these things where i was not. in his childhood and his past. it's an amazing gift, i have to say, for both the stroemans and race to allow someone like me to kind of come into your world and not knowing what i'm going to do or say and let your story be told because without that we wouldn't know very much about our condition. >> ladies and gentlemen, check out his book, the true american murder and mercy in texas. are you going to be downstairs signing some copies? >> i will. i will sign copies of this book. if you prefer other books, i'll sign copies of those books, too. áh you efore lunch, i'll giveqpá. a quick rundown of some of my world. i'm a cancer biologist, i'm a genetic scientist. i'm going to run through a few things about cancer, about drug developments, about some of the work that i've been doing that i think you'll find pretty interesting. i'm with a group auto desk, it's normally known for design with a brand new group in that company

cancer is a relatively straight-forward disease, even though we really accumulated a large body of information on it. quite so much about cancer because it was actually bacterial infections that tended to kill us. small cuts, accidents, et

cetera,s if we had a bacterial infection that started to kol lon niez, continue to grow, we had no really fight it with. then this molecule is discovered in 1929, penicillin. penicillin was a game changer in the world of medicine. it still took a while to get it up to production at commercial -- in commercial volumes, but once penicillin and its chemical cousins became available, suddenly we didn't die from microbial infections anywhere near as much. unless you have a very resistant bar tear ya. today we don't get a day off of work. but this was a major life-threatening disease. cancer is treated in a completely different way. we carpet bomb any cell that's growing fast. the look of a cancer patient, the hair falling out, the iv

poll, that's actually the treatment. it's not necessarily the cancer. so, we completely obliterate cells in a nondiscriminate way that are growing quickly. more modern medicines are targetive. medicines like her septemberen in the cell. they're very focussed. they tend to be used alongside chemo therapy. but when they work, when those targets exist in the cancer, it's as phenomenally different in treatment outcomes as penicillin and bacteria. phenomenal response. unfortunately it's -- we don't have a lot of these magic bullets, so to speak. we all want more of them. but we're not going to get them.

and here is why -- this is a 60-year trend in the outputs of drug development. graphed out as billions of dollars invested in r&d per new drug. this is an exponential graph, but it's not the exponential graph we like to see in digital, moore's law. this is a negative exponential. what this means is that over the last 60 years we're getting dramatically less drugs per dollar invested in drug development. this isn't one company. this isn't one business. this is an industry that is not able to make its products faster and better and cheaper. this is something we expect from every digital technology. even though drug development is very high-technology, it's

really not giving us the medicines we need. last year only 27 new drugs were approved. cancer. the business model of the pharma companies isn't hard to understand. it's the same one used by hollywood. they go out and find interesting projects. they bring them in house. they polish them. they get them through censers. the fda and the drug case drug development and then they're marketing and advertising teams start to work to deliver it to the public. it's really long. it's really risky. it's really expensive, which is why like hollywood, drug companies choose to seek block busters. when you think about it, targeted medicines are more like those little indy arts films. ty#eu a big audience. the problem is, it costs about the same amount of money to make a little indy art film as it

does to make a hollywood blockbuster and get it through the drug process. if you're naking a targeted drug, a niche drug, the result is it becomes phenomenally expensive. the more expensive it, the harder to get your insurance companies to pick up and pay for for it. the best medicines end up helping the fewest people. it's kind of ironic. i started thinking about this a lot. how could this trend be reversed? how could we make a drug company that truly made faster, better, cheaper medicines? and start to generate lots of cancer drugs? my philosophy is simple, you want to beat cancer, make better drugs. so i'm kind of a yin-yang kind of guy. if i see everybody going one way and a whole industry is over on this way, mass-market drugs, for profit, et cetera, i go the other way. and i ended up creating an experimental drug company that was completely different than anything else.

it was a cooperative drug company. it was completely open source. taking some inspiration from lenux which went on to challenge major software need any money. i don't want any money. that's not the case. for me. but i really wanted to focus on one person at a time. .í;@hw rather than a mass market. and for me, this was important. one, because no two cancers are the same. the cancer is your cells, r no two people have the same cancer. it's not an infectious disease. . . the second thing i wanted to focus on one person at a time was because if you make a drug for one person, all the really expensive and time consuming parts of drug making getting it through phase clinical trials, it's irrelevant. . risk and benefit reduces to a single individual, not a societal threat.

it's simply a drug for one person and one cancer. and that's actually a much easier problem to solve."sñ and genetic engineering is getting really cheap. can i make the most advance medicines in the world using genetic engineering for the lowest price possible. ideally free. and don't think free is so cr y crazy. remember, 1995,c:t7ñ giving awa free e-mail account seemed strange and today we all take it for granted. i had this problem cancer that hadn't been solved yet. what drug could i possibly make that was cheap enough to do for one person at a time?

then a friend of mine dropped a paper on my desk on viruses that breaks apart cancer cells. and there's been a about 30 years of r & d. it'sg,$áqp&ly, really weak virus. it's really weak. a common one usually. the normal cell just shuts it down. it's so weak that a normal cell has the viral defenses and just says, yeah, go away. cancer cells are broken cells, they're corrupted. turns out some of those corruptions lead them vulnerable.

your immune system tends to shut them down. so the real breakthrough in oncolytic is we learn how to make it escape the eimmune system. and some of these companies developing these drugs are getting a lot of success. really, at the end of the day cancer cells just get a cold. it's really, really gentle. you don't get all of the dramatic effects. but i wanted to find atk[gñ way make> i was inspired by a nobel prize winner named ham smith.++m

but we also used the same tools and technologies that we do for dna. took these brilliant scientists ten years ago to do and it turns out they could. in some cases they have to push

their synthesis machines to the limit. i was able to boot up with some colleagues these synthetic viruses. this is a growth plate wherever you see a spot there, a synthetic virus has booted up and started killing the e. coli cells around it. this is a synthetic genome booted up by a company, a software company because viruses are really little biological software. and i didn't have to go into the lab to do this. it was all digital. so here's what i see happening in the future of cancer. we already have this digital diagnostics and the ability to get cells out of a patient. that's very straightforward. today we can sequence a cancer genome in less than a day. that's so much information. but it can feed into an auto design program. auto drug. from that design program, it can go to a printer to print that viral genome. and we can get that in two weeks now.

for $1,000 in print costs. and that allows us to make a virus that we could actually test on one person person's cell. if it kills the cancer cell, it passes. that could be used as a treatment. we're testing this now. that's our next step. we'd love to do veterinary studies. but we think this type of approach could get into humans very quickly. because there's a foundation in oncolytic viruses. and because we can open source the entire design process. it's just software. you don't need a lab to do this. and the amazing part is the cost of writing synthetic dna like the cost of genome sequencing is falling so rapidly that it's actually really remarkable. oh, i'm sorry, it's not going back very well. the cost is falling so low, it costs $1,000 to make that virus. next year, it'll cost about $10.

year after that, maybe $1. which allows us to explore new business models in drug development instead of just making one drug for $1 billion and taking 10 or 15 years. why not a netflix model for an individual where you can have all the cancer drugs you want made specifically for you for one low price. change the fda requirements single drug. instead prove a drug development process. and if these tools keep opening up and keep getting cheaper, there's nothing to stop people from actually just making their own drugs. today we see phenomenal amounts of creativity coming into the 3d printing space. all generally starting with one individual. i want to see every drug maker, you know, come from the maker community. i want to see it done fast and cheap. i want to see these best -- these amazing medicines be

available for everyone. and i think if we do that, we'll actually beat cancer. we've been fighting it for so long, we actually forget we just might win. thank you. >> in nebraska, democrat faces pete ricketts for governor. the current governor is term limited. we'll have live coverage thursday evening at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span 2. here are some of the ads running in that race. >> you know, all across our state, i see people facing the same tough challenges. nebraskans want a fair shot. i stood up for family farmers and ranchers, and we helped 10,000 small businesses and secured tuition assistance for young nebraskans. i'll invest in our future by expanding early childhood education and training nebraska workers for good-paying jobs. i'm running for governor because

when nebraskans work together, we succeed. >> typical politicians are at it again. they're losing, so they're falsely attacking pete ricketts. but pete, he's staying positive. a proud nebraska businessman endorsed by sarah palin with a plan to cut property taxes. >> typical politicians don't get it. i'm pete ricketts. when i started with the family business, we had 150 people working in omaha and now there's more than 2,000 here in nebraska. i know how to create jobs, set priorities and produce results. and that's what i'll do as governor. >> pete ricketts is making false attacks, but ricketts tried to avoid paying his own taxes. but his organization proposed a plan that would raise taxes for family farmers and 80% of nebraskans. ricketts would lower taxes for corporations like the one owned by him and his family. ricketts wants higher taxes for us, but lower taxes for rich people like him. nebraska needs a governor who fights for the middle class.

and that's just not pete ricketts. >> the nebraska i grew up in expects people to take responsibility, to treasure faith and family. those are nebraska values. >> pete ricketts. >> my faith guides me, from raising my family to running our business. i believe god gave us fundamental rights and our constitution protects them. that we have to be a culture that protects life and inspires responsibility. i'm pete ricketts. as your governor, i'll work to make you proud and lead nebraska with shared values. >> watch live debate coverage with chuck hassellbrook and pete ricketts at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span 2. >> more now from the 2014 ideas festival in new york. coming up, a conversation about the future of finance with executives from hbo, kickstarter, and donors choose.org. the atlantic and the aspen institute cohost this event.

it's about 2 hours and 45 minutes. >> and the universe parts. the fabric of the universe unfolds. brian green has written "the fabric of the universe." the fabric of the cosmos, the elegant universe. icarus on the edge of time, which i love. and the hidden reality. the trio of books that deal with multiverses, relativity. we are supposed to within 20 minutes, actually, 18 minutes and 17 seconds, give you the whole story of the cosmos and the universe. so, brian, let's begin at the beginning. how did it begin? >> how did it begin? oh, good question. we don't know. but -- >> but we have some ideas.