-
So let me with start with Roy Amara.
-
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 -- slow motion --
-
and the long-distance call.
-
Because, of course, you used
to get interrupted by operators
-
who'd 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.
-
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.
-
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 to image
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 that 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 were 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 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.
-
AATCAAG: 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.
-
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 note, 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.
-
What they've done is 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 change is
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.
-
(Laughter)
-
It only took 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 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,
-
can produce music, 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 100 hectares
to make oils or to make proteins,
-
you can make it in these vats
-
at 10 or 100 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
-
100 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.
-
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 physicists,
-
and then started creating
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:
-
you've got their genomes,
you've got their viromes,
-
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 it's going to compare stuff,
-
and it'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 produce,
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 the debates going on
at the National Academies today
-
is you have the power to put
a gene drive into mosquitoes
-
so that you will kill
all the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
-
Now, some people say,
-
"That's going to affect the environment
in an extreme way, don't do it."
-
Other people say,
-
"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 --
-
mosquitoes 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 is 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
-
or how to regrow our bladders.
-
Both of those have been
implanted in humans.
-
Tony Atala 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 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)