Re: Where are we?

Description: Much of what is natural is painful, and a lot of what is synthetic is not well thought out.

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