[MUSIC PLAYING]
BROOKE BASINGER: My name is Brooke Basinger.
I'm the technical lead of a medical device project
at Verily Life Sciences.
And you might wonder why I'm starting off
my talk that sounds like it should be about medical devices
with a picture of a roller coaster.
And it's because I've been a little bit of a risk taker,
since I was very little.
I remember when I was a little bit older than what
you see in this picture, I would go
to this amusement park in Denver with my family
called Elitch Gardens.
We went every year for a while.
And I wanted so badly to ride this big, historic
wooden roller coaster.
I looked at it longingly every year that we went.
And finally, one day, I was tall enough to ride it.
And the attendant let me in the line.
I was so excited about this.
I'm sure I was really little.
And as I got closer and closer to the front of the line,
this thing started to look bigger, and taller,
and scarier than it really was.
And it started to sound even scarier.
You could hear this rattling and rumbling
from the roller coaster.
I would never have admitted it at the time,
but I think I was kind of terrified.
But I had set my sights on this big thing.
I had convinced everybody to let me do it.
So I couldn't really back out at that point.
So I just decided to set aside my nerves.
I decided to ignore them, put them aside, distract myself
until I got to the front of the line.
And I sat down in my seat next to my dad.
And I pulled that lap bar down on top of me.
And at that point, I was not just
mentally committed to this thing,
but I was physically strapped in, literally strapped in.
I could not get out.
So at that point, you might as well get on board,
and just roll with whatever is going to happen,
and enjoy the adventure that is coming.
So I've used that a lot through my career as well.
I grew up to be a mechanical engineer.
I went to a place called Harvey Mudd College.
It's a pretty awesome place that deserves an extra shout out.
It is actually one of those places
that [? Marion ?] talked about is
getting to be half and half with female engineers and computer
scientists.
But when I was graduating from Harvey Mudd,
I should have gotten a professional, responsible adult
engineering job like all of my classmates did.
But no.
I had applied for something called a Thomas J. Watson
Fellowship.
And this Thomas J. Watson Fellowship,
the intent of this fellowship is to take students
who are really good at meeting expectations
and give them the opportunity-- basically pay them--
to run around the world studying some independent study
project that they make up, that might be kind of wacky
and off the wall.
And I, of course, proposed that I
should study international influences in roller coaster
design.
Because aside from being a fan, I now
had an engineer's appreciation for the design challenges
of a roller coaster.
In particular, I was, and I still
am, really fascinated by the interaction between the body
and the machine.
How do your design rules change when you're no longer working
with just metal and plastic?
But now, you actually have to design
for and around the human body that grows, and moves,
and changes, and feels, and breathes, and thinks.
How do you do that?
When you add that human being into the equation,
it changes everything.
It changes the whole picture.
So maybe it was my nostalgic stories about Elitch Gardens.
But I somehow convinced this fellowship committee
to pay me money to travel around the world riding
roller coasters.
[LAUGHTER]
That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
I realize that that sounds outrageously cool.
And it was.
Trust me.
But it was another one of these things
that got even more terrifying as I got closer to it.
Not only was I going to be outside of the United States
traveling by myself for a whole year with basically no support;
but on top of that, they take all these students who
are good at meeting expectations and pitch them into an area
where there are no expectations.
And that was as scary to me as the travel was.
But again, I had set my sights on this big thing.
I had talked somebody into letting me do it.
So you can't really back out at that point.
So I got on the plane.
I strapped myself in.
And I ran off around the world to study roller coaster design.
Mostly, that meant that I was traveling
for a year with a backpack and dreadlocks.
But by the end of this year, I had circumnavigated the globe.
I had ridden a lot of roller coasters,
despite what you see in the pictures.
I had built up this confidence that you could drop me
basically anywhere in the world, in any situation,
and I might not know the answer.
In fact, I probably wouldn't know the answer.
But I had the confidence that I would be fine
because I would figure it out.
I trust my own ability to adapt and sort out
whatever it is that I land in.
I also had realized by the end of this year
that the only expectations of me that matter are mine.
And that's an important one.
I didn't need somebody else to define for me what it
looked like to do a good job.
I can do that for myself.
And I should do that for myself.
Also by the end of this year, I had actually
realized that I didn't want to go into roller coaster
design as a career.
But I was still fascinated by the interaction
between the body and the machine.
So instead of putting the body in the machine,
let's flip that on its head and put
the machine inside of the body.
So I ended up going back to grad school.
I got a PhD in biomedical engineering from USC.
And as part of my dissertation work,
I worked on this retinal prosthesis device.
This takes an image from the patient's eyeglasses.
And it sends it through a couple of different processing steps
and eventually applies it as a spatially distributed pattern
of electrical stimulation directly on the patient's
retina, the back of the eye.
That gives these patients artificial vision
for people who have certain types of blindness.
So that's a pretty amazing thing.
This was a huge team that did this.
And this is a huge feat of engineering.
But the pieces that really hit home for me
were the stories that our subjects
would tell about how this impacted their daily lives--
to be able to see something again, anything again--
how much this meant to their lives.
There is one patient in particular
who I remember talking about how his granddaughter had
been born after he went blind.
And of course, he had talked to her and interacted with her.
And he could hug her.
But he had never seen her.
And this amazing feat of engineering,
when he was able to take it home for the first time,
he was able to take the glasses portion of it home.
He was able to see his granddaughter's
face for the first time ever.
So that's pretty cool.
Again, you add that human being into the equation,
and it changes everything.
Now, I did eventually grow up and get
a real, professional, adult engineering job.
I actually did a couple of jobs in a row
where I was working on different medical devices
and different types--
different parts of the body.
But I ended up running product development
at this small company that was making cannulas, and catheters,
and really complex medical tubing
that goes into different types of surgeries.
So this particular cannula is a really good example
of the types of things that we worked on.
This cannula takes deoxygenated blood
from the inferior and superior vena cava.
Those are the two big veins that take all of the blood
from your body and pump it back into your heart.
So it takes that deoxygenated blood and pumps it out.
And then simultaneously, through the same tube
and the same incision, pumps back in oxygenated blood
and spits that back out into your heart.
That, again, is a pretty complicated thing
to figure out how to do.
And it's a super complicated thing to manufacture.
We ran a manufacturing plant that made this.
And there were plenty of challenges with that.
But this allows hospitals to take patients whose lungs don't
work anymore and keep them alive, for weeks on end
sometimes, while they figure out how to fix their lungs.
So I was at this company when what was then
a division of Google X, and is now Verily Life Sciences,
came calling and wanted to talk to me.
And to be perfectly honest, I wasn't actually sure
that I wanted to take the job.
I really enjoyed my life in southern California.
I was living in Long Beach.
I also was on this very traditional med device career
path.
I knew exactly where my career was going.
I knew exactly what promotion I would get next.
I wasn't sure that I wanted to flip that all on its head.
And also, I didn't have any idea that any division of Google
was doing anything remotely related to medical devices.
To be perfectly honest, this is kind of all
that I knew about Silicon Valley.
But true to form, I decided to get on the ride.
And I am so glad that I did.
I've been at Verily now for two years.
Our mission is to really take the world's health
organization, and organize it, and make it accessible so
that we can use that to help improve patients' lives.
That's a pretty big, lofty goal.
It's a little hard to understand, hard to visualize,
what that might look like.
But in the near term, that means we've
got a lot of concrete hardware projects
and science and clinical projects, as well.
We've got lot of concrete projects
that are moving that are going to help
us build either investigational tools
or help us interact in some patient's
life in a positive way, maybe in some more
specific targeted way.
And this glucose monitoring contact lens
is a really good example of the types of things
that we work on.
If you imagine how this thing is built,
we take a little microelectronics ring that
might have an antenna on it.
It would have some sort of energy storage,
whether that's a capacitor or a battery--
definitely a custom designed chip.
And then you sandwich that between layers
to make it into a functional contact lens.
Now, I want you to think about the team of people
that it takes to do something like this.
You might need an electrical engineer.
You might need a chip designer, an antenna engineer.
You definitely need a mechanical engineer, probably
a polymer chemist.
You might need a biochemist.
You definitely need a couple of people
working on the glucose sensor.
You might need a process engineer to scale it up.
You might need a quality team.
You probably need a regulatory specialist
who can help talk to the FDA.
There are a lot of functions that go into this.
And I'll let you in on a little secret.
I am not an expert in all of those things.
Nobody could be.
But as the technical lead, it's my job
to not only bring all those functions to the table,
but make sure that we're talking to each other,
make sure that we're speaking the same language,
that we're all pulling in the same direction
and working together towards a common end goal.
So that requires of each of us, myself
included, that we are not only confident and competent
in the areas that we own, but that we're not
afraid to say we don't know certain areas of the project.
I have to get into areas of the project
all the time that are things that I don't really
know that well.
But I have to learn, and I have to adapt as I go.
All of us need to be willing to be
the beginner in the room on these topics
that we're not familiar with.
So this picture is a really good example of that.
This is some of my team from about six weeks ago.
And what you see in this picture is an antenna engineer,
a materials scientist, a mechanical engineer,
and an applied physicist, all learning
to do eye surgery for the first time.
I ask my team to stretch like this every day.
And I also continue to take risks and put myself
in situations that are outside of my comfort
zone, outside of my core competency,
perhaps, things that are a little nerve wracking, maybe
even a little scary.
But I continue to do that because I think that that's
how great things happen.
Now, I am wholeheartedly on board with wherever
this ride is taking me.
And I am definitely committed to continuing
to take risks and do things that I find to be scary all the way
until I'm old and gray.
But I wanted to encourage all of you guys to do the same thing.
Take risks.
Set your sights on something big.
Talk somebody into letting you do it.
And then strap yourself in so that you can't get out.
And at that point, you have to just be on board
and enjoy the adventure and see where it takes you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]