Transcripts For CSPAN3 National Competitiveness Forum - Part

Transcripts For CSPAN3 National Competitiveness Forum - Part 3 20180108

And digital currency. This is just under 2 1 2 hours. Hello. Thanks for having me. My name is adam piore, and im glad to be here. Im here to talk about my book, the bodybuilders inside the science of the engineered human, and some of the trends that i reviewed. Its funny to be here, because i left d. C. I used to cover im a journalist. I used to cover capitol hill. About 20 years ago i left and said i was never coming back. And actually, i covered congress for a newspaper in new jersey, and i left in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. My job was to stand off the house floor and ask every congressman what they thought of the days news. So, i quit my job and i went about as far away as i could go, and i moved to the country of cambodia. And i spent a year and a half there reporting on events there, and it was an amazing experience. People were the country was emerging from 30 years of civil war, from a genocide in which one in four people died of murder, starvation, and disease. And what really struck me while i was there was this theme of human resilience, you know. And it was a very valuable experience after i mean, d. C. , theres a lot of data here and a lot of information, but to be seeing peoples lives and how they bounce back sort of changed the way i looked at journalism and what i wanted to do. And when i came back, i wanted to write more about the theme of human resilience, and i found that in the United States, some of the most exciting stories of human resilience are being unleashed by technology. And thats really what my book is about. My book is about a field called bioengineering, which im sure some of you have heard about. And you know, i guess my presentation here is less datadriven than some of the stuff, but i just wanted to you know, what i tried to do was put some of these trends that we keep hearing about in the news into context, and some of these, you know, fields like bionnics, genetic engineering, braincomputer interfaces, thats what i really focused on in my book here. Ill put it right here. Its a little bionic vetruvian man there. Got a little creative. Anyway, what all these things have in common is weve sort of reached the tipping point. And in the last century, some of the most talented engineers, we did incredible engineering feats. We went to the moon, we built skyscrapers, we mastered flight. And sort of my argument and what, you know, ive seen in the last ten years of sort of covering this beat for science magazines like the m. I. T. Technology review and scientific america and popular science, is that you know, the new frontier now, some of the most talented engineers are turning their sights inward, into the human body. And you know, weve always tried to do that, but now many of the technologies that weve heard about here, sensing and computing technologies, are allowing us to do things that we could never really do before, to reverse engineer the human body and mind in a level that would have been impossible just a few years ago. So thats what i tried to explore. And you know, these are trends weve heard a lot about, and im a journalist, so i went out and i tried to talk to people and find out if this was really going on, what were learning about where our limits lie and how we might overcome them and how this was actually affecting peoples lives. And so, i think its pretty obvious, this is going to be a tremendous area of growth in the next century. You guys are the ones who can figure out how to monetize it. Various different areas are coming along at different paces. But ill tell you, the first person that i wrote about and the first person i talked to sort of demonstrates, you know, an area where already theres progress that can be commercialized. And that person was a man named hugh herr. And ill just tell you a little bit about him, since its lunch and i like to tell stories. This guy, hugh herr, this was a great story of human resilience. This guy was he was not the best student in high school. He was a c and d student, but he loved to rock climb. And he was already as a teenager kind of a worldfamous rock climber. He had been on some rock climbing magazines as a young prodigy, and all he did in class was think about rock climbing. And one day he went hiking in mt. Washington, new hampshire, with his friend. They ice climbed. They got to the top of a mountain. The winds shifted, and they were in the middle of a blizzard, and they went down the wrong way, and they descended into the wilderness. And they wandered into the wilderness and they got lost, and they almost died. And they were rescued on the brink of death. And hugh herr had severe frostbite and both his legs were amputated below the knee. So, the doctors told him hed never walk, hed never run, hed never climb again. And every night he would go to sleep and he would dream that he was running through the corn fields behind his parents house with the wind running through his hair. Then hed wake up and hed see his legs were gone, and you know, it was devastating. But soon he was tired of being in bed, so he scooted out of bed. He started climbing around. He realized he could pull himself up on the refrigerator, he had all this arm strength. He convinced his brothers to take him rock climbing. And on the rock wall, he was able to, you know, he was even lighter than before, so he began tinkering with his prosthetics. He made them seven feet long, he made them little stumps with blades so he could climb areas he couldnt climb before, and soon he was even better than he had been before, and he was on 60 minutes and was kind of worldfamous again, an inspirational story of this boy wonder. But when he got down, his prosthetics were, you know, they were no better than the peg leg that had been designed for civil war soldiers or pirates a couple hundred years ago. So he began tinkering with them, and he began enrolling in engineering and math classes, and he became a straighta student. And he got accepted into m. I. T. And today hes one of the le leadilea leading bionics engineers into the world. And what hes done is he has taken these technologies that im talking about that are driving this revolution, which are computing and sensing technologies, and hes used them to make bionic limbs that are so similar to the real thing that when i went to go visit him at m. I. T. , i couldnt even tell he was wearing them. You know, we were walking across an icy quad and i was slipping and he was wearing fancy italian leather shoes, and i couldnt, you know. And what he did is, you know, and this is sort of what well see more and more of it at greater resolutions, but when you think about it lets see, i wrote down this number here. We have, how many . We have 206 bones, 360 joints, 700 muscles and about 4,000 tendons 4,000 tendons, and a small portion of those are on our legs. He took ablebodied individuals, used the same kind of motion capture technologies that you see for ea sports or avatar or any of those movies, and he had them walk and he recorded how the constituent parts of the leg move in relation to one another. So he could tell, you know, when your ankles at this angle and your knee is here and youre moving down at this depth what happens to, you know, your foot. And he was able to take these variables and put them into a computer algorithm, and he put them on a computer chip. And then he built robotic parts that could emulate the real thing. Its a manageable number when you think about it, 306 joints, however many bones and different parts. But still beyond our capacity to figure out by hand. But when you think about the advances in Computing Power and sensing power in recent years, it suddenly becomes a manageable problem. And so, he built robotic parts out of, you know, silicone and various things. And this device that hes made adjusts hundreds of times a second. And you know, hes done tests on treadmills with oxygen and co2 and force plates to see, and it really does emulate the real thing. It feels so realistic that disabled people often when they try it out, they begin to cry because it feels so real. Theres a long way to go. You have to hook it up to the nervous system if you want to do the real thing, but thats just an example of what we can do. Now, when you take that further, and thats what i wanted to look at in my book, you know, all the different areas that we hear about have to do with reverse engineering and doing the same thing, except on a much greater level. So lets see, how many neurons do we have . I think we have like 300 billion, i guess, and maybe 3 billion nucleotides in our jean y genome. We dont have the power to reverse that yet, but people are trying a certain extent, and its amazing how far we have come in some of these areas. When you think about, well, genetic engineering, thats one area. There are some mutations that are caused by a single you know, some conditions that are caused by a single mutation. And i looked at one of them. I mean, theres a negative rebulator in muscle growth called nyo statin, and its a protein, and if you knock out that gene, you get bigger muscles. There is a guy at the university of pennsylvania, now moved to florida, lee sweeney, and he made what the press called Arnold Schwarzenegger mice. He knocked out the myostatin and they got really big. So, theyve been using this as a potential therapy for people with duchennes muscular dystrophy where it tears their muscles apart, but others have gotten a hold of this and muscle heads are getting ripped. So lee sweeney, in addition to pushing this and taking part in the trials is also a member of the antidoping authority. So, when you look at intelligence, there are thousands of genes that can be involved in combination with environment, and we dont necessarily have the computational power yet. Theres a company in china called bgi, and they have sequenced about 1,000 people with high intelligence and have been trying to get to the bottom of it. But theyre using supercomputers. But its only going to get easier as these technologies improve. So, thats one example of where we are on that. And then in terms of the brain, i looked at the most extreme example is trying to understand and decode imagine speech, you know. So, there are people who, it seems like the ultimate challenge to me, theres people who are locked in, who have lou gehrigs disease and have lost their ability to, you know, to speak. And so, there is a project that was funded by the u. S. Military. There is a guy at the Army Research office who was a Science Fiction fan growing up, and he had always dreamed of a thought helmet. So he actually funded people. And one of the people, i forget theres somebody here from Washington University, right . Yeah, eric luthard. I wrote about him, hes in the m. I. T. Technology review this month, and i watched him do technology, but he and gerwin schulte have discovered a neuro signature of imagine speech. And what they have found is that when we talk, our mind sends a signal to the motor cortex to tell the muscles of our articulators how to talk, but it also sends a copy to the auditory cortex as an error correction mechanism, so we know when somethings wrong. And amazingly enough, when we just imagine speaking, it still sends that signal there, and you can actually pick up that signal. So, eric luthart of Washington University and gerwin schulk of the Albany Wadsworth institute, can tell if somebody is imagining reciting the gettysburg address or the Martin Luther king i have a dream speech, but they cant, you know, listen in on your thoughts and just decode it yet, altogether. But you can imagine that once we have computational power to monitor 100 million, 300 million neurons, maybe Something Like that would be possible. So anyway, as you can imagine, there are all sorts of areas where theres potential growth in the future, and thats what i explore. And there are all sorts of ethical issues as well. You know, i asked somebody at beijings genomics institute, what do you think, should we really be able to tweak intelligence . And he said, you know, i think every parent should be able to have their child be as intelligent as they want. And i thought, well, there anything that would alarm you . And he said, well, i could imagine a very aggressive tiger mom who wants to engineer her child with the perfect combination of intelligence and ruthlessness and she gives him antisocial lack of empathy. And so, that was a little alarming to think about. So i dont know. Were going to have to grapple with these issues, and theres no easy answers, as i asked a military scientist, are these Good Technologies or bad technologies . And he said, it depends. Is a baseball bat a good thing or a bad thing . Its a good thing if we play baseball with, but its bad if we use it to beat somebody over the head with. So, these are issues that were going to have to deal with. And you know, in terms of commercialization, it depends on its just going to increase our level of specificity. Kind of what we rely on now, we rely on smallmolecule drugs and we systematically alter the molecules in all of our body. And were going to be able to get more and more specific as these technologies improve. I also wrote about a technology where theyre actually trying to stimulate neurons directly with electricity, which is much more robust, but were a long ways away from this. So, anyway, that is my talk, and im happy to answer questions. Thank you. [ applause ] did anyone want to ask questions . I have a question. In your lifetime do you think we will really be able to sorry. In your lifetime do you think we will have solved the most complex dangerous brain cancers, galileo blale glioblastomas . I dont know, but i have seen many encouraging things. One thing thats going on youve probably heard of is immunotherapy. And somebody was just telling me last night, you know, at Argonne National laboratory in lawrence, theyre using supercomputers to look at cancer and look at some of the data sets from veterans. And you know, as we have big data, we can discover some of these things. I have been down to a place called m. D. Anderson in houston, and theyve set up this platform where theyre looking at sort of theres an interesting battle that goes on between different cancerous tumors and the immune system, you know. And i dont know if anyone has heard of these things called checkpoint inhibitors. Theyre what saved jimmy carters what saved jimmy carters life. Basically theres switches in the immune system that can be turned on and off. Some cancers are able to flip a switch that turns off different components of the immune system. At md anderson they are learning to flip it back on. So in glioblastoma, im not sure what goes on in that. It seems a very effective way to fight cancer would be to harness the bodys own immune system. But i do not know specifically where they are in that. Thinking about how you suggested a mother might choose particular traits for her child. It sort of raises the nature versus nurture argument from a different perspective. But presumably the child would still be limited by genetic material they had to work with. Right. But i mean, i guess the idea people are talking about, if you understand the genetic cloed and what combination of nucleotides would have super intelligence you could use chris per and technologies to write the genome. That combination of genes, genetic code that would allow them to be the most intelligent. I guess what im saying so ma many so many complications between different nucleotides, i think were a long way from decoding exactly what will allow us to control intelligence. Let me just add a little complexity to that. We thought as biologists when the human genome project was complete wed understand this. Turns out, as most of you know, each gene codes ultimately for a peptide or a protein. So if you know how many genes you have, you should be able to match those to the number of peptides. Turns out theres several mul multiplication in the genome. The other complexity here, if you take two identical twins, humans, some of you may be aware, their fingerprints are actually different. Epa though they have actually the same genome their phenotype has been modified in their Genetic Development let alone the nature once they are born. Thinking we can identify the gene, supplies it and put something in and result in a final human being thats going to be have those traits is far from the reality. Nature has levels of complexity. Im just giving you some examples, that arent going to simply let us its not just one gene, one trait, even when we think thats the case. On the other hand, there are some genetics is in some ways revolutionizing pharmaceuticals or certain companies. Theres a company thats partnered with all sorts of academics who are looking and studying different populations that have rare mutations with a powerful effect. Anagen bought this company in iceland called decode, which they have tried because the icelandic population is so homogeneous, they have collect add lot of dna from a lot of these individuals. Its easier to spot very powerful mutations associated with different diseases or that could predispose you. Usually its a combination of a lot of things. For instance, i think one of the reasons anagen bought decode they found in elderly patients a mutation that seemed to make it harder for them to get alzheimers disease. It didnt explain alzheimers disease but apparently it made it harder for them to form the plaques and tangles that actually cause it. If you can replicate that with a small molecule drug, you could presumably combat alzheimers. But you couldnt give them intelligence necessarily. Adam, as you went around the world did you notice a different in intellectual perspective of visual augmentation versus physical augmentation . I dont know. Ive read Tropical Storm some studies from, i think, scientific journals that many people academic try to intellectually augment themselves with ritalin or all sorts of stuff. I dont know what its like in college nowadays. But i have actually you can see the same thing that happened with steroids is happening with some of these gene things like myostatin. As soon as they get discovered in the scientific literature and they are used to help the weakest among us steroids were originally used for muscle wasting disease. People who were survivors of the holocaust. Athletes start using them. Recently i read about somebody for business week, a guy, ucc san diego and Salk Institute named james evans. Hes actually found a mutation hes found these receptors that if you tweak them they can make they can allow a mouse to run twice as far as he normally would. Its like this fat burning switch. If you administer this drug, the body starts to burn more dplglue and you delay the point which the mice hits the wall. They call these marathon mice. W

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