Institute. This is about 20 minutes. [applause] we are in kind of an unusual technical situation because craig venter, who is in san diego, hes supposed to be here is ill will something. So i guess lets see if i can just craig, can you hear me . Hes ill with something akin to muteness. Hes looking pretty good. [laughter] craig, can you hear me at all . You think hes scary looking . Hes not scary looking. [laughter] hes just an ill man. Lets see if we can we have a number of backup systems which i suppose we should employ. [laughter] if worse comes to worse, ill just tell you what i think he would have done if i could control him like a puppet. [laughter] all right. Now maybe hes hearing me. Craig, can you hear me . I can, robert. Nice to hear you. All right. We lost you for a bit. So whats wrong with you . [laughter] or. Lets see, i didnt want to leave la jolla sunshine for washington d. C. No, a number of things going op but, you know, it would have made montezuma proud. [laughter] let me quickly ask you because we dont have a whole lot of time, you have a whole list of things that youre doing but the one that intrigues me maybe the most is this notion of a minimal cell. First of all, could you explain what a minimal cell is . Well, weve been trying to work on this since 1995 when we sequenced the first two genomes in history trying to understand just fundamentally a minimal set of genes that can be responsible for complete selfreplicating life. And so weve been working on this for a long time. Weve had our first synthetic version in 2010 as you know. Weve been working since then to try and design a cell from scratch that has just the minimal set of genes necessary for living and replication at least in laboratory environment. So we humans have about 2030,000 genes. You started with a little, itty bitty thing, and you tried to make it ittie r b ittier. Thats correct. How long did you go . So thats put in a way only you can put it, robert. But, yes. So the smallest organism set of genes is one we sequenced in 1995 microplasma general tail yum as a little over 500 genes. The goal is and the problem with this whole field is our fundamental knowledge of biology is so limited that we dont know what about 20 of the genes can do. So its trying to do a design when you dont know what 20 of the parts do, all you know is theyre absolutely necessary. I think i told you this story before, i was up in seattle as part of my book tour, and my late uncle who was part of the boeing design team for the 767 i said imagine if designing boeing airplanes they didnt know what 20 of the parts did. He said, what makes you think we knew . [laughter] so let me just this is a kind of interesting idea. You take the genes that you have chosen as you think these are the ones that are necessary for life, you shoot one of them, and then you look and say, well its still alive. You shoot another one, is it still alive . Another one, is it still alive . So where are you now in the shooting gallery . I think so the problem with that method, and thats a pretty good description of what weve done it turns out and its important for life theres dual pathways and dual systems that havent yet been totally recognized by modern science. Because its hard to get funding to study these things. But you can knock out a gene that when you knock it out on its own it doesnt kill the cell. But if you knock out its unknown counterpart, you can do that. So if we use the airplane analogy and youre in a 777 aircraft, you can lose one engine, and the airplane keeps flying. And so you could say, well maybe engines arent really necessary until you lose the second one, and you find out, in fact, they were very important. So it turns out people thought by knowing the structure of a set of genes that they knew all the functions. So we thought intellectually we could say, well we dont need that particular function, so we can knock it out. But genes have multiple functions, and their counterparts have, it turns out, key functions that we werent aware of. So its been more than just trial and error. First we did it totally by design, and that didnt get us a living cell. And so we started adding back components. We had two different teams. Ones working on, as you said the shooting them one at a time. We added them back one at a time in sets. We built these in five different sets, and so we could test that one set, but you test it in the environment of all the others, it looks like it works because theres a counterpart, unknown gene in one of the others that counteracted it. So this is just trying to get below 500 or so genes. Youre right, we have over 20,000 right . Yeah. Im just so glad that this is hard. You were starting in this is a little bit like god. I mean, you know, theres clay god goes whoosh, and then theres adam. So it should at least take you i hope, ten years to figure out the whoosh part. Exactly. Maybe a while longer. You might remember Stephen Colbert asked me why i thought i could do better than god, and i said well, we have computers. [laughter] well, let me ask you this, what would you do assuming i assume that be you get a cell if you get a cell that you can boot up from storebought ingredient, its a very simple lifeline. Why did we need one . Well, we dont need one per se for that. Its a proof of principle. But if we actually want to do design for building new organisms to make new vaccines new medicines, food sources, etc. , we want to get down where we can actually do design on first principle basis. So the other thing were doing other than trying to make a minimal gee anemia were trying genome were trying to defrag the genome. Things get inserted all over the place, and theres no real logic to it. Theres a lot of randomness. But if were trying to do design where we want to put in a cassette for genes that do sugar metabolism versus methane metabolism, wed like to do that where you plug in this cassette and you have the Energy Production for the cell. So were defragging as well, and thats a lot more complicated than it might seem as well. But the point is to get to where we can start to do design from known components to start to build new things for the future. So these are the early baby steps that allow us to start accelerating the design and building of new organisms for very specific manufacturing purposes. Some of those purposes, you were thinking of maybe pollutioneating bugs fuelproducing bugs that urinate diesel or gasoline toxineating bugs medicineproducing bugs. You would then put them in the air and the water and the hand. Now, the first question comes to my mind is how how hungry are we about to be or how energy needy or how anxious for freshwater that this would be something that politicians would bless . Do we need this . Well youre let me correct your earlier statement. Our plan is not to add them back to the environment. I think that would be a mistake to do. As you know, weve sailed around the globe taking samples ever 200 miles in the ocean, sequencing the organisms there. Over 40 of our oxygen comes from those algae. We would not want those replaced bilal gee that produce a whole lot of by algae that produce a whole lot of oil and instead of oxygen give us an oily goo in the ocean. So these would be organisms that, in fact would not live outside the laboratory or outside a production environment, and thats an important part of our design is building kill switches into these so they cant survive on their own. But were thinking of industrial manufacturing, industrial applications. So, for example, with sugar as a theme you can convert that sugar into almost anything. Were working on designing new pathways that dont exist in nature from making the chemicals that go into plastic bottles. Right now that comes from oil. Its a byproduct of oil production. So its adding to the pollution of taking oil out of the ground. We burn some of it, others we turn into chemicals in carpets and plastic bottles. If we make those same chemicals from sugar we convert it into a renewable chemical and are able to recycle all the waste and reuse them. We also have algae that grows out here in the desert that use sunlight and carbon dioxide. So theyre pulling co2 out of the atmosphere. In fact, we need high doses of co2. We have to concentrate it and pump even more in let me interrupt you turn co2 into all these different chemicals including food stuffs. Let me ask you about scaling, because youre talking about Little Things but we need a lot of fuel or we need to remove a lot of co2. Is it a simple matter once youve proven the concept to scale up . Unfortunately none of this is simple. Probably the hardest goals are going to be new really high throughput fuel that can compete with the cost of natural gas now and the lowering of oil. Every time new biofuel approaches came along in the past, all of a sudden the cost of carbon out of the ground gets cheap again. Thats what makes it impossible to compete. The only way it can ever compete is if governments actually create a carbon tax so we tart to realize we start to realize it doesnt matter how cheap it is to burn coal or oil or natural gas, in the long run we cant afford to keep doing that. At that stage yes, it can be scaled up very dramatically. Its not Cost Effective to do so now. Let me ask you food substances, Cost Effective for specialty chemicals, for vaccines, etc. Let me ask you a lifestyle question. If youre running out of food and you can create a bug that makes more food or youre running out of water fresh water and you can make a bug that creates more water, or youre running out of energy and you can make more energy theres a kind of a theme here. More, more and more. The alternate approach, it seems to me, would be to do less have fewer babies eat less, buy less, live more gently on the either. It strikes me like youre in the more, youre a more guy. Well, were trying, you know, i can only control how many babies people have in my own local environment to some extempt. [laughter] finish extent. I dont know how to do that globally. We have a tremendous challenge with all the people that we keep adding to the planet. Within not too long we could be approaching ten billion people. Its not sustainable with the approaches were using and consumption of everything now. More is the problem. We can have less babies but unless were going to roll back populations which i dont think anybody is truly advocating, at least not in the political arena we have to find solutions to produce more food, more medicine not at the expense of the environment but in a recyclable sustainable fashion. That is doable. We can support the number of people that we do have, but only be we change how we do it. My last question to you, because were p almost out of time i hesitate to do this but i am curious about the ebola story right now. Rather quickly, when you watch that story since you have been involved in vie rolling and dealing with bird flu as well what are we doing right at the moment about ebola, and what do you think were doing wrong . Well ebola is primarily a Public Health management problem. Its, theres been numerous outbreaks in the past, and and theyve all been managed by really good containment because of the location on borders and in a war area, those containment issues kind of fell apart. And it started spreading around. Ebolas not a lethal disease most of the time. I think i understand a group at harvards been working at treatment in africa, and theyre down to around 12 mortality just by using good medical practices. Yes, it would be great to have a vaccine, yes itd be great to have drugs to treat it, but containment is the most important thing initially with new outbreaks. Obviously, in the future as weve done with the flu vaccine, we can synthetically make a vaccine very quickly for flu, we can email it around the world. You can use one of our devices to print it. And if that can be given locally, we should be able to stop future flu pandemics from overspreading. That has to be done disease by disease. I would love to tell the audience about this guy is working on a digital biological converter which can make if somebody is sick and pooping and vomiting and stuff, you can scoop up the poop, you can assay whats in the poop, you can figure out what the virus is, you can transfer the genome of the virus to a lab enough in the world, they can come up with a vaccine, and they can send it back to you digitally, and you can make it where you live one day, one day soon one day never, one day maybe . Well, one day soon. We can actually do that right now with new, emerging flu vaccines. The u. S. Now has a stockpile of the h7n9 vaccine. Barta has led this effort in the u. S. Government. Its the first synthetic, dnabased vaccine that my team at the Venter Institute did with novartis. It proves the parado you mean can happen paradigm can happen, so we have a stockpile before the first case of this has occurred in the u. S. So for the first time were ahead of the game instead of always trying to may catchup. Its a matter of each of these Infectious Diseases working out the right basis of a vaccine. One size does not fit all. But the future will be rapidly emailing these around, downloading them and blocking transmission very early on and we should be able to eliminate future pandemics. Well, santa claus has very little on this guy. His presents are huge and fascinating. Were out of time santa [laughter] look everybody say goodbye to him applause wise so he can hear you. [applause] also at the sixth annual Washington Ideas Forum an interview with david scoredden currently the president of Cornell University. Hell become the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in july of this year. This is 15 minutes. [applause] well, good afternoon. Its a real pleasure to get to know briefly but i hope a longer process david scoredden from cornell. The announcement that youd be the 13th secretary was made back in march. You wont assume the position until next summer but has your thinking clarified at all since that announcement was made about the broad objectives that youd like to realize while youre there . Not really, but its a fair question. Im hugely enthusiastic about it and very excited about being able to to work at the intersection of culture and science. And im a doc. Ive spent my life in science and medicine, but i think that the humanistic disciplines, art and culture, are unbelievably important, and were living in a s. T. E. M. Oriented age. And so its a fabulous opportunity work at this institution. And thats a way of sidestepping your question that i really do not have specific ideas of whats going to happen yet. Im still going through the learning curve, which is pretty steep more me. Okay. One of the things you did see which gave some of us in washington a bit of a pause was i think you were asked by one of my colleagues about admission fees to the smithsonian and you said something ill just read, its too early for me to be pinned down on specific questions, but im not aware of any aspect of the nonprofit or forprofit world that doesnt have to take another look at their Business Models. Now, that sounds like the door may be open. Is, in fact, the door open to the charging admission . Let me say that over again and try to be more clear this time. I think one of the fabulous aspects of smithsonian is the fact that everybody can get in there. And, in fact, these days you dont even have to come to washington to do that thank toss the work on digitizing part of the collections which i think is a fabulous idea to make it more accessible. But in washington one of beauties of it is that you can come, and its a very populist idea and ideal. What i did say, and its possible maybe my fault that two different thoughts got conflated was that Business Models of everything that depends on government funding are going to have to be more and more creative, and i think were all dealing with that. At least in universities we are. And private Public Partnerships are springing up everywhere because of that reality of revenue. But, no, i have no intention of making those institutions less accessible. Okay. Fund raising for the smithsonian may be more difficult, perhaps, than for canal. The bbc had a piece today saying cornell is number six when it comes to the number of its alumni who are billionaires. Smithsonian doesnt really have billionaire alumni. Of under the tenure of lawrence small, there was a lot of debate about where the line should be drawn when it comes to entering into private or commercial relationships with the smithsonian, and one case in particular was an arrangement with showtime that would have given them apparently, exclusive or at least first rights of refusal over the use of archival material smithsonian objects. A lot of people complained about about that, that it seems to be taking a public resource and privatizing it. Any idea where the red lines need to be for Something Like the smithsonian when it comes to those sort of arrangements in the future this. Yeah, its a great question. Let me talk about the fundraising a little bit. The way fund job raising works in most fundraising works in most organizations is sort of a pa ramal structure where people give modest amounts and fewer give more and fewer give more and as you mentioned sometimes youre able to get these enormous breathtaking gives from people with the capacity to do it. And i think that kind of gift table or gift pyramid is true for every nonprofit that raises money, and im hugely impressed, hugely impressed that the smithsonian has already raised this was announced ten days ago or so a billion dollars toward or a Campaign Goal of a billion and a half in an organization that doesnt have alumni, billionaires or not. But i think the brand of the smithsonian, if i could use that word, is fabulous. Is that you . No. [laughter] its not me. Im trained to turn that baby off. But anyway i think the fundraising will be different, but i think it will be doable and i think a lot of people are supportive of it. But despite the fundraising and despite the very generous money that comes from the u. S. Government, there will be a push to find other what ill call enterprise type of funding and every nonprofit that i know about thinks about this broad range of revenue streams. I cant comment on the showtime contract. I never looked at it. I will become familiar wit, of course, when im in the saddle, but i will say that defining where that line is legally and ethically and in terms of what fits the feeling the ethos of the institution is unbelievably important. Thatll be part of my job. And ill try to be open about it and hope that people will comment on where they think that line should be drawn. I cant say much about the showtime. I do think its important to think about enterprise functions and Public Private