Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jamie Metzl Hacking Darwin 20240713 :

Privilege to 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. The addition of jamie metzls highly acclaimed and bestselling book hacking darwin. Until recently a successful book launch involved 100 people, maybe a few more some hors doeuvres. Some bad wine perhaps. But now you can eat your favorite food from your refrigerator. Your beverage of choice, so this is a lot better and yes, by the way, this is also being carried by cspan so welcome everybody from cspan. These are unprecedented times and they are unsettlingtimes 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 for 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. Weve galvanized our Global Community and weve created more social interaction and closeness even this geographic distance because we are all galvanized by our times. We are a community of very big thinkers and one of the biggest thinkers of the mall is a person that weve come to celebrate tonight and join in this global conversation. We at the Atlantic Council are concerned with covid19 for sure but were looking at it through 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 to democracy and hypocrisy, looking at the us role in the world. Looking at the future of the global system, looking importantly climate change, migration, resilience factors and finally how do we Harness Technology for good. Thats a huge importance for the Atlantic Council with our newly launched geotech center. In addition to being Atlantic Council senior fellow and as you all know, jamie metzl has a lot of titles but i consider this one to the most important. The Council Senior fellow, he got a few other things. Hes the leading technology and healthcare futurist. Geopolitical expert. A Science Fiction novelist. A faculty member of singularity universities exponential medicine and a member of the human genome project bright consortium. Last year, he was appointed to the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on human genome editing. Jamie previously served in the Us National Security council, state department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the United Nations in cambodia. Sometimes i think hes done so many things there must be three or four of them. I tried to keep upwith them , bicycle riding and other things and it just hasnt worked for me. Hes also a regular commentator on cnn and other major media packing darwin is jamies fifth book. And since it came back in hardback last year the reviews have been teller. And er says that quote, metzl writes with great clarity and a sense of urgency. That we should all take to heart. Nature says metzl as a knack for clarifying granule or scientific complexity and foreseeing the big picture. Cnn sends son jacob says quote, if you can only read one book on the future of our species. If you can read fivebooks, read all of jamies books. You get the point, if you havent already read packing darwin, you should. And if you dont want to read it, at least by it. This is my pick for you. You have a deal right now that youre not going to get another time so this is a little bit like telemarketing but here yougo. I do not get out of this, i want you to know this. Workbooks making packing 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 the event and introduce you to the otherspecial guests. After jamie speaks for about 10 minutes he will then invite your church to do the same. As many of you know, george is one of the worlds greatest scientists. We promised you a backdrop is not life. It is a safe backdrop. George is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and professor of Health Sciences and technology at harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of technology writ director of the Us Department of Energy Technology center and director of the National Institutes of Health Center of excellence in genomic science. He leads the symphonic, Synthetic Biology where he oversees the directed evolution of modules, column yours and all 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 which resulted in the first genome sequence. He helped initiate the genome project in 1984 and the personal genome project in 2005. George is just a delight to have you with us after george speaks devils bar were will share questions 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 now professor at Harvard Business School Senior associate of Harvard Business school online. Her new book , work made mary 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 the facebook site. Anyone can pose a question and the ones that are uploaded the most will rise to the top of the list. We encourage you to post questions and book questions throughout the session. Daniel is a stanford and harvard trained physician scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and innovator. The chair of Medicine Singularity University and the founder and chair of exponential medicine, a program that explores convergent rapidly developing technologies and the potential in biomedicine and healthcare. So with that, what an incredible lineup. Start thinking about your questions, get them going. Im passing jamie to kick us off. Class you so much fred. Its an incredible honor for me to be here. You mentioned allstar team, this is like my dream team. I know whether its lebron and then whomever but if i just could imagine a team from everyone on earth who i want to have joining me in an event like this to share insights, it would really just be the people on this call now so thank you you fred, george, deborah and daniel thank you all to our really great cohost. Thanks thought, Atlantic Council. Singularity university and my publisher sourcebooks is like i dont know any authors who say i love mypublisher. I happen to be one. And were all coming together at this crazy, moment and i think were all feeling this sense of sadness, the sense of morning because there are very real and meaningful people and things that are being lost. Im 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 its being created. Trends that were already having accelerating and just in really profound and incredible ways. New communities are forming area and its these days i think for everybody feels like its hard to differentiate days because so many things are happening. New types of collaborations are happening and i always tell people this isnt like a snow day or a big storm where we waited out and the snow gets plowed and everything, the sun comes out and melts the snow and wego back. This is a fundamental change in my view in how we live. In our history and the history of everything not just our science but our science, our unities, our societies and our world. And as fred said, i have one leg in the world of National Security geopolitics. And a lot of people referenced this year to 2001, the year of the 9 11 attacks. But for me this feels more like in 1941 year where there was a huge battle i had. And it wasnt clear whether that battle was even going to be one. But even in those really dark days of the war, there were people, leaders like fdr and churchill who came together and said we have to know what we are 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. But something thats exciting about this moment is it feels like we are dividing up that task. Were all coming together and everybody is a little piece of fdr are doing things that are governments and other times may have done like providing support, providing hope and encouragement and thats something that really is incredible because we have a virus that is supercharged by globalization. Its getting around the world because you are so many humans and were so mobile. But the networks that were using to address this crisis are also moving at the speed of globalization and thats something thats really incredible. Communities like this and many others. Daniel is a hub for all medical community. Everybody is forming and reforming communities are looking at new ways to solve these kinds of problems. And the scientific community. George is a central hub of that. The jnana cysts and others around the world who are coming together as they have to Work Together to solve this problem. What were seeing is an intersection of the genetics revolution and the tools of the genetics revolution and this crisis so let me say a few words about each of those. First, the geneticsrevolution. Among the billions of species that live and have ever lived , our one species suddenly has this ability to read, write and hack thecode of life. Its incredible when 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 now suddenly were starting to have those powers or maybe spidermans uncle, with that power from the great responsibility. They have a responsibility to make sure that our most cherished ethics and values, our guiding application of our most powerful technology. Thats what my book and this whole conversation is about. So the genetics revolution is raising forward and i focus on three primary areas. One is in this transition from our world of generalized precision and then print predictive healthcare and life. Humans, we are a mega massive data set but were not infinite data set and that means there will come a time when the sophistication of our tools matches and then perhaps exceeds the sophistication, the complexity of our biology so we are developing these incredible capabilities that are going to move us not just treating people individually based on their own biology but on knowing a lot about people either from their moment just after birth or even before birth thats going to change the way we think about healthcare but not just healthcare. Right now we think about genetics. We tend to think about it in the context of healthcare because thats our primary interaction. But we dont have a disease genome. We dont have a healthcare genome. We have a human genome sardines are in many ways the blueprint for what we have at least the potential that these arrange a possibility so were going to be experiencing genetics outside of the realm of healthcare which is already having through direct consumer genetics but its going to get much bigger and its going to touch a tougher more challenging issues like identity. 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 of that option of idea and embryo screening and gabbys amazing book is coming out in august talking about this. But also it will change ultimately and over time the nature of the babies meaning. So this is this very, very profound conversation and it feels like this is a conversation about science and without the science we wouldnt even be having a conversation. Ultimately, this is a conversation about ethics. Because all technology, no Technology Come with their own builtin value system up to us to infuse our values into a belief, the most significant application of those technologies. Since the hardcover version of hacking darwin cannot last april, i had a preliminary reference to the first genome edited crisper babies who were born. But since then we know that there are at least three of these genome edited babies. There could be more. We just dont know. Then after that experience, the World Health Organization created the international Advisory Committee on genome editing. I was honored to bes posing as one of 18 numbers of that commission. We are working extremely hard trying to suggestively what might be a framework. I about how we can apply these very powerful technologies in a way, in ways that maximize benefits and minimize harm and im honored that other members of the commissioner here on this , in this meeting. And i was honored to be invited to go and speak at the vatican about how these issues and we have also people from the back and are participating. And my view is that this is about the future of our species and we need a table thats big enough for everybody from religious conservatives of various backgrounds to the diy biomarkers andtranshumanists. Were all humans and were all in this together so these technologies, this trend of the genetics in revolution is intersecting with the coronavirus question. We had these kind of pandemics in the past. We would never have been able to sequence vital genomes with in two weeks. Weve never been able to have digital readout of the code and understand the virus that we were facing. Weve never had computer models that could allow us to test different responses. Hes never been able to develop testing as quick and decisive, asmonumental screw ups in the country. Weve never been able to do diagnostic tests this quickly and now with the rapid sequencing, the kind of sequencing george innovated, we are able to see and to watch this vital genome you take as it spreads around the world it is critically important for tracking it. Robert greene is my friend at Harvard Business school, Harvard Medical School and hes also on this call. Theyre working to bring together the biomass from around the world to say, to try to figure out are there patterns . Are there genetic patterns we can use to understand what kind of people maybe prone, may have increased resistance to this kind of viral infection. Or maybe what kinds of people are at greatest risk and we can make smart decisions around once we have that kind ofknowledge. Developingvaccines , there are these people who are saying maybe 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 the other day weve been working on this for a long time who says he didnt know if we could ever achieve this. George is on this call and george is the scientist of the possible. So we will ask him what he thinks. And then developing surveillance systems, not just for this pathogen but for other pathogens. All these schools are essential tools and we wouldnt have them but for the incredible science that we have. This science comes with very significant ethical challenges. It like every technology it could be of use so the onus is on us to try to figure out how do we optimize the benefits and minimize the harm. That would be hard enough if we were living in some kind of abstract world where we could just make the smartest decisions possible. But we live in a world and i write about this in the book thats defined by politics, by the political context in which we live and certainly weve seen that in the political failure, 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 have adequate information that could be provided to the american people. The failure, i would say the failure of the World Health Organization but the way ill friend it is the failure of all over decades to build a World Health Organization that was resourced and empowered and had the mandate to do the job probably every human on earth would want it to do. And then the science exists within the context of global power structure and big power competition between the United States, china and others. Everybody i think, certainly everybody in this meeting i think everybody around the world is getting maybe in the way that we havent really gotten since sputnik, that understanding science is absolutely not just something for professors. Its something for everybody. Everybody needs to understand the science area not just so we can understand the world around us and make sense of things or beginning to make sense of things but so we can make smart decisions. Though we can protect the people who we love. And thats the origin of hacking darwin. 23 years ago i was working on the National Security council and my then boss and good friend richard clark, he was telling everyone who would listen, fighting all kinds of internal flights and we have to focus on terrorism but people thought oh no, thats not important. One little thing and tragically when 9 11 happened his memo was on president bushs, george w. Bushs desk. Always used to say to really be effective you have to look around the corners that we have to try to see whats coming and that means that this conversation, we