Transcript: There’s this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment, and our genes, and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there’s huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth. And to see how interplay of the environment and genes works out requires that we do really a vast experiment involving everybody who is willing to share on the planet, sharing what they know about their environment, and what they know about their DNA, so we can make correlations and see how people can live up to their own potential. I don’t think we should think of this in terms of curing things. To some extent there’s a huge diversity. And we might want more diversity. We might want to figure out what are the positive affects of autism. – mild cases. What are the positive aspects of the incredible diversity we have? And can we make it greater by really understanding all the interactions of environment, culture, and genetics.

You could ask should the government get involved in determining the genetics of intelligence? And at first that sounds horrible, okay? But actually it’s routinely done. Four million kids per year in hospitals are tested for phenylketonuria, PKU, a little prick on their heel, and you find out whether they have this thing which could be considered 100% genetic. Meaning if you have this two doses of the bad form of this, you are almost certain to be mentally retarded. So that’s a very high certainty. But on the other hand, it could be considered 100% environmental; because if you know it and you change your diet so you don’t have ___________ in your diet, you don’t have mother’s milk, for example, which has ________, then you could be of completely normal intelligence. So this is something where knowing the interaction between the environment and the genes is neither one nor the other, nor is it even something where you can say it’s 50/50. It’s completely . . . It requires a really integrated, holistic view of the person’s physiology. And there are many, many, things like that.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: Is there a gap between diagnosis and treatment?

Transcript: Well there’s two gaps there. One is a gap between our ability to diagnose and cure, and there’s other cases where they have the ability to cure but not diagnose the small set of people who react very negatively. Both of these, I think, are going to see major progress. They’ve already seen some major progress. But for example, different people have different responses to a personal decision. If you are offered the ability to get diagnosed for a disease for which there is no cure, some people say, “I don’t want to know that”. Other people say, “I want to know that, but I’m not going to do anything about it.” And the third set say, “Oh we’re gonna embrace this. We’re going to become experts on this disease,” even though they’re not even scientists. They become experts. Think of Lorenzo’s Oil where Augusto Odone actually starts to learn biochemistry and himself makes a contribution to lipid disorders . . . makes a new drug-like, food-like molecule. But there are many cases of this where people become the poster . . . . their family will become poster children for the disease: Michael J. Fox for Parkinson’s, and Doug Melton for Diabetes, and Betty Ford for cancer and substance abuse, and so forth. So I think that’s a really big opportunity is to take ownership of all the things that are special about your family, both positive and negative, and link up with other families that have the same alleles, the same changes in their DNA, the same variations that make them different from the average, and see how it plays out differently in different families. Maybe that some of them have much more severe traits than others, and you can find it by sharing that information. And you can see what lifestyle changes might be correlated with a less severe outcome. So I think that embracing things that don’t have cures, whether they’re severe or not, is an opportunity that we’ll see more and more.

Question: What is your vision of the future?

Transcript: Well I think that certainly in the . . . I would say in the short term, but since these are exponential technologies, it’s actually a very long time, in say, Internet time, okay? I think that most people will get access to their genetic information. A lot of people will want it and they will get it. It will probably be affordable this year. So it’s not very long even in Internet time. But then to get it interpreted they will have to share. I don’t know exactly how it will work out, but I see trends for sharing. You know, Wikapedia, the Red Cross, all kinds of things old and new that indicate that at least a significant fraction of the population will share their genes, their environment, and their traits. That will lead us to a point where . . . And I also see stem cells where you can take a bit of skin and reprogram it so then you can get access to any tissue in your body. That’s coming down just in a few years. Then using that to fix what’s going on in adult aging so you actually stay youthful for a longer period of time. Not necessarily eliminating aging, but certainly increasing the quality of life. I think that will happen, and that it will have a huge impact because there’s a certain wisdom that will happen when healthy people stay healthy and engaged for a long period of time. Another one of the things that make humans fairly amazing is that they do live for a long time, well past what would have been their reproductive limit in ancient days, because grandparents, and great grandparents, and business leaders and so forth add value that goes beyond their reproductive years. And I think that if we can make those very healthy and very undistracted by health issues, that would be a huge change in the future. And then if we have computers, robots, humans, all acting as super computers and geniuses, we have a planet full of six billion people, each with six billion super computers, then you can no longer predict. I mean that’s a fairly rosy picture, but that at point you don’t know where it goes.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival

Transcript: I think a huge fraction of . . . And this is not a political scientist speaking, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But from my biased viewpoint, a lot of the political problems have to do with the “haves” and the “haves not”. And we have seen many examples of the rising tide floating all the boats where there’s more people in the middle class then there ever was in the past history. So if that trend can continue, then there will be fewer people who feel like they represent an underprivileged class. Now there still are cultural differences that even though two different wealthy people could have major cultural differences of opinion, but perhaps those will be mitigated by having . . . by some embracement of diversity. We’ll just have to see. It certainly will change. The technology will change the way that people interact politically, but it’s very hard to predict exactly that dynamic.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: I think it’s more of a problem in the United States than it is other places. I mean there are some places where science is less of an issue, and there’s other places where faith is less of an issue; but in the United States, it’s very nicely juxtaposed. And I think it’s actually very good dynamic. I think if I were . . . I think that part of the problem is there’s a tendency to focus on the extremes. It makes for good press, and for book sales, and so forth. And I think there’s a lot more need for meeting in the middle which is finding ways you can . . . If you really don’t know something, just admit you don’t know something. If you don’t know for sure that you can’t rule out an intelligent designer, then teach it in schools. If science is so fragile that they can’t teach exactly how you would question things and discover things, then I think we need to work on that. Make it much less fragile. So I think it could become a healthy dialogue. Right now it’s not healthy because of focusing on the extremes and not trying really hard to get people engaged. I mean people should be engaged in it more than just a gut reaction. They should actually want to, even if there is an intelligent design agenda that should be deeply informed about science, about technology, about how you actually answer questions.

I think that a lot of what we have are a set of accidents. And there is design in the world, and there will be lots of design going forward. And it’s an opportunity to embrace both the natural and the synthetic. There’s a lot of what’s natural is painful, and a lot of what’s synthetic is not completely thought out, but offers an alternative. My worldview is that dynamic between design and past and future. The parts of nature that we like, and the parts of nature which, for one reason or another, because of say population explosion is still natural, but it’s ________. It’s pathological from our human viewpoint, and we need to embrace ecology in a very intelligent way. And this requires that our politicians and regular folks know a great deal more about ecology in their world and their personal diversity than they currently know.

Question: Can science and religion coexist?

Transcript: I think that while science and religion . . . Science has very definite faith components, and most religions don’t stick to faith. They venture out into making predictions about our physical world. They don’t just say there’s something that is completely unconnected to us. They say actually it affects a lot. And when they do that they merge. We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain. Our brain is a scientific . . . something that we can study scientifically. So I think they can and should coexist. There’s a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It’s kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don’t know that for sure. We won’t know that . . . We may not know that millions of years from now. And by good things, even phrasing goodness in a scientific context like survival of the species would be something that probably scientists would agree is a good thing. We won’t know whether science is a good thing for the survival of species rather than having entirely faith based. So I think these things are fair. They are solvable. They are addressable. We can bring them together, but it requires less extreme views . . . or what would benefit from less extreme views.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: So the big issues would be the things that might affect our ability to survive as a species on the planet. I think most, people religious and nonreligious, would agree that that would be a very bad thing. And so the sort of things that could affect that is some sort of pandemic, overpopulation and pollution, or getting hit by a meteor. So to some extent, we may need to do things like eliminate poverty just so we have less burden so we can go forward with our science and engineering enough, so that we can get some of us off the planet, so when the meteor hits we will still survive. So in a way, you have to think in this very interconnected, far reaching way in order to decide what the priorities are. And at least some of the priorities are to get us to a point where it’s not such a luxury to have science and engineering that’s capable of getting us to another habitable planet; or for that matter constructing a habitable biosphere that’s not planetary. Many steps between there. I mean personal genomics, and being able to monitor our environmental microorganisms and so forth, could be a huge step towards reducing poverty and increasing education so that then we can do things that involve physics again.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: Well clearly we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could chain us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future. We are quantitatively not necessarily qualitatively different in that we have spirituality. We have exotic language. We have mathematics. We have the ability to completely change our environment to go . . . to take on . . . to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA and that’s inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space. So there are many things that make us at least quantitatively different, if not a new species in a qualitative sense.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: My group, were integrators, and interdisciplinary, and I’d like to see . . . We often integrate the analytic and the synthetic side. I’d like to make those tools of sequencing and synthesis of DNA something that’s broadly integrated. So if you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age, or repair things that were inherited disorders. I think that’s . . . Actually those are both going very quickly as if often happens in the exponential field. I’d like to see integration of better software – the computing aspect of this behind everything – so that the average person can actually connect to the science. We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I’d like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too. I’d like to see better education, and I think this is one of the ways to get politicians and regular folks excited about sciences. Most people are excited about themselves. Personal genome will deliver for inexpensively something about science to which you can relate. Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate. It should be even easier to relate to your own biology, and I hope that will be one of the ways we get broader literacy in science.

I think education is a barrier. If people don’t understand what genetics is about, they are not going to adopt it. If they don’t adopt it, then there won’t be funding – both whether commercial or governmental – to expand it. If it doesn’t expand, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy that well, it wasn’t important because it didn’t expand and we didn’t get it. So I think there’s many technological hurdles. Many, as we said before, opportunities for innovation and so forth; but they have to connect to society. In my lab we are constantly asking, “What’s the utility of this pure science that we’re doing? Let’s nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun, and/or help some very serious problems they have.”

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: So when something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears – it seems to suddenly appear – we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of no where. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few month or few years. The Internet was such a thing that came very quickly, it seemed, even though some of the infrastructures were built in the ‘60s. In the ‘70s, people would say, “Why would anybody want a computer?” And by 1993 in one year, it went from zero web sites to many millions. And the same thing . . . But they’re in unintended consequences that weren’t fully articulated to the broad public. Probably should have been for the Internet. So for example, cyber stalking, identity theft, addiction to computers, hackers, spam, and so forth. These were really not fleshed out. They just said, you know, something good will come of it, and a lot of good things did. Same thing with personal genomics. We need to figure out how you’re gonna actually make it useful, which means you need to be able . . . people need to think about how they’re going to share the information with other people. Are they gonna be scared of it and not want to know it themselves? Are they gonna wanna know it themselves, but not share it with anybody, and therefore not really know it? They have this big pile of Gs, As, Ts, and Cs, and if they don’t share it with anybody they won’t learn anything about it. And so you need . . . we need to pursue this minefield and find ways that people can feel safe about sharing, at least in a research sense. So that’s one thing . . . it’s kind of an ethical, legal, social issue that we’ve been working with on the personal genome project very proactively. And then synthetic biology. Our technology and others create a situation where people could synthesize organisms that are either new or old. Old things like small pox, which we thought was extinct and not available to anybody because the information is available they could recreate it. It’s not sufficient for all the good guys to say, “We will be good guys.” You need to actually have an active surveillance mechanism where you’re looking to see people . . . they’re doing things where either they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t fully appreciate what they’re doing, or they’re actively being terrorist-type actions.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: When did you first incorporate computers into your work?

Transcript: Well the first connection was really between biological polymers – the things that make up our body – DNA and proteins. They’re very much like a computer program or a computer set of data. Zeros and ones turn into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. And that’s . . . once you see it, it’s such an obvious mapping that seems very profound. And it’s as if somebody’s been programming all this for a long time and has done a really nice job of it, and you want to look at it and appreciate it the way you would appreciate any work of art or design. So yes, I think . . . Then it turns into a three dimensional structure. So you have this simple binary or simple digital stream of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, and it turns into this folded molecule. And that’s what we were doing in crystallography was looking at the three dimensional structure. And that was an interesting metamorphosis.

Well you can think of crystallography as kind of a way of taking pictures of very, very, small things. It’s smaller than you get with a microscope; smaller than you get with an electron microscope typically, at least back then; but it’s more complicated because instead of just taking a picture, you make this diffraction pattern. And then you have to use a computer to grope it back to something that’s more like a three dimensional image that humans think about and that is actually the reality of the . . . And it gives you atomic positions of every piece of the molecule. And so we were really pushing the envelope back there in the mid ‘70s by studying what’s now called “macromolecules” or the proteins in nucleic acids of life, rather than what had been so that you could do x-ray diffraction on salt crystals, like table salt. This was much, much larger molecules that we were dealing with.

When we – and by “we”, a large community – saw the first examples of folded nucleic acids, it really started a series of events that . . . It’s like watching a _______, the first DNA folding. We saw the folding of a _______, and it said that the code for going from the simple digital molecular description – its name, basically . . . its sentence structure – to this fold of molecule, it’s something that you could do on the computer. You could either solve it theoretically or you could solve it by x-ray diffraction. And I think that knowing the parts, the shape of the parts that make up our body . . . It would be like trying to work on an engine without not being able to know what it looks like or what it feels like. In other words, even a blind person knows the shape of the parts of a car, and we didn’t know the shape of anything that we are made out of. So that’s now changed radically. We know the shape of most of our parts.

Question: How did new technological developments change the way you worked?

Transcript: So from that point, it seemed reasonable that the kind of computing and automation that was used in crystallography in the mid-70s could be applied to the rest of biology. And so I restarted graduate school with Wally Gilbert, who a few years later got the Nobel Prize in chemistry for doing the first kind of really reasonable sequencing method that could be scaled for DNA. And we started dreaming about ways that you could automate the process of collecting the sequence data, meaning the order of As, Cs, Gs and Ts for DNA, and quantitating how that plays out in terms of the amounts of proteins and other products of the DNA in your body and in various cells. And so that automation of analyzing the DNA and the _____ and the proteins, then transition more recently to synthesis. So automating the process of synthesis where you would take what you learned analytically, and turn it into sort of nano scale sculpturing . . . making machines where now you know the parts; now you can put parts together in new, and interesting, and useful configurations. So I think that what I see is sort of the spark that happened in the mid-70s played out into automation and computer analysis, and kind of this very intellectual task of figuring how it all folds up, how it fits together, and how to make it useful, making the biotechnological companies and a shared academic experience.

So our top priorities right now are genomics, in particular personal genomics, making it affordable for the average person to have as much knowledge of their body as we can provide them. And behind that is some basic technology to make the instruments and the what we call “wet ware” –software, hardware – freely available, open source.

I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project for example will take on as many subjects as we can find.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: So our top priorities right now are genomics, in particular personal genomics, making it affordable for the average person to have as much knowledge of their body as we can provide them. And behind that is some basic technology to make the instruments and the what we call “wet ware” –software, hardware – freely available, open source.

Well, so some of the problems that have been brought up are employment and health insurance practices; the possibility that people would overreact to the information, either by cutting their life short or by asking for excessive number of diagnostics from their physician. So those are four kind of many possibly scenarios. The genetic and insurance discrimination is something clearly our lawmakers have taken very seriously. Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act seems to be making its way . . . certainly made its way through the House of Representatives 420 to 3. It’s passed unanimously. Things like it in the Senate before, but it needs to pass. This particular one needs to pass the Senate this time, and the president said he’s gonna do it. So there is some that will change completely the way people respond. Not everybody, but a huge number of people will respond with less fear. And as time goes by, as trust will build, the same way right now people send their credit cards all over the Internet, they don’t worry about it the way they used to. Everybody should be vigilant, but not so vigilant that they don’t do things that are in their best interest and the best interest of society. It has to be a personal decision with lots of information shared.

I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project for example will take on as many subjects as we can find.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival

Transcript: Well I guess my question would be a variation on the one you said before, which is how can they get involved?  And they should ask themselves why is it they’re not involved.  Why is it that they’re not the healthcare activist or some other kind of activist?  Why are they not writing their Congressman on a regular basis?  Why is it that they feel that they have math block?  Why don’t they spend a little bit more time learning about science because it affects our toxic environment?  It affects all kinds of business decisions.  Why aren’t they learning a little bit more?  And if they have an answer already, then act on it.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: Well there’s almost nothing that we’re not doing at some level. We could be spending more money on it, but that means we have to be spending less money on something. So it’s really where we move the money from and to. I’m not going to be very profound here. Anybody could say we should be spending less money on wars, especially since we are no longer really seriously threatened. Terrorism is not a public health threat relative to cancer, and heart disease, and malaria and so forth. We need to move that money into things that are health threats and threats to educating the population. If the population were educated it would solve a lot of problems, both scientific and political. So that’s a huge reprioritization that we have historically not been very good at doing. Certainly there are fewer American deaths with each war that we’ve had for the last few wars, but that really isn’t solving the problem of money being spent. And money is life in a certain sense. That money is not being spent on healthcare, education and scientific progress.

Question: Who is responsible for solving these problems?

Transcript: You know if there were a solution I’m sure we’d implement it. It’s a complex combination of getting the voters to stay engaged on these complex issues that require an attention span on the decade level rather than on the five minute level. It’s gonna require politicians to learn more about the opportunities that they’re missing. If they don’t care about science and they don’t see that they’re missing any opportunities there . . . if they don’t see that healthcare can actually change if you injected more money, then why should they move from neocolonialism to healthcare? So it really requires a broad dialogue that we’re doing. I think we are doing it, and hopefully it will get some traction

Question: What should we be doing as individuals?

Transcript: Well I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project for example will take on as many subjects as we can find. They can also encourage school children, and teachers, and government to spend more money on that early stage education. I mean I think that’s something they can do at their local level. They can volunteer. They can raise money. They can talk to politicians about making our educational system second to none.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question:  Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: Well I’d like to think that I’m realistic which means that the optimism is only justified if a few people take very strong action, sometimes putting themselves or their careers at risk.  And then you will see this positive feedback loop where more people get inspired by this, and I mentioned some of the people that have inspired me, that have taken their family’s disease and become healthcare activists.  If we have a few activists, it doesn’t have to be everybody, but everybody should join with them in doing their little part.  So I think that would lead to optimism, but I’m not going to be blindly optimist.  We need to have activists and people who get inspired by activists.  

Question: Do you have a vision for the future?

Transcript: Well I think that certainly in the . . . I would say in the short term, but since these are exponential technologies, it’s actually a very long time, in say, Internet time, okay?  I think that most people will get access to their genetic information.  A lot of people will want it and they will get it.  It will probably be affordable this year.  So it’s not very long even in Internet time.  But then to get it interpreted they will have to share.  I don’t know exactly how it will work out, but I see trends for sharing. You know, Wikapedia, the Red Cross, all kinds of things old and new that indicate that at least a significant fraction of the population will share their genes, their environment, and their traits.  That will lead us to a point where . . .  And I also see stem cells where you can take a bit of skin and reprogram it so then you can get access to any tissue in your body.  That’s coming down just in a few years.  Then using that to fix what’s going on in adult aging so you actually stay youthful for a longer period of time.  Not necessarily eliminating aging, but certainly increasing the quality of life.  I think that will happen, and that it will have a huge impact because there’s a certain wisdom that will happen when healthy people stay healthy and engaged for a long period of time.  Another one of the things that make humans fairly amazing is that they do live for a long time, well past what would have been their reproductive limit in ancient days, because grandparents, and great grandparents, and business leaders and so forth add value that goes beyond their reproductive years.  And I think that if we can make those very healthy and very undistracted by health issues, that would be a huge change in the future.  And then if we have computers, robots, humans, all acting as super computers and geniuses, we have a planet full of six billion people, each with six billion super computers, then you can no longer predict.  I mean that’s a fairly rosy picture, but that at point you don’t know where it goes.

Question: What are the political implications?

Transcript: I think a huge fraction of . . .  And this is not a political scientist speaking, so you have to take it with a grain of salt.  But from my biased viewpoint, a lot of the political problems have to do with the “haves” and the “haves not”. And we have seen many examples of the rising tide floating all the boats where there’s more people in the middle class then there ever was in the past history.  So if that trend can continue, then there will be fewer people who feel like they represent an underprivileged class.  Now there still are cultural differences that even though two different wealthy people could have major cultural differences of opinion, but perhaps those will be mitigated by having . . . by some embracement of diversity.  We’ll just have to see.  It certainly will change. The technology will change the way that people interact politically, but it’s very hard to predict exactly that dynamic.

Question: Will we be able to move beyond this planet?

Transcript: It’s not inevitable because right now it’s a trade off between curing poverty and sending very expensive space machines out there.  And I wish there weren’t an economic tradeoff.  We will probably do both as we have, but it would be great if we cured poverty and then used all those resources, those additional minds and so forth, to help us get off the planet.  But I think sub orbital is very far stretched from where we need to go because out there is a lot of radiation, and a lot of particles that will destroy any rapidly moving device and everything in it.  And so we need to build a . . .  It’s a very challenging task to be able to build space elevators, build very thin devices that are very robust, that would not be affected by space particles.  Or build very large devices that will not be affected by radiation, because like the earth’s atmosphere they provide many meters of protection from cosmic radiation.  So I think these are things that are not commonly discussed.  Even getting to Mars is extraordinarily expense undertaking. Getting to something outside of our solar system is almost beyond fathoming from an economic standpoint, and really requires that we have all the rest of our economics, I think, in good shape.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well so the big issues would be the things that might affect our ability to survive as a species on the planet. I think most, people religious and nonreligious, would agree that that would be a very bad thing. And so the sort of things that could affect that is some sort of pandemic, overpopulation and pollution, or getting hit by a meteor. So to some extent, we may need to do things like eliminate poverty just so we have less burden so we can go forward with our science and engineering enough, so that we can get some of us off the planet, so when the meteor hits we will still survive. So in a way, you have to think in this very interconnected, far reaching way in order to decide what the priorities are. And at least some of the priorities are to get us to a point where it’s not such a luxury to have science and engineering that’s capable of getting us to another habitable planet; or for that matter constructing a habitable biosphere that’s not planetary. Many steps between there. I mean personal genomics, and being able to monitor our environmental microorganisms and so forth, could be a huge step towards reducing poverty and increasing education so that then we can do things that involve physics again.

Question: Can science fix the world’s problems?

Transcript: Well there’s this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment, and our genes, and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there’s huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth. And to see how interplay of the environment and genes works out requires that we do really a vast experiment involving everybody who is willing to share on the planet, sharing what they know about their environment, and what they know about their DNA, so we can make correlations and see how people can live up to their own potential. I don’t think we should think of this in terms of curing things. To some extent there’s a huge diversity. And we might want more diversity. We might want to figure out what are the positive affects of autism. – mild cases. What are the positive aspects of the incredible diversity we have? And can we make it greater by really understanding all the interactions of environment, culture, and genetics.

Question: Can you provide an example?

Transcript: Well a very classic one that people might not fully appreciate is that almost every . . . You could ask should the government get involved in determining the genetics of intelligence? And at first that sounds horrible, okay? But actually it’s routinely done. Four million kids per year in hospitals are tested for phenylketonuria, PKU, a little prick on their heel, and you find out whether they have this thing which could be considered 100% genetic. Meaning if you have this two doses of the bad form of this, you are almost certain to be mentally retarded. So that’s a very high certainty. But on the other hand, it could be considered 100% environmental; because if you know it and you change your diet so you don’t have ___________ in your diet, you don’t have mother’s milk, for example, which has ________, then you could be of completely normal intelligence. So this is something where knowing the interaction between the environment and the genes is neither one nor the other, nor is it even something where you can say it’s 50/50. It’s completely . . . It requires a really integrated, holistic view of the person’s physiology. And there are many, many, things like that.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview.  I think that a lot of what we have are a set of accidents.  And there is design in the world, and there will be lots of design going forward.  And it’s an opportunity to embrace both the natural and the synthetic.  There’s a lot of what’s natural is painful, and a lot of what’s synthetic is not completely thought out, but offers an alternative.  My worldview is that dynamic between design and past and future.  The parts of nature that we like, and the parts of nature which, for one reason or another, because of say population explosion is still natural, but it’s ________.  It’s pathological from our human viewpoint, and we need to embrace ecology in a very intelligent way.  And this requires that our politicians and regular folks know a great deal more about ecology in their world and their personal diversity than they currently know.

Question: Are religion and science at cross-purposes?

Transcript:  I think it’s more of a problem in the United States than it is other places.  I mean there are some places where science is less of an issue, and there’s other places where faith is less of an issue; but in the United States, it’s very nicely juxtaposed.  And I think it’s actually very good dynamic.  I think if I were . . . I think that part of the problem is there’s a tendency to focus on the extremes.  It makes for good press, and for book sales, and so forth.  And I think there’s a lot more need for meeting in the middle which is finding ways you can . . .  If you really don’t know something, just admit you don’t know something.  If you don’t know for sure that you can’t rule out an intelligent designer, then teach it in schools.  If science is so fragile that they can’t teach exactly how you would question things and discover things, then I think we need to work on that.  Make it much less fragile.  So I think it could become a healthy dialogue. Right now it’s not healthy because of focusing on the extremes and not trying really hard to get people engaged.  I mean people should be engaged in it more than just a gut reaction.  They should actually want to, even if there is an intelligent design agenda that should be deeply informed about science, about technology, about how you actually answer questions.

Question: Can Science and religion coexist?

Transcript: I think that while science and religion . . .  Science has very definite faith components, and most religions don’t stick to faith.  They venture out into making predictions about our physical world.  They don’t just say there’s something that is completely unconnected to us.  They say actually it affects a lot.  And when they do that they merge.  We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain.  Our brain is a scientific . . . something that we can study scientifically.  So I think they can and should coexist.  There’s a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science.  It’s kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing.  We don’t know that for sure.  We won’t know that . . .  We may not know that millions of years from now.  And by good things, even phrasing goodness in a scientific context like survival of the species would be something that probably scientists would agree is a good thing.  We won’t know whether science is a good thing for the survival of species rather than having entirely faith based.  So I think these things are fair.  They are solvable.  They are addressable. We can bring them together, but it requires less extreme views . . .  or what would benefit from less extreme views.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Transcript: Well I think my original inspiration came from just natural curiosity about science, and math, and biology.  In particular, I would say that as I matured it became more a feeling of trying to avoid the waste that occurs in the world where we have 6.5 billion minds.  If you’re a computer scientist, you can think of them as supercomputers.  They’re awesome.  But not all of them are really . . . have the luxury of being able to think deep thoughts all the time because they are dealing with malaria, starvation, or war, or things that are avoidable.  And I think that that’s the passion that drives me.  It’s to figure out ways that technology and outreach through education can bring health benefits to many people.  And then they will perform . . . their performance, their ability to think clearly and contribute back will be enhanced, and then we can get this virtual cycle where they will be doing the sort of things that all my scientific colleagues and nonscientific colleagues do more effectively.

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: What is your legacy?

Transcript: So I like . . .  My group, were integrators, and interdisciplinary, and I’d like to see . . .  We often integrate the analytic and the synthetic side.  I’d like to make those tools of sequencing and synthesis of DNA something that’s broadly integrated.  So if you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age, or repair things that were inherited disorders.  I think that’s . . .  Actually those are both going very quickly as if often happens in the exponential field.  I’d like to see integration of better software – the computing aspect of this behind everything – so that the average person can actually connect to the science.  We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day.  And I’d like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.  I’d like to see better education, and I think this is one of the ways to get politicians and regular folks excited about sciences.  Most people are excited about themselves.  Personal genome will deliver for inexpensively something about science to which you can relate.  Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate.  It should be even easier to relate to your own biology, and I hope that will be one of the ways we get broader literacy in science.

Question: What is the biggest challenge your field faces?

Transcript: Well these are interconnected.  There tends to be more of a desire to do production than to do technology development.  So I’d like to see more support for technology development.  It’s very important that . . .  I think education is a barrier.   If people don’t understand what genetics is about, they are not going to adopt it.  If they don’t adopt it, then there won’t be funding – both whether commercial or governmental – to expand it.  If it doesn’t expand, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy that well, it wasn’t important because it didn’t expand and we didn’t get it.  So I think there’s many technological hurdles.  Many, as we said before, opportunities for innovation and so forth; but they have to connect to society.  In my lab we are constantly asking, “What’s the utility of this pure science that we’re doing?  Let’s nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun, and/or help some very serious problems they have.”

Recorded on: 7/6/07

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: I was born at McDeal Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

Question: When did science spark your interest?

Transcript: Well nobody in my family was a scientist. Certainly my mother had sort of a math block; but she thought that maybe I could do it, and certainly encouraged every time I got interested. I think it just . . . I don’t know, it came out of nowhere; but it came out very strong and very early on. It was like built inside of me somehow, like in my DNA.

Question: Do you remember your first experiment?

Transcript: Oh yeah sure. Well my first . . . the first things were observational. I would go and go through the pond in the back yard, and we’d find little . . . I’d find little what later turned out to be larvae of a dragonfly. And I’d put it in a jar, and I’d wake up the next morning and the larvae would be gone. There’d just be a little shell there, and I wondered what happened. And then I saw a little dragonfly, and at first I thought the dragonfly ate the larvae. And then I realized eventually that the larvae had metamorphosed into this beautiful dragonfly, and that got me really excited. And I went to books and I found out what had happened without really anybody helping me or prodding me or anything like that. And then I would go on and I would do experiments on trying to make plants that would, like, make a Venus flytrap that was big by using plant hormones that I would find. I managed to get really big bean plants, kind of like Jack and the Beanstalk, but I never made a big Venus flytrap. It just didn’t work. You know?

Question: When did you begin to approach science in an interdisciplinary way?

Transcript: Well I think to some extent, kids with natural curiosity are naturally interdisciplinary. And so I like built little analog computers and learned. And I wanted to marry together this wonderful biology and medicine. My third father was a doctor, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was some connection between computers and biology?” And both of those are . . . can be interdisciplinary if you let them be, and certainly try to bring them together back then started me on that path.

Question: Who was your greatest influence when you were young?

Transcript: Well certainly there were a couple of professors in high school that encouraged me, ironically by asking me to work independently . . . leave the classroom and go off work on my own. That was a big thing. It gave me . . . Creighton Bedford gave me a book, and my photography teacher gave me his camera, and then later Sungho Kim as an undergraduate got . . . actually first made the connection for me that I was looking for between computers and biology by doing __________.

Question: When did you embrace technology?

Transcript: Well at that time it was one of the few places where . . . this was more chemical as sort of the intersection of chemistry, biology, and computing. And of course computers were primitive in 1974 even though we were using the most advanced one of the time, the IBM 360. And yes, it was a bit of an epiphany that really everything could be automated; that the computer . . . that you could program the computer to do all kinds of tasks that would be impossible really to do in a reasonable period of time by hand. And I started looking around at the rest of biology and saying, “Gee, why isn’t everybody using this?”

Recorded on: 7/6/07