1 00:00:01,317 --> 00:00:03,452 So let me with start with Roy Amara. 2 00:00:03,452 --> 00:00:07,935 So Roy's argument is that most new technologies 3 00:00:07,935 --> 00:00:10,597 tend to be overestimated in their impact to begin with, 4 00:00:10,597 --> 00:00:13,200 and then they get underestimated in the long term because we get used to them. 5 00:00:13,200 --> 00:00:17,169 These really are days of miracle and wonder. 6 00:00:17,169 --> 00:00:20,453 You remember that wonderful song by Paul Simon? 7 00:00:20,453 --> 00:00:21,926 There were two lines in it. 8 00:00:21,926 --> 00:00:25,613 So what was it that was considered miraculous back then? 9 00:00:26,608 --> 00:00:32,132 Slowing down things, back then, and the long distance call. 10 00:00:32,323 --> 00:00:34,689 Because, of course, you used to get interrupted by operators 11 00:00:34,689 --> 00:00:37,762 who would tell you long distance calling, do you want to hang up? 12 00:00:37,762 --> 00:00:41,159 And now we think nothing of calling all over the world. 13 00:00:41,159 --> 00:00:43,812 Well, something similar may be happening 14 00:00:43,812 --> 00:00:45,884 with reading and programming life. 15 00:00:46,851 --> 00:00:49,300 But before I unpack that, 16 00:00:49,300 --> 00:00:52,610 let's just talk about telescopes. 17 00:00:53,004 --> 00:00:57,556 So telescopes were overestimated originally in their impact. 18 00:00:57,556 --> 00:01:00,281 This is one of Galileo's early models. 19 00:01:00,281 --> 00:01:04,695 People thought it was just going to ruin all religion. 20 00:01:07,019 --> 00:01:07,513 (Laughter) 21 00:01:07,513 --> 00:01:10,851 So we're not paying that much attention to telescopes. 22 00:01:10,851 --> 00:01:14,956 But of course telescopes launched 10 years ago, as you just heard, 23 00:01:14,956 --> 00:01:18,055 could take this Volkswagen, fly it to the Moon, 24 00:01:18,055 --> 00:01:24,091 and you could see the lights on that Volkswagen light up on the Moon. 25 00:01:24,895 --> 00:01:28,862 And that's the kind of resolution power that allowed you to see 26 00:01:28,862 --> 00:01:32,489 little specks of dust floating around distant suns. 27 00:01:32,489 --> 00:01:36,501 Imagine for a second that this was a sun a billion light years away 28 00:01:36,501 --> 00:01:39,765 and you had a little speck of dust that came in front of it. 29 00:01:39,765 --> 00:01:42,742 and that's what detecting an exoplanet is like. 30 00:01:43,507 --> 00:01:47,964 And the cool thing is the telescopes that are now being launched 31 00:01:47,964 --> 00:01:51,737 would allow you to see a single candle lit on the Moon, 32 00:01:52,501 --> 00:01:55,180 and if you separated it by one plate, 33 00:01:55,180 --> 00:01:58,334 you could see two candles separately at that distance. 34 00:01:59,355 --> 00:02:02,333 And that's the kind of resolution that you need 35 00:02:02,333 --> 00:02:05,945 to begin that little speck of dust as it comes around the sun 36 00:02:05,945 --> 00:02:09,311 and see if it has a blue-green signature. 37 00:02:09,311 --> 00:02:13,090 And if it does have a blue-green signature, 38 00:02:13,090 --> 00:02:13,824 it means that life is common in the Universe. 39 00:02:13,824 --> 00:02:16,385 The first time you ever see a blue-green signature 40 00:02:16,385 --> 00:02:18,583 on a distant planet, 41 00:02:18,583 --> 00:02:19,953 it means there's photosynthesis there, 42 00:02:19,953 --> 00:02:23,341 there's water there, 43 00:02:23,341 --> 00:02:24,225 and the chances you saw the only other planet 44 00:02:24,225 --> 00:02:27,307 with photosynthesis are about zero. 45 00:02:27,307 --> 00:02:29,837 And that's a calendar-changing event. 46 00:02:29,837 --> 00:02:32,184 There's a before and after we are alone in the Universe. 47 00:02:32,184 --> 00:02:35,062 Forget about the discovery of whatever continent. 48 00:02:36,958 --> 00:02:40,068 So as you're thinking about this, we're now beginning 49 00:02:40,068 --> 00:02:41,487 to be able to image most of the Universe, 50 00:02:41,487 --> 00:02:43,742 and that is a time of miracle and wonder. 51 00:02:43,742 --> 00:02:47,217 And we kind of take that for granted. 52 00:02:47,217 --> 00:02:49,572 Something similar is happening in life. 53 00:02:49,572 --> 00:02:52,757 So we're hearing about life in these little bits and pieces. 54 00:02:52,757 --> 00:02:55,241 We hear about CRISPR and we hear about this technology 55 00:02:55,241 --> 00:02:58,567 and we hear about this technology, but the bottom line on life 56 00:02:58,567 --> 00:03:01,105 is that life turns out to be a code. 57 00:03:02,107 --> 00:03:04,736 And life as code is a really important concept 58 00:03:04,736 --> 00:03:06,079 because it means, 59 00:03:06,079 --> 00:03:09,250 just in the same way as you can write a sentence 60 00:03:09,250 --> 00:03:13,385 in English or in French or Chinese, 61 00:03:13,385 --> 00:03:16,481 just in the same way as you can copy a sentence, 62 00:03:16,481 --> 00:03:18,769 just in the same way as you can edit a sentence, 63 00:03:18,769 --> 00:03:21,142 just in the same way as you can print a sentence, 64 00:03:21,142 --> 00:03:24,305 you're beginning to be able to do that with life. 65 00:03:25,460 --> 00:03:28,943 It means that we're beginning to learn how to read this language. 66 00:03:28,943 --> 00:03:32,957 And this, of course, is the language that is used by this orange. 67 00:03:32,957 --> 00:03:34,866 So how does this orange execute code? 68 00:03:34,866 --> 00:03:37,151 It doesn't do it in ones and zeroes like a computer does. 69 00:03:37,151 --> 00:03:39,222 It sits on a tree and one day it does, 70 00:03:39,222 --> 00:03:40,819 plop, 71 00:03:40,819 --> 00:03:43,641 and that means, execute. 72 00:03:43,641 --> 00:03:46,550 AACTAAG. Make me a little root. 73 00:03:47,057 --> 00:03:49,707 TCGACC. Make me a little stem. 74 00:03:49,950 --> 00:03:53,432 GAC. Make me some leaves. AGC. Make me some flowers. 75 00:03:53,432 --> 00:03:56,822 And then GCAA. Make me some more oranges. 76 00:03:57,056 --> 00:03:59,762 If I edit a sentence in English 77 00:03:59,762 --> 00:04:01,858 on a word processor, 78 00:04:01,858 --> 00:04:06,954 then what happens is you can go from this word to that word. 79 00:04:07,984 --> 00:04:10,510 If I edit something in this orange 80 00:04:10,510 --> 00:04:12,841 and put in GCAAC, 81 00:04:12,841 --> 00:04:16,484 using CRISPR or something else that you've heard of, 82 00:04:16,484 --> 00:04:19,180 then this orange becomes a lemon 83 00:04:19,180 --> 00:04:22,780 or it becomes a grapefruit or it becomes a tangerine. 84 00:04:23,325 --> 00:04:25,419 And if I edit one in a thousand letters, 85 00:04:25,419 --> 00:04:27,750 you become the person sitting next to you today. 86 00:04:27,750 --> 00:04:29,994 Be more careful where you sit. 87 00:04:29,994 --> 00:04:32,718 (Laughter) 88 00:04:33,203 --> 00:04:36,586 What's happening on this stuff is it was really expensive to begin with. 89 00:04:36,586 --> 00:04:38,518 It was like long distance calls. 90 00:04:38,518 --> 00:04:44,013 But the cost of this is dropping 50 percent faster than Moore's Law. 91 00:04:44,013 --> 00:04:48,494 The first $200 full genome was announced yesterday by Veritas. 92 00:04:48,494 --> 00:04:50,291 And so as you're looking at these systems, 93 00:04:50,291 --> 00:04:54,654 it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, and then it does. 94 00:04:54,654 --> 00:04:58,858 So let me just give you the map view of this stuff. 95 00:04:59,219 --> 00:05:01,801 This is a big discovery. 96 00:05:01,801 --> 00:05:04,460 There's 23 chromosomes. Cool. 97 00:05:05,065 --> 00:05:08,360 Let's now start using a telescope version, but instead of using a telescope, 98 00:05:08,360 --> 00:05:11,181 let's use a microscope to zoom in 99 00:05:11,181 --> 00:05:13,430 on the inferior of those chromosomes, 100 00:05:13,430 --> 00:05:16,032 which is the Y chromosome. 101 00:05:16,032 --> 00:05:20,204 It's a third the size of the X. It's recessive and mutant. 102 00:05:20,650 --> 00:05:23,587 But hey, just a male. 103 00:05:25,113 --> 00:05:27,218 And as you're looking at this stuff, 104 00:05:27,218 --> 00:05:30,851 here's kind of a country view 105 00:05:30,851 --> 00:05:33,030 at a 400 base pair resolution level, 106 00:05:33,030 --> 00:05:36,363 and then you zoom in to 550 and then you zoom in to 850 107 00:05:36,363 --> 00:05:40,520 and you can begin to identify more and more genes as you zoom in. 108 00:05:40,520 --> 00:05:43,102 And then you zoom in to the state level 109 00:05:43,102 --> 00:05:46,827 and you can begin to tell who's got leukemia, 110 00:05:47,702 --> 00:05:50,361 how did they get leukemia, what kind of leukemia do they have, 111 00:05:50,361 --> 00:05:53,371 what shifted from what place to what place? 112 00:05:53,371 --> 00:05:57,122 And then you zoom in to the Google street view level. 113 00:05:57,649 --> 00:06:00,164 So this is what happens if you have colorectal cancer 114 00:06:00,164 --> 00:06:05,284 for a very specific patient on the letter-by-letter resolution. 115 00:06:05,284 --> 00:06:09,282 So what we're doing in this stuff is we're gathering information 116 00:06:09,282 --> 00:06:13,590 and just generating enormous amounts of information. 117 00:06:13,590 --> 00:06:15,069 This is one of the largest databases on the planet, 118 00:06:15,069 --> 00:06:19,100 and it's growing faster than we can build computers to store it. 119 00:06:20,301 --> 00:06:23,324 You can create some incredible maps with this stuff. 120 00:06:23,586 --> 00:06:25,201 you want to understand the plague 121 00:06:25,201 --> 00:06:26,611 and why one plague is bubonic 122 00:06:26,611 --> 00:06:28,246 and the other one is a different kind of plague 123 00:06:28,246 --> 00:06:30,190 and the other one is a different kind of plague? 124 00:06:30,190 --> 00:06:32,596 Well, here's a map of the plague. 125 00:06:33,307 --> 00:06:34,965 Some are absolutely deadly to humans. 126 00:06:34,965 --> 00:06:36,660 Some are not. 127 00:06:36,891 --> 00:06:38,985 And oh, by the way, as you go to the bottom of this, 128 00:06:38,985 --> 00:06:41,392 how does it compare to tuberculosis? 129 00:06:41,963 --> 00:06:45,620 So this is the difference between tuberculosis and various kinds of plagues, 130 00:06:45,620 --> 00:06:47,973 and you can play detective with this stuff, 131 00:06:47,973 --> 00:06:50,216 because you can take a very specific kind of cholera 132 00:06:50,216 --> 00:06:51,798 that affected Haiti 133 00:06:51,798 --> 00:06:55,221 and you can look at which country it came from, 134 00:06:55,221 --> 00:06:57,364 which region it came from, 135 00:06:57,364 --> 00:07:02,238 and probably which soldier took that from that African country to Haiti. 136 00:07:05,356 --> 00:07:06,876 Zoom out. 137 00:07:06,876 --> 00:07:08,753 It's not just zooming in. 138 00:07:08,753 --> 00:07:12,661 This is one of the coolest maps ever done by human beings. 139 00:07:12,661 --> 00:07:15,221 So what they've done is they've taken all the genetic information they have 140 00:07:15,221 --> 00:07:17,031 about all the species, 141 00:07:17,031 --> 00:07:20,485 and they've put a tree of life on a single page 142 00:07:20,485 --> 00:07:22,612 that you can zoom in and out of. 143 00:07:22,612 --> 00:07:26,473 So this is what came first, how did it diversify, how did it branch, 144 00:07:26,473 --> 00:07:29,685 how large is that genome, on a single page. 145 00:07:29,881 --> 00:07:31,789 It's kind of the universe of life on Earth, 146 00:07:31,789 --> 00:07:35,138 and it's being constantly updated and completed. 147 00:07:35,348 --> 00:07:37,131 And so as you're looking at this stuff, 148 00:07:37,131 --> 00:07:40,671 the really important changes, the old biology used to be reactive. 149 00:07:40,671 --> 00:07:42,880 You used to have a lot of biologists that had microscopes 150 00:07:42,880 --> 00:07:46,945 and they had magnifying glasses and they were out observing animals. 151 00:07:46,945 --> 00:07:49,680 The new biology is proactive. 152 00:07:49,680 --> 00:07:53,350 You don't just observe stuff, you make stuff. 153 00:07:53,350 --> 00:07:55,021 And that's a really big change, 154 00:07:55,021 --> 00:07:58,269 because it allows us to do things like this. 155 00:07:58,766 --> 00:08:01,496 And I know you're really excited by this picture. 156 00:08:01,496 --> 00:08:04,583 It only two us four years and 40 million dollars 157 00:08:04,583 --> 00:08:06,363 to be able to take this picture. 158 00:08:06,363 --> 00:08:07,681 (Laughter) 159 00:08:07,681 --> 00:08:09,817 And what we did 160 00:08:09,817 --> 00:08:13,680 is we took the full gene code out of a cell, 161 00:08:13,680 --> 00:08:17,615 not a gene, not two genes, the full gene code out of a cell, 162 00:08:17,615 --> 00:08:21,127 built a completely new gene code, 163 00:08:21,127 --> 00:08:22,725 inserted it into the cell, 164 00:08:22,725 --> 00:08:25,579 figured out how a way to have the cell execute that code, 165 00:08:25,579 --> 00:08:28,426 and built a completely new species. 166 00:08:29,099 --> 00:08:32,624 So this is the world's first synthetic life form. 167 00:08:34,009 --> 00:08:36,827 And so what do you do with this stuff? 168 00:08:36,827 --> 00:08:39,584 Well, this stuff is going to change the world. 169 00:08:39,584 --> 00:08:41,576 Let me give you three short-term trends 170 00:08:41,576 --> 00:08:44,090 in terms of how it's going to change the world. 171 00:08:44,428 --> 00:08:48,206 The first is we're going to see a new industrial revolution, 172 00:08:48,206 --> 00:08:50,294 and I actually mean that literally. 173 00:08:50,294 --> 00:08:54,677 So in the same way as Switzerland and Germany and Britain 174 00:08:54,677 --> 00:08:59,625 changed the world with machines like the one you see in this lobby, 175 00:08:59,625 --> 00:09:01,536 created power, 176 00:09:01,536 --> 00:09:04,001 in the same way CERN is changing the world 177 00:09:04,001 --> 00:09:05,826 using new instruments 178 00:09:05,826 --> 00:09:08,283 and our concept of the Universe, 179 00:09:08,283 --> 00:09:11,970 programmable life forms are also going to change the world, 180 00:09:11,970 --> 00:09:16,452 because once you can program cells in the same way as you program 181 00:09:16,452 --> 00:09:17,959 your computer chip, 182 00:09:17,959 --> 00:09:20,552 then you can make almost anything. 183 00:09:20,552 --> 00:09:23,354 So your computer chip can produce photographs, 184 00:09:23,354 --> 00:09:25,638 it can produce music, it can produce film, 185 00:09:25,638 --> 00:09:27,522 can produce love letters, can produce spreadsheets. 186 00:09:27,522 --> 00:09:30,740 It's just ones and zeroes flying through there. 187 00:09:30,740 --> 00:09:34,219 If you can flow ATCGs through cells, 188 00:09:34,219 --> 00:09:37,478 then this software makes its own hardware, 189 00:09:37,478 --> 00:09:40,044 which means it scales very quickly. 190 00:09:40,694 --> 00:09:42,368 No matter what happens, 191 00:09:42,368 --> 00:09:44,258 if you leave your cell phone by your bedside, 192 00:09:44,258 --> 00:09:47,490 you will not have a billion cell phones in the morning, 193 00:09:47,490 --> 00:09:53,329 but if you do that with living organisms, 194 00:09:53,564 --> 00:09:57,597 you can make this stuff at a very large scale. 195 00:09:57,756 --> 00:10:00,477 One of the things you can do is you can start producing 196 00:10:00,477 --> 00:10:02,723 close to carbon-neutral fuels 197 00:10:02,723 --> 00:10:05,352 on a commercial scale by 2025, 198 00:10:05,352 --> 00:10:08,676 which we're doing with Exxon. 199 00:10:08,676 --> 00:10:11,185 But you can also substitute for agricultural lands. 200 00:10:11,185 --> 00:10:16,344 Instead of having a hundred hectares to make oils or to make proteins, 201 00:10:16,344 --> 00:10:17,961 you can make it in these vats 202 00:10:17,961 --> 00:10:21,370 at 10 or a hundred times the productivity per hectare. 203 00:10:21,679 --> 00:10:24,410 Or you can store information, or you can make all the world's vaccines 204 00:10:24,410 --> 00:10:26,347 in those three vats. 205 00:10:27,483 --> 00:10:31,432 Or you can store most of the information that's held at CERN in those three vats. 206 00:10:32,612 --> 00:10:36,386 DNA is a really powerful information storage device. 207 00:10:36,870 --> 00:10:38,654 Second turn: 208 00:10:38,654 --> 00:10:42,037 you're beginning to see the rise of theoretical biology. 209 00:10:42,463 --> 00:10:47,148 So medical school departments are one of the most conservative places on Earth. 210 00:10:47,148 --> 00:10:48,563 The way they teach anatomy 211 00:10:48,563 --> 00:10:51,761 is similar to the way they taught anatomy a hundred years ago. 212 00:10:51,761 --> 00:10:53,917 "Welcome, student. Here's your cadaver." 213 00:10:53,917 --> 00:10:57,735 One of the things medical schools are not good at is creating new departments, 214 00:10:57,735 --> 00:11:00,004 which is why this is so unusual. 215 00:11:00,004 --> 00:11:07,248 So Isaac Kohane has now created a department based on informatics, data, 216 00:11:07,248 --> 00:11:09,552 knowledge, at Harvard Medical School. 217 00:11:09,552 --> 00:11:11,581 And in a sense, what's beginning to happen 218 00:11:11,581 --> 00:11:14,045 is biology is beginning to get enough data 219 00:11:14,045 --> 00:11:17,199 that it can begin to follow the steps of physics, 220 00:11:17,199 --> 00:11:22,576 which used to be observational physics and experimental physics, 221 00:11:22,576 --> 00:11:24,666 and then started create theoretical biology. 222 00:11:24,666 --> 00:11:27,391 Well that's what you're beginning to see 223 00:11:27,391 --> 00:11:28,709 because you have so many medical records, 224 00:11:28,709 --> 00:11:30,168 because you have so much data about people, 225 00:11:30,168 --> 00:11:32,997 because you've got their genomes, because you've got their ??, 226 00:11:32,997 --> 00:11:34,721 because you've got their microbiomes. 227 00:11:34,721 --> 00:11:36,543 And as this information stacks, 228 00:11:36,543 --> 00:11:40,451 you can begin to make predictions. 229 00:11:40,451 --> 00:11:43,315 The third thing that's happening is this is coming to the consumer. 230 00:11:44,955 --> 00:11:49,873 So you too can get your genes sequenced. 231 00:11:49,873 --> 00:11:52,624 And this is beginning to create companies like 23andMe, 232 00:11:52,624 --> 00:11:55,110 and companies like 23andMe are going to be giving you 233 00:11:55,110 --> 00:11:57,960 more and more and more data, not just about your relatives 234 00:11:57,960 --> 00:12:01,138 but about you and your body and that's going to compare stuff 235 00:12:01,138 --> 00:12:02,842 and that's going to compare stuff across time, 236 00:12:02,842 --> 00:12:06,440 and these are going to become very large databases. 237 00:12:06,440 --> 00:12:09,240 But it's also beginning to affect a series of other businesses 238 00:12:09,240 --> 00:12:12,136 in unexpected ways. 239 00:12:12,136 --> 00:12:15,211 Normally, when you advertise something, you really don't want the consumer 240 00:12:15,211 --> 00:12:21,674 to take your advertisement into the bathroom to pee on, 241 00:12:22,200 --> 00:12:24,839 unless of course if you're IKEA, 242 00:12:24,839 --> 00:12:28,571 because when you rip this out of a magazine and you pee on it, 243 00:12:28,571 --> 00:12:31,910 it'll turn blue if you're pregnant. 244 00:12:32,100 --> 00:12:32,579 (Laughter) 245 00:12:32,579 --> 00:12:36,475 And they'll give you a discount on your crib. 246 00:12:36,475 --> 00:12:37,540 (Laughter) 247 00:12:37,540 --> 00:12:39,868 Right? So when I say consumer empowerment, 248 00:12:39,868 --> 00:12:42,095 and this is spreading beyond biotech, 249 00:12:42,095 --> 00:12:45,424 I actually really mean that. 250 00:12:46,519 --> 00:12:50,755 We're now beginning to provide at synthetic genomics 251 00:12:50,755 --> 00:12:53,506 desktop printers 252 00:12:53,506 --> 00:12:57,529 that allow you to design a cell, 253 00:12:57,529 --> 00:12:58,491 print a cell, 254 00:12:58,491 --> 00:13:00,929 execute the program on the cell. 255 00:13:00,929 --> 00:13:04,119 We can now print vaccines real time 256 00:13:04,119 --> 00:13:07,190 as an airplane takes off before it lands. 257 00:13:07,190 --> 00:13:12,315 We're shipping 78 of these machines this year. 258 00:13:12,315 --> 00:13:17,945 This is not theoretical biology. This is printing biology. 259 00:13:18,571 --> 00:13:21,589 Let me talk about two long-term trends 260 00:13:21,589 --> 00:13:25,558 that are coming at you over a longer time period. 261 00:13:25,897 --> 00:13:29,055 The first one is we're starting to redesign species. 262 00:13:29,055 --> 00:13:31,131 And you've heard about that, right? 263 00:13:31,131 --> 00:13:33,841 We're redesigning trees. We're redesigning flowers. 264 00:13:33,841 --> 00:13:35,964 We're redesigning yogurt, 265 00:13:35,964 --> 00:13:38,891 cheese, whatever else you want. 266 00:13:39,250 --> 00:13:42,622 And that of course brings up the interesting question, 267 00:13:42,622 --> 00:13:48,019 how and when should we redesign humans? 268 00:13:48,019 --> 00:13:52,429 And a lot of us think, 269 00:13:52,429 --> 00:13:53,044 "Oh no, we never want to redesign humans." 270 00:13:53,044 --> 00:13:55,083 Unless, of course, if your child has a Huntington's gene 271 00:13:55,083 --> 00:13:57,077 and is condemned to death, 272 00:13:57,419 --> 00:14:00,758 or, unless if you're passing on a cystic fibrosis gene, 273 00:14:00,758 --> 00:14:03,130 in which case, you don't just want to redesign yourself, 274 00:14:03,130 --> 00:14:05,694 you want to redesign your children and their children. 275 00:14:06,994 --> 00:14:11,149 And these are complicated debates and they're going to happen in real time. 276 00:14:11,149 --> 00:14:13,777 I'll give you one current example. 277 00:14:13,777 --> 00:14:17,573 One of those debates going on at the national academies today 278 00:14:17,573 --> 00:14:22,827 is you have the power to put a gene drive into mosquitos 279 00:14:22,827 --> 00:14:25,811 so that you will kill all the malaria-carrying mosquitos. 280 00:14:27,199 --> 00:14:31,301 Now, some people say 281 00:14:31,301 --> 00:14:35,007 that's going to affect the environment in an extreme way, don't do it. 282 00:14:35,240 --> 00:14:39,112 Other people say, you know, this is one of the things 283 00:14:39,112 --> 00:14:40,018 that's killing millions of people yearly. 284 00:14:40,018 --> 00:14:44,703 Who are you to tell me that I can't save the kids in my country? 285 00:14:45,430 --> 00:14:47,125 And why is this debate so complicated? 286 00:14:47,125 --> 00:14:49,965 Because as soon as you let this loose in Brazil 287 00:14:49,965 --> 00:14:53,171 or in southern Florida, mosquitos don't respect walls. 288 00:14:53,171 --> 00:14:55,541 You're making a decision for the world 289 00:14:55,541 --> 00:14:58,229 when you put a gene drive into the air. 290 00:15:02,415 --> 00:15:05,326 This wonderful man won a Nobel Prize, 291 00:15:05,326 --> 00:15:07,122 and after winning the Nobel Prize, 292 00:15:07,122 --> 00:15:11,988 he's been worrying about, how did life get started on this planet 293 00:15:11,988 --> 00:15:15,503 and how likely is it that it's in other places? 294 00:15:15,503 --> 00:15:18,768 So what he's been doing he's been going around to this graduate students 295 00:15:18,768 --> 00:15:20,864 and saying to his graduate students, 296 00:15:20,864 --> 00:15:24,531 build me life but don't use any modern chemicals or instruments. 297 00:15:24,531 --> 00:15:27,219 Build me stuff that was here three billion years ago. 298 00:15:27,219 --> 00:15:32,241 You can't use lasers. You can't use this. You can't use that. 299 00:15:32,568 --> 00:15:36,957 He gave me a vial of what he's built about three weeks ago. 300 00:15:36,957 --> 00:15:38,128 What has he built? 301 00:15:38,128 --> 00:15:41,531 He's built basically what looked like soap bubbles that are made out of lipids. 302 00:15:41,531 --> 00:15:45,410 He's built a precursor of RNA. 303 00:15:45,410 --> 00:15:50,188 He's had the precursor of the RNA be absorbed by the cell, 304 00:15:50,188 --> 00:15:53,457 and then he's had the cells divide. 305 00:15:54,301 --> 00:15:57,215 We may not be that far, 306 00:15:57,215 --> 00:16:00,949 call it a decade, maybe two decades, 307 00:16:00,949 --> 00:16:04,067 from generating life from scratch 308 00:16:04,579 --> 00:16:07,846 out of proto-communities. 309 00:16:07,846 --> 00:16:10,710 Second long-term trend: 310 00:16:10,710 --> 00:16:14,109 we've been living and are living through the digital age, 311 00:16:14,109 --> 00:16:16,240 we're starting to live through the age of the genome, 312 00:16:16,240 --> 00:16:21,220 and biology and CRISPR and synthetic biology, 313 00:16:21,220 --> 00:16:24,990 and all of that is going to merge into the age of the brain. 314 00:16:24,990 --> 00:16:28,994 So we're getting to the point where we can rebuild most of our body parts 315 00:16:28,994 --> 00:16:32,214 in the same way as if you break a bone or burn your skin, it regrows, 316 00:16:32,214 --> 00:16:35,530 we're beginning to learn how to regrow our tracheas 317 00:16:35,530 --> 00:16:37,997 and how to regrow our bladders. 318 00:16:37,997 --> 00:16:39,644 Both of those have been implanted in humans. 319 00:16:39,644 --> 00:16:43,219 ?? is working on 32 different organs. 320 00:16:43,219 --> 00:16:45,688 But the core is going to be this, 321 00:16:45,688 --> 00:16:49,258 because this is you And the rest is just packaging. 322 00:16:49,258 --> 00:16:53,797 Nobody's going to live beyond 120, 130, 140 years 323 00:16:53,797 --> 00:16:56,324 unless if we fix this. 324 00:16:56,324 --> 00:16:57,975 And that's the most interesting challenge. 325 00:16:57,975 --> 00:17:02,680 That's the next frontier, along with how common is life in the Universe, 326 00:17:02,680 --> 00:17:04,686 where did we come from, 327 00:17:04,686 --> 00:17:07,036 and questions like that. 328 00:17:08,294 --> 00:17:11,697 Let me end this with an apocryphal quote from Einstein. 329 00:17:11,697 --> 00:17:13,940 [You can live as if everything is a miracle, 330 00:17:13,940 --> 00:17:16,426 or you can live as if nothing is a miracle.] 331 00:17:16,426 --> 00:17:18,897 It's your choice. 332 00:17:18,897 --> 00:17:21,254 You can focus on the bad, you can focus on the scary, 333 00:17:21,254 --> 00:17:24,092 and certainly there's a lot of scary out there, 334 00:17:24,092 --> 00:17:28,768 but you use 10 percent of your brain to focus on that, or maybe 20 percent, 335 00:17:28,768 --> 00:17:30,618 or maybe 30 percent, 336 00:17:30,618 --> 00:17:33,028 but just remember, 337 00:17:33,028 --> 00:17:36,406 we really are living in an age of miracle and wonder. 338 00:17:36,406 --> 00:17:39,779 We're lucky to be alive today. We're lucky to see this stuff. 339 00:17:39,779 --> 00:17:42,042 We're lucky to be able to interact with folks like the folks 340 00:17:42,042 --> 00:17:45,002 who are building all the stuff in this room. 341 00:17:45,002 --> 00:17:49,066 So thank you to all of you for all you do. 342 00:17:49,066 --> 00:17:52,762 (Applause)