he talks about the former aig ceo benmosche revived the company after the 2008 financial crisis and how the company became profitable again. >> he was the only person who thought this was possible essentially. i mean the government didn't think this was going to happen. the company certainly didn't think it was going to happen. they were ready to sell it off for spare parts. certainly the american people had no expectation this was going to happen. so that idea he was a little crazy, you had to be a little crazy to take this on. he was the right kind of crazy. >> go to booktv.org for the complete weekend schedule. up next here on c-span2 conversation on genetic engineering and synthetic biology. we'll hear from scientists working on glowing plants, hornless cows and 3d bio printers. they discuss the ethics altering human embryos and gene-altering technology. this is hosted by a group

called, shaping san francisco. >> thanks. yee, welcome to c-span. welcome to the vast audience at c-span programing across the united states and across the world. we're happy to have you all with us tonight at our shaping san francisco talks. this talk tonight is on synthetic biology, diy meets big capital is the title they gave it. it is really borne out of a long interest i have had, in some ways the roots of shaping san francisco which is community participatory history project but rooted in ses lendings acritical relationship to technology. we started in the mid 90s during the big boom then of interactive multimedia and kind of way before there was even web 1.0 really. we were already working on this project. we've gone through quite a few iterations. we all lived through endless rounds of hysteria technology will save us and take us to the promised land and so on and so one of the interesting topics

for me is to try to think about what is the moment in history that you're living through and it's very difficult to get your head wrapped around that. so tonight's topic was a chance to take a pause, invite people who are thinking about this and really busy working on it in critical capacities, from various points of view to come together and help us get a grip on big part of the current tech boom. we talk about it almost else in terms of social media, google, things like that but really the big mystery here in san francisco that a huge part of our economy is medical and a large part of that is really rooted in biological sciences. so we have this phenomenon really huge investment going into that world, changing everything we know about longevity and health and so on. that is part of what we get into a little bit tonight but there is also this underground that's kind of claiming that same world for from a hacking point of view and we have somebody tonight to help us get a little bit of a handle on that as well, an perhaps some of you in the

audience will be able to advance one or more of those threads in the conversation that follows because all of our talks start with lovely people who come and give us their expertise and then we open it up for you to participate in the conversation. second hour of the night everybody that's here has equal chance to participate. we'll bring the microphone out to you so your voice gets regarded and you're equally part of the programing. we record them and save them online, if you haven't discovered thats all our talks 10 years, most of them, ones successfully recorded anyway are on line at shaping us f.org. hunt through the archived talks an find your way to the interesting things at that proceeded proceeded tonight and this will be on line in day or two tonight. i will read you quick bios of the three speakers in the order they will appear. we have elliot hosman. staffer at center for genetics society. graduated from uc san francisco hayess college of law.

elliot advocacy work money, bail reform and jobs not jail campaign. litigation at transgender law center and non-profit assistance for artists of color on the front lines of gentrification in san francisco. elliot's research focuses on vulnerable bodies and populations under surveillance and apartheid, particularly queer, trans, intersects neurodiverse, disable and racialized youth. in december 2015 elliot was invited along with pete shanks to attend international summit on human gene editing at district of columbia and live tweeted the event for the center for genetics and society. elliot will be first followed by tito janikowski. the bio doesn't start with his name. bill gates quoted if he was starting his career today he would be a bio hacker. five years ago we, this is tito's voice opened first community biotech lab in the world, bio cure chris with the

motto, experiment with friends. we're a community of amateurs, scientists engineer who are curious about biotechnology. come learn how this new model innovation is reinventing the field of biotechnology and how you can apply this creative approach to your own work. tito is one of the cofounders of bio curious and ecosystem manager at runway incubator, 30,000 square foot startup incubator home to 84 startups downtown in the san francisco in the twitter building, our favorite place in town. finally we'll have pete shanks, who studied philosophy and economics at oxford university and moved to california in the mid-19 '70s. he has been active in a range of local and national political movements making his living in the publishing industry. he enjoys the craft of book making. here here for book making. he worked at consultant for the center of genetics in society

since its it's early it day. author of genetics guide for human engineering, guide for skeptics and very perplexed published by nation books and regular contributor to biopolitical times. we're excited to have all three of you. well have you come up one after another. elliot, if you don't mind, take it away. thank you y'all for coming. [applause] >> okay. i'm adjusting the mic as told. okay. so i am so excited to be here. thank you so much for having us, chris. i am real glad we're having this conversation particularly not only in this city, in this neighborhood, right? last week we've seen really brutal police violence just a few streets from here. i don't know if you're following in the news but i really think we need to think about not only, you know, i'm going to talk a bit about imperialism. a little bit about sort of pioneering values that are driving a lot of technological innovation today.

also you know, how that violence manifests and how we make space, right for more innovators to come into this city and what that looks like. so, yes, so this is me. we are at the center for genetics and society. i really want to talk specifically about putting biotechnology sort of in this idea of the empire of technological innovation so, here we go. does anyone know what this is? it's not the death star. okay. [inaudible]. yeah. okay. so, this is rendering on a computer, this is not the real thing. looks more like, what is that called, hangar right now. but you know, the economist says may be the most expensive headquarters in history. i really want to think about this, height? what does manifest destiny look like in this current moment?

as we're clearing space and thinking about, this is cupertino but this is sacred iloni land. i want to think about are we moving from this idea of manifest destiny towards the west and then through the web and through big data and now looking at sort of the manifest destiny of the genome and what are sort of some of these frontiers we're looking at and what does innovation look like from this vantage point? so, i want to kind of walk, try to piece together i think a lot of the strands that i see happening in our city right now. i want to kind of work through this idea of solutions through technological innovation and tie them from the app for that economy. tie it to some of the work we witnessed at center, right, which is genetic determinism. the idea our dna is the code of our bodies and try to pull out some of the assumptions and reductionism of that. i want to ask, you know, is this

new moment of technology something where we look at organisms as there is an org for that, and do we need new orgs for different solutions for our lives? so you guys are clear with the app for that probably in the news and i think a lot of this, app for that is in the news and i think there are similar values and look for gene for that and org for that so i am going to start here. one of the pieces i think is really interesting, there is a lot of text, you don't have to read it, one thing i think is really interesting what are the underlying values of the app for that economy? this idea if we could only have this critical mass of bright minds in a room somewhere and if they were working on our hardest problems, then they would come up with an innovation and we'd all be okay, right? i think there is almost sort of, this hopefulness, this o optimism, unlateral solutions

very smart mind would work on a global scale. some of this uses a lot of language of empowerment, democratizing revolutionary that we're sharing things, right? we know a lot of this prioritizes customers and convenience and certain classes over the right of workers and over the social consequences that flow from a lot of sort offer ant wastefulness of venture capital and thinking high-risk is very normal i'm kind of trying, we're laying that out there. and the gene for that. so you know, when i was growing up it was very not okay to be gay at all. i didn't come out until i was 24. and, one of the things, right, when i heard about this idea of a gay gene, well that makes sense. finally my parent will listen to me, right? right, it is not my fault. there is again net basis why i am who i am. -- genetic basis for who i am. what if we found that gene or we

thought we found that gene. what could be the flip side or the consequences? a lot of work we look at the society or the center has been almost super absurd genes for that, right? we used to have a column on our blog, biopolitical times, called the gene of the week. we kept seeing this sort of research emerging there. is a gene for being liberal. there is a gene for being promiscuous. a lot of this is also taken an interesting turn with regard to behavioral genetics. we see the idea, not own is there gay gene potentially, it gets kind of risen from the archives of pseudo science, a couple years in the scientific journals but i'm not sure about the science but we also see it in really toxic ways when it comes to things like criminality. there is scientists say there is warrior gene, there is a gangster gene. what's the implications of that.

what if would we do if we found the gangster gene? would we go into low-income schools to start screening kids or maybe they need rehabilitation or segregate them from the other students? we need to be really careful using metaphor like code and blueprint and map when we talk about dna there is no, that is the reference, right, there is no gene for the human spirit and we are not our genes and, it is this idea that even if we thought that there was a genetic link, that it could be really toxic, you know in pre-adult testing in so many spheres. so that's the gene for that. then i want to talk a little bit about oops, orgs for that. i want to talk about two separate spheres. this vegan cheese is something tito has been working on so props for tito. i want to work together about this idea with the technological solutions. i want to talk about the idea of glowing trees has been really

interesting. i've seen this in the news over past few years. this idea what if we use these really exciting new organisms to replace some sort of environmentally toxic things we have in our life. electrical lighting, like trees could replace street lamps. i find that fascinating. then vegan cheese. this idea we take the animal out of an animal product. not only get away from utilitarianism of using animals but moral implications a lot of people have with animal products. but i want to turn to the biotech sphere and see how some of these things actually can become really toxic. with golden rice. i think that the food writer michael pollen, has a real interesting comparison on this. i don't know if you have seen the four-part netflix series which is very good but he has this idea, postwar, we're in america and we've moved from idea of whole grain flours down at local stone mills and all this stuff, we move into more commercially processing used

food we created for soldiers overseas and we brought it back into america. we have this pretty -- flour. we havedone it in commercial way but we will add vitamins back into it. we'll call it enriched flour and sell it to the american people like it is even better than the old stuff. golden rice is interesting metaphor. genetically-modified rice with vitamin a, it is sold as this biotech solution to malnutrition in developing countries. i want to sit with that idea a little bit. this idea of hornless cows which uc-davis is working on. they use this new editing technology called crisper cast 9. one of the things they have been doing in agriculture is like we cut off the horns of a cow while they're living because it makes less likely they will gore farmers. what if we could sort of make

this easier and less painful for the cows. we're actually genetically modify cows to not have horns. there is variety of ways popping up in big agriculture. how do we make animals more convenient for industrial farming we do. we think a lot about animals as biomedical models in medicine. i think it is really important how are we treating animals and treating various life forms? is there sort of precursor to how we're treating humans down the line? so, i want to talk about a little bit of eugenics history of fixing life. .

long history of trying to engineer life in, what is basically saying is as opposed to sort of the sterilizations or the way the segregated people we didn't want world's vulnerable, away from society we are able to do that. it's seemingly innocuous, sterile like your love. take away some of the violence of what appears to be happening. he is basically saying there's this disturbing tendency to look at our children. it's also the point i'm going to reiterate with another person which is the idea we sometimes assume biotechnology as the most effective tool for social problems. i want to interrogate that with you here tonight because i'm not

sure that it is. another person that was editing was transit. you can watch the videos online. they are lovely and she is officially incredible panel called interrogating equity where she was pushing back on this idea they were rigid scientific category for humans and she wanted us to think about life and humanity as much more malleable and daughter identities interface with these categories in really harsh ways. one of the things she said in a recent ted talk was rather than deal with the underlying social conditions that affect us all like this global poverty, inequality and mass incarceration, housing and food shortage we see all over san francisco and oakland. rather than doing with these problems sometimes recruit short-term solutions and not only does this give people the ability to opt out of the social

maltreatment in the have access by the resources but to try to get the issue out of sight. we don't even think as a problem we are interested in solving. i'm just going to end with some questions to ask you guys and this is kind back, decided we would have a think tank upright man's to run to solve the world problems we be okay. i want to ask who is a citizen scientist? is diy democratizing? can we call it that? what does it look like in these new spaces? spaces? particularly when they are backdropped by the context of biotech, by this huge market, backdropped by these giant billion dollar patent battles. more questions, what to think through how can we start talking about the ethics of biotech in. article and rely upon the idea freedom of expression? how do we define like what i see

in the go to conduct a sort of peace and respect for the environment, thinking about the apple rant at the beginning of respected by the indie spaces. are we engaging sometimes the sake of a public deficit model of public participation? who is the expertise in the settings? who is in the observer, who is the student, who is the teacher? lastly i really want to go back to decide if interrogating equity and access it is this the equivalent of trickle-down technology? who is designed to platforms come user experience, the algorithms? what values are being mechanized if we bring it to market and who stands to profit? so this is our motto at the center for genetics and society, of human genetics, and thank you so much. [applause]

>> spirit next up we will have tito genachowski. i'm just going to take this one off. >> thanks, elliot. that was great. hi, everybody. let's see.

biocurious, a hacker space for biotech. when we started five years ago, our goal was to get more people doing science stuff. we started labs in our garages and our apartments, and then we got a kickstarter and said we want to make this bigger, so we raised $35,000 to make this happen. we bought all the equipment. we got a warehouse, a mailing list of a few thousand people who were interested, and something happened. five years later i want to ask this question come is biocurious successful? what does success mean? in silicon valley it's easy to define.

success is for a place like biocurious in terms of innovation it means started. it means inventions it means an idea that is spreading. so is biocurious successful in that we? first off we have the global plant project which was started at biocurious, it wa there was s idea of isn't it neat that things in biology below, living things can glow in the dark? jellyfish or mushrooms. isn't it cool? what if we could make a plant that glowed in the dark. how would that work? people got together and started thinking about it and put it up on kickstarter and it took off. like it, we've had other startups come out of biocurious like the. startups, yes. there's another one, real vegan

cheese. they are using genetically engineered yeast to make cows milk without cows. so it's like brewing beer but instead of beer it is the yeast, milk and cheese. so another startup that's come out of space. that's pretty cool. how about intentions? we also have a group that came together to create this 3-d printer, a bio printer. the long-term ideas to be able to print living things. what they've done is they have used basic electronics to make a kit that is now being used in universities around the world because this is the type of thing normally would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. so it allows for people around the world, universities at least, to try out this idea. startups, yes. inventions, yes.

when we first started biocurious was the first of its kind in the world. a whole bunch of people told this will never work, nobody will be arrested doing biology. who wants to go back to high school and take a biology class? nobody is going to want to do this, plus it's way too expensive and it will never work. well, five years later there's always other people around the world started calling themselves either do-it-yourself biology or bio hackers or i'm curious. there's some show up on google maps and places it isn't any land, so that's interesting. so five years later is biocurious successful by the definition we might use in silicon valley? other startups? yes. this idea spreading, looks like it to me. but that's not what i came to talk to you about. when we started biocurious, i came at it from the aspect of

biotech, biotechnology, genetic engineering, biomedical engineering, synthetic biology. and that was me. i was like let's get all the equipment together and you biotech. over the five years what i learned is it's much more about curious, much more about hey, this is a cool idea, this is a cool concept. this is something that i never thought i would learn about. this is a topic that i walked out of freshman year knowing i would never look at biology again. and that's the curiosity that i really discovered at biocurious and i wanted to share some stories about that. the group is a group of students we brought in to do a workshop in the letter one of the most interesting things is we bring

in people from all around the world who are like what is going on at biocurious? and i remember we brought in this one group and it was, they were from switzerland and they would like very corporate. it was like what are they doing? we didn't really know. but it all came and they're all in like suits and business ideals and things like that. we were doing this experiment where we are looking to discover new antibiotics in nature. you might not know this but just like undiscovered species of life all around us. you probably walk by a couple on the way here. so we just discovered a new species of bug in new york city. this stuff is around. a project from a guy from nasa is working on called the iliad project. he is saying let's get plant samples from the world around us and let's mix them up with

bacteria and to the bacteria die, it's an antibiotic. if they don't die, it means it doesn't have antibiotic properties. so what we said let's go outside and we will go big leaves and do this experiment. what i remember about this was i was walking with this woman into the backyard of biocurious, and it's not like a tom sawyer jungle backyard that is supercool. it's a corporate, like asphalt, right? we wanted around, she is stepping over this bush. we are like tromping through these very corporate flower gardens that are evilish based and she stepping over the bush and she reaches to a redbud tree and she grabs a piece of it and she turns to me and she says, do you think this is going to work in our experiment? and i look at her and i say i

have no idea, but let's try. the location on her face was gray. we should vote because she had not had the ability or the room to just try something in a really long time. and that's what we've been able to do at biocurious is give people the space to try something and not know if it's going to work. and that's okay. so i have a picture of some different lab experiments, people getting together, try things out. a lot of people who come to biocurious have never been to a biotech lab before. that's one of the proud experiments i do in every class. i say how many people have never been to a biotech lab before? it's almost like everybody. welcome and this is like your first step towards checking us out. another experiment that we did at biocurious is called

microscope committee project. that's basically a team that is working on building a really high into microscope, shook like a $20,000 lab microscope. they said we want to build his like 100 or $200. i was sitting at biocurious one day in this group started to commune. i was just listening in. i'm not part of a group of people started to go around the room and introduced themselves, and i remember the first person says, hey, i'm here. i'm really excited about the microscope project. i'm from vallejo. unlike, the layout is two hours away. -- i'm like, vallejo is to hours away. you drove two hours to be interested in this microscope project. next to him is this woman and she's like i work at google. i work on the search bar at google like you magically type things into. i was pretty uncountable about

leaving work early today because want to come check this out. and next to her is erica, one of the regulars and a scientist any sort of leaving -- leading the design of the microscope project. so it's this cool mixture of different people that never would have come together if we it said let's start a company to build a microscope if you want to start a company to build a 100 a microscope you would say we need a mechanical engineer, an optical engineer, electric engineer, and he would've gotten this very different group of people. but instead when it's driven by interest and curiosity and maybe passion, later, you get the truly cool group that we never would've in december i think that's a cool thing i sat biocurious is you build it seems no one else could ever predict, people from all sorts of different technical interest and

technical trainings. and so what i worked on over the past five years is come is biocurious, one pentagon is what everyone about that. if i were to share with you the secrets of biocurious, it's about people, places and public. it's like changing all those things. it's about changing the people you work with. if you work at google, if you're a student at the university, just change up, go somewhere else and work with some other different people you don't normally work with. us what happens at biocurious is nobody works at biocurious, it's complete a volunteer, nonprofit and everybody who comes to their is there by choice. no one is made to come there. which is very different than your normal job or corporation or things like that. and changing the places so you get different people. maybe that means, if you work in

an office, just go to a set of the office and switch seats with somebody. it sounds crazy but it completely changes your view and your experience. and then lastly, public. if you have a project at your office that you think nobody would ever be interested in angel tour de france about undercover like okay, bring them in. when one person in to work on your project, whatever it is. maybe it's accounting, maybe its human resources. maybe it's designing better light bulbs for projector things. but if you just bring people in, there's something interesting about it. that's what we do not biocurious is great these open projects that are open to the public and bring people in. so that's kind of the summary of what i've experienced at biocurious, usually about the curiosity. biocurious is 10 letters, three

letters are bio, seven letters are curious and that's the right balance. it's really about curiosity. it's this reason for people to come together and be curious about something. because we're not allowed be toe curious about a lot of other things. a lot of topics get thrown into, can you be curious about climate change? it's so scary you can't wrap your freaking head around it. this is a topic you can come and be curious about and ask questions and the research. it works. so that's what we have helped build. biocurious is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit down in sunnyvale. we are open to the public and would love to give anybody a tour or if anyone is interested in a class we would love to hear from you. my e-mail is tito at biocurious.org. and i'm also part of a runway which is a startup in debater and also, i just -- incubator.

i just got accepted to minilabs which is a branch of the gordon and betty moore foundation and so i've tried to take some lessons i learned from biocurious and apply them to climate change. if you think that's a good idea, great. you think that's a terrible idea let me know and i would love to help figure it out. so thank you all very much. [applause] >> in okay, next up is peter shanks.

>> i just want to set this up with the timer. are there any basketball fans here likes i was going to test it. it seems plausible. start that, and i know where i am. i think we have three different complementary presentations going on, which is great. i'm going to focus a little more on the big capital, although they all tie in together, and this is my first introduction to computers. this famous 1960s slogan button that we all loved is i

think the development of the computer technology has a lot of people drawing parallels between that and biotechnology in various ways nowadays, and some of that is reasonable, some of it is a little off. a little later i actually worked, i didn't work directly on this kind of computer, but i sent requests to the department to produce data calculated on this, which is probably about smartphone level of power, i'm not quite sure. not long after though you had these guys come and this is really where people tried to make comparisons i think between the homebrew computing of the early mid 70s, which definitely lead to apple.

this is since steve, was come into famous garage. but still, we move on. i 1991 i was working in a typesetting shop with a minicomputer ever actually had this thing. we had to refrigerate the room, stuff like that. but it worked. i bought myself a computer. that's not me. that's someone else but that's the computer i bought. it was a lot of fun. this is the famous xerox star that turned jobs on come and actually saw one here in san francisco were a book designer was using one of the very earliest ones to design. and, of course, what jobs produced was mac, whereupon it sort of stopped being a thinkers game. mac was sealed. you had to have professional

people to go and deal with it and expand it and so on. and, of course, that led to this, in such. around the time it was getting going, the human genome project -- sorry, i keep going at the. the human genome project was trying to figure out how many genes people had, and they really didn't know. they didn't know until shortly before the end of it, by almost an order of magnitude, most people were guessing there were 100,000 more, a nice round number, and it turned out to be like 20,000. 23, then some people said 19. it's all in that sort of general area, which is kind of interesting. it would not have happened

without advances in computer technology. can you read this one? it's one of my favorite cartoons. god has to change the password. but what do you do? you've got all this basically digitized information about the genome, and what do we do with it? we tinker. that's just what we do. that's actually what biocurious is doing on some level, although at this point they are using computers more like the ones that take up full rooms. and to do ineffective tinkering you need to do gene editing. if you think the gene is running things and you want to change the way things run, they have been working on that for 25 years, something like that at this point. there's a history already in this.

although as eliot mentioned, i think, the big jump was three or four years ago when, we were not getting how does it because no one can explain how it does it get i've been looking for an explanation for the intelligent layperson, and at some point if you are intelligent enough to follow but you went into this black box your it just does. it enables scientists to target exactly, with close to success, exactly where a given gene is that they wish to either shut off or replace. that's sort of like jobs and the mac. that's it. you don't need to know any more than that. just can't it's worth knowing that it's not perfect at this

point, that there is an error factor involved. they are working on reducing the error factor, but conceptually that sort of happened. and so of course people started experimenting on embryos, human embryos. the first paper came out just about a year ago now where chinese scientists had attempted to make alterations in vitro in embryos. they were using embryos that were left over the that chromosomal damage so they couldn't be used for reproduction. it actually failed. there were a few changes did get incorporated, but mostly they did not, some of the changes were not as predicted.

it was a failed experiment, but it showed you could do something. and that, just think about it a moment, that's scary. and basically the scientific world went, oops, we've got to talk about this. we have all got to talk about this. what should we do, can we do, what should we do. and this started a process which is continuing now. i'll come back to that end of it, but it's continuing. in february the uk government officially gave approval in principle to a particular research team to do a particular kind of excitement on embryos, and i actually because in that they will them into 14 days. thethe one that gets implanted. there's no question of making a genetically modified person out of this, but it's still, that's

crossing a big bridge and i don't want to get into, you know, the abortion controversy spent a question of where life begins at all this kind of thing. i think you can be completely pro-choice and still go, you've got to talk about this or you've got to figure out what the appropriate response is. maybe this research can be valuable, but under what conditions? what are the limits, what should we do? and wouldn't you know it, last week and other chinese team did another set of experiments with the attempt to make embryos resistant to hiv because there is some evidence there's some genetic combinations, really the

way to put it, that do make people unusually resistant to hiv. and, obviously, that's attractive. still didn't work really. but it sort of did. as one of the scientist in the field put it, it didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know, so why do the experiment? but it does mean the stuff is moving very fast. it's right on us right now, and if we can get some kind of consensus, then we could be in trouble. yeah, i sort of include this one which is, maybe i should've put it before but as you can see from the chart which is about a year old, so it's out of date. i think you can take it the numbers were all heading in the same direction but the crispr gene editing is far more efficient, far cheaper, far

quicker than previous technology. although some of the previous technologies are actually more advanced in terms of getting towards clinical trials. the are some clinical trials used. but you just look at that number, the bottom left one that put the oval around and you go, i'll. credit where it's due. these two are generally thought to be the discoverers of crispr. jennifer is in san francisco and emmanuelle charpentier as european. she is now in berlin. feng zhang is at harvard and he holds the patent right now

because of basically patent law jittery. his holding of it has been appealed. essentially either jennifer doudna or emmanuelle charpentier, which means berkeley, will get the patent. or harvard will get a. we probably won't know for a couple of years, and it could be worth a lot of money. by the time the patent decision is made it might be worth passing. it might just be a complete replacement for it, we don't know that. george church is always worth mentioning in this pic is also from the new england side of thing. he's the one with the beard, if you didn't know. who is probably the most quotable mainstream radical scientist. he is really in favor of doing this stuff. he has talked about making

himself -- is talked about reconstituting the mammoth. he talks about an awful lot of things. he is a real true believer. but the point i want to me, this is coming back to jobs and lost the knack -- wozniak. these ain't hippies. these are very, very secure, successful professionals. and they've got a lot of money behind them. they all found a company. some details on a couple of them. editors was founded by most of them but jennifer doudna backed out. daybasic because of the patent fight, i think. so it goes. so editas, i forget what it was

big it originated terrible that someone came up with editing, editas, david? which is supposed to be gene editing for humans basically. we're talking hundreds of millions right there right now already. intellia is a joint venture between, the company caribou. and novas is the original pharmaceutical and a bunch of -- countries don't mean that much. i'm serious, countries don't mean that much to these people.

they move around internationally. 350 million, five year deal and lots more money, as they say. so this comes back on this brings us back. that's the context. i wanted to put the big question, this is the big question as i see. government regulation and control, of which people, by which people and for which people? this is something where i think we can, i think biocurious has an interest in this as well. i think that some of us have sort of a philosophical interest, some of us have a financial kind of interest. some of us have a social equity

interest. some of us just have safety interest. but what can we do, what should we be able to do, when should we be able to do it and to decide and how do we decide? it's kind of a big deal. i am sure that biocurious doesn't want to generate anything that is going to be a pathogen that gets out of the lab that causes damage. in fact, i would like actually to you talk about that maybe at some point, what, if any, protection needs to be made at that level. but if you're talking about diy come your talked about hundreds of different locations, all of them small if you don't have like cops around every corner. no, it's not, if you look at it as being a problem, that's not easy deregulate at all. on the other hand, if you're

looking at crispr therapeutics and intellia, they've got a billion bucks. that's not easy deregulate. they've got access to the resources to get around things. so i will just throw in cgs and i am close associate with cgs. i completely agree. i think we should draw a line at intervention to generate genetically modified humans. we have germ cells, eggs, sperm, precursors and then later on embryos. and if you make changes to them, the changes go into what's known as the germ line, the human genome in general.

they get replicated, they go on. we have simplified it down to seven reasons not to do it. i'm not sure what my timing is. maybe you can just look at them, but who are you doing to expand on, never one. if you are producing a baby, you've got, it's just an unethical experiment. you don't know what's going to happen. sufficient variables, unknown and unquantifiable, and could have really found health effects. it's being sold to us as a medical cure for heritable genetic diseases, but a point of fact on almost of those, you can actually avoid them by testing

before beginning the pregnancy. there are very, very few cases in which a given couple cannot have a related child that's healthy. honestly, they are overstating the medical benefits, in my opinion. and, of course, they are doing it by treating people like things. that ties in i think with some of the stuff elliot was raising questions about. they come in heritage, communities, a term that world health organization i world health organization i think came up with. there's been a lot of talk about these in the last 40 years because people have realized that people, professionals so to

speak, bioethicists have realized that this was coming. and viewing the collective human genome as part of our common heritage, that's something that the european union and the unesco, i think, have both agreed is, that's a level of being sacred. whether or not you are religious in any conventional term and, of course, the art bunch of nations which actually have put that into law, that you should not make germ line interventions. so if some people try and do it, it's really going to throw illegal cat among the pigeons. -- the legal. it's also very unpopular according to the opinion polls.

and we really need science to be trusted. look at climate change. i imagine most of the people in this room except that anthropogenic climate change is a reality and th there are questions about how we might deal with it. i certainly do. but then we are living in a society where a lot of people hold anti-vaccination beliefs, many of which are based on extremely dubious, if not false, claims. we need science. we all need to be able to trust in science. and broadly, the scariest thing, what got me into this is the id of a techno- eugenics whereby a

few people could get very expensive enhancements for their kids. and as professor lee silver put it, gosh, more than 15 years ago now, end up dividing us into the rich and the naturals. the idea that the class divisions in our society would become genetically reinforced is just horrifying to me. so winding up, genetics and society and friends of the earth put out a report last december, which i was the lead writer on, it was a collective effort which has a lot more what we say is going on, extreme genetic engineering and the human future, and it's available at both websites or you can just search for it.

and, finally, this is jennifer doudna who is no fool, once the discovery is made, it's out there. anybody with basic biology training can use it for genome editing. that's a bit scary. i will leave it at that. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations] >> okay, now it's a chance for the hills to get into the conversation. who is ready to jump in with a question or a comment or an angry rebuttal, or any old thing that you have? i have a million questions so

nobody else wants to jump in i will start but i'm going to stand back here for a minute. i really appreciated the sort of try to frame these questions around this notion of democratic versus -- elliot you did at the beginning and everyone can come back to that inevitably. i wonder if you could also a little bit about this. i'm a driven by this fascination that all of us in our relationship to the work we do, whether we do it as an exchange for money, as a job, or as biocurious participants to because they're fascinated and interested and curious, to what extent do we bring without combat experience, the building and responsibility to participate in deciding what we are doing and why the hell we are doing it? and so from the biocurious point of view, you can a philosophical discussion. is that part of it? what does this for? why is this interesting? it's fun to tinker. we all like little games we can

solve problems but is there a larger mission that is debated? in terms of the relationship to the more mainstream and highly capitalized bioengineering world, both of you have been thinking about it a lot, how much are you and kevin technicians, people who do the work in the labs and the scientists were at the front end of the stuff? who are willing to step back and engage with these questions on ethical terms and in terms of we make the world with the work we do, and this is one of those moments where it's super in our face and yet it feels like it's not discussed, like the implications, the direction that affects the size and technology is simply under discussed. and the fascination for getting it done overrides all possibility of stopping and thinking about why, here on the planet and what the hell are we doing? i kind of just want to start, get the philosophical discussion happening. i invite all three of you to respond to that and then i'm sure other people will want to

jump in. who wants to go first? >> one of the things -- is a this on? yeah. in my experience, people don't like talking about human genetic modification. it freaks people out. now, there are some people, the minority i think that there are some people who are gung ho for it. you know, i want to be green, i want to afford, i want to do all kinds of things. but most people who are, talking now about people who are concerned with gm food. you think it would be a natural audience for jumping into this discussion. most of them go, yuck. really, that's about it.

it's very hard to get the discussion going because people don't want to take part of it because it's scary. >> so i want to answer this in two ways because i think it's a really important question, and so i think in the curriculum, right, when you're actually, you know, taking microbiology at uc berkeley, i know some friends of mine sort of like what is ethics? white magic take this course? i think there's this idea but it is sort of messy and it gets in the way. i think it's really about how much we specialize education these days. i didn't know what sociology was until i was in law school. by that point i was like holy crap, i really need a sociology right now. like the law, this is really complicated stuff and we talk about this as if it's politically neutral. as if it's inevitable. i really need to sociology right

now. i had to kind of work that into my curriculum even though it really wasn't super unavailable. and i think on this explicit context of jennifer doudna and everyone, i think they have done, they've been having conversations amongst themselves when the rumor started occurring. people knew this was happening before april 2015. both the major journals rejected the paper identified a minor journal to publish the paper. people knew this was going on. we have to get out ahead of this, start talking about this, and then i think there's some good in the. i'm glad they are considering this in like we've responsibly to talk about this and putting together the summit on human gene editing in december and trying to have these conversations at least with scientists and regulators and international countries. at the same time you asked a lot of people what is crispr, could

we make genetic modified humans? i don't think they would do. if we are relying upon the psyche of scientists self-regulation trickling down to public discussion, i don't think that's sufficient at all. i think it really has to do with the fact we really bifurcated science and stimp away from humanities, with amenities normative and ethical discussions. >> so the question i heard was his vouchers a place where people come to participate, philosophically, hands-on. i think one of the things we start at biocurious is we've always open to bring people in for presentations and giving them a tour of the lab. that was anything, people have never been to a lab before. dimbleby started and was getting people involved in experiments. that's when things change because it was not just hearing about it with your head but

feeling it with your body and with your hands and seeing what do you think of this stuff. and the idea is that gives people a better i think a better perspective to come added insight is this right, is this wrong? they've had some experience with it at another slot inside that's about if you are exposed to low more sites than they will be okay with science. that's like rubbish. i don't really believe any. we get a lot of people at biocurious that come in and they're just like here's what i think of this and here's why i am not comfortable with this. we do a live discussion. and just as another important piece of information, biocurious is a biosafety level one lab which means it's equivalent of what you find in the high school biology lab. that's by design. it's great craze about if you

give me a board and deliver i can move the earth. it's not about if i had a billion dollar harvard lab, then i could move the earth. it's about let's get people a few of the basic tools that are safe and then we can kind of experiment and be curious. it's like creating a sandbox for biology. something where people can try things and given a certain boundaries, we don't have anything with human cells, anything pathogenic it's all just completely not happening and not allowed at biocurious. we have a safety board that reviews projects that coming. we have a completely open lab like this. there are not doors and locks. you could just walk up and see what someone is doing and ask them. we take safety very seriously, and i think that the best proof of that is if somebody comes up with a an experiment that window is total crap and will never work, but safe, great.

we've done our job. that's the idea is we know this is not going to work but as long as it's safe that's exactly what biocurious is for, this sandbox where you can experiment and ask questions and see things happening. i see huge transformation in people from when we did powerpoint presentations and everybody was happy and excited and then went home and that was it, to which of the powerpoint presentation and bring up the lab and satyrs this experiment. i remember this guy, we were doing, what was it? something with flowers and people follow the instruction. went teach and 10 people and this one guy jumps this thing together and it turns red like the color of your shirt and everybody was like, and was told a mistake and it ruined his whole freaking experiment of remote everybody was like that is a cool color. this mistake was a mistake at all. it was actually you got to try something. depending on what you thought

working, it was pretty cool. it was something that was safe, something that you did have the boundaries to try that. and that's why biocurious is a dsl level one lab, it's constrained so that you can experiment, you can be curious. >> thanks. chris, i'm going to take a stab at your question actually about whether the scientists were on the front lines of developing these gene editing technologies, do they talk about why they're doing it and what it's for? and, you know, i think it's a competent and important question, and i think of course you can't generalize. some of the scientists that you saw on peterson's lives, george church i'm thinking of, you know, i think he's been the

busiest about technology and i think he is biocurious. i'm going to come back to the enemy because this is what makes me a little nervous about what you are doing your george church also starts ever talked by putting a slide up that has, i don't know, 20, 25 corporate logos on it and he says this is my conflict of interest statement and everybody laughs and then we move on. so it's a combination that can be very powerful and very poisonous between financial incentives, power incentives. wow, we're changing the world, changing life. curiosity and just, yeah, there's the mountain, i'm going to climate. but adobe we can underestimate the strength i don't think we can underestimate the force at the dynamics of money come of commercial forces will that take on their own momentum.

i really appreciated pete's analogy to the personal computer market. and we could see a much that can change the what and how much technology really does affect how we, you know, how we live, who lives, our circumstances of life. and get we don't have, we don't really have, and mechanisms of democratic control over the shapes of technologies, we don't have habits of mind we think about what that might mean. added think that's a very dangerous situation that we are in. i think it certainly was with the technologies that we see as much control over our lives, the ones that are causing climate change that i started a couple hundred years ago, the information technology that have changed our lives and their own lifetimes. and now a life sciences that are really poised to do that. and i think, you know, it's, you

know, so now i want to come to tito and emphasis on curiosity. boy, i can really resonate with that edit is really attractive. the idea of a sandbox of being able to experiment sounds like a lot of fun. but i wanted to tell this little story of a colleague of ours, he's a developmental biologist at new york medical college, stuart newman. when he was a kid and when he was in high school and college you want to be a physicist but he also had, he grew up in a political family and he had a political sort of understanding of the world and he decided that he didn't want the works that he did in science to be used by the military and he couldn't see any alternative. he could see anyway to be a physicist and not have that happen. he decided he was going to try to keep his science and politics completely separate from each other, so we decided to be a

developmental biologist. and, of course, that didn't work out the way he thought and now he is very deeply involved in the politics of biology. the reason i tell the story, to make it totally clear, is that we can't really separate them very well. and when we focus much on the coldest of being able to play in the sandbox of biotechnology, i get worried that unless there's also, i think this is maybe what you are alluding to, chris, unless there's a very deliberate and very completely entwined effort to understand the political forces, the commercial forces, the social and cultural forces in the larger world, then those technological developers are going to run away with us. a techno- enthusiasts are going to be left in the sand in the

sandbox wondering what hit them. in fact, what happened to steve wozniak who we never hear about, most of us, because steve jobs took the mac and apple where he took it. >> yeah, i mean, one of the things maybe following up and hopefully we can move after come away from biopic one of the things, i'm reminding of 16 years ago when eduardo, this brazilian artist, did the glowing rabbit anti-contracted french laboratory to fuse the jellyfish gene and made a glowing rabbit. and when this became public, there was a huge black lash and this attitude is very much seen this is sort of a steady

landscape that he was willing to experiment and try your he was playing with it. but that all these kinds of questions about bioethics and just maybe, i don't know if i really want to the question with this but i feel like there's a lot of pushing today with art and all these programs are programs in schools are emerging, and i would just wonder what your opinion on that? >> does anybody want to take a stab at that? >> yeah, i mean, i think is really fascinating. eye scan the news every morning when they get into the office and i see that san jose has an exhibit right now the central interesting and is very interactive and they have like mechanical basis for bio parts of the people doing but they're thinking about putting together organisms and what that looks

like and is more mechanical way. one thing i really appreciate is some of the art i have seen that really problematize is what happens and i think that's important. heather has done a piece which goes around new york city, i think the city and she collects come off the street and she singles is the dean and tried to come up with what this person would look like an itchy moles a face. she has this gallery of faces. it's like do you have this idea that we think dean is anonymous and we're told that often when we're handing over our dna to countries like don' don't worry, we'll taken off of it, not a big deal. cheese, as science progresses maybe they could maybe we can become just a piece of gum on the sidewalk that i think is fascinating. so yeah, i don't know. art goes in any direction. does anyone want to talk about art?

>> next question. >> i just want to ask a direct question. maybe you can and should because i've been getting a lot of comments and i'm not hearing a response to the comments necessary. maybe that are not questions to these comments, but is there a red line in terms of where you did not go beyond in terms of science and discovery? .. where the rewards whether it's financial, political, whatever, at the end of the day could be a cure for a serious disease, so

what is that redline and not the obama redline. >> the lying i drop personally, i have no problem with gene therapy, the kind that restores the way a person is-- was. and they are doing a lot of work on to my analysis and all of this stuff about the genome of the cancer as opposed to the genome of the person and then if they can do an intervention, then it might be a way towards curing cancer, which would be, i would think, great. i prefer to keep it that one

simple line because it is simple. and i'm willing to give up-- i'm willing to disappoint the very few people who could not have related children without, you know, without a genetic intervention of that kind. there are very few-- not many and it would disappoint them. i don't think that-- i think that the consequences of opening up the society to having heritable genetic alterations are horrendously wrong and wide, potentially widespread and so i -- that's a line you can draw. when it comes to modified fish,

you know, glowing fish in it tanks, glowing plants i'm not sure about plants on the street. i don't like that, myself. i think there are more complicated discussions we can have and i just want us to have us make a conscious decision. i don't want individuals, no matter how well-intentioned they may think they are to run roughshod over the rest of us. so, we talk. [inaudible] >> to add to what he said, that line he just described, yes, to genetic modification in existing patients who could consent to it and all of that if it is safe

and especially if it can be made accessible and not superexpensive so most of us can't afford it, great. but, not just, but actually many scientists, many bioethicist and the laws of dozens of countries and international treaty from the council of europe, they draw that line pete just described where we are not going to modified genes passed down to future children, to future generations and the reason for it are the ones that pete showed on that final slide their, almost final slide of not safe and then jump to that very last point opens the door to new kinds of discrimination, new kinds of inequality and a new high-tech genex and that is sent really want to go down. >> it's not a cure. it's not treating in the existent person who is sick.

the most medical statement-- most medical statement you could make is that it would prevent the birth of a child and allow parents at risk of passing on a genetic condition to avoid the birth of a child with a condition, but as pete said, we already do that in other ways. everyone who has that risk can have a healthy child and almost everyone, like 99.99% can have a child who is both unaffected by that condition and who is related to both members of the couple, both parents, so we don't need it for medical and the conclusion that many people come to is that the medical argument is really that tenuous, then in fact with people who are -- whether they admit it or not, people who are advocating this really want in enhancements. they want to have children and future generations who are somehow improved genetically and there we are in dangerous territory, socially.

[inaudible] >> i thought you had a great statement earlier and i have been thinking it over. i think your question was, what is the role of curiosity, is that this thing you can separate and is it this thing that-- can you separate technology from society? one of my favorite excerpts from a book that inspired me around this idea that as a technologist i approach the world with this idea that let's look at how technology changes society. and what really opened my eyes is what i started to think about the reverse, how does society change technology lacks how does our drive to find cures, how

does that drive the size happens? this idea of a redline, how does that drive science? where i have seen it bio curious is it's about curiosity, lab work and also curiosity around the ethical questions around who's involved in biology, what is an expert in what should be the roles of experts? lock the key and send information up to experts and we will trust them to have it work? one experiment that comes to mind is bio curious is a lab we did on the brock out one test and this is a dna test, a test for breast cancer and however inefficient it is doesn't matter. what matters is i think 2000-dollar pad to do-- pad to attend testing what i can tell you that i wish you could experience with that it costs about 20 cents of chemicals and

it's something that would be illegal for us to sell as a product. it would be illegal, but certainly a good case for infringing on the patent, but we are able to do it in the lab and i think people that take it from this intellectual idea to be i did that experiment and so did a whole bunch of other people and we got to ask the question, what's up with that, is that right, is a hushed things should be. we have hard-core technologist as a it does not have to be this way and others say it involves in some way it's good because it means the test has to go through a doctor and not just people testing themselves. so, it sparks these questions of curiosity around the science and curiosity around the bigger questions of science and society. it really, i think, that puts it in a start perspective because it is pennies of chemicals and stuff you can order online and

you have the right machines that used to cost a lot, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and now it stuff you can buy on ebay used ncl it works. i think it's a great example because in such stark contrast, here is this test that costs so little and takes very little expertise, but on the other side is an assessable unless you thousands of dollars. scientifically it's completely a boring experiment. you are ordering dna primaries in couple, coast, not a big deal from a biology standpoint. it's a procedure that you use for dozens, hundreds, thousands of other experiments. this case, the specific sequence of dna you are looking at has a lot of other questions attached to it. i think that's a great example of how this curiosity and bringing other people in to that discussion is pretty powerful

and i think it's potentially a really great way to enhance science. to bring people in and be curious about science, be serious about culture and society, because reese about economics, startups, be curious about this philosophy behind whether this is right or wrong, so thank you for your question. >> so, pete, i hear your arguments about crisper and human genome editing, but this is maybe not where we want to draw the line in terms of drop it-- talk about ethics because i think in some ways we are falling victim to cognitive ease, when we think about human editing being kind of hardline we can draw in terms of bioethics because i think it's very easy for the public to look at that and form in pit opinions on that, so i went to trackback to some of the things tito and elliott were talking about, so i have specific questions, but

before i do that i went to the questions i see and in number one, easy is relative and you make this claim about genome editing is becoming easier and easier and easier, but i think the point has to be, i think the point has to be made that we run into significant challenges making the smallest changes in cells, so that more evolved organisms are harder to edit and that has to basically because their dna is more protected. back thierry has dna that is pretty much unprotected, so very malleable in terms of what we can change and i think there is a scale issue that it's hard to grasp when talking about changing bacteria because we kind of think a bacteria as something we can change, modified as an weight of throwaway, but when something changes our world is bacteria in our whole evolutionary history has been driven by the changes

in bacteria. the question i have for you, elliott, is how do we engage the public on these huge massive scale issues where something very simple becomes very complex in a global context and the question i have for you tito is where do we define the boundaries of safety because you talk about the simplest things that currently are not pathogenic, but if you draw analogy to coding, computer program is simple pair there's nothing dangerous about computer programming, but in the right hands even the simplest tools can be developed into something that is not simply not safe. this bacteria can be made unsafe, so how do we navigate the nebulous issues that are really difficult i think for the public and nonscientific public to think about and engaging? >> that is a wonderful question. i think what's interesting is a lot of the work that has been

done by scientists to make those issues, which is really complex, super nebulous and super global and tried to make it simple by the using metaphors and i think the metaphors can be really helpful for public buy-in, but they also have the downsides. so, when pete was talking about like these series of genome editing tools and what they can do, i mean, we talk about it like editing and almost every news source you see will make some reference to a word processor and it's like as easy as cut and paste. but, it's not. so, not only that it's again like i went to bring it back to this point of genetic determinism like it's not computer code. we use computer code to think about it, to try to understand it, but there is so many levels of ambiguity and unknown. the fact that we still refer to 90% of the genome as junk dna is a problem. we will be cutting and pasting

it. i think it's really hard because you want public buy-in, but at the same time i think this is an issue way bigger than crispr, way bigger than any particular field of science and back to this point i had to make earlier is this point where we treat the public like they are stupid and you have expertise to talk about stem and i love the fact that like you say, some people hated their biology class and like it feel like they could be curious or make mistakes because there is this sort of expertise involved. but, i mean, we can't keep referring to scientists as the people who need to go out until the people what's up. i think what marcie's same with this idea of new ways of thinking about shaping technology, i mean, it means taking the public seriously. i mean, recognizing that we all have expertise and that its it's influencing technology and science as well. aikido kitty just have expertise working at burger king actually are part of this debate and you

are important in this-- your voice matters. we went to the summit in dc and as amazing as it was to rub abuzz with noble laureates, there was a certain point especially when the conversation edge more towards sociology, when we saw these really famous people literally rolling their eyes and it was frustrating. but like what can you do next so i think we really have to get away from this idea that public engagement means of talking down to people about what sciences and really try to bring them into the conversation of like science isn't about experts telling us what is safe, especially when so many of these risks are bigger than the biological risk. they are about social and political risks and what is this mean on a global scale. so, i mean, i don't have an easy answer for how to convey this to the public without this metaphor that even we get caught using because we are trying to make it

something people can attach to like velcro. at the same time like we need to really complicate that metaphor and once we had people's attention complicated again like this is actually jean editing. >> trying to think of an answer to your question. so, your question was-- [inaudible] >> how do we deal with kind of unknown unknown of synthetic biology and may be the genome, maybe it's something more general. >> i can tell you how we do it with bayou-- bio bio curious. like i said we have a safety board that reviews each project that comes in where a bsl on lab which means its biosafety us one where very simple requirements.

there is nothing pathogenic, no human cells, nothing that can be harmful to humans and we look at the projects that come in and i think looking in a different direction, to me safety is around bringing more people into the work and into the conversation. i think the bracco one experiment i talked about was a great example because it's not about bringing people into be pro- science and i think that's the opportunity for science outreach. site that reach now i'm in the word outreach is like kind of like grabbing for people to like around them or something and i think the opportunity is really to go to where people are and talk about topics they are interested in and it's about his science good or something we should wait for other people, but like instead here's this experiment and has to do with a

test for breast cancer. what you think, i mean, let's get that information to wrap your head around it, i mean, jim owes, jim is a giant topic and to me that's where my concerns about safety command is it's about what is unfit is when people are not up to speed on this stuff and people don't feel like they can have an opinion. they feel like they are not-- this is something that we should leave to other people and i think the real opportunity, for more science and that the public doesn't exist. it's you, it's you, too. it's you. it's you. like there is no public out there. if you are not engaged in these conversations that is it. if you are great, but if not like come check out bio curious or start reading stuff online and talking about it with other people. that's what is missing is you

and that's how things become safer and more, i think more engaging is to have you involved in the conversation and i went to say thank you for these fantastic questions. they are very thought-provoking questions. think you. >> well, as to how to address the public, i'm going to come back to both of your comments. i think art is really a wonderful way of doing it, bio arch because artists can take risks. they are not ruining their reputation, which i think is a concern for a lot of scientists and it can reach a general public in a large white and in a very creative way and the fluorescent rabbit, alba, that created so much discussion about

some of what we are talking about here and he never even got the rabbit. you know, it wound up dying in france, but the point being that what his peace became about was the discussion that happened based on what he did and there's a lot of other artists that are working in that bio field that are doing i would say very controversial content. cell arc is one of them who cloned and here and mounted it on his arm because no one would mounted to give him a 30 year, so you have scientists and artists working together and i think they can reach a broad audience, so i'm wondering what you all think of that because it winds up dealing with some of the very heart topics we've been talking about in a very public way, but it does start the discussion that is sometimes

hard to do in other venues. >> so, one of the things i was going to put in these slide, but did not have time for and most of them were things like the face of drone. i will get into that later. there is this one person brian hammond doing this thing called open gender codes, i'm forgetting the name right now, sorry. he actually started in baltimore i forget the name of the lab to. so, he is working at the intersection of diy hacking and art and a lot of sort of like theory and what he's doing is trying to draw attention to the problems you are talking about with the brca1 test and he is saying, what if we could not only bring eight-- clear lab, but bring the lab to clear people and it's really interesting because he is doing

a lot of things at once and i'm not even sure if he has tried to do will take off or if it's even save, but what he is doing is genetically modifying tobacco plans to grow your own gender hormones if you are trying to use those hormones. a lot of things he is engaging in, he has like his three-minute kickstart a video and then like a 20 minute video of history and know his knowledge and it's wonderful because he is really talking about like what he is trying to do and what i see out of this is like, yes, i agree privatized health care is crap in the amount of surveillance and the forcible hormone therapy that people and through is crap and i really am engage with this and if you today i'm also not sure if the hormones they extract from the tobacco plants will be safe for people will know if there hormone levels are getting dangerous and it raise a lot of questions for me and i appreciate how much work he has

put into the 20 minute video and going through the history of next line life support i think it's fascinating. i think it's also a question of like, okay there are certain things we can't control and there are certain things sometimes the market takes out of our hands, so like sometimes you create something beautiful and in the market takes it over. it becomes something else. what can we do to make sure that even best intentions have some kind of containment strategy that they don't kind of get away from us i think it's one of the things i'm thinking about. >> doesn't really speak to your question, but it sort of provoked this, a couple of thoughts. when i got into this-- it's marcy's fault. her and her buddy rich gave a presentation with a reading list at the end and i went and read it. i went this is modem capitalism.

doing this on the doing human genetic engineering is just, it's the logical extreme of modern capitalism as we have seen it. i went, we will find that out to people and maybe we will finally have a revolution. well, it didn't really sort of workout yet. you know what, i mean? i think there is truth to that and i think we have to remember that all of these things are rooted in the social and financial set up that we have got including art. there is very little arts nowadays that is not traveled by financial consideration. for pretty easy and valid reasons and just as the evening is winding down a bit i want to

make sure one other thing gets in, which is related to money and technology, which is that we don't like saying for very good reason is that we are spending a million bucks to give someone a heart transplant. if it's coming out of insurance or the government or even their own pocket, you know. so, that million bucks, we are talking rounded numbers here, you could treat 10000 pregnant women, something, you know. you could do major health intervention for a very large number of people and i think that's a really difficult problem to think about. we in this society valued individual. i'm an individual work i want to get treated if i'm ill.

i was ill a couple of years ago. i got treated. it cost me directly practically nothing because i had good insurance, but it cost the system quite a lot. now, i know people, i have seen people in westerville and selena who frankly whole families would've benefited from what we spent on me. i wasn't even dying, so i'm just tossing that, you know, this is technically irrelevant. i think it does help to ground everything in the societal context. >> i think a lot about we need to think about more with this conversation is helping us to do more than we get to do in our daily lives is the context of text-- technological choice in how it's implemented, how it's embedded etc. and i went to sort of like reinforce this point about claiming expertise back

from the experts because i think that is at the heart of the discussion and crucially part of what we need to do with this particular realm of technology. obviously, there are things about it that is dangerous that we need to know about those limits on their own terms, but just to point out the things that equally dangerous like nuclear power used to be left to guys in white lab coats that tell us it's safe, you want to need to meter it and we figured it out. we be the average citizen throughout the world learned about this by having conversations like this on working hard, grassroots organizing. another case in point is how much medical care changed because of the rise of women organizing themselves to control their own healthcare. these are incredibly good examples of society appropriating technical knowledge knowledge from experts and diffusing it broadly the population so we don't accept experts as readily as we once did.

in this case i think that's been really helpful. that said, wanted to put out, i mean, obviously the guys that left already unfortunately was putting out this cancer magic bullet is the holy grail of this technology like there's always some version of that lurking out there and we will all live forever and be immortal and never be sick again or so in the blank. there some fantasy like that that is always the hook and i think those these are sort of obviously sales pitches and the reality is the technology is invented and controlled by people who plan to make huge profits. always interested about the fact that you were able to duplicate this expensive test essentially for nothing in a lab and i wonder to what extent not for the political conversation among the people in that room about how ridiculous it is that someone is allowed to control these patents on this technology and it's very peril to software and digital media in general, so i think that is exciting. last thing is to give you the

possibility of let's push this step aside for a moment, is there any reason why we should be excited about this stuff really? what is your best cased fantasy of where we are going with this? i can't think of one and i wonder what it would be and maybe you guys who have been immersed in this various combating or welcoming as the case may be might offer us some vision that gives us a reason to think we should spend time and energy on this because it does have some applications worth pursuing. i don't know what these are i'm not really convinced. >> that was a sprawl. >> the brca1 experiment i talk about is like i said scientifically we can do the sites within our.

the science, if you have done other experiments you have seen the same science and we are just changing the letters around and it's completely different. so it does bring those questions and where comes to the conclusion you have which is a ridiculous system. know, comes up with different answers. people of different perspectives from a cost might to develop the test. it was 20 years ago it was patented all the way to it's completely ridiculous and should be open source and what can we do to make it open source and maybe we can modify the patent an effort to make it open-source. that something i did with pcr, which is chain reaction, a nobel prize-winning technology and within every biotech lab in the world. originally it was a patented technology and when the patent expired in 2010, friend and i started building the machines in our garage. up it up on kickstart and it was the stories i got were fantastic. they were from one that comes right high school teacher who

wrote me and said i had written all of the people in kickstart her and said like why did you buy one of these things. like it's a glob of wires. so they said, you know, i'm just closing out my semester of high school biology and i had body make-- machine on ebay because we don't have a big budget and when i went to turn it on it broke because it was a used machine is so my students do get to do seat-- pcr the share, so my hope by building this machine my students get to get to do that experiment and students everywhere get to do this experiment and so i think whether it's a lab tool that kicks out the discussion around patents or un- experiment that kicks up a discussion, i mean, that's where all my knowledge around patents and ethics of mail come to this perspective of biotech. my whole understanding of how to be democratic and how to vote comes from this one time where

we work as california voting on whether gml should be labeled a not and i went really really as deep as i could-- i read the bills and i had never done anything like that before. i read all of this stuff to try to figure it out. so, think that back to your question about what can be-- with promising about that, it's curiosity. curiosity is what's promising whether it's about biotechnology or something else. we are culturing that curiosity whether it's about policies, whether it's about patents, biotech or about something completely unrelated to biotech, it allows people to get interested and learn something. every piece of the universe is connected to every other piece of the universe. i would save butchering of a quote, but that is a completely true. it can't separate society and technology. what you can really do is embrace that they are the same

thing in a lot of ways like they are all connected to each other. so, from my perspective biotech and curiosity is a way that that is the door for me as maybe for someone else it's different, but i think it always starts with some type of curiosity. >> so, i struggle with this question. this question of what is the best case scenario for biotech and i think so much of it is when we are doing best case scenario and worse case scenario and i think we are in this vacuum and we are thinking like the context won't influence it somehow. i think that's-- so human genome project, we remember in 2000, get on the stage and we are like guess what you guys, we are 99.9% and everyone is so excited finally. we have all of this commonality. like it's so wonderful. what immediately happened? what immediately happened is

that we start mining that .01% and we call it race and class and sexuality and we call it everything like you know. i don't know. like for me i want to harness the passion and the curiosity that i see growing in europe biocurious labs and i wanted to turn it away from the cool stuff in the technology and that stuff anyone to put it back on this idea of social problems and maybe-- maybe it's not so much about curiosity of what we can do or what we can fix or what we can make happen, that maybe it's about the curiosity of what happens at next. like what are the consequences of our actions? so much of this world we are living in is so high risk and it's like we are assuming nine out of 10 fail and we don't even care because the 10% will be so amazing. but, what about that 90% of what we are doing? i want to be curious. would be curious about how rapidly this neighborhood has

changed in the last 10 years. like how i can go to school three years and watch this happen block by block. so, maybe it's that we are just focusing on the wrong things. maybe it's biotechnology could be really awesome, but maybe we need to like marriott to a lot of other things first. maybe this is like the original question you asked like are we having these ethical, philosophical, should we do these conversations the same time we expect the lab, i think your space is lovely because it's-- like i dated dave funded lab level i don't think it's happening. if that continues to happen than it will be the elite who has those degrees making the tools and cause the pr people to sell the tools to the public and that really scares me, so if we look at that human genome project as an example i can know we can beat given this beautiful

message from biotech, market forces, centuries of racism, you know, systems of privilege will work that beauty and so we need to really start looking at the social problems beyond technology or? name: solve so many of them with our humanity. we don't need a technical fix for climate change or global inequality. we can literally just do other things instead. >> i kind of had to come up with the conclusion of your brilliance like statement and get into this-- that's what i was getting to as a layperson and an artist, also.

i wanted to add to that thing, the concept of danger or safety within tinkering or planar being curious with science and that may be just like the metaphor with the small lever you can move the world. i think the degree of danger only has to do with the extent to which science is separated from that just ethics in sociology, but also kind of a greater vision and it would be one thing i want to add to that is like two things, one an incubator space cultivating cool curiosity is awesome and also harvestable as you are saying to do greater things. it is not a rare thing. like my impression very much like the american culture is very much glorification of the brilliant individual discovering things, going where no man has gone the poor and things.

i think that's more like that is what is perceived at the general call church to is more rare and wet-- what i would love a space wars the other things, like those things we never ask about, okay what would make life better. what do we actually went to-- would we actually want to go with this and not to be an afterthought after you discover new things, what are the applications, actually something that comes before. secondly, not being something perceived like a hindrance or like a dampener or wet blanket, we could do so many cool great things, but bummer all these ethical blocks keeping us from, you know. sort of like this attitude is like this profit driven sort of world and all of these

things have actually kept us from exploring incredible process-- possibilities. like if we could infuse that curiosity precisely in a different way of approaching all of this, which is like what new incredible societies could we get to if we harness our genius in a purposeful way in that direction. do you see what, i mean? by turning it on its head. >> we have really run out of time. the last comment from the panel. last chance. short, sweet comments. >> i totally get what you are talking about because i have seen it. i have seen over and over and over again and the biggest opportunity for biocurious 2010 was getting equipment together, getting maybe a million dollars for the lab equipment that we bought for $20000. was the opportunity and then up to a couple

thousand people with a couple dozen labs around the world. the biggest opportunity for biocurious now is it's giving permission to other people to come in. what we have established his people that are really curious and really really driven can come into biocurious and do experiments and they make their way there. what the opportunity is to add the ability to bring in more people to say you have permission not to leave. you have permission to ask a lot of questions. you have permission to not have a project. i think that's the next step for biocurious and is more around the basic classic, basic education, bringing in different people who have different insights into biotech and opinions on things that might develop biotech, but aren't that's top layer people that are so driven they will drive two hours to come to a microscope project.

it's amazing to see and now the opportunity for 2016 to grow beyond that to bring in people that otherwise are kind of like i don't know really where i fit in, but when you-- if you give them a place in a way to have conversations about that they will ask really good questions, so i get what you are saying and it's something we learn through our experience. that's the biggest opportunity for us. >> on going to call it a night. tito jankowski, elliot hosman and teaching spend, thank you for c-span coming to film it. everyone in the world it -- we'll get to see it and come back in two weeks for a discussion on keeping the oil in the soil. we will have a very good discussion that night. we look forward to basically being in these kinds of conversations

with an ongoing basis, so if any of you have an idea for future discussions, please talk to me. we are always looking for new ideas and we look forward to resuming this one again because it is a discussion that will not end in their lifetime, obviously. thank you very much. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[ inaudible conversations ] >> us economy added 160,000 new jobs in april with the unemployment rate remaining at 5%, the same level as last month. if your labor statistics release those numbers this morning. >> tonight on c-span, republican party chair on the 2016 presidential campaign and donald trump as a republican nominee. mr. previous set down earlier today to offer his thoughts on efforts to unite the party behind donald trump. you will be a bit watch that tonight on c-span starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. this weekend on c-span newsmaker program, the governor of puerto rico, on monday puerto rico missed a 400 million-dollar debt payment, another

$200 billion in loan payments are due out this summer. he is our guest on newsmaker sunday at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern. this week in the c-span city to or posted by our charter and time warner cable partners takes you to san bernardino california to expire the history and literary culture of the city. on december 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 seriously injured in a terrorist attack at the inland regional center in san bernardino. we will talk with the congressman about the attack and recovery efforts by the community. his district includes the inland regional center. >> when we talk about terrorism, the fight against terror, it is it something that is an abstract anymore. it is something that across this country means something because this is a big city in san bernardino that was attacked.

this could happen anywhere. >> we will also speak with san bernardino city councilman about establishing a permanent memorial to to the victims of the attack. >> it provides a sense of remembrance. it highlights their lives and what that contributed to our local community and certainly they always will be near and dear for us and to provide a place of consolation, serenity. we are thinking serenity guarded prayer chapel of some sort in and around this area. >> on book tv we will learn about the family of wired up. his burke the group planned talks about the herbs notoriety and their connection to san bernardino thematic connection-- connection they had to san bernardino county starts back to about 1852 when the father of wyatt earp who is the most well-known, his name is nicholas, he basically left his family temporarily.

they were living in illinois. he heard about the gold rush in northern california. before he went back to midwest, he ventured down to southern california and he passed through the san bernardino valley and he vowed one day he would come back to san bernardino. >> on how mert-- american history tv we will visit the san bernardino history railroad museum and talk about the importance. san bernardino historical society vice president located in the san jose depot and contains many objects related to the railroad history. >> construction was completed in 1918 and replaced a wooden structure or proximally 100 east of here that burnt in 1960. it was built a lot larger than it was needed because they decided to house the division headquarters at this location at that time. >> watch the c-span city tour saturday at noon on c-span 2 book tv and

sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. on american history tv on c-span 3. the c-span cities who are working with our cable affiliate and visiting cities across the country. on american history tv on c-span 3,. >> we are here to review the major findings of our fallen basic-- investigation of that pi intelligence including the intel program and other programs aimed at domestic targets. fbi surveillance of law-abiding citizens and groups, political abuses of fbi intelligence and several specific cases of unjustified intelligence operations. >> 1975 church committee hearings convened to investigate the intelligence activities of the cia, fbi, irs and nsa. saturday night at 10:00 p.m. eastern that commission question former associate counsel and staff assistance to president nixon on a

plan he presented to president nick sent to collect information about antiwar and radical groups using burglary, electronic surveillance and opening of a male. >> undertaken black bag jobs over a number of years up until 1966. has been successful and valuable again particularly in matters involving espionage and they felt again it was something even the revolutionary climate they thought they needed to have the authority to do it. >> just before 7:00 p.m. eastern. >> and she said you-- she spoke hungarian, also. he asked her where are our parents and she said , you see that smoke >> holocaust survivor

and a gross recalls her family's experiences in the ghettos in nazi occupied hungary and poland and forced hard labor. this event was part of the united states holocaust memorial museum first-person series. @8:00 p.m. on lectures of history,. >> an artist named alexander broke into bricks office in nearby pittsburgh, shot him twice and repeatedly stabbed him. bookman, however, was one of the great failures in assassination history. not only did he fail to kill him, he also undermined the strikers for whom he was professing sympathy because in many ways public opinion sought outburst of radical violence as a discredit to the union movement. >> the university of maryland's robert childs on the labor and social unrest at the turn of the 20th century and a

sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. onwards the white house rewind, the 1968 presidential campaign of former democratic governor of alabama george wallace. for the complete american history tv we can schedule go to c-span.org. up next on c-span 2, conversation on anti-semitism around the globe. we will hear from irwin cotler, former canadian attorney general also founder of the center for human rights or indiana university this is just over an hour. >> as one of only two research institutes in the nation dedicated to the exploration of anti- semitism in modern context the institute for the study of contemporary anti- semitism is a source of great pride for indiana university. moreover, the institute has made contributions to the bloomington community by bringing leading scholars and activists to campus from all parts of the globe to share their experiences, expertise

and perspectives. this week's conference alone has brought some 70 scholars from 16 different countries to our campus. this is the third such international conference sponsored by the institute in the past five years. in short, the efforts of professor rosenfeld and those who work with the institute have established bloomington as a worldwide hub for the study of anti-semitism and equally as important a hub for a global community of individuals dedicated to that in during power of diversity and inclusion. >> this evening i'm delighted to continue this tradition by welcoming back to our campus the honorable irwin cotler to deliver our keynote address. irwin cotler is the founder and chair of the

wallenberg center for human rights as well as emeritus professor of law at mcgill university. he has served various roles in the canadian government, including as a member of parliament minister of justice, and attorney general. professor cutler's career has been defined by abiding commitment to human rights and equality and all storms. this commitment has been evident in everything from his effort to make the canadian supreme court the most gender representative in the world, to his leadership of the canadian delegation to the stock home conference on the combating of genocide. furthermore, he has distinguished himself as an international human rights lawyer, serving as counsel to prisoners of conscience who includes up notable figures as nelson mandela, and others.

sharansky, a former lecture in this series in the former soviet union. he has testified as an expert witness on human rights and governmental assemblies around the world. including the united states, russia, sweden, norway and israel. professor cotler advocacy for human rights in all corners of the globe reminds us of the powerful words of doctor martin luther king. in justice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. most recently professor cotler lifelong commitment to human rights led to the creation of the raul wallenberg center for human rights, named

after the swedish diplomat who saved thousands of hungarian jews-- juice from the nazis during world war ii only to tragically disappear after being captured by soviet forces in 1945. as you might expect from professor cotler leadership the center has a distinctly international scope in its advocacy for human rights, focusing on issues of pressing contemporary importance such as human rights in iran. in february his work on behalf of the center brought him to the geneva summit for human rights and democracy and we are so pleased that his workout brings him back to indiana university bloomington. please join me in welcoming professor cotler. [applause]. >> thank you for really bad warm and very heartwarming

introduction. when i come to indiana amongst such a community of scholars, i feel very much at home and i have to say that i'm the two clearly moved to produce eight in the simona visiting scholars program because of a mention to both of them just before coming in here, they have been heroes of my wife. my wife was a parliamentary secretary, very close to the former prime minister of israel and shared a close friendship. so, for me this is a unexpected connection, and very very welcome one on a personal level as well as a scholarly basis. i want to as well join in the tribute to professor alvin rosenfeld. i want to say that he is a model of moral and

intellectual leadership. he is made of this conference, this gathering of international scholars the preeminent gathering of its kind internationally. he is made of the institute for the contemporary study of anti-semitism a preeminent institute in that regard. [applause]. >> also, his work reminds me of something and if you will pardon me a personal reference here, i know the introduction and you could not have mentioned the one thing in the introduction that is always missing and understandably so and that is the debt that i go to my parents blessed memory. the reason for that is it was my father who taught me when i was a

young boy, before i understood the profundity of his remarks, when he would say to me repeatedly that justice, justice you pursue is equal to all of the other commandments combined. this as he put it, you must teach unto your children, but it was my mother who would hear my father saying this would say to me, if you want to pursue justice, you have to understand you have to feel the injustice. you have to go in your community and beyond and feel the injustice and combat the injustice, otherwise the pursuit of justice remain safe theoretical abstraction. i suspected as a result of these teachings i got involved in the two great human rights struggles of the second half of the 20th century, the struggle for human rights and in the former soviet union

and the struggle against apartheid and with political prisoners who became the face, the identity, the vision of those struggles in the former soviet union and nelson mandela in south africa but, the reason i mention this and i'm connecting it to alvin is because his work with respect to the scholarly inquiry and the moral intellectual leadership that he is providing is really not just the struggle against anti- semitism, but the larger sense of the word the struggle against injustice. that is what brings us together. that is what my mother would have liked to have seen as do as part of my father's coffin justice, but my mother's warning about pursuing justice by combating injustice and that is what we are doing in convening as we

are today. so, i am pleased to share with you this evening some thoughts and concerns, reflections and yes, even some hope. someone said to me will i be adding to some of the brooding presence we have been hearing about, the shadows of anti-semitism, the dangers, the threats, the terror and the like, but i want to say that i am also hoping to end on hopeful ending and i'm encouraged by the fact that we do have these gatherings of scholars coming together. so, our struggle that is not an itemized struggle in silos, but we can come together in common cause here and beyond. so, it is in that context that i want to share these remarks with you this evening about the jewish conditions and the human condition, about assaults on jews and assaults on human

rights, about the state of jews in the world today and the state of the world inhabited i jews. about anti-semitism as being not only the oldest and most enduring of hatreds, i would say the paradigm of radical hatred is the holocaust is the paradigm of radical evil, but the most toxic, the most lethal as our later great colleague robert put it in his magisterial work, lethal obsession. ..

too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened. 1.3 million people were murdered at auschwitz. 1.1 million of them were jews. let there be no mistake about it. jews were murdered in auschwitz because of anti-semitism. but anti-semitism did not itself die at auschwitz. and jews and the related anti-semitism have emerged come and have emerged for some time. what i would call the bloodied canary in the mine shaft of global evil. and as we've learned only too well and to tragically, that while it may begin with jews, it doesn't end with jews.

and so the underlying thesis of my remarks this evening, and i regret that i have been repeating this to this for some time now, but it just intensifies, is that we are witnessing a new global, escalating, sophisticated, virulent, and even lethal anti-semitism. grounded in classical anti-semitism is distinguishable from it. which received its first international institutional derivative expression and the united nations zionism is racism resolution 40 anniversary we've recently commemorated but it's gone dramatically the onset. that which the then u.s. ambassador to the united nations daniel moynihan said about it, dedicated the abomination of anti-semitism the appearance of

international legal sanction. but as i said, it has gone dramatically be on that. on your anti-semitism which needs almost a new vocabulary to define it, but which can best be defined or defined expression in a set of metrics that are anchored in human rights and international law, in general, and equality rights and equality law in particular. in other words, traditional or classical anti-semitism is a discrimination of, then i'll up the muscle to bone, the rights the jews to live as equal members of any society that they inhabit. and we have developed metrics to identify and evaluate this traditional or classical anti-semitism. the anti-defamation league, in a

global comparative study in 2014, using something 11 of these what i would call traditional metrics, such questions as to jews have too much power or control the media, et cetera? determined at the end of the global study that anti-semitism as they put it was a persistent and her basic virus. but i want to suggest that there is this new anti-semitism with a set of metrics that were not even included in the anti-defamation league. and which i want to share with you this evening. but first fma, to excerpt from a speech at the first if i may, -- some 16 years ago at the beginning of the 21st century wind, and observing the developments in the old and new

anti-semitism and the intersection between the two, stated in a rather pricey and we -- press the way, a process and connection and intersection only if you wish which underpins my remarks this evening when he said and i quote, compared to most previous anti-jewish outbreaks, mr. anti-semitism is often less directed against individual jews. it primarily targets the collective jews, the state of israel. i just might add parenthetically, he was a former deputy prime minister of sweden who emerged as one of the leading scholars with respect to old and new anti-semitism. then he continues, and in such attacks start a chain reaction of assaults on individual jews and jewish institutions. and he concludes, in the past the most dangerous anti-semites were those who want to make the

world free of jews your today's most dangerous anti-semites might be those who want to make the world free of a jewish state. and in that context i want to summarize some five of metrics of the new anti-semitism. i've outlined from 12 metrics but it don't want to unduly bore and burden you so i will limit it to five. even then you might say this is somewhat burdening. to five want to discuss this evening are, one, genocidal anti-semitism. two, geological anti-semitism. three, political anti-semitism. number four, anti-jewish care. and, finally, and the one that i think is the most sophisticated and, therefore, may be the most dangerous in that sense because the others at least are overt and public and clear, is what i would call the laundry or

masking of anti-semitism under universal public values. they are all the things that people care about in their common humanity. i hope then and if time permits to not leave it in an analytical framework but to suggest some initiatives that we may take as a group of scholars to both not only better understand but to better address and redress this new anti-semitism. let me begin with the first metric of the new anti-semitism, what i would call genocidal anti-semitism. this is not a term that i use lightly were easily. it is a term that i am taking right out of the genocide conventions prohibition against the direct and public incitement to genocide. as the supreme court of canada put it in a major case in the

matter of upholding the constitutionality of our anti-hate legislation in canada and the court said that the holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers. it began with words. and in a more recent judgment, i case where a rwandan had come to canada in 1992 and sought refugee status in canada, won't go to the levels of receipts and hearings but at the end of the day, the court ordered his extradition back to rwanda. he had said, how can i, on the grounds of incitement, to genocide? and his argument was, i came to canada in 1992. i was actually seeking refugee status. the genocide in rwanda did not begin until 1994.

how can you accuse me, let alone convicted me, of incitement to genocide? and the court held that the very incitement to genocide constitutes the crime under international law. whether or not acts of genocide follow. and important, it in my view, a compelling precedent in terms of combating state sanctions, hate, and hate to genocide. i might mention because i think it's important to do so, that we are on the eve of the 22nd anniversary of the rwandan genocide, which began on april 7, 1994. and i say this because what makes the genocide in rwanda so unspeakable is not only the

horror of the genocide itself, that would be bad enough, what makes it so unspeakable is that the genocide was preventable. nobody could say we did not know. we knew but we did not act. just as in the case of darfur, nobody could say we did not know. we knew that we did not act, or now as we just passed the fifth anniversary of the macabre killing fields in syria, where some close to 500,000 have been killed, 12.5 million have been displaced, close to 5 million are refugees. isis cayman at the end -- came in at the end of th a scorched earth policy. it began with the criminality of the assad regime. [applause] and those of us who said at the time, invoking to responsible to

protect doctrine which says that whatever you have a situation in any country or with any government of war crimes, crimes against humidity or god forbid a genocide, and the government in place is unable or unwilling to do anything about it, or is in the case of syria, is the author of that killing field, and there's a responsibility on the part of the international community to intervene and protect the innocent civilians. but those of us who called for years ago for intervention in syria whenever quote-unquote only 7000 dead and quote-unquote less than 100,000 displaced, were told that if you intervene, this will lead to sectarian warfare, this will lead to civil war, this will lead to jihadists coming in. everything we were told would happen if we intervened happened because we did not intervene.

and in a parallel thing, similarly with regard to the struggle against and six, we cannot be bystanders -- against anti-semitism. the bystanders pay the road to the genocide in rwanda and darfur to the killing fields in syria as the bystanders contributed as well to the paradigm, as i said, of radical evil, the holocaust. in looking at the phenomenon of genocidal anti-semitism, i found that there were some seven manifestations of genocidal anti-semitism. i'm not going to go through all of them, just several of them to give you an appreciation. this audience does not need an elaborate explanation. the first expression of genocidal anti-semitism came at the beginning of the 21st

century. though not with the first expression by the person, but the first expression in the first century on january 3, 2000, when the supreme leader of iran, the ayatollah khamenei, said that there can be no resolution of the arab-israeli conflict without the annihilation of the jewish state. did not use the euphemism of the zionist entity. without the annihilation of the jewish state. and as we heard earlier today, this continued in terms of the calls for the excising of the cancers tumor israel, and several weeks ago in the testing of ballistic missiles as it had been with the shahab missile with its emblem of wipe israel off the map repeated again three weeks ago. and what is so disturbing about

these genocidal calls is that they are standing violations of the prohibition against this direct and public incitement to genocide, anchored in the genocide convention and international law. in effect state parties have a responsibility. it's not a policy option to hold the leadership of transcendence iran accountable. i use that term because of what to distinguish it from the people in public of iran who are otherwise the targets of mass domestic repression, where similarly the international committee is not sufficiently intervening to redress on that level as well. so here's the first manifestation. the second manifestation of genocidal anti-semitism are the covenants and charters and declarations and programs, to circuit for example, of iran,

hamas, the senior circuit, and hezbollah, a shiite circuit. i'm not saying anything new when i tell you that the hamas in its own public charter calls for the church of israel and the killing of jews wherever they may be. you can find in article seven an account and so on. but what is perhaps less well known and surprised my colleagues in the canadian parliament was i read into the record not simply his public genocidal column but the anti-semitic tropes, the classic anti-semitic tropes which underpin it. calling israel the country, are calling jews i should say, responsible for the french revolution, the first world war, the second world war, the league of nations, the united nations. there's not an evil in the world

in which jewish footprints are not there. as we have the juxtaposition and the hamas covenant of the old and new anti-semitism. similarly with regard to hezbollah. we know of its public threats as well with regard to the destruction of israel. but the hezbollah leader not only speaks of quote-unquote israel's disappearance that he is a adequate you probably know this quote, that it shows how the old and the new come together. and as he said, if all the jews were gathered in israel it would be easier to kill them all at the same time. but on a lesser note, but no less defamatory, he said if we search the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the jews.

notice i do not say the israeli. and as a shiite scholar, author of the book hezbollah politics and religion says the statement, provides moral justification and ideological justification for dehumanizing the jews. she went on, the israeli jews it comes illegitimate target for extermination and it also legitimizes attacks on non-israeli jews. and so you see here to manifestations of genocidal anti-semitism. a third come and i believe at that, are the religious fatwas or execution rates calling for the killing of wherever they may be. and i can give you a litany of that in terms of radical imams whether they be in paris or spain or berlin and the like. where jews and judaism are held

out to be the perfidious enemy of islam, and we are in their genocidal calls israel as it were emerges as a zalman rushdie among the nations, the object of a state that law. and so it is under this phenomenon of genocidal episode is in -- fatwa -- the issue becomes the only state in the world today, and the jewish people the only people in the world today that are the standing targets of genocidal anti-semitism. i didn't even go into the other manifestations of it, which include populist anti-semitism, those expressions jews come jews to the gas which were in the streets of paris and berlin and the like, while the anti-semitism now in the social media, and so on.

which brings me now to the second metric, it is i'm referring here now to deepen a logical anti-semitism and i will move more quickly. the globalizing and type it in this metric additional and the jewish people as the embodiment of all evil in the world today. of israel as a racist, imperialist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing child killing genocidal apartheid nazi people and state. the embodiment of the worst evils of the 20th century and constituted of all evil in the 21st century. and so it isn't that the issue of the jewish people become not only the only state in the only people that are the standing targets of genocidal anti-semitism, but the only state in the only people that are systematically accused of

being genocidal themselves. the whole serving as a form of prolog justification for the incitement and assault upon israel and the jews. all of which serve as a validator for a third indicator, political anti-semitism. the denial of fundamental rights to the jewish people. if the first indicator, genocidal anti-semitism is a public call for the destruction of israel and the jewish people, if in the second metric israel and the jewish people are the embodiment of all evil, warranting the assaults upon it, then political anti-semitism as a dial up israel's right to exist -- denial or the denial of its legitimacy or the denial of the jewish people's right to self-determination, if not even their denial as a people. as martin luther king, jr. put

it, i quote, it is the denial to the jews of the same right, the right to self-determination that we accord african nations and all people of the globe. in short, come as martin luther king, jr. concluded, it is anti-semitism. which brings me to a fourth metric, and that is the phenomenon of anti-jewish terror, underpinned by anti-jewish state sanctioned incitement, and then the glorification of that terrorism, and even the rewarding of that terrorism by both hamas and the palestinian authority. let me just say that the 21st century also began on rosh hashanah in figure october 2000, with the worst anti-jewish terrorism, i would say more than

that, the worst terrorism that we have, in fact, ever witnessed over a period of time. in the first two years of the onslaught of what was called the second intifada, a kind of sanitizing term, because the notion that it is up with some kind of resistance to an occupation that really comes with the validating expression. what it really was was the worst kind of terrorism that we have witnessed in contemporary history. some 600 jews were murdered in the first two years of the intifada. that is equivalent to a half a dozen nine elevenths. entering the same time, there was a series of major attacks that never took place because they were thwarted. the attempt to bomb the israeli

towers which could have been a 9/11 and a particular sensor issue. the attempt to poison, i can go on to what i'm saying is you have specific anti-jewish terror which included also the targeting of synagogues and jewish community centers and hebrew university. and i can go on in the terrorist attacks. and, regrettably, regrettably what we've been witnessing has been an ignoring or marginalizing or sanitizing of such attacks. let me just give you a personal experience and i will close with this metric with this experience. i was in israel over the december-january break. i went there to begin with to attend an international jewish parliamentarians conference. i a ride because of the day sticks in my mind and in my

psyche on december 20. i arrived at the airport, ben-gurion airport, picked up the jerusalem post. on the front page of the jerusalem post it said, three terrorist attacks. my daughter and grandchildren live in that city, said these attacks took place while i was flying over to israel. and so immediately called my daughter and she said it's okay, daddy, we are fine but it was a neighbor of ours, and she fought the terrorists off. fast-forward, january 1 i'm going to go visit my son who recently moved to israel and is living in tel aviv. walking to his house when again i got engulfed in a virulent terrorist attack in the heart of tel aviv. and then the third, just as i

was about to leave israel, being there for several weeks, you may have read about a pregnant woman that had been stabbed and, thankfully, lived and the fetus was fine. that happened to have been a cousin of mine. and so i'm visiting israel and i am there in a three-week period at all these terrorist attacks occur. which israelis are experiencing this anti-jewish care day in and day out. and yet when i would look and i experimented with this, we have a channel in our tv which brings you the israeli news. every single day for months now, the news is led off with another terrorist attack that took place in israel. every single day that i watch the canadian news, there's almost no reference to these terrorist attacks. so not only is this the

sanitizing of anti-jewish terror, but it emboldens the terrorists to not only continue striking in israel but to continue to strike elsewhere. because when we did not intervene at the beginning of this century with regard to anti-jewish care, we been found that anti-jewish terror, the tentacles within move on to europe and elsewhere. and so our responsibility here to intervene on behalf of our common humanity, and that common humanity must include in it israelis and jews. and when i say israelis i am referring also to israeli arabs who themselves have been injured or killed sometimes in these terrorist attacks, though not necessarily targeted for that purpose. and now i come to the final metric, the one that i said is the most sophisticated. and that is a laundering or

masking of anti-semitism, delegitimization under universal public values. because of the strictures of time i'm going to give one example of each of the four arenas in which it is laundering takes place. the first, the laundering under the protective cover of the human. second under the authority of international law, third under the culture against the culture of human rights and forth, under the struggle of racism. one could add even as it is laundering because it's becoming much more present of light, and that is the laundering under the indigenous peoples framework as well. let me begin with regard to the laundry under the protective cover of the united nations. i'm not saying anything new for this audience when i say that yet again in december this year the annual ritual was repeated of some 20 resolutions of condemnation against one member

state and international community. it happens to be israel, and some 30 resolutions against the rest of the world combined. a critical mass of indictment and standing breach of united nations charter requirement of equality for all states, large and small. at that is not the only disturbing phenomenon there. as someone who was a member of the canadian delegation to the united nations, there's not only a critical mass of indictment, there's a critical mass of exposure to that indictment. that process which culminates in 20 resolutions of condemnation proceeds over a three-month period through the various entities and the like of the united nations. the delegations are composed not simply a diplomat at the u.n. they are composed of parliamentarians, of scholars, of faith leaders, of academics,

of journalists sometimes, even of students. so there is a critical mass of exposure to that ongoing process of indictment. and i can tell you many of the people who come to these parliamentary delegations come as a kind of tabula rasa. they are uninformed basically about the palestinian -- but when they listen to the drumbeat of indictment over three months with resolutions passed that read like findings of fact and conclusions of law, and to internalize willy-nilly is delegitimizing dynamic. and that is why one of the things we need to do is to address and redress the situation that's going on at the united nations. we know about the 40th anniversary that zionism is racism resolution. resolution. let me to you what took place at the exact same time that kind of coverage and even know

remembrance at all, a process which began than that has been continued sense, which was that attempt to portray israel been as the enemy of all that is good, as a repository of all that is evil. and so it was that in 1974 and 1975, israel was helped out to be the enemy of labor. evidence? the resolution of the international labor organization condemning can i use the word alleged, condemning. the enemy of health? evidence? condemning israeli mass poisoning of palestinians on the west bank. the enemy of culture. evidence, the revolution of genesco condemning israeli desecration of palestinian holy sites and eastern jerusalem and the west bank -- unesco. the enemy of women. evidence?

the resolution of united nations commission on the status of women condemning israel for its oppression of palestinian women. by the way recently israel became the only state in the world condemned for its oppression of women. i mean, you can't make this thing up in less you're sitting at the united nations council for human rights. the enemy of peace. evidence? the resolution of united nations general assembly condemning israel as a non-peaceloving nation and the enemy of human rights. the resolution of the been united nations commission on human rights, the predecessor to the president's u.n. council on human rights condemning israel as a major human rights violator. in a word come into world in which human rights then, let alone until now how i'm talking 40 years ago, have emerged as a new secular religion of our time. the condemnation of israel as

the human rights i met israel had emerged as a new geopolitical antichrist of our time. so much for the first example. the second example is laundering under the authority of international law. i could regrettably regalia on this forever, but let me take one example and as mentioned earlier today but it deserves a recall. and that is in december last year the contracting parties of the fourth geneva convention, anarmed conflict, the repository of international humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict as it was called, met to but one state in the international community in the dark. it was not iran. it was not sur syria. it was not north korea. it was not, i can go on. the only state put in the docket when the contracting parties convened was israel.

and it had presidents. this was the third time that the contracting parties to the geneva convention had met in 50 years. and each time they put one state in the docket, and each time that state is israel. and let me tell you that this quote-unquote jurisprudence is also taught in the law schools of countries around the world, but without the caveat they may refer to the jurisprudence of the condemnation, but not as by the way, this was the only state in the world, so indicted. leads me to if i may borrow but i don't want to miss appropriate -- miss appropriate another person's pain that sometimes when i hear about black lives matter, and it is true and somebody who has been part of that movement, sometimes i think when i hear about and witness

the daily stabbings in israel and the like, so what should also say, and israeli lives matter as well. as we are all part of a common humanity, and it is blacks, it is each in its own context that we have to remember and to redress those situations. a third reference is made and when they made, is the laundering of delegitimization under the u.n. council on human rights. by the wages for purposes of anchoring it in history, this is the 70th anniversary now of the founding of the u.n. commission on human rights back in, at the time in -- you can make the exact time in terms of 1946, in terms of the founding of the u.n. commission. the 10th anniversary now of the u.n. council on human rights

which was set up to redress the singly out of israel that had occurred under the u.n. commission on human rights as kofi annan put it come and to adhere to do in principle of equality for all nations large and small but which is even been more prejudicial in its singling out in an obsessive way of one state that its predecessor u.n. human rights commission. and here, too, i could go to the resolutions on special session, emerged in such. i want to give you my own personal experience with how this has taken place. you know about the operation protected edge, the u.n., the council united nations council established a commission of inquiry to look into it. what it did not tell you or what was not always known was that there was some 18 references in

the resolution establishing that commission inquiry into operations protected edge. 18 separate references to israeli criminality in the resolution establishing this investigative inquiry, and not one reference to hamas. this is the framework under which that resolution was set up but let me give you my own personal extremes. i received a call in 2006 from then united nations commission on human rights, a former colleague of mine when we called together, i guess in which judge of the supreme court of canada and then went on to become the united nations commissioner for human rights. she said to me, i'm going to ask you, do invite you to be a member of a commission of inquiry that we are setting up to look into killings of palestinians in northern gaza.

she said bishop tutu of south africa, one member and you would be the other. i said to louise, with his commission of inquiry be going to -- she said no, why would ago there? i said it is because of the rocketing that came from hamas in northern gaza, the rocketing of the civilian in southern israel, that israel is responding to that constant rocketing barrage, regrettably, tragically, an errant artillery shell killed 18 palestinians. she said to me know, and we're not going to be going there but you can be a member of the commission. you can, of course, make such submissions as part of the commission. i said, louise, i've read the

resolution establishing the commission of inquiry that you're asking me to join. the resolution says that israel willingly murdered 18 palestinians. so what is there to investigate? i said, i'm sorry, i don't intend to be a fig leaf for the u.n. i sadly don't intend to be a jewish fig leaf for the u.n. which leads me to the final laundering, and that is the laundering under the struggle against racism. let's face it, one of the worst thing she can say about a person that of other countries to call them a racist. the very label supplies the indictment. no further proof ostensibly is required. and if any further proof is required as in the case of israel, then you refer to israel as an apartheid state. and let me tell you that referencing israel as an apartheid state is not an accidental reference. because those who do up and draw

the indictment knew and know very well that apartheid is defined in international law as a crime against you may be. if you to israel as an apartheid state, it is a crime against humanity. if it is a crime against humanity, that it has no right to be. and that is not enough, you called it a nazi state. so not only does it have no right to be, but there is an obligation to ensure that it has no right to be. and we should recall that five years ago a public opinion survey was done in europe where countries were asked, do you believe that israel is doing to the palestinians what the nazis did to the back, and an average of 40% of the europeans in the countries polled said yes. that followed therefore their psychological from this laundering of delegitimization.

and so what we find at this point in this last part in this struggle, against the laundering, goes back also to durbin whose 50th anniversary we are going to be commemorating, and we are the tipping point for that laundering began. the laundering didn't begin in 2001 at durbin. it began as i said way back over 40 years ago, the attempt then to portray israel as the enemy. but what happened at durbin was a tipping point and i will just close with an excerpt of the marches that used to take place in the chanting and the marches in the streets of durbin, which dramatically i think convey the impact of that laundering. and the chanting went as follows. the struggle against apartheid in the 20th century requires the dismantling of south africa as an apartheid state and the

struggle against poor apartheid in the 21st century requires a dismantling of israel as an apartheid state. and so the blueprint, therefore, for what we are witnessing today in the campus culture and the like, which brings me now to the final part in so the question, what needs to be done, and in particular what can we do? i'm going to just do one-liners because of time. again i think you can fill in the blanks even better than if i were to elaborate upon it. the first thing is we need a more inclusive definition of anti-semitism whose metrics are not anchored just in the traditional or classical metrics of anti-semitism, but which include and reference the metrics of the new anti-semitism. some of these metrics initially were found in the federal rights

agency definition of anti-semitism. i remember two years ago this conference we discussed how it'd been removed from the fra website. but i want to say that it is still in this part of the u.s. state department definition and is part also of both the london parliamentary declaration and the autolock parliamentary protocol to combat anti-semitism. so that is the first thing that we need to do to have a more inclusive and common definition. the second thing is the phenomenon of intersection only, which is anchored in the rubric of human rights which underpins the movement today which underpins the phenomenon of bds that we find even in academic ribs. because if you look at it it's

to the organization of health academics or anthropologists or, this is the nature of intersection of the. and intersection of it as a human rights world is for all the oppressed groups are victims of oppression come together against the oppressor, when it comes to the middle east the reconfiguration of the arab-israeli conflict of the israel-palestinian conflict with the conflict been defined as a human rights configuration and narrative and what israel is the oppressor and the palestinians are the oppressed, then intersectionality results in a situation recently at mcgill university where bds movement was joined by the environmentalists, the women's groups, the black groups and so on as part of that phenomenon of intersectionality. and you know one of the things about this and think about intersectionality is that in a

way the soviet jewry movement pioneered intersectionality. because when you think back to the struggle for soviet jewry joint academics, lawyers, scientists, women, students for soviet jewry. we then did what today has come to be known as intersectionality on behalf of the struggle for soviet jewry which was part of the overall struggle for human rights and which was when the prototypical metaphor for the struggle for human rights was a struggle for soviet jewry. this has now been turned on its head and intersectionality has been turned on its head. and recently a group of students when we hosted at our home told us regarding the recent bds dynamic, that it wasn't just directed against israel. it was directed against the jewish students on the mcgill

campus, in the sense that they were seeing and the dynamics of intersectionality. it would seem as part of the white privileged group that was also dominating the underprivileged or repressed groups. and so as i said, you know, it's not that we don't know the case against bds. it's not that we don't know the case about the israeli-palestinian the problem is we are not seen as having standing to make the case. because we are seeing as being also part of the oppressor class. and so this phenomenon of intersectionality is much deeper than we might think. a third thing that i believe we need to do, and by the way, what i said to them is returned to intersectionality as it was once patterned by the black civil rights movement and the struggle for soviet jewry. you start making languages with the women's movement, with environment the movement, et

cetera, et cetera, so that the jewish struggle is not defined come as we are today in terms of israel as a kind of ethic of state, but is defined as part of the struggle for justice and against injustice as a whole. the third thing, we need to combat if not prevent a state sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide as i said the remedies are there in international law. it's astonishing that not one state party to the genocide convention has undertaken what is not a policy option but an international legal obligation to in that address this here country and. before thing is we need to affirm and implement the ottawa parliamentary protocol to combat -- lunatic is a test. how many people here have read the ottawa parliamentary protocol? very few. and this is, i'll say that there were more who did not put up their hands.

but one of the problem is that some of these things are not sufficiently known, appreciated and acted upon. the ottawa parliamentary protocol contains within it the definition of the metrics of the new anti-semitism, also contains the blueprint for action by governments, by parliaments, by civil society and the like. which leads me to a fifth initiative, intended to share with you a unanimous resolution that was adopted by the canadian parliament invoke in the ottawa protocol in that context as well. i do have to say that unanimous resolutions are not that easy to get adopted. if just one person from any of the political parties in our parliament when the speaker of the parliament puts the question to them and says does anyone object? if one person and department says no, you can't adopt the resolution. so the resolution was adopted by

all members from all parties. and i will just summarize the resolution very quickly because you can use it as a template in other parliaments and in our work with civil society. i know as once said am a candidate canceled for lack of interest. the resolution set as follows, number one, it condemned the alarming global rise in anti-semitism. number two, it called on the canadian government and the canadian parliament to make the combating of anti-semitism a priority in both domestic as well as foreign policy. and number three, it abstracted from the ottawa protocol to say the following and then i close. instead of criticizing israel is not anti-semitic, and saying so is wrong. but singling israel out for

selective indictment, denying israel's right to exist, let alone calling for israel's destruction is hateful and discriminatory, and not saying so is dishonest. and i believe as scholars, this is a template that we can invoke and apply. number six, we need to combat the laundry or delegitimization a visual of the human values which i discussed earlier. not a something which is presidential to israel. frankly, if you talk about just the limitation of issue, people say at this point i have been israel should be delegitimize. deserved to be. what would have to say that the real phenomenon here is the laundry of that delegitimization, this invalidation under universal public value. to make it clear that this is not just prejudicial to israel,

but any roads the integrity -- the the roads the united nations on his protective cover it passes but it diminishes the authority of international law which is invoked in its favor. it corrupts the culture of human rights, and it means the struggle against the real racism, against the real apartheid and james and the needs that the struggle against the real apartheid, south africa. so we have to say that what is at stake here is the laundry, delegitimization and, therefore, the delegitimization of the universal public values and the pursuit of the delegitimization of israel. seven thing, we should not retreat from the united nations as is sometimes the instinct to do, or as we are sometimes even counsel to do. but rather we should engage with

the united nations and the out of the docket of the defendant and become our rights claimant, become a plaintiff. and is so not in the name of israel, but do so in the name of the charter of the united nations. do so in the name of universal declaration of human rights, because what is happening in the singling out of israel for selective program and indictment is really a standing breach of those principles of equality before the law and international human rights law and the like. i know you say it will not make a difference. the very process is important. the very making of the case has its own dynamic. are often the bds movement doesn't care if it wins at the end of the day the vote. what occurs is how many people they are seeing the sensitizing to the position of the bds. that's what i say we can be

sensitizing our countries and international community to the manner in which this laundry is actually taking place under the protective cover of the u.n. and the things they care about the next thing, we need to reverse the paradigm, the conventional paradigm of the middle east which has taken hold for some time now which says that the israeli-palestinian conflict is the root of all conflict in the middle east and beyond. the occupation is the root of the israeli-palestinian conflict and apartheid israel is the root of the occupation. we have to turn it around to say that it is radical islam that is the source of all conflict in the middle east and beyond. the denial of israel's legitimacy in any borders come anywhere in the middle east, that is the real apartheid.

and the call, the subsequent call for the destruction of israel and the killing of jews is the criminal apartheid of today. and so we should both identify and name the evil, and again stepped out of the docket of the defendant and become the plaintiff, the rights claimant. we need also to protect the vulnerable minorities whose cases and causes in the middle east are being overshadowed or not even being addressed at all. i am referring to the yazidis, to the christians, it occurred, and the like who are standing targets themselves a state sanctioned incitement, in some cases to genocide, to mass atrocity and the like. we have to change the channel of the international agenda which is focusing only on israel to call on them that if they really

care about human rights, where is there inclusive concern with the targeted, forget about israel. with all these targeted minorities in the middle east who are the standing targets of mass atrocity. under the principle of intersectionality we should make this our case and cause. and, finally, may i close with a conversation that i had with aboriginal law student advantage of law students. took place the day that i was appointed minister of justice and attorney general of candidate. i'm saying this because another feature of the laundry that it didn't go to is the manner in which the delegitimization is laundered under the rubric of indigenous people were israel's foreign colonial interloper and the like, palestinians indigenous people and so on. let me share with you an exchange. the average -- the average lost to do that with me and said we are not just law students.

we are aboriginal law students. we come with a past, with the history, with heritage, own cultures, religion, language, with her own indigenous legal system. and we have been dispossessed of all that. we have been deprived of our history or heritage and our culture, our spirituality, our language, our own indigenous legal system. it's not to go to court because what to nurture agreements. we go to court to give expression to who we are. we go to court to anchor ourselves and our aboriginal identity. we go to court to give expression to our aboriginal legal system, but we are always getting expression and feeling this enormous pain, because we feel that the canadian government and the canadian people don't understand who we are, where we have come from and what we aspire to be. and i said to the glasgow edition with them a parable that comes out of a tradition, the

traditional students come to the rabbi and they say, rabbi, we love you. the rabbi says, do you know it hurts me what the students a wide ask if we know what virtue if we tell you we love you? the rabbi says, because if you don't know what hurts me, you can't tell me you love me. as i shared with them, that is a profound principle of human relationships. as i said, that would be the way in which we as a government and the parliament will seek to relate to the aboriginal, to the indigenous people in terms of their past, their history, their identity, the aspirations. and then aspirations. and did i say give him something i say, you know, at the risk of being somewhat presumptuous, not pretentious, i said i, too, come from an aboriginal people. of people that still in habits the same land come embraces the same aboriginal religion,

harkens to the same aboriginal profits, studies the same aboriginal iran, speaks the same aboriginal language, hebrew, and there's the same aboriginal name israel as we did 3500 years ago. whereupon they came up to me and they said, you know, we thought this was going to be another blah, blah, blah, lecture by another white man. welcome one aboriginal people to another. i want to tell you this is not a story that i am sharing old in the confines here and international scholars. i repeated it again and again when i was minister of justice and attorney general of canada. not only because i felt it was making the case that had to be made about why aboriginal justice had to be a priority on our justice agenda, but the subtext of it is i was also speaking out on the authenticity of my own identity. i think we have to speak out of

the authenticity of our identities, whatever, jewish or otherwise. in that sense we cannot compromise what we say or what we do on the altars of political correctness. because at the end of the day if you indulge political correctness too much, you end up becoming a bystander. and my whole lead to do it for us not to be by standards, but to be intervenors into a struggle for justice. and as my mother would say, the best way to do it is to struggle against injustice. every member that old jewish proverb which would apply to us all, when i say that jews our indigenous people, i am not saying that the arabs, they are also and aboriginal people. that's part of the difficulty of the struggle, and while will have different approach to it in terms of the principle of least

injustice. that for another time. but the thing to remember always that come and there's the epigram i always remember, that at the end of the day, truth and justice will prevail. we are involved in a just struggle. we are not involved only on behalf of jews or israelis, or only against anti-semitism or hatred. we are on behalf of our common humanity, and that is the most profound struggle for justice and against injustice. thank you. [applause] >> now on c-span2 we take you live to the rayburn house office

building where a meeting of the congressional internet caucus advisory committee. today they would be discussing how ice is uses the internet that ice is to recruit supporters but also what law enforcement and industry are doing to combat the problem. the event should be getting underway in just a few moments. live coverage here on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..