trying to figure out how embryos are formed. and then it gets rediscovered and soon after 1909 we find the world gene because botonist said we have to have a word for this. something carries this information, we know it is important and we need a word from it. one of mendel's great defenders, there is a picture of him in the book, coined the word genetics from genius. all of these words coming together in that word and coins the word genetics and his colleague says that is the discipline.

we have to name that thing and they named it the gene. >> host: so there is progress and setback and more progress and you do an amazing, wonderful job of bringing to life these people who probably led extraordinary lives. you fast forward to the 1950s to watson and crick but before you get to that point, you know, things really go badly off track. why and how did that happen? >> guest: it is important to remember off track because while the gene is being explored scientifically the study of heredity has a long history and the desire to manipulate

heredity -- you can do a parallel study. in england, darwin's cousin invented the term eugenics. he didn't know much about genes. i talk about it in the book but we will set it aside. fascinating character. great mathematician but lived in darwin's shadow all of his life. he is between darwin and mendel. can you imagine these two giants and he was supposed to be a giant himself being a child prodigy and he had many important contributions to mathematics and statistics. but the term eugenics is coined

and we can use heredity and manipulate that and make man. good genes, eugenics, in order to try and meet better human beings. he thought issue selectly breed the best human beings you will gate superior human being. this was considered an incredibly progressive idea like evening walks or getting constitutional -- this was considered a healthy idea for human kind and many progressives said this is a great idea and we should do more of this. that took off in england and stays there and metastasizes and reaches the shore of this country and mingles with the yankee practicality and morphs

into not just breed the best but sterilize those who carry bad genes which ultimately sort of escalates slowly and leads to a case that many people know kerry bucks case. she was a woman accused of having nugetic embalsyl and was sterilized. the case climbed to the court and said three generations of embassy is enough. carry buck was moved to a state can colony and forced against her will and taken to an operatoring table and sterilize >> -- operating. >> host: and there was no

evidence she had anything wrong with her. >> if anything, she was at bit of a rebel. >> you were saying earlier today you felt that was so important and she was one of the two people you dedicate the book to. it is important to remind everyone this is happening. it is not just nazi, germany. >> yes, it metastasizes again and moves from selective breeding, selective sterilization and selective extermination. that is the final incarnation eugeneics takes which we remember it by. not the eugenics but beginning with people who had mental illness and moving on to things like depression and ultimately moving on to the racial and ethnic and human cleansing that the nazi brought to the full mucob form.

i put that in the middle of the book. i wanted to start the book with that idea but then i realized -- i wanted to start with the german episode but realized it is -- seeing it happen in front of your own eyes. the roads were paved by progressive feat. the desire to emancipate and perfectability and the desire to make us better and in less than 30 years, in the extermination of someone who has a modest form of mental illness. >> host: i think we all want to believe that could never happen again but as you said a moment ago because of the incredibly advances made in such a short time that people really still don't understand.

what do you think the possibility that it is that decisions could get made now, or in the near future, not a repetition of the worst of what you described but we could head in a direction that could be hard at a turn around. >> host: one example in the united states and one internationally. i think having read this book it is very unlikely we will have a state mandated form of eugenics in the united states. i don't think that is likely. i think what is more much difficult to contend with is we are entering an area of personal eugenics. this technology is available today. very soon you should we able to sequence, and people have done this in other countries, every single gene of your unborn question and the question you need to ask yourself is what do

we do with this information. you will not know what to do with the information unless you know what genes are and how they interact with what they produce. that is one arena that is important. let's not forget numerically the largest eugenics project is going on in india and china. there is a skew of gender ratio. that is a dysgenic project, fostered by ultra sound diagnose and ending with gender diagnose through chromosome analysis. welcome to a eugenics we are part of. it has destabilized the way we think about it.

it is not someone other world problem. this is our world problem. the faster we accept it and the more we understand it the more armed we are in able to mitigate against its affects internationally. >> host: it is clearly a case of the science being ahead of the government policymakers. how much of that is the practical effect in the united states right now? you talk about the work being done to edit genes and what you said about creating a person synthetically. >> creating a genome. >> host: how much do scientist talk about that? you are a scientist yourself. how much do they worry about it? sit around and think about it

>> guest: the policymakers don't have the language to understand the implications. there is an important meeting in the book that happens at a famous concert when my mentor, paul burke, and other scientist discovered that technology to cut and paste genes together in the 1970 said. it is pretty simple. you take dna and cut them together and sit them with another enzyme, another factor, that is used when your dna strands break because of x-rays,

say, something needs to stitch them together. if you combine them you can take a gene from a frog and stitch it together with a gene from a virus. you can take a gene from a blue whale and put it into a monkey cell and they will recognize it and make it from a monkey gene. and that is because we are all evolved from the same original organisms and share the same genetic code. when this technology was first created, scientist got together.

then they had a meeting and they said it will be one year before the technology is possible. it is possible. there was a conference with the suggested auditorium on editing human genes in particular kinds of cells. not every cell. embrionic stem cells but that is unlikely to happen but embryos for sure. there was an ex experiment in

china where they made a human embr embryo. in principle, they could make changes in the human embryos. with the technology, you can do a lot of tweaking but if you tweak the technology you could say, and i talk about how you might treat that in the real world, the chinese experiment is not a great way to do the experiment. but if you tweak it you could say i am going to try to erase the cystic fibrosis mutation from my heritage.

i will try to change the variation that causes alzheimer's disease from my heritage. in thebizarrest scenario you could say i want to add information back to the human genome which you could do. you could have information to the human genome. >> host: you want to make people taller or something? >> guest: i talk about this. height is genetic but at least 5-7 genes govern that. could you change 5-7 genes? probably. you could add information back to the human genome. >> host: that is a surprising think. >> guest: we should take that very, very seriously. >> host: we will be taking questions from all of you in just a couple minutes but before we do i want to -- just how do we make sure -- be thinking

about your questions -- but how to we make sure this kind of work goes in the right direction and not some place we don't want to think about? >> guest: there has to be national agreement. therethex thick you know there will be an -- the next thing you know is there will be an arms race. long before the atomic bomb was made there was a famous letter saying there is no such thing as the atomic bomb but walk through this process and you wind up with unleashing of power in a c c concentrated manner. nothing has been made but you can walk the mental steps to it.

so i think we need to walk those mental steps and figure out what the realm of possibility is and walk those steps internationally so we can figure out the realm of control. i suggest a framework we can stick to before we enter an era we don't want to enter. >> host: we will take questions and i guess there are a couple microphones. before they come to the mic, when i think about what you do, and i think about the book you wrote on cancer and the work you did with public television with weta and sharon rockefeller who is the president of weta who worked with you on the film and ken burns around the emperor of all maladies. and i think how do you even have time to sleep?

you are a science, oncologist, write books, you are a husband and a father, and you have a life. how do you do it all? >> this book came out of such urgency it had to be written. i prioritized this book over everything else. it took five and a half years. so it seems it came up one morning but it took five and a half years. i spent a lot of time on it. a lot of it was going back to these stories. i thought if i could knit together the stories, one after another, i would achieve the book. >> it is kind of extraordinary he can get it all done. let's start over here and i cannot see well but step up to the mike and ask the question. >> hi, i am andy and i am studying in the fall anthrop

anthropology and genetics. i know drawing upon the words you have written about in genetics i think we are starting to find a lot more information and evidence about the transgenerational transmissions and inheritances of genetic information. i was wondering in the spirit of this conversation about understanding the ethical and social considerations of new scientific findings what they would be for intergenerational and transgenerational. >> let me rephrase the question. very important. we know genes transfer information across generations. but there have been interesting findings on whether things that happen to you in the environment can also be transmitted across generations. the evidence for that, i think, is very, very minimal right now. it is totally unexplored frontier.

the famous experiment was the experiment in which he dismembered, gruesome, but dismembered the tail of one generation of mice and waited for the next generation to be born and he kept doing this for multiple generations and not even one centimeter of tail was lost. so we know as significant of trauma as having part of your body cut off in the case of the poor mouse does not register across multiple generations. yet, there are some inklings for instance the starvation response creates changes transmitted across multiple generations. it is an entirely new frontier and challenges the classical model of how genes transfer information. we are still trying to figure

out what is really being transferred. what is amazing about it and i will finish with this idea. what is amazing about it is that genes actually protect us. they were almost designed to wash away the sins of ourselves and our fathers. we reproduce and all of the scars and things we have in our body are washed away and formeded -- formed anew. there is evidence from detailed studies on starvation and others that in simple organisms that seems to have effect across generations. >> host: we will have a find a more cheerful aspect of genetics. >> my name is scott. for years we have this dichotomy

between genetics and environments. i thought everything was genetics and everything else is influenced by the environment. and the question is not something it is environmental or genetic but whether malable it. having poor eyesight is genetic but we can have laser or wear glasses. so it is a false question. >> guest: i think it is a question that has led us in the wrong direction. let me tell you what i think about it and i write about this in the book extensive leadership. when someone asks the question is it nature or nurture. the first question we should be asking back is what are we talking about? what aspect of human being or biology are we talking about. i am give you concrete examples.

the anatomy of gender is strikingly genetic. there is one gene that governs for the most part gender anateoanat anatomy. if you have that gene you will have the anatomy that goes along with it and vice versa. some women inherent the xy. so they are chromosome male but that one gene is mutated and these women are self-described as women. they have most of their gender anatomy in type and they are diagnosed with a syndrome because they experience infertility. so gender anatomy strikingly governed by genes.

gender identity, on the other hand is a complex mixture. we know that. so the idea, and i talk about these distinctions in the book, the idea we made this difference between gene and environment is a fool. it it depends on the level of higherarchy and the question we are looking at. it is amazing in 2016 the human mind doesn't understand this idea that something could be strikingly dominated by genes and some can be strikingly dominated by environment and some things in the middle. it depends on what you are asking about. thank you for asking that. >> would you please elaborate on the recent developments in treating cancer with gene modification particularly breast cancer. >> guest: so the -- right now, all of these technologies and

this goes back to the point we are trying to make. all of these technologies can have powerful effects and a lot of traumas. the brain cancer one comes to mind and there are a couple recent and important striking trials of gene therapy in brain cancer using genetic therapy to traet brain cancer. -- treat. the idea of genes being used in breast cancer has a rich history starting with diagnose. brac-1 and brac-2 were identified years ago and changed the lives of women who happen to have that mutation. an anti-body is how we make that. the only way to make the anti-body is to make a human gene from an anti-body and put it in a cell using the same technique i talked about and that is the only way you can

make the enzyme. the genes in cancer run the gamut from diagnose, the genetic therapy, to the creation of new drugs. we would not be here in cancer today were it not for genetics and genetic engineering in particular. >> thank you. how much promise do you feel are in that area? >> depends on the arena. we are using anti-bodies more and more. genetics was used to figure what an anti-body was. we would not know how the immune system works if it were not for genetics. genes underlie these advances. the most obvious example. remember the breast cancer

distinctions? they are genes. estrogen receptor genes. we would not know to treat breast cancer with the concern drugs if we didn't know this. >> host: doctors and physicians had to learn this quickly. >> what do you make or how close are we to getting a cure to cancer and do you thing the efforts like the president's shot and others by silicone valley to get to the cure, how close do you thing we might be? >> cure is a complicated word in cancer. depends on the cancer we are talking about. it has a rich history detailed in another book. [laughter] >> guest: if you ask me about what i think all of these moon shot efforts, i think they are helpful in some ways and hurt

full in others. they refocus our attention at a time when our attention spans degenerated and we are talking about what, i think, are irrelevant issues when there are focused issues we should talk about. how to help ourselves, how to help the economy and so forth. rather than focusing on things that are not constructive they allow us to rebuild faith in systems whether they be federally funded or fill philanthropic. the flip side is that creates a cycle of hope and hype and people say the technologies are not ready and they have not met their goals. i think the moon shot will be practically successful because it will allow us to clear out some cobwebs that are in the way

of medical advances in cancer. i think there will be a backlash. ten years from now we will be sitting here saying how dare we say this. i think cancers will advance significantly the next decade. i am confidant of that. >> we have time for two more questions. >> hi, we have been talking mostly about, like human genetics. but when it comes to policy and science being ahead of policy, my first thought goes to gmo and my understanding is there is a huge gap between what is the scientific consensus and the public perception. i was curious. >> to be honest, i did not cover gmo's in the book because i think it deserves a full second book. i am not going to write it.

the issue of genetically modified organisms -- what i do is talk about the technologies to create transogenic organisms in the books but i don't go into the pros and cons and pluses and minuses of genetically modified organisms. in brief, one thing i would say is our sophistication in being able to create the organisms is increasing daily and that raises the spectrum of unintended consequences in the greater biosphere. i am less concerned about the unintended consequences on human health locally. i am concerned more about the biosphere at large which is a larger conversation we could have another time but an important topic. >> we will not count that as a question. we will count that as a lead into another conversation.

so we will take two more questions. >> my question is element identical to his. i want to ask your opinion -- >> thank you. >> i want to know your opinion. all right. >> okay. hi, i am allison and i am a graduate student finishing up at the national institute of health and recently i have gotten interested in science policy. one of the questions you asked is how much do the scientist who do the science talk to the policymakers and you had responded something like well the scientist talk science and the policymakers talk government and they don't communicate well. but you do a great job and lots of other science writers do a great job of translating that really difficult science talk into understandable media. so i was just wondering if you ever get the opportunity to talk

to policymakers and participate in that? >> personally i do a lot. i am in washington a lot and i have been to congress several times particularly on parts of cancer. so i do. i think the problem is not that there isn't meeting opportunities or spaces. but the problem is the vocabulary is different and once the vocab is common it is easier to have the conversation. part of the effort is to arm ourselves and when you open the newspaper and someone says, you know, someone is trying to synthesize the human genome.

thank you for reminding us that is the kind of effort that we need to have the vocab. >> okay. last question. >> my name is marcel. i am originally from the czech republic so i understand what it is like. >> let's have a drink. >> very simple question. you opinion, do you think that in the future we will be able to find smaller particles of gene? and for example, identify genes that define happiness? and since we are in the synagogue, genes of spirituality? >> these are interested and complicated questions. 10-15 years ago someone would say those are crazy questions. but 10-15 years later they are not so crazy. are there genes for temperament, personality, etc?

almost always these things are very high order principles. they lie in intersections between genes and environment. but do i feel that some of these evanescent qualities have some components of genes? how do we know the answer is yes? very, very detailed studies on identical twins separated at birth, a famous study i talk about a lot and interviewed one of the authors of that study for this book, he said twins separated at birth, brought up in different circumstances, share surprising kinds of behavior. they share personality traits that you would not have imagine happen by random chances, they share preferences and anxiety. there must be thinks in the