Knowing theres talented leaders in the room. Would you want to revive that in some way . Something that would fit on a billboard . I mean, i think again the myth that the gentlemans agreement between grant and lee is a compelling one and not one that doesnt have merit. It was a great achievement for these two men to end the war. I would like to say parent radically, sometimes people these days well talk about a long civil war and appomattox didnt win the war. Effectively, appomattox ends the civil war. There are surrenders to come. Yes armies in the field, but what happened after appomattox is not going to revive hopes were confederate independence. They die here at appomattox. It is the effective end of the civil war and a great achievement to end the war. This notion of a narrative about a gentlemans agreement exists from the very start and even some of these editors like really who were arguing about the terms. Theres an air selfcongratulation that america ended at civil war and away no country is ever done so before. The gentlemans agreement is rooted in american exceptionalism, how remarkable we are able to end our war without massive executions and reprisals. Across the spectrum that impulse to selfcongratulation says president , even among people who than express will argue about what the terms really meant. My argument here is nothing that will set clearly on a billboard. I dont think one has to throw out the old billboard so much as remember that the surrender was controversial. How could it not be . 700,000 men have lost their lives. The road to true reconciliation was a very, very difficult one. I think to appreciate the meaning of the surrender who lived at this time, we have to remember they let jjuliett grant, the most prestigious men in the country aside from lincoln and after lincoln dies, the two most prestigious men. Southerners in northerners look to these meant to represent their respective causes from which so many people lay down their lives in pieces they had in war. They didnt expect these meant to be ends in defeat. They sell them as clients and assumed thats what they would continue to be. Part of my argument is landgrant our enemies. How could it be otherwise . It doesnt detract from the achievement of having brought the worst we close. But reminds us these terms down to the cause we dont want to be disturbed and if you disturb us come you broken the covenant. These terms are controversial. I think again sometimes some people are trying to debunk the myth, they tell you something you thought was of greater importance is not as greater importance he thought. My purpose is opposite to say its even more important to say what happens here says the terms for an unfolding debate that we have appreciated. Yeah. [inaudible] yes, yes. [inaudible] i think thats right. Really for me, the most surprising discovery of all was et al. , with web relish the antirepublican democrats, those copperheads just adopted the confederate bob things. It just shows you how the instant impulse to politicize this. My argument if there is never a moment in which northerners and not celebrate grants victory and not very moment when confederates en masse are southerners lament please defeat. Its political from the very start. This has to do them part with the price. What did the traces his followers and here come the campaign, meeting of the clean house from promulgation of the farewell address. I show what happens in the news hits the wires and lands in northern cities and communities and lands in southern cities in the impulse to spin the news is instantaneous for political rivals to try to use it to political advantage. It happens instantly and shows divisions within a society, not just between them. [inaudible] what you are saying is a great, robbery between the usct and everyone sending [inaudible] begin with each other that is not. And that was a quote from a postwar race history by George Washington williams. The context for these africanamericans clinked the idea that the surrender is a special moment for them. A moment which they are in the thick terser old in which they are dispensing magnanimity. The context for that is a very longstanding charge that goes back as far as we can trace debates about slavery but if you have emancipation come youre going to have chaos and reprisals and for williams to highlight, i think his account there is somewhat wishful. But it served a political purpose to highlight the possibility of racial record deletion and say that appomattox could symbolize racial reconciliation with an answer to all those who sent us this freedom in the victory, theres going to be social chaos, resource the one. Williams wanted to allow himself with the forces of progress and civilization and to have decided to magnanimity of africanamerican at that moment was to do that and offer counter narrative to a dystopian discourse about what would happen if you had read in the union to jury. Yes. [inaudible] yep, thats right. I dont have a figure they are. Really, this is a moment at which theyre essentially, you know, the way its described by sherry dan and others is that we and his men thought the might have achieved a breakthrough moment by scattering the union calvary. When they see the infantry en masse in en masse in those Woods Committee realize their hopes were breakthrough failed. So is the presence of the africanamerican troops in the sight of union reinforcements that causes the way flex to start going out. Indeed, it would be in at the grant and an africanamerican postwar discourse that black troops fired the shot at lees army. That is technically not true. But again, it served a purpose in it served a purpose to say we are within the thick or circle and we hope to bring to shield this army that symbolized everything, that symbolizes the very regime that slavery and of the elite. Again, to get back to johns question, part of what im arguing is that literally happened here is fascinating. I talk about the campaign in a lot of detail, but im trying to argue appomattox is a much richer symbols and weve realize. It wasnt just a symbol of victory and defeat in vindication of restoration and liberation. Functioning on office many levels. [inaudible] it was 116, the 27, the 145th. Its all in the book. You got it, good. [inaudible] yeah, and one of the regiment waited in the waiting. As one of the marchers and discoveries for me is how many of the men in those armies, not the officers and leaders of the army and later became prominent in referred back to the service very proudly. George washington williams is the most important africanamerican intellectual of this postwar period and he he was there and he considered it very, very important, sort of a key moment in his life, as dissidents and others who would become prominent political leaders. So thats the story. In a way, this is what got me to the project. Ive been interested in only ingrained for a long time, but i was asked to music or to give a talk in philadelphia on the subject of juneteenth, the emancipation moment taxes for union forces arrived and announced they are free. In the course of doing research, which was something i knew little about, i kept running across references to appomattox is a freedom day for africanamericans. References that dated to the 1930s. The symbolic importance of the place for africanamericans persist a really, really long time. Sometimes it took the form from chris this out maddux, covering the spectrum of africanamerican military service is eventually does lease for the world wars of the one. But it really lingers as a moment of symbolic importance. It goes beyond things that casualties in who in fact fired glass shards. [inaudible] thank you very much. My pleasure. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [laughter] j. Craig venter was the first to sequence the human genome talks about bioengineering and the impact to have an human to future. Mr. Venter spoke at the National Museum of history new york city. This is about an hour and 10 minutes. [applause] i could listen to him all night. Thank you for the very warm introduction. Its a pleasure to be back at the museum again. Pick a comeback last 10 years after theyre a part of an exhibit. So it shows how science is changing what we can do. As im talking about my new book tonight, life at the speed of light, this is based in no small part on his lecture i was invited to give last year in dublin college, following up on what truly jury did in 1943 when he gave a series of lectures as a physicist trained to define life and see if life had to obey physical principles. And i think he largely concluded that it did. He wrote a book based on his lectures. It is a tiny but did ive read several times. Its called what is life. But it has influenced a tremendous amount of modern science. I want to show you why it has if you havent read the book. The short answer is because it or saw it the discoveries that have been made over the last almost 70 years at a time when people had no idea what the genetic code was or where it was going to go. So his fundamental question, and i start the book with it, is how can the events in space and time that the reason the boundaries of living organisms be accounted for by physics and chemistry . He made a tremendous attempt to answer those questions, but he also hedged a little bit by saying that the inability of them present day science could not explain everything, but that was no reason to doubt that they would eventually be accounted for. The major form of communication electrically at that time as being sufficient to have a tremendous diversity. So 1944, in his book he came up with this definition talking to the leading biologist of the day, and everybody was sure that dna was too simple of a molecule. It was a simple backbone that helps support a more complex protein that everybody was certain was the basis of inheritance. In reality, it was very wrong but it didnt matter based on the assumptions that he was putting forth about the code script. It was also 1944 that the first conclusive experiment took place to, in fact, proved that dna was indeed the genetic material. So there was a very famous experiment that was remarkably simple. They just used a sense of different enzymes and ones that destroyed proteins, destroyed rna and destroy dna to prove that dna was this key transforming factor. But it took a long time for recognition to come to dna. People were ringo really focus on proteins, and the first protein was sequenced a few years ago later by fred sanger. And this proved in fact that proteins were a very specific linear sequence. People in this timeframe, in the 40s actually thought that proteins were just some sort of boost combination of substances, and not distinct linear chemicals. So obviously the work from watson and crick estimating on the double helix advance the thinking quite a bit because it should have dna could be the template for making copies of itself by unwinding. But even in 1953 when his key paper was published in nature, not a lot of attention was paid to this paper. It really took a while and it wasnt until the 1960s, using some of the first uses of synthetic dna molecules worked out what the dna code was an out triplet letters coded for different amino acids. At this stage it was really clear that dna was the genetic material, and a lot of other transformation experiments have been done convincing people at the same time. But after 1960 when things started to move forward much more rapidly in our understanding, bob holly worked out the sequence of trna. Pee rna is a key molecule that actually brings in each amino acid one at a time for the synthesis of proteins. So these discoveries linked together to things, a huge step forward. The next decade actually brought the first stages of recombinant dna, start to make changes, and the key discovery, one of the key discoveries that enable this was one that my friend and colleague at the institute made, discovering the first restriction enzyme. These three gentlemen shared the nobel prize in 1978 for their discovery. But a number of people were able to take these new tools and use them for some pretty dramatic purposes. I described that not only did dna change in the 1970s, but so did dress codes. [laughter] so this was an early photo right after they made their first recombinant dna experiments work. And rapidly developing this to have a human insulin be produced out of a bacteria which was the basis of genentech getting going and the whole biotech industry taking off. Genomics still advanced pretty slowly and it wasnt until 1976 that the first genome was sequenced, and it was a small rna virus. The first dna genome was again by fred sangers team, and it was a key genome that we will come back to come a little over 5000 letters of genetic code, and this was considered a major breakthrough and fred sanger kites second nobel prize for sequencing this genome and developing a new sequencing technology, now refer to as sanger sequencing, that came without. It was another 18 year gap though between we could go from small viruses to the genome of a living organism. Thats what my team accomplished at the institute in 1995, and this is is to sure how fast things are going, so we went from 5000 letters of genetic code to 1. 8 million letters, and it was only five years later that, in fact, were able to scale up using this whole genome shotgun technique to do the entire human genome. So we went from 1. 8 million to 3 billion letters of genetic code in a massive effort. When we read the genetic code and put that data in a computer, i described as digitizing biology. And, obviously, weve been doing this for quite a while now of taking the four letter code and converting it into ones and zeros in the computer. We been a chelating more and more of this data over time, and an understanding the fundamental basis of heredity, going back to that code script. The same time that all these advances were taking place in the dna world we were getting a better and more complete understanding of the protein world. In this history of proteins, they came up with what i thought every apt description of proteins as natures robots. These are the instruments where genetic programs are transferred from the linear dna code to the linear protein code, but contained within the protein code is all the instructions for how they fold, how stable they are and what they did to everybody is im sure very similar with the variety, types of proteins that make up our bodies and make up the living world we see around us. And these have wide ranging set of characteristics from very elastic proteins to very strong structural proteins to our muscle proteins, transporters, et cetera. But these proteins have those functions built into their linear code and they dont have any master controllers other than that code. And just to show you how recent some of these findings are, so this is from 2005 where the complete High Resolution structure of the bacterial ribosome was determined to. This is, if theres a fundamental motor for life as the coprescribed, our work is change one of the engines or motors, this is probably one of the most important motor in the south, because this is where cell, this is where the linear code is converted into proteins. So appreciating these as complex threedimensional structures i think its very important. Protein folding is an area thats taken quite a while to understand, and were still in the process of doing it. It took the blue gene computer at ibm to actually do a complete energy compilation for the folding of a single protein. So contained within a typical protein of 100 amino acids there somewhere between of possible confirmations. So is each protein that we make in a matter of seconds had to try all these combinations, it would take about 10 million years to go through that process. But, in fact, because we have one of the most important physical principles that was discovered early on called brownie in motion, these processes happened within thousands of a second. So brownie in motion was named after robert brown when he noticed that looking at paula molecules under the microscope that they had this ability to move around quite randomly. But it took about 75 years until einstein came along to action show that this movement that we see in looking under any microscope is due to the water molecules and in the states and how they are constantly moving. So light is driven by this basic physical robbery of molecules but its driven by brownian motion. We always see pictures of dna and proteins in the static forms. But they are actually constantly jigging jiggling and rotating and spinning and people have described it as the equivalent of magnitude nine earthquake going on constantly inside your cells. When you think about the evolution of processes, and a lot of our biological systems are like simple gears and motors, because of this Tremendous Energy and shaking and movement, you would have to have a dear that goes forward. So to be like im trying to ride a bicycle as long as a with the backwards you would never have to battle. So just to show you one example of modeling that has been done of six microseconds, heres an extended period looking at a longer period of a small peptide. This is what the final confirmation is but you will see it going from the linear code, this takes several seconds but when it happens in reality, thats happening in six microseconds. Thats what proteins are like in the cell. Thats what dna is like. Its constantly moving and shaking, and this energy allows proteins, based on their linear code, to form into the final confirmation that has the Lowest Energy state and gives them their stable function. They are constantly moving. They are not looking like the in state. And so its very dynamic and if you could look inside each cell you would see this constant shaking and moving, energy transfer. Also built into the linear code from the dna to the protein is something that determined the absolute stability of each protein. Its called the in role of degradation. Because how fast approaching will be broken down and turn over. Proteins turn over in a matter of seconds to minutes. Most people dont realize how dynamic each of our 100 early in cells our or 200 trillion bacterial cells are. They are changing from second to second because they are reading the code and giving us information. If you take the dna out of the cell, cells will die a very quickly. Protein turnover is probably the single most important biological process because of all this shaking and brownie motion, proteins and theyve been very unstable. And if you cant constantly making new ones, cells will die. And if you cant degrade proteins, this is not new york city, but new york city has looked this way at times. When the trash stops being hauled away its aching legs and it causes things to become an operative. Our cells and our bodies and our brains work the same way but, in fact, theres a lot of mis folding diseases where the proteins are not trafficked out normally. Cystic fibrosis, one of the most widely genetic disorders, is due to a letter changed in the fluoride ion channel but people thought he just affected its function. In fact, what it affects is the finding of one of the chaperones and how it folds. It never gets folded properly so you never get enough produces so theres less protein in the cell. So all our cells work on the process of dynamic renew. If you cant