if you leave your cell phone by your bedside,
you will not have a billion cell phones in the morning,
but if you do that with living organisms,
you can make this stuff at a very large scale.
One of the things you can do is you can start producing
close to carbon-neutral fuels
on a commercial scale by 2025,
which we're doing with Exxon.
But you can also substitute for agricultural lands.
Instead of having a hundred hectares to make oils or to make proteins,
you can make it in these vats
at 10 or a hundred times the productivity per hectare.
Or you can store information, or you can make all the world's vaccines
in those three vats.
Or you can store most of the information that's held at CERN in those three vats.
DNA is a really powerful information storage device.
Second turn:
you're beginning to see the rise of theoretical biology.
So medical school departments are one of the most conservative places on Earth.
The way they teach anatomy
is similar to the way they taught anatomy a hundred years ago.
"Welcome, student. Here's your cadaver."
One of the things medical schools are not good at is creating new departments,
which is why this is so unusual.
So Isaac Kohane has now created a department based on informatics, data,
knowledge, at Harvard Medical School.
And in a sense, what's beginning to happen
is biology is beginning to get enough data
that it can begin to follow the steps of physics,
which used to be observational physics and experimental physics,
and then started create theoretical biology.
Well that's what you're beginning to see
because you have so many medical records,
because you have so much data about people,
because you've got their genomes, because you've got their ??,
because you've got their microbiomes.
And as this information stacks,
you can begin to make predictions.
The third thing that's happening is this is coming to the consumer.
So you too can get your genes sequenced.
And this is beginning to create companies like 23andMe,
and companies like 23andMe are going to be giving you
more and more and more data, not just about your relatives
but about you and your body and that's going to compare stuff
and that's going to compare stuff across time,
and these are going to become very large databases.
But it's also beginning to affect a series of other businesses
in unexpected ways.
Normally, when you advertise something, you really don't want the consumer
to take your advertisement into the bathroom to pee on,
unless of course if you're IKEA,
because when you rip this out of a magazine and you pee on it,
it'll turn blue if you're pregnant.
(Laughter)
And they'll give you a discount on your crib.
(Laughter)
Right? So when I say consumer empowerment,
and this is spreading beyond biotech,
I actually really mean that.
We're now beginning to provide at synthetic genomics
desktop printers
that allow you to design a cell,
print a cell,
execute the program on the cell.
We can now print vaccines real time
as an airplane takes off before it lands.
We're shipping 78 of these machines this year.
This is not theoretical biology. This is printing biology.
Let me talk about two long-term trends
that are coming at you over a longer time period.
The first one is we're starting to redesign species.
And you've heard about that, right?
We're redesigning trees. We're redesigning flowers.
We're redesigning yogurt,
cheese, whatever else you want.
And that of course brings up the interesting question,
how and when should we redesign humans?
And a lot of us think,
"Oh no, we never want to redesign humans."
Unless, of course, if your child has a Huntington's gene
and is condemned to death,
or, unless if you're passing on a cystic fibrosis gene,
in which case, you don't just want to redesign yourself,
you want to redesign your children and their children.
And these are complicated debates and they're going to happen in real time.
I'll give you one current example.
One of those debates going on at the national academies today
is you have the power to put a gene drive into mosquitos
so that you will kill all the malaria-carrying mosquitos.
Now, some people say
that's going to affect the environment in an extreme way, don't do it.
Other people say, you know, this is one of the things
that's killing millions of people yearly.
Who are you to tell me that I can't save the kids in my country?
And why is this debate so complicated?
Because as soon as you let this loose in Brazil
or in southern Florida, mosquitos don't respect walls.
You're making a decision for the world
when you put a gene drive into the air.
This wonderful man won a Nobel Prize,
and after winning the Nobel Prize,
he's been worrying about, how did life get started on this planet
and how likely is it that it's in other places?
So what he's been doing he's been going around to this graduate students
and saying to his graduate students,
build me life but don't use any modern chemicals or instruments.
Build me stuff that was here three billion years ago.
You can't use lasers. You can't use this. You can't use that.
He gave me a vial of what he's built about three weeks ago.
What has he built?
He's built basically what looked like soap bubbles that are made out of lipids.
He's built a precursor of RNA.
He's had the precursor of the RNA be absorbed by the cell,
and then he's had the cells divide.
We may not be that far,
call it a decade, maybe two decades,
from generating life from scratch
out of proto-communities.
Second long-term trend:
we've been living and are living through the digital age,
we're starting to live through the age of the genome,
and biology and CRISPR and synthetic biology,
and all of that is going to merge into the age of the brain.
So we're getting to the point where we can rebuild most of our body parts
in the same way as if you break a bone or burn your skin, it regrows,
we're beginning to learn how to regrow our tracheas
and how to regrow our bladders.
Both of those have been implanted in humans.
?? is working on 32 different organs.
But the core is going to be this,
because this is you And the rest is just packaging.
Nobody's going to live beyond 120, 130, 140 years
unless if we fix this.
And that's the most interesting challenge.
That's the next frontier, along with how common is life in the Universe,
where did we come from,
and questions like that.
Let me end this with an apocryphal quote from Einstein.
[You can live as if everything is a miracle,
or you can live as if nothing is a miracle.]
It's your choice.
You can focus on the bad, you can focus on the scary,
and certainly there's a lot of scary out there,
but you use 10 percent of your brain to focus on that, or maybe 20 percent,
or maybe 30 percent,
but just remember,
we really are living in an age of miracle and wonder.
We're lucky to be alive today. We're lucky to see this stuff.
We're lucky to be able to interact with folks like the folks
who are building all the stuff in this room.
So thank you to all of you for all you do.
(Applause)