labs mick ebbeling. then an interview with joseph o'neill and gary shteyngart and then with chad dickerson. next, conversations from the 2014 washington ideas forum beginning with not impossible labs founder mick ebling on his efforts to bring prosthetics technology to sudan. this is about half an hour. >> hello. so everybody has a chapter one. my chapter one started with as steve mentioned this is tempt. tempt in the 1980's and 1990's was one of the foremost graffiti artists on the west coast. he came down with a disease called a.l.s. made very popular recently by the ice bucket challenge which is an amazing awareness campaign. my production company said well this year instead of giving our clients a silly gift of a fruit basket or bottle of

wine or something they'll forget immediately let's make a donation on their behalf. so we went and had a meeting with this father and brother and said hey, we're going to give you this money. what are you going to use it for? they said, i just want to be able to talk to my brother again. i just want to be able to communicate with him. i said, wait a second. how do you communicate now? they said, we do it with a device called a piece of paper. and the piece of paper has a letter, all the letters written on it. go to the next slide. on that piece of paper when he gets to it, when we run our finger along it, he blinks. and we write that letter down. and then we repeat and we repeat and repeat and letters form words and that's how we communicate. i said, that's crazy. why don't you have -- i've seen steven hocking and kristoffer reeves and these inventions that allow paralyzed people to talk. how come you don't have them? he said, we to enter have money

or insurance. they're too expensive. so i have a process, and my process is that you commit and then you figure it out. so i said, all right. here's what we'll do. [applause] >> we're going to do two things. one, he's going to communicate again. we'll get him a steven hocking machine. two, we'll get him a device that allows him to draw, lets him do his art again. they said really? you can do that? i went, yeah. big hugs. yeah. high fives. and they left and we high fives and i went, holy crap. what did i just commit myself to? i had never put the words recognition technology together in a sentence and now i was claiming to do that. part of my process as well is to invite brilliant people into my life. i like to be the guy at the party who is the dumbest guy in the room. if i am, that means that i'm the guy who's learning. i invite all these brilliant

people to my house and we have a hacker weekend and come up with this concept if we could get a web camera mounted in front of someone's eyes and then track with technology the pupil as if that was the tip of the pencil maybe temps could draw again. so we went about doing this and we came up with this device. the device is called the eye writer. that's what it is. it's not pretty but it's a web camera mounted in front of an eye. we took it to his hospital room and set up a projector in the parking lot and a wireless signal from his room down to the projector and he drew again. we projected it on the side of a building. he drew again for the first time in seven years. and it was this incredible -- thank you. [applause] it was this incredible experience. that was it. there wasn't a chapter 2 to this. there wasn't a, what's next? we did it. and so we went and got some

drinks and talked about how awesome it was. then we went to bed. right? that was it. then we woke up the next day. and it was "time" magazine's top 50 inventions of 2010. it was diaz moeto's eight incredible health inventions that transform lives. it is part of the collection at the moma. so on and so forth. media and media. what the hell did we do? how did we do this, right? then temp sent us an e-mail and the e-mail was this. that was the first time i've drawn anything for seven years. i feel like someone -- i was under water and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so i could take a breath. and we got that and i said, all right. i don't know what we did but we got to figure out how to do it again and for more people. that was the launch of not

impossible labs and it's based on this premise of technology but it's technology for the sake of humanity. it's how do you hack? how do you modify? how do you take something that serves one purpose and make it apply to something else so it accomplishes a fundamental social need, some communication mobility freedom of expression something like that? and so this kind of sets the course of what we were doing with not impossible labs. so that was my chapter one. this is chapter two for me. chapter two, july 11, last year a year and couple months ago, i went out to dinner with a friend. at dinner, he tells me about this dr. tom. dr. tom is a doctor in the area between sudan and south sudan and he is the only doctor within a 1500-mile radius. he does everything from deliver babies to pulling teeth

appendectomy, he's everything. he's it. and we kind of go on throughout this dinner talking about him. so i did what a curious individual does after he gets home after having a couple glasses of wine and nice dinner with a friend. i flipped open my laptop and opened up an article about him. and i come to learn about his situation and his situation is that the government of sudan, led by president bashir, is running a campaign of terror on the people of the mountains. he flies turboprop planes over this region and rolls 55 gallon drums filled with jet fuel and shrapnel out of the back. that's what he does. and he does this is a meaning, a military tactic. because if you drive the people out, when the military comes in there is nobody to fight. it makes it an easy war to fight. so the people are used to this. the story went on to talk about a young boy named daniel.

daniel was out tending his family's goats. he heard the prop plane coming. he went for cover. he wrapped his arms around a tree. the bomb went off not far from him and the tree protected his body but it blew off his arms. and after i think it was eight hours he finally got to dr. tom. dr. tom stitched him up. when he woke he said, if i could die, i would have. because now i'm going to be such a burden to my family. i'm sitting at my kitchen table. i got my lap top and glass of water getting ready for bed. i look down the hallway where these three knuckleheads sleep. and i couldn't imagine if you're a parren, could you imagine if your son or daughter woke up and said i wish i was dead because i'll be such a pain in the ass to mom and dad now? that was the moment for me.

that was the all right. i got to do something. i'm not quite sure what but i got to do something. so you commit and then figure it out. repeat. you'll see a trend here. invite a bunch of people to my house who make me feel stupid, brilliant people. people that work in 3d printing manufacturing fabrication. we try printing with 3d printers ballsa wood, all types of different things. the weekend was a great success if you measure success by everything that fails because we didn't come up with one thing that worked. the ticket was bought to sudan. there was no turning back. this guy had successfully built a hand for himself and he said i can tell you got that glint in your eyes. you're not bailing on this trip. are you? i said no. he's like, all right. come out to south africa on your way to sudan. route through jones jones. i'll get you started. i flew to sudan to his house. slept on his floor and ate his food and we spent six straight nights 24 hours a day just going, going going. testing hands, testing arms. learning how to work with

prosthetics. i had never successfully 3d printed until that point. we basically came to the end and successfully made a prototype. and i bid his family farewell and hopped on a plane to juba and then a prop lean to the refugee camp. it was there that i met daniel for the first time. our plan was to meet daniel. it was a nervous experience because the whole thing is called project daniel. i never talked to the kid. i didn't know what we were going to do. we were dealing with other people. i wanted to look him in the eye. we got there and the plan was to load up the trucks after meeting him and start our journey. it's about a nine-hour journey from the refugee camp across the border of sudan. we'd be going under the protection of the rebels spla and we'd cross under the cover of night to get to dr. tom where we would start our process. there is a rub. the rub is the cease-fire ended while we were in the air from

johannesburg to sudan. so security came in and said, i'm sorry. you can't go. we can't guarantee you safe passage so your a he not going. so, luckily an n.g.o. found out about us and said, hey. come on over. we've got this shed in the bag. if you want to set up shop there while we sort sort you before you go to uncle tom, jump on it. we went over there and set up the printers and started making the casts daniel would use for his forearms to replace where his arm used to be. we played with the ergonomics of the elbow and started the making. there is a saying i learned there called t.i.a. which is, this is africa which is the equivalent of murphy's law which i'm an optimist and i kind of discounted and i got my ass handed to me right quick as soon ace got there and experienced this. because if it could go wrong it did. the electricity was wrong. we had to rewire electricity. it was so hot during the day that the 3d printing filament that we had was melting to

itself before it even got into my printer where it's supposed to melt and then print out something. so it was one thing after another after another. eventually we got to november 11, and this is what happened. ♪ >> there is this thing in me that loves to see things that are supposed to not be done be done. daniel is just one of 50,000 amputees left in the wake of the ploodiest war africa has ever known. we heard of an active war zone in sudan and flew there with three printers, lap tops, spools of plastic, and the goal to build daniel an arm. >> you ready?

the concept of project daniel was hatched july 11. on november 11, daniel fed himself for the first time in two years. but it's never about just one person. if we could teach the locals to do it themselves then project daniel could live on long after we left. and it did.

[applause] >> thank you. i've seen that video probably thousands of times and i still get that grin when he gets up and tries to throw. so what we're doing around project daniel, and everything we're doing around project daniel is around this concept of technology for the sake of humanity. we're creating inventions like the eye writer that was comparabley was 15 grand that we made for a hundred dollars. we're making devices, e.e.g. tracking devices that allow people with syndromes to communicate using their brain

waves and eyes. the project daniel arm we were able to make that was able to do something -- arms are 15 grand up to a hundred grand and we were able to make it for a hundred dollars. so, for us, this is the philosophy of making -- using technology for the sake of humanity. this is the philosophy of how do you take something and make it so it accomplishes a fundamental social need? so the question that we ask and we ask everybody here is, let's not try to cure malaria. let's try for sure but if i ask you right now in this room would you guys want to help me cure malaria, yeah, sure mick. if i say let's go help jim. let's go help jane. let's go help suzy there is this philosophy of helping one person. and then making that available to many people afterwards. making it open source, accessible. that's where the power lies. one of our mantras is help one help many. so the question that i would ask you guys today is, who is

your one? who is your one? based on what you just saw, who is your daniel? thank you guys. [applause] >> thank you. >> thank you. >> if mapping the human genome was one of the biggest scientific victories of the last decade comprehensively mapping the human brain is the new goal for this one. our next speakers are two neuro scientists at the forefront of the effort to discover how the brain works, how genetics makeup controls memory, emotions, attention, and even hunger. please welcome jacopo aness, director of the brain observatory and allan jones the c.e.o. of the allan institute for brain science along with the atlantic senior editor jim hamblin, himself a doctor. welcome.

>> thank you. >> thank you. >> a lot of you probably know last year the federal government announced something called the brain initiative, which dedicates somewhere between 300 and $500 million to mapping the human brain. we're lucky to have a few scientists here today who are working on similar projects trying to figure out exactly what's going on in our brains, which is no small task, but an incredibly fascinating and important one. i want to start at the very top and just get to simple but also very complex question of what are we talking about when we say brain mapping? >> yes. so let me talk about what we often talk about at the allan institute for brain science which, by the way, is not named for me but rather for paul allan, one of the cofounders of

microsoft. we often think of it as if i have a samsung phone here but imagine that this is a new iphone 6 and i work for samsung, our big challenge would be how does this thing work? and imagine, this is something you can all relate to, what would you do, and they do this, very common in industry. you take it apart. you start to look at the chip architecture. they pop these chips out. they put them in an electron microscope app look at all the individual parts. that's only the start. if all you knew was that architecture to tell you something about the advantages one phone had over another, you also need to turn it on, figure out how the software works. there's probably new a new operating system you need to start to dig into, how that information is coded. then you need to understand the new apps and how those work on top of that. so there are these levels of

the components, the computation, and ultimately in the human brain cognition, those apps that are running that we all need to understand. so when we think about brain mapping, we think about all of those different elements and how they come together. >> so in some way our brains are almost as complex as our phones. >> and -- almost, yes. there is a caveat. the work that we do at the brain observatory is try to catalog different cell phones. so the problem is once you map one cell phone, once you reverse engineer one cell phone if you in reality we're not like the same model, you know. we're not all samsung. even if we were the same brand we would be very different. so each brain -- i brought mine. i brought a spare. i almost forgot it in the hotel room. even at this level this is just a 3d print of my brain and shows the con voleution.

even at this level if i printed your brain it would be very different. when you zoom in and look at connections and cells and, you know, even sin apps is and the architecture of the brain at the microscopic level all bets are off. so really we have a project called the digital brain library. not the digital cell library. we catalog brains from individuals who donate them to science. we create cellular resolution maps. one day when we know the basic architecture of one particular brain of a particular species then we can look at individual differences which is really what i'm very interested in is why i am who i am, how much has that to do with the brain? how similar we are if we make the same choices in life. how are we differently susceptible to disease as well? >> so we have the federal grant initiative. we have the allen institute, the brain observatory. we've been cutting open brains for a long time.

we've been study neuroscience for a long time. what's different right now? why do we have all of these initiatives to map the brain? what is allowing us to do that? what's driving this? >> i guess i would say for those who don't know the ail ensigns tsustumi -- allen institute for brain science has been around for 10 years and 2 1/2 years ago paul announced a major new niche tiff, which ultimately will commit almost a billion dollars of his own money to an ambitious project that goes after the components and the computation of the brain. a year later, there was a large european effort that was announced. this was a 1.3 billion euro investment. then the brain initiative announcement came soon thereafter. probably any day now i have heard there will be one from

china, a japan announced their brain initiative earlier. so there's a lot of people converging on this. the question one might ask is why? there is certainly an urgency around understanding human brain disease but i think it's also a really interesting time in history and convergence around a lot of new technologies developed over the last many years. things like at ability to actually manipulate the firing of the neuron with light. there are advances in microscopey that allow you to get a very high resolution image. there are advancings in being able to see the brain firing in real time. i liken this to a hundred years ago there was this unfolding of the language of chemistry. in a very short period of time, lots of very fundamentals were established. fast forward 50 years with the

discovery of dna. we had the language of life that unfolded. and so now here we are 50 years from now. i don't think this is a bold prediction if you look at where people are putting the money. i think we will have some understanding of language of the brain in the next decade with all of these efforts. it's a really exciting time. >> is it good there are all of these different efforts and countries and institutions or should everybody be working together on one giant initiative? >> internationally it's a challenge to combine goals. it is even a challenge within a single institution especially an academic institution. labs work independently. at the national level. we compete for funding between each other. it would be great to have, we were talking before backstage, would be great to have as we suggested an initiative that would be just like -- where all the scientists got together and decided that's what we really

need to understand. we would like to understand that spark in our brain, what makes us human. i think neuro scientists are not unlike even physicists should be less social than neuro scientists you would think but they manage actually to get together and do this. >> i like the fact that the brain initiative really made people think about the brain more. in my experience with the brain library because we know the participants, the patients, we know the person behind the brain, i understood over the years without public engagement there cannot be neuroscience. we cannot study the human brain if people don't lend themselves to go in for a scan. even at the very basic level. 20 minutes of their time. if people didn't care about the brain, not that we pay them. we don't pay them. some studies pay 20 bucks to go in for an hour or so. but public engagement is where i like to focus for example the -- i started a new nonprofit

called institute for brain society to make people more engaged in neuroscience so we can actually -- i think it will accelerate research as well hand in hand with technology. >> if i can just follow on, to your question of collaboration versus competition, i think everyone right now is viewing this, it is such a broad space. unlike the genome projects which pitted private vs. public, i think there is no reason, the space is too large. we've been approaching this as something where there is a lot of cooperation and collaboration. we partner with the european effort as much as we do and the u.s. brain initiative as well. so i think it's unlike those previous big science projects, it feels more collaborative than it does competitive. >> and it's true that when you narrow your goals then you're able to collaborate on something. if it's an open field and

everybody may find a different reason to focus on a particular aspect of brain structure or brain function. the synthesis is the challenge. even with the willingness and ability to cooperate, making a final map for the brain and eventually many different brains from many different human brains in particular. that's going to be i think the challenge. technology now, that's the time primetime to tackle this issue. >> speaking of narrowing your goals, you talked a little bit about community engagement with brain house and what you're doing at the observatory in the institute in san diego right now. can you talk a little more about how you call the big community engagement and what this means for people? brain mapping is such a -- >> we make it personal. i had a couple -- there it is. if you can move through the slides a little bit, it would tell, you know, these are participants who are also willing -- they are also meeting us. for example, jane. one thing i discovered, you

know i really came out of the -- not out of the closet -- i came out of the lab. i was a basic scientist. and by meeting patients who would come to me with a diagnosis i started really challenging even the idea of the patient. why do we call somebody -- june died of a.l.s. you know, when we met her she had already been diagnosed. but my -- i became intrigued by the fact, why does medical field call somebody a patient the moment that they have a diagnosis while they are still the person? june was motivated to participate. she wanted to help somebody else in the future. there was nothing they could do about her when she was in life but by donating the brain we could find out what really happened using techniques. of course available today to look at the phenomena that are happening inside the tissue and that will help other people. but in terms of as an idea, i wonder if the idea of a patient really keeps us away from also

understanding human nature from a neuro scientific perspective. i met parkinson's disease patients very soon after their diagnosis and the question is, why me? you please, i was riding my bike the week before and now i'm a patient. that i think hinders us understanding the relationship between brain and disease. it's more of a humanistic view i think of the brain. then we focus -- this is the painting we commissioned for the brain institute society. i think it is more important when people become more aware of the brain they become more responsible themselves aware of what lifestyles, diet, nutrition, what it can do. these are things that can help a lot. hand in hand with technology of course. you need to understand the processes. >> sure. and you talked a little bit in your talk downstairs which was great but a lot of people didn't get to see it about people having regular m.r.i.'s and a relationship with understanding how their own

brain looks before they become a patient. >> it's like a selfie of your brain. you join our program and take a selfie of your brain and over time it will tell you how your brain is doing. and everybody's brain, this is my brain three years ago. if i, two years ago. if i printed, i used an m.r.i. scan from three years ago. if i print it now it maybe would be less flattering. you know? as an organ to show with me. [laughter] >> it should be our favorite organ. the brain should be our first priority because it's who we are and we know what happens with dementia. >> so the thing about dementia is one of these extremely terrifying but also very costly to society diseases that sort of drives justification for

continued investment in something like the brain initiative. do we have enough? is this looking promising? i think we've got, it said 10 years and at that point, you know, we don't know and how is that going to play out? are we going to need to continue to see? >> i think the numbers are constantly changing but there was an n.i.h. panel that recommended the project fund up to $500 million annually. up to 2025. so i think they proposed a plan for that. that's currently unfunded. so to be clear, the brain initiative while having a lot of momentum at this point is not incorporated into the future funding yet. so i think those are, you please, to make the case, you look at this societal