Extinction looks at the very real and compelling Science Behind an idea one scene as Science Fiction and addresses how the distinction will redefine it in the future. Next is david morris. The former marine officer he worked as a reporter in iraq from 2004 to 2007 his writing has appeared in the new yorker, slate the virginia quarterly review and the best american nonrequired reading. His book a biography of post Traumatic Stress disorder or a memoir it is also an analysis of an ever increasing phenomena that has changed the landscape of our culture. It too is a finalist in the sears competition. He was part of a team of times reporters that one the prize for explanatory reporting for its look into that Business Practices by apple and other Technology Companies that illustrates the darker side oflo a changing Global Economy for workers and consumers. He lives in San Francisco. His book machines of loving grace, the quest for Common Ground will they help us orp will they replace us. This is also a finalist. The author who has covered business and technology he currently serves as a time business columnist and he is with us today to discuss his latest book big science. Effort l it is an untold story of how one invention changed the world and the man responsible for it. And how that effort led to the dependent on government and industry for the big scienceat a we have today. You will have an opportunity to ask the questions. We had four microphones and we ask you to direct your questions there and i will let you know when you can line up for that. So lets begin. Beth schapiro, could they really be brought back to life . It depends on what you are willing to accept for aas mammoth or a pigeon. I when an organism dies all of it sells and the dna begins to decay immediately and that dna which exists now and all of us has long unbroken strands of letters that make up the code that make its look and act the way we do. With that it has been dead before 5,000 years or 10,000 years. Yes, if we go out and collect the bone it will have dna in it but it will have broken fragments and we cant use that dna on the same way that we can use that. That is not actually possiblea with mammoths. Ct we can take those little tiny fragments and start to understand how it differs from an asian elephant. They share about 99 percent of the dna. Then we can take an elephant we take the elephant sell and turn it into an elephant so sure. I follow up. Our ability to do that is that going to come at a cost of the current efforts that we have two protect the dangerous speeches. But the fantastic approaches these are not competing for resources. Those of us who are interested in this and its not to bring to use as a technology to help species that are alive todaydanr but going extinct because they cant adapt quickly enough to be able to keep up with the changes that are happening qe is the same technology to assist that adaptation. Re they are being funded by research that wants to use the same technologies to do things i we are interested in that. What if we could identify the genes that are responsible for that and then go in there with the tools of science and cut and paste our own genomes. S . Thats for the funding from that technology is coming from. His ot a tool with conservation. Think you. Yours is a very personal story about post Traumatic Stress disorder how did you come about deciding to expand it to much larger topics. I feel like going from woolly mammoth to this. Ptsd. Science fiction to dr. Freuds office. The question must how did i get interested . You also tell a wider story not just your story i had been in the marine dash i have seen were from a number of different angles and then came back and felt really at odds with the countrys politically,d and they just feel out of place. The defi they were talking about expanding the definition to include some sense and they have those. It was a larger emotionalemotioa disconnect from society and thats really how i felt. Rps, a i came from a very conservative family. I have voted for George W Bush the first time in my view of the world changed and my relationship with my country change radically in 2004 when i went to a rack for the first time i dont know a lot of people that felt the same way. Most of them didnt think about it the same i did. t tal this emotional or political cultural mecca that i felt a strong as any other symptom so i went to the library and started digging around and i thought rather than being the only one who felt that way ily just discovered it came from the vietnam war they felt thats how they did that. Its a product of 1970s America Today they think of it its essentially a part of a postwar narrative. Basi there was nothing for you. And people basically said but your uniform in a closet and go get a job. There was nothing for veteransjo up until vietnam so that was my discovery i thought i was on my own and i went to the library and discovered that i was not that was for me the genesis of my interest in law for me. And it want to write a sob story. How did this fit in to the whole group of ideas so the book became about that. And a followup to that. What does modern neuroscience had to tell us about ptsd . I have a semi controversial view of this. I dont think it has a whole hell of a lot to say. To real i think that is related to the larger saga of science the age of discovery or to use a bad analogy if a science interest or some sort of const to knit. If you think about that as the continent to be discovered the shifts are just now leaving the harbor to go discover what we might know about the brain. Its very important to keep that in mind and there are a lot of professors on this campus that will tell you we have cure. I think those people are misleading you. I dont think there is a simple care. Simp it touches on the whole part of a human being as as far as more specifically there are some areas i like a lot who had discovered things that h have been replicated but theres not just a one off and specifically they have discovered that there are stress hormones that are secreted in the human body under stress and she discovered that the quartered salt profile of someone who has been exposed to extremeo exm threats like war and genocide through the internal offspring they will have a different cortisol profile and she studied the survivors of the holocaust in the maternal line of people who survived. She found through the line they are different descendents well had a different stress hormone profile. It does change the persons chemistry and how they function. There has been Research Done by tim cahill on the drugg which is a beta blocker. Its a very common heart drug that if you give it it suppresses the adrenal and ift, you give that to someone after a car accident in the er you can reduce that. By 50 . That in my mind is a one data point there is not a miracle a drug or cure on the horizon it is a very safe. Its been off patent for about four decades they are just beginning to use that. And that started just down the road. Some researchers there. John, how close are we to a robot run society. I think it depends on what you mean by that. If you are willing to take a broad definition of the term and i do i would think ofgs things like siri to be virtual robots and we are interacting with them if you mean that they are displacing us that is another question. Two years ago they have an interesting contest here inn the Los Angeles Area they gavea 24 teams several Million Dollars apiece some of the best people in the world competed to design machines to do eight simple tasks. Ve, the and three of them were able to perform this they took aboutum 45 minutes to an hour instead of the five minutes that human would and most of them could not even do a simple task like opening the door which led the guy who led the contest to say that if youre worried about the terminator just keep your door closed. I think that was it. You kn we can have robots in space and underwater but the ground is really hard that as a last place that they will move around freely and that brings us to self driving cars. I think we have this as a society think that self driving cars are almost here im live in San Francisco. Ive taken the same if it shows up in 2025 to drive me to dinner im buying the problem is many of these technologies are gonna make the ability for cars to drive themselves commercial. Its happening right now. Out of but taking the human completely out of the loop is going to be a big challenge because of the random things that humans step in and takee over. , Googles Google has shifted their self driving car program a couple of years ago and i didnt get enough attention they went from trying to build self driving car to these little cars that they are limited to 25 miles per hour. They did that because at a certain point in their project they took of the professional drivers out of the car and they replace them withpl employees and let them commute and they watch to see what happens. What they found was a lot of destructive behavior up into and including falling asleep. What you say when you take control. Youre your neck in a come back and do Situational Awareness when you need too. Thats really hard problem to any of the technologies are neck and salt. It is the way of the future. Lets talk about this. Abo how did he almost singlehandedly develop the big science model of research that we have today. Appens w as often happens with these big leaps in achievement it was a combination of luck necessity and intuition they came on the scene in 1930 at a moment when physics had reached a dead end or a brick wall. The old generation and a small scientist who have been the great researchers of physics up to that point. They have gotten about as far as they could get with the tools that nature have given them and they have achieved and learned a tremendous amount but they understood that to delve deeper into the mysteries of the item they were and gonna need energies that were beyond what nature could provide they need something that required human ingenuity. Rutherford was the one that stood out and set forth the challenge for the colleagues and what i would like to see is an apparatus that can produce a thousand volts and fit into a comfortably sized room and all over the world they took him up on the challenge of what they tried to do was apply a thousand volts to an apparatus and if it was glass they ended up with a laboratory filled with pieces of glass. S. It was lawrences intuition was if you wanted a thousand volts what you have to do is build it up on the particle that you are using as a projectile knot on the apparatus. He realized if you could deliver a series of jolts to approach on you could build ath and the way to do that it was to move in a spiral if you put it through. His first integration of what became that was something he called the proton merrygoround. Now, once he started with the sort of apparatus it fit in the palm of his hand and caused less than a hundred dollars hundred dollars in Raw Materials but it opens more powerful machines and more expensive machines. Decade w but before the decade was outt he was going through the foundation and saying i need a Million Dollars. It would have been the largest single some that they have ever given to a singlen scientist in its history ands they said why yes, okay we will do that. And that really set the stage for the series of continuednued generations that got bigger and bigger the latest weve seen today where lawrence is first one fit in his hand it has several in it occupies the tunnel 17 miles in circumference. Its buried under the landscape on the border off france and switzerland and caused 9 billion to build and its not quite done yet. More gen there will be more generations and questions about whether all of this money really needs to be spent. Th are there other lawrence is out there today. Where are they today . Ally wan do we really want or need them . I think we need people like that in a scientist of his generation who spoke up for the idea that delving into the laws of nature the Natural World that we live in was something very important and i think that there is a lot of skepticism today about the sort of endeavor that we didnt have in the days of lawrence in part because he was such an effective spokesperson for the principal the biggest science project that this country has tried at least in physics was the superconducting collider whichr was on the drawing board in the 1990s it was in a cost something and the neighborhood in the neighborhood of 5 billion and we actually wouldve been more powerful. But it raised a lot of questions in congress and a congress that at that point was skeptical about Government SpendingSteven Weinberg who is a physicist at the university of texas was a great supporter of thisog program tells a story of going on a weighty radio show when congress was debating whether to continue this project after it have already spent 2 billion. He was on the show with a texas congressman who is opposing it im not in favor of spending government money on anything that is and can have practical uses. He responded this can open thehe door to new knowledge of our Natural World that practical enough. He remembered every word of the congressmans reply and itit was no. And they killed the super conducting politer because it did not had effective spokesmen who could speak for science in general people like Ernest Lawrence they have all passed on by that point. Ill i will ask of this this as a general question for the panel any surprises along the way as you were writing your book in other words, you came to a topic did your finished book different from what you started out to accomplish andom i think i see john nodding his head. My book began about every two decades our nation passes through this. Of in society about we passed through this. Of anxiety about technology. I began to see ai based technologies actually working and not just displacing manual workers but displacingkilled whitecollar skilled professions and doctors. E were g i have my hair on fire and that we work thought we were going to see this dramatic discontinuity where these technologies would actuallyns transform the workforce. I have actually come full circle they wrote in 1930 that technology destroys jobs. It doesnt destroy it work. It is continued to grow despite three or four decades of a computerization nicely around the world. My hair i have my hair on fire and i was talking to and instead of making the argument that as these technologies came to china they were in the lead to social disruption. He said you dont get it, if her lucky in china the robots will come just in time. And i said excuse me . He got me to take a close look at whats going on with the demography of china. Its a demand dramatically aging society. The actual working age population is shrinking. And, and china is aging. Globally in the number of people over 80 and the world will double 2050. Right now for the first time in history the fewer people under five that over 65. I began to realize that you cant look at these things in a static sense i began to say demography trumps technology and in fact we will be lucky if the robots come just in time. Furthermore i also have come around on the issue of job destruction. I think were seen mores task destruction. Lawyers, at the time a class of technology that reads documents that can do a better job of leading documents than a human being and now widely used in the human profession. What has happened is that there has been some job displacement but not dramaticc in fact you look at what they do they do about 11 Different Things they going to court, the council their clients they read documents also but thats only one of their tasks. And it looks like the impact of e discovery has been about single digit kind singledigit kind of displacement. I really reframed how i looked at this wave of technology. It is having impact but in fact the thing you have to deal with about the United States right now is that theres more people in the United States working today that have ever worked in history in the face of this past automation timeframe that weve head. I really came out on the other side. What surprised me or what it learned that i didnt expect to learn was the role of the scientists of society and how it evolves from generation to generation intel easily it can be politicized and i think that is something we see these days and the biggest big science project i think we have before us. It is the quest to solve the dilemma of Climate Change. We are in an era today when,t sc public funding which became so important to science. , when government is withdrawn from patronage of basic science which requires government funding to move ahead, no other industry would do it. We get less of it and at the same time has really become vulnerable because it is a threat discovering what causes Climate Change, figuring out ways to combat it which requires extensive Earth Science that requires satellites to help us understand what is happening on the surface of the earth and in the atmosphere. I think what we see is an attack on Climate Change science because its such a threat in going back to what we said a few minutes ago, because we dont have enough stature and authority to speak up for it, the salk science is under attack and i think thats a real threat. I basically almost every preconception i had about postTraumatic Stress disorder was basically overturned. I understood it for very particular popculture frame of reference and i sort of expected that there would be this long clear lineage reaching back into antiquity where you could clearly see where ptsd could bec found in world war i and world war ii, the korean war and the trojan war etc. And what i found is in this really shocked me and they didnt understand this idea which is pretty obvious to most working psychiatrists. The sympt