Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge

Good evening, I am Stewart Brand from Long Now Foundation. Juan Enriquez is an inspiration to a lot of people in biotech who become interested in biotech because of him who start to re-understand how things move around in the world in terms of national borders and things like that, books that you can see in there introduction card and he is a person who not only talks a good talk but he invests he he puts his money where his mouth is and has great adventures he has adventures I guess the one I most envy is when Craig Venter was out basically inventing Metagenomics in changing all of biology by finding out kind of microbes were in the ocean and shotgun sequencing them and coming up with a whole new science that transforms everything else in biology who else was on his sailboat the Sorcerer was Juan Enriquez and he is here tonight. So California we should start in Spanish we will bring you public service announcement top of the eight, Red Sox 10, Cleveland three. Not that anybody's counting, Stewart was kind enough to say why don't you come give a talk and you know, you talk about this months ago n he says you know, let us come up with the fun title, Mapping the Frontiers of Knowledge, I thought nah that's too arrogant sounds like you going to do too much or so, I tried to simplify - we will just talk about mapping life. What I'm going to try and do tonight is to try and tell you what we know about mapping life where life is? How life is structured? Where we think the edges of a known world are? And then I am going to get into non-controversial territory like what that does to politics and religion. This is what our early maps of life look like and its so we really didn't understand life, we are kind of looking out of the hole then we crawled out of a hole and we were able to see something it looks like this. And we are still not quite sure what lives over the next ridge over the next ridge. This is a little bit like the first maps of the America's where you get a little squiggle of the edge of Brazil and a couple of islands and there is nothing behind that, which would be the Admiral's map one of the first maps of America. As we think about life and how life evolves in this wonderful man who is one of my heroes, this is a guy who went out and wrote and studied for decades and after writing and working for decades he gets a letter from an obscure island called Ternate near the Sulas. From an absolutely obscure guy called Alfred Russell Wallace, and when he gets that letter, the letter basically has his entire theory of evolution outlined, written and Wallace is asking whether he would submit it for publication. This is about a week after Darwin's child died. Darwin thinks about it for about three minutes and since of the manuscript to his friends at the Royal Institute with a letter that says this guy could have taken the dictation on the stuff that I have been thinking for decades. He is preempted my life work, but he got it first he gets primacy and you basically took 20-30 years a life and mailed that off, and of course his friends have been talking to him for 20 or 30 years so they reached a compromise and what they did is they read the Wallace and the early Darwin manuscripts together into a small seminar room where about 20 people were sleeping, and that's how you came to understand how things evolve and how things work, and how things are structured in traits of life, and these early notebooks, of course not always believed by everybody, led to the first trees which started branching species. And so these are some of the first maps of life as we understood it. You know, there is the famous Darwin's "Finches" and there is that wonderful book by Weiner, which won a Pulitzer and it begins to give us an idea of how evolution occurs, not just in long periods, but in real time. That led to more and more complex classifications of life and this is how we thought about life until quite recently. So there are always, nifty little taxonomist who would set an obscure museums and dusky desks and really go out and find where in this little set of lines all this was. What the mapping of life has been doing recently as it's been blowing these things to pieces. And it's articles which I am sure all of you have read like this one, - no obviously you are all interested in "endosymbiont" which look absolutely obscure but what this is telling you is that you are beginning to find whole genomes of smaller species inside larger species, like insects. And there is a series of these articles coming out. And so the problem with this is then what is the genome or the life code of an animal, because it used to be that you have these nice well structured things, but if you start to find the gene code of the thing down in the lower left and the upper right, then where does that gene code fit into that tree. And when you start finding these things transcribed again and again in these obscurer things, what it does is that completely changes our understanding in the map of life. And you start getting maps of life which let you in on a little secret. Here is the secret. This is what a tree of life begins to look like. And all of a sudden, instead of understanding, life is a series of very defined trees and branches and you know, there is a common trunk and that it goes up and every thing else. You are now beginning to think of life as the circle that is constantly interchanging, exchanging, moving, modifying and changing gene code. And that's a very different form of life because instead of thinking life as a tree we are beginning of think of it as a star system or the various nodes on the star constantly exchanging data. There was a wonderful Doonesbury Cartoon once upon a time that asked a creationist if he believed in evolution. And the person said, "Why do you ask". And he said, "Well, because you have got antibiotic resistant TB and if you don't penicillin ain't going to work. So as we begin to understand life, if you came here today to understand the secret of life, it turns out that life is code. And it's imperfectly transmitted code and the frontier of knowledge is beginning to understand how to map this code, where to map this code, how this code works, how it exists and what it does. And that's a really neat mapping project because they aren't a lot of continents left to map. But most of the life is left to map out there. So Stewart and Rayon and E.O Wilson and series of other wonderful people are out trying to create an encyclopedia of life on the planet. And that is an absolutely worth while endeavor because we haven't even started to scratch this stuff. On the Sorcerer expedition that Stewart meant mentioned the Venterand the series of other pirates were on. We basically doubled the number of genes and proteins known on earth simply by sailing around the world and sampling surface sea water every 200 miles. And any one of your kids can go out and do really experiments that are quite extraordinary. This answer is the age old question because all life turns out to be made of four little base pairs which come together in a spiral staircase, four rungs Adenine, Thymine, Guanine Cytosine. And what we are beginning to do in these maps is we're beginning to try and map what this code does and how this code is structured using various fancy instruments. So this is a type of high end laser that breaks down protons and if you shoot it at life forms, you can break down the whole series of the images of these things, it's like a super telescope, it's quite extraordinary, absolutely incredible images, you can't really see it up here but some of the things you are getting out of this material will be wonderful. This is a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Machine. You have to be really careful when you walk into this room because if you have anything metallic it will be drawn very fast toward these magnets. It is not a good place to walk in with a blackberry with the pocket full of change. But what you can do with this machine is you can take a sample of urine and you can break it down and you can start to find peaks in different human cancers. So this becomes a high end diagnostic machine, it starts to break down the chemicals in your body in a noninvasive way. This is the more common way of understanding and mapping the frontier of life. So these genes sequencing machines can generate about 200 million letters of new gene code every 24 hours. To do that, you are looking at a layer of about eight different corridors about this size. And machines that are 300,000 bucks a piece. These are similar largest databases on the planet. They are growing faster than computers can keep up the storage of those devices. So computer storage doubles about every 18 months, this doubles about every 12 months. That is going to be an interesting cross over point between IT and life code. But we are not quite sure how to catch up. And part of the reason why that's going to happen is because at the gene sequencing meeting that took place three days ago in San Diego. Whole series of the people who make this machine show it up, just show off their new toys. If you can imagine eight corridors of this machines that gets substituted by one machine that looks like this. You are beginning to look at single desktop machine that will generate about a billion letters of gene code in a single run. This is heading very quickly towards a $10000 human genome. That means that likely is not every baby born in the United States will come out of the hospital with a full gene code and will have to start understanding what the map of his or her genome begins to mean. There were three competing machines at this particular show. Three weeks ago, you had the first published human diploid genome. Reason why this is an interesting adventure is because DNA replicates by splitting. So, when you think of that spiral staircase, "A" always goes with "T", "C" always goes with "G". And when DNA replicates, it works like a zipper. So this side goes off in one direction and the other direction gets copied and you have two copies of the same stuff. That's how your cells grow and are made. Because DNA replicates that way, when the first human genomes were mapped in 2001, everybody thought "If I take half the genome 3.2 billion letters as opposed to 6.4 billion letters, the other will simply be a mirror image". That turns out to be false. So, this gentleman vendor sequences his own genome. And when he sequenced his own genome he found this stuff. This is about three weeks old. The original 2001 map is up on top and the new genome map for the same region is down below. And it turns out that human beings are an awful lot more complicated than we thought. And an awful lot more variance than we thought. Of course you know that because you have lived with your brothers or sister. These maps are going to change the way in which we think about medicine that we think about nutrition, that we think about why some people live long, why some people are cured and some people aren't. This code is coming at you and accumulating in an absolutely extraordinary fashion. And we are just mapping the stuff. This is the first outlines of these continents. we haven't even got into the point where we understand the continent as it's there yet. This is just the bare outlines of these little islands. A single gene change will mean a difference of 200 fold in bodyweight in the same species. So yes, which cassette you insert really does matter. And as you look at this stuff what's really neat about it is how fast it's spreading. So this is a science children's museum at Minnesota and you got people working on cheek cells and you got people working on giant chromosomes and the kids will isolate the chromosomes and images. And they will go out and they will start to understand particular gene sequences. And they are learning the stuff, and unfortunately not everything is working well in this museum. You still have to post signs that look like this. And of course I would argue this is probably not the sign that you should have to tell people in a Children's Museum but we are entering a period where we are going to start prescribing, thinking about our own bodies in terms of our own gene code, our own protein code, our own metabolic code. This is a very very different era. Its an era where we are going to move it from the medicine which is a binary medicine, you are sick, you are not sick take a medicine, don't take a medicine, into an era where you work handed a probability curve that tells you, you are not sick but here is your lifetime chance of getting Alzheimer or Breast cancer or Colon Cancer, or this or that or the other. Problem number one, most schools don't do a very good job of teaching arithmetic, just look at the federal of deficit. Second problem, if they don't teach arithmetic they don't teach probability and doctors in the 15 minutes that they see you aren't going to have the time to explain probability theory to you and even if they have the chance to explain probability theory on a specific condition like Breast cancer because you have got a BR CA1 or a BR CA2 mutation or P53 mutation, you are not going to have the time to explain a phonebook with 60,000 probability curves in it which is what comes out of the single gene chip today. And all by the way this information is changing every week, this is good for you. No, no, no turns out its bad for you. This is really dangerous but only in conjunction with these other five factors, tune in next week it will change. We are moving from in an era of relative certainty in medicine in nutrition in a whole series of things in to an era of probabilities, uncertainties and constant change. And a lot of way in which we have being teaching doctors and teaching engineers and stuff its going to divide that type of mental personality absolutely crazy. And these are people who want to know and memorizie the answer in the book, and that's how they get tested and how they get graded and that how you go through your GMATs and that's how you go through engineering, and we are going to have to think long and hard about what we do other education because this is a very different type of minds up. Let me move now from some of the gene code, they are absolute micro or the nano scale, into what's happening in a similar field couple of chains of the ladder, so you go from gene code ATCG, up in the proteins and then you go in to the executional stuff and tissues and then you get organs. Here too were beginning to enter some really interesting areas. We will begin to map the stuff in a very different way so this is one of the first great cartographers and map makers. South African surgeon interesting personal life, opponent of apartheid who went out and did the first heart transplant. Second heart transplant he did was mixed race which in South Africa that time was not an easy thing to do, and when he did first heart transplant one of the questions he went out and started asking is did the person receive a heart fall in love with the relatives of the donor? Why would he ask a question like that? Because there was no map, you had no idea and for 2000 years you have being telling people I gave you my heart, she broke my heart, she took my heart, da-dada-da so we thought emotional resided in the heart I have a heart ache. Of course eventually we learn through things like this that the heart turns out to be a muscle but you don't translate or transport emotion in a heart, and as you go forward one of the really interesting things that's happening in the map is how many disciplines that are academic disciplines were coming together to create images of what is a muscle. This is a center in Canada, and the really interesting thing as its combining things which in a traditional university you never see, but in a new university you can do it because you don't have these stovepipe departments. Since the new universities that are putting together vascular hearts, biology completely different disciplines, molecular, go down to the bottom level, imaging well that's a problems of radiology. And here you got five completely different academic disciplines coming to the other in a single center. This is really interesting stuff and this is the stuff that's going to make for mergers, this is the stuff it's going to make for new knowledge. Because you can get people of completely different ideas and disciplines and ways of looking at the world coming together to begin to understand something like the heart, only interesting things you are doing here this wonderful man learnt how to keep hearts alive. So this whole apparatus the purpose of this apparatus is to keep the tiny mouse heart alive for a week, and this is a little disconcerting because you walk in and there is this little tiny heart, its kind of beating there. But you can now keep hearts alive outside the body and in fact if any of your squeamish you should probably close you eyes just like a roller coaster. But now you can now start to put hearts inside machines. This is a wonderful picture from national geographic. Let me show you what these machines do. (Video Clip) Anyway you get the general idea this. We're going to start working on a whole series of other parts of the body, and we are going to start thinking about keeping various parts of the body alive. But this is moving pretty quickly. This week you have this announcement. So what these folks were able to do is they are able to differentiate cells not even take heart cells, but take skin cells and begin to build a series of blood vessels out of skin cells. So when you think of how do you rebuilt all the veins or arteries of somebody who is being in a accident or have being burnt or he is eating too many McDonald's burgers, this may be one option. This ability to understand life to keep life alive in different parameters to map life, to be able to differentiate life and guide life. It is one of most exciting single explorations and maps and cartography going on today A third sort of cartography that is quite interesting as you start mapping life is this whole notion of who we are and what we can do. So there was a period once upon a time when you called folks like this handicapped. It is hard to do that these days not just for political correctness but because these guys are running with various and sundry devices in races and they are actually running pretty fast. This particular character is interesting. He holds the world record in the 400 meters in the Special Olympics. He is now got into the point where he is within about half a point half a second of qualifying for the Olympics with no adjective. not the Special Olympics, and he is creating a hell of a quandary for the IOC, the International Olympic Committee. Because he is asking to won against the able bodies runners, and it turns out that may be this year, may be in two years, may be five years. Folks like this were going to beat folks who were born with, quote unquote, normal legs. This is also moving forward in to whole series of different parts of the body. So it used to be that when you were partially deaf you would have one of these massive speakers if it looks like an RCA phonograph coming out, you kind of listen through that and then you got these clunky machines that never worked and then you got these tiny discrete machines that went behind your eye glasses, and now you got these little tiny machines you can see almost at all. But even people who are profoundly deaf are beginning to have machines which are implanted in to their bodies and what we were seeing here is a transmitter and a receiver stimulator over here, the speech process are over here, and a whole electrode ray over here. And these things in its first generation allow people to begin the hear primitive sounds and about 18 months later you can hear better, and about 18 months later you can hear better. And it takes you about a few hundred thousand years to evolve to a higher plane of hearing. It takes the stuff of about 18 months, and at some point these folks are going to able to hear stuff in tones that you can't hear. They will have an accuracy in hearing that will go beyond ears and you will probably start to see discriminations suites in symphony orchestras when somebody is not hired because they have normal hearing. This of course is also beginning to happen with things like eyes. So as we begin to move through these primitive areas or we start transmitting images from cameras on to chips into electrical impulses and giving sight to the partially or totally blind, again the stuff we are doing today looks clunky and hugely. But as we start mapping the frontiers of where the stuff is going its not inconceivable that some of these folks will have better eye sight than your eye. Here is a couple of questions, ouch part of all we learned over the past decades since Barnard started transplanting things and part of what this map tells you is the soul doesn't reside in the heart, it doesn't reside in the kidney, it doesn't reside in the liver, it doesn't reside in part of the stomach, it doesn't reside in the intestine. You can alter, you can change, you can swap, and the person doesn't become more soulful or or less soulful so there fore the soul does not reside being those particular body parts. That leaves one area, and this to my mind is one of the most interesting areas about the study of life as we start studying life on a molecular level unless we start mapping life in a whole series of other ways with photons and with magnetic resonance and the rest of the stuff, the black box still remains the brain. And it's that study of the brain in various machines, in various ways that I think is one of the single most interesting areas of where things are being mapped, and again it's an interdisciplinary thing that's going to ask a series of questions that are some of the most interesting questions sitting out there. How does life occur? Where does life occur? That's one segment of that on a micro level, but on a macro level, on a human level, on an organ level the folks doing this kind of research I think they are the great cartographers, and this research is taking place in buildings that look like this. This is something that very few universities could do, because it is not a startup university. This is MIT, but what MIT is doing is it is bringing together a whole series of departments and they are not kicking and screaming to trying to stay autonomous, and this new building which ironically is right across from the New Robotic Centre is bringing together brain and cognitive sciences, and it is trying to map the brain from psychology and psychiatry and imaging and chemistry neurobiology and genomics and a whole series of other things, and some of the conversations that will take place in these hallways probably wont be very relevant to venture capitalists for a while, but they certainly be relevant to the people who are doing some of the most interesting cartography on the planet. This is part of the frontier out of the mapping of where known life lies on a macro scale. Of course, you don't have to wait for these buildings to be built. This is something that we saw on getting off about a week and a half, two weeks ago. And the interesting thing about this particular robotic arm that DARPA is funding is that it allows a series of movements that become stronger and stronger and more and more controlled, but usually this robotic arms have use the muscles that are there to transmit the instructions to the arm. What's particularly interesting about this arm is this is using brain waves to control that arm, and we are beginning to link those waves to the control of the arm and that is an ordered magnitude different from those some of the stuff that we have been doing with the prosthetics. This is the edge of the known world in terms of transmission. Let's go back to the micro for a second as we talk about life. Here is something we found out about a month ago. Life actually does happen and it isn't that complicated, so you have this wonderful trio of unindicted coconspirators Clyde Hutchison, Hamilton Smith and Craig Venter. Ham you probably haven't heard of, Ham is one of these gentle giants on the planet, he is one of the most wonderful human beings. He is also one of the most modest human beings. When he discovered restriction enzymes which a ways of splitting genes, one of the things he got for that was the Nobel. He has been so modest about what he was doing and working on but he got a call from his mother. Mom calls and says "Ham I just heard on the radio somebody called Ham Smith won the Nobel I don't know there was a second Ham Smith at Hopkins". Okay mom, what these three folks have been doing is they been trying to figure out can we begin to operate cells as code. And the experiment it was published about a month ago and science looks like this. And the reason why this stuff is very cool is because they took entire strands of DNA from one species inserted it into a different cell and have the second cell boot up as an entirely different species. Talk about identity theft, this actually for real and the fact that you now have specific recipes and cook books this is presented on Monday in San Diego, would you like to up another species in your kitchen? No, here is about what it takes. And the fact of that's what it takes means that life happens and probably life is very common not just here, but probably in a lot of different places which goes back to that little secret life is promiscuous. And if you think about this stuff what you are looking at in this two blue cells with the different identity for the different species is probably in terms of economic power going forward of economic change something similar to this little gismo which was the first transistor. As all you now here the reason why Silicon Valley exists, it's because this particular man had a sick mother moved back to take care of her and he was so unpleasant that no body want to work with them for very long. So he had all these start up garages working in different places, because everybody kind to got sick of him and went out and did there own thing, and built up the whole electronics industry. This is what the first life transistor looks like. Brand new, no body is quite sure what you going to do with it, like this one not terribly elegant, but always that's going to make a difference in the world. If you start to think if the cell as hardware and gene code is software then you can start programming cells for specific purposes. The first thing that you are going to start seeing is changes in places like the energy markets. Why the energy markets? Well it's a simple area, it's easy to understand, you can containerize the stuff, you don't have to put it out in the environment. But you can do things like start transforming coal all hydro carbons are basically concentrated sun light right? So you put out the whole bunch of solar panels called leaves or you put out a mass of bacteria it will absorb the sun, they concentrate the power of the sun, the power of the plant eventually they die they rot under pressure for millions of years, and you spent a lot of moneys putting pipes under the ground to bring the stuff then you put another pipeline you cross several countries, you go in to a huge refineries and you go through a primary, secondary and tertiary petrochemical process. An outcomes gas, or outcomes gasoline, or outcomes polyester, or various chemicals. We are now learning to short circuit the stuff and that will make a difference. It will make a difference because we are able be able among other things eventually to get energy out of plants. We already do that its called ethanol, but the conversation ratio is awful. It may not even be one-to-one. But in the measure that we have begin to understand how life forms can make energy, because most life forms on this planet haven't evolved so that human begins can have more energy, not surprising. We are going to start doing the same thing that we do with our pets, with bacteria. See a house pet is a domesticated parasite, right? You tried leaving your little pet out there some where in an African jungle and see what happens. You have to walk it everyday; you have to feed it everyday, you have to pet it everyday. It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings, same thing with corn. Same things going to start happening with energy and things like bacteria we are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside in closed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life. Eventually we will reach medicine; eventually we will reach the whole series of other things but we are many years away from that. That's the frontier and that's the map of life. So that were life is heading. As life heads in this direction, as the cartographer discovered these new continents discovery of course has a series of consequences because nations arise and fall based on this stuff. So it is not just life thus evolving, it is also power that's evolving and as you think of power, traditional power was based on things like this, got soldiers, got weapons, you will be powerful. Other sources of power, well you could have God on your side or you could have really big governments on your side. But how you are powerful and why you are powerful today is changing in a fundamental way, and as you think about power today think about how the old great empires were build. Just before the industrial revolution, India and China were about 40 percent of the global economy. Until recently they were about 3.4 percent. What happened to these great empires that were able to build these absolutely wonderful palaces in marble? Well technology and business passed them by. They focused on living on in harems, they focused on the beauty of poetry, they focused on the beauty of literature, they focused on the beauty of history of all their accomplishments but they quit building, they quit educating, they quit making new stuffs, they quit learning new stuffs. They were so focused on celebrating the pleasure of today and the glory of past. That they kids ended up in indolent not terribly smart and the world pass him by. And this architecture over the course of relatively short period of time turns into this architecture, which is of course the architecture of a different empire. Because there is little Obscure Island on the edge of Europe did focus on learning, did focus on technology and took over about eleven million square miles in the world. You learned, you don't learned you get these ways of technology, you don't get these ways of technology that actually makes a difference in terms of whether your country survives, whether your country is sovereign. The really interesting question to my mind isn't how did India lose its independence and sovereignty, the really interesting question to my mind these days, is how can a society that looks like this today that has politics that makes American politics look simple, end up with a 10 percent growth rate on a consistent basis and of course the answer to the part of that is in buildings like this. This is what power looks like today. India doesn't have a huge army. India has got a politics that is just messed up. It has very little infrastructure. But this particular building right here and this particular building are part of the core why India is powerful. This is the Bangalore India institute of Technology. What these guys have done as they have been able to educate the next generation to the point were they are now the second largest software provider in the world, and the impact of this originally is in places like this for 40 percent of CEOs and Silicon Valley are of Indian and Chinese descend building and GDP is larger than India. But as you go forward this is were it really makes a difference because it is not just the elite that are going to the schools, it is not just the six thousand that are on that campus. It is the kids in the street, and the kids in the street are carrying little computers on their motorcycle, and the stuff they admire and the stuff they like they don't have logos of sports teams on their helmets. These guys have computer associates on their helmets. And when you get a society that is learning this quickly and educating kids this quickly, when you land at the airport, you see educational loans everywhere. You see the kids taking drugs, but their drugs to improve their memory not to loose it, and you start to see these little shops that look like third world sharps but instead they are selling nick knacks and falafels and rest of the stuff. They have got the IBM distributorship and right next to the IBM distributorship they have got the cable company, the InfoTech Company, the Placement Company, the Laptop Company all staked one on the other, all dreaming and wondering this digital world, all educating their kids to do this on MITs online courses. Let me contrast that with what happened with the people who first colonized India. For one of the colonies in India is Goa, the Portuguese go out and colonize that and then they keep going and they eventually get to china and in an Macau you start getting the strange mixtures of Chinese and Portuguese on all the buildings. But these were folks who thought you know the natives are pretty stupid, we shouldn't teach them anything, we should just exploit them. So we will focus on prostitution, we will focus in gambling, we focus on staying up above, we don't bother to learn Chinese. And as a result the most famous buildings are building that are build on exploitation. This is one of the great monasteries, this is where Vasco Da Gama is buried wonderful statues of Vasco da Gama went around Africa, open the road to the pacific I am sorry to Asia. But because he didn't bother to and the Portuguese didn't bother to deal with natives or educative the natives. This is the single most famous building in Macau. It is an empty facade. and of course you could see billboards like this. When you go to Portugal today, it is a little worn down. Now think about that for one second, if these folks had bothered to deal with Hindi languages, to learn Chinese, to train people, to have the kids of the Portuguese at least learn these languages, established trade relationships, have a good relationship with the people that they were conquering, colonizing, teaching, missionaring. What might have been the consequences? Will these little tiny state would have been the entrance for Chinese and Indian goods and the bridge into Europe? Much of Spain which has been one of the most successful models has recently learned to be a bridge to Latin America. But these folks never bothered to learn how to speak Chinese or Indian - Hindi. Could a Portugal today, walk through the streets, these are folks who colonized china and India for centuries. Find me a Chinese restaurant, find me an Indian restaurant, hard to find. Very different from London, very different from Paris or everybody goes around an Egyptian obelisk, or you going to one of the great museums in the world and it is full of cultures of other things and they are absorbing those cultures. Here is an example of what would have happened? You have got a river coming down the Pearl River on one bank you have got Macau and right across from Macau, right on the other side of the river, there will be Hong Kong. The Brits were not perfect colonizers by any means but they did established a civil service, they did establish schools, they did establish a whole series of ways and coming up through that system and because of that there is an absolute extraordinary trade that went on between Britain and continues to go on between Britain and parts of Asia. Not always easy, not always pleasant. But the difference between the buildings in Macau and these buildings its quite significant and this is what that little experiment led to. It really matters how you treat those who seem at this point done or dispossessed or ignorant or poor. When I was in college you know there were words like hi-tech, there were words like hard work, there were words like innovation, there were words like great universities, and those did not usually applied to Ireland. But of course today the Irish have a higher income per capital and do the Brits and I am doing absolutely extraordinary job in real estate, in education, in high technology, in bridging the roads, the America's or Britain is still trying to figure out what went wrong. This is what the power looks like in the US today. Its not the Washington monuments, its not a huge obelisk, its not the old or new memorials its that things would like this - this is Jefferson High School, I went to this about three weeks ago in Virginia. This is what the hallways look like. Nothing special about this place where allow the kids to paint the roof, the tiles, except that the all back packs they are on top of the lockers, they don't have to be locked up. Because every kid who is here wants to be here, because one out of six kids gets picked for the school, public school. Here are the kinds of projects that these kids are working on as juniors, here is some of the text books that they are looking at they are not textbooks because they are on the edge and they are simply putting in the articles as they come up. This is one of the most extraordinary teachers who teach of this place. He and the principal of this place Evan Glazier, have generated more of what we used to call Westinghouse scholars, or they are now Intel scholars than any in the US. Kids are writing from six different counties of Virginia everyday to come to this place. They have got a prototype shop they got a placement agent that makes any school green with envy. They have a list of where all their kids gone and these were the kids were going to MIT in the Caltech and Harvard and Yale and Stanford and UVA and the rest of these places. And when you walk outside you see something which you very rarely see in a high school in the US. It turns out that they were all state champs in debate and swimming and diving and indoor track in cross country all in by the way right alongside the sports here is the academic championships. This is a school that is treating academia in the same way as Texas High Schools treats Friday Night Football. You can hire coaches, you can fire coaches, you were award excellence, you have doing the practical, you don't show up, you leave you were because you want to. And if other high schools in the US start treating academia academics in the same way as many schools treat football. This will continue to be a more powerful country. When you take this line out of high schools you can get into trouble very, very quickly, right? When those kids graduate from high schools they are not going to work in buildings that look like the Hong Kong buildings. They don't go to work for fortune 500 for the most part. All and by the way the fortune 500 has generated no net new jobs in the past few decades in the US. The new jobs come out of places that look like this then you drive by you kind of say well you know, it's a lousy little building. This is some of the most expensive real estates all you know in the United States. This is San Hill Road. So this is where you are incubating and often lot of the companies that we were talking about in life sciences are the key parts of the life, or the do microchips or they do this that or the other. Now what is the basic input of the brains either imported or generator that makes the little engine run. Those little engines leads to computers sounds as this one this is one of the newest and largest computer centers in the US. This is the new Howard Hughes facility in the engineering farms in Maryland, and this is one of the centers where life is going to be mapped, studied and structured. Lets bring in together the IT world with the life science world in absolutely extraordinary buildings, this has a full hotels, its got a lake right here, your hotel room like out right on the lake, you have got a super computer facility they will fund you generously as long as you are you are a scholar, the largest structural last building in the world. Absolutely extraordinary minds coming together in a few places to map life. As you think of life being mapped and those power changing whole series of areas of our lives are going to be changed and sometimes I have talked about what it does to you Chemistry companies or Pharma companies or Biotech companies or Insurance companies or Chip companies or Manufacturing companies or Energy companies, but it even starts to change things like religion, so to be completely non controversial let me bring together two words that often go together, religion and evolution. That is a fact right? Species go extinct and so due to religions do we have any proof of this? And all this is what the Sumerian religions look like and how they have evolve from being sky gods into air gods into wisdom gods into lady of wine they are getting smarter here. Then they invented evil queen of the underworld all kinds of things coming together. None there were these other folks, they thought you know, if we don't throw 20 virgins with their hearts cut off of the top of this thing may be that some will come up. We put out a thesis like that, one day the head priest sleeps and 20 virgins are sacrificed and some comes up oops, a little bit of distance between what you are saying and what happens, and of course we worshipped gods of death, we worshipped gods of the sea or the gods of sky or the gods of the rain or the gods of whatever, the Mayans had hundreds of these gods, and here there was a common argument. This or these are the one true gods we and we priest alone have discovered the one truth. You don't follow these truth we will burn you, we will kill you, we will eliminate you or you will rot in hell because we and we alone know the answer. Curiously enough recent archeological digs have founded a series of these gods of these priests who use to use their power to hurt people and to prove that their god was the only true god. This is what one of the archeological things look like. Here is a history of what we know about single gods. Single gods were not very popular over the hundred and thousand years we were been here as far as we know, until about right here we start getting things like Judaism and Christianity and Muslims and Protestants, just to put this concept in our historical framework. But how this stuff has evolved, but we have now discovered the truth depending on which part of the world are you in. The interesting thing is how many of these things have common roots and evolved from common roots. So here you have got this nice fellow Abraham who actually is really important to these three very different religions. And if you want to get a little bit closer and more personal, here is someone of the Jewish religion who gives birth to early Christianity until you have got a great schism and then you get your first evolution between the Greek and the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholics and then the Roman Catholics Beget a whole series of other things like the Virgin of Guadalupe the whole series of different groups and then you get this nasty fellow Luther who comes along and he evolves and begets the whole series of other things, and then of course a little more recently you have got the Mormons coming out over here from somewhere. But of course there is an evolution to this stuff right in a lot of common belief, in a lot of common structures; in a lot of common things and the closer they are the, the more they seem to fight. There is a whole series of questions that scientist I don't think should be answering or trying to answer at this point. And those questions have to do with the, who and the why of the universe. The scientists are and they are actively and quickly mapping the edges of life, the edges of the non universe, the edges of power, the edges of the body, the edges of how things are done and when a religion start to get into the questions of how and what? Then they get into real trouble. Because as soon as you leave the realm of who and why and moving to the how and what you can end up with some really nasty surprises. Here is what one of these surprises look like. And all of a sudden you have a universe that revolves around the earth and this nasty fellow comes up with a telescope finds that the earth actually revolves around other things and he gets excommunicated for that fact. Fortunately the Catholic Church knows how to recognize his mistakes. So it recognizes that Galileo was right in the 1990s. But how - who is counting, now let's just put a context on what we know about life and what we think about these things these days. Most of you are probably seeing these wonderful Hubble images, right? So you have this wonderful nebula sitting out there, the only thing that is missing from this picture is the small sense of scale. So if you take these three little columns that are sitting right here in the middle and you take a close up picture, say a family picture. This is what it looks like, this is a whole bunch of stardust coming together, coalescing and crunching to such an extent that you get fission and what you are watching here is the birth of stars. These are star nurseries just giving of stars or just being born themselves floating out into space. And again you don't quite get a sense of scale remember, these three columns are basically right here. When you look at that one of these columns is about 57 trillion miles high. If you look at pictures like this, when you look at universe like this and one of the things that you now know is that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Of course this keeps changing. Here is one thesis on this stuff. One thesis is that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, earth about 4.5 billion years ago, life about 4.4 billion years ago, humanoids about 0.6 billion years ago and man came here about 0.00015. And the purpose of this particular machinery of these billions of stars, of the universe that looks like this is so that we can be at the top of the pyramid. And we are the be all and end all. there is no other life in the universe, there is no other purpose to the universe, there is no purpose to the billions of stars and the billions of planets except to reach an evolution in seven days or in 13.7 billion days depending on what you believe. To look plan we can be right about here and that is it. All and by the way the purpose to all these other proto humans, the austrolopithecus, this that and the other was to get to what's in this room today. That is a scary thought. But if that's not the purpose of of life and if we are not the be all and end of all of evolution, then some of the questions that we have been talking about tonight about how you map life? What happens with life? How does life occur? What does life do? How does life evolved? Where is it going? And even how are we evolved? Become really interesting in fundamental questions. And we should have the honesty to ask those questions without a whole series of prejudices of "hey, god told me and he phone that da-da-da-da-da" I didn't read that. In closing he would be a summary of the talk. These are what I think some of the new rules of life are and they are incomplete and this is a draft version and you will look first to see this talk. So I am happy to take comments, I am happy to alter it. It can basically over simplify almost any topic you want, but hell. But some of the rules that you can get out of this would be these. It is this last point that makes the stuff so interesting, it is in the last stuff that makes you all cartographers, this is a particularly interesting place to be discussing this because you are right next to the, UCSF campus. Because you are right next to some of the places were some of the research is taking place. So think of yourselves of citizen as citizens of the Renaissance. You were sitting in front of the most extraordinary intellectual discovery and banquet of knowledge, of opportunities, of ideas that anybody who has ever called himself a human has ever sit in front of. We are doubling the amount data of generated by the human species in the next five years. And all of you can do this to have cafes, to talk philosophy, to talk ethics, to build companies, to change governments, to change countries, to change education, what would you like to do with this wonderful adventure of mapping life. Because mapping life in this cartography is in its very early infancy and this is an absolute extraordinary period to be sitting here to be alive, it is like Christmas every morning. Get your new science magazines, you get a new articles, you get new books by some of the folks on these room like Stewart and Kevin Kelly, and I just fills you with joy, and you know, it's just wonderful, because you learn stuff everyday, you can build stuff everyday, you don't have to bet about stuff everyday. Mapping life is going to change every aspect of our lives. It is going to change our concept of religion, of ethics, of business and of countries. And therefore I would argue in conclusion that life is something worth mapping and it is worth mapping well. So let me put a period on the talk and that is the end of the story for now anyway. Thank you!