Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jamie Metzl Hacking Darwin 20240713

Welcome you to this global event celebrating the release of the highly revised paperback which means if youve got the hardback by this one too because youre going to want to know whats been changed. Its the addition of jamie metzls highly acclaimed and bestselling book hacking darwin genetic engineering and the future. Until recently a successful book launch involved people and some bad wine perhaps. But now you can eat your favorite food from your refrigerator, your beverage of choice and so this is a lot better and yes, by the way, this is also being carried by cspan welcome everybody from cspan as well. These are unprecedented times and they are unsettling times but theres also some promise in these times if we get our act together. As cosponsors of this great event, this is a time when you can move things. A classic moment in history where things can be shaped for ill or good. We at the Atlantic Council are focused on the good. We have found in our four weeks of telework that its not really social distance, its geographic distance. We galvanized our Global Community and created more social interaction and closeness even at this geographic distance cause we are all galvanized by our times. We are a community of very big thinkers and one of the biggest thinkers of them all is the person that we come to celebrate tonight and join in global conversation. We at the Atlantic Council are concerned with covid19 for sure but we are looking at it for the prism of our mission which is working with friends and allies to shape the future, looking at major power competition, looking at the contest between democracy and auto accident autocracy, looking at the future of the global system, looking importantly climate change, migration, resilience factors and how do we Harness Technology for good . Thats a huge import for the Atlantic Council chart with our newly launched tech center and in addition to getting an Atlantic Council senior fellow and jamie metzl has a lot of titles but the Atlantic Council senior fellow, hes done a few other things as well. Hes a leading technology and healthcare futurist and geopolitical expert. A Science Fiction novelist, faculty member of Singularity Universitys exponential medicine and a member of the human genome project consortium. Last year, he was appointed to the World Health Organizations Expert Advisory Committee onhuman genome editing. Jamie previously served in the Us National Security council, state department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the United Nations incambodia. Times i think is done so many things there must be three or four of them i try to keep up with them, bicycle riding and other things and this hasnt worked for me. Hes also regular commentator on the nn and other major media. Hacking darwin is jamies fifth book and since it came back in hardback the reviews have been stellar. And the r says that jamie metzl writes with great clarity and a sense of urgency that we should all take to heart. Nature says that jamie metzl has a knack for scientific and moral complexities and for seeingthe big picture. Cnn says quote, if you could only read one book on the future of our species, if you can read five books, read all of jamies books. You get the point. If you havent already read hacking darwin, you should and if you dont want to read it, at least by. But this is my bit for you, you have a deal right now that youre not going to get another time so this is a little bit like telemarketing here you go , i dont get a cut of this, i want you to know this. Source books is making hacking darwin available today only for 4. 95, a third of the regular price. 4. 95. Before asking jamie to speak i want to tell you just a little bit about the flow of events and introduce you to the other special guests. After jamie speaks for 10 minutes he will invite George Church to do the same. As many of you know, george is one of the worlds greatest rightists. We promise you as backdrop is not live, it is a safe backdrop. Georges professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and professor of Health Sciences and technology at harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. Director of the Us Department of Technology Center and the director of the National Institutes of center of x excellence in genomic scientists and he leads a Synthetic Biology of licenses where he oversees the directed evolution of molecules , polymers and whole genomes to create new tools with applications in Regenerative Medicine and bio production of chemicals. In 1984, he developed the first direct genome sequencing method resulted in the first genome sequence. He helped initiate the human genome project in 1984 and the personal genome project in 2005. George, its just a delight tab with us. After george, debora spar will share her reflections on what shes heard and asked the first question for jamie and george to answer. Deborah is another superstar, the former president of Barnard University shes president at Harvard Business school and senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online read her new book work make merry love, how machines shape our human destiny will be released in august. After that, daniel kraft will then moderate our question and answer session based on questions raised by you on that think spot site. Anyone can pose a question and the ones that are up voted the most will rise to the top of thelist. We encourage you to pose questions and up folk questionsthroughout the session. Daniel, another star is a stanford and harvard trained scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and innovator. The chair of medicine for Singularity University and founder and chair of exponential medicine, a program that explores convergence, rapidly developing technologies and the potential inbiomedicine and healthcare. With that, what an incredible lineup. Start thinking about your questions, get them going. Im passing to jamie to kick us off. Thank you so much fred, its just an incredible honor for me to be here. You mentioned an allstar team. This is my dream team, i dont know if its lebron and whoever but if i could just imagine a team of choosing from everyone on earth fly would want to have joining me and in event like this, just share insights, it would just be the people on this call now so thank you to you fred, george, deborah and daniel and thank you also to are really great cohost, think spot Atlantic Council, Singularity University and my publisher sourcebooks who is, i dont know any authors that say i love my publisher but i happen to be one. And were all coming together at this crazy moment. I think were all feeling this sense of this, this sense of mourning because there are very real and meaningful people and things that are being lost here in new york city at the center of it. But theres a lot of pain thats going around. But i think were also feeling as fred said that theres a new world on so many levels thats being created. Trends that were already happening are accelerating and in just really profound and incredible ways and new communities are forming and its the day i think for everybody it feels like its hard to differentiate days because many things are happening. New types of collaborations are happening and i always tell people this is it like a snow day or a big storm where we waited out and this snow gets plowed and the sun comes out and then we go back. This is really a fundamental change in my view and how we live and in our history and the history of everything, not just our science but our communities, our society and really our world. And as fred said i have one leg in the world of National Security and geopolitics. A lot of people reference this year to 2001, the year of the 9 11 attacks but for me this feels more like a 1941 year where there was a huge battle ahead and it wasnt clear whether that battle was even going to be one but even in those early dark days of the war, there were people, leaders like fdr and churchill who came together and said we have to know what were fighting for and then we can organize around building that world. We may not have an fdr or a churchill right now in our political world, and something thats exciting about this moment is it feels like we are dividing up that task. We are all coming together and everybody is a little piece of fdr and were doing things that our governments and other times may have done but improvising support, providing hope and encouragement. Thats something thats really incredible because yes, we have a virus that is supercharged by globalization. Its getting around the world because there are so many humans and we are so mobile but the networks we are using to address this crisis are also moving at the speed of globalization and thats something thats incredible. Communities like this and many others, daniel is a hobbit for a whole medical community and everybody is forming and reforming communities that are looking at new ways to solve these kinds of problems and the scientific community. George is a central hub of that period of the economic cysts and others from around the world are coming together and saying how can we Work Together to solve this problem. And what were seeing is an intersection of the genetics revolution and all the tools of the genetics revolution and this crisis so let me say a few words about each of that. The first, the genetics revolution. Among the billions of species that live and have ever lived , our one species suddenly has this ability to read, write and hack the codes of life and its incredible and we think of it. Just one species and its almost a godlike power. These are the powers weve imagined our gods having through our recorded history and it suddenly are starting to have those powers but spiderman or spidermans uncle, with that power comes responsibility and there comes a responsibility to make sure that our most cherished ethics and values are guiding that most powerful technology and thats what my book and this whole conversation is about. So the gen x revolution is racing forward and i focus on three primary areas. One is in this transition from our world of generalized to precision and then predicted Healthcare Health and life. Humans, we are a map massive negative data set but we are not an infinite data set and that means it comes from a time when the sophistication of our tools matches and perhaps exceeds the sophistication and complexity of our biology so we are developing these incredible capabilities that are going to move us not just to treating people individually based on their biology on knowing a lot about people either from their moment just after birth or even before birth and thats going to change the way we think about healthcare but not just healthcare. Right now we think about genetics and we tend to think about itin the context of healthcare because thats our primary interaction. We dont have a disease genome, we dont have a healthcare genome, we have a human genome so our genes are the blueprint for what we have, at least the potential, the range of possibility so were going to be experiencing addicts outside of the realm of healthcare which is already happening through consumer genetics is going to get much bigger and its going to touch cover more challenging issues like identity. Like parenting and then perhaps the most profound application or among the most profound will be how these technologies change not just the way we make babies and will shift towards more adoption of ivf and embryo screening and deborahs amazing book is coming out in august talking about this but also it will change ultimately and over time the nature of the babies we make quick. Since the hardcover version packing darwin came out last april i had a preliminary reference to the first babies were born. But since then we know there are at least three of these babies, there could be more. We just dont know. Then after that experience the World Health Organization created its International Advisory committee. I was honored to be chosen as one of the 18 members of that commission. We are working extremely hard to try to suggest what might be a framework. Think about how we can apply these very powerful technologies in ways that maximize benefits and minimize harms and im honored other members of the commission are here in this meeting. I was honored to be invited to go and speak at the vatican about these issues. We are also people from the vatican who are participating. My view is this is about the future of our species and we need a table thats big enough for everybody, from religious conservatives of various backgrounds, diy bio hackers, were all human and were all in this together. These technologies, this trend is intersecting with the coronavirus crisis. Weve had these kinds of pandemics in the past. Weve never been able to sequence in two weeks. Weve never had lets get that digital readout of the code and understand the virus that were facing. We have never had computer models that could allow us to test different responses. Weve never been able to develop testing as quick despite the monumental screwup here in this country, weve never been able to develop diagnostic tests as quickly. Now with the rapid sequencing, the kind of sequencing that george indicated we are able to see, watch this viral genome mutate as a spread around the world. George and robert green to us by friend whos also on this call are working to bring together the bio banks around the world to say, to try to figure out our other patterns, genetic pattes we can use to understand what kind of people may be prone, may have increased resistance to this kind of viral infection, or may do a kinds of are at greater risk and we could make smart decisions that once we had the kind of knowledge developing vaccines. There are people who are saying made we can do it in a year. Maybe some are saying two years. I was talking with a very senior very smart scientist in los angeles just the other day who has been working on this for a long time and said he didnt know if we could ever achieve Georges Georges on this call and george is a scientist of the possible so i will ask him what he thinks. And then developing surveillance systems, not just for this pathogen but other pathogens. All these tools are essential tools and we wouldnt have been but for the incredible science that we have. This cites comes with very, very significant ethical challenges. Like every technology it could be abused and so the onus is on us to try to figure out how to optimize the benefits and minimize the harm. That will be hard enough if we were living in some kind of at mistretta world where we could just make the smartest decisions possible but we live in a world and i write about this in a book, is defined by politics, by the political context in which we live. Certainly we have seen that in the political failures, the failure of china especially in the first three weeks of this outbreak to get on top of this crisis. The failure of the United States to test, to adequate information that could be provided to the american people, the failure, i would say the failure of the World Health Organization but the failure of all of us over decades to build a World Health Organization that would resource and empower and has a mandate to do the job the problem every human on earth would want it to do. And then the site exists within the context of global power structure and big power competition between the United States, china and others. Everybody, certainly everybody in this meeting but i think everybody around the world is getting maybe and a way that we havent really gotten since sputnik, this understanding science is absolutely, its not just something for professors here its something for everybody. Everybody needs to understand the science. Not just so we can understand the world around us and make sense of things or begin to make sense of things but so that we can make smart decisions, so we can protect the people who we love. Thats the origin of hacking darwin. 23 years ago i was was working on the National Security council and my then boss and no good friend who is also on this call, richard clarke, he was telling everyone who would listen fighting all kinds of control fight say we have to focus on terrorism. But people say thats not important, thats just one little thing. Tragically when 9 11 happened is memo was on president bushs george w. Bush his desk. Dick always used to say that you really be effective where to look around the corners, try to see whats coming. That means this conversation definitely we have to get through this crisis but we have to say what other other big existential threats were facing . Its not just this virus, its not just coronavirus, not even deadly pathogens. Its a whole suite of things that pose potential harm and we are not organized to address them. In part because we organize ourselves around states and around the International Organizations that are funded and in many ways controlled by states and not empowered to do what needs to be done. What the book is trying to do is pull all of those pieces together in a package for everybody. Im a Science Fiction writer so wanted a science book to feel like its the story because this is the greatest of all time, the story of the past, present, and future of our species. But in this revised paperback theres the full story of the first three crispr babies. Theres more on deadly pathogens. But to understand, my feeling is theres kind of a package of things people need to understand in order to really get what we are facing. There are a lot of good books in each of these categories that help this is one. But also includes our readers guide because people at home i hope will read the book and talk about over dinner. I have spoken about this to a Senior Scientist and there was an eighth grader at the Hebrew Academy integers and everybody got it. Everybody gets that these issues are human issues. Theres a political guide because we have to be asking our elected officials and our government officials what are they doing. As an author we write a book. Once you deliver it, it becomes everybody else everybody else owns it. I dont owned anymore but i really hope what the digital equivalent is a a people markig up a book and ripping at pages and whatever it is i hope people will use this. As fred said, sourcebooks just for today, practically given away. I think the official price is 4. 75 and you can get it on think spot. The amazon price intimate that today Something Like 3. 50. Nobody in the history of the world other than john and through the people have ever made money off of writing books. You write books to share ideas and to bring people together around moments like this. Theres a lot of fear and we all have a tendency to hunker down in moments like this and to really just focus on the things went to that are right in front of us. The world is changing in such a huge and fundamental way that while we are doing that we really have to challenge ourselves to take a step back and see the big picture. Because thats whats going to allow us to develop, together identify what is our northstar and where are we heading and then can evaluate the decisions, those decisions we make along the way based on our goal of where we are hoping to head. If there is anybody who sees the big picture of the science and what sites has the potential to be, and the implications of that science, its my friend George Church and i have to say its such an honor for me to have all of my people who are speakers, but george is special. As i believe, i think most people believe he is among the greatest living scientists, at least on this planet. I cant speak for other planets. He is certainly among the most creative and forward thinking scientist because not everybody is trying to resuscitate the woolly mammoth. And people have said he is todays charles darwin, and just in you had any doubts the group appeared to look like him. He could be coincidence but you judge for yourself. So george, as we discussed, we would love for you to share your thoughts on how can these incredible tools in biology and genetics revolution in your view best used to address the Current Crisis and beyond . George, over to you. Thanks, jamie. This is truly an amazing time. I feel we need to embrace both the challenge and fight this but also to think about the Silver Lining. H really markable things coming up. For example, were seeing really remarkable things coming up. We are seeing lower and effectively of flu in addition to this or find one. So that those our commitment to having better preventative medicine in the future. We are seeing a spike in collaboration. We just did not see with so much for sars and ebola. Finally we got it right. Were really collaborating. We see it in increased booze just under fire. And diagnostics boost. Diagnostics, it couldve saved this 2 trillion. Weve been spending on the order of tens of millions of dollars per year. Just think of the boost we could get Going Forward as we do that proactively. Just on the topic of hacking darwin and jamie said Synthetic Biology is what this is. I think you need to think about Synthetic Biology in the broad term. It is engineering life in general. You can engineer like a doesnt have to be, doesnt have to involve dna or rna. Its very far from my ancestors. Its still a mashup of where part of nature but it is engineer. This includes things like therapies, vaccines, smart phone, zune that were on right now, adderall, ritalin, caffeine, cosmetics, gene therapy, many of these things can be considered enhanced. It doesnt mean they are bad, on the contrary most of them are what is allowing us to have the help that we have right now. I dont think its german night so much. Thats distracting. Its taken six decades to debug. Were seeing now in covid19 something that goes much faster. What are we doing about what you describe broadly and anything that is engineering of our life . My colleagues and i not just in my lab in companies and worldwide are on the order of great things, divided broadly into therapies in vaccines, in the things that are more diagnostic and social hacking. Lets start with the therapies and vaccine. Even though we know those may take 18 months to deliver, possibly more, this is very fast compared to most new drugs which take a decade but it still frustratingly slow for those of us who are locked down. In the therapy category are things like neutralizing antibodies. These were cut in a sars 2003 and three and now are being adapted. There are receptors. Like a soup that needs to make molecules that inhibits other viruses that can be adapted. Many of these have already been approved either for Clinical Trials or for use, so the reuse makes a faster path to those. For vaccines one of the things weve already got, 20 different vaccines in the pipeline, ingested into some of the volunteers. First of all my thanks to all medical volunteers and medical workers who are putting through the front line, they are getting injected either intentionally or through the patients. So lets all take a moment to thank them. But the vaccines are not tested, even though they are tested on related organisms, related viruses, there are phenomenon like antibodies that tend where it makes it possible for the virus to infect cells which he normally dont. At allows them to go to the imme system. We need to be cognizant of antibody vaccines and thinking about what can happen next and thinking about the next wave that can happen. This is not a highly mutable virus but all it takes is one mutation or one immune the problem to make us at risk, or the next coronavirus it came from nowhere. We are developing organ like systems for testing new therapies. Thats in the category of therapies in vaccines. It may take 18 months to deliver but some things we can do immediately and could eliminate the problem, more than just flatten the curve on the order of weeks or 18 months. I think have to do with the way we interact with ourselves and with each other in the environment. These include masks. Every time we see another person outside where it is getting close to the sixfoot limit we should have a mask on. We see politicians in the same room. They should all be wearing masks. Whenever we go to a Grocery Store everybody, we should be taking pictures of and documenting just how well we are queuing up, for example. So that is a challenge for all of us is to document the pictures, how well we are making progress on this. We are developing rapid home tests and rapid centralized test. Test. These are getting down on the order of a dollar or less protest and they can happen, some of them can happen in five minutes and some of them can handle more samples and more accurately, taking even variations, mutations that occur. And theres two things that we want to check, viruses and reaction. You really should go back to the workplace, you ideally would want the zero positive virus negative. Virus negativity, you want a a very sensitivities they could detect small number of viruses, one through ten, and zero positive you want to that very low false. In other words, you can get a zero positive look like antibodies to coronavirus, but theres a lot of common cold coronavirus involve. A third. You want to have very specific test. When you start hearing more and more into news about these zero positive tests, you need to keep that in mind. All of the above them all the vaccines and therapies and diagnostics have to be taken on a covertly contribute one of these cohorts was a first genome project which we been working on since 2005 and this is like wikipedia. This is your project. Anybody can participate. Anybody can see the data. Its not siloed and i think this is really the moment for that kind of project here we need to have diagnostics that are not just custom for the moment we have two struggle, like we lost a month in the trinity shuffling around, but even in other countries its not clear that they have a high enough sensitivity. But in any case we need something where we can be looking at advance at all the things that are causing as respiratory distress and the drug resistant and so forth. We need in addition to the custom, we need a more general one. Thats my list of what we can do and what we are doing in projects all over the world. Its wonderful to see it all been shared. We have one less thing which is even further off that is getting some attention that i need to mention, is that we have a way to make any organism resistant to all viruses by creating genome and it is not going to solve our problem in the next couple of weeks, but it is a very interesting thing that we can do with synthetic policy. So i think that i look forward to the conversation that is coming up very soon. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you both so much in giving us a tend to think about. To get things going by just trying to put all of this to get all of it and asking one question and then i will turn over to daniel. So jamie, i agree with a lot of what you say. So clearly were going through a moment of seismic change, clearly and what in the world needs to understand that the work that people of georgia to is crucial, sites very many to try to sport and try to understand the best we can. I agree of course that assisted reproductive technologies are part of whats driving this change. That the baby business is no longer needs. We are fundamentally changing conception and of life. However, i am less sanguine, then general but i particularly less sanguine about whats going to come out of this moment. You had a very lovely freie started out that people are taking over from governments, that lacking in fdr at the moment, people are providing hope, support and encouragement. Thats great. But theres other things that government usually provide, Insect Research funding and economic stability funds and infrastructure, i concern for an equity, concern for any qualities and fundamental rules. All of these technologies because theyre so pathbreaking need some kind of guidelines around them, some kind of Financial Support and some concern for who whos getting s and who is not, who surviving the coronavirus, and who is dying disproportionately. Where did the rules for this brave new world come from . Can we as people actually create them ourselves . Thats not happen 1921. Or do we need to rely on our political system to create the rules for the future thats about to befall us . Its a great, great question. I went hundred believe in government. We need a functioning government and we are now suffering and youre in the United States we are dying in large numbers because of a total systemic and systematic failure of our government. Its really a tragedy that the countries that are doing well, korea, taiwan and singapore to name three, all of the Top Public Health officials actually trained here because the United States used to be the Gold Standard for Public Health. And weve had more than four decades of almost an autoimmune response inside our system starting with when Ronald Reagan said government isnt the solution, government is the problem. If there ever was a time when we needed a functioning government here in the United States, its now. I wasnt at all suggesting we dont need government. I think we are having a crisis of governance on multiple levels, and if our government is failing us, at least our federal government in many ways we are losing incredible people are really Holding Things together at stoker agencies like the cbcf fta, it would be better if we had in fdr but we dont have it. And so we all need to step up to play a role that most people dont, most people just go on with the lies. They dont its up to them to prepare for some kind of hypothetical deadly outbreak, they think thats why i pay taxes. Somebody ought to be doing it. What were seeing here is the equivalent of you have Fire Department and you dont adequately fund them and you let the culture shutdown and you insult them and break them and its no big deal until theres a fire and binge of a big problem. We need governance. In the absence of the current government we need we need to come together to make that happen. The same is true on a global level. Its not coincidental theres a total mix match between the Global Nature of the problems we face and the way we are organized to face them, and thats why we havent been able to solve issues not just deadly pathogens which are the ultimate transnational agent, the climate change, destruction of our worle last two integers of states, the first two world wars show that follows a power model was inherently unstable, so some brilliant people like dean acheson and others articulated a vision of a different kind of world where we pooled our nationalism in certain ways and pooled our sovereignty identities as is happening in europe, but what we saw is the countries were not willing to give the International Organizations the ability to do the jobs that needed to be done and the International Organizations as weve seen have all kinds of shortcomings. So one of the things that you know that im working on now, i drafted on and put out in the world, now we have a Big Community in like 25 countries working on this, a declaration of global interdependence. Because we had seen this virus which is showing us how connected we are and what are we doing . Were putting up walls between our countries not just between the countries, now we have states in the United States that a barricading each other. Wouldnt it be better if we said hey, this is something, a virus that affects everybody. How can we Work Together to solve the problem . So i do think this is a transitional moment. Because if we dont come to this realization that governments matter and governance matters on every level, individuals alone cant do it. Having said that, i have been encouraged by what ive seen just in these last few weeks, so many new and incredible communities. Thanks, everybody. We live in an exceptional time, and exponential time. Ive never heard the word exponential used sometimes in the context of viral spread but also potential technology. The book hacking darwin, georges book hacking biology. I think if we think more saw downstream continues into how might we be hacking our future prevention diagnostics and response to both future pandemics and responding to those that might emerge . You seen examples where you could sequence the new coronavirus, help is like novae and three hours made a dna, turning it into a dna vaccine. Maybe if we could imagine what could be possible in the next few outlets if we hack pandemic response. George first. Yeah, so it is remarkable how fast we can reignite dna. Keep in mind that the real bottleneck is no longer reading and writing the dna. It is the testing to make sure that we dont jump ahead of safety and efficacy test. But i think weve got that lined up. But we cannot read and write in the order of a month and the safety testing take summer between 12 months and ten years. Just to go back briefly to the government. I agree government is not just government. The reason the costs on all these things have come down 10 million fold is largely due to innovation, which it probably wouldve come about whether it was capitalistic or governmentfunded or not. A lot of this was funded by industry, and i think that will happen again. We need both. We need Good Governance of our companies as well as our nation, and i think thats particularly clear in the questions asked. Thank you. And so bando, i would just add, and youre a great person to answer this question as well, daniel, because youre so thoughtful on this. But in addition to all of the progress that we are going to make it all the scientific tools that we need, and youre right, exponential is everywhere, but when we think about how long it took to go from the bronze age to the iron age and all those things that used to take thousands of years, we talk about crispr, the seminal paper came out in 2012. 2012. 2010 come sixers later the worlds first genome metadata babies are born. We are in a world science is moving at work speed. I want to talk a little bit not just about the signs what about the superstructure around the site. I talked about over institutions and actually put out a piece last week on this, on my website but why do we have a super empowered agency, may be a part of the u. N. , agency of existential threats or get some of the smartest people in the world, the top six or seven really fundamental threats that were facing. Certainly deadly pathogens would be one of them. Deadly pathogens have this which almost certainly is quoteunquote naturally occurring, but just a few years ago i keep in alberta created a synthetic version of horse box, because of smallpox probably now it is then for a few thousand dollars. This science is democratizing and theres all the good guys, 99. 999 are the good guys i could george, but there are bad actors could have access to these technologies and if you really wanted to be disruptive, now is a good example you can say this is a good strategy for doing it. Why dont we have a u. N. Agency that is empowered and resource . We say its your job, get the sixers have most existential threats to the world and human, and to develop a really smart, thoughtful, dynamic action plan for what we need to do and bring the world together. Had we done that for outbreaks, which a lot of people were saying we could come you could at least imagine how we would have response that would not allow everything to break down as is happening now, but just imagine rather than this virus there had been a Nuclear Detonation in two different cities. We would be having this exact same call. Lets say it was new york and e of the place, new york and i dont want to jinx anybody. We would be having this exact same call, like how can we live with his Nuclear Weapons that are in the hands of that guys, have these urban centers, they could be wiped out. Lets just say theres an ocean collapse and working to save our oceans. Imagine if we have an ecosystem collapse in inside of the oceas and huge percentage of human population who gets their nutrition from the sea no longer has, we would be having the same call and we have to say we cant, how do we solve this problem . It how do we think about the whole group of problems that we may face and have a longterm systemic approach for addressing them. Thanks. Ive got a lot of inbound questions. One is about the news assertions made by pundits, politicians and experts at the world will change of you know. Seems pretty extractor what are specific with which industries and human relationships will change in the aftermath of this pandemic . I will start with george. How do you think academics in the way we collaborate and to sites might change . Its already changed. You can see companies that normally would keep things proprietary our listing full details on websites on how to make competing products, whether its academic or some cases home and corporate, thats one thing. It could change back, its possible. I think the internet is becoming a much nicer place than it was, a little less polemic and ideological its still there but theres a lot of sort of 1999 niceness going on in the internet. But in the science part, we are going to, i think will have a real boost to the kind of surveillance i dont think we need the multinational thing that jamie we know what the big existential threats are. What we need is created, Sustainable Business models where we can give everybody excited about having something on the phone in addition to having six cameras on the phone, having a few sequencers on the phone as well. If thats affordable, and i agree with debora about equity. We need to have equitable distribution of these technologies and one of them is bring them down a million fold or more. But i think that is going to get a boost, and wouldnt it be great to have a wild weather map . People are fascinated with what the weather is. Wouldnt it be great to see on International Skill and a local skill, with the Drug Resistance are, whether you should send kids to daycare today or not. That is really, should be impacting our lives and its going to be hopefully a better cooperative pipeline between science and citizens, and citizens lives as well come just like were interested in the weather and gardening and other sciences. This is something that could really affect our life. Data donors, you getting the flu or coronavirus or a microphone on your cell phone could pick up a coronavirus cough. The way google maps for Infectious Disease or otherwise. Im curious, debora, given youve run universities how this might shape academia, how about Online Education Going Forward . Every university around the world was forced to confront the future much faster than without food. Theres a general sense for the past ten years that education would inevitably move more online, but weve all been forced to it in one week we moved, just in my institution, we moved when 1142 classes onln a week. Were learning what works and what doesnt work. I think we are learning that are many things you can do online that may be better than what you can do in the physical space, and were learning some things need the physical space. We will figure it out. I like your point about being data donors. I keep saying to my students and colleagues everybody should be taking notes right now. This moment will pass in a blur so we need to be really document what works and what doesnt work, how we make it better. When we move from this act we take the best parts of online and get it out there. So online gives you the ability to get access, we put some program up online on friday, and overnight we had 50,000 registrants. Extraordinary. The potential for education is back. We just need to figure out how to make it as good as possible. Can answer that just quickly . Its such an important one. I want to give one small example and then i want to kind of go big because when you have the name, made up name futurist in your title, you have to prove it every day. Its not like my dad was a doctor who just has the degree, or my mother also, in so when i see specific, i completely agree with the points that were made. Just my one example, so three weeks ago i i had a piece in cnn. Com, and editorial talking about several for virtualizing our lives. The point was we need to recreate the essence of the village that grandparents or greatgrandparents or whomever left. Its kind of virtual, emotional connectivity to compensate for our physical, social distancing. And then two days later so much ive never met reached out and we talked and she was starting a company doing Something Else and i said no, no, no, its a wrong thing. What we need to do is build a matching platform that connects retirees at home with skills, many of them socially isolate with kids sheltered at home in need of tutors. Eight days later we had a prototype, and then we have a site and its gone live and going out in the world and where people are signing up, and life is moving at speed. The big picture, i think this is a really huge rebound moment. I dont think allies are just going to s. N. A. P. Back. The way i see this, it started out as a government crisis in the sense the chinese system, if the chinese to support as it would have we wouldnt be a period of the World Health Organization was empowered to do the job we set out for it to be in 1940, we wouldnt wouldnt be. If the United States government and federal government and Trump Administration had done its job wouldnt be here in this way. So the governance crisis became health crisis. Now its becoming an economic crisis, and i think this crisis going to grow because life cant fully normalized until theres a vaccine. And then that governance, that economic crisis is becoming a series of the government crises around the world, kosovo was the first government to follow. There was a coup in hungary. Its extremely likely the last. Elections in november will be attacked because if youre a bad guy and lets call it putin and you got away with the last time and you think well, its not like you want the United States to play this role in the world, this is the moment. And then i think the government crises are going to morph into a potential geopolitical crisis and thats what i think we need to be really worried about. The United Kingdom had the same number of soldiers and ships and weapons at the 1956 as it did in the beginning, but in the middle of that year was the suez crisis. A change that it always been happen suddenly became clear, and so the game is open and again of national governments, but even the whole global power structure, so its hard to make these kind of massive predictions but ill do it anyway. I think this year 2020 is really the in of the postwar world. Historians look back and up 100 years from now, we had a postwar world, 2020, something new hopefully started to be created here we dont know what that is and thats why coming together to try to imagine it in together build it is so important. Great. I think we have a few minutes over but try take a couple more questions. How do you see the future of telemedicine evolving and how far personalize medicine based on our dna makeup . Can we imagine in the very near future, we would have her own digital twin second look at our genetic makeup and our risk for not just getting coronavirus but are any response. Might there be that have and not have. I very much agree with debora about we dont want to create have and have not and that requires i think innovation more than anything else. If were going to make digital versions of ourselves, we should do it we can do it in such a way that it is dirt cheap, in a certain sense. Anybody has any kind of access to smart phones, even if they have to borrow it from somebody next to them, can access worlds information and it could include these personal components. But there are other technologies even more equitably distributed which are transitively biological biology grows by itself. You have, for example, smallpox is something which is equitably disputed. Its one of the technologies that are put on earth has access to. Nobody has to pay even a penny to get a new smallpox drug or new smallpox vaccine because it is extinct. We need to use that as a lesson to where we need to be going with technologies in general. Somma will be easier than others. I hope thats where we are going with equitable distribution. And also there will be some, even though i should be championing personalize medicine and gene therapies having played a role in both, i think theres a growing need for generics. So there will be things that affect diseases that really impact a huge number people and they will be less expensive because the denominator is so much larger. The fix costs Clinical Trial is spread out over billions of people and these things include vaccines, aging reversal, all of aging, every way we die prematurely. If we could get some of those things that could impact everybody and get down to the price of generic or lower very quickly. I can sort imagine on the question of telemedicine, almost every come even the bottom billion have smart phones. They can be the lens to get disease, high your tweeting, moving, vital signs and also democratize, delivering of information, therapeutics. It might be you could reprogram your smart phone with digital diagnostic that can screen for particular viruses and went out the vaccine locally in a much more rapid manner, and we are seeing through this pandemic a bit of democratization of access to information and using it. Im hoping and have will be a bit of a Global Center for regular General Health but also responding early. Just look it over time. A few closing comments. I think the best we can do at this moment is not not lose the advantage of a good crisis. So we have a very good crisis here. Its truly global. I began less optimistic than jamie perhaps but willing to be convinced, and i think if we can get headway on any of these collaborative techniques and technologies that george are working on and daniel youre describing, and find out how to use our personal information to advance the greater good, then it will have been a crisis worth surviving. But we know a lot of folks getting on the bandwagon so that we make sure we get the good out of this crisis and not the very real evils that are working as well. George . Yes. This is a onceinalifetime thing, we hope. But what if . This is accelerating. It seems like the number of pandemics is increasing. What if the next coronavirus or other virus, so i hope we dont forget i hope our memory is so much better. This has finally gotten our attention. Its no longer about oh, we can just make up facts. Lets just be entertained by facts. Lets dribble a couple of dollars, scientist, because sometimes it entertaining. This is really a crisis not of tanks and chemical weapons and hydrogen bombs. This is a crisis of nature invading our space, and we are ill prepared for it. We could be for very inexpensively, just more creativity, we could be prepared for the next one which may not be a lifetime away. It may be two years away. It could be before we went in with this one next one comes. Thats what happened with the 1918 flu. The second wave was even more serious than the first one because their selection for it spread quickly through the because all the people in the military were only shipped back if he had a really serious disease, so it started spreading on that route. I hope that were paying attention, as was said earlier, taking notes. I think in this era now we have the ability of darwin hacked a response and we could argue the Silver Lining is some of the new innovations from Public Health to how we educate to, you know, even if many folks unfortunately have a lot mortality and morbidity, economic impact, the things that will emerge out of this way benefit us in better ways. I love the quote from apollo 13 when folks that might be disaster for nasa and the head of Johnson Space center said this might actually be nasas finest hour and it takes a new mindset and collected do that. Jamie, take us home as we move into this great new world. I wanted in on it even more hope with love and respect to debora but first i just wanted to thank george endeavor and daniel. Its such an honor for you guys to have you with me in this event, so thank you, thank you, thank you. And you are cohost. Heres what i feel hope. I hundred years ago there were 2 billion humans on earth and we had about a 20 literacy rate. That means any problem that we had them you had about 400 Million People who could contribute to solving it. Thats a lot of people. Now we have 7. 7 billion humans. We have an 85 literacy rate. Thats. 5 billion humans who cant have the potential and we are all network to come together to solve this problem so we are this horrible species and we have certainly destroy our planet but we are a magical species that can do great things that no other species perhaps can even imagine. So that gives me hope. And then just maybe a call to arms is probably the wrong word, but this is an all hands on deck moment for all of us, and this is touching everybody on earth. Everybody has a role to play from big to small, whether its george helping to find a vaccine, to find the cure, and dando, you bring together the great innovators, medical innovators and Health Innovators in the world to find new ways to innovate. Debora finding new ways for us to learn and build new communities. We are all going to be, everybody has a role and we have to do this together. And everybody, even, anybody who is sitting at home and i guess if youre watching this you are not things watching netflix but if you are then watching netflix, you are not appreciating nudges the magnitude of this moment but whats required of each of us so that, you mentioned finest hour, nasa referencing churchill. This is a terrible time but we can together make it our finest hour and thats why coming together in advance like these energetic ideas i think is so important, its why i thank you and all the participants for being part of this. Thanks, jamie. I just reminded how to get the new edition of your book. I thought youd never ask, daniel. So its available everywhere. The ebook, midnight tonight, its like a third offseason get anywhere. I just wherever books are, if you go to your local bookstore, please be careful, a mask, do all the things that george says but i would just order it if i would you. Great. With that, next to debora, thanks to george, thanks to jimmy. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors, and we will see you in the future. Thanks so much, daniel. Goodbye. We are showing some of the authors weve covered whose books discuss disease and pandemics. Heres how diseases transfer from animals to humans. This is like a drumbeat of disease outbreaks and small crisis. Theres another on the Arabian Peninsula. There is a virus that emerged that closely resembles the sars virus, belongs to the same family, coronavirus, the sars virus that really scared the disease experts back in 2003. This new sars like it virus out of the Arabian Peninsula has only killed one person, put another man in hospital in britain but scientists all over the world are watching it carefully. Why . Because they know that the next big one could look Something Like that. So as i say theres a drumbeat of these things. Those diseases that ive mentioned all have two things in common. They all come out of wildlife. A emerge from nonhuman, and among those that image in the all caused by viruses. Thats a particular profile of this scariest of the exemplar. The scientists have fancy name for it. As barbara mentioned, they call these animal infections the past and humans zoonoses. A virus can be of the forms of infectious bug. It can be a bacterium, could be a protozoan like the creatures the cause malaria. It could be a a fungus. It could be a warm. It could be something called a prion which causes mad cow disease. But usually its a virus. Viruses more than anything cause of these. And they pass from animals and humans. They dont always cause disease. Sometimes they become harmless passengers in humans. To watch the rest of this program and to find other books on pandemics visit our website tv. Org. Type pandemic and the word book in the search box at the top of the page. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending on where youre watching this and welcome to the hoover mutual policy virtual sister im bill whalen, the fellow in journalism and host of area 45 podcast and are goodfellows podcast. For more than a century the recitation has been collecting knowledge and generating ideas that support freedom and improve the human condition. Our work is printed in Public Policy initiative and the United States and around the world. Were excited built to connect virtually with you to showcase important work come out of the institution. These policy briefings are an opportunity for you to hear directly from some of our nations