>> rose: welcome to the broadcast. tonight, science. we talk to nobel laureate harold varmus on his book "the art and politics of science." >> there have been a series of articles over the last 10 years that the goals of the war on cancer have not been achieved, and i-- i agree with that, that we have not made the degree of progress many of us would have liked. but nevertheless, our concept of cancer as a disease has radically changed. our ability to treat some of the many kinds of cancers has radically altered. >> rose: we continue with freeman dyson on his views on almost everything. >> i enjoy life and i don't particularly care whether what

i'm doing at that moment is important. >> rose: it's whether it interests you, is that the test? >> yes. >> rose: is s challenging and interesting to you? >> yes, and science to me is just some, and it's just like-- like painting pictures or anything else. >> rose: two men of science,s can varm and freeman dyson coming up. ptioning sponsored by rose communications captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york

city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: harold varmus is here. in 1989, he was awarded the the nobel prize in medicine along with his collaborator jay michael bishop. since 2,000 heeb president of the memorial sloan cancer center here in new yorkrk he was recently appointed co-chair of president barack obama's council vasers on science and technology. his new book is called "the art and politics of science." heeb is a friend of this broadcast and has been on this program many times and i am always pleased to have him back the this table. >> thank you. >> rose: i say that because here is the interesting thing, of all the times you have been on here by reading this book, i found owl all of these things that i didn't know about you. you're not a guy that went to college and said, ious i want to be a doctor." >> i started wanting to be a doctor but i quickly learned there were more interesting things in the world. >> rose: here is what is also

interesting, "for my parents buy and frank who missed so much of it." >> they were socially active people. my father was a general practitioner who at one time, for many years, the start park commissioner at jones state beach park, somebody committed to family values and a family doc who loved his patients. my mother was a psychiatric social worker. they lived the american dream in a sense. they were children of immigrants who took it almost as something that was a bit of a birth right to be able to grow in immigrant families and go off it ivy league schools, become members of the middle class, and enjoy life at a pretty high level. and, unfortunately, my mother died of breast cancer in the-- when she was 61. my father died of a heart attack in his mid-60s. they had a lot invested in their children, and when they died, i was in my early 30s.

they-- they knew i had gotten educated and married, but they-- they never saw the other parts of my career that they would have found interesting and, you know, having seen me as a young person who wasn't always so easy to get along with, i think they probably would have enjoyed seeing my more mature years and some successes and-- parents like seeing their kids go to stockholm. >> rose: exactly. ( laughter ) >> or working in government. >> rose: that's my point, make a nobel speech. >> or running cancer centers or other things they would have thought useful. >> rose: the point is they would have been proud. >> exactly. they believed in and try to teach reflected in the career you have which has spanned health and public issues as well. there is also this-- this book is the extension of a series of lekt-- lectures you gave,

lectures on one? >> jean strauss who runs the common center for the humanities at the new york public libraries asked me to do three lectures called the norton lectures. i naively accepted and when i read the fine print i realized i had signed on to turn the three lectures into a book. initially i was interested in-- actually at her instiitation-- of talking about the two cultures, the concept snow introduced just over 50 years ago, in which he pointed out there was a gulf between the culture of the humanities and the culture of science that these cultures should be called upon to solve some of the problems in the world, and he argued that the culture of science was much more likely to solve the world's problems and the culture of the humanities, and one of the things that gave him pain was a novelist who was in government and a respectable scientist was that the two cultures talked to each other rather poorly.

as we tried to build that into a series the lectures, i realized it was simplistic. it was exciting at the time because people hadn't thought about it. i decided to give one lecture on the circuitous route i took to become a scientist. going off to college and being influenced by my great thesis teachers and going to graduate school in english and finally making my way back through an interest in freud and psychiatry to internal medicine and finally serving in the vietnam war at the n.i.h. where i learned to love science. then the second lecture was about some of the central themes in the science i did that proved to be important-- studying cancer genes. and the idea was to show how ideas develop in science and how-- not so much to tell them about the specifics of experiments but to describe for the audience how a scientist gets, in a sense, influenced by

the companionship you keep, by the ideas you hear, by theimes that you live in, and how some things work out and some don't, for reasons that i tried to generalize. and then i was fortunate in part because the nobel prize gives you opportunities. i was privileged to be able to work for for the government, and i wanted to talk about the relationship between science and politics, government. >> rose: and it continues in your present role as an advisor to the obama administration on science. >> right. but the third lecture concerned the issues that you face-- how you allocate money when you're in charge of big budgets, how you try to steer the ship of science into the right channels. >> rose: at the risk of political interference. >> at the risk of political interference, how other things like a new form of science that addresses embryos and stem cells and how science publishing is affected by all kinds of

financial considerations. how we do the right thing by the world in trying to address problems of global health. so a lot of really deep issues that our society fate faces. >> rose: who is interesting about it, as you say in here, all of this gave you pause to think, gave you opportunity, gave you mandate to think about a life in science, which is what this is. >> thinking about it and writing it up are two different things. >> rose: someone said let me see what i ote so i can know what i think. but there is this-- you describe it as a kind of meandering. there was not someone-- and this was what i alluded to earlier-- things influenced decisions you made. talk a bit about that, this notion of this life you have lived. >> yeah, well i think-- i wouldn't characterize it as simply a life in which i have been buffeted by external forces. there are-- i would contend, some internal principles and

goals, but there's no doubt that my ability to achof in certain domains has been affected by circumstances, people. for example, in the last 10 years, i've been work incredibly hard, as you've heard on this show before, to try to make the scientific literature much more accessible to all scientists in the world, doctors and so forth. that was something i hadn't really thought much about until one of my colleagues, a brilliant scientist named pat brown, told me what he had learned just by chance that finding out the physicists in the world are putting their work up on the web at a very early stage. and he started to think about how we in the biomedical research could use the internet in similar ways. these conversations led to other conversations with people at the n.i.h. who had big, electronic systems for storing information and for putting it on-- and for

putting information about publications on to the web. and one thing led to the next and we built a public digital library, now called pub med central, in which all n.i.h. supported work must be depos this was the result of a political battle woe won-- and a whole new set of journals called open access journals. i think the principles within me that desired that the scientific community work more effectively together, share their knowledge were there, but i needed the stimulation of some ideas from the outside. to mount this campaign which has been quite successful. >> rose: how did the academic experience in english literature inform and influence your abilities in science? >> well, i don't think there is a simple way to explain that. but i do think that many people

underappreciate the role of reading, writing, and speaking in a life in science. it's often a disappointment to people to learn that you may get into science because you like to do experiments, and as soon as you have your first faculty position, you know that your life is going to be devoted to a very great extent to writing grants and papers, to giving talks to students and colleagues to trying to think things tlou in a logical fashion, and the experience of working with words understanding what's on the page taking pride in a piece of writing. i mean, i still have to say that i am somewhat obsessive about-- about the use of language. and sometimes become consumed with details about writing. but, you know, as you-- >> rose: what you say is

important. the ability to express yourself enhances the argument you want to make. >> certainly. >> rose: which wilson and others amply demonstrate. >> if you want to make your scientific work clear to people and interesting it does help to have some sense of the narrative, and the-- >> rose: let me take you to cancer research. when you got there, epidemiology was more prevalent than what you began to do yourself. >> well, i think one way to think about this is that, you know, people had known for a long time that cancer was a major cause of mortality. we knew that normal cells were behaving in an odd way when they became cancerous. but the nature of the transformation, the way in which a normal cell would convert into a cancer cell, was pretty mysterious. the only really pottent handle, from my point of view, knowing that there was epidemiological data saying smoking was a cause

of cancer and certain industrial pollutants were causes of cancer and knowing something about the keendz of abnormal chromosomes one could see in cancers. still, the only really powerful experimental tol that was available was-- were the set of viruses found in animals that could make a cancer. indeed, someone who would have-- my neighbor, if he were living now instead of working 100 years ago, peyton rouse discovered the virus that made my career powerful, a virus of chickens which you think, well, you know, why would anybody want to work on a chicken virus when we're trying to cure human disease? i think it's very important to remember how much work with experimental animals has meant to modern medicine. >> rose: just one reference in terms of people who influenced your life. jay michael bishop.

>> yes. >> rose: what did he do? >> i went out shopping in california for a place to do post-doctoral work after spending a couple of years at the n.i.h. i loved the n.i.h. as a place to train, ira pastons who was a remarkable person, married to the poet laureate in maryland. that was the only reason i got a place in his lab. i was an english major and clinician but he took me in because he thought i might be able to talk to his wife and enjoy lab parties a little more than she had in the past. but we worked on a problem that actually taught me a lot, the problem of understanding gene control and bacteria. using molecules that are important in human gene regulation, taught me that models were crucial for, you know, making something that was complex seem simple and able to yield insight. but i wanted to do something

that was more medically pertinent, and having learned at the n.i.h. about the existence of cancer viruses wanted to find some place to do it. but i was also attracted to california for purely sentimental, romantic reason, havinged to with landscape and mountain and seashore, sdpi went out there shopping for a lab to work in. i didn't know who mike bishop was when i went out shopping pii talked to a lot of senior famous people, some of of whom did and some who did not particularly want me to come to their lab. and somebody mentioned this young guy mike bishop was doing work in san francisco and i went over there and met him at the university of california san francisco and there was an ininstantaneous recognition that we were two guys different in our deep background but we trained in similar ways and had a similar outlook on how to approach cancer through virus and how to use the new tools of molecular biology to do that. >> rose: you have characterized that research as more wagner than mozart? >> well, the research i

characterized that way because there were theme attic qualities. it wasn't our single discovery of the fact that the sarcoma virus that could make a chicken cell into a cancer cell, didn't have big reverberations until a lot of other folks-- us and,s, many others-- discovered this theemps a universal theme and the light motif of showing that environmental cancer genes were derived from normal cells, and then as shown by others that those genes were often mutated in human cancers and that the proteins made by those genes were often bad acting enzymes that could be countered by drugs. all of those things that came together over the years it make this part of cancer research so

important for thinking about how woe approach the disease. and many people complained-- there have been a series of articles over the last 10 years-- the goals of the war on cancer have not been achieved. and i-- i agree with that, that we have not made the degree of progress many of us would have liked. but nevertheless, our concept of cancer as a disease has radically changed. our ability to treat some of the many kinds of cancer as radically altered. i think many of us have reason-- have good reason to be optimistic what has been put in place over the last 20 or 30 years of trying to understand cancer at its fundamental level augers well for the future. >> rose: you have said on this program and others, and other people have said on this program that there are many cancers and many causes of cancer, not just one cause of cancer. >> sure but there's a common pathway. >> rose: and a common pathway is... >> mutations that change the

behavior of genes that are important in normal life so they distort the abilities of our cells to grow and to die, to do the things they normally do. >> rose: for the record, what is it that you did with protooncaegeans-- am i saying that right? >> it's the form of a gene before it undergoes a mutation that makes it cancerous. >> rose: tell me what you think this country needs in terms of health care reform. >> there are several things. there's no doubt the-- the social reformener me says we have to cover everyone. i mean, we are the most advanced economy. we're a democracy. it is painful to me to know that nearly 50 million people in this country don't have a way to cover their health care costs, except to go to an emergency room, which is a terrible way to be taken care of. and yet, in this process of creating access to health care

for everyone-- which i think is fundamentally important-- that moment has to be seized now because there's no one-- even the most right wing of republicans is saying something's got to be done about our health care system, that the costs are running away, that there are inequities that everybody recognizes, and we have a president who is committed to this, and this is a moment which we must pass a reform bill that makes health care available to everyone. but in the frenzy to do this-- and i think, you know, the frenzy is justified-- but we don't want to lose sight of some of the things about american medicine that are truly extraordinary. you know, it's easy to say american health care costs too much. it's true. hospitals waste money, we have poor incentives, we shouldn't be doing fee for service. we ought to find other ways to

reward value, not just acquisition of procedures. but we don't want to forget that one of the things that's really extraordinary about american medicine has made america the leader and not in health care provision but in the science of medicine has to do with our academic health centers, where we train doctors from all over the world, where we do some of the most outstanding research, where we generate new findings that influence the way medicine's practiced everywhere. those values are very hard to mash because they go out into the-- throughout the globe and the progress that's being made in medicine-- which is very real and, you know, our successes in cancer care may be somewhat limited, but our successes in controlling lots of other diseases, infectious diseases and cardiovascular diseases and many others, is equally extraordinary. we need to be careful as we legislate health care reform that we don't end up

shortchanging academic health centers. i run an academic health center, the sloan memorial ketting health center, and we want to treat everyone who has encountered cancer as a disease. we arere not making money. on the contrary, we lose hundreds of millions every year. medicare does not reimburse us for the cost of taking care of cancer patients. we have a special rate, still doesn't cover it completely. there has to be some way to ensure that the academic health centers, while contributing to cost control like everybodyes, also are adequately compensated to continue to do the research and training and provide the coined of intense, specialized care that is unique to many of the interests thaha attract patients from all over the world. i don't know yet quite how to do that. we have to do that by having rates for specialized centers that are determined by a health

advisory board, whether we provide special kinds of compensation for these centers. but there's got to be some way to preserve what is truly extraordinary in american medicine. >> rose: do you have ideas for what ought to be in the health care legislation? >> i definitely want to see a public pair system. i think we have to have that. it's one way to generate competition for the insurance industry. and i think it can be done. from many, many aspects of medicine, a medicare-plus system is going to work. the extension of medicare is the logical thing to do, extending it to all branches of our society. but we have to figure out a way to make the-- what i anticipate will be a tremendous movement into a public pair system compatible with the existence of academic centers like ourselves.

>> rose: finally, your role on this science advisory committee. what is it that you guys are going to do-- and i mean by that not gender-specific? >> well, we have guys and gals on this committee. the president has been very clear with me and my co-chair, eric lander and john holden, the official-- and works full time in washington. he said to us since december, when he appointed us before he was inaugurated, he said, "i want science to be the centerpiece of my administration. i accept the idea that this advisory council, which has had its ups and downs-- nixon dissolved it, some people ignored it, some people filled it with political appointees-- i want this to be full of exciting interesting people from a lot of fields. >> rose: what is it that he wants advice on? >> what the president sees that has attracted all of us to this council, he sees the connection between doing basic and

technology-related science and every aspect of his major programs-- education, manufacturing, the economy, health care, improving-- trying to control our climate, energy-- all of these things he sees as closely linked to scientific activity. so we have on this council 21 people who represent virtually every discipline in science and technology and people from many different states and people of different genders and colors and we are going to take on, we hope, with his blessing, a large number of important topics. we're currently working on a report on influenza, but virtually every aspect of modern society that's influenced by science and technology will be subjected to our scrutiny when we feel that we can give advice to the president that will help him develop a sensible policy

for the country. >> rose: harold varmus, nobel laureate, an interesting story of one man's discovery as he pursues his life in science, but also coming out of a classical education. thank you. >> charlie, thanks very much for having me on. >> rose: on our next charlie rose we're in cairo with an executive television interview with the president of ejipz, hosni mubarak. join us. >> do you think israel will allow iran to have a nuclear weapon? >> before nettenyahu and before and the minister of defense in israel-- nuclear weapons in iran

but our understanding is the whole region should be free of all forms or types of mass destructive weapons. >> rose: it is also said are you urging president obama to urge israel not to engage in a strike against iran. >> look, i would like to say something. the nuclear capability of iran, if it goes on like this, and it happened that military force is used, this-- again, this is the whole region. again, misuse of military power. that is why i say this should be

solved amically, peacefully. and i call on iran to have this flexibility to negotiate with representatives of the united states of america to resolve this issue in order that no military actions would be brought about. we want to stop all military activity. >> rose: freeman dyson is here. he has spent a lifetime grappling with some of the toughest problems in expeens beyond. as a young physicist he received worldwide recognition. he has become a best-selling author on topics from biotechnology to extraterrestrial television. he has emergeed as a critic of climate change. in march, the "new york times" profiled him in an article called, "the globing warming her tech".

how did freeman dyson, liberal intellectual, problem solver wind up infuriating the environmentalists? we'll ask that and more. i'm pleased to have freeman dyson back at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: i'll get to this in a moment but you really stirred them up when you talk about global warming, don't you. >> so, that article, of course, is totally misleading. global warming is a very smaller part of my concern. the author is a very fine writer. >> rose: he is, indeed. >> but it is mostly fiction rather than fact. >> rose: how can a very fine writer, write fiction rather than fact. >> he had his agenda which wasn't mine. >> rose: what was his agenda? >> his agenda was to write a piece about global warming. >> rose: right. >> he told me he was going to do a profile of me, and it was-- he twisted it into a story about global warming, which is

really-- i don't claim to be an expert on that subject. i'm not an activist, and i certainly am not an appropriate person to be a political activist. so it gave, i think other a very misleading view. however, i mean, the pictures are beautiful, and so i can't complain. ( laughter ) >> rose: it's like your tie. you have a beautiful tie. >> which my wife chose for me this morning. >> rose: this morning. she picks out your clothes when you leave in morning? >> not usually. >> rose: the tie. or for television. >> for television, yes. >> rose: well, she has good taste. >> thank you. >> rose: so what is your view on global warming? >> well, i'm very skeptical-- >> rose: however small large it is in context of all the things you talk about? >> i am very skeptical about the all the pronouncements made by the experts. i know how completely uncertain the subject is, so i would say just don't believe the experts, but i don't claim to be an

expert myself so i won't argue with anybody about details. and i'm certainly not a spokesman for the opponents of the prevailing dogmas. i haven't given much time to it and i don't pretend to know what the real answers are. what i'm-- what i know for sure is that most of the people who make pronouncements don't know, either. >> rose: all right, maybe you don't know, so let mow just ask some questions and you can say, "i don't know." do you deny the world is getting warmer? >> no. >> rose: you don't deny that. clearly the world is getting warmer. >> i went to greenland, myself, where the warming is most extreme. and it's quite spectacular of course what you see in greenland. what is also true is the people there love it. the people there hope it continues. it maukz their lives a lot more pleasant. >> rose: do you believe there continues to be global warming in those regions that we will eliminate the ice and, therefore there will be a rising of the water level, and, therefore, at some point it will threaten us

all? >> no. i don't believe that. i mean, the point is that the sea level has been rising for 12,000 years. and it has nothing to do with global warming. >> rose: nothing? >> it's a separate problem. i mean-- >> rose: does global warming contribute to? >> probably. but we don't know how much. and it's certainly not-- the main problem when you're dealing with ridesing ocean-- i mean, we know it's been going on for 12,000 years. wean it has very little to do with human activities. so it will be a great-- it will be a terrible mistake to think you solved the problem of the rising ocean when you're only dealing with climate. >> rose: what else need you do? >> well, we don't know. it's-- we don't know the causes. it's absurd to imagine that you can treat a disease without doing a diagnosis. if you're a scientist, you don't

jump to, conclusions. >> rose: right. but here's what some people say. they say if climate warms at, say, the current rate for the next 100 years, the difference in climate will be as dramatic as the difference at the end of the ice age. >> i think that's extremely unlikely, but of course i don't know. certainly there's no that he was that that's true. >> rose: why are they so excited about you saying all these things if you simply are saying, i don't know?" what is it you are saying that really gets under their skin? >> i don't know whether it gets under their skin. that again, was exaggerated in the "new york times". >> rose: the "new york times"? i. >> i never got under anybody's skin as far as i know. jim hencen, for example-- >> rose: a revered-- or a reupon maybe is a better word-- >> he is my friend. and we're portrayed in that article as enemies. that that he was a manipulator just as i was. >> rose: do you and jim hanson

have the same view about climate change? >> no, but we are friendly-- we have divergeant vows but we are quite good friends. so-- society of us, i think, felt aggrieved because we were-- >> rose: that you were somehowan tagganist other than different opinions about a central issue. >> yes, we happen to agree about a lot of things. >> rose: i'm going to ask you about these fact. the average temperature has climbed 1.4 degrees fahrenheit since 1880, much of this in recent decades. is that true? >> yes. >> rose: the 20th centuriy last two decades were the hottest in 400 years. >> that's probably true, but the last-- actually the last decade has been cooler. and-- >> rose: cooler than the previous decade? >> yes. and it's not at all clear

whether the rise is continuing or not. >> rose: you also believe that certain biotechnologies will in the end serve to reduce the impact of global warming. >> yes, i think-- of course, first of all i don't believe global warming is bad. i think that's first question to be settled. >> rose: another so is global warming bad? >> no, i would say warming is certainly real, but it's mostly happening in cold places at high latitudes, and it's also happening more in winter than in summer, and it's also happening more at night than in daytiti. >> rose: is the emission of so much c.o.2 into the atmosphere a good thing? >> yes. >> rose: even though it breaks whatever it does up there. >> yes, i would say it's a very good thing. it makes plants grow better. but plants cannot consume all the c.o.2 out there. >> no, but they're doing better because of the co2. it's true of crop plants and for

all of forforest. against that, you have possible harmful effects of warming. but i think it is important that warming is happening in place, that a a cold, in place where's it's winter rather than summer, and it's summer reasoner nighttime. >> rose: what's interesting is that are you not arguing with the facts. you are arguing with the collusions. >> right. >> rose: for example there's melting at montan's natural park. is that a good thing? >> it's a good thing and a bad thing. >> rose: you don't think that human contribution to global warming is as significant as the critics, those who very

vehemently oppose global warming and want to do something about it argue. >> that i would sayy we don't know. what we do know is glaciers were swinging in switzerland and many other places long before human activity became ropt. >> rose: let me talk about-- in the context of freeman dyson's remarkable life, here are you in your 80s? what concerns you today? what do you worry about? >> i worry about nuclear weapons. >> rose: i have written about nuclear weapons. >> that is the number one problem, for me, and all the discussion of global warming distracts people from more important things. well, they can hold two things in their head. >> last night we had in prince son a commemoration of hebroch ma, and two survivors spoke

about their exporns. that's what we should be talking about. >> it's becoming a more visible issue. >> rose: including the president of the united states and henry kissinger, and sam nunn. >> especially the gang around reagan. >> that's i think the beauty of it that it is something that the right wing republicans generally believe in. so it's something we may have a chance to do. >> rose: mutually assured destruction is not a good idea. >> i don't think it's a good idea. it works up to a point. it's not something we should rely on. >> rose: and do you think the united states, to lead the way, should reduce its stockpile of

weapons by how much? >> i would say total. i mean i'd like-- >> rose: just go right out and get rid of all of them and show the world the right direction. >> that's what nixon did with biological weapons and it was a wonderful move. he did it youn laterally becausey so he didn't have to have it ratified by the senate. he didn't have to negotiate with anybody. we said if we get rid of our weapons we will destroy the stockpiles, and it happened one afternoon. >> rose: would woe be less of a nation? >> i don't think so pup. but that's a matter of opinion. the public believes nuclear weapons give them security. i don't think so. it's a question of balance, of course. >> rose: suppose we gave up all our nuclear weapons. do the think they would give up

theirs? >> no. the real danger is somebody steals a few of them, and getting rid of ours world certainly help. they're more likely. >> i once walked into a room in this country, where there were 41 hydrogen bombs just lying around on the floor. >> rose: i've been on a submarine where they had 18. >> they're all over the place i don't think they're particular low safe. you think if people using today today's strategies might very well steal a nuclear weapon from the united states repository. >> yes. i mean, it's of course-- you depend on the fact that people are careless and we are as carol as other poem.

but it's more likely to pakistan and other places like that where there is under stability. so, anyway, i don't say it's necessarily. that wore any worse than the other people who are taking care of them. oim saying we're not perfect. you consider that the greatest problem of man and humanmind? >> at the moment, yes. >> rose: dog away with-- getting rid of property on the same level. >> and how are we doing on that very well, china and india are becoming rich. that's the center of gravity to the world, china and india. if they become rich countries the majority of moneykind is rush marine tour sglnjts in the

remained of your life, whether 10 years, or 20 years or what you-- what would you like to achieve? >> i don't have any illusions that i will karks chief these great things. i like to help push people and push things in a sensible way. >> as you know most people think your more interesting ideas in physics came a long time ago. >> that's true. >> rose: i know. >> i enjoy life and don't particularly care what i'm doing at that moment that is interested. is it challenging and interesting to you you? >> science, of course, to me is sun and just like painting pictures or anything else. >> rose: it's a puzzle. >> well, i would say it's a technical skill, which is fun to exercise. >> rose: yeah. there is this idea that physics has had its sentry, and the.

>> i think that's quite likely to be true. it's certain that physics has slowed down during my lifetime. largely just because the experiments have become so slow. but biology, at the same time, has been speeding up. so i i think it's probably true that this century is the century of biology. >> rose: because of the discovery of dna and the mapping of the human genome. >> i think all these scientists are driven by tools rather than ideas sglool. >> tools for the biologists, and gene synthesizers, now we can read and write-- >> rose: we are understanding more about disease than we have

in the whole history of human kind. that's going slow. the healing part of biology is really tough. >> rose: it's not easy to understand how these work. >> certainly, we're not doing woman with the war against cancer. >> rose: why do you think that is? >> it's a lot more complicated than we hoped. >> that's true >> i have tremendous respect for nature, that nature is almost always smarter than we are, and that's what make biology so exciting. why is nature much smarter than we are? >> it's had a much longer time to work out the details. and it will take care of itself. this is not to name drop but i've done one interview with him stevein hawking. >> good, and others who worked with him and studied under him. >> that's one person i have

enormous respect for some he's great in both respects as a human being and as a scientist. i think he's one of the few people i would say clearly deserveaise nobel prize and hasn't got one. i don't know why. >> is he considered one of the top 10 physicist in the world today? >> by me, yes. ( laughter ) >> rose: and that's all that matters, isn't it? >> not all that matters, but-- anyway, he's terrific and he wears--. he's amazingly tough. >> rose: you know him though. >> the last time i met him he was in a bar in tokyo. >> rose: at a bar! >> drirchgsing whiskey and having a good time. what were you dog there. i was there just to do that, too. i think he was having more fun

than i was. >> rose: what happened to the super collider? >> the super collider-- >> rose: explain to us what it was just so we know that. >> it's a big machine in geneva on the border between switzerland and france. >> rose: orch there rather than here because they paid for it. >> yes, the europeans built and paid for it. i think it will do a lot of interesting science. >> like what? >> it will discover things that weren't expected. that's what the science is all about. if you knew in advance what you were going to o scover, it's not interesting. so we hope it will discover lots of things that nobody imagined, but it has technical problems. big machines very often do. there's nothing unusual in that. they switched it on and something broke. >> rose: to their great

disappointment. >> this is disappointing, but sooner or later they'll it working. >> rose: but when? >> we don't know. but we have to think on a long-term scale. that's why physics is slowing down. >> rose: because they're doing huge mathematical computations and more. so they took 10 years to build it, and 10 yearses to-- >> rose: get it right. >> to get it actually to work. that is most of the of a lifetime, which is a shame. >> rose: what is the great question you would like to see answers? >> to me mind the most exciting questions are really in biing on. that question i've--. i even got so concerned i wrote a book about it-- "the origin of life." it is a good problem because everybody is equally ignorant, even i could write a book about it and it's a complete mystery.

>> rose: what did you determine about the origins of life? >> well, i'm simply speculating that it hullly had two oranges. >> rose: adam and eve. >> that we have at our-- living crete urdz made of two components, which is sort of hardware and software, like computers. >> rose: lifgs creteures are made of hardware and software. >> the hardware is the chemistry of things, what they call metabolism. eating and drinking and processing all the materials. all of active things like nerves and muscles so far are made of harl hardware, proteins. and then there is the software that is genome, just the instructions for how to build it. so we have those two components which are very separate in life

as fay we know it. i'm making the hypothesis, but really it was unlikely that they were both there from the beginning. it's much more lightly that they recorded separately. you had life evolving without genes for a long time. genes were then independent creature, which originally were parasites and then took over the direction so to bottom then a symbiosis, a collaborative system, which both of them worked together. that seems to me a reasonable point of view but i don't claim it's true. >> rose: what do you think about the technologies of nanotechnology? >> there again it's been hype too much. but, clearly, it's very real. we've got a lot of interesting

materials that are a deepstancy in the wam way as genetics. >> rose: stevin hawking talks about the search for the theory of everything. are you interested in ray theory of everything? >> i hope it doesn't exist. it would show that god had been lock with imagination. >> wait a minute, god would be-- >> rose: how do you get your mind around religion and science? >> well, i think they both are real and they both say something about the universe. but they're qoit different. i think of them as two windows through-- you can't look at both at the same time. >> rose: and so for scientists who say to those people of fakt,

i appreciate your faith but i can't believe anything that i can't see and that i can't prove. >> well, that's, of course, a correct statement if mean by "belief" "scientific belief." but i think a religion is not just about belief. >> rose: it's about? >> it's about a way of life, a mmunity. it's big polit raature and music and architecture. it's a big part of your human. which is really not so much dependent on belief. >> rose: are you a religious man by that definition. but i certainly don't believe any particular theology. >> rose: what do you think of richard dawkins? >> i like richard dawkins as a human being but i think he's done a lot of harm by telling young people that you have to be

an eightist it in order to become a scientist. that's a stupid thing to say. it actually pushes away a lot of young people from science who don't want to give up religion. >> rose: are you optimistic about all of us? >> yes. >> rose: in the end? >> oh, very optimistic. it's quite amazing we've been able to do in the short time we have been here. we have talents which to me are quite extraordinary because they don't have any obvious survival value. for example, calculating numbers i need to calculate numbers in order to survive. it's not at all kpleer. why should we be abe to compose string quartets or paint paintings.

>> rose: so you are optimistic about our future because you look at where we've come from, and we've evolved not badly. >> i would say we're doing-- >> rose: even though we've built these bombs that could destroy us. >> we've been doing amacingly well. >> rose: have you been kind to the planet? >> yes. >> rose: a lot of people don't have that view. are you in a stinkinority that including our friend evan hooker of december. no, the fact is of course we've done a lot of damage to the planet, but we also repair the damage. i grew up in england, and england was far more filthy then than there was now. england is much more-- is comparatively green.

you can go to london and your collar doesn't get black each day, and the tham sing happened in los angeles. the smol in no, sir. >> rose: have you been to beijing? >> yes. >> rose: and you're not bothered by that? and you want them to build every coal-burning plant they could build? >> global warming people don't make a distinction between carbon dioxide, which is essentially, in my view, harmless, and the other things which are told is horrible, certain smog, and nitrogen oxide and all that stuff. there's a lot of very ugly stuff in coal which you can get rid of by scrubbing the hole and the gases that come out of the fire station. so the chinese certainly can do a lot more of that and they are doing a lot more than that.

>> rose: you are a member of caisson. >> what is that? >> it's a group of consult antz that work for government. wove been just in existence 50 years. >> rose: 50? >> yes. we're just tell our separate birthdays. we're doing a study about nunuear weapons, which is one of the things we've always been interested in. we've goneb been asked boy congress to assess the state of the stockpile and how you can taken a thought pile that is reliable without doing tests. >> rose: suppose they come to you and jason said, here's the project. we want you to help us decide a weapon. >> i would look at the details. jason is not in the business of

inventing weapons, anyway. advising the government about all kinds of technical problems mostly minor. what we are get yet is clearing stupid ideas. >> rose: that seems to me like a worthy function. >> that's what i think is most useful about what we're doing. somebody tells us they have a wonderful scheme for detecting submarines, and you only need $100 million to get started. and then we demonstrate that the thing is no good. >> rose: it's a pleasure to have you here. >> thank you. >> rose: freeman dyson, an interesting man. and you've had a remarkable life and you continue to live with great spirit and great fun and i admire you for this spirit and passion you bring to conversations. >> thank you.

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