was able to find stories come from the caucasus or central asia and they were oral histories there were only written down fairly recently, within the last 100 or 200 years. linguists say the languages and traditions were they give us a pretty good idea theye kinds of stories told themselves. i hope that answers your question. thank you. [applause] ♪

♪ on the c-span networks, we have been live at the 2014 national book festival, taking place at washington convention center. our coverage on c-span wrapping up now. booktv, dorothy has been discussing her book. she will be taking fewer calls starting shortly. that is live on booktv on our companion network, c-span2. some programming to tell you about later this evening on c-span, starting with a debate alexbdc scotland between salmond and former chancellor debater darling, the

over whether scotland should end its political union with england in the upcoming referendum vote scheduled for september 18. that debate airs tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. later on, remarks from former president jimmy carter. he spoke earlier today at an event held by the islamic society of north america. watch his keynote address tonight at 9:40 eastern. next it is cancer biologist about thesel, talking science behind cancer and his proposal for creating medicine that directly targets cancer cells as opposed to the whole body. he spoke at this year's new york ideas festival, voted -- hosted by the atlantic and the aspen institute. >> before lunch, i will give you a quick rundown of some of my world. i am a cancer biologist, genetic scientist. i will run through a few things about cancer and drug development and some of the work i have been doing that i think you will find interesting.

i am with a group normally known for design with a brand-new group in that company focused on bio design. cancer is a relatively straightforward disease, even though we accumulated a large body of information on it. strip it all down and it is cells that have had their dna corrupted. if it keeps growing and starts to spread to the body, it can crash the network essentially. the problem is, when you think about it, cancer is an infection, not with the microbe or a virus, but with one of your own cells who have gone rogue. 100 years ago, we did not worry quite so much about cancer

because it was bacterial infections that tended to kill us. small cuts, accidents, etc. we had nothing to fight it with. this molecule is discovered in 1929, penicillin. it was a game changer in the world of medicine. it still took a while to get it up to production in commercial volumes, but once penicillin and its chemical cousins became available, suddenly we did not die from microbial infections anywhere near as much. today, it is quite rare. we do not even get a day off of work. this was a major life-threatening disease. cancer is treated in a completely different way.

we carpetbomb any cell that is growing fast. the look of a patient, the hair falling out, that is the treatment. it is not necessarily the cancer. we completely obliterate cells in a nondiscriminatory that are growing quickly. more modern medicines are targeted. medicines really key in on specific molecular pathways. they are very focused and they tend to use alongside chemotherapy, but when they work, it is as phenomenally different to the treatment outcomes as penicillin and bacteria. phenomenal response. unfortunately, we do not have a lot of these magic bullets.

we all want more of them. we are not going to get them. here is why. this is a 60 year trend in the outputs of drug development draft out as billions of dollars invested in r&d for new drug. -- per new drug. this is an exponential graph, but it is not the graph we like to see in digital technologies. this is a negative exponential. what this means is that over the last 60 years, we are getting dramatically less drugs per dollar invested in drug development. this is not one company. this is not 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 is really not giving us the medicines we need. last year, only 27 new drugs were approved. 27 for all diseases. the business model of the pharma companies is not hard to understand. it is the same one used by hollywood. they find interesting projects and they bring them in-house and then polish them, they get them through sensors, the fda, and their marketing and advertising teams start to work to deliver it to the public. it is long and risky and expensive, which is why, like hollywood, drug companies choose to seek blockbusters. when you think about it targeted medicine, they are more like those little indie art films, not a big audience.

if you are making a niche drug, the result is, it ends up being phenomenally expensive. it is hard to get the insurance companies to pay for it or for an individual to pay for it. the best medicines end up helping the fewest people. kind of ironic. i started thinking about this a lot, how could this trend he -- be reversed, how can we make a drug company that truly made faster, better, cheaper medicines and start to generate cancer drugs? you want to beat cancer, make better drugs. if i see everyone going one way, the whole industry is over on the side, mass-market drugs, i go the other way.

i ended up creating an experimental drug company that was completely different than anything else. it was a cooperative drug company, completely open sourced. no money involved. i do not need any money, i do not want any money. that is not the case for me. i really wanted to focus on one person at a time rather than a mass market. no two cancers are the same. the cancer is your cells infecting your body. the second thing, if you make a drug for one person, all the really expensive and time-consuming parts of drug making, getting it through phased clinical trials, are relevant.

-- irrelevant. risk and benefit reduces to a single individual. it is simply a drug for one person and one cancer. that is a much easier problem to solve. i also had a big tech knowledge -- technology in my back pocket as a genetic engineer. genetic engineering is getting really cheap. my goal was, can i make the most advanced medicines in the world using genetic engineering for the lowest price possible? ideally, free. i do not think free is so crazy. 1995, evening away a free e-mail account seems really strange. -- giving away a free e-mail account seems really strange. the challenge for me is i had this tool, i had this problem cancer that had not been solved. what drug could i possibly make

that was cheap enough to do for one person at a time? a friend of mine dropped a paper on my desk. it is a virus that breaks apart cancer cells. it turns out there has been about 30 years of r&d. the basic idea is it is a really weak virus. quite a common one, usually. if it infects a normal cell, the normal cell shuts it down. it is so weak that a normal cell has the defenses to say go away. breaks apart and never starts to replicate. cancer cells are broken cells. they are corrupted and it turns out some of those corruptions leave them vulnerable to weak virus attacks.

the virus starts to grow in the cancer cell, breaks the cancer cell, and releases more virus. it is hijacking the cancer cells and turning them into drug factories. the problem with this, your immune system recognizes all viruses as foreign and intends to shut them down. the real breakthrough in the last decade, we have learned how to keep fighting the cancer. some of the companies are getting a lot of success. at the end of the day, cancer cells just get a cold. you don't get all of the dramatic effects. i want to find a way to make these viruses faster, better, and cheaper. i was inspired by a 2003 paper

by the genetic scientists and his research partner and nobel prize winner. in december of 2003, a computer designed a virus. a very safe little virus. it just kills e. coli cells. they could print out the dna of the virus and they could boot up the virus to make virus particles. this was the whole protocol. it reduces down to design of a genome, the build of that genome and the test of that genome. it took two weeks to do this work in 2003. that is with some brilliant genetic scientist. i work with this design company and we make really cool design software. we've been working on a project called project cyborg.

it is for all forms of bio design, molecular design, dna origami. we took that bacteria and we modeled it. we are really good at 3-d printing. we printed out some of these little virus particles. so cool when you hold them in your hand. there are molecular jigsaw puzzles. we also use the same tools and technologies that we use for 3-d printing. we sent it to this company, one of the best dna synthesis companies around, and a number of other companies. could you make this genome today?

it turns out they could. they sent me these genomes. they had to push their synthesis machines to the limit, what i was able to boot up with some colleagues these synthetic viruses. this is a growth plate. this is a synthetic genome booted up by a company, a software company, because viruses are biological software. i did not have to go on to the lab to do this. it was all digital. here is what i see happening in the future. we already have this digital diagnostics and the ability to get cells out of a patient. that is very straightforward. we can sequence a cancer genome in less than a day. you can feed into an auto design program.

they can go to a printer to print that viral genome and we can get that in two weeks for $1000 and print costs. that allows us to make a virus that we can test on one-person cells. if it kills the cancer cells and does not hurt normal cells, it passes, and it could be used as a treatment. we are testing this -- we would love to do veterinary studies, but this type of approach could get into humans very quickly because there is already such a foundation. here is something -- because we can really open source the entire design process, it is just software. you do not need a lab to do this. the amazing part is, the cost of writing synthetic dna is falling so rapidly, it is remarkable.

it cost $1000 to make that virus. next year, it will cost about $10. the year after that, maybe one dollar. instead of just making one drug and taking 10 or 15 years, why not a netflix model? change the fda requirements about approving a single drug. if these tools keep opening up, there is nothing to stop people from making their own drugs. we see phenomenal amounts of creativity coming into the 3-d printing space. i want to see every drug maker come from the maker community.

i want to see it done fast and cheap and i want to see these amazing medicines be available for everyone. if we do that, we will beat cancer. we have been fighting it for so long, we forget we just might win. thank you. [applause] on the next "washington journal," washington examiner commentary editor philip klein discusses president obama's foreign and domestic all as he challenges and previews the upcoming midterm congressional elections. cofounder of the progressive change campaign committee, outlines the political and legislative agenda of regressive groups of the 2014 elections, and foreign policy senior staff writer talks about the u.s. response to the threat posed by isis.

as always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. live atton journal" 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> this labor day, on the c-span at 5:30, on c-span eastern, and education department's summit on bullying in schools. at 8:00, bill nye the science guy and creation museum founder ken ham debate evolution. 's booktv, congressman james clyburn talks about his youth. 8:30, an author on her book, "price of fame take a -- fame." at 10:00 p.m., michael lewis discusses the hidden world of high-frequency stock trading. 's american history tv

at 7:15 eastern time, american artifacts looks at declassified documents related to the 1964 gulf of talkin incident that led to the escalation of the vietnam war. president warren harding's newly released love letters. at 9:45, the life of milton friedman. find out television schedule at www.c-span.org. let us know what you think about the programs you are watching. call us at the number on your screen. or email us at comments@c-span.org. conversation. like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. >> this labor day weekend, the president used his weekly address to talk about his administration's efforts to raise the minimum wage. congressman larry bush shot from

indiana gave the republican response, talking about jobs and the economy. >> hi, everybody. whether you are firing up the or loading the car for one last road trip, happy labor day. this labor day, we have more to celebrate. we passed -- for the past 53 months, our businesses have added millions of jobs. for the first time since 1997, we created more than 200,000 jobs for six straight months. for the first time in over a decade, business leaders worldwide have declared two years running that the number one place to invest is not china , it is america. there are reasons to be optimistic about where we are headed and the decisions we make will determine whether or not we accelerate this progress am a weather economic gains flow to a few at the top or whether a

growing economy fuels rising incomes and a thriving middle class. think about it this labor day. the things we often take for granted, like social security and medicare, work lay safety laws, and the right to organize for better pay and benefits, even weekends -- we did not always have these things. workers and the union's who get their back had to fight for them. those fights built a stronger middle class. to build a stronger middle class in today's changing economy, we have to keep fighting. have got to fight for the right for affordable health insurance for everybody, the right to fair pay and leave and work lays flexibility. -- workplace flexibility. the right to a fair living wage. in america, no one who works full time ever have to raise a family in poverty. a hard days work deserves a fair days pay. raising the minimum wage would be one of the best ways to give a boost to working families. it would help 28 million

americans from all walks of life pay the bills, provide for the kids, and spend that money at local businesses. that grows the economy for everybody. the bottom line is, america deserves a raise. but until we have a congress that cares about raising working folks' wages, it's up to the rest of us to make it happen. americans of all walks of life are doing just that. and d.c. have done their part by raising their minimum wages. four more states have minimum wage initiatives on the ballot this november. in states where the minimum wage has gone up this year, they have experienced higher job growth than the states that have not. is this leaders and companies like the gap are doing their part am a raising wages for tens of thousands of workers because they know it is good for business. arers across the country doing their part. mayor emanuel in chicago and mayor garcetti in l.a. are working to lift their city's

wages over time to at least $13 an hour. earlier this month, the president of kentucky state university set a great example by giving himself a $90,000 pay cut so he could give raises to his lowest paid employees. his sacrifice will give more of his workers and their families a little extra money to help make ends meet. build thew america greatest middle class the world has ever known. i making sure that everyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules can get ahead. that is the bedrock this country is built on, hard work, responsibility, sacrifice, and looking out for one another as one united american family. that's keep that in mind this labor day, and every day. have a great weekend, everybody. proudly serving indiana's

eighth congressional district. i am honored to be speaking with you from the heartland of america on this weekend when we tip our hat to the working man and woman. american workers make our country go. our goal should be to make the economy work for them. traveling around indiana this week, going from job fairs to listening sessions with small businesses, it was easy to see how our workers are still hurting. we are seeing some jobs come back, but too many of our fellow americans are stuck in part-time work or stopped looking altogether. between wages staying flat and costs on everything from food to health care going up, families are being squeezed at every turn. in indiana and many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good paying middle class jobs, like the one my family relied on when i was a kid. my dad spent 35 years as a coal miner in my hometown. he was proud of the work he did everyday, and rightly so.

put food one helps our table and helps me pursue an education and realize the american dream. currentately, the administration is waging a war on this reliable, affordable source of energy and the countless jobs it supports. of manyone example where policies coming from washington, d.c. just don't make tose are it i took an oath do no harm. while this administration's policies continue to harm our nation's economy and families continue to struggle to make ends meet. republicans are offering solutions america's workers can count on. need to get people back into steady, good paying jobs. one thing we have already done is fix our job training system to make it easier for workers to find the skills they need to get ahead. this was a bipartisan, commonsense compromise. we have offered proposals to jumpstart small business

investment and rain in the red tape factory that makes it harder for employers to hire and expand. we have more than 40 good jobs bills awaiting action in the senate. lowering costs is another area that demands action. we are asking senate democrats to help make energy less expensive for families and small businesses, like the manufacturers that help support they hoosier eceonomy -- economy. we need to restore real opportunities for all americans. that is why we sent the senate solutions that solutions to make education more affordable for middle-class families. we are willing to fix our tax code to make it simpler and fairer for everyone. these three things, getting people back to work, lowering costs at home, and restoring opportunity, will continue to be our focus in the weeks ahead. we call them american solutions

because they put the american people first, which is exactly what we're asking of president obama and senate democrats as we celebrate our nation's workforce. aside politics and do what americans do every day, and that is get to work. thanks for listening. god bless you. god bless the united states of america. >> this month, c-span present debate and what makes america evolution, and genetically modified foods. issue spotlight with in-depth looks at veterans health care, irs oversight, student loan debt, and campus sexual assault. new perspectives on issues including global warming, voting rights, fighting infectious disease, and food safety. and our history tour showing sights and sounds from america's historic places. find our tv schedule one week in advance at www.c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you are watching. call us at the number on your screen.

join the conversation. like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. >> coming up next, "the communicators" with aster taylor talking about her book, "the people's platform." then a discussion on corporate tax laws and their effect on revenue and jobs. at 8:00, a debate on whether scotland should end its political union with england. it is between scottish national party leader alex salmond and alistair darling. c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service i your local cable or satellite provider. >> the book is called "the people's platform, taking back power and culture in the digital age." the author is aster

taylor, who joins us from our new york studio. abouts book, you write openness and you say that new-media thinkers have claimed openness as an appropriate utopian ideal for our time and the concept has caught on. does that apply to the internet as well? >> that is exactly what i'm asking. it seemed like the internet was going to magically solve all the problems of the old media, and for me, i am independent. my background is in documentary filmmaking. i make films about philosophies. kind of obscure educational films. these films were not on television, they were not on commercial media. the