inventions, yes. when we first started, biocurious was the first kind -- of its kind in the world. who wants to go back to high school and take a biology class? nobody is going to want to do this and it is too expensive and it will never work. later, therears are all these other people around the world that have doingd calling themselves girl -- do-it-yourself bio hackers or biocurious. even some show up on a place where there is not any google land. are there startups? yes. are there inventions around the world? yes. are these ideas running around the world? looks like it to me. but that is not what i came here to talk about. when we started biocurious, i

came at it from the aspect of .iotech biotechnology, genetic engineering, biomedical engineering, synthetic biology. let's get all the agreement together, let's do biotech. over the five years, what i learned is, it is much more this curious, much more -- is a cool idea, this is a cool concept, this is something i never thought i would learn about. yearked out of freshman knowing i would never look at biology again. that i the curiosity really discovered at biocurious. i just want to share some stories about that. the group you are seeing is a group of students we brought in to do a workshop in the land.

one of the most interesting things is, we bring in people who are,over the world like, what is going on at biocurious? i remember we brought in one from, they were switzerland and they were very corporate. what were they doing here? we did not really know. they were all in suits, business high heels, things like that. we were doing this experiment where we were looking to discover new antibiotics in nature. you may not know this but their allscovered species of lice around us. you probably walked by a couple on the way here. somebody just discovered a new species of both in new york city. this stuff is around. there is a project that a guy from nasa is working on call the iliad project. he is saying, let's get plant

samples and mix them up with bacteria. if the bacteria die, it means it is an antibiotic. if they do not, it means it is a plan without antibiotic properties. so then what we say is, let's go outside and pick leaves and do this experiment. what i remember about this, i was walking with this woman into the backyard of biocurious. it is not like a tom sawyer jungle backyard. it is a corporate -- it is like asphalt. wandering around and she ,s stepping over this bush tromping through these flower gardens. she is stepping over this bush and reaches of into a redwood tree and grabs a piece of it and turns to me and says, do you think this is going to work? in our experiment?

i say i have no idea, but let's try it. the look she had on her face was great. she had not had the ability or the room to just try something in a really long time, and that is what we have been able to do at biocurious. give people the space to try something and not know if it will work. and that is ok. a lot of people come to biocurious and have never been to a biotech class before. that is one of the proud experiment i do in every class. how many people have ever been to a biotech lab before? it is almost everybody. welcome. this is your first step towards checking this out. another experiment we did at

biocurious is the microscope community project. that is basically a team that is working on building a really high and microscope, a $20,000 microscope. they said we want to build this for $200. i was sitting at biocurious one day and this group came in, i was listening -- i was not part of the group. people were going around the room, introducing themselves. i remember the first person that said, i am here, i am really excited about the microscope project. i from vallejo. malay how is two hours away. you drove here to be interested in this microscope project? next to him is a woman who says, i work at google, i do not do anything related to biology. i work on the search bar at google.

i was pretty uncomfortable leaving work early, but i did because i wanted to check this out. next to her is eric, one of the regulars at biocurious, actually a scientist, leading the design of the microscope project. so it is this cool mixture of that nevereople would have come together if we said, let's start a company to build a microscope. if you want to start a company to build a $200 microscope, you need a mechanical engineer, optical engineer, electric ,ngineer, electronics engineer and you would have gotten a different group of people. is driven by it interest and curiosity and maybe passion later you get is really cool group that you never otherwise would have assembled. that is a cool thing that i have seen at biocurious. you see these teams that nobody

could predict. people from all sorts of different technical interests and trainings. what i have worked on over the what have iars is, learned about that? if i were to share with you the secrets of biocurious, it is about people, places, and public. it is changing all of those things, changing the people you work with. if you work at google, a student at a university, just change it up. --somewhere else and work at with people you don't normally work with. at biocurious, nobody works there, it is a nonprofit, volunteer run. everybody that comes is there by choice. nobody is made to come. which is very different from your normal job or corporation. changing the places, so you get different people. , if you work in

an office, go to the other side of the office and switch seats with somebody. it sounds crazy but it completely changes your view and your experience. lastly, public. if you have a project at your office that you think nobody would ever be interested in, you have told your friends about it, bring them in. bring them into work on your project, whatever it is. maybe it is accounting. maybe it's human resources. maybe it is designing better lightbulbs for projectors. if you just bring people in, there is something interesting about it. that is what we have done at biocurious, create these open projects for the public and bring people in. that is the summary of what i have experienced at biocurious. really about the curiosity.

istarted to say, biocurious 10 letters, three of the letters are bio, and seven are curious. that is the right balance. it is the reason for people to come together to be curious about something, because we are not allowed to be curious about other things. there are a lot of things -- can you really be curious about climate change? it is so scary you cannot even wrap your freaking head around it. this is a topic that you can be curious about and do research. that is what we have helped build. profit in is a 5013 c sunnyvale, open to the public. we would love to give anyone a tour or a class. we would love to hear from you. my e-mail is tito@biocurious.org.

i just got accepted to many labs , which is a branch of the gordon and betty more foundation . i am trying to take some of the lessons i learned from biocurious and apply them to climate change. goodu think that is a idea, great. if you think that is a terrible idea, let me know. thank you all very much. [applause] pete shanks.e

work?s that i want to set this up -- are there any basketball fans here? it seems plausible. i think we have three different complement three presentations great.n, which is i am going to focus more on the big capital, although they all tie them together. this is my first introduction to .omputers this famous 1960's slogan button

-- the all loved development of computer technology, a lot of people are drawn parallels between that and biotechnology in various ways. some of that is reasonable. some of it is a little off. -- noti actually worked directly on this kind of , but i sent requests to the department to produce data , which is about smartphone level of power, not quite sure. this is really where people have tried to make comparisons, i think, between the homebrew computing of the early mid 70's, which definitely lead to apple.

and woz in the famous garage. still, we move on. by 1981i was working in a type shutting -- typesetting shop with a mini refrigerator. it worked. i bought myself a computer. that is not me. that is someone else. that is the computer i bought. it was a lot of fun. xerox star famous that turned jobs on. i saw one here in san francisco, where a designer was using one of the earliest ones to design it. --t jobs produced was back mac. whereupon it stopped being a thinkers game. ac was sealed.

you had to have professionals to deal with it, expanded, and so on. around the time the wind was getting going, the human genome was trying to figure out how many genes people had. they really didn't know. they did not know until shortly before the end of it, almost by an order of magnitude. most people were guessing 100,000. it was a nice, round number. be 20,000, 23,o some have said 19. it is all in the general area,

which is interesting. it would not have happened without advances in computing technology. can you read this one? it is one of my favorite cartoons. god has to change the password. you have all of this basically digitized information about the , and what do we do with it? we tinker. that is what we do, that is what biocurious is doing on some point,although at this they are using computers more like the ones that take up full rooms. you need to do gene editing. if you are saying the gene is running things and you want to change the way they run, well, they have been working on that for 25 years. something like that. there is a history already in

this, although as elliott mentioned, the big jump was three or four years ago when getper -- and we will not into it because nobody can explain how it does it. i have been looking for an explanation for an intelligent layperson. at some point, if you are intelligent enough to all -- follow it, you fall into this black box. targetles scientists to exactly, with close success, exactly where a given gene is because the other wish to shut .ff or replace that is sort of like jobs and the mac. that is it. you don't need to know any more than that. it is worth knowing that it is

point, thatat this there is an error factor involved, working on reducing the error factor, but conceptually, that happens so of course, people started experimenting on embryos, human embryos. the first paper came out just a year ago from now where some chinese scientists had attempted to make alterations in vitro in embryos. they were using embryos that were left over from ivf and they had chromosomal damage so that they could not be used for reproduction. it actually failed. there were a few changes that were incorporated, but mostly they did not. some of the changes were not as

predict it. it was a failed experiment, but it showed you could do something. just think about it a moment. that is scary. basically, the scientific world oops, we have to talk about this. what should we do, can we do, wet should we do --shouldn't do? it is continuing. in february, the u.k. government officially gave approval, in principle, to a particular research team to do a particular kind of experiment on embryos. i actually do trust them that they will limit it to 14 days, that they will not be implanted. there is no question of making a genetically modified person out

of this. but still, that is crossing a big bridge. i do not want to get into the , theion controversy question of where life begins, but i think you can be stilltely pro-choice and talk about this. you have to figure out the appropriate responses. maybe this research could be valuable. under what conditions? what are the limits, what should we do? when you know it, last week, another chinese team did another with theperiments attempt to make embryos that are resistant to hiv because there that there aree some genetic combinations that

do make people unusually resistant to hiv. attractive.hat is still did not work, really. but it sort of did. in theof the scientists field put it, it did not tell us anything that we did not already know, so why do the experiment? that stuff is moving very fast. it is right on us, right now. if we cannot get some kind of consensus, then we could be in trouble. i included this one, which is why i have crispr in particular. chart,,an see from this i think you can take in the numbers are heading in the same direction. gene editing is far

cheaper, quicker than other technologies, although other technologies are actually more advanced in terms of getting toward clinical trials. but you just look at that number on the bottom left, the one i put the oval around and you go, oh. credit where it is due, these two are generally thought to be the discoverers of crispr. at university of san francisco, emmanuelle is now at the university of berlin. another is at harvard. he holds the patent right now

because of, basically that law -- patent laws. his holding of it has been appealed. , either berkeley will get the patent, or harvard will get it. we probably will not know for another couple of years. and it could be worth a lot of money. it may be worth nothing. we don't know that. church is always worth mentioning in this, too. he is from the new england side of things. he's the one with the beard, if you didn't know. quotable the most mainstream radical scientist. he is really in favor of doing

this stuff. he has talked about making himself virus free, reconstituting the mammoth, he talks about a lot of things. .e is a real, true believer the point i want to make, this is coming back to the jobs and wozniak thing. these eight 50's. hippies. these are very successful professionals and they have a lot of money behind them. they all founded companies. some details on some of them. so it goes.

i have forgotten what it was. originally it had a terrible name and then somebody came up , which is supposed to be gene editing for humans, basically. we are talking hundreds of millions right there, right now, already. intellia is a joint venture with andother company, caribou, novartis, a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, a bunch of venture similarly,and several hundred million dollars.

another company in boston. companies -- countries do not read too much to these people, they move all over. bayer,llion deal with and lots more money. as they say. so that is the context. i want to put the big question, as i see it. government regulation, and control, of which people, by which people, and for which people? ,his is something where we can i think, tito and biocurious have an interest in this as well. i think some of us have a philosophical interest, some of us have a financial kind of interest. social equitye a

interest. some of us just have safety interest. but what can we do, what should , when should we be able to do it, who decides, and how do we decide? it is kind of a big deal. i am sure that biocurious does not want to generate anything that is going to be a pathogen that gets out of the lab that causes damage. in fact, i would like to hear you talk about that maybe at some point. what, if any, protections need to be made at that level. ,f you are talking about diy you are talking about hundreds of different locations, all of them small. if you look at it as being a problem, that is not easy to

regulate at all. on the other hand, if you are intellia, editas, they have a billion dollars. that is not easy to regulate. they have access to the things.s to get around cgs and ist throw in are closely associated, and i completely agree, i think we germlineaw a line at intervention, meaning heritable. cells, alex, sperm, precursors of them, and then later on embryos. if you make changes to them, the changes go into what is known as

the germline, the human genome in general, they get replicated and go on. it down toplified seven reasons not to do it. i am not actually sure where my timing is. maybe you could just look at them there. who are you doing the experiment on, number one. , itou are producing a baby is just an unethical experiment. you don't know what is going to happen. there are sufficient variables that are unknown and unquantifiable, and could have really profound health effects. as a being sold to us medical cure for heritable genetic diseases, but a point of fact, on almost all of those, you can actually avoid them by

beginning. full there are very, very few cases cannoth a given couple have a related child that is .ealthy honestly, they are overstating the medical benefit, in my opinion. and they are doing it by treating people like things. that ties them with some of the stuff that elliott was raising questions about. of humanityeritage is a term that the world health organization came up with. there has been a lot of talk about these in the last 40 years , because people have realized

bioethicistsonals, and viewing the collective human genome as part of our common heritage, that is something that the european union and unesco, i is on have both agreed the level of being sacred, whether or not you are religious in any conventional terms, but there are a bunch of nations, which actually have put that into law, that you should not germline interventions. so if some people try to do it, it is really going to be the cap among the pigeons.

it is also very unpopular according to the opinion polls. and we really need science to be trusted. look at climate change. i imagine most of the people in this room accept the anthropogenic climate change as a reality, and questions about how we might deal with it. we are living in a society where a lot of people hold anti-vaccination beliefs. areeliefs, many of which based on extremely dubious, if not false, claims. we need science. we all need to be able to trust in science. and broadly, the scariest thing that woke up me into this is the id of a techno eugenics whereby

a few people could get very expensive enhancements for their as professor silver than 15 yearsmore ago now, and up dividing us into naturals.h and the the ideas that the class divisions in our society would become genetically reinforced is just horrifying to me. the center for genetics and society in front of the earth put a report last december, which i was the lead iveter on, a collect effort, which has a lot more on what is going on today and it is available at both of the or you can just search

for it. and finally, this is jennifer udna, once the discovery is made, it is out there. anybody with basic molecular biology training to use it for genome editing. that is a bit scary. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> ok, now it is the chance where everybody to get into the conversation. who is ready to jump in with a question or a comment or angry rebuttal? i have a million questions.

i will start. i will stand back here in minute. i really appreciated trying to frame the questions in terms of democratic participation, elliot, you did that in the beginning, and i think everybody comes back to that inevitably, and i wonder if you can all speak a little bit about this. i'm driven by the fascination that all of us in our relationship to the work we do, whether we do it as an exchange for money as a job or as biocurious participants do because they're fascinated and curious, to what extent do we bring with that experience an ability and responsibility to participate in deciding what we are doing and why the hell we are doing it? and from the biocurious point of view, do you have philosophical

discussions? what is this for? why are we doing this? why is this interesting? we all like little games that we can solve problems. is there a larger mission that's debated? and in terms of the mainstream and highly capitalized bioengineering world, how much are you encountering technicians, people who do the work in the labs and the scientists who are willing to engage in ethical terms and in terms of we make the world with the work we do, and this is one of those moments where it's super in our face, and it feels like it's not discussed, some of the fascination and the implication of science and technology is simply underdiscussed and the fascination overrides all the possibilities of stopping of why am i here in the planet and what the hell am i doing, so i kind of just want to start the

discussion happening. i invite all three of you to respond however you like and i'm sure by then other people will jump in -- whoever wants to go first. mr. shanks: one of the things -- is this on? yeah. in my experience people don't like talking about human genetic modification. it freaks people out. now, there are some people that it's a minority, i think, there are some people who are for it, who, you know, i want to be green, i want to have horns, i want to do all kinds of things. but most people who are -- and i'm talking about people who are concerned with g.m. foods, you think they'd be a natural audience for jumping into this discussion? most of them go, yuck, really that's about it.

it's hard to get the discussion going because people don't want to take part of it because it's scary. >> so i want to answer this in two ways because i think it's a really important question, and so i think in the curriculum, right, when you're actually -- taking biology at uc berkeley, there is this idea right now that it is messy and get in the way,. i did not know what sociology was until i was in law school. that is when i knew i need sociology right now. this is complicated stuff and we are talking about it is

politically neutral, and i hadly need sociology, so i to work that into my curriculum even though it was not available. they havek com been having conversations when the rumor started occurring. people knew this was happening before april 2015. both were journals rejected the paper. the knew this was going on. we have to get out ahead of this, we have to start talking i am this, and i think glad they are considering this and we have a responsibility to talk about this and putting and trying to have the conversation, at least scientists and regulators, with international countries. if you ask a lot of people on the street right now could we

make genetically modified humans, i don't think they would know. if we are relying upon the idea scientists trickling down to a public discussion, i don't think that's sufficient at all and i think, you know, i think it really has to do with the fact we bifurcated science to stem away from humanity and away from having ethical discussions. >> so the question i heard was biocurious a place where people come in to participate hands-on, and i think one of the things we started at biocurious we were always open to bringing people in for presentations and give them a tour of the lab because that was a very new thing, people had never been to a lab before. and what we started doing was getting people involved in

environments, and it was not just hearing about it with your head, but feeling it with your body and your hands and seeing what do you think of this stuff, and the idea is that gives a better perspective to come at it, is this right, is this wrong. i have some experience with it, and now it's -- i know there's a lot in science if you expose more science, then they'll be ok with science. that's like rubbish. i don't really believe in it. we get a lot of people at biocurious that come in, here is what i think of this, here is why i am not comfortable with this. we do a live discussion. we have -- just as another important piece of information, biocurious is a biosafety level one lab. it is the equivalent of a high school biology lab.

that's by design, if you give me a board and a lever, i can move the earth. it's not like if i had a billion dollar harvard lab, then i could move the earth. it's about let's give people a few of the basic tools that are safe and then we can kind of experiment and be curious. it's like creating a sand box for biology. something where people can try things and given these certain boundaries, we don't do anything with human cells, anything pathogenic is not happening and not allowed at biocurious. we have a safety board that reviews projects that come in. we have a completely open lab like this. there aren't doors and locks. you can walk up and see what somebody is doing and ask them. we take safety very seriously and i think that the best proof of that is if somebody comes up with an experiment that we know is total crap and it's never

going to work, but safe, great, we've done our job. and that's the idea, is we know this is never going to work, but as long as it's safe, that's exactly what biocurious is for, this sandbox where you can experiment and ask questions. i've seen a huge transformation in people with everybody being happy and excited and then went home and that was it to -- we did the powerpoint presentations and bring it to the lab, hey, here is this experiment. i remember this guy, we were doing -- what was it? it was something with flowers and, you know, people are following instructions. this one guy jumps in and turns red like the color of your shirt and everybody was like, whoa, it was a mistake, but for a moment everybody was, wow, that's a cool color. this mistake wasn't a mistake,

it was actually you got to try something and depending on what you thought working was it was pretty cool. and it was something that was safe, you know, something that you did have the boundaries to try that. and that's why biocurious is a level one lab, is it is constrained so that you can experiment and be curious. >> thanks. so, chris, i'm going to take a stab at your question, actually, about whether the scientists who are in the front lines of developing these gene editing technologies, do they talk about why they're doing it and what it's for? you know, i think it's a complicated and important question, and you can't generalize. some of the scientists that you saw on the slides, george i'm

thinking of, he's an enthusiast about technology. i think he is also biocurious. george church also starts every talk by putting a slide up that has, i don't know, 20, 25 corporate logos on it, and says this is my conflict of interest statement, and everybody laughs and then we move on. and so it's a combination that can be very powerful and very poisonous between financial incentives, power incentives. wow, we are changing the world, we are changing life. curiosity, and just, you know, i'm -- there's the mountain, i'm going to climb it. but i don't think we can underestimate the force and the dynamics of money, of commercial forces that take on their own

momentum, and i really appreciated pete's analogy to the personal computer market and we can see how much that can change the world and how much technology really does affect how we -- you know, who we live, -- how we live who lives, our , circumstances of life, and yet we don't have -- we don't really have common mechanisms of democratic participation and democratic control over the shapes of technologies, and we don't have habits of mind where we think about what that might mean. and i think that's a very dangerous situation that we are in. i think it certainly was with the technologies that we see have so much control over our lives, the ones that are causing climate change that got started a couple hundred years ago, the information technology that have changed our lives in our own lifetimes, and now the life sciences that are really poised to do that.

and i think, you know, it's -- you know, so now i want to come to tito and the emphasis on curiosity, and, boy, i can really resonate with that and it's attractive with the idea of sandbox and idea of experimenting sounds a lot of fun. but i wanted to tell a story about a colleague of ours, he's a developmental biologist, stewart newman. when he was a kid in high school, he wanted to be a physicist. he also grew up in a political family and had a political understanding of the world, and he he decided he was going to keep science and politics completely separate from each other and so he decided to be a developmental biologists and of

course, nothing worked out the way he thought and now he's deeply involved in the politics of biology and the reason i tell the story to make it totally clear is we can't really separate that very well. and when we focus so much on the coolness of being able to play in the sandbox of biotechnology, i get worried that unless there's also -- i think this is maybe what you were alluding to, chris -- unless there's a very deliberate and very completely entwined effort to understand the political forces, the commercial forces, the social and cultural forces in the larger world, then those technological developments are going to run away with us and the techno enthusiasts are going to be left in the sandbox

wondering what hit them. in fact, what happened to steve wosniak that we never hear about, most of us because steve jobs took the mac and apple where he took it. >> yeah, i mean, hopefully we can move after away from bioethics, one of the things is i'm reminding of 16 years ago when eduardo katz, a brazilian artist, did the glowing rabbit and he contracted a french laboratory to fuse this jellyfish gene and made a glowing rabbit. and when this became public, there is a huge backlash, and

that he was willing to experiment and try it, and he was playing with it. but, you know, they were all kinds of questions about bioethics. i don't know if i have a question with this, but i feel like there's a lot of pushing today with arts and science and all these programs are programs in schools are merging, and i just wonder what's your opinion on that. >> anybody want to take a stab at that? >> yeah, i mean, i think it's really fascinating. so i scan the news every morning

when i get into the office, was seeing san jose has -- parts, people are thinking of putting together organisms in a more mechanical way. one thing i appreciate is the art that is the problem of what is happening, and that is important. heather has done a piece where she goes around new york city and collects gum off the street and tries to come up with phenotype of what the person would look like and she has a gallery of faces. this idea that we think dna is anonymous, and don't worry, we don't worry, we will take your name off of it. progressive,cience like maybe they could. maybe we can become just through a piece of gum on the sidewalk. i think that's fascinating, so, yeah, i don't know. art goes in any direction. does anyone want to talk about art? no.

ok. >> next question. >> i want to ask a direct question, maybe you can answer it because i'm getting a lot of comments and i'm not hearing a response to the comments necessarily, and maybe there aren't questions to these comments, but is there a red line in terms of where you do not go beyond in terms of science and discovery? and, i mean, i can see how this new technology might offer a cure to cancer, for example, and would you want to draw a line that would prevent scientists to take the step beyond what you feel may be ethical, where the rewards, whether it's financial, political, whatever, at the end of the day, it could be a cure for a very serious disease. so what is the red line? and not the obama red line, but

a real red line. [laughter] mr. shanks: the line that i draw personally is heritability. i have no problem with gene therapy, the kind that restores the way a person is, was, thought they were. and they are doing a lot of work on tumor analysis and all this stuff about the genome of the cancer as opposed to the genome of the person and then if they can do an intervention there. it might be a way towards curing cancer, which i think would be great. i prefer to keep it that one simple line because it is simple

and i'm willing to give up -- i'm willing to disappoint a very few people who could not have related children without, you know, a genetic intervention of that kind. there are very few of them, not many, and it would disappoint them. i don't think that -- i think that the consequences of opening up the society to having heritable, genetic alterations are horrendously wrong and potentially widespread, and so that's a line you can draw. when it comes to modified fish,

and you know, glowing fish in tanks, glowing plants, i'm not sure about plants on the street. i don't like that myself. but i think there are much more complicated discussions that we can have. buy this want to have a discussion and make a call just decision. i don't have individuals, no matter how well intentioned they may think they are to run the rest of us. so we talk. >> to add to what pete said, that line that pete just described, yes to genetic modification in existing patients who can consent to it and all that, if it's safe and if it can be made accessible

and not so expensive so most of us cannot afford it, great. but not just pete, but many scientists and bioethicists and laws of dozens of countries, they draw the line that pete described where we are not going to modify genes that are passed down to future children to future generations. and the reason for it are the ones pete showed and not safe and jumping down to the very last point, open it is door to, you know, new kinds of discrimination, new kinds of inequality, a new high-tech eugenetics, and that's not the road we want to down on. [indiscernible] it is not a cure. the most medical statement you could make would be it would

prevent the birth of a child, to avoid the birth of a child with that condition, but as pete said, we can already do that in other ways. everyone who is at risk can have a healthy child, and almost everyone, like 99.99%, can have a child who is both unaffected by that condition and who's related to both members of the couple, both parents, so we don't need it for medical reasons. and the conclusion that many people come to, is that, in fact, if the medical argument is that tenuous people, whether they admit it or not, they really want enhancements. they want to have children and future generations who are somehow improved genetically, and there we are in dangerous territory socially.

[indiscernible] >> i had a great statement earlier and i have been thinking it over. i think your question was, what is the role of curiosity? saying --is this curiosity is this saying it -- is this thing you can separate or can you separate technology from society? one of my favorite experts -- excerpts that inspired me, as a technologist, i approached the world for a long time, this idea how technology changes society. and what open my eyes was when i looked at the reverse. how does society change technology? how does our drive to find cures, how is that social how

, does that drive designs that happens? this idea of a red line, how does that drive science? what i have seen at biocurious, is it is about curiosity, about lampwork, but also about the ethical questions, the pricing questions, what is an expert, what is the role of experts and send all this information off with experts and we will trust them to have it work? one experiment that comes to test we did --b w it was a dna test, a test for breast cancer, and however efficient it is does not matter. what matters is the $2000 patented test. and what i can tell you that i wish you could his experience was it costs about 20 cents of

chemicals and it would be illegal for us to sell as a product. we were able to do it as a lab, and if people take it from this intellectual idea that i did this experiment and so did a bunch of other people, and we got to ask the question, what is up with that? is that right? is that how things should be? how might they be different? there was the question of technologists who say it does , not have to be this way. in some ways it is good because it means the test tested with your doctor so it is not just people testing themselves. it sparks all these questions of curiosity around science and curiosity around the bigger questions of science and society. i think that bracket test puts it in perspective because it is pennies of chemicals and stuff you can order online, and if you have the right machines that

used to cost a lot, tens of thousands, millions of dollars, now it is stuff you can buy on ebay used and see how it works. so how should that -- it is a great example because it is such a stark contrast. here is this test that costs a little and takes very little expertise, but on this other side, it is inaccessible unless you have thousands of dollars. scientifically, it is a boring experiment. your mixing a couple chemicals together. not a big deal from a biology standpoint. it is a procedure that is used for dozens, thousands of other types of experiments. but in this case, that specific sequence of dna you're looking at, i have a lot of other questions that are attached to it, and that as an example of how this curiosity in bringing other people in to that discussion is pretty powerful.

i think it is potentially a really great way to enhance science, to bring people in and be curious about science, the curious about culture and society, be curious about economics, about startups, about the philosophy behind what it does is right or wrong. so thank you for your question. >> pete, i hear your arguments about the human genome editing, but i want to challenge what you are saying in saying this is not where we want to draw the line in terms of talking about ethics, because i think in some ways we are falling victim to cognitive ease, when we think about human editing being hard-lined that he can draw in terms of bioethics. i think it is easy for the public to look at that and form opinions on that. i want to track back to some of the things that tito and elliot were talking about.

before i do that, i want to make points of things i see in the field. easy is relative. you make this claim about how genome editing is becoming easier and easier. i think the point has to be -- i think the point has to be made that we have run into significant challenges, making even the smallest changes in mammalian cells, so more evolved organisms are harder to edit. that has to do basically because their dna is more protected. bacteria have dna that is completely unprotected, so they are malleable in terms of what we can change. i think there is a scale issue that is hard to grasp when talking about changing bacteria. we think of a bacteria something we can change, modify, and throw away. if something has changed our world it has been bacteria. our whole evolutionary history has been changes that has been

driven by changes in bacteria. i question is, how do we engage the public on these huge, massive-scale issues where something very simple comes very complex in a global context? and the question i have for you, tito, is, where we could define the bounds of safety? you talk about the simplest things that at least currently are not pathogenic, but if you draw analogy to coding, computing programming is very subtle. there's nothing dangerous about computer programming, but in the right hand, the simplest tools can be developed into something that is not the plan not safe. a safe bacteria can be made unsafe. so how do we navigate these nebulous issues that are difficult for the nonscientific public to think about and engage in? >> that's a wonderful question. i think what's interesting is that a lot of the work that's been done by scientists to try

to make this issue, which is super complex, super nebulous and super global, is to try to make it simple by using metaphors. i think the metaphors can be helpful for public buy-in, but they have downsides. so when pete was talking about the series of genome editing tools, we talked about it splicer, every news outlet will make reference to a word processor, it's as easy as cut and paste. but it's not. and not only that, but again, i want to bring it back to the point of genetic determinism. it's not computer code. we use computer code to think about it, to try to understand it. but there's so many levels of ambiguity, and the fact that we refer to 98% of the genome as junk d.n.a. is a problem, that we're going to be cutting and pasting it.

it's really hard, you want public buy-in, but at the same time, this is an issue that's way bigger than christopher, it's way bigger than any particular field of science. and the point i tried to make earlier, they the idea that we treat the public like they're stupid, you have to have expertise to talk about stem. and i love the fact that, like you're saying, some people hated their biology class and didn't feel like they could be curious or make mistakes because there's a sort of expertise involved. we can't keep referring to scientists as the people we need to go out and people what's up. i think what marcy is saying with the idea of we need new ways of shaping technology, that means taking the public seriously. that's recognizing that we all have expertise and that it's influencing technology and science as well. you don't just get expertise working at burger king. you are part of this debate and you're important and your voice matters.

and so much -- we went to the summit in d.c., and as amazing as it was, right, to be rubbing elbows with nobel laureates, there was a certain point when the conversation edged toward sociology, where you saw famous people rolling their eyes at us. and it was frustrating. but like, you know, what can you do? so i think we really have to get away from the idea that public engagement means talking down to people about what science is and try to bring them into the conversation of, science isn't about experts telling us what is safe, especially when so many of these risks are bigger than the biological risk, they're about social and political risk. what does this mean on a global scale? we don't have an easy answer for how to convey this to the public without this metaphor that we use, gene editing, because we want to make it something people

can attach. but we need to complicate that met forand once we have people's attention, complicate it again. this isn't actually gene editing. mr. jankowski: trying to think of the right answer to your question. your question was, -- >> how do we deal with the unknown unknowns of synthetic biology? maybe it's genome editing or something much more general. mr. jankowski: i can tell you how we do it at biocurious, how i think personally about it. we have a safety board that reviews each project that comes in. we're a b.s.l. 1 lab, biosafety level one, which is simple

requirements. there's nothing pathogenic new -- pathogenic, no human cells, nothing that can be harm to feel humans. we look at the projects that come in. look in a different direction, to me, safety is around bring manager people into the work and into the conversation. i think that the brca-1 experiment i talked about was one thing. it's not about bringing people to be pro science. it's an opportunity for science outreach they feel word "outreach," you're kind of like grabbing for people, to grab them or something. i think the opportunity is really to go to where people are, talk about topics that they're interested. in brca-1 is a great one. it's not about is science good or is science something we should leave for other people, but instead here's this experiment.

it has to do with a test for breast cancer. what do you think? let's get all the information so you can wrap your head around it. g.m.o.'s, that's a giant topic. to me that's where my concerns about safety come in -- it's about what is unsafe is when people aren't up to speed on this stuff. people don't feel like they can have an opinion. people feel like they're not -- this is something that should -- we should leave to other people. i think the real opportunity for science and the public is, the public doesn't exist. it's you, it's you, it's you, it's you, it's you, like there's no public out there. if you're not engaged in these conversations, that's it. if you are, great. but if you're not, then, like, come check out biocurious or start, you know, reading stuff online and talking to other people about it. that's what's missing, is you.

and that's how things become safer and more engaging. we can have you involved in the conversation. i just want to say thank you to everybody asking these fantastic questions tonight. they're very thought-provoking questions. thank you. >> as to how to address the public, i'm going to come back to both of your comments. i think art is a wonderful way of doing it, the bio art. because artists can take risks, they're not ruining the reputation, which is, i think, a concern for a lot of scientists. and it can reach a general public in a large way and in very creative ways and they -- the fluorescent rabbit, alba, that created so much discussion about some of what we're talking

about here, and he never even got the rabbit, you know. it wound up dying in a lab in france. but the point being that what his piece became about was the discussion that happened based on what he did. there's a lot of other artists that are working in a biofield that are doing very, i would say, controversial content, selarc is one of them who cloned an ear and mounted it on his arm because no one would mount it at his ear to give him a third ear. you've got scientists and artists working together. i think they can reach a broad audience. i wonder what you all think of that because it winds up dealing with some of the very hard topics we've been talking about in a very public way, but it does start a discussion that is sometimes hard to do in other venues.

>> so one of the things i was going to put in the slides that i didn't have time for, i got like 20 slides. most of them were things like the facebook drone, i'll get into that later. but there's a person, ryan hammond, doing this thing called open gender codes, open source gender codes, i'm forgetting the name right now, i'm sorry. he started in baltimore at a diy lab, i'm forgetting the name of the lab too. it was in the slide. so he's working really at the intersection of d.i.y. hacking and also sort of queer theory. what he's doing is trying to draw attention to a lot of problems you're talking about, the brca-1 test. he said what if we could not only bring queer people to the lab but bring the lab to queer people. it is interesting because he is doing a lot of things at once. i'm not even sure if what he's

trying to do is going to take off or if it's safe but he's genetically modifying tobacco plants so you could grow your own gender hormones if you're trying to use those hormones. a lot of things he's engaging, he's got his three-minute kick starter video, but he's got a 20-minute video of queer history and all this knowledge, and it's wonderful because he's talking about what he's trying to do. what i'm seeing out of this is, yes, i agree, privatized health care is crap. and the amount of surveillance and control over queer and transbodies for hundreds of years and the forcible hormone therapies that people went through is crap. and i really am really engaged with this. at the end of the day, i'm also not sure if the hormones that they're going to extract from tobacco plants will be safe or if people will know if their hormone levels are getting in dangerous zones. it raises questions for me. i appreciate how much work he's put into it, this 20 minute video going through the history, explaining why it's important. i think it's fascinating.

i think it's also a question of, like, ok, there's certain things we can't control and there's certain things sometimes the market takes out of our hands, the wosniaks. sometimes you create something beautiful and the market takes it over and it becomes something else system of what can do to make sure that even our best intentions, right, that there's some kind of containment strategy that they don't, kind of, get away from us is one of the things i'm thinking about. mr. shanks: it doesn't really speak to your question, but it sort of provoked a thought. a couple of thoughts. one is that when i got into this -- marcy's fault. there was a presentation, there was a reading list at the end and i went and read it. i went, this is a reductio ad

absurdum of modern capitalism. doing human genetic engineering is just -- it's the logical extreme of modern capitalism as we've seen it. and i went, we'll point that out to people and maybe we'll have a revolution. well, it didn't really sort of work out yet. you know what i mean? but i think there's some truth to that. and i think we have to remember that all these things are rooted in the social and the financial setup that we've got, including art. there's very little art nowadays that is not trammeled by financial considerations.

for, you know, pretty easy and a valid reason. and just as the evening is winding down a bit i want to make sure that one other thing gets in, which is related to money and technology, which is that we don't like saying, for very good reason, that we're spending a million bucks to give someone a heart transplant. it's coming out of insurance or the government or even their own pocket, you know. so that million bucks, we're talking round numbers here, you could treat 10,000 pregnant women. something? you know? you could do major health interventions for a very large number of people. and i think that's a really difficult problem to think about. we in this society value the individual, i'm an individual, i want to get treated if i'm -- if i'm ill.

i was ill a couple of years ago. i got treated. it cost me directly practically nothing because i have good insurance. but it cost the system quite a lot. now, i know people, i've seen people in watsonville and salinas who, frankly, whole families would have benefited from what was spent on me. i wasn't even dying. so i'm just tossing that, you know, technically irrelevant but i think it does help to ground everything in the societal context. >> i think a lot of what we need to think about more in this conversation is helping us all do it a little more than we get to do it in our daily lives is the context of technological choice. how it's implemented, how it's invented, how it's applied, etc. i want to reinforce the point

about claiming expertise back from the experts. i think that's at the heart of the discussion and crucially part of what we need to do with this particular realm of technology. obviously there's things about it that's dangerous that we need to know about those limits on their own terms. but just to point out, things equally dangerous, like nuclear power used to be left to guys in white lab coats to tell us it was safe and don't worry you it, you don't need to meter it. but we as average citizens learned about this, by having conversations like this, and working hard grass roots organizing. another case in point is how much medical care changed because of women organizes themselves to organize their own health care over the last 50 years. these are incredibly good examples of society appropriating technical knowledge from experts and diffusing it broadly in the population so we don't accept experts as readily as we once did.

and in this case i think that's helpful. that said, i want to put out it's obvious, the guy that left , already was putting out the cancer magic bullet is the holy grail of this technology, like there is always some version of that lurking out there. there's a pitch, we'll all live forever, be immortal, never be sick again, fill in the blank. there's some fantasy like that. i think all those things are obviously sales pitches. and that the reality is technology is invented and controlled by people who plan to make huge profits. i was interested about the fact that you were able to duplicate this very expensive test essential for nothing in a lab and i wondered to what extent it brought forth a political conversation in that room about how ridiculous it is that somebody is allowed to control these patents on these technologies. that's like what's happened to software and digital media in general. that's an exciting implication hiding in there.

the last thing, to give you the possibility, push all the stuff aside for a moment, is there any reason why we should be excited about this stuff? what is your best case fantasy of where we're going with this? because i can't think of one. i wonder what it would be. maybe you guys who have been immersed in this in various -- combating it or welcoming it as the case may be might offer some vision that gives us a reason to think, well, we should spend some time and energy on this as a society because it does have implications that are worth pursuing. i don't know what those are. i'm not convinced there are in. -- there are any. maybe you guys have a better idea. that was a sprawl. do what you will. mr. jankowski: the brca experiment i talked about, that is, like i said, scientifically we can do the science in an hour. the science is -- if you've done other experiments, you've seen the same science. we're just changing the letters

around and now it's completely different. it does bring up those questions. whether it comes up with a conclusion you have that it's a ridiculous system, no, it comes up with different answers. people have different perspectives from, you know, it costs money to develop these tests. it was 20 years ago that it was patented. all the way to, yeah, it's completely ridiculous and should be open sourced and what can we do to make it open sourced, maybe take a patent and modify it just enough to make it open source. that's something i did with pcr, the prelim chain reaction, it's nobel prize winning technology in every biolab in the world. originally it was a patented technology. when patents expired in 2010, a friend and i started building pci machines in our garage, put it on kick starter, and the stories i got were fantastic. they were from, one that comes to mind a high school teacher who, she wrote me and said, you know, i had written all the

people on kick starter and said, why did you buy one of these things? have you seen it? it's a blob of wires, why did you buy it? the lady said, you know, i'm just closing out my semester of high school biology, and i bought a machine on ebay because we don't have much budget. when i turned it on, it broke because it was a used machine. my students didn't get to do pcr this year. my hope is that by building this machine, my students get to do the experiment and students everywhere get to do this experiment system of i think whether it's a lab tool that kicks off a discussion around patents -- it comes through the perspective of biotech. my whole understanding of how to

be democratic and how to vote comes from this one time where we were at california voting on whether gmo's should be labeled or not and i went really, really as deep as i could into, i read the bills, i had never done anything like that before. i read all this stuff on it tried to figure it out. and so i think that back to your question about, what can be -- what's promising about that? it's curiosity. curiosity is what's promising. whether it's biotechnology or something else. we're culturing that curiosity. whether it's about policies, whether it's about patents, whether it's about biotech or about something that's completely unrelated to biotech. it allows people to get interested and learn something, because every piece of the universe is connected to every other piece of the universe. that's a butchering of a john muir quote. but that's completely true. you can't separate society and technology. and what you really do is embrace that they're the same thing in a lot of ways. it's all connected together.

so from my perspective, biotech and curiosity is the way, that's the door for me and maybe for somebody else it's something different. but i think it always starts with some type of curiosity. >> so i struggle with this question, right, of what is the best case scenario for biotech and i think so much of it is, when we're going best case scenario, worst case scenario, things like that, it's in this vacuum. we're thinking like, the context won't influence it somehow, and i think the -- so the human gee project. we remember in 2000, get on the stage and they're like, guess what, you guys, we're 99.9% the same.

and everyone was so excited, oh, finally, right, we have all this commonality, like, it's so wonderful. what immediately happens? what immediately happens is that we start mining that .01%, call it race, call it sexuality, and call it everything. like, you know, so i don't know, for me i want to harness the passion and curiosity that i see free throwing in your biocurious labs and turn it away from the cool stuff and away from the technology and all that stuff and i want to put it back on to this idea of social problems and it's not so much about the curiosity of what we can do or what we can fix or what we can make happen. maybe it's about the curiosity of what happens next. what are the consequences of our actions? so much of this world we're living in right now is so high risk. it's like, you know, we're assuming that nine out of 10 startups will fail and don't care because 10% will be so amazing. and like -- but what about that 90% of what we're doing? i want to be curious about that i want to be curious about how rapidly this neighborhood has changed in the last 10 years and

how i can go to school three years and watch gentrification happen block by block. so maybe it's that we're focusing on the wrong things. maybe biotechnology could be really awesome but maybe we need to marry it to a lot of other things first. like maybe this is like the original question that you asked. you know, what is -- are we having ethical, philosophical, should we do these conversations at the same time as we're experimenting in the lab? i think your space is lovely because it's exploring those connections, but on a day-to-day, funded lab level, i don't think it's happening. and if that's going to continue to happen, then it's going to be the elite who has those degrees, who are making the tools and has the p.r. people to sell the tools to the public. and that scares me system, and so if we look at the human joe gnome project as an example,

genome project as an example, even though we can be fwiven this beautiful message from biotech, market forces, centuries of racism, you know, systems of privilege will warp that beauty system of we need to really start looking at these social problems beyond technology. we can solve so many of them with humanity. like we don't need, you know, like techno fix for climate change. we don't need a techno fix for global inequality. we could literally just, you know, do other things instead. [applause] yourhad to come up with -- brilliant statement right now, elliott, exactly what you are getting too. part of my question was answered by your brilliant statement already. but as a layperson and artist also, the concept of danger or safety within tinkering or playing or being curious with

science and that maybe, you know, just like that metaphor with the small lever you can move the world kind of thing, the degree of danger really has only to do with the extent to which science is separated as you were saying from, not just ethics and sociology, but also a greater vision and what our purpose really is. and one thing i wanted to add to that is like two things, one, the space a space that cultivates just a core curiosity a awesome and also harnessable, as you were saying, to greater things. it is not a rare thing, like my impression, very much like the american culture here is very american culture here is very much the expectation to have the brilliant individual discovering things, going where no man has

gone before and finding things. that is what i perceive the general culture to be. what is more rare and what i would love an incubator space for is the other thing. those questions we never actually ask about ok, what do we actually -- what would make life better? where do we actually want to go with this? and that this might be an afterthought for after you discover new things, what are the applications thereof. but actually be something that comes before and secondly, not only that, not being something that is perceived like a hindrance or like a dampener or wet blanket. we could do so many great things , but all of these ethical blocks are keeping us from. this attitude is actually, this process driven sort of world and all these kinds of things have actually kept us from exploring

incredible possibilities. like if we could infuse that curiosity precisely in a different way of approaching all like, what new incredible societies could we get to if we harnessed our genius in a purposeful way in that direction? you see what i mean? like turning it on its head. that is it. peter: we've really run out of time but last comment from the panel, i would welcome it. last chance. last short, sweet comment. >> i totally get what you're talking about because i've seen it. i've seen it over and over again. the biggest opportunity for biocurious 2010 was getting equipment together. getting maybe $ million worth of -- getting maybe worth of lab $1 million equipment we bought

for $20,000. tito: that was the opportunity. that opened it up to a couple thousand people. a couple thousand labs around the world. the biggest opportunity for biocurious now is giving permission to other people to come in. we've established that people that are really curious, really driven can come into biocurious and do experiments and make their way there. what the opportunity is, is to add the ability to bring in more people. to say, you have permission not to lead. you have permission to ask a lot of questions. you have permission to not have a project. i think that's the next step for biocurious is more around the basic classes, basic education, bringing in different people who have different insight into biotech and opinions on things that might involve biotech but aren't, you know, that top layer of people that are so driven they're going to drive two hours to come to a microscope project. it's amazing to see. and now the opportunity in 2016 to grow beyond that, to really

bring in people that otherwise are kind of like, yeah, i don't know really where i fit in but when you -- if you give them a place, a way to have conversations about that, they start to ask really good questions. so i get what you're saying. it's something we use. we have learned through our experience. that's the biggest opportunity for us. chris: ok, i'm going to call it a night. elliott tito, pete, thanks for , coming to see us. come back again in two weeks an d we'll have a discussion on oil, keeping oil in the soil with our panel, we'll have a very good discussion that night. and we look forward to having these kinds of conversations on an ongoing basis so if you have ideas for future panels, please talk to me. we look forward to resuming this one again, it's a discussion

that's not going to end in our lifetimes, obviously. so thank you very much. [applause] >> coming up, we will go live to the woodrow wilson center for a panel on sustainable development tools for women and girls. again, it will be live on c-span. also coming up tonight in the result from the wisconsin republican primary between paul malin.d paul mailing -- we expect to hear from speaker ryan shortly after 9:00 p.m. watch the results tonight on c-span . for more on the race, we spoke

to a political reporter. host: good morning. guest: thank you for having me. host: all eyes on paul ryan, so how serious of a challenge is it today and what are the predictions? what we have another erica cantor repeat? guest: this primary has dry lot of attention. nobody expects paul ryan to lose or even come close to losing today. he has a huge cash advantage, nearly $10 million in cash on hand in his campaign account, compared to less than 200,000 for his challenger. host: when where the numbers dated? they would have to spend them by today to make their point before election day, correct? guest: yes. but there is no indication that ryan has been spending heavily,

which you would expect him to do if you thought he was in danger. polls show ryan with an enormous lead over his challenger. host: so as people watch the returns tonight, when do we expect to know about the rhine race? race? it -- ryan guest: it depends. i would not be surprised if it was called shortly after the returns come in. as you mentioned, people have paid a lot of attention to this because thepart majority leader's loss two years ago in virginia, that took washington by shot. but if anything, the press has overcompensated here, trading somebody that is a long shot candidate as maybe a bigger threat. host: do you expect comments from donald trump tonight? he has become a figure in this campaign in the last couple of

weeks. inst: donald trump did weigh a little bit, saying, come lamenting paul -- complementing paul nehlen. spat with that his paul ryan is now over and i do not think that he will weigh in on somebody who has been blown out in a primarily -- primary. donald trump has only officially endorsed in one republican primary in the house this cycle, that was for north carolina, one of the only incumbent's to lose a primary. he does not have the best track record. host: looking around at the other races today, any incumbents in danger of losing their primaries tonight? guest: no, this has been a pretty good year for incumbents defeating challengers.

on the republican side, only three have lost so far and nobody has lost so far to 18 party kind of challenger -- tea party kind of challenger. host: there is a competitive primary happening in the second district of minnesota, the cf -- the seats of john kline, it should be competitive. what will happen there tonight and how is that election shaping up? guest: yes, there are a couple of different other open seat primaries that are expected to be decided tonight. one of them in minnesota, where john kline is retiring. he has weighed in on behalf of one of the candidates as sort of a later date, but it is expected that lewis will be the favorite there. and then also in wisconsin, the eighth district, where reid

ribble is retiring. this is a seat that they see as a top target if they want any chance to regain the majority this fall. there are two republicans facing off their -- there for the chance to hang onto the seat. one of them is a former marine. democratsmentioned looking ahead to the fall and possibility of taking control of the house, are they putting in place the candidates necessary to take advantage of a wave if it develops this fall? is the house in play? guest: democrats would certainly say that the house could be an play, although they have shied away from making really bold predictions that they are going to retake the house. they have sort of a very slim path to retaking the house, in part, because they do not have

candidates in a huge number of races. when republicans retake the house in 2010, they ran a huge number of candidates that had substantial resources, and then many of them one. where as the democrats would have to prevail in almost all the races that they are competitive in to retake the house. so it is expected to be sort of a tougher climb for them. primaries, astwo i mentioned, the one in wisconsin in the eighth district today, and minnesota, the second district. that is where they will have to win in november if they want to have any shot at all of retaking that. host: theodoric meyer is a reporter for politico. we appreciate your time and the preview of tonight's action. thank you so much. guest: thank you for having me.

>> watch the wisconsin primary after the polls close, tonight on c-span. on saturday, c-span's issue spotlight looks at train deals, the impact on the economy and the presidential election. >> we will defend american jobs and workers by saying no to big trade deals, like the chance -- transpacific partnership and unfair practices. >> those in pennsylvania have lost one third of their manufacturing jobs since the clintons put china into the wpo. >> the program includes a look at the 1994 to free-trade agreement between the united states, mexico and canada. >> this will bring us together in the cause for more jobs, for exports for the markets, and more democracy for our allies.

>> a discussion on how the founding fathers viewed free trade. >> historically, the united states simply was not a free trade nation for most of american history. u.s. is in fact a tariff protected economy, going back to the constitution. >> and an examination of the world free trade organization, the body that forces world trade rules. >> at the time it was negotiated regulations,ges of nothing inevitable here. it is supposed to be different. being negotiated, the official visors of the u.s., 500 corporate advisors -- >> watching the issue spotlight on trade deals, saturday on c-span and c-span.org. and a reminder we will be live

with this discussion on sustainable development tools for women, coming up in 20 minutes. now a look at this morning's washington journal. host: for the next 45 minutes, we will talk about public trust in corporations and corporate leadership. here is the president of the national association of corporate directors. mr. gleason, explain the you represent. guest: great to be with you. we are a membership association for both individual directors and a full corporate boards of directors. we have just shy of 18,000 members here in the u.s. and some overseas. our job is really to identify the issues making their way into the board rooms and socialize those, put them into the public and debate them a little bit and eventually they will lead us in

the boardroom. host: publicly traded companies, you represent 98% of the fortune 1000 companies. how would you describe the current state of publicly traded companies antitrust -- and trusts in those companies? guest: because of what we seen that have seen -- because of what we have seen with enron, there is skepticism and we have slowly been building that trust backup. because of performance and the turnovers, there are still some questions out there in terms of how the companies are run, what are they disclosing, and how they make money. there, job is to go out we represent the director of communities, not just public companies, but private companies and nonprofits, as well. and our job is to help in the transparency, health in the -- help in the process of the

companies, and focus on the board of directors. and visitation between those is -- distinction between those is important, because the board of directors is not there on the day-to-day operations, they are advisors to the management team, but they are independent. they are not the operators of the company. host: can we talk about the issue of good corporate government? what goes into that? guest: a lot. it spans from the structures and processes that the companies have around how they operate, how they make money, and how they disclose their financial results. how the board oversees management and goes from everything to the selection of the board, the ceo, the performance evaluations to the disclosures of the committee, the committee functions, this is the processes that they use to oversee the management.

host: there is an effort underway that has gotten headlines to overhaul the corporate governments. -- what does this effort involved? guest: they came out with some common sense principles. what they espouse, via the principles, are things that are organization have been promoting for the past 45 years. so, there really is -- in the common sense name was practical for this issue, because that is what it is. a lot of what they put out there is a lot of what the companies have been doing for years, the more progressive companies. we have gotten feedback on these principles, saying that it is great that they are out there, but we've been doing this for years, so what is new about this? what is new, you have the name that you cited, jamie dimon,

warren buffett, you have an activist investor in the group, this group, this is probably the first time they got together and said, this is how the companies should be run. this is what we think is important for people to know about. host: and the principles that is a group came up with some of the board of directors should be truly independent from the company, they should be diverse and have enough turnover to make sure that they are fresh, they should have a strong independent lead director, especially the ceo has a dual role, and others that we will go through. .e're talking to peter gleason taking your calls and questions as we talk about corporate governance in this country. you have the phone numbers. independents, democrats, republicans, if you want to call. we will go to glenn from

california. good morning. would: good morning, i like to talk about quantitative easing. the trillions of dollars that the federal reserve has pumped and, whostock market is benefiting from this? the big banks, the corrupt politicians like the clinton foundation? what is really going on. we spent $10 trillion in the last seven years and we are not even where we were. this correct government, it is sickening what is happening to the american people and the press is not talking about any of this. rainsve hank paulson the -- reins to do anything he

wanted, which is aig and the big banks and the millionaires and billionaires of this country have made out like bandits, but the people, people on social security and disability and american citizens have not gotten anything but more illegal corruption, correct -- hospital care, where we have to get into it and we are find -- fined -- host: thank you. we want to give our guests a chance to answer. guest: that is one of the reasons we saw this group come out with these principles, we came out with similar principles in 2009. ours were done collectively with the institutional investors and the business roundtable, the investment groups and the directors to reestablish some of this trust that has been broken over the years. some of the things the caller

was referring to, but some of the scandals as well. i think rebuilding the trust is why we are looking to some of these principles, where we are looking at corporations. those are the ones creating jobs in america right now. and we have to have that trust in the corporations to be able to look at the long-term and strategic views to build the corporations and to be about to hire continuing employees to build those companies going into the future. so there is a trust factor and a way that we need to continue to build trust. host: what are you building that trust on? some feel like the trust is broken and it cannot come back. guest: transparency, that is what some of the principles get to. and what our principles got to. telling us how the companies are run, being transparent about it and committed getting with the shareholders, the shareholders are the owners. that is where the accountability

comes back to. the shareholders. if we are going to build strategy and long-term goals for the company, we need to be more transparent in what we are doing, how we are executing on that, and what those actually are so that the people know how we are progressing. and that way we know. being a 20% market share, when we go out there to get the 20% market share, we need to hire more people and create new jobs. host: give me an example of how the transparency is happening now. guest: what you see with transparency, the best place and easiest to look are the proxy statements that are put out. people working on the other side of the industry years ago and i looked at these everyday for my job, the average proxy statement was probably in the 30-40 page range. the transparency required now, via the dodd frank disclosure,

averageone are now on 46 pages, just the beginning section, let alone to the directors are, their biographies, what the company is doing, the initiative the company is undertaken, what is voted on by the shareholders, so we have a great deal more transparency in terms of how they are telling the shareholders what is going on. host: craig is an independent. good morning. caller: i want to thank c-span for all that you do. you bring a great range of guests. you really promote democracy. and so my question has to do with corporate power. i think there is confusion in america about the difference between democracy and economy. that bernieuality sanders talked about, i believe

is rooted in the inequity in the legal system, which favors corporate -- corporations over people. favoritism within the culture, within the economic system, within the legal system, came through in the citizens united decision. which is now considered one of the worst decisions ever. and the citizens united decision basically affirmed many, many and other created affirmed the principle of corporate personhood. so my question is, are corporations people? and do corporations deserve greater rights than people,

equal rights than people, or let's say less rights? host: thank you. guest: tough question. thank you. there was a debate many years ago on whether corporations have a soul. it is a tough answer. the interesting thing about corporations is it that they are run by people, number one. but number two, they are responsible for different groups and i think that is where some of these principles are getting at, you know, the long-term focus for companies has been -- they are accountable to the shareholders, the owners of the company. but there are broader groups impacted by the companies, if you think about employees, suppliers, so when any company has an issue they run into problems with the distribution system, the stock affected by problems that have been

uncovered, that has a broader ripple effect not just for the show photosthere could be layof. whilethe prom memory -- the primary response ability is for the shareholders, there are broader at that that bring any personal aspect -- broader aspects that bring in a personal aspect. you need to think about the employees, should something happen. if you think about it from a trade issue -- host: so they are not people, but they are made up of people? guest: they are made up of people. it is hard to say that an entity is a person. it is hard to grasp. but they are people at their core. the management team our people, the board our people. they have responsibility for another group of people. it is people in a sense, but you need to think about how the structure is put in place.

public companies are responsible to the shareholders, they have employees and suppliers that they need to deal with. if you think about in the wake of the financial crisis when we had the auto manufacturers struggling, there were thousands of layoffs and we had plans lants closing. companies were doing everything they needed to survive, it was all about, can we keep the company alive? because if these companies go down -- many people said let them die, we will start over. but much of that goes back to the employers and the communities, where these are located. people are part of the equation. host: david is a democrat, good morning. caller: good morning. all, my first question to peter is, how can he make

basically make it more mandatory that they are transparent? somebody had mentioned the clinton foundation, i do not think they are transparent. and they should be audited. there seems to be so much corruption at the corporate level, that it is all about how much they will take on. -- take home. for the people that are part of the businesses, actually help make the money, the movers and shakers, those in the corporate offices, those are the people that always lose out. it is all of these scandals that occur, they are always at the top. they get caught, they do not go to jail. and they end up with a large sum of money. how can government change to

make it more mandatory for transparency? host: go ahead. as i: you know, i think said before, we have seen a tremendous increase in transparency. there is a competitive nature that will push back on transparency, i cannot get into the foundations because i do not know about the rules around the transparency for the foundations, so the core of the question is a little bit outside of my expertise. in terms of the corporations themselves, we have seen an increase in transparency. you can see in the principle -- some of largest the leaders of the largest companies in the nation are pushing for transparency. you need to be careful that you do not ask for too much, because you will get to a point where nobody is going to read what is put out. that could be a problem. if you get to a stage where every company's disclosure is 1000 pages, you are not communicating effectively. what they're looking at his, how

we communicate more effectively in plain english so people understand what is happening? you still have to have competitive edge for the company, so you cannot disclose everything going on, so -- or else he will lose an agile competitors. -- an edge on competitors. so it has to be from a corporate standpoint, disclosing your broader goals, but not how you will achieve those goals. transparency, there is more and more of it there. it is increasing on a constant basis. you can see that by looking at the documents that are put out. the problem now is getting the transparency into plain english, so it is readable and not just jargon that comes out and it is repetitive, we want to get it down to a system where we have clear, concise communication coming out of companies. more companies are moving in that direction. host: your group represents more

than 17,000 board of directors, so can you talk about how boards get chosen, what is their relationship to the company itself? guest: there is a broad perspective on this, because depending on where you are, you make it paid or you may not get paid. if you look at public companies, we do surveys on public companies, private coming, and nonprofit companies. directors are chosen, and even in the printable that were just released, there has been a call for independent directors. we started that. we started it almost four years ago, saying a majority of the directors should be independent. you create committees within the board itself, so that you have a committee that oversees competition, an audit committee looking at the financial reporting that looks at what

goes out and the financials, how they are managed. and you have a nominating committee, it is independent and they have no ties back to management. their job is to look at, what do we need in terms of skill sets on the board to help us move forward? they will recruit directors. -- they will go out and recruit directors. they may do that through search firms or databases like we have. we have profiles of directors that say -- i need a financial executive in the pacific northwest to has five years of company experience as a director . we could identify a whole group of people like that. they are trying to match the skill sets of the board against the strategy of the company to make sure we have the best advice and representation that we could possibly have around the table going forward.