Asked what they thought of todays news so i quit my job and i went about as far away as i could go and i moved to the country of cambodia and i spent a year and a half there reporting on events there and it was amazing. The country was emergingfor 30 years in the civil war and genocide. 24 people died of starvation and disease and what struck me while i was there was the human resilience. It was very noble experience. A lot of information, but just seeing peoples lives and how they bounce back, it changed the way i looked at journalism and what i wanted to do and when i came back, i wanted to write more about the theme of human resilience and i found in the United States one of the most exciting stories of human resilience are being written by technology and thats really what my book is about. Its a book about bioengineering im sure youve heard about and you know, i guess my presentation is less datadriven than some of this stuff but when i tried to do was put some of these things we are hearing about in the news into context and in these fields like ionics, regenerative medicine, engineering. Thats what i focused on in my book here. Its a little bionic vitruvian man here. Anyway, what all these things happen, and is we sort of reached a tipping point. And in the last century, some ofthe most talented engineers, we did incredible engineering. We did skyscrapers, we met detroit so to my argument and what ive seen is through the last 10 years of covering this for sciencemagazines like Mit Technology review and Scientific American and Popular Science is that the new frontier now , these are the most talented engineers are turning their insights inward into the human body and weve always tried to do that but now, many of the technologies we heard about here, Computing Technologies are allowing us to do things we could never do before. Reverse engineer the human body and mind at a level that would have been impossible. So thats what i tried to explore and these are trends weve heard a lot about and im a journalist so i went out and i tried to talk and find out if this was going on, what we are learning about our limits and how we might overcome them and how this was actually affecting peoples lives. So i think its pretty obvious that its going to be a tremendous area of growth in the next century. You guys are the ones who can figure out how to monetize it. In various different areas are coming along atdifferent paces but the first person that i wrote about , the first person i talked to sort of demonstrates one area where already theres progress that is being commercialized and that person was a man named hugh kerr and ill tell you a little bit about him. I like to tell stories. This guy, this was a great story of human resilience. This guy was not the best student in high school. He was a c and d student but he loved the rock climb. He was already as a teenager kind of a worldfamous rock climber. He been on some rock climbing magazine as a young prodigy and all he did in class was think about rockclimbing and one day he went hiking and not washington New Hampshire with his friends. They got to the top of the mountain, the wind shifted and theywere in the middle of a blizzard and went down the wrong way. And they wandered into the wilderness and got lost and they almost died. They were rescued on the brink of death and hugh had severe frostbite and both his legs were amputated below the knee. So the doctor told him hed never walk, he never run, he never climbed again and every night he would go to sleep and he would dream that he was running through the cornfields with his house with the hair running through , the wind running through his hair and then his legs were gone when you wake up and it was devastating. But soon he was tired of being in bed. He got out of bed and started climbing around and realized he could pull himself up on the refrigerator. He convinced his brothers he could rock climb again and on the rock wall he was even lighter than he was before so he began tinkering with his prosthetics. He made them evan feet long, little stumps that he could climb these areas that he couldnt climb before and soon he was even a better climber than you ever been before. He was worldfamous again and it was a story of this boy wonder that when hegot down , his prosthetics were no better than the tech at the time designed for civil war soldiers or pirates a couple hundred years ago. He began tinkering with them and enrolling in engineering and math classes. He became a straight a student and he got accepted into mit. Today hes one of the leading ionics engineers in the world. And what hes done is he has taken these technologies that im talking about that are driving this revolution, these new technologies and used them to make bionic limbs that are so similar to the real thing that when i went to visit him at mit, i couldnt tell he was wearing them. I was slipping and he was wearing fancy italian leather shoes and what he did is this is sort of what we will see more and more with greater resolution, but when you think about it, i wrote down this number. We have how many . 206 phones, and about 4000 tendons. He was able to take these variables and put them into a computer algorithm, and he put them on a computer chip, and then he built robotic parts that could emulate the real thing. Its a manageable number when you think about it, you know, 206 bones, 306 joints, however many different parts. But when you think about the advances in Computing Power and sensing power just in recent years, it suddenly becomes a manageable problem. And so he built robotic parts out of, you know, silicone and various things, and these, this device that hes made adjusts, you know, hundreds of times a second. And, you know, hes done tests on treadmills with oxygen and co2 and force plates to see, and it really does emulate the real thing. It feels so realistic that disabled people, when they try it out, they begin to cry because it feels so real. You have to hook it up to the nervous system if you want to, you know, do the real thing, but thats just an example of what we can do. Now, when you take that further, so and thats what i wanted to look at in my book, you know, all the different areas that we hear about have to do with reverse engineering and doing the same thing except on a much greater level. So, lets see, how many, how many neurons do we have . I think we have, like, 300 billion, i guess, and maybe 3 billion nucleotides in our genome. We dont have the power yet to reverse engineer that. But its amazing, but people are trying to do that to a certain extent, and its amazing how far we have come in some of these areas. So when you think about, well, genetic engineering is, thats one area. Theres some mutations that are caused by a single, you know, some conditions that are caused by a single mutation. And i looked at one of them. I mean, theres, theres a negative regulator, muscle growth called myostatin, and if you knock out that gene, you get bigger muscles. So there was somebody who was at the university of pennsylvania, hes moved to florida, named lee sweeney, and he made these things the press called them Arnold Schwarzenegger mice. They got really bigment so theyve been using this as a potential therapy for people with due chains muscular dystrophy whose muscles rip apart, but then, of course, gene copers got ahold of this dopers got ahold of this and, you know, meatheads are getting ripped. So lee sweeney, in addition to pushing this and trying to push things into trial, is also a member of the World Antidoping Authority. So thats an example of things well face, but when you hook at intelligence, some people you know, theres thousands of genes that can be involved and a combination with environment, and we dont necessarily have the computational power yet. Theres a company that has sequenced about a thousand people with high intelligence and have have been trying to get to the bottom of it. But theyre using supercomputers. But its only going to get easier as we, as these technologies improve. So thats one example of where we are in that. And then in terms of the brain, i mean, i looked at the most extreme example is trying to understand and decode imagined speech. So you can theres people who, it seems like the ultimate challenge to me, theres people who are locked in, have lou gehrigs disease and have lost their ability to speak. Theres a project that was funded by the u. S. Military, there was a guy at the Army Research office who was a Science Fiction fan when he was growing up, and he had always dreamed of a thought helmet. So he actually funded people, and one of the people, i forget, theres somebody here from Washington University, right . Yeah, eric, i wrote about him. Hes in the Mit Technology review this month, and i watched him do brain surgery. Him and a collaborator named ger win, they have discovered a neural signature of imagined speech. And what they found is that when we talk, our mind sends a signal to the motor cortex to tell the muscles of our, you know, articulators how to talk. But it also sends a copy to the auditory cortex thats an error correction mechanism so we know when somethings wrong. Amazingly enough, when we just imagine speaking, it still sends that signal there, and you can actually pick up that signal. So eric of Washington University and gerwin of Albany Wadsworth institute can actually tell if somebody is imagining reciting the gettysburg address or the Martin Luther king i have a dream speech. But they cant, you know, listen in on your thoughts and just decode it. Yet. [laughter] altogether. But you can imagine that once we have computational power to monitor 100 million, 300 million neurons, maybe Something Like that would be possible. Anyway, as you can imagine, theres all sorts of areas where theres potential growth in the future. And thats what i explored. And theres all sorts of ethical issues as well. You know, i asked somebody at beijing genomics institute, i said what do you think about, you know, should we really be able to tweak intelligence . And he said, well, you know, i think every participant should be able to have parent should be able to have their child be as intelligent as they want. And i thought, well, is there anything that would alarm you . He said, well, i could imagine a very aggressive tiger mom who wants to engineer her child with the perfect combination of intelligence and ruthlessness, and she gives him antisocial lack of empathy. So that was a little alarming to think about. [laughter] so i dont know, were going to have to grapple with these issues, and theres no easy answers. I asked the military scientists are these Good Technologies or bad technologies, and he said, it depends. Is a baseball bat a good thing or a bad thing . Its a good thing if we use it to play baseball with, its bad if we use it to beat somebody over the head. So these are issues that were going to have to deal with. In terms of commercialization, it just the it depends on, its just going to increase our level of specificity, you know . The kind of we rely on small molecule drugs now, and we systemically alter the molecules in all of our body. Were going to be able to get more and more specific as these technologies improve. I also wrote about a technology where theyre actually trying to stimulate neurons directly with electricity which is much more robust. But were a long ways away from this. So anyways, that is my talk. [laughter] happy to answer questions. [applause] thank you. [applause] did you guys, did anyone want to ask questions . Be or i have a question. What, in your lifetime, do you think oh, sorry. In your lifetime do you think we will have solved the most complex, dangerous brain cancers, glioblastomas . Yeah. Well, i dont know. I have seen many encouraging things. One thing thats going on you probably heard of is immune know therapy, and somebody was just telling me last night at argo National Laboratory theyre using supercomputers to look at cancer and look at some of the day the sets from veterans. And, you know, as we have big data, we can discover some of these things. I have been done to a place called md anderson in houston, and they set up this platform where theyre look at sort of the theres an interesting battle that goes on between different cancerous tumors and the immune system, you know . And i dont know if anyone has heard of these things called checkpoint inhibitors, theyre what save ised jimmy carters life. Basically, theres these switches in the immune system that can be turned on and off. And some cancers are able to flip a switch that turns off different components of the immune system. At md anderson, theyre learning to flip it back on. So in glioblastoma, im not sure what goes on in that. I mean, it seems a very effective way to fight cancer would be to harness the bodys own immune system. But i do not know specifically where they are on, in that. Thinking about how you suggested a mother might choose particular traits for her child, it sort of raises the nature versus nurture argument from a different perspective. But presumably, the child would still be limited by the genetic material that they had to work with. Right. Well, but, i mean, i guess the idea that bgis going by or people are talking about is if you understand the genetic code and what combination of nucleotides would predispose someone to superior intelligence, you could use the various Gene Editing Technologies that people are developing to rewrite the genome to give them that combination of jeeps, that genetic genes, that genetic code that would allow them to be the most intelligent. But, you know, i guess what im saying is theres so many variables involved, and its so complicated, its such a complex combination between different nucleotides and environment that i think were a long way from decoding exactly what will allow us to control intelligence. We just add a little complexity to that. We thought, as biologists, when the human genome project was complete, wed understand this. Turns out that, as we all most of you know, each gene codes ultimately for a pep tide or a protein. And so if you know how many genes you have, you should be able to match those to the number of peptides. Well, it turns out theres multiplication in the diversity from the genome. So just by gene editing wont get you that. The other complexity here is if you take two identical twins, humans some of you may be aware, their fingerprints are different. So even though they have exactly the same genome, their phenotype has been modified in their embryonic development. Let alone the nurture once theyre born. So simply thinking that if we can identify the gene, splice it, put something in and result in a final human being thats going to be, have those traits is far from the reality. Nature has levels of complexity. Im just giving you some examples that arent going to simply let us its not just one gene, one trait. Each when we think thats the case. So on the other hand, there are some, i mean, genetics is in some ways revolutionizing pharmaceuticals or certain companies. Theres, you know, regeneron is a company that has partnered with all sorts of academics when are looking and studying different populations that have rare mutations with a powerful effect. And also amgen has bought this company in iceland called decode which, you know, theyve tried to because the icelandic population is so homogeneous, theyve collected a lot of the dna from a lot of these individuals, and its easier to spot very powerful mutations that are associated with different diseases or that could predispose you. But, you know, usually its a combination of a lot of things. And, you know, like for instance, i think one of the reasons amgen bought decode was because they had found in you would orally patients in elderly patients a mutation that seemed to make it harder for hem to get alzheimers disease. And it didnt explain alzheimers disease, but apparently it made it harder for them to form the tangles that actually cause it. So if you could replicate that with a small molecule drug, you could presumably, you know, combat alzheimers. But you couldnt give somebody intelligence necessarily. Adam, as you went around the world and talked to people, did you notice a difference from an ethical perspective in sort of intellectual augmentation versus physical augmentation . I dont know. I i mean, it seems like ive read, there are some studies from i think scientific journals that many people in academic already try to intellectually augment themselves with, you know, ritalin or all sorts of stuff. And i dont know what its like in college now a nowadays, but [laughter] finish. [inaudible conversations] but i have actually, and, you know, i mean, you can see the same thing that happened with steroids is happening with some of these gene things like myostatin, you know . As soon as they get discovered in the scientific literature and theyre used to help the weakest among us, you know, steroids were originally used for musclewasting disease and survivors of the holocaust, you know, athletes start using them. And recently i wrote about somebody for businessweek, a guy at ucsan diego and the Salk Institute named james evans, and hes actually found a mutation that, hes found these receptors that if you tweak them, they can make they can allow a mouse to run twice as far as he normally would. Its like this fatburping fatburning switch. You administer this drug, the body starts to burp more glucose, and you delay the point at which the mouse hits the wall. And when he First Published a paper about a drug that did this in 2008, he gave a copy of reference sample to the World Antidoping Authority, and i think theyve found samples on the Tour De France within, like, three weeks, you know . But then the World Antidoping Authority was so alarmed that they put out a notice warning that it had been, that trials had been stopped because theyd been found to cause cancerous tumors in mice. So that helped a little bit. But i think [laughter] i still think theres been evidence that the soviet, the former soviet group job doping authorities have used this in some places. But recently every advance came out with evans came out with a new drug that supposedly doesnt is have these tumorcausing effects. And you can b