Weve escalated it up all the way to the president and he said he wants it fixed and it will be fixed. The problem that the reporting shows is that its not just a matter of the website being a little budgie, that there are underlying issues here about the system, the coordination here between the Different Insurance Companies and the federal program and the system of delivering healthcare where the president is said fine is where some of the complexities and problems are and that seems more difficult to fix than getting the computer code to arrange 23450eu6sly so it works okay. Rose i want to talk about the computer code first and then come back to the healthcare in general. You would think that the Campaign Team that put together such an extraordinary digital machine would at the same time know how to find people that can put together an extraordinary Digital Healthcare program. You would think so. They have revolutionized the obama team, revolutionized by several orders. The operation and rung of running of campaign with all sorts of entrepreneurial activity. Why did they do that. They allowed basic three their programmers, it was a free flowing organization where they were allowed to fail quietly in problem and fix that. None of that appears to have have been what was at work at the federal government program. And this is one of the sort of ratifies one of the arguments of a lot of the republican critics, which is that just government cant do comprehensive big complicated things the way you can when youre in a kind of more free flowing corporate environment which is closer to what the Obama Campaign was than what you have here in government. Rose but at the same time, i mean they knew this was come. This was not a surprise to them, was it . Well, it was asked in the interviews before with journal its and interviews i had with administrative officials. This is great, this theory you have about how and we should talk. Its hard to under state how much weight they were putting on these websites in term of solving the problems with obamacare and getting people signed up. But leaving that aside for a moment when i said, what if this thing doesnt work, i was assured by several Different Administration official on several different fronts that they had tested it. That they used the irs Electronic Filing model and all of the computer learning that theyve done over the years in dealing with peoples tax returns applied it to this. They tested it like they test pent gun systems. Then they were saying before it runs it was thoroughly tested. One of the arguments being made by secretary sebelius was that it wasnt tested enough. When he left when he came into office or the wars or the before p oil spill that was not of his making. This is the president s signature domestic achievement and he launched it. He knew when the launch date was, so that wasnt a surprise either and yet some of these problems seems to be the kinds of problems that are catching him off guard as if this were dropped out of the sky. Rose does the smart money think this is going to do real damage to obamacare . Well, this is a really interesting question. Im not sure what the an is. So there is the political question which if the damage were just political, you know the president s not going to be reelected. You could imagine that those really the democrats who are running for the senate in those republican states are the one most at risk. And you can make a political argument that theyve already taken the pain for obama, people are not going to vote for them who dont like the president s Healthcare Plan so theyre not going to lose a whole bunch of new votes was of this. So thats the politics of it. This is a sustained problem for several months. I think it really does hurt democrats. Rose lets talk quickly about the policy. Which is that what the Affordable Healthcare Act requires, its a lot of young voter sign up and get into those insurance pools in variation regions of the country so that those insurances pools arent filled with older sicker americans. If that doesnt work because the healthcare is faulty then va real problem because that sends the premiums higher and thats a big big problem. Rose thats used to treat the elderly. The Insurance Company can keep prices down because they know weve got lots of these young people in here so we can spread the cost out across them. That was a crucial reason when i talked to Administration Officials about how this was going to work on the website, what they hoped was the website would launch and these younger americans who know how to use the web is quite Second Nature to them, that they would easily glide into the Affordable Care act system, thats the real policy question here that could be a real problem for this. Its a problem on the policy front that is a political problem. Rose the president said he would bring out the best and brightest to fix the this. I dont understand why he didnt do that two weeks ago. Well in the first place. Were walking the cat back on this a little bit. Why didnt you, who was not on the sort of on the ball here when this is getting launched. And we can go all the way back. Part of the problem here is the way this law was written. Thas that it was complex that youre trying to meld public and private. When youre trying to meld Computer Systems in both the public and private sector theres complexity. But as you rightly said it isnt like this is a surprise to them. The real challenge now though is this problem like a fire in which case you can bring firemen in from across the country and more hoses and put it out and thats great. Or is it a problem where you really like untangle christmas lights, you actually make your jobs harder because you need 58 Conference Calls for lots of different people who have lots of different opinions and the actual work isnt getng done. When the president said hes bringing in lots of people, that is not necessarily a recipe for quick solution. Rose is it simply Government Intervention in lives that made so many people on the far right so opposed to obamacare. What was the one thing that made them the angriest sea that so that they were willing to shut down the government. I think its a great point. For those people who had insurance they thought their insurance was going to get ruined. And they thought they were going to have to pay more in premiums or wait for doctors or when the president promised that the existing insurance system wouldnt be changed, that he wasnt telling them the truth. And i think a corollary to that and with some people this is the primary concern was just get out of my life. Its just kind of a visceral reaction to the government being involved in their personal lives. And of course this comes up against the great disconnect between the same kind of voters saying keep your hands off my health care are also the ones who, you know, are fine with medicare in that regard. So it is not always a totally rational reaction among everybody who hates this at such a visceral level. Rose it was a great moment in political theatre when somebody stood up and raised their hand and said you tell the government to keep their hands off my medicare. Thats right. Its a sign of how successful its been that even those who hate government dont recognize its fingerprints. Rose do people like medicare . They do. Rose it has problems of all kinds. Yes. I mean they like it no, sir who are on it and those who are expecting to get it, they do like it. And whats interesting here the whitehouse has pointed to the Medicare Part d which you know when that was first the drug Prescription Drug benefit, when that was first put forward there were a lot of people who thought oh no youre going to ruin my medicare by adding some thing to it. A similar reaction. They liked their medicare and they wanted pretty scription drugs covered but there were a lot of people worried adding more government on to this would ruin it. Now it terms out thats been a much more Successful Program than a lot of people thought at first. Rose i do remember one of the debates, didnt romney say to the president youre cutting medicare. At least in the republican debates the question was raised as to whether the Obama Administration wanted to cut by some 700 million or was it billion. I think it was billion. Rose it was billion. Thats right. You know i mean the president s argument for those medicare cuts was that this was all, and people didnt buy this in large numbers, but that this was an effort to deal with those long term entitlement costs that medicare is a part of. That if you rationalize the system, you can bring some savings out it by just being smart about how you distribute healthcare. And thats one of the, again people didnt buy that at the time but thats where that 700 brilliant came from where you didnt necessarily feel because that was from something that was going to be implemented. Rose hears something thats counterintuitive. Was the fact this thing got into shutting the government down mean that people who might otherwise have been willing to sort of vote against obamacare are so mad that they are maybe less inclined to do so now. The republicans succeeded in finding something . X l was even less popular than the president s Healthcare Plan which was this funding of the government to shutting down healthcare. People just absolutely didnt like that. I think another interesting side effect here is that maybe theres a recent poll about how many people know now about these federal exchanges. More know they exist. One of the challenges for the Obama Administration getting the word out that these exchanges exist because of the pool of people that are uninsured theyre trying to reach arent watching the evening news every night. Theyre not participating in the news culture so much. So they didnt even know this is out there. Well now that its become a problem, its much more, its kind of ubiquitous these stories about it so thats raised the level of awareness. Thats bad on the one hand people are hearing the first stories about it theyre thinking negotiator this is a mess i dont want to engage in it. If there are stories that say well its been fixed now you have a greater number of people who at least know its out there and might go sign up for it. So thats the optimist case for how this debacle has created at least greater awareness that exchanges are even out there. Rose this administration it seems to me has had a hard time selling its progms, being able to effectively communicate what they are and what they are not. Thats right. And that comes into play here. I think the president s very good communicator in the binary election context which is its either the other guy or me. And there will be a date where you have to make that choice. When youre trying to explain policy, people can choose to opt out. They can choose to not listen or they can choose to imagine that theres a policy out there that is not all the bad things that youre offering and its a lot of good stuff. So they can imagine something and thats where they say we like that even though in reality such a policy might not be possible. But they have another place they can put their thinking. With an election you cant put your thinking anywhere else, you can stay home from participating of course. But people who do want to participate kind of have an a or b choice and thats not, it is not that simple with policy. Whats interesting on your plan about communications is the president is basically got an operational challenge here. Hes got to basically make the trains run and yet hes trying in part to solve it with communications. Thats what his event was in the rose garden. The problem is that the president continues to say well the underlying thing is okay, you raise expectations. Remember when they first came out and said well these are just glitches. Give us the slack you would cut apple. Now were three weeks into it if appearal had Something Like this not apple maps withstanding, it would be a huge catastrophe. A lot of these sort of end up biting them in the end because people say wait you said it was going to be this and now its Something Else and that leads to a kind of credibility problem that has dogged the Affordable Care act since its inception. Rose you got people like the senator from South Carolina and the found agent says quote we will continue to fight against obamacare. So you got the speaker of the house saying that, you got most republicans, you got ted cruz obviously saying that. So how are they going to do this . Well, you know i think theyre going to do it, a come things. One, theyre going to have to keep saying that for the constituent who want them to keep the fight up. There are a lot of republicans who are very gun shy about doing anything too adventuresome on the Affordable Care act thats having problems on its own. Fft problems continue to mushroom then you can see a larger call for action. In the polls right now the Washington Post had some polling on this. People are dissatisfied with the waive the rollout has gone. They recognize some of the problems in the roll out people dont wanted it defunded or delay. Theres no at least in the polling support for any Republican Program to undo it. So theres going to be perhaps a lot of rhetoric about this. But im not sure theres a whole lot that they can do that lawmakers can do. If they wanted to try to fix or tweak it you get a group of the conservative movement say no you must rip it out totally by its roots. Anything that seeks to tweak it is an improvement and thats an improvement of a thing dough dont want to exist in the first place. Rose speaking of senator cruz. There is this fact. Hes been at iowa, and im told, i mean the iowa primaries are determined by the, you know, the more active ist whether republin or democrat. Im told if iowa voted today, he would win. Charlie ive heard the same thing from folks involved in the caucus out there for a long time. I hear ted cruzs name and scott walkers name from the governor of wisconsin. What do they like about ted cruz. Do you remember Rick Santorum won the caucus there in the end. What the activists of iowa like is somebody who, you know, stands on principles. Does what they say theyre going to do. And particularly in the washington context where republicans have time and time again heard people they thought were conservatives say im going to washington and ill give them what for, im going to stand on principle and even if it requires fighting my own party i will do it. And when push comes to shove they witness. Ted cruz didnt wilt and ive heard people who are ted cruz fans now but as you know the iowa caucus voter and the Tea Party Voter in the Republican Party is still a minority of the party. But given the way the process works, they have an outside influence on the primaries and caucuses. And so if this continues, ted cruz should have an interesting role to play although theyll bump up against a lot of the problems that Rick Santorum had which is you can fill a ball room of very enthusiastic people but you got to show how you can lead. And right now ted cruz is only increasing the number of people in washington who dont like him and if he ever wanted to come back here and lead hes got to show some capacity for doing that. Rose governors have more easy examples to illustrate the point of leadership than senators. They do. In fact the Republican Governors Association is using the washington republicans, now this is the Republican Governors Association is pointing to washington and saying if you dont like the dysfunction there just look at the republican governors, theyre the ones getting things done. You have an amazing split in the Republican Party. You have ted cruz saying hes demonstrating what real conservative principles look like here in washington and youve got republican governors saying no thats not the example the example to look at are these 30 republican governors in the country. Thats the day bait youre going to see in 2016 between a kind of doer out in the states and the talker from washington. Rose john, its a pleasure to have you on the program. Always a pleasure, charlie, thanks. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. So if we look forward to this next on 50 years, this is going to be very exciting. Almost anything and anybodys imagination can be designed and made as a biological unit. Now were not working at the atom scale but you can get roughly a third of all the humanities, genomes within the perverbial head of the pin. Its a pretty small scale but we can work now by changing evolution by building on top of it simply by designing new software of life. Thank you very much. Rose he is one of the worlds leading scientists and entrepreneurs and one of the first people to map the human genome. His Team Announced in 2010 that they had created synthetic life, the first fully functioning cell controlled by synthetic dna. His new book is called life at the speed of light from the double helix to the dawn of digital age. It describes the origins of synthetic genomics, its current challenges and its potential for the future. I am pleased to have aji t venture back at this table. Welcome. Thank you. Its nice to be back. Rose its a pleasure. Theres so much you want to talk about, including dublin in 1943 to 2012 which is chapter 1. And you start with a question, which im very much in favor of. What is life, only three simple words and yet out of them spends a universe of questions that are no less challenging. What precisely is it that separates the animate from the inanimate. What are the basic ingredients of life. Where did life first stir. How did the first organisms evolve. Is there life everywhere. To what extent is life scattered across the cosmos. Other if other kinds of creatures do exist on exo planets are they as intelligent as we are or even more so. These questions are about the nature and origins of life remain the biggest and most hotly debated in all of biology. So therefore we have this book. Tell me what is life as you explore in this book. What are we talking about and how are we changing the definition if we are. Well, everything we know about life in a meaningful way has come in the last 70 years. So when the lecture in 1944, the world was certain that proteins was the genetic material. Dna was a back barone for the proteins. But he changed the thinking saying it didnt have to be complicated and as simple as a binary code. Since 44 until now first we discovered that much dna was in fact genetic material then the structure was solved by watt kins krict. We started sequencing the first bacterial genome in 1995. Weve been going from understanding that dna was a genetic material to being able to read it. And the latest phase were learning how to write it and rewrite it. What became clear by writing the genetic code starring with four bottles of chemicals and creating new life out of that material that all life on this planet is dna software. Were a dna softwaredriven species. All life we know it is dna driven software. Thats a differ view than 1944. Rose what did you accomplish . So, what we did is we, after reading the genetic code and having that converted to the ones and zeroes on the computer, we went the other way. We started with the ones and zeroes to see if we could recapitulate life on the genome. Four bottles of chemicals we wrote 1. 1 million letters of genetic code. It took us a long time to be able to do that and the booker details the trials and errors forgetting there. We then put that software in another cell. Rose one cell. One cell. And that software took over the cell. And converted everything into that cell based on the code we put in to create a new cell. I think it was the biggest change was that finding by change of the dna software in the cell, the new Software Take it over and converts it into a new species. And so it became very clear with this how life is totally dna software driven. Our cells constantly turn over preteens every few seconds. If you take the software out of the cells they die. Its like taking the software out of your computer, you can do nothing without it snoovment what do you say to someone like david baldmore at a conference who said it has not created life only mimicked it. We dont claim we created life. We created new life. Theres a difference, theres some fantastic work going on harvard trying to recapitulate early origins of liver with rna and lipid vesicles. Were doing something on top of three andahalf billion years of evolution. Were showing that all modern life is now based on this software and by rewriting the software, davids absolutely right. We started with a known genome. This was actually proof of consent experiment. It was nt creating whole new life. For the last few years weve been designing a cell in the computer and were currently manufacturing the dna for this and well know in a little while whether were smart enough to actually create new life. Rose you make a point in doing this which is interesting to me, i find that the audience watching this program and other programs are really interested in science if you can explain it to them. Because it is like a puzzle. It is like a detective, i mean it is exploring things that they can never imagine or can only begin to imagine. All that makes it for one extraordinary kind of curiosity about these things. So when you say biology is in the digital age, what do you mean. So we can now readily interchange between the four letter chemical dna software and the ones and zeroes in the computer. Can we now go in both directions. When we read the genome and sequenced the human genome we converted those six billion letters to ones and zeroes in the computer. And now digital code and dna code can rapidly convert one into the other. And thats where the title comes from. We can now actually send life as that digital code and recapitulate it at the other end. Rose so you send it as email or something. You can send it as email and reconvert it back to dna. So the future well be able to actually download living things from our desktop computers. Rose and you also write the Synthetic Biology freeze the design of life from the shackles of revolution which is obvious too. There are some obvious things here but its worth underlining them as well. Well, what we have evolved with all the species on this planet, theyve evolved in a very constrained set of environments. For example, our goal of trying to get algae to produce enough lipid to be able to use as a cheap fuel to replace oil. No algae has evolved to produce those levels of oil. If they did, the oceans would be full of oil instead of water. So we need to change evolution to change the constraints and what were selecting for. We can the do that by design or we can do it by selection. Doing it by design changes the speed by orders. Rose so you can produce it really brilliantly fast or speed, faster than the speed we might image. Yes. Rose and therefore you have enough to produce a fossil fuel. Thats the goal. Rose what are the other goals in all of this. So when you think of sending life, life information through the computer, we tried to think what are the most important early applications. And so we were working to come up with a new way to treat flu ax venes. Rose these are pharmaceutical companies. Well bart is a u. S. Program. With h1n1 pandemic with a didnt have a vaccine until two months after the pandemic speak. Fortunately the death rate was much lower than people were originally worried about. But if it happens again with the h7, 78 and 9 outbreak in china that apparently has a much higher lethality rate. Weve taken this period of time of months and converted it down to less than 12 hours of just taking the digital information, using our ability to write the genetic code, to recreate the flu virus that can be used as a vaccine. And so they just got their new facility in North Carolina using cell lines instead of chicken eggs for the first time. Where we have set up one of our machines there for taking digital information. So we could send just an email message to this plant in North Carolina if theres a new out break strain. Make it in 12 hours and they can scale up into production. Rose and produce it how fast . So the scale up, the scale is the issue, and so they can produce 300 million doses there but they cant do that over night. But it takes months off the whole time in the front end by building the vaccine very quickly. Now the future, as i portray it here in a somewhat fanciful way but maybe in the future well all have boxes on our computers that do the same conversion. Rose you have one of those boxes now. We have one of though boxes. Its about the size of this table. Biological digital converter. Rose in a fancy World Everybody would have one of those. The goal is to prevent future pandemic. The more distributed it is the better. We had one site making it but initially when the vaccine became available only government senior officials and healthcare workers had access to the machine. A lot of countries didnt have access as all. If its look the movie contagion rose you call the digital biological converter the household appliance of the future. Thats right. Rose ever has to have one. Yes. Rose when you thank you about the time line for completion of the kinds of things youre working on, are we talking the next century or are we talking 25 years out. So what we do, ham smith is 32 im 67. We try to figure out what well do in our lifetime so that puts constraints on it. We have the prototype machine and help with funding for this. Were going to have the first robotic device that synthesizes and assembles dna on the market next year. Rose a robotic device that assembles the dna. To genes and larger packages. Rose you have it on the market. Yes. Rose meaning people can buy it. Yes. Rose and who would buy it. Well, it would be High Level Research labs that right now its becoming a big business with laboratories contracting out to a number of companies to synthesize dna. And well make it possible for them to do much faster and cheaper in their own laboratories. Rose you also think about mars. Yes. Rose and you think about what might be possible if you can do what youre now working on larger. How would that work. So, we had a test project until the government got shut down or reactivated next month. Nasas funding the front end of this. Its a sending unit. Well test it out in the Mojave Desert taking a sample of dirt out there on the mars test site. Sequencing it and then sending the information up to the cloud. Which would be the equivalent of doing that on mars and beeping it back to earth. It can take the signal and convert it back to dna and into life. Rose how does this work in terms of exploration of mars. So on mars, the indications are there used to be a lot of water there. Maybe at least two or three times massive oceans. Weve exchanged 100 kilogram of materials between earth and mars every year. Rose how do we do that. Its just meteors that have gone back and forth early on. Earth sends about 10 kilograms, we get about 100 kilograms from mars. And so finding life on mars rose nasa or somebody else. Its through meteors. Rose so nasa tracks it. Yes. Some people have argued you cant take a soil of earth with a shovel, a shovel worth of oil and not find martian soil in it. And so if there was life on mars, it would have mirrored what we have on earth. Maybe originated on mars and came to earth, nobody knows where it started. But were going to have to drill down deeper into the surface. The current atmosphere there, lack of atmosphere and the radiation makes a pretty low probability were going to find surface life. On our planet, if you dig down a mile or two, we find massive life. And theres as much life beneath the surface of the earth as there is in the oceans. Rose oh really. Microbial life. Rose didnt you go and find a gazillion new species. Exactly. Taking sample every 200 miles, every stop thousands and thousands of new species. Rose ended up with what, 80,000. 80 million new genes that were discovered through that expedition. Its interesting, theres much more diversity in the oceans but not more organisms. And the reason is the major drivers of evolution are sunlight and oxygen. Deep in the earth, theres the same density of organisms but not the tremendous diversity around each type. In fact, deep in the Colorado Mine we found organisms their closest match and they were very close came out of a volcano in italy. So all of evolution has been highly constrained deep in the earth. And the oceans because of all the oxygen and uv light, it changes much more quickly. But if we go deep into mars, you go down about a kilometer, theres ice. I would be surprised if we dont find life contained in the ice. But below the ice, theres a good estimation of liquid water. So if were going to find life there, well find it there. But the problem is getting it back to earth. You got to send up a rocket big enough to bring the back and land on earth. If we just send up a little sequencing device, if theres life there, we sequence the dna and send it back. Rose do we have the power to do that now. Absolutely, yes. Rose so we can do it. Thats what these new tests are going to be. It isnt a matter of just shrinking down the devices but the technology is all there to make it happen. Rose have you seen the movie gravity. I havent seen it yet. Ive been told its worth seeing. Rose a brilliant Young Filmmaker too and Sandra Bullok and george clooney. Scientists finds something wrong with you but it1 yes. Rose he surprised us before. I think its very likely and it achieve. But our technology would be the most important thing they have for supporting the colony there. Because we can send up new biology, not in a rocketship but as an electromagnetic wave. Whether its new antibiotics for diseases that will break up, new cells for making food or fuel, that would be the way we send information and send actual life. We wont we sending people that way, but the support things to keep the people alive will be doing by digital waves. Rose to what end result . Well, for example as you know with the micro biome we have more bacterial cells than human cells. So every astronaut or cosmonaut that goes up to the space station is taking 100 trillion bacterial cells with them. And so unless were going to start sterilizing people before they go to mars, each person that goes there is going to be carrying a huge bacterial repertoire. We will be sending diseases up with people. And so the only way to, unless you have the world supply of medicines with you, we can actually send antibiotic in the form of phage, these viruses that kill bacteria through the internet. New cells to take the co2 on mars and convert it into construction material. Rose are there a bunch of people all over the world as you mentioned harvard and people at cambridge and people in moscow and people in beijing and people in cairo all working on this. What most scientists in the Synthetic Biology field are working on are designing new biological circuits. Its really amazing stuff. Were trying to write the whole genetic code, theres this fantastic Research Going on, i detailed some of it in here, of out of biology creating the equivalent of electronic circuits, oscillators, detectors, proof that only engineers life but engineers function into life. Bacteria that serve as sensors. Manufacturing will change because of these technologies. So lots and lots of new circuits and components are being built, assembling them together in life is going to be a new challenge. Rose is there a race for nobel prize going on here. Probably not. I dont think anybody races for those. Rose they dont. Really, you dont think so. No. Rose in other words, you look at what happened just in term of economics here what we just saw. You think the nobel prize comes to people after theyve done something several years someone looks back on physics it happens very quickly. Last year one of the scientists that got it for work he did 50 years before, right. So you know, i dont think anybody is focused on those as a scientist compared to just the excitement of getting answers to these questions were asking. Rose right, exactly. We believe in questions, as i said, before we started. First met at the time of the mapping of the human genome. Youve done a lot of series about that, a lot of interviews about that. Where are we and most whats the most surprising thin thats been discovered and where were you wrong in your assumption going in if anywhere in terms of size, in terms of whatever. So i think the thing thats most exciting about whats changed in that last 14 years is the technology. My genome being the first one done was about 100 million genome project. Rose 100 million. Yes. Now Companies Like aluma can do it in a very short period of time. Rose you can get it down for a thousand dollars today. Yes. What we need are large numbers. Having my genome and a hundred other genomes, there are more curiousities no rose you need a wide sample. Thats right. We need tens of thousands of genomes to understand how with the six billion letters we get all the variety that you see in human life. And so 10,000 would be the minimum number we need. But now thats doable when you consider the Public Program was at 3 million program, you get a lot of genomes done for 3 billion and build a lot of computers. So this next phase, the next five years rose how about doing that now, trying to make. Theres going to be several efforts in the private world that are doing this because its moving too fast to have it happen with government research. But as you know from my last book writing about my genome, theres very little you can understand having the genome sequence today. Rose thats exactly right. Theres now in cancer a couple dozen what are called actionable items. For example, if you have lung cancer, theres nothing more important to know than your genome, because if youre lucky and youre one of the three to 5 people that have this one letter change in one gene. Pfizer has a drug over 60 of the time knock out your tumors. So what were looking for is more and more of these actionable. Rose did Something Like that happen with leukemia or not. Yes. Theres a handful of these things now we can tell from the genetic code. The goal is to get 30,000 things like that. And if i was wrong on something, it was optimistic, over optimism. Rose do you encourage people to go out and get their genome done. Yes. Its better t get it down. Its not a static identity. It changes rose you mean certain cells appear and multiply. Some of the latest data indicates that genome is slightly different in different parts of our body. It certainly changes in cancer cells. And so having a base line is going to be very useful for the future, and especially as soon as these databases are populated with tens of thousands. So its going to become the number one way in the future to lower healthcare costs through preventive medicine. Weve talked about this before, preventing disease and getting people to understand its worthwhile to prevent something, is a tough economic argument until you have large data sets. Its Pretty Simple as an individual if you can prevent something you can. Rose i dont know where this came from i first heard it from the mouth of Francis Collins who said, who you know well. Yes. Rose who said the interesting thing about technological advances especially in health is that in the beginning the delivery is never as big as you thought it might be. But after ten years its much larger than you ever imagined it might be. Yes. Its moved a lot slower. And in part, you know, after all the hoopla around getting the first human genome there was nothing there to follow it up with. Theres a new data set people are using and its driven a tremendous amount of basic science. But the next agent understanding the genome is doing large numbers and when you spend billions or hundreds of millions getting the first one, its not immediate obvious youre going to do 10,000 of them. I think we will follow the typical hockey stick kind of curve. Well have constantly more and more impact. I think ten years from now its going to be so different from today. Your genome will be the number one thing you have to have for medical care. Rose ten years from now. Yes. Hopefully soor. Rose what question drives you the most . Well, this one about what is life, you know, its impossible as a scientist. I mean everybody asks these questions at some time during our lives trying to understand it at whatever level we can. Rose trying to understand what it is to be human. But answering that question out of a simple bacterial cell it was exciting to get some of the answers to that. Weve all heard about brownie in motion the energy in small molecules moving things around. Thats important for the fundamentals of life as the genetic code. Its the energy that drives it. Rose its amazing to me. You think about this, you talk about ten years. Are you certainly to talk about 13 or 14 years from the any 90s to today in terms of the dinnal revolution. Its stunning what weve done. And the power of a process now, the process is now, its just, its unbelievable. And how fast things change. Once you have an ipad its hard to remember the period when we had nothing. Rose and how they deliver velocity change that in itself is stunning. Yes. Rose thats going to continue to happen, then you can imagine, were going to be doing things we cant imagine even now beyond our imagination. Yes. With a we hope, well in fact trying to work out what the most important thing for downloading biology from the internets going to be, we decided we probably have to higher 12 and 13 year old to ask them because what ill think about will probably be nothing what it ends up being thus far. Rose its the idea of thinking like a beginner, isnt it . Thats what it is. Unburdened by wont work, unburdened by any of those kinds of things but y dont know. Well the content you can actually get life out of your computer is probably one of the most important concepts for people thinking about this. Rose is this the most important. Is what youre doing now more important than mapping the human genome and your contribution to that . I think the work on synthetic life will be remembered far beyond the human genome. I think because its so much more fundamental. The human genomes going to be important for understanding key parts about us, but the way youre going to discover that and the way youre going to survive on this planet is having new technologies to change our future. Rose and being able to convert it to xs and os, how crucial a break through is that . Its, you know, its especially critical because if we could not digitize life, this next world would have never happened. If it wasnt for the coevolution of computational efforts and biology, and now theyre merging together as we heard in aspen, were trying to attach things to the nervous system, right. Rose exactly. So if were going to attach it to the dna, to the computers, to our brains, hopefully we can both get those modules to attach to go faster. Rose there are people sitting in washington right now and there are people sitting in theis this a tool for terrorism. It can be. And we had sponsorship by the Sloan Foundation for my institute along with m. I. T. And with various branches of government to look at the approaches and the ability to write the genetic code of how it can be misused. Yes, its something we have to be very much aware of. Rose if youre smart in say government and where you are charged with national security, you want to say to the smartest people you know, figure out a way this could be used in the most malicious way, that would threaten us and then figure out how you can stop it. And the solution for stopping it is the same for, same solution for the biggest medical problem now facing the modern world. Rose which is. Its new antibody resistent organisms that are now killing more people in the u. S. Than car accidents. And were getting into rose what antibody so the staph resistent, its resistent to all known antibiotics. Rose infection kills you, is that what happens. Yes. And so Jim Henderson was in the news because somebody wrote a book with him. Rose henson. Henson, right. And you know, its happening at an ever increasing rate at hospitals around the country. Weve overused our repertoire of antibiotics and now the bugs are fighting back and theyre resistent. Now for an emerging infection is the same as if somebody makes a new infectious agent. It has a sufficient repertoire of antivirals and antiinfectives. We need them both. Rose you have to stay ahead of the curve. Exactly. On both fronts. The biggest threat is the emerging infections than it is manmade infections. We have powerful technology, obviously any can be used for good or for evil. We are been working with them on what can be didnt, what cant be done. Rose what makes them super resistent. Some develops techniques for pumping into the body back out of the cell. They change their genes owe the antibiotic doesnt have any effect anymore. Were investigating this area that used to be popular in Eastern Europe before the discovery of penicillin and that was using the viruses that kill bacteria. And coming up with new repertoires of those and they can actually be sent through the internet. Rose in 2010 you told me that synthetic genomic theres linen increase in negative potential do you still believe theta. I still believe it. And it develops what can be done with it. Rose i hate to do this but i want to do this. So what are you most proud of how . What would you want, if you walk out here and dont make it across the street. Here is what craig venture did for us. I hope i would make it across the street, i have a lot to do. Rose i hope i make it across the street. I think aside from the direct scientific contributions ive made with my teams, i think ive brought a new approach back into science that makes teambased discovery the way to be far more effective than the kind of linear approach weve had with government funding and universities. And my small teams having multidisciplinary teams that got the first genome in history, the first human genome, the first synthetic cell, theres been content major break throughs by this small team. And it is team science. Im the orchestra conductor but its this Phenomenal Team that i acknowledge in the front of the book that made the first synthetic life happen. Rose its always human resources. It is, totally. And i think if i have the skill set its been putting the best teams together and helping motivate them by asking the right questions. Rose exactly right. And refusing to be impeded. Yes. Rose its great to see you. The book is called life at the speed of light from the double me little to the dawn of light. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org dean hi and welcome back to hometime. On the show today we have a couple more steps were working on to get the house and yard all dried in. Miriam yup, were at the creekside home project, and we also have windows going in. So well be talking about proper flashing and weather protection as those go in. Last well be digging in the french drain, with fabric, rock, and some eco friendly pipe that should keep things dry well into the next century. Dean first time we done that on the show so make sure to stick around and see how it all turns out. Miriam should be interesting right . Dean yup man. What we need is some elbow grease. Yeah, you can. Are you kidding me . Gmc. Proud to lend a helping hand to hometime. Miriam if youve seen any of the other shows on this project, you know that weve pretty much covered everything right from the start. And that includes framing, a lot of which happened off sight. We worked with a framing contractor, who designs and builds their walls back at the factory they have set up just for that purpose. Theres a guy named jake crowley who takes the architects plans and lays out all the walls on his computer. Each one is sized exactly with openings for doors and windows. And theyre all numbered for reference at the factory and out at the home sight. Down in the factory floor, the built the walls in a series of stations inside where its always warm and dry, which is good because the creekside walls went through the coldest part of a minnesota winter. Once the foundation was ready, they sent the walls out to the home sight, where a crew led by ted hilgendorf put them all together. And working with a crane, goes pretty quickly. When the guys finished up the roof, it was time for us to get started on rough ins. Well that was a while ago, but we did say they would be back for windows, and our windows arrived a couple days ago. With the new driveway base we installed last time, they were able to back the truck right up to the house in a nice bed of gravel, rather than the muck and the mud we had out front before. That makes things a whole lot easier to negotiate. So from that stand point alone it was worth the time needed to get the driveway squared away, and with the windows here, weve got ted and the guys coming back to start putting those in. Dean well we finally got things cleaned up a little bit, so we thought wed have our architect Mike Sharratt out again, just to take a look at things. Its been a while since you were out here. Mike its been a while, its looking Pretty Amazing actually. Dean so one comment we get a lot is people ask what is that little swoop up there all about. Mike its just a artistic way to hold that overhang. I didnt want the overhang to be up way high, which it would have been if we went straight up. Its just not something that is expected and i think there is more to like in whats not expected. Dean i mean weve seen this fully trimmed out on a house that has an exterior very much like this, and it really is an attractive feature. Mike yeah i think anytime that things are in a framing stage i think that its not complete and that people dont really understand it, but when it is complete, theyll understand it. Dean and Something Like that kind of plays in to the whole fact this is sort of an asymmetrical roof here. Mike its deliberately asymmetrical here because what were trying to do here is get the roof to grow out of the lower part of the roof, so its more of a human scale. And then on the garage side we do have a symmetrical roof on the gable over the double door. Dean and again, with a roof like this, a lot of that second floor is actually up in the roof itself. Mike well thats the design of a story and a half is that youre really occupying the space up inside the roof. There arent just two story walls that go up and create that roof. It is about living inside the roof. Dean and the nice thing about that, i think that people really enjoy that you end up with some, you know, kind of unique little spots where, you know, that roof kind of comes down and violates what is normally just a rectangular space. Mike if you think back when you were a kid, probably were in grandmas attic, and thats probably what its like is that, is that you feel, the roof coming down and its more a human scale than it is a square cubic room dean but it is a little more difficult to insulate and dry wall and stuff. Mike it is that but its worth it. Dean now one thing thats been kind of fun is explaining to people how you talked about doing the layout for this whole thing, you say well i mean, the layouts pretty obvious. Youve got your gorgeous views out there so you wanna have your main living space here so youre going to enjoy those views. And then if you want to have an open floor plan your kitchen goes right there. Mike well thats the way people live today. Its about communication. Its about openness. Its about flow of space. And we do consciously