>>J. Craig Venter: We've shown that DNA is actually the software of life.
And you saw some excellent examples of it in the previous talk.
And the thing I learned, I know who not to push too far.
[ Laughter ] But chemically, we wrote the genome, starting
with four bottles of chemicals, literally going from the 1s and 0s in the computer to
writing the four-letter alphabet.
And have shown, in fact, that it's totally interchangeable between the digital world
and the biological world.
We then wrote the entire 1.1 million letters of the genetic code, booted it up, and got
a new cell-driven totally by the software.
So that's what we call synthetic life.
We actually use living cells to boot it up, but you change the software and you change
the species.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: And you -- as Martine mentioned earlier, you're also working on doing this
with pigs in order to create -- >>J. Craig Venter: Yes.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: -- organs for humans.
>>J. Craig Venter: We're trying to create a humanized pig.
I won't talk about the political implications.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: A humanized pig.
>>J. Craig Venter: But it's been done with monoclonal antibodies which were developed
in mice.
Basically, the genome was changed so they would produce the human version, not the mouse
version.
And those can be used in human therapy.
With rejection systems, our immune system recognizes all kinds of surface antigens.
In the case of the pig, a lot of molecules that are very close to our own, but we're
just rewriting the genome to change all of those to the human version so that when they're
put in the human body, our immune system will see them as human, not pig organs.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: When you did this work with the human genome under President Clinton,
that was 15-plus years ago now, you mentioned to me it took nine months to do one, and $100
million.
>>J. Craig Venter: That's right.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: And now you're trying to do 100,000 of these in one year.
>>J. Craig Venter: Yes.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: Science has come very far.
>>J. Craig Venter: The thing that's changed, and it just changed in the last 12 months
-- I've been waiting a long time for this -- is the threshold of DNA sequencing technology
-- and computing technology's just passed this threshold that I was waiting for -- where
we can now do, probably for less than a thousand dollars, very large numbers of genomes to
try and sort out some of the traits that Dr. Fallon was talking about.
These are rare events, probably fortunately, in the population, on the order of maybe one
in 50,000 or so.
So we need literally millions of genomes in the database to be able to find in each of
us these patterns and understand what they mean.
So it's a law of large numbers.
My genome's been on the Internet for 15 years now, and there's not much more today that
I can interpret from it than we could 15 years ago.
That's 'cause there's really not much to compare it to.
So if we start to build up hundreds of thousands and millions of genomes with all phenotypic
information that goes along with it, just like the nice PT scans, we're going to do
quantitative MRI imaging on everybody that we can.
And what it -- there's nice software now, developed by our colleagues at UCSD, that
take these images and convert them into digital volumes, so we can get, for example, the hippocampus
volume.
And you can then understand what's in your genes associated with that hippocampal volume
and your memory.
But we can measure changes in as little as three months.
In fact, we can measure changes in your brain ten years before any symptoms show up for
dementia.
So it gives sort of an early warning system, it gives ability to understand the genes associated
with this, and, hopefully, new avenues to do something with it.
So it's a massive data problem like has never been dealt with before when you think about
all the things associated with your life, including how your brain works, all your chemical
composites, your complete digital medical record.
We're measuring all the chemicals in the bloodstream, we're measuring the microbiome, which is about
-- you have 100 trillion human cells.
You have 200 trillion bacteria.
It's not a personal thing.
Everybody does.
And to understand these interactions is an important part of understanding us as human.
And, obviously, this gets into the behavioral dimensions, as we just heard very nicely.
But if we are software-driven machines, like every other biological species on this planet,
understanding how to interpret that software, including the parts of the software associated
with interacting with the environment and feedback control mechanisms, we will start
to understand our species quantitatively for the first time.
Everybody's asked questions, what's nature and what's nurture?
We will be able to solve in the next decade mostly of what's nature.
By difference, everything else is nurture.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: And what do you see as the human application of that knowledge?
>>J. Craig Venter: The ideal application that we see is preventative medicine.
If you know that you have these risks for different diseases, in the cases where you
can do something about it early, you can change behavior, change what you eat, maybe have
different therapies.
But we're also hoping to find the genes associated with healthy life.
For example, the scientific community has looked for genes and changes associated with
diseases and traits that they're studying.
Nobody's really looked for the other side of why don't you get that disease?
Why is he not a murderer?
I have a risk allele for Alzheimer's disease.
And a lot of people are heterozygous for the apo E4 allele.
In theory, if you go to 23andme or anyplace else, it says you have a 30% risk of getting
Alzheimer's disease.
But not everybody, obviously, with that allele will get it.
And there's no history of Alzheimer's in my family, in part 'cause the males on my father's
side died in their 50s and 60s, so never got a chance to see if they had Alzheimer's.
But I had a quantitative MRI with radioactive dyes to see if there was any amyloid, which
you can actually detect 20 years before you would have symptoms.
And my brain is totally void of amyloid.
So I have a clean bill of health at least for the next 20 years.
So, investors, it's okay.
So why not?
If I have these genes associated with increased risk, and I have (indiscernible), not just
apo E4.
There must be protective alleles that also prevent that from happening.
The same is true for breast cancer and almost any other trait that you can find.
In 23andme, there's very few, if any things in there that you say you are in the 100%
category.
It's in this one in 1,000 to maybe one in three risk.
It's never 100%.
So understanding our complexity is part of this massive computer analysis we're going
to do.
If you can turn on the protective alleles, then even if you're at risk, you can change
things.
We saw examples of how changing the environment can maybe turn on and turn off different genes.
If we understand that at a key level, we can change humanity in lots of ways, but provide
mayoral shifting medicine to a preventative medicine paradigm.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: One of the concerns is that the understanding, the acknowledgment of the
underlying propensity to be some way goes deeper and farther faster than the understanding
of how to actually prevent that thing, such that we know, for example, that you have a
propensity to have Alzheimer's at some day in the future, whereas we don't have a cure,
and we don't know exactly what will prevent that.
How do you tell the consumer or the average human, this is valuable information even if
we haven't gotten to that next phase?
>>J. Craig Venter: Well, medicine has totally proceeded on that basis.
You can measure something before there's ever a treatment or a cure for it.
And usually having a quantitative measure and understanding the underlying molecular
components will lead to these kind of treatments much faster.
But there's sort of -- it's very clear, there's, like, two categories of humans.
There's ones that want to know this information and ones that don't.
And it's amazing.
That's in every group.
If you ask medical student classes, half the class don't want to know.
It's scary they're going into medicine and they're advising everybody else on this information.
But I don't understand how you don't want to know.
As the video said, I learned in Vietnam, knowledge is power.
Knowledge is power for your own life.
It's knowledge for your -- it's power for your family.
Preventing disease and knowing something in advance you can do something about I think
is the most empowering thing anybody could possibly know.
But we obviously don't want to force it on people.
But we want to show with clear examples by having this data how much more you know about
your life, how much more your physicians will know, how it can totally change the directions
and outcomes.
Our goal is to have people have healthy, long lives, not necessarily live to 150.
But if you do have a healthy life, you're probably likely to have a much longer one
as well.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: You brought up Vietnam.
You grew up a California surfer. >>J. Craig Venter: Yes.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: Self-described slacker.
And then you went to Vietnam.
How much did that shape the work and the efforts that you're making today?
>>J. Craig Venter: Tremendously.
I moved from the Bay Area to Southern California to take up a surfing career, and got drafted
off my surfboard, which was a tremendous cultural change.
[ Laughter ] But, you know, I learned, being in the middle
of a war, that if you had knowledge, you could change the outcome of people's lives.
You know, if you didn't have that knowledge, you had to watch them die.
So as I say, a very powerful lesson that basically has driven me for the rest of my life.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: It set you on your path.
>>J. Craig Venter: Yeah.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: You knew that it was about finding as much about the future as was humanly
possible to protect as many people as humanly possible.
>>J. Craig Venter: Well, and to change the outcomes from knowledge.
You know, even looking back to what medicine was like in the 1960s, it was frighteningly
primitive.
It's still pretty primitive.
I mean, we know roughly 1% of the knowledge that's contained in our genome.
Look at the examples that Martine just gave of, you know, this story keeps happening over
and over again of finding new treatments, new avenues that go beyond conventional wisdom.
That's why I love some of the earlier stories.
And my career has largely been based on ignoring wisdom and what's possible.
The current NIH directory turned down with prejudice a grant in 1994 to sequence the
first genome in history, as it turned out, with this new method that depended on mathematics
and computers.
You know, in almost every case in history, conventional wisdom is wrong.
And we have a chance, if we have a new starting point with a new data set, to totally change
the future.
I mean, this is -- We're at this threshold in humanity.
I don't think we'll have totally merged human machines.
But I would love it if I had a USB port on the back of my head and I --
>>Rebecca Jarvis: You would want that.
>>J. Craig Venter: I would absolutely want that.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: What would you want it to do?
>>J. Craig Venter: Well, if you didn't have to go look up things on Google, if you could
just, you know -- >>Rebecca Jarvis: You'd want it to put Google
out of business?
>>J. Craig Venter: I'm going to Paris today, can I get the French app so I can speak French?
I mean, who knows.
[ Laughter ] It would really be nice if surgeons had this
information.
If your doctor actually knew something besides what you tell them they found on the Internet.
[ Laughter ] People are educating their physicians.
They're not educating themselves.
We need some ways to have this digital DNA constant inner conversion to upgrade our software
and to understand it, to understand what we heard with these behavioral traits that affect
very much of society, affect people's lives.
But it's also an important lesson in terms of people get very caught up in the eugenics
of this.
If we know what causes manic depression, we want to eliminate it.
But Kay Jamison wrote these books on how most successful people have some degree of manic
depression.
So we could wipe out the success of humanity by trying to correct so-called errors in the
genome.
So we don't have the knowledge to rewrite the human genome.
We're not trying to make smarter pigs.
We're just trying to make them as good organ donors.
We need to be very careful about trying to rewrite our own genome.
But we do have the ability to understand that information and to act on it and maybe use
the same tools that we're using to rewrite the pig genome to rewrite the genome of a
stem cell that could then reactivate -- you know, I like to coin new terms and new uses
of things.
If you're making something more youthful, is that "youthinizing" them?
It's not the normal usage of the word.
But, you know, I wanted to make it the company slogan, but I got talked out of it, you know,
our goal is to "youthinize" people.
[ Laughter ] But we can -- just like what happens with
stem cells, you can reprogram your DNA to be in a more youthful state.
It's been one of the consequences of the early bone marrow transplants.
Bob Hariri, cofounder of Human Longevity, has actually found that looking back at these
patients after -- the ones that survived the stem cell transplants actually had a much
more youthful state because their DNA got sort of reprogrammed to this earlier version.
So there is hope for trying to eliminate disease as we know it.
Or at least postponing it, and to improve the human condition through the ultimate use
of this knowledge that we've all been working for.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: So what does the future look like, 20, 100 years from now?
>>J. Craig Venter: I used to get asked this question, so 300 years from now, you're looking
back.
And I said, well, I hope I'm still there to answer the question.
But that is really not the goal.
I think if we can turn medicine into an information-driven science, we will basically, in the process,
turn humanity into an information-driven species where we're working from knowledge, not from
millennia of myth and the strange things that happen in our societies.
>>Rebecca Jarvis: J. Craig Venter, thank you.
>>J. Craig Venter: Thank you.
[ Applause ]