tonight's program ranges in scale from nanotechnology to the farthest reaches of our solar system. this interweaving of science and art elevates the world to a place of wonder. to our place in space! devastating events happen every day on scales both global and personal. i like to tell this to creationists when i meet them. we have a super villain with incredible super powers, and we need a new and powerful mode of attack. this is natural selection. this is unnatural selection. [laughter] what if that hump-- which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat... it's ted, it's times square, it's town hall.

announcer: "ted talks: science and wonder" was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. please welcome your host, baratunde thurston. [applause] welcome to the town hall theatre in new york city. i am so excited to be hosting "ted talks live" brought to you by pbs here tonight. now, one of the reasons i'm excited is because of tonight's theme, science and wonder. your minds are going to be blown tonight, and with it being a ted audience, that means there are several neuroscientists here to repair any damage that is done by those blown minds. these talks in this program, they're about magic and the making of magic, and i can't think of a more magic-making company than pixar. we have with us tonight the director of photography and lighting for pixar, and, yeah, she is as cool as that job title sounds,

so please give a warm ted welcome to danielle feinberg. [applause] when i was 7 years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what i wanted to be when i grow up. proudly, i said, "an artist." "no you don't. you can't make a living at that," he said. my little 7-year-old picasso dreams were crushed, but i gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, but i could never quite let go of that dream of being an artist. i have always loved math, science, and, later, code. i love programming so much, i studied computer science in college. in my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. it was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. as i watched those films, i fell in love,

i was transfixed. "that is what i want to do with my life." the idea that all the math, science, and code i had been learning could come together to create these worlds, characters, and stories that i connected with was pure magic for me. just two years later, i started working at the place that made those films, pixar animation studios. it was here i learned about the process of making the films. to create the films, we build a 3-dimensional world inside the computer, so we start with a line that makes a face that makes a character or a tree and rocks that eventually become a forest, and because it's a 3-dimensional world, we can move our camera around in it. i was fascinated, but then i got my first taste of lighting. there's this moment in lighting that made me fall totally in love with it, and it's the moment where we go from this...to this. it's the moment where all the pieces come together and the world comes to life, as if it's an actual place that exists. this moment never gets old, especially for that little 7-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist.

as i learned about lighting, i learned how to use lighting to tell the story, how to set the time of day, how to create the mood, how to guide the audience's eye, how to make a character look appealing or show up in a busy set. did you see wall-e in there? there he is. you can see we can create any world we want inside the computer. we have complete artistic freedom. while this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom can create chaos, implausible worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience, so to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. we have science and the world we know as a backbone to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. "finding nemo" is a great example of this. most of the movie takes place underwater, but how do you make something look underwater? in early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage

and recreated it in the computer, and then we broke it back down to figure out which elements make up the underwater look. one of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water, so we coded up a light that mimics this physics-- first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. objects close to the eye have their full rich colors. as light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths. in this scene, you can see two important elements. the first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. the second is the caustics. these are the ribbons of light like you might see on the bottom of a pool that are created when the sunlight bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the water's surface. in this scene, you can see the fog beams. these give us color depth cues, but they also orient us to which way is up in shots where we can't see the water surface. the other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics,

so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle magical sparkle to the underwater. you can see how we use science, the physics of water, light, and movement to tether that artistic freedom, but we're not beholden to it. we considered each element and decided which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to help tell the story or set the mood. so we realized early on with color we had a lot of leeway. this is a fairly traditional underwater look. here we can push it very green in sydney harbour to suite the sad mood of what's happening. in this scene, we need to see deep into the ocean so we understand what the east australian current is that the turtles are diving into and going on this rollercoaster ride. so we push the visibility of the water well past anything that you would see in real life, because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world,

we're trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story. we use science to get something wonderful, and we use storytelling and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. there's a beauty in these unexpected moments. the jellyfish scene in "finding nemo" was one of those moments for me. there are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. this was one of those scenes. the director had a vision for it based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the south pacific. as the scene floundered, the reviews with the director turned away from the normal look and feel conversation and into far more questions about numbers and percentages. that scientific tether was strangling the scene. but even with all the frustration, i knew it could still be beautiful. when it came in to lighting, i dug in. as i worked to balance the pinks and the blues, those caustics dancing on the bells of the jellyfish,

the undulating fog beams, something promising started to appear. one morning i came in, and i got excited, checking of the previous night's work, and then i showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. and soon, i was showing the jellyfish to the director in a dark room full of about 50 people. so i gave my intro, and i showed the jellyfish scene, and the director was silent for an uncomfortably long time, just long enough for me to think, "oh, no. this is doomed." and then he started clapping, and the production designer started clapping, and then the whole room was clapping. this is the moment in lighting that i live for: when all the pieces come together to create a world that we can believe in. we used math, science, and code to create these amazing worlds. we use storytelling and art to bring them to life.

this interweaving of science and art elevates the world to a place of wonder with soul, a place we can believe in, where the things you imagine become real, in a world where suddenly a girl realizes not only is she is a scientist, but she's an artist. thank you. [applause] radiolab has some of the best science stories in recent memory, and it's no surprise that the team that puts them together is as talented as they are curious and eclectic. we are lucky to have one of them here with us tonight. he is the director of research, holds a ph.d. in the history of science, and has something very special to share with all of us tonight. please provide a warm welcome to latif nasser. [applause]

so this is a story about how we know what we know. it's a story about this woman, natalia rybczynski. she's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff, or in her own words: rybczynski: yeah, i had someone who called me "dr. dead things." and i think she is particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the arctic circle in the remote canadian tundra. in 2006, she was at a dig site called the fyles leaf bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole. rybczynski: it's not going to sound very exciting because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your gps and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil. and at some point she noticed something. rybczynski: rusty, kind of rust-colored,

about the size of the palm of my hand. it was just lying on the surface. nasser: and at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the fyles leaf bed before, prehistoric plant parts, but that night, uh, back at camp... rybczynski: when i get out the hand lens, maybe i'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. it looks really like bone. huh. so over the next 4 years, she went to that spot over and over and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, and she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. rybczynski: it's broken up into so many little tiny pieces. i'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's, like-- it's not looking good. so finally we had a 3d surface scanner. it turns out what she had was a tibia, a leg bone, and more specifically, a tibia from a cloven hoofed mammal.

rybczynski: the size of this thing, it was huge, just a really big animal. so what animal could it be? having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in colorado, and they had an idea. rybczynski: we took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell. it smelled like singed flesh, a smell that natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab... collagen. collagen is what gives structure to your bones, and usually it breaks down after so many years, but in this case, the arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it. then a year or two later, natalia was at a conference in bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named mike buckley was demoing this new process that he called collagen fingerprinting. so she shipped him a fragment, uh, fedex. rybczynski: i mean, you know, you want to track it.

[laughs] it's kind of important. nasser: and he processed it and compared it to 37 known and modern day mammal species, and he found a match. uh, it turns out that the 3.5-million-year-old bone that natalia had dug out of the high arctic belonged to...a camel. [laughter] rybczynski: i'm thinking "what?" that's amazing, right, if it's true. the size of the bone that they found was such that it meant that this camel was 30% larger than modern day camels, so, uh, this camel would have been about 9 feet tall, weighed around a ton. natalia had found a giant arctic camel. [laughter] so how on earth would one of these guys end up in the high arctic? well, scientists have known for a long time that camels are actually originally american.

[guitar playing beginning of "star spangled banner"] yeah, so they started here. for 40 of the 45 million years the camels had been around, you could only find them in north america. and then about 3 to 7 million years ago, one branch of camels went down to south america, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over to the bering land bridge into asia and africa, and then around the end of the last ice age, north american camels went extinct. scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how natalia found one so far north. how is it that one of these saharan superstars survived these arctic conditions? so natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer,

and it's kind of brilliant. what if those broad feet were not meant to tromp over sand, but to tromp over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? what if that hump-- which huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat-- was there to help the camel get through that 6-month-long winter when food was scarce, and then only later, long after it crossed over that land bridge, did it retrofit those winter features for a hot dessert environment? like, the hump may be useful in hotter climates because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body, so it helps heat dissipate easier. it's this crazy idea that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its high arctic past. for me, it's a story about us,

about how we see the world and about how that changes. so i was trained as a historian, and i've learned that actually a lot of scientists are historians, too. they make sense of the past. rybczynski: we make up stories, and we stick with it, like the camel and the desert, right? i mean, that-- that's a great story. it's totally adapted for that, clearly it always lived there, you know. nasser: but in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd dr. seuss-looking creature looks the way it does, and--and for me, it completely upended the way i think of the camel. it--it went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment to being like this-- this world traveler that--that just happens to be in the sahara and could end up virtually anywhere.

[applause] this is azury. uh, you're lucky because she's actually on a break from her regular gig at the radio city music hall. [laughter] and that's not even a joke. um, i--all of a sudden i have the feeling that no one is going to listen to single word i say because i'm standing next to a camel. um, but azury is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. it requires our willingness to readjust, to--to reimagine. [laughter] because at any moment at any place, we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.

thank you very much. [applause] so that happened. [laughter] we're going to bring you our first film from the evening, and this film by denise zmekhol and max salomon is about a "bridge to the future." laarman: think about what a spider does. a spider starts from nothing, and it starts weaving its web. if you don't know how a spider came to be able to make a spider web, it's like magic, but it's basically evolution at work. it was programmed by evolution,

and we can do exactly the same with a robot. i'm joris laarman. i wouldn't consider myself just a designer; i'm more of a conceptual thinker. we are, at the moment, at the beginning of a new technological revolution, something that is as big as the industrial revolution. this robot is our spider, and now all we have to figure out is how to breathe life into that thing. it's a form of hacking. we started couple of years ago when i had the crazy idea to strap a welding gun to a robot, and we could print like drawing in mid-air. the way a spider weaves with a silk thread,

a robot weaves with metal. by inserting smart software, it starts to become smart, it starts to think. it starts to teach itself how to print. it's going to be a totally adaptive autonomous system. we know a little bit about what the robot's able to do, enough to say we are going to build a bridge. in design history, bridges are usually the most complicated things people can make, sort of the edge of what a civilization was capable of in terms of technology. the bridge is highly challenging. that's the reason why nobody did it before. but if it works, there is a huge world of opportunity to dive into. in the future, the world will be built by robots like this one.

by experimenting over and over again, you get better at it. if you're good at it, and you develop it to perfection, it looks like magic, but it's evolution at work. [applause] thurston: coming up, we have a talented individual. you look at his wikipedia page, he's got enough accomplishments to cover an entire graduating class. please give it up for juan enriquez. [applause] so there's an actor called dustin hoffman, and years ago he made this movie, which some of you may have heard of, called "the graduate," and there's two key scenes in that movie. the first one is a seduction scene. i'm not going to talk about that tonight.

[laughter] the second scene is where he's taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a young college graduate, the old guy basically says one word. it's "plastics." and the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice. [laughter] so silicon valley was just being built in 1967 when this movie is released, so had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up on stage, maybe with these two. [laughter] so as you're thinking of that, what word of advice would you give people? i think the answer would be lifecode. lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life, so instead of programming computers, we're using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or dna or rna or plants or animals or a whole series of creatures. and as you're thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do,

what it's programmed to do, what you end up doing is you end up taking what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life forms, and we accelerate it, and this is not something new. the difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term, is... [laughter] we're beginning to practice intelligent design, and that means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, we're inserting specific genes, we're inserting specific proteins, and we're changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes, and that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens. let me just give you one example. some of you occasionally might think about sex. [laughter] and we kind of take it for granted how we've changed sex, and what's happened with sex over time is normally sex equals baby, eventually,

but in today's world, sex plus pill equals no baby. [laughter] and again, we think that's perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history, and it's not the case for animals, and what it does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. then we've been playing with stuff that's a little bit more advanced like art, not in the sense of painting and sculpture but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization, and when you do in vitro fertilization, what you're doing is you're separating sex, conception, baby, so you've separated the baby from the body from the act. think about twins. so you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can freeze fertilized eggs. well, that's a good thing if you're a cancer patient. you're about to go under chemotherapy, or you're about to go under radiation, so you save these things, you don't irradiate them, but if you can save them, and you can freeze them

and you can have a surrogate mother, means that you decouple sex from time. it means you can have twins born, oh, in 50 years... [laughter] in 100 years, in 200 years. so this lifecode stuff turns out to be a superpower. it turns out to be this incredibly powerful way of changing viruses, of changing plants, of changing animals, perhaps even of evolving ourselves. that's something steve gullins and i have been thinking for a while. this has some risks. like every powerful technology, like electricity, like an automobile, like computers, some stuff potentially can be misused. there are consequences to acting, and there are consequences to not acting, like curing deadly diseases, which, by the way, is completely unnatural. when we put vaccines into people, we are putting unnatural things into their body

because we think the benefit way outweighs the risk. some of these treatments actually end up changing your blood type, or they'll put male cells in a female body or vice versa, which sounds absolutely horrible until you realize the reason you're doing that is you're substituting bone marrow during cancer treatments. so by taking somebody else's bone marrow, you may be changing some fundamental aspects of yourself, but you're also saving your life. what all this does is it flips darwin completely on his head. see, for 4 billion years, what lived and died on this planet depended on two principles: on natural selection and random mutation. and so what lived and died, what was structured, has now been flipped on his head. [laughter] and what we've done is we've created this completely parallel evolutionary system where we are practicing unnatural selection and nonrandom mutation. so let me explain these things. this is natural selection. this is unnatural selection.

[laughter] we started breeding wolves thousands of years ago in central asia to turn them into dogs, and then we started turning them into big dogs, and we started turning them into little dogs. but if you take one of the chihuahuas you see in the hermes bags on fifth avenue and you let it loose on the african plain, you can watch natural selection happen. [laughter] so as you're thinking of lifecode, let's think of 5 principles. we have to take responsibility for this stuff, and the reason we have to take responsibility is because we're in charge. these aren't random mutations. we engineered this stuff, and it's the pottery barn rule: you break it, you own it. principle number two: we have to recognize and celebrate diversity in this stuff. there have been at least 33 versions of hominids that have walked around this earth. most all went extinct except us, but the normal and natural state of this earth is we have various versions of humans

walking around at the same time, which is why most of us have some neanderthal in us, some of us have some denisova in us, and some in washington have a lot more of it. [laughter] principle number 3: we have to respect other people's choices. some people will choose to never alter, some people will choose to alter all, some people will choose to alter plants but not animals, some people will choose to alter themselves, some people will choose to evolve themselves. diversity is not a bad thing. because even though we think of humans as very diverse, we came so close to extinction that all of us descend from a single african mother, and the consequence of that is there's more genetic diversity in 55 african chimpanzees than there are in 7 billion humans. principle number 4: we should take about a quarter of the earth and only let darwin run the show. we should not run every evolutionary decision on this planet. we want to have our evolutionary system running, we want to have darwin's evolutionary system running,

and it's just really important to have these two things running in parallel and not overwhelm evolution. [applause] last thing i'll say: this is the single most exciting adventure human beings have been on. this is a single greatest superpower humans have ever had. it would be a crime for you not to participate in the stuff because you're scared of it, because you're hiding from it. you can participate in the ethics, you can participate in the politics, you can participate in the business, you can participate in just thinking about where medicine is going and where industry is going and where we're going to take the world. it would be a crime for all of us not to be aware when somebody shows up at a swimming pool and says one word, just one word, if you don't listen, that's that word is "lifecode." thank you very much. [applause]

filmmakers david alvarado and jason sussberg met at stanford, and since then have committed most of their work to telling stories of science, health, and technology. along the way, they met bill nye, you know, the science guy, and it turns out all 4 of them shared an obsession with "our place in space." nye: since i was a kid, i look up at the sky, and there's 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and then there are, in turn, that many galaxies...galaxies! which just reminds me of the importance of space exploration. the reason we have these rockets is to know our place in the cosmos, our place in space. today we are going to launch lightsail. when this thing gets in space, mylar sheets are deployed,

and the photons from the sun will give it a push. it will be able to go edge on into the sun, turn and get a push, just like a sailboat. you never run out of fuel. you could greatly lower the cost and make space exploration accessible to many, many more people. greetings, greetings. hi, everyone. carl sagan talked about a visionary mission using a solar sail, which is pushed through space by nothing but sunlight. it never flew, so today, 39 years later, the planetary society, i'm very proud to say, is launching our lightsail spacecraft. thank you all very much. here you go, jeff. so in 2005, we launched the first solar sail spacecraft, and it crashed. if this doesn't work, i'll be very disappointed. [cheering]

this chemical reaction is making water vapor. yes. nye, voice-over: we believe that by the successful launch of our lightsail spacecraft, we will advance space science for the betterment of human kind. man on phone: indications are that an rf signal is being received. that would indicate that the antenna deployed successfully. awesome news. nye, voice-over: you and i are made of the dust of exploding stars, we are stardust, and so we are at least one way that the universe knows itself. that fills me with reverence. that is astonishing. [applause] if the past few decades have taught us anything,

it's that science alone isn't enough to combat climate change. in fact, science alone can't even convince some people that climate change is a real thing, so what do you add to science to help make the case to save our home planet? this next speaker thinks that answer is art, and she would know; she's an incredible artist on a worthy mission, and her instagram account is off the charts. please welcome zaria forman. [applause] good evening. i consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. i've traveled north to the arctic to capture the unfolding story of polar melt and south to the equator to document the subsequent rising seas. my drawings explore moments of transition,

turbulence, and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers like you to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. experts predict ice-free arctic summers as early as 2020, and sea levels are likely to rise between 2 and 10 feet by century's end. i have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not. my process begins with traveling to the places at the forefront of climate change. on site, i take thousands of photographs, and back in the studio, i work from both my memory of the experience and the photographs to create very large-scale compositions, sometimes over 10 feet wide. i draw with soft pastel, which is dry, like charcoal, but colors.

i consider my work drawings, but others call them painting. i cringe, though, when i'm referred to as a finger-painter. but drawing is a form of meditation for me. i don't perceive what i'm drawing as ice or water; instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. on average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds. [laughter] no, really more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. but i've been drawing ever since i could hold a crayon, really. my mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. my mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and i were fortunate enough to join and support her on those adventures.

in august of 2012, i led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of greenland. my mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. she and i were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. during the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and i made a promise to carry out her final journey. the sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. the ice fields are alive with movement and sound in a way that i never expected. i expanded the scale of my compositions to give you that same sense of awe that i experienced. yet while the grandeur of the ice is evident, so, too, is its vulnerability. from our boat, i could see the ice sweating

under the unseasonably warm sun. the melting glaciers in greenland are one of the largest contributing factors to rising sea levels, which have already begun to drown some of our world's lowest lying islands. devastating events happen every day, on scales both global and personal. when i was in greenland, i scattered my mother's ashes amidst the melting ice. now she remains a part of the landscape she loved so much even as it, too, passes and takes on new form. my drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose. i hope they can serve as records of sublime landscapes in flux, documenting the transition and inspiring our global community to take action for the future.

thank you. [applause] our next speaker is the head of the chemistry department at mit. she's the first woman ever to hold that title... [applause] she's the first person of color ever to hold that title... [applause] and she's the first person ever with that title to give me a high five because i think she's so dope. please give it up for paula hammond. [applause]

chemical engineering opens doors. it allows you to actually create new things, and the things you can make can be huge like a chemical plant or incredibly tiny like the nanoparticle i'm going to tell you about, but most importantly, it can be amazingly impactful on some of the world's big problems, and i have been drawn to the problems of human health. cancer is a very clever disease. there are some forms of cancer, which fortunately we've learned how to address relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery, but there are some forms of cancer that don't respond to these approaches, and the tumor survives or comes back even after an onslaught of drugs. we can think of these very aggressive forms of cancer as kind of super villains in a comic book. they're clever, they're adaptable, and they're very good at staying alive,

and like most super villains these days, their superpowers come from a genetic mutation. the genes that are modified inside these tumor cells can enable and encode for new and unimagined modes of survival, allowing the cancer cell to live through even our best chemotherapy treatments. one example is a trick in which a gene allows a cell, even as the drug approaches the cell, to push the drug out before the drug can have any effect. imagine the cell effectively spits out the drug. this is just one example of the many genetic tricks in the bag of our super villain cancer, all due to mutant genes. so we have a super villain with incredible superpowers, and we need a new and powerful mode of attack. actually, we can turn off a gene.

the key is a set of molecules known as sirna. sirna are short sequences of genetic code that guide a cell to block a certain gene. for many years since its discovery, scientists have been very excited about how we can apply these gene blockers in medicine, but there is a problem. sirna works well inside the cell, but if it gets exposed to the enzymes that reside in our bloodstream or our tissues, it degrades within seconds. it has to be packaged to protect it through its journey through the body on its way to the final target inside the cancer cell. but how do we carry that out? using molecular engineering, we can actually design a super weapon that can travel through the bloodstream. it has to be tiny enough to get through the bloodstream, it's got to be small enough to penetrate the tumor tissue, and it's got to be tiny enough to be taken up inside the cancer cell.

to do this job well, it has to be about 1/100 the size of a human hair. it's a tiny capsule that contains the chemotherapy drug. this is the poison that will actually end the tumor cell's life. around this core, we'll wrap a nanometer's thin blanket of sirna. this is our gene blocker. because sirna is strongly negatively charged, we can protect it with a nice protective layer of positively charged polymer. we have to target the super weapon to the super villain cells that reside in the tumor. but our bodies have a natural immune defense system, cells that reside in the bloodstream, and pick out things that don't belong so that it can destroy or eliminate them. and guess what? our nanoparticle is considered a foreign object. we have to sneak our nanoparticle

past the tumor defense system by disguising it. so we add one more negatively charged layer around this nanoparticle, which serves two purposes: first, this outer layer is one of the naturally charged, highly hydrated polysaccharides that resides in our body. it creates a cloud of water molecules around the nanoparticle that gives us an invisibility cloaking effect. this invisibility cloak allows the nanoparticle to travel through the bloodstream long and far enough to reach the tumor without getting eliminated by the body. second, this layer contains molecules, which bind specifically to our tumor cell. once bound, the cancer cell takes up the nanoparticle, and now we have our nanoparticle inside the cancer cell and ready to deploy. man: whoo! all right, i feel the same way, let's go!

[applause] with sufficient gene blockers, we can address many different kinds of mutations, allowing the chance to sweep out tumors without leaving behind any bad guys. we've tested these nano-structured particles in animals using a highly aggressive form of triple negative breast cancer. this triple negative breast cancer exhibits the gene that spits out cancer drug as soon as it is delivered, and as you can see, it grows very rapidly over a period of days. usually doxorubicin-- let's call it "dox--" is the cancer drug that is the first line of treatment for breast cancer. so we first treated our animals with a dox core, dox only. the tumors slowed their rate of growth, but they still grew rapidly, doubling in size over a period of two weeks. then we tried our combination super weapon, and, look, we found that not only did the tumors stop growing,

they actually decreased in size and were eliminated in some cases. [applause] as doctors learn how to test patients and understand certain tumor genetic types, they can help us determine which patients can benefit from this strategy and which gene blockers we can use. high-grade ovarian cancer is one of the biggest super villains out there, and we are now directing our super weapon towards its defeat. as a researcher, i usually don't get to work with patients, but i recently met a mother who is an ovarian cancer survivor, mimi, and her daughter, paige. i was deeply inspired by the optimism and strength that both mother and daughter displayed and by their story of courage and support. at this event, we spoke about the different technologies

directed at cancer, and mimi was in tears as she explained how learning about these efforts gives her hope for future generations, including her own daughter. this really touched me. it's not just about building really elegant science; it's about changing people's lives. a few weeks later, the daughter, paige, got back in touch with me. she decided that she wanted to study science and engineering. she changed her classes in high school to add more math and science, and she joined my lab for the summer, but most exciting to me is that she recognizes the power of manipulating molecules. i know that as students like paige move forward in their careers, they will open new possibilities in addressing some of the big health problems in the world, including ovarian cancer, neurological disorders, infectious disease, just as chemical engineering has found a way to open doors for me,

has provided a way of engineering on the tiniest scale that of molecules to heal on the human scale. thank you. [applause] announcer: please welcome to the stage ted curator chris anderson. [applause] the world lost a truly remarkable scientist, the neurologist oliver sacks. [applause] now, in the weeks before his death, the award-winning filmmaker ric burns was able to capture some truly special moments with oliver sacks as he reflected back on his life in the sure knowledge that it was soon to end,

and we're so excited to share with you the world premiere of ric burns' short film. we may have lost a legendary scientist, but his words, his work, his inspiration live on. such a delight to introduce the enduring wisdom of oliver sacks. [applause] sacks: i think one can become wildly and beautifully excited and ecstatic just by what one is thinking. when i was about 14 or 15, my love of the physical sciences, of physics and chemistry and geology and astronomy, got displaced, but not annihilated, by a rising love of biology and by darwin.

darwin saw evolution and natural selection as having determined the diversification and the development of life on earth, and that's why stephen jay gould is also such an important influence in my life, someone who reminded me incessantly that nothing in biology made sense except in the light of evolution and chance, contingency. he put everything in the context of deep evolutionary time. i love the sense of evolutionary history. my mother was a comparative anatomist, as, uh--as well as a surgeon, and would always refer to precursors and vestiges, and so i--i never had the sense of human beings as-- you know, as something separate from the animal kingdom. i sort of feel my kinship with starfish and jellyfish

and, you know, that all of them are our brother animals. when i was at ucla, one of my chiefs wrote a paper on what was then called-- what is still called-- "palatal myoclonus." this form of myoclonus is a rhythmic, pulsing movement, and it can affect the palate, it can affect the eardrum, and it can affect some of the so-called strap muscles in the neck. and, um, one says, "why these 3 places? do they have anything in common?" they do. they are the remnants of the gill arches of fish, and what one is seeing is probably the mechanism for gill movement still present, a sort of darwinian vestige in the brainstem 400 million years after we emerged from the sea.

i like to tell this to creationists when i meet them, you know, put that in your pipe and smoke it. [laughter] my generation is on the way out, and each death i felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. there will be nobody like us when we are gone, but then there is nobody like anybody ever. when people die, they cannot be replaced. they leave holes that cannot be filled. it is the fate, the genetic and neural fate of every human being, to be a unique individual, to find his own path,

to live his own life, to die his own death. even so, i am shocked and saddened at the sentence of death, and i cannot pretend i am without fear, but my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. i have loved and been loved. i have been given much, and i have given something in return. i have read and traveled and thought and written, i have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. above all, i've been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet, and this in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

so that's it. thurston: we wanted to end with something hopeful. we have paul cantelon, angela mccluskey, and john sneider. [applause]

♪ i see trees of green ♪ red roses, too ♪ i see them bloom ♪ for me and you ♪ and i think to myself ♪ what a wonderful world [applause] we have learned so much this evening. i hope you all feel the same way i do, and i demand that you share what you learned here with others. that is what this is all about. i want to thank everybody who made tonight possible. i want to thank ted, public television,

our crew, our performers, and all of our speakers, and especially all of you. thank you for being part of "ted talks live: science and wonder," and good night. [applause] ♪ i see friends shaking hands ♪ ♪ saying "how do you do?" ♪ they're really saying ♪ "i love you" ♪ i hear babies cry ♪ i watch them grow ♪ they'll learn much more ♪ than i'll ever know announcer: to learn more about this program and for links to more ted talks,

visit pbs/org/tedtalks. annoustarting withlks: sccall the midwife... vo: sundays are made for drama -- photographer: do you mind if i take your picture? phyllis: we are midwives, not glamour pusses. vo: and on grhester... syndey: suicide? man: this is a dangerous business. woman: you're out of your depth. vo: then an all new mr selfridge... woman: put your money where your mouth is, mr. selfridge. man: they're an expensive hobby, harry. vo: midwwife, grantchester, and selfridge. it all starts sunday at 8/7 central only on pbs. announcer: "ted talks: science and wonder" was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting.

barbara mikulski: i walked on the senate floor in a pair of slacks, and the senate never had women wear trousers before, and i felt like i was walking on the moon. jeanne shaheen: i started out addressing envelopes and licking stamps, and then finally decided that the men i had been working for hadn't been getting it right, and so i needed to run myself. sarah palin: i will be honored to accept your nomination for vice president of the united states. kirsten gillibrand: my first opponent called me just a pretty face, and of course, i didn't mind. i was going to prove that he was wrong. barbara boxer: money was a real obstacle, because there was no place you could go. the men didn't want to give you money, and the women said, "oh boy, i have to ask my husband." kay bailey hutchison: i was like cinderella at the ball. everyone was paying attention to me for the