(soft relaxing music)
- There's a lot of people that think science
is cold and unfeeling.
I think it's quite the opposite.
I think science is magnificently artistic and romantic.
The idea that when a bee comes and looks at a flower,
that the bee sees something entirely different
than what I see, colors that are only visible
in the ultraviolet spectrum that shows the bee, come here.
That's amazing.
For many people, figuring out how things work
actually takes away the beauty and the magic.
They need the mystery.
For me, the beauty and magic comes from wonder.
Isn't it amazing that it works that way?
(soft relaxing music)
I think that the 21st century
is gonna be the century of biology.
(soft digital music)
We are now in the beginning of an era,
of a new level of manipulation that we have over nature.
We have a whole new way of thinking
about what we want around us and how to create it.
And it gives us powers we've never had.
I think that we are gonna come
to rely on this kind of manipulation more and more.
Genetic engineering and CRISPR are gonna be essential tools
for how we can mesh
with a different kind of planetary situation.
Other forms of editing existed, but with CRISPR,
the power of it and the lowered expense of it,
means that you have a qualitative change in the science.
Think about the transformation with YouTube.
Suddenly, everybody can be a movie maker.
When you take something
that otherwise needed very elaborate laboratory equipment
and a PhD, and you change it into something
that high school students could do
in their high school laboratory,
that is fundamentally disturbing to our status quo.
With this kind of very precise form of engineering,
there's concerns that it might get away from us.
But, can this be an essential tool
for what might be some truly dramatic,
even revolutionary changes in the way the earth functions?
Yes.
We need to be thinking together about
how to create sustainable environments
or new sources of water that we can drink.
New ways to engineer plants
that can tolerate higher degrees of salinity.
How to grow food in a sustainable fashion,
on a scale we haven't seen before,
without damage like we have seen before.
How to create a surface for your homes that is organic
and is engineered to react
to the outside temperature and sunlight
so that it automatically cools and heats
without the need for carbon-based fuels.
We could engineer a park
so that the greenery glows at night
and you don't need to have artificial lights,
which use energy.
Bioengineering is going to be a ticket to that.
When I was in college and I was a biology major,
my focus actually was on a field called ethology.
It's animal behavior.
(hooves beating)
One of the things you really begin to have to face
is how cruel things are in the natural world.
At some point over time,
we began to recognize we needed to separate ourselves
from this aspect of nature.
We had many eras in human history
where we accepted conditions of tremendous filth
and we just thought that was the way things are.
The diseases, and the now what we consider
to be terribly short lives, were just a normal part
of human existence in this planet.
It's not about rejecting nature.
It's about beginning to appreciate
that nature is not some always benevolent force.
It's simply a set of background conditions.
CRISPR is part of the natural world.
And this is a world of opportunities
that come with this incredibly accurate
and sophisticated ability to manipulate biological organisms
and understand how things work on a fundamental level.
It's biology, that's the place genetic engineering starts.
We don't need to make our lives easier but when we do,
it opens up possibilities to do other things
with our time and our energy.
In the future, I do think
that we are going to be able to develop a universal vaccine.
We're going to be able to regenerate tissue
in our heart that has been damaged.
People might have a form of organic blindness.
Would it be so terrible when we give them glasses
that let them see, if they could also see
into the ultraviolet or the infrared?
Would that be so terrible?
We're going to be able to live more actively
and more vigorously to whatever turns out
to be the natural kind of limit of our time spans.
But I don't think we're gonna turn into gods, you know.
(woman laughs)
(soft relaxing music)