and political director for cbs news. i'm pleased to have him here. let me begin with this. so what was the president doing today trying to reassure that the healthcare program is a, a good program, and b, these are problems we can fix. >> yes. and you saw him there trying to maintain a difficult balance. on the one hand showing i'm as angry as anybody, i understand the irritation, i share the irritation with those people who are trying to sign up and this is the problem that's going to get fixed. and very quickly thereafter saying but are the underlying product are just fine. don't let these problems you're hearing about with respect to the website do anything to cloud your view about the underlying product, the healthcare program is going to be just fine. >> rose: he wants to separate website problems from the notion of content, that what they have is a good product. >> he does. and that is, that would be a win for them, basically, after three weeks of getting pounded, is for it to just look like well it's kind of a tech issue and here

we've escalated it up all the way to the president and he said he wants it fixed and it will be fixed. the problem that the reporting shows is that it's not just a matter of the website being a little budgie, that there are underlying issues here about the system, the coordination here between the different insurance companies and the federal program and the system of delivering healthcare where the president is said fine is where some of the complexities and problems are and that seems more difficult to fix than getting the computer code to arrange 23450eu6sly so it works okay. >> rose: i want to talk about the computer code first and then come back to the healthcare in general. you would think that the campaign team that put together such an extraordinary digital machine would at the same time know how to find people that can put together an extraordinary digital healthcare program. >> you would think so.

they have revolutionized the obama team, revolutionized by several orders. the operation and rung of -- running of campaign with all sorts of entrepreneurial activity. why did they do that. they allowed basic three their programmers, it was a free flowing organization where they were allowed to fail quietly in problem and fix that. none of that appears to have have been what was at work at the federal government program. and this is one of the sort of ratifies one of the arguments of a lot of the republican critics, which is that just government can't do comprehensive big complicated things the way you can when you're in a kind of more free flowing corporate environment which is closer to what the obama campaign was than what you have here in government. >> rose: but at the same time, i mean they knew this was come. this was not a surprise to them, was it? >> well, it was asked in the

interviews before with journal it's and interviews i had with administrative officials. this is great, this theory you have about how and we should talk. it's hard to under state how much weight they were putting on these websites in term of solving the problems with obamacare and getting people signed up. but leaving that aside for a moment when i said, what if this thing doesn't work, i was assured by several different administration official on several different fronts that they had tested it. that they used the irs electronic filing model and all of the computer learning that they've done over the years in dealing with people's tax returns applied it to this. they tested it like they test pent gun systems. then they were saying before it runs it was thoroughly tested. one of the arguments being made by secretary sebelius was that it wasn't tested enough. when he left when he came into office or the wars or the before p oil spill that was not of his

making. this is the president's signature domestic achievement and he launched it. he knew when the launch date was, so that wasn't a surprise either and yet some of these problems seems to be the kinds of problems that are catching him off guard as if this were dropped out of the sky. >> rose: does the smart money think this is going to do real damage to obamacare? >> well, this is a really interesting question. i'm not sure what the an is. so there is the political question which if the damage were just political, you know the president's not going to be re-elected. you could imagine that those really the democrats who are running for the senate in those republican states are the one most at risk. and you can make a political argument that they've already taken the pain for obama, people are not going to vote for them who don't like the president's healthcare plan so they're not going to lose a whole bunch of new votes was of this. so that's the politics of it. this is a sustained problem for several months. i think it really does hurt democrats. >> rose: let's talk quickly about the policy.

>> which is that what the affordable healthcare act requires, it's a lot of young voter sign up and get into those insurance pools in variation regions of the country so that those insurances pools aren't filled with older sicker americans. if that doesn't work because the healthcare is faulty then va real problem because that sends the premiums higher and that's a big big problem. >> rose: that's used to treat the elderly. >> the insurance company can keep prices down because they know we've got lots of these young people in here so we can spread the cost out across them. that was a crucial reason when i talked to administration officials about how this was going to work on the website, what they hoped was the website would launch and these younger americans who know how to use the web is quite second nature to them, that they would easily glide into the affordable care

act system, that's the real policy question here that could be a real problem for this. it's a problem on the policy front that is a political problem. >> rose: the president said he would bring out the best and brightest to fix the this. i don't understand why he didn't do that two weeks ago. >> well in the first place. we're walking the cat back on this a little bit. why didn't you, who was not on the sort of on the ball here when this is getting launched. and we can go all the way back. part of the problem here is the way this law was written. thas that it was complex that you're trying to meld public and private. when you're trying to meld computer systems in both the public and private sector there's complexity. but as you rightly said it isn't like this is a surprise to them. the real challenge now though is this problem like a fire in which case you can bring firemen

in from across the country and more hoses and put it out and that's great. or is it a problem where you really like untangle christmas lights, you actually make your jobs harder because you need 58 conference calls for lots of different people who have lots of different opinions and the actual work isn't getng done. when the president said he's bringing in lots of people, that is not necessarily a recipe for quick solution. >> rose: is it simply government intervention in lives that made so many people on the far right so opposed to obamacare. what was the one thing that made them the angriest sea that -- so that they were willing to shut down the government. >> i think it's a great point. for those people who had insurance they thought their insurance was going to get ruined. and they thought they were going to have to pay more in premiums

or wait for doctors or when the president promised that the existing insurance system wouldn't be changed, that he wasn't telling them the truth. and i think a corollary to that and with some people this is the primary concern was just get out of my life. it's just kind of a visceral reaction to the government being involved in their personal lives. and of course this comes up against the great disconnect between the same kind of voters saying keep your hands off my health care are also the ones who, you know, are fine with medicare in that regard. so it is not always a totally rational reaction among everybody who hates this at such a visceral level. >> rose: it was a great moment in political theatre when somebody stood up and raised their hand and said you tell the government to keep their hands off my medicare. >> that's right. it's a sign of how successful it's been that even those who hate government don't recognize its fingerprints. >> rose: do people like medicare? >> they do. >> rose: it has problems of

all kinds. >> yes. i mean they like it no, sir who are on it and those who are expecting to get it, they do like it. and what's interesting here the whitehouse has pointed to the medicare part d which you know when that was first the drug prescription drug benefit, when that was first put forward there were a lot of people who thought oh no you're going to ruin my medicare by adding some thing to it. a similar reaction. they liked their medicare and they wanted pretty scription drugs covered but there were a lot of people worried adding more government on to this would ruin it. now it terms out that's been a much more successful program than a lot of people thought at first. >> rose: i do remember one of the debates, didn't romney say to the president you're cutting medicare. at least in the republican debates the question was raised as to whether the obama administration wanted to cut by some $700 million or was it billion. >> i think it was billion. >> rose: it was billion. >> that's right. >> you know i mean the president's argument for those medicare cuts was that this was

all, and people didn't buy this in large numbers, but that this was an effort to deal with those long term entitlement costs that medicare is a part of. that if you rationalize the system, you can bring some savings out it by just being smart about how you distribute healthcare. and that's one of the, again people didn't buy that at the time but that's where that 700 brilliant came from where you didn't necessarily feel because that was from something that was going to be implemented. >> rose: hears something that's counterintuitive. was the fact this thing got into shutting the government down mean that people who might otherwise have been willing to sort of vote against obamacare are so mad that they are maybe less inclined to do so now. >> the republicans succeeded in

finding something ?x@l was even less popular than the president's healthcare plan which was this funding of the government to shutting down healthcare. people just absolutely didn't like that. i think another interesting side effect here is that maybe there's a recent poll about how many people know now about these federal exchanges. more know they exist. one of the challenges for the obama administration getting the word out that these exchanges exist because of the pool of people that are uninsured they're trying to reach aren't watching the evening news every night. they're not participating in the news culture so much. so they didn't even know this is out there. well now that it's become a problem, it's much more, it's kind of ubiquitous these stories about it so that's raised the level of awareness. that's bad on the one hand people are hearing the first stories about it they're thinking negotiator this is a mess i don't want to engage in it. if there are stories that say well it's been fixed now you have a greater number of people who at least know it's out there and might go sign up for it. so that's the optimist case for

how this debacle has created at least greater awareness that exchanges are even out there. >> rose: this administration it seems to me has had a hard time selling its progms, being able to effectively communicate what they are and what they are not. >> that's right. and that comes into play here. i think the president's very good communicator in the binary election context which is it's either the other guy or me. and there will be a date where you have to make that choice. when you're trying to explain policy, people can choose to opt out. they can choose to not listen or they can choose to imagine that there's a policy out there that is not all the bad things that you're offering and it's a lot of good stuff. so they can imagine something and that's where they say we like that even though in reality such a policy might not be possible. but they have another place they can put their thinking. with an election you can't put your thinking anywhere else, you can stay home from participating of course. but people who do want to

participate kind of have an a or b choice and that's not, it is not that simple with policy. what's interesting on your plan about communications is the president is basically got an operational challenge here. he's got to basically make the trains run and yet he's trying in part to solve it with communications. that's what his event was in the rose garden. the problem is that the president continues to say well the underlying thing is okay, you raise expectations. remember when they first came out and said well these are just glitches. give us the slack you would cut apple. now we're three weeks into it if appearal had something like this not apple maps withstanding, it would be a huge catastrophe. a lot of these sort of end up biting them in the end because people say wait you said it was going to be this and now it's something else and that leads to a kind of credibility problem that has dogged the affordable care act since its inception. >> rose: you got people like

the senator from south carolina and the found agent says quote we will continue to fight against obamacare. so you got the speaker of the house saying that, you got most republicans, you got ted cruz obviously saying that. so how are they going to do this? >> well, you know i think they're going to do it, a come things. one, they're going to have to keep saying that for the constituent who want them to keep the fight up. there are a lot of republicans who are very gun shy about doing anything too adventuresome on the affordable care act that's having problems on its own. fft problems continue to mushroom then you can see a larger call for action. in the polls right now "the washington post" had some polling on this. people are dissatisfied with the waive the rollout has gone. they recognize some of the problems in the roll out -- people don't wanted it defunded

or delay. there's no at least in the polling support for any republican program to undo it. so there's going to be perhaps a lot of rhetoric about this. but i'm not sure there's a whole lot that they can do that lawmakers can do. if they wanted to try to fix or tweak it you get a group of the conservative movement say no you must rip it out totally by its roots. anything that seeks to tweak it is an improvement and that's an improvement of a thing dough don't want to exist in the first place. >> rose: speaking of senator cruz. there is this fact. he's been at iowa, and i'm told, i mean the iowa primaries are determined by the, you know, the more active ist whether republin or democrat. i'm told if iowa voted today, he would win. >> charlie i've heard the same

thing from folks involved in the caucus out there for a long time. i hear ted cruz's name and scott walker's name from the governor of wisconsin. what do they like about ted cruz. do you remember rick santorum won the caucus there in the end. what the activists of iowa like is somebody who, you know, stands on principles. does what they say they're going to do. and particularly in the washington context where republicans have time and time again heard people they thought were conservatives say i'm going to washington and i'll give them what for, i'm going to stand on principle and even if it requires fighting my own party i will do it. and when push comes to shove they witness. ted cruz didn't wilt and i've heard people who are ted cruz fans now but as you know the iowa caucus voter and the tea party voter in the republican party is still a minority of the party. but given the way the process works, they have an outside influence on the primaries and

caucuses. and so if this continues, ted cruz should have an interesting role to play although they'll bump up against a lot of the problems that rick santorum had which is you can fill a ball room of very enthusiastic people but you got to show how you can lead. and right now ted cruz is only increasing the number of people in washington who don't like him and if he ever wanted to come back here and lead he's got to show some capacity for doing that. >> rose: governors have more easy examples to illustrate the point of leadership than senators. >> they do. in fact the republican governor's association is using the washington republicans, now this is the republican governor's association is pointing to washington and saying if you don't like the dysfunction there just look at the republican governors, they're the ones getting things done. you have an amazing split in the republican party. you have ted cruz saying he's demonstrating what real conservative principles look like here in washington and you've got republican governors saying no that's not the example the example to look at are these 30 republican governors in the

country. that's the day bait you're going to see in 2016 between a kind of doer out in the states and the talker from washington. >> rose: john, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> always a pleasure, charlie, thanks. >> rose: back in a moment. stay with us. >> so if we look forward to this next on 50 years, this is going to be very exciting. almost anything and anybody's imagination can be designed and made as a biological unit. now we're not working at the atom scale but you can get roughly a third of all the humanities, genomes within the perverbial head of the pin. it's a pretty small scale but we can work now by changing evolution by building on top of it simply by designing new software of life. thank you very much. >> rose: he is one of the world's leading scientists and entrepreneurs and one of the first people to map the human genome. his team announced in 2010 that

they had created synthetic life, the first fully functioning cell controlled by synthetic dna. his new book is called life at the speed of light from the double helix to the dawn of digital age. it describes the origins of synthetic genomics, its current challenges and its potential for the future. i am pleased to have aji=t venture back at this table. welcome. >> thank you. it's nice to be back. >> rose: it's a pleasure. there's so much you want to talk about, including dublin in 1943 to 2012 which is chapter 1. and you start with a question, which i'm very much in favor of. what is life, only three simple words and yet out of them spends a universe of questions that are no less challenging. what precisely is it that separates the animate from the inanimate. what are the basic ingredients of life. where did life first stir. how did the first organisms evolve. is there life everywhere. to what extent is life scattered across the cosmos. other if other kinds of creatures do exist on exo

planets are they as intelligent as we are or even more so. these questions are about the nature and origins of life remain the biggest and most hotly debated in all of biology. so therefore we have this book. tell me what is life as you explore in this book. what are we talking about and how are we changing the definition if we are. >> well, everything we know about life in a meaningful way has come in the last 70 years. so when the lecture in 1944, the world was certain that proteins was the genetic material. dna was a back barone for the proteins. but he changed the thinking saying it didn't have to be complicated and as simple as a binary code. since 44 until now first we discovered that much dna was in fact genetic material then the structure was solved by watt

kins krict. we started sequencing the first bacterial genome in 1995. we've been going from understanding that dna was a genetic material to being able to read it. and the latest phase we're learning how to write it and rewrite it. what became clear by writing the genetic code starring with four bottles of chemicals and creating new life out of that material that all life on this planet is dna software. we're a dna software-driven species. all life we know it is dna driven software. that's a differ view than 1944. >> rose: what did you accomplish? >> so, what we did is we, after reading the genetic code and having that converted to the ones and zeroes on the computer, we went the other way. we started with the ones and zeroes to see if we could recapitulate life on the genome.

four bottles of chemicals we wrote 1.1 million letters of genetic code. it took us a long time to be able to do that and the booker details the trials and errors forgetting there. we then put that software in another cell. >> rose: one cell. >> one cell. and that software took over the cell. and converted everything into that cell based on the code we put in to create a new cell. i think it was the biggest change was that finding by change of the dna software in the cell, the new software take it over and converts it into a new species. and so it became very clear with this how life is totally dna software driven. our cells constantly turn over preteens every few seconds. if you take the software out of the cells they die. it's like taking the software out of your computer, you can do nothing without it snoovment what do you say to someone like david baldmore at a conference

who said it has not created life only mimicked it. >> we don't claim we created life. we created new life. there's a difference, there's some fantastic work going on harvard trying to recapitulate early origins of liver with rna and lipid vesicles. we're doing something on top of three and-a-half billion years of evolution. we're showing that all modern life is now based on this software and by rewriting the software, david's absolutely right. we started with a known genome. this was actually proof of consent experiment. it was n't creating whole new life. for the last few years we've been designing a cell in the computer and we're currently manufacturing the dna for this and we'll know in a little while whether we're smart enough to actually create new life. >> rose: you make a point in doing this which is interesting to me, i find that the audience watching this program and other

programs are really interested in science if you can explain it to them. because it is like a puzzle. it is like a detective, i mean it is exploring things that they can never imagine or can only begin to imagine. all that makes it for one extraordinary kind of curiosity about these things. so when you say biology is in the digital age, what do you mean. >> so we can now readily interchange between the four letter chemical dna software and the ones and zeroes in the computer. can we now go in both directions. when we read the genome and sequenced the human genome we converted those six billion letters to ones and zeroes in the computer. and now digital code and dna code can rapidly convert one into the other. and that's where the title comes from. we can now actually send life as that digital code and recapitulate it at the other end. >> rose: so you send it as

e-mail or something. >> you can send it as e-mail and reconvert it back to dna. so the future we'll be able to actually download living things from our desktop computers. >> rose: and you also write the synthetic biology freeze the design of life from the shackles of revolution which is obvious too. there are some obvious things here but it's worth underlining them as well. >> well, what we have evolved with all the species on this planet, they've evolved in a very constrained set of environments. for example, our goal of trying to get algae to produce enough lipid to be able to use as a cheap fuel to replace oil. no algae has evolved to produce those levels of oil. if they did, the oceans would be full of oil instead of water. so we need to change evolution to change the constraints and what we're selecting for. we can the do that by design or we can do it by selection. doing it by design changes the speed by orders. >> rose: so you can produce

it really brilliantly fast or speed, faster than the speed we might image. >> yes. >> rose: and therefore you have enough to produce a fossil fuel. >> that's the goal. >> rose: what are the other goals in all of this. >> so when you think of sending life, life information through the computer, we tried to think what are the most important early applications. and so we were working to come up with a new way to treat flu ax venes. >> rose: these are pharmaceutical companies. >> well bart is a u.s. program. with h1n1 pandemic with a didn't have a vaccine until two months after the pandemic speak. fortunately the death rate was much lower than people were originally worried about. but if it happens again with the h7, 78 and 9 outbreak in china that apparently has a much higher lethality rate.

we've taken this period of time of months and converted it down to less than 12 hours of just taking the digital information, using our ability to write the genetic code, to recreate the flu virus that can be used as a vaccine. and so they just got their new facility in north carolina using cell lines instead of chicken eggs for the first time. where we have set up one of our machines there for taking digital information. so we could send just an e-mail message to this plant in north carolina if there's a new out break strain. make it in 12 hours and they can scale up into production. >> rose: and produce it how fast? >> so the scale up, the scale is the issue, and so they can produce 300 million doses there but they can't do that over night. but it takes months off the whole time in the front end by building the vaccine very quickly. now the future, as i portray it

here in a somewhat fanciful way but maybe in the future we'll all have boxes on our computers that do the same conversion. >> rose: you have one of those boxes now. >> we have one of though boxes. it's about the size of this table. biological digital converter. >> rose: in a fancy world everybody would have one of those. >> the goal is to prevent future pandemic. the more distributed it is the better. we had one site making it but initially when the vaccine became available only government senior officials and healthcare workers had access to the machine. a lot of countries didn't have access as all. if it's look the movie contagion -- >> rose: you call the digital biological converter the household appliance of the future. >> that's right. >> rose: ever has to have one. >> yes.

>> rose: when you thank you about the time line for completion of the kinds of things you're working on, are we talking the next century or are we talking 25 years out. >> so what we do, ham smith is 32 i'm 67. we try to figure out what we'll do in our lifetime so that puts constraints on it. we have the prototype machine and help with funding for this. we're going to have the first robotic device that synthesizes and assembles dna on the market next year. >> rose: a robotic device that assembles the dna. >> to genes and larger packages. >> rose: you have it on the market. >> yes. >> rose: meaning people can buy it. >> yes. >> rose: and who would buy it. >> well, it would be high level research labs that right now it's becoming a big business with laboratories contracting out to a number of companies to synthesize dna. and we'll make it possible for

them to do much faster and cheaper in their own laboratories. >> rose: you also think about mars. >> yes. >> rose: and you think about what might be possible if you can do what you're now working on larger. how would that work. >> so, we had a test project until the government got shut down or reactivated next month. nasa's funding the front end of this. it's a sending unit. we'll test it out in the mojave desert taking a sample of dirt out there on the mars test site. sequencing it and then sending the information up to the cloud. which would be the equivalent of doing that on mars and beeping it back to earth. it can take the signal and convert it back to dna and into life. >> rose: how does this work in terms of exploration of mars. >> so on mars, the indications are there used to be a lot of water there. maybe at least two or three

times massive oceans. we've exchanged 100 kilogram of materials between earth and mars every year. >> rose: how do we do that. >> it's just meteors that have gone back and forth early on. earth sends about 10 kilograms, we get about 100 kilograms from mars. and so finding life on mars -- >> rose: nasa or somebody else. >> it's through meteors. >> rose: so nasa tracks it. >> yes. some people have argued you can't take a soil of earth with a shovel, a shovel worth of oil and not find martian soil in it. and so if there was life on mars, it would have mirrored what we have on earth. maybe originated on mars and came to earth, nobody knows where it started. but we're going to have to drill down deeper into the surface. the current atmosphere there, lack of atmosphere and the radiation makes a pretty low probability we're going to find surface life.

on our planet, if you dig down a mile or two, we find massive life. and there's as much life beneath the surface of the earth as there is in the oceans. >> rose: oh really. >> microbial life. >> rose: didn't you go and find a gazillion new species. >> exactly. taking sample every 200 miles, every stop thousands and thousands of new species. >> rose: ended up with what, 80,000. >> 80 million new genes that were discovered through that expedition. it's interesting, there's much more diversity in the oceans but not more organisms. and the reason is the major drivers of evolution are sunlight and oxygen. deep in the earth, there's the same density of organisms but not the tremendous diversity around each type. in fact, deep in the colorado

mine we found organisms their closest match and they were very close came out of a volcano in italy. so all of evolution has been highly constrained deep in the earth. and the oceans because of all the oxygen and uv light, it changes much more quickly. but if we go deep into mars, you go down about a kilometer, there's ice. i would be surprised if we don't find life contained in the ice. but below the ice, there's a good estimation of liquid water. so if we're going to find life there, we'll find it there. but the problem is getting it back to earth. you got to send up a rocket big enough to bring the back and land on earth. if we just send up a little sequencing device, if there's life there, we sequence the dna and send it back. >> rose: do we have the power to do that now. >> absolutely, yes. >> rose: so we can do it. >> that's what these new tests are going to be. it isn't a matter of just shrinking down the devices but

the technology is all there to make it happen. >> rose: have you seen the movie gravity. >> i haven't seen it yet. i've been told it's worth seeing. >> rose: a brilliant young filmmaker too and sandra bullok and george clooney. scientists finds something wrong with you but it1> yes. >> rose: he surprised us before. >> i think it's very likely and it achieve. but our technology would be the most important thing they have for supporting the colony there. because we can send up new biology, not in a rocketship but as an electromagnetic wave. whether it's new antibiotics for diseases that will break up, new cells for making food or fuel, that would be the way we send information and send actual life. we won't we sending people that way, but the support things to

keep the people alive will be doing by digital waves. >> rose: to what end result? >> well, for example as you know with the micro biome we have more bacterial cells than human cells. so every astronaut or cosmonaut that goes up to the space station is taking 100 trillion bacterial cells with them. and so unless we're going to start sterilizing people before they go to mars, each person that goes there is going to be carrying a huge bacterial repertoire. we will be sending diseases up with people. and so the only way to, unless you have the world supply of medicines with you, we can actually send antibiotic in the form of phage, these viruses that kill bacteria through the internet. new cells to take the co2 on mars and convert it into construction material. >> rose: are there a bunch of people all over the world as you mentioned harvard and people at cambridge and people in moscow

and people in beijing and people in cairo all working on this. >> what most scientists in the synthetic biology field are working on are designing new biological circuits. it's really amazing stuff. we're trying to write the whole genetic code, there's this fantastic research going on, i detailed some of it in here, of out of biology creating the equivalent of electronic circuits, oscillators, detectors, proof that only engineers life but engineers function into life. bacteria that serve as sensors. manufacturing will change because of these technologies. so lots and lots of new circuits and components are being built, assembling them together in life is going to be a new challenge. >> rose: is there a race for nobel prize going on here. >> probably not. i don't think anybody races for those. >> rose: they don't. really, you don't think so.

>> no. >> rose: in other words, you look at what happened just in term of economics here what we just saw. you think the nobel prize comes to people after they've done something several years someone looks back -- >> on physics it happens very quickly. last year one of the scientists that got it for work he did 50 years before, right. so you know, i don't think anybody is focused on those as a scientist compared to just the excitement of getting answers to these questions we're asking. >> rose: right, exactly. we believe in questions, as i said, before we started. first met at the time of the mapping of the human genome. you've done a lot of series about that, a lot of interviews about that. where are we and most what's the most surprising thin that's been discovered and where were you wrong in your assumption going in if anywhere in terms of size, in terms of whatever. >> so i think the thing that's most exciting about what's

changed in that last 14 years is the technology. my genome being the first one done was about $100 million genome project. >> rose: $100 million. >> yes. now companies like aluma can do it in a very short period of time. >> rose: you can get it down for a thousand dollars today. >> yes. what we need are large numbers. having my genome and a hundred other genomes, there are more curiousities no -- >> rose: you need a wide sample. >> that's right. we need tens of thousands of genomes to understand how with the six billion letters we get all the variety that you see in human life. and so 10,000 would be the minimum number we need. but now that's doable when you consider the public program was at $3 million program, you get a lot of genomes done for $3 billion and build a lot of computers. so this next phase, the next five years -- >> rose: how about doing that now, trying to make. >> there's going to be several

efforts in the private world that are doing this because it's moving too fast to have it happen with government research. but as you know from my last book writing about my genome, there's very little you can understand having the genome sequence today. >> rose: that's exactly right. >> there's now in cancer a couple dozen what are called actionable items. for example, if you have lung cancer, there's nothing more important to know than your genome, because if you're lucky and you're one of the three to 5% people that have this one letter change in one gene. pfizer has a drug over 60% of the time knock out your tumors. so what we're looking for is more and more of these actionable. >> rose: did something like that happen with leukemia or not. >> yes. there's a handful of these things now we can tell from the genetic code. the goal is to get 30,000 things like that. and if i was wrong on something, it was optimistic, over

optimism. >> rose: do you encourage people to go out and get their genome done. >> yes. it's better t get it down. it's not a static identity. it changes -- >> rose: you mean certain cells appear and multiply. >> some of the latest data indicates that genome is slightly different in different parts of our body. it certainly changes in cancer cells. and so having a base line is going to be very useful for the future, and especially as soon as these databases are populated with tens of thousands. so it's going to become the number one way in the future to lower healthcare costs through preventive medicine. we've talked about this before, preventing disease and getting people to understand it's worthwhile to prevent something, is a tough economic argument until you have large data sets. it's pretty simple as an individual if you can prevent something you can. >> rose: i don't know where this came from i first heard it from the mouth of francis

collins who said, who you know well. >> yes. >> rose: who said the interesting thing about technological advances especially in health is that in the beginning the delivery is never as big as you thought it might be. but after ten years it's much larger than you ever imagined it might be. >> yes. it's moved a lot slower. and in part, you know, after all the hoopla around getting the first human genome there was nothing there to follow it up with. there's a new data set people are using and it's driven a tremendous amount of basic science. but the next agent understanding the genome is doing large numbers and when you spend billions or hundreds of millions getting the first one, it's not immediate obvious you're going to do 10,000 of them. i think we will follow the typical hockey stick kind of curve. we'll have constantly more and more impact. i think ten years from now it's going to be so different from

today. your genome will be the number one thing you have to have for medical care. >> rose: ten years from now. >> yes. hopefully soor. >> rose: what question drives you the most? >> well, this one about what is life, you know, it's impossible as a scientist. i mean everybody asks these questions at some time during our lives trying to understand it at whatever level we can. >> rose: trying to understand what it is to be human. >> but answering that question out of a simple bacterial cell it was exciting to get some of the answers to that. we've all heard about brownie in motion the energy in small molecules moving things around. that's important for the fundamentals of life as the genetic code. it's the energy that drives it. >> rose: it's amazing to me. you think about this, you talk about ten years.

are you certainly to talk about 13 or 14 years from the any 90's to today in terms of the dinnal revolution. it's stunning what we've done. and the power of a process now, the process is now, it's just, it's unbelievable. >> and how fast things change. once you have an ipad it's hard to remember the period when we had nothing. >> rose: and how they deliver velocity change that in itself is stunning. >> yes. >> rose: that's going to continue to happen, then you can imagine, we're going to be doing things we can't imagine even now beyond our imagination. >> yes. with a we hope, well in fact trying to work out what the most important thing for downloading biology from the internet's going to be, we decided we probably have to higher 12 and 13 year old to ask them because what i'll think about will probably be nothing what it ends up being thus far. >> rose: it's the idea of thinking like a beginner, isn't

it? that's what it is. unburdened by won't work, unburdened by any of those kinds of things but y don't know. >> well the content you can actually get life out of your computer is probably one of the most important concepts for people thinking about this. >> rose: is this the most important. is what you're doing now more important than mapping the human genome and your contribution to that? >> i think the work on synthetic life will be remembered far beyond the human genome. i think because it's so much more fundamental. the human genome's going to be important for understanding key parts about us, but the way you're going to discover that and the way you're going to survive on this planet is having new technologies to change our future. >> rose: and being able to convert it to x's and o's, how crucial a break through is that? >> it's, you know, it's especially critical because if we could not digitize life, this next world would have never happened. if it wasn't for the

co-evolution of computational efforts and biology, and now they're merging together as we heard in aspen, we're trying to attach things to the nervous system, right. >> rose: exactly. >> so if we're going to attach it to the dna, to the computers, to our brains, hopefully we can both get those modules to attach to go faster. >> rose: there are people sitting in washington right now and there are people sitting in theis this a tool for terrorism. >> it can be. and we had sponsorship by the sloan foundation for my institute along with m.i.t. and with various branches of government to look at the approaches and the ability to write the genetic code of how it can be misused. yes, it's something we have to be very much aware of. >> rose: if you're smart in say government and where you are

charged with national security, you want to say to the smartest people you know, figure out a way this could be used in the most malicious way, that would threaten us and then figure out how you can stop it. >> and the solution for stopping it is the same for, same solution for the biggest medical problem now facing the modern world. >> rose: which is. >> it's new antibody resistent organisms that are now killing more people in the u.s. than car accidents. and we're getting into -- >> rose: what anti-body -- >> so the staph resistent, it's resistent to all known antibiotics. >> rose: infection kills you, is that what happens. >> yes. and so jim henderson was in the news because somebody wrote a book with him. >> rose: henson. >> henson, right.

and you know, it's happening at an ever increasing rate at hospitals around the country. we've overused our repertoire of antibiotics and now the bugs are fighting back and they're resistent. now for an emerging infection is the same as if somebody makes a new infectious agent. it has a sufficient repertoire of anti-virals and anti-infectives. we need them both. >> rose: you have to stay ahead of the curve. >> exactly. on both fronts. the biggest threat is the emerging infections than it is man-made infections. we have powerful technology, obviously any can be used for good or for evil. we are been working with them on what can be didn't, what can't be done. >> rose: what makes them

super resistent. >> some develops techniques for pumping into the body back out of the cell. they change their genes owe the antibiotic doesn't have any effect anymore. we're investigating this area that used to be popular in eastern europe before the discovery of penicillin and that was using the viruses that kill bacteria. and coming up with new repertoires of those and they can actually be sent through the internet. >> rose: in 2010 you told me that synthetic genomic there's linen increase in negative potential -- do you still believe theta. >> i still believe it. and it develops what can be done with it. >> rose: i hate to do this but i want to do this. so what are you most proud of how? what would you want, if you walk out here and don't make it

across the street. here is what craig venture did for us. >> i hope i would make it across the street, i have a lot to do. >> rose: i hope i make it across the street. >> i think aside from the direct scientific contributions i've made with my teams, i think i've brought a new approach back into science that makes team-based discovery the way to be far more effective than the kind of linear approach we've had with government funding and universities. and my small teams having multidisciplinary teams that got the first genome in history, the first human genome, the first synthetic cell, there's been content major break throughs by this small team. and it is team science. i'm the orchestra conductor but it's this phenomenal team that i acknowledge in the front of the book that made the first synthetic life happen.

>> rose: it's always human resources. >> it is, totally. and i think if i have the skill set it's been putting the best teams together and helping motivate them by asking the right questions. >> rose: exactly right. and refusing to be impeded. >> yes. >> rose: it's great to see you. the book is called life at the speed of light from the double me little to the dawn of light. thank you for joining us. see you next time.

captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

♪ >>dean: hi and welcome back to hometime. on the show today we have a couple more steps we're working on to get the house and yard all dried in. >>miriam: yup, we're at the creekside home project, and we also have windows going in. so we'll be talking about proper flashing and weather protection as those go in. last we'll be digging in the french drain, with fabric, rock, and some eco- friendly pipe that should keep things dry well into the next century. >>dean: first time we done that on the show so make sure to stick around and see how it all turns out. >>miriam: should be interesting right? >>dean: yup

>> man. what we need is some elbow grease. >> yeah, you can... are you kidding me? >> gmc. proud to lend a helping hand to hometime. ♪ >>miriam: if you've seen any of the other shows on this project, you know that we've pretty much covered everything right from the start. and that includes framing, a lot of which happened off sight. we worked with a framing contractor, who designs and builds their walls back at the factory they have set up just for that purpose. there's a guy named jake crowley who takes the architects plans and lays out all the walls on his computer. each one is sized exactly with openings for doors and windows. and they're all numbered for reference at the factory and out at the home sight. down in the factory floor, the built the walls in a series of stations inside where it's always warm and dry, which

is good because the creekside walls went through the coldest part of a minnesota winter. once the foundation was ready, they sent the walls out to the home sight, where a crew led by ted hilgendorf put them all together. and working with a crane, goes pretty quickly. when the guys finished up the roof, it was time for us to get started on rough ins. well that was a while ago, but we did say they would be back for windows, and our windows arrived a couple days ago. with the new driveway base we installed last time, they were able to back the truck right up to the house in a nice bed of gravel, rather than the muck and the mud we had out front before. that makes things a whole lot easier to negotiate. so from that stand point alone it was worth the time needed to get the driveway squared away, and with the windows here, we've got ted and the guys coming back to start putting those in. >>dean: well we finally got things cleaned up a little bit, so we thought we'd have our architect mike sharratt out again, just to take a look at things. it's been a while since you were out here. >>mike: it's been a while, it's looking pretty amazing actually.

>>dean: so one comment we get a lot is people ask what is that little swoop up there all about. >>mike: it's just a artistic way to hold that overhang. i didn't want the overhang to be up way high, which it would have been if we went straight up. it's just not something that is expected and i think there is more to like in what's not expected. >>dean: i mean we've seen this fully trimmed out on a house that has an exterior very much like this, and it really is an attractive feature. >>mike: yeah i think anytime that things are in a framing stage i think that it's not complete and that people don't really understand it, but when it is complete, they'll understand it. >>dean: and something like that kind of plays in to the whole fact this is sort of an asymmetrical roof here. >>mike: it's deliberately asymmetrical here because what we're trying to do here is get the roof to grow out of the lower part of the roof, so it's more of a human scale. and then on the garage side we do have a symmetrical roof on the gable over the double door. >>dean: and again, with a roof like this, a lot of that second floor is actually up in the roof itself. >>mike: well that's the design

of a story and a half is that you're really occupying the space up inside the roof. there aren't just two story walls that go up and create that roof. it is about living inside the roof. >>dean: and the nice thing about that, i think that people really enjoy that you end up with some, you know, kind of unique little spots where, you know, that roof kind of comes down and violates what is normally just a rectangular space. >>mike: if you think back when you were a kid, probably were in grandma's attic, and that's probably what it's like is that, is that you feel, the roof coming down and it's more a human scale than it is a square cubic room >>dean: but it is a little more difficult to insulate and dry wall and stuff. >>mike: it is that but it's worth it. >>dean: now one thing that's been kind of fun is explaining to people how you talked about doing the layout for this whole thing, you say well i mean, the layout's pretty obvious. you've got your gorgeous views out there so you wanna have your main living space here so you're going to enjoy those views. and then if you want to have an open floor plan your kitchen goes right there. >>mike: well that's the way people live today. it's about communication. it's about openness. it's about flow of space. and we do consciously