[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
what I want you to think about is life
as a video game so all of us played
video games and it was very frustrating
because you had to get to the next level
the next level the next level and if you
think of life as a video game one level
one is redesigning sex and rooms get
very quiet when you start with that so
let’s think about that
okay so here’s grandpa grandma and
imagine you’re gonna have a
birds-and-the-bees talk with Grandma and
Grandpa
little awkward but imagine for one
minute that you’re not bringing back
ramp on grandma
as those kind white-haired nice folks
that saw on porches and give you counsel
imagine you have a time machine and what
you’re gonna do is you’re giving
bringing back grandpa grandma as hunky
21 year olds so you’re sitting in a room
and you’re four grandparents are in
front of you and they’re 21 years old
and you’re going to talk about the birds
and the bees this part they knew because
they were usually married but there are
other parts that they might not have
known right so if you’re talking your
grandpa and grandma you say oh by the
way we don’t have to conceive today that
would have been really strange to them
because for all of human history for
every animal on earth usually sex equals
consumption and what we’ve done we take
for granted everyday is that we’ve
separated these two things grandpa and
grandmas lives would get a little wide
[Music]
but you talk to him about IVF and you
say grandpa grandma do you realize that
now you can bring together sperm and egg
and not have two people even close to
each other I would say yeah I’ve heard
that story somewhere I don’t think you
called it the Immaculate Conception and
you know what that’s America well yeah
we perform miracles every day because
maybe you go through a cancer treatment
or maybe you want to finish a PhD and
then you get to the part about surrogate
mothers now you say hey we can freeze
eggs we can freeze sperm we can have a
surrogate mother and we can have
identical twins born 50 years apart so
we’ve separated the sex from time and
these are things that we take for
granted right but about this point in
the conversation here for grandparents
we’re gonna begin to ask some serious
questions because in just two
generations the most fundamental aspect
of evolution which is reproduction has
been so profoundly altered that your
four grandparents would think that
either you are crazy or you’re a male
miraculous version of the human species
and we take this for granted and as you
think about what we’re about to do with
life code there’s a whole series of
levels that we are going to go up that
are pretty stunning so one of the things
we’re starting to do is we’re starting
to remake ourselves one piece at a time
Tony attalos got a nice lab down in Wake
Forest and Tony’s thought is hey let’s
think about teeth so you’re born with no
teeth your mothers are very grateful
Linnea grow a set of teeth you give them
away the tooth fairy Tooth Fairy leaves
a little candy leaves a little dollar or
something and then you regrow your teeth
but if you go and play hockey and lose
some of your teeth then they don’t
regrow unless if you become lawyers
[Music]
so here’s the deal your body knows how
to make tea
your body’s made teeth twice the entire
gene code to make teeth is inside each
of your 10 trillion cells and if you can
do it once and if you can do it twice
why can’t you do it a third time because
the code necessary to do that is inside
your body and of course if the code
necessary to make teeth is inside your
body
so other organs and so what Tony’s doing
is he’s in planning bladders he’s in
planning tracheas he’s in planning skin
he’s in planning years the simple stuff
Bobby is also working on more complex
organs and what that means is just like
you redo a house and you change out the
windows or you change out the furnace or
you do something else what we are going
to start doing with our bodies is we’re
gonna start refurbishing it’ll be the
same house but the parts will be swapped
out as they wear up which takes us to
life level 3 and as you keep playing
this game it gets more interesting right
so we’ve now been able to clone many
many species we’ve cloned cats and
you’ve cloned dogs you’ve cloned
catalysts in your clay whole series of
things it’s not inconceivable that we
are gonna start cloning humans now we
should not do that at this point because
it is not yet a safe reproducible
technology which takes us to life level
for life level 4 we’re gonna start to
edit ourselves so it’s not just that
we’re gonna copy exact we’re gonna start
tinkering with the code you know what I
like that but I’d like to have blue eyes
you know I like that but I’d like to be
taller you know I like that but I’d like
to not have this gene more on that in
the next talk life level 5 we’re
building entire genomes
so we’re beginning to take not just
genes but the entire program and make
things like this which was the world’s
first synthetic light phone that was
made in a company that craig Venter and
ham Smith and Dave Karen and I
co-founded and what you can do with this
company is you can program little green
soup and the cool thing about green soup
the software makes its own hardware no
matter what happens to my cell phone if
I leave it by my bed I will not have a
hundred cell phones in the morning but
if I make green soup I can make a lot of
them in fact I can scale and what we
want to do with the screen soup is to
make those pawns reach the mountains in
the background and the reason why we’re
doing that is because program while the
life-forms can make almost anything so
your cell phone has a computer chip and
as long as you’re executing ones and
zeros then you can do apps or you can do
music or you can do love letters so you
can do anything you want life it’s the
same right but it doesn’t operate ones
and zeros that operates again the code
of DNA so this orange execute slice cut
four letters in DNA adenine thymine
guanine cytosine atcg and how does this
work well sits on a tree until one day
it does that then it begins to execute
life code a ATC a AG make a little root
TCG ACC make a stem G CIA make some
leaves JC make some flowers a JC a make
a copulas change a couple letters and
thus GC a 40-day a and this orange
becomes 11g AC becomes a tangerine CGA
becomes a grapefruit
change one 1000 letters you become a
person sitting next to you today be more
careful where you sup we’ve now taken
this stuff and built the stop printers
and we’re shipping so you can desktop
print your little green suit to make
energy to make chemicals to store
information to make vaccines which leads
to life level six which is life at the
speed of light
what is life at the speed of light well
it means you can write nerdy articles
that look like this digital biological
converters for on-demand production and
biologics which translated into English
means you can get a sample of the flu
you can run it through gene sequencer
you can print a vaccine you can ship it
to this machine what’s in an airplane
and that airplane will land with a full
supply of flu vaccines in real time so
you’re building the equivalent of fax
machines except that they’re printing
biologics or vaccines or medicines or
others daily life level so the really
interesting thing about this stuff is
how many different ways you can change
life code so it becomes like a
multi-dimensional chess game if you move
something on this level you got some
moving stuff down here at level six and
you can do that with a whole series of
instruments you can do it in the brain
or you can do it in the expression of
gene code which is the epigenome you can
alter the viruses that change the gene
code in the viral you can change the
microbiome how food is translated in
your stomach you can change the
environment you can change the brain you
can change the input whole series of
ways of doing this and the curious thing
about this is if you move over here then
you’re moving a whole series of pieces
over here in the expression of gene code
like flow
why stop there why not create an
entirely new gene code which is what
float roms Bert’s doing in this
beautiful office overlooking the golf
course at Torrey Pines in La Jolla and
what he did is he took the basic code of
DNA those four letters atcg and he said
is that the only conceivable way to
create heredity and a living life-form
and after working for a series of years
he found he could substitute out two of
those base pairs so instead of having a
TCG he creates a T XY which is a
completely different life code from
anything that’s existed that we know of
on earth and as you think about that you
create a parallel branch of evolution
where you could have plants that are
immune to every virus and bacteria on
earth but why stop there why substitute
to the base pairs why not add on it
because then you go from twenty-some-odd
building blocks into 172 and your
palette goes from colic 20 crowns and
172 grams so we are really redesigning
life at this point in pretty fundamental
ways that means we’re not a unique
solution that means we can grow
life-forms and create heredity with a
very different chemistry which means as
you’re thinking of life-forms in places
like the liquid methane seas of
Neptune’s moons the chemistry might be
very different even though we wouldn’t
recognize it as a life form that could
survive on earth and coming back to
Harvard one of the things that they’ve
been doing is they’ve been building
bio-hybrid animus mixing rat cells and
rubber and gold and a whole series of
other things life level-9 we’re starting
to hack the brain were the only species
that has ever tried to decode its own
programming both its genome and its
memories and its thoughts on this
caution that’s like hell on an adventure
as you’re thinking about that what had
Boyd ins been doing as he invented or Co
invented something called optogenetics
it allows you to begin altering the
firing of neurons or the not firing
neurons using little beams of light and
once you begin to do that then you can
build your own very simple off-the-shelf
laser and viral injector system for
invivo optical neuromodulation yes kids
you can try this at home which leads to
life level 10 wishes could you stir and
reproduce the brain that’s the stuff
that Madeleine Lancaster’s doing she’s
building these little organelles which
are brains in a petri dish very small
very inefficient but once the stuff
starts to flywheel and once the stuff
starts to scale it gets amusing fast so
why stop at the current brain at life
level 11 why not build one big brain and
start sharing in molding memories and
melding them I’ve heard this somewhere
where in the world have I heard this
concept who’s gonna do this stuff well
here’s the basic computer science
curriculum for building neural networks
as engineering design challenges and
these are curriculums for high school
computer science so we may not do it
what your kids are gonna do and your
grandkids are gonna take it for granted
and as you’re thinking about the stuff
it does create one or two small ethical
moral challenges
because as you can modulate memories you
can erase memories you can insert
memories you can moduli as memories and
who’s gonna control the stuff and what
are the rules on this stuff and that
stuff we’re gonna face life level 12 why
stop on earth why not begin to design an
interplanetary species why would you
ever want to do that well because it
turns out that solar system tourism has
a couple of issues your heart starts to
screw up you start to get hearing loss
from cranial pressure and co2 your bones
begin to demineralize so you can’t
really walk along you got big kidney
stones the high energy particles start
to really screw up your brain radiation
is like getting a full CT every five
days as you go to Mars and there’s
vision loss for over 60% of the
astronauts so if you are ever going to
live on the moon or if you’re ever gonna
live on Mars or go further beyond that
you have to fundamentally change the
human gene code because there hasn’t
been an evolutionary pressure on earth
to adapt to those environments and then
there’s the ultimate level which is life
level 13 could you ever design an
interplanetary species if we ever want
to get beyond the solar system at
current speeds Proxima Centauri Proxima
being close is a mere 17 thousand light
years away 17,000 human years away
oh yeah the Rockets can get faster but
it’s still gonna be a thousand years to
get there and you fundamentally have to
change calorie consumption human
longevity the design of the body and
that would require building almost two
completely different species and we have
to ask
okay so what do you want to keep about
this what do you want to Hansa bout this
and what are you gonna allow change and
that’s probably the greatest adventure
humans will ever face so now let’s go
back to the beginning of this stuff now
we’re gonna take that same time machine
we’re gonna bring back all of you your
grandparents are now 80 years old you
are sitting in front of them as 21 year
old what were they gonna take for
granted what’s gonna shock you as much
as we are shocking the previous
generations and how much more our
grandkids gonna do by the time they’re
80 that will seem perfectly normal and
natural and coming back to one of my
favorite thinkers Stewart Brand the
present moment used to be the
unimaginable future and that will be
true for our kids and that’ll be true
for our grandkids and this is the
greatest single adventure and
exploration we’ve ever been on and
that’s the reason why life code is just
such a cool thing to be involved with
today and so much fun thank you all very
much
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
what I want you to think about is life
as a video game so all of us played
video games and it was very frustrating
because you had to get to the next level
the next level the next level and if you
think of life as a video game one level
one is redesigning sex and rooms get
very quiet when you start with that so
let’s think about that
okay so here’s grandpa grandma and
imagine you’re gonna have a
birds-and-the-bees talk with Grandma and
Grandpa
little awkward but imagine for one
minute that you’re not bringing back
ramp on grandma
as those kind white-haired nice folks
that saw on porches and give you counsel
imagine you have a time machine and what
you’re gonna do is you’re giving
bringing back grandpa grandma as hunky
21 year olds so you’re sitting in a room
and you’re four grandparents are in
front of you and they’re 21 years old
and you’re going to talk about the birds
and the bees this part they knew because
they were usually married but there are
other parts that they might not have
known right so if you’re talking your
grandpa and grandma you say oh by the
way we don’t have to conceive today that
would have been really strange to them
because for all of human history for
every animal on earth usually sex equals
consumption and what we’ve done we take
for granted everyday is that we’ve
separated these two things grandpa and
grandmas lives would get a little wide
[Music]
but you talk to him about IVF and you
say grandpa grandma do you realize that
now you can bring together sperm and egg
and not have two people even close to
each other I would say yeah I’ve heard
that story somewhere I don’t think you
called it the Immaculate Conception and
you know what that’s America well yeah
we perform miracles every day because
maybe you go through a cancer treatment
or maybe you want to finish a PhD and
then you get to the part about surrogate
mothers now you say hey we can freeze
eggs we can freeze sperm we can have a
surrogate mother and we can have
identical twins born 50 years apart so
we’ve separated the sex from time and
these are things that we take for
granted right but about this point in
the conversation here for grandparents
we’re gonna begin to ask some serious
questions because in just two
generations the most fundamental aspect
of evolution which is reproduction has
been so profoundly altered that your
four grandparents would think that
either you are crazy or you’re a male
miraculous version of the human species
and we take this for granted and as you
think about what we’re about to do with
life code there’s a whole series of
levels that we are going to go up that
are pretty stunning so one of the things
we’re starting to do is we’re starting
to remake ourselves one piece at a time
Tony attalos got a nice lab down in Wake
Forest and Tony’s thought is hey let’s
think about teeth so you’re born with no
teeth your mothers are very grateful
Linnea grow a set of teeth you give them
away the tooth fairy Tooth Fairy leaves
a little candy leaves a little dollar or
something and then you regrow your teeth
but if you go and play hockey and lose
some of your teeth then they don’t
regrow unless if you become lawyers
[Music]
so here’s the deal your body knows how
to make tea
your body’s made teeth twice the entire
gene code to make teeth is inside each
of your 10 trillion cells and if you can
do it once and if you can do it twice
why can’t you do it a third time because
the code necessary to do that is inside
your body and of course if the code
necessary to make teeth is inside your
body
so other organs and so what Tony’s doing
is he’s in planning bladders he’s in
planning tracheas he’s in planning skin
he’s in planning years the simple stuff
Bobby is also working on more complex
organs and what that means is just like
you redo a house and you change out the
windows or you change out the furnace or
you do something else what we are going
to start doing with our bodies is we’re
gonna start refurbishing it’ll be the
same house but the parts will be swapped
out as they wear up which takes us to
life level 3 and as you keep playing
this game it gets more interesting right
so we’ve now been able to clone many
many species we’ve cloned cats and
you’ve cloned dogs you’ve cloned
catalysts in your clay whole series of
things it’s not inconceivable that we
are gonna start cloning humans now we
should not do that at this point because
it is not yet a safe reproducible
technology which takes us to life level
for life level 4 we’re gonna start to
edit ourselves so it’s not just that
we’re gonna copy exact we’re gonna start
tinkering with the code you know what I
like that but I’d like to have blue eyes
you know I like that but I’d like to be
taller you know I like that but I’d like
to not have this gene more on that in
the next talk life level 5 we’re
building entire genomes
so we’re beginning to take not just
genes but the entire program and make
things like this which was the world’s
first synthetic light phone that was
made in a company that craig Venter and
ham Smith and Dave Karen and I
co-founded and what you can do with this
company is you can program little green
soup and the cool thing about green soup
the software makes its own hardware no
matter what happens to my cell phone if
I leave it by my bed I will not have a
hundred cell phones in the morning but
if I make green soup I can make a lot of
them in fact I can scale and what we
want to do with the screen soup is to
make those pawns reach the mountains in
the background and the reason why we’re
doing that is because program while the
life-forms can make almost anything so
your cell phone has a computer chip and
as long as you’re executing ones and
zeros then you can do apps or you can do
music or you can do love letters so you
can do anything you want life it’s the
same right but it doesn’t operate ones
and zeros that operates again the code
of DNA so this orange execute slice cut
four letters in DNA adenine thymine
guanine cytosine atcg and how does this
work well sits on a tree until one day
it does that then it begins to execute
life code a ATC a AG make a little root
TCG ACC make a stem G CIA make some
leaves JC make some flowers a JC a make
a copulas change a couple letters and
thus GC a 40-day a and this orange
becomes 11g AC becomes a tangerine CGA
becomes a grapefruit
change one 1000 letters you become a
person sitting next to you today be more
careful where you sup we’ve now taken
this stuff and built the stop printers
and we’re shipping so you can desktop
print your little green suit to make
energy to make chemicals to store
information to make vaccines which leads
to life level six which is life at the
speed of light
what is life at the speed of light well
it means you can write nerdy articles
that look like this digital biological
converters for on-demand production and
biologics which translated into English
means you can get a sample of the flu
you can run it through gene sequencer
you can print a vaccine you can ship it
to this machine what’s in an airplane
and that airplane will land with a full
supply of flu vaccines in real time so
you’re building the equivalent of fax
machines except that they’re printing
biologics or vaccines or medicines or
others daily life level so the really
interesting thing about this stuff is
how many different ways you can change
life code so it becomes like a
multi-dimensional chess game if you move
something on this level you got some
moving stuff down here at level six and
you can do that with a whole series of
instruments you can do it in the brain
or you can do it in the expression of
gene code which is the epigenome you can
alter the viruses that change the gene
code in the viral you can change the
microbiome how food is translated in
your stomach you can change the
environment you can change the brain you
can change the input whole series of
ways of doing this and the curious thing
about this is if you move over here then
you’re moving a whole series of pieces
over here in the expression of gene code
like flow
why stop there why not create an
entirely new gene code which is what
float roms Bert’s doing in this
beautiful office overlooking the golf
course at Torrey Pines in La Jolla and
what he did is he took the basic code of
DNA those four letters atcg and he said
is that the only conceivable way to
create heredity and a living life-form
and after working for a series of years
he found he could substitute out two of
those base pairs so instead of having a
TCG he creates a T XY which is a
completely different life code from
anything that’s existed that we know of
on earth and as you think about that you
create a parallel branch of evolution
where you could have plants that are
immune to every virus and bacteria on
earth but why stop there why substitute
to the base pairs why not add on it
because then you go from twenty-some-odd
building blocks into 172 and your
palette goes from colic 20 crowns and
172 grams so we are really redesigning
life at this point in pretty fundamental
ways that means we’re not a unique
solution that means we can grow
life-forms and create heredity with a
very different chemistry which means as
you’re thinking of life-forms in places
like the liquid methane seas of
Neptune’s moons the chemistry might be
very different even though we wouldn’t
recognize it as a life form that could
survive on earth and coming back to
Harvard one of the things that they’ve
been doing is they’ve been building
bio-hybrid animus mixing rat cells and
rubber and gold and a whole series of
other things life level-9 we’re starting
to hack the brain were the only species
that has ever tried to decode its own
programming both its genome and its
memories and its thoughts on this
caution that’s like hell on an adventure
as you’re thinking about that what had
Boyd ins been doing as he invented or Co
invented something called optogenetics
it allows you to begin altering the
firing of neurons or the not firing
neurons using little beams of light and
once you begin to do that then you can
build your own very simple off-the-shelf
laser and viral injector system for
invivo optical neuromodulation yes kids
you can try this at home which leads to
life level 10 wishes could you stir and
reproduce the brain that’s the stuff
that Madeleine Lancaster’s doing she’s
building these little organelles which
are brains in a petri dish very small
very inefficient but once the stuff
starts to flywheel and once the stuff
starts to scale it gets amusing fast so
why stop at the current brain at life
level 11 why not build one big brain and
start sharing in molding memories and
melding them I’ve heard this somewhere
where in the world have I heard this
concept who’s gonna do this stuff well
here’s the basic computer science
curriculum for building neural networks
as engineering design challenges and
these are curriculums for high school
computer science so we may not do it
what your kids are gonna do and your
grandkids are gonna take it for granted
and as you’re thinking about the stuff
it does create one or two small ethical
moral challenges
because as you can modulate memories you
can erase memories you can insert
memories you can moduli as memories and
who’s gonna control the stuff and what
are the rules on this stuff and that
stuff we’re gonna face life level 12 why
stop on earth why not begin to design an
interplanetary species why would you
ever want to do that well because it
turns out that solar system tourism has
a couple of issues your heart starts to
screw up you start to get hearing loss
from cranial pressure and co2 your bones
begin to demineralize so you can’t
really walk along you got big kidney
stones the high energy particles start
to really screw up your brain radiation
is like getting a full CT every five
days as you go to Mars and there’s
vision loss for over 60% of the
astronauts so if you are ever going to
live on the moon or if you’re ever gonna
live on Mars or go further beyond that
you have to fundamentally change the
human gene code because there hasn’t
been an evolutionary pressure on earth
to adapt to those environments and then
there’s the ultimate level which is life
level 13 could you ever design an
interplanetary species if we ever want
to get beyond the solar system at
current speeds Proxima Centauri Proxima
being close is a mere 17 thousand light
years away 17,000 human years away
oh yeah the Rockets can get faster but
it’s still gonna be a thousand years to
get there and you fundamentally have to
change calorie consumption human
longevity the design of the body and
that would require building almost two
completely different species and we have
to ask
okay so what do you want to keep about
this what do you want to Hansa bout this
and what are you gonna allow change and
that’s probably the greatest adventure
humans will ever face so now let’s go
back to the beginning of this stuff now
we’re gonna take that same time machine
we’re gonna bring back all of you your
grandparents are now 80 years old you
are sitting in front of them as 21 year
old what were they gonna take for
granted what’s gonna shock you as much
as we are shocking the previous
generations and how much more our
grandkids gonna do by the time they’re
80 that will seem perfectly normal and
natural and coming back to one of my
favorite thinkers Stewart Brand the
present moment used to be the
unimaginable future and that will be
true for our kids and that’ll be true
for our grandkids and this is the
greatest single adventure and
exploration we’ve ever been on and
that’s the reason why life code is just
such a cool thing to be involved with
today and so much fun thank you all very
much
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
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