we become is a combination of a little bit of what we put in our heads and a model for it's it py much works, the model we put in our heads and you create as a journalist is being economically incentivized by this system that rewards cheap. .. >>.

>> it is my pleasure with an all-star cast with amazing brainpower and authors in the world so on behalf of the atlantic council and our host it is my honor and privilege to welcome you to this global event celebrating the highly revised paperback which means if you got the hardback by this one too because it has been changed and with jamie metzl incredible highly acclaimed best-selling book and genetic engineering and

the future of humanity. and some bad wine perhaps. but now we can eat your favorite food. and your beverage of choice. this is a lot better and by the way this is also carried by c-span. so welcome everybody from c-span as well. and as cosponsors of this great event, this is a time where things could be shaped. we at the atlantic council are focused and in the four weeks of total work that is not

social justice its geographic. we have galvanize the community to create more social interaction and closeness even at this geographic distance because we are galvanize by her time the biggest thinker of all joining a global conversation. we are concerned with corporate 19 for sure looking at the prism of our mission which is working with friends and allies to shape the future and democracy of the us role. looking at the future and importantly at climate change and migration and finally how do we harness technology?

that is hugely important for the atlantic council. in addition to being a senior fellow, jamie metzl has a lot of titles and there has been a few other things as well. a leading technology in healthcare futurist of science fiction and faculty member's singularity exponential medicine and part of the genome project. last year appointed to the who expert advisory committee previously served in the us national security council, the state department and senate foreign relations committee and the united nations in cambodia. sometimes i think he's done so

many things. like bull riding and other things is a regular commentator on cnn and major media and hacking darwin is the fifth book and since he came bart back in part last year the reviews have been stellar and pr says "writing with great clarity and a sense of urgency that we should all take to heart. jamie metzl has clarifying granular and moral complexities and for seeing the big picture. cnn says if you can only read one book on the future of our species, then read all of the books. if you don't want to read it at least buy it. we have a deal right now that

you will not get out another time. it's a little bit like telemarketing. sourcebooks is making hacking darwin e-book available today only $4.95, one third of the regular price. before asking jamie metzl to speak i want to tell you about the flow of the event and introduce you. after he speaks for about ten minutes our guest will do the same. george is one of the world's greatest scientist. it is a safe backdrop and the harvard medical school and at

the massachusetts institute of technology. the us department of energy technology center and the national institutes of health for excellence in genomic science. with a synthetic biology where he oversees the directed evolution. and with those applications and with that bio production of chemicals. in 1984 that resulted in the first genome sequence. to help initiate the human genome project in the personal genome project in 2005. those reflections on what she has heard to ask the first question for jamie and george to answer. the former president professor at harvard business school and

senior associate the harvard business school online. it will be released in august. after that daniel kraft will moderate the question and answer session based on questions raised by you. anyone can pose a question and the ones that are uploaded the most will rise to the top of the list. we encourage you to post questions throughout the session. and the stanford and harvard trained physicians and entrepreneur and innovator the chair of medicine for the founder and chair of program that explores rapidly developing technologies and the potential of biomedicine and healthcare. with that, what an incredible

lineup i am passing to jamie metzl to kick us off. >> it is just an incredible honor for me to be here. i don't know if it is lebron with the dream team but if i could just imagine from everyone on earth if i would want to have joining me at the event like this would just be the people feel and to counsel. i don't know any authors is that i love my publisher but to be one all coming together as the crazy moment in the

sense of sadness because there are very real meaningful people that are lost at the center there is a lot of pain going around. but we are also feeling that this is a new world on so many levels that is being created and trends that were already happening are accelerating in profound and incredible ways and new communities so these days for everybody it feels like they hard to differentiate because so many things are happening with these types of collaboration and i always tell people it's not like a snow day or a storm and waited out.

this is a fundamental change of our communities and societies and as fred said of national security and geopolitics a lot of people reference this year 2001 of the 9/11 attacks but for me it feels more like 1941 where there was a huge battle ahead and it wasn't clear if that battle even would be one. even in the early dark days of the war there were people and leaders like churchill who came to gather to say we have to know what we are fighting for then we can organize around building that world. we may not have the fdr or churchill right now in our political world but what is exciting about this moment is

it feels like we are dividing up the task and all coming together it is a little piece and we are doing things our governments may have done. because the networks are moving at the speed of globalization. everybody is forming and reforming communities to solve these kinds of problems.

so the genome assessed and those who are coming together around the world to solve this problem so we see the genetics revolution in all the tools for the crisis so let me say a few words about each of that but with that revolution among the billions of species that ever lived one species suddenly has this ability to read and write and hack the code of life and it's incredible when we think about it. and it's almost like a godlike power we can imagine god telling with that power comes

a great responsibility most cherished ethics and values and most powerful technology the whole conversation what that is about it is racing forward the focus from the transition to the precision and then predictive healthcare. as humans we are a massive data set so there will come a time when the sophistication of our tools matches and succeeds the complexity of our biology. we are developing incredible capabilities that don't let us treat people individually based on biology but either from their moment just after birth then that will change

the way we think about healthcare. but not just healthcare thinking about genetics in the context that is the primary interaction. we don't have a disease or health care genome so they are the blueprint but to have that potential and then experiencing genetics outside the realm of healthcare that's already hoping the direct to consumer eugenics but it will get much bigger and cover more challenging issues like identity and parenting in the most profound application will be how these technologies change not just the way we shift toward embryo screening

and the book is coming out in august talking about this but also it will change ultimately over time the nature of the babies that we make. this is a very profound conversation and it feels like it's a conversation without's one - - was science and without that we would have the conversation but ultimately this is a conversation about ethics. because no technology comes in with their own built-in value system it is up to us to infuse our values into the most significant application of those technologies. this is a hardcover version that came out last april for the babies who were born but since then you know that there

are at least three of these babies. there could be more. we just don't know and then after that experience the world health organization created the international advisory community and i was selected to be an 18 member commission working extremely hard. and with these ways to maximize benefits and other members of the commission are here in the meeting. and then to speak at the vatican and in my view, this is about the future of our species. we need a table that's big enough for everybody. we are all human and we are all in this together.

and that genetics revolution is intersecting the growing virus crisis. if you have these pandemics in the past we never been able to sequence the viral genome or guess the digital readout to understand the virus. we never have computer models to allow us to test different responses. we've never been able to develop testing despite the monumental screwup in this country. now we watch as viral genome you today as it spreads around the world. and for tracking it.

and those who are also on this call will bring together the bio from around the world to say are there genetic patterns we can use to understand what kind of people may be prone to increased resistance to viral infection or maybe at greatest risk to make smart decisions around that kind of knowledge. or with a vaccine. saying maybe we can do it in a year. some say two years. was talking to a very senior scientist in los angeles the other day. and he said he didn't know if we ever could achieve it. george is the scientist of the possible. and then all things surveillance system. all of these tools are

essential and we wouldn't have them but for the incredible science that we have. that comes with significant and ethical challenges and so the owners is on us to optimize the benefits to minimize the harm. living in an abstract world for you could just make the smartest decisions possible we live in a world that was defined by politics that political context in which we live. and certainly we have seen that in the political failures of china especially the first three weeks of this outbreak to get on top of the crisis. the failure of the united states to test and have adequate information that could be provided to the american people. i wouldn't say the failure of the who but the failure of all

of us over decades to build the who to resource and empower and have mandates to do the job for every human on earth. and in the science exist of a global power structure between the united states and china. i think everybody around the world that we haven't gotten since sputnik. everybody needs to understand the science. so we can make smart decisions and protect the people that we

love. that's the origin of hacking darwin i was working on the national security council 23 years ago. and with all that we have to focus on terrorism and that was president george w. bush's desk but to say to be effective we have to try to see what is coming that i have to get through the crisis. 's is not just this virus but all of those that are existential harms to address.

to be organized around states and international organizations that are control that are not empowered to do what needs to be done and so the book tries to pull all those pieces together in a package for everybody. i'm a science fiction writer. i wanted to feel like a story because it's the greatest story of all time the past and present and future of the species but the full story of the first three babies there is more and to get into the coronavirus happened but to understand my feeling is there is a package of things people need to understand.

's i hope they read the book and talk about it. i have spoken about this as a senior scientist and the seventh and eighth graders at the hero academy and everybody got it. everybody gets these issues are human issues. we have to be asking elected officials and government officials what are they doing? and once you deliver it and everybody else owns a. and i hope whatever the digital equivalent is to rip out pages whatever it is and as they said it practically giving it away. it is $4.35 it's like $3.50.

nobody in the history of the world other than john grisham ever made money off of writing books. we share ideas and to bring people together. we all have the tendency to hunker down in moments like thi this. but the world is changing in such a huge and fundamental way that while we do that, we have to challenge ourselves , to take a step back to see the big picture because that will allow was to develop , together identify the where we are heading. we can evaluate those decisions along the way based on our goal.

if there is anybody that sees the big picture of the science and what it has to be is my friend george church. it's an honor to have all of these that are speakers but george is special. i think most people believe one of the greatest living scientist on this planet. but certainly is among the most creative and forward thinking scientist because not everybody is trying to resuscitate the woolly mammoth. and people have said he is today's charles darwin plan just in case you had any doubts he looks like him it could be a coincidence but judge for yourself. so as we discussed, we would

love for you to share your thoughts on how these incredible tools of the genetics revolution in your view could be address the current crisis and beyond. >> thanks. what we need to embrace about the threat but we also have to think about the silver lining. and for example lower activity of flu and all of those other things and in addition so this boost the commitment to have better medicine in the future. we see a spike of collaboration we just did not

see through sars and ebola but we finally got it right to collaborate and also with being under fire and those diagnostics that could've saved us $2 trillion as we are spending anywhere tens of millions of dollars per year so just think what we could do going forward to do that proactively. but just on the topic of hacking darwin so it doesn't have to be in the rna we are engineering life with those ancestors. we are part of nature but it is engineered.

and those that we are on right now. and the caffeine and cosmetics and they all can be considered enhanced? and that allows us to have the help that we have right now? and that it takes six decades to program and what we are seeing right now it with covid-19 is something that goes much faster. so applying synthetic biology broadly is the engineering of

our life. going on the order of eight things. with the therapy and vaccine. even though we know those may take a team is to deliver it's very fast to most new drugs that take a decade for those of us that are locked down. so in the therapy category are like those antibodies with sars 2003 and those receptors.

and those molecules that can be adapted. many have been approved for the reuse that we already have 40 different vaccines in the pipeline and thanks to all medical volunteers and workers who are really on the frontlines of this to be injected either intentionally or through their patients. so i want to take a moment to thank them. but the vaccines are not tested even though they have been tested on other viruses.

they are phenomenon antibodies that enhance and make it possible for the infects cells and then go to the immune system. we need to be very cognizant of the antibodies in the vaccines. and in thinking about what could happen next with the next wave. it only takes one mutation or one immune problem to put us at risk.

and with humans. that may take 18 months to deliver but to delineate the problem or just to flatten the curve in a matter of weeks over 18 months, that is the way we interact with ourselves and the environment. every time we see another person outside getting close to the 6-foot limit we should have a mask on if we see politicians in the same room they should all be wearing a mask. whatever we go to a grocery store we should be documenting just how well we are showing up. that is a challenge that we are making progress on this.

we are developing rapid home test coming down to a dollar or less. some of them can happen in five minutes and some happen in more samples and even taking variations or mutations. and with that serological reaction. you ideally want to be have a very sensitive to detect a small number of viruses and then with that false positive you can look like you have antibodies to the coronavirus

the third is the common cold. so there were these positive tests. but all of the vaccines and therapies and agnostics that we can share from beyond 2005 and anybody can participate. and this is the moment for that kind of project. we need to have diagnostics

that are not just for the moment and to shuffle around it's not clear to have that high enough exclusivity. so in any case we need to be looking in advance of the respiratory distress and so in addition that is my list of what we can do and what we are doing it is wonderful a seat on - - to see it and even to be further off is we have a way to make any organism resistant.

it is not going to solve our problem in the next couple of weeks. but this is an interesting thing that we can do. so i look forward to the conversation coming up. >> thank you both so much. let me try to pull this together a little bit. i agree with a lot of what you say jamie. with the people are dealing with is crucial and science matters. and without reproductive technology is driving change we are fundamentally changing the nature.

however i am less sanguine but in particular less that will come out of this moment that people are taking over from government lacking in fdr at the moment people are providing hope and support and encouragement. that's great. but there's other things that government usually provides, like research funding and economic stability funds and infrastructure were concerns foreign equity. and all of these technologies need some set of guidelines around them sometimes financial support who is getting access and who's not. who was dying disproportionately. so where does that come from?

can we create that ourselves? i happen 1941 or do we need to rely on the political system for the future? >> that's a great question. and i 100 percent believe in government. we need a functioning government and we are dying in large numbers because of a total systemic failure and it's really a tragedy the countries that are doing well like taiwan and singapore all top public health officials actually trained here because the united states used to be the global standard for public health. more than four decades of almost the autoimmune response when modeled reagan said

government is the problem. so there's ever a time we needed a functioning government here in the united states is now. so i was not at all suggesting we don't need government. i think we are having a crisis of governance on multiple levels and it is failing us and those that are holding stuff together and it's like the cdc and fda. it would be better if we have fdr but we don't so we need to step up the most people just go on with their lives. they don't think it's up to them to prepare for a hypothetical deadly outbreak somebody ought to be doing it so we see the equivalent of a fire department and you don't

adequately fund it and you let the culture shut down and insult them and berate them but then you have the big problem we need governance that we need to come together to make that happen with the same is true on the global level is not coincidental between the global nature of what we face and that's why we haven't been able to solve the issues not just dead the pathogens that climate change and destruction of oceans and all sorts of things because we live in the world the first two world wars show the balance of power is inherently unstable those like dean atchison and others talk about a different kind of world where we pull our nationalism

and our sovereignty with our identities that we saw the countries were not willing to give these international organizations the ability to do the job that needed to be done they have all kinds of shortcomings. so what i am working on and now we have a big community working on this globalization of interdependence we are putting up walls and now those that states that are barricading each other and when it be better we said this affects everybody how do we work together to solve the problem? it is a transitional moment

because if we don't come to the realization government matters and governance matters on every level in individual alone can't do it. and just what i have seen in the last few weeks and in these communities. >> i guess it's over to me. so this exponential time i've never heard the word exponential use so many times in the terms of this case but also technology just like the book hacking darwin like hacking biology so how might we be hacking our future prevention diagnostics in

response and responding to those that might emerge? with the new coronavirus and those that took it to make that dna vector that turns into a vaccine. if that could be possible that could be a response. >> it is remarkable and you have to keep in mind the real bottleneck is no longer it is the testing of safety and advocacy in the way that it lined up and now we could read and write and that goes somewhere between 12 months and years.

so just to go back briefly to the government issue is not just government the reason the cost come down largely due to innovation which would've come about whether it is capitalistic or government-funded or not. some of this was funded by industry. we need both. we need good governance of our companies. and i think that's particularly clear. >> i were just add your the person to answer this question but in addition to all the progress we will make in all

the scientific tools that we need and exponential is everywhere, but if we think about how long it took to go from the bronze age to the iron age and they came out in 2012 and then 2018 the world's first genome babies are born so we are in a world where science is moving at warp speed. so not just about the science but the structure around the science i actually had a piece last week on this on my website. but why don't we have a super empowered agency the agency of existential threats to get

some of the smartest people in the world the top six or seven really fundamental threats and certainly dead the pathogens would be one of them and then we have this which almost certainly is more naturally occurring. but just a few years ago alberta created a synthetic version of smallpox and that cost 100,000 now is just a few thousand dollars. if science is democratizing there are 99.99 percent are the good guys like george. but there are bad actors who could have access to these technologies and if they really wanted to be disruptive now was a good example and a good strategy for doing it. so with this agency that is empowered and resourced, so

with the six or seven most existential threats to the world and to humans and to develop a smart and thoughtful dynamic action plan for what we need to do to bring the world together. and had we done that for outbreaks you could at least imagine how we would have a responses system to allow everything to break down what is happening. so just imagine if there was a nuclear detonation in two different cities let's say it was new york. i don't want to jinx anybody but how can we live with this nuclear weapon in the hands of bad guys? or that ocean collapse that

--dash what is a national geographic explorer to save our oceans. imagine if we have an ecosystem inside the ocean with a huge percentage who gets their nutrition from the sea and we have to say how do we solve this problem and how do we think about the whole group of problems we may face with a long-term systemic approach. >> it is about the newest assertions the role that has been fundamentally changed that has been abstract so what are the ways they change in the aftermath of this pandemic? so even with the academics and collaborate how does that change? >> it has already changed.

you can see companies that keep proprietary are listening. i love science and how to make competing products whether academic and home and corporate. and the internet is becoming a much nicer place than it was. little more polemic an ideological. is still there. there's a lot of 1999 stuff going on. but in the science part we will have a real boost to the kind of surveillance we don't even need the multinational that jamie metzl is talking about or those existential threats we just need creative, sustainable business models to get everybody

excited about have something on their phone in addition to six cameras on their phones as well. if that is affordable and i agree with equity we need to have that equitable distribution and when it great to have a by a weather map to see on the national and international scale to keep things moving. that is where they should be an impacting our lives. hopefully a better cooperative pipeline between science and citizens.

just like we are interested in gardening and other science that could affect our life and genomes. >> and those will pick up if you get the flu or the coronavirus. and you can build on the weather map the way it is or otherwise. i am curious about the universities how much it shape on academia? >> every university around the world goes much faster than we thought we were there is a general sense over the past ten years in education would move more online but in one

week like my institution move 1142 classes online in one week. and we are learning what works and what doesn't i think we are learning there's many things you can do online that are better and also some things need the physical space. so we will figure it out i love what you say about being data donors. everybody should be taking notes because this little path we really need to be documenting what works and what doesn't and how to make it better and when we emerge how do we take that online and get it out there? so that is the ability to get access. and overnight we have 50000 registrants.

>> that is extraordinary with the potential of education. >> cannot answer that quickly? it so important. i want to give one small example and then go big because you have to prove it every day is not like my dad is a doctor. so we completely agree with the point so three weeks ago at cnn.com and editorial talking about the seven rules to virtualize our life and to re-create the essence of the village that are grandparents or great-grandparents left the conductivity to compensate for social distancing. then two days later someone i

never met reached out and she was starting a company doing something else. but what we need to do is build a matching platform and those with skills that are socially adequate with kids sheltering at home in need of tutors and then eight days later we had a prototype and it has gone live and is going out in the world. but the big picture this is a profound moment i don't think that and the way i see this it started out as a governance crisis. if the chinese system worked as it should have we would not be here. if the who was empowered to do the job is set out to do in 1948, we wouldn't be here. the united states government

said the federal government and trump administration had done his job we would not be here. so that is a crisis now it becomes an economic crisis and will grow because we cannot normally finalize until there is a vaccine and now that is a series of government crisis around the world there was a soft to in hungary i think it is extremely likely the us elections in november will be attacked if you are a bad guy let's call him putin and you got away with it last time and you think it's not like you want them to play this role in the world but this is the moment that then i think that

governance crisis will morph into a geopolitical crisis and then the united kingdom had the same number of soldiers and at the end of 1956 at the end than it did in the beginning but the middle of the year a change was already happening and it became clear so the game is open of national governance even with the whole globe role power structure i think this year 2020 is the end of the postwar world as historians look back 1945 through 2020. that is something new hopefully something new has started to be created we don't know what that is that is why coming together to imagine

what work. >> we are going a few minutes over but we'll take a few more questions and for the future of telemedicine evolving in the future of socialized medicine and you have this role so can you imagine any future that they can look at the genetic makeup? and the immune response what about the babies of the future? where might that go? >> i very much agree with deborah we don't want to create that have and have-nots. i think innovation more than anybody else ever going to make digital versions of ourselve ourselves, we can do

it in such a way that is dirt cheap in a certain sense if anybody has any kind of access to smart phone phones, even if they have to borrow it to - - from somebody next to them can access information but the other technologies should be intrinsically biological so for example smallpox to be distributed that's one of the few technologies everyone on earth has access to. nobody even has to pay one penny to get a smallpox drug or vaccine because it is extinct. we could use that as a lesson for where we need to be going

that would be easier than others. i hope this where we are going to get the distribution and also i should champion the personalized to play a role in both. . . . .

what do you keep putting what has been taken. >> the best that we can do at this moment is not lose the

advantage of a good crisis. so we have a very good crisis here. it's truly global. i remain less optimistic but willing to be convinced and i think that if we can get headway on any of these collaborative techniques that you are working on and describing and find out how to use the personal information to the greater good than it would have been a crisis or surviving. we have a lot of folks getting on the bandwagon so we make sure we get the good of the crisis and not the evil that is working as well. >> this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing we hope, but what if it is accelerating? it seems the number of pandemics

is increasing. what is the next coronavirus? i hope our memory is so much better. this has finally gotten in our senses. it's not just we can make up facts. let's be entertained by facts. let's dribble a couple of dollars and sometimes they are entertaining. this is really the crisis not of tanks and chemical weapons and hydrogen bombs. it is the crisis of nature invading our space and we are ill prepared for it when we could be with just more creativity we could be prepared for the next one which may not be a lifetime away. it may be two years away before we are even done with this one. that is what happened, the

second wave was more serious than the first because of this election for it spread quickly through. they were sent back if they had a serious disease as far as spreading. anyway, i hope that we are paying attention as it was said earlier, taking notes. >> now we have the ability to have the response and argue that the silver lining is some of the innovation from public health to how we educate them even if many folks unfortunately have more mortality, economic impact in things out of this that may benefit in better ways. i love the quote from power 13 when folks thought it might be a disaster for nasa and the johnson space center so this

might be nasa finest hour. so, take us home as we move into this great new world. >> i want to end on even more hope with respect to deb and thank george and deb and daniel. it's an honor for you to be with me in this event so thank you, thank you. and to our cohosts. here's why i feel hope. 100 years ago, there were 2 million on earth and we had a 20% or is h but are they right. that meant there were about 400 million people who could contribute to solving it and that is a lot of people. now we have 7.7 billion humans, we have an 85% literacy rate. 6.5 billion humans who have the potential to come together to

solve these problems. so, we are this horrible species and they've certainly destroy our planet, but we are in magical species that can do great things that no other species perhaps can even imagine, so that gives me hope. and then there may be a call, ours is probably the wrong word, but this is an all hands on deck moment for all of us and this is touching everybody on earth. everybody has a role to play from big to small. whether it is hoping to find a vaccine, to find a cure that they were bringing together the greatest innovators, medical innovators, health innovators in the world and find a new ways to innovate and ways for us to learn and build new communities. we are all going to be -- everybody has a role we have to do this together.

if somebody is sitting home, and i guess if you were watching this you are not just watching netflix, if you are binge watching netflix, you are not appreciating just the magnitude of this moment, but what is required of each of us so we can mention the finest hour referencing churchill, this is a terrible time that we can together make it our finest hour and that is why coming together in events like these and sharing ideas i think is so important. i think you and all of the participants for being part of this. >> thanks, jamie. how do we get the new edition of your book? >> i thought they would never ask. it's available everywhere. it is an e-book until midnight tonight. it's like a third officer you can get it anywhere but just wherever books are. if you go to your local bookstore, please be careful, wear a mask, all the things

george said. i would order it if i were you. >> great. with that, thanks to debra, george, jamie, organizers and sponsors and we will see you in the future. >> thanks so much, daniel. ♪ i think i came to the idea of addiction with my own implicit biases. i didn't think someone struggling with a drug addiction with like peter and maybe earning a salary that he was earning with advanced degrees. a highly successful partner and a very prestigious silicon valley law firm. to me someone struggling with an addiction is also struggling with weak conditions in their

life. they were someone i would see on the side of the road panhandling on the subway and i was very wrong although it was hard in those communities there are plenty of people at the top of the socio- economic ladder i've certainly educated myself in the symptoms of drug addiction. i never thought that it would affect me or my family so when he was suffering from those, i turned it into everything else. maybe he was psychotic were having an eating disorder or had an illness that he didn't know about like cancer. i never considered it but he did have all the symptoms of it and i thought it's the flu. he is working too hard, he's not

getting enough sleep. all those things. good morning. glenn hutchins. i hope to get an insightful session. when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and ben bernanke was the federal chair she had to create one from scratch. a few of the successors would need to refer to it so soon but for all of us he left a copy and i would recommend people on the call if they are interested there is a good cold firefighting and one was first rede