Like Professors Shiller and Zedillo I’m an economist,
but I’m going to tell you about three new scientific ideas from Yale.
So these are endophytes seen here growing in culture.
Endophytes are microorganisms that live on the -
inside of plants symbiotically.
And there are probably about a million species of endophytes
and we only have identified about 20 percent of them.
The other 80 percent we’ve never isolated, identified,
and we don’t know their properties.
This is gonna be an example of how teaching and research
can combine in a great university.
Scott Strobel is a professor of biology at Yale and he teaches a course about
endophytes that runs from the beginning of the spring semester in January
all the way through the summer.
A student has to sign up to work in a lab all summer.
During the spring break in March they go to rainforests and gather plants
and bring them back and they find the endophytes in those plants
and isolate them, they run their DNA, sequence the DNA,
and test their properties.
This is a typical student’s yield.
Typical students wind up with about 40 endophytes that then they run tests on.
Now, what can endophytes do?
Do we know that some of them are antibiotics?
But Pria Anand wanted to know if endophytes could -- if they could find
one that would degrade plastics.
Well, lo and behold, out of 40 specimens she found one.
Two other students the next year went back and looked for plants
like the ones Pria had found, things that physically resembled the plant,
and they came back and found better ones.
Here’s what happened -- here’s what they tested.
Here’s polyurethane in solution. Chlororaphis, pre-chlororaphis,
is a known bacterium that actually has some degrading properties of -
just this little bit is degraded.
Look at what happens with these endophytes, five of them we found,
all of them -- two or four of them are better
and one completely eliminates the polyurethane.
Now, another discovery we’ll move to is -- relates to the human genome.
We have this great breakthrough of sequence in the entire human genome
and the promise of personalized medicine that we can find cures
for individual people because of their genetic defects.
But it’s really hard to do that because the genome is so long
and contains so much information. It’s hard to process.
But the exome is the one percent of the DNA that --
it contains the known genes.
The other 99 percent of DNA is junk.
So what -- the idea is to sort of isolate the exome through sequencing and then see
if you can use that information to find out more about disease.
Rick Lifton, professor at Yale, developed a technique for
the first person to actually be able to sequence only the exome.
You cut up the DNA and you take only these pieces that are known genes,
you put them on to a chip, you wash them, and you sequence just those,
one percent of our DNA, and that’s the way --
then you find clues.
Now, here’s the first successful example of personalized medicine from Yale.
Umit was a severely ill, five-month old Turkish male
who’s suffering from terrible dehydration.
Notice he’s inbred. We got all these intersecting lines here.
This is a genetic chart.
Two siblings died in??? one in childbirth,
and he was five months old.
What was going on?
Well, it was with -- Lifton ran his technique, and what did he find?
He found that there was one difference,
the G -- instead of a G in the normal case, he had an A in the nucleotide
which synthesize -- with created in amino acid N instead of D.
Notice all the known species for which we know the genetic sequence actually
had with -- they figured out what was wrong and cured the young man.
Now, third discovery. What’s the future of computing?
We know that we double the processing speed every two years for 30 or 40 years.
That’s gonna run out because as we shrink circuit elements,
we get to an atomic scale and the laws of physics take -
different laws of physics- quantum mechanics takes over
not normal???? physics.
And so what we’ve got scientists at Yale working on,
developing computers that are based on the quantum principles
that a single atom can be in two states, zero and one,
and sometimes in the same state - both states simultaneously.
It’s really hard to build -- wire atoms in the computer but we’ve done it.
Rob Schoelkopf and Michelle Deveray have built a quantum process,
???? on a chip that uses artificial atoms
and it makes the world’s first quantum computer.
Two bits, it’s really small, but it’s a start and it’s a very important start.
Here’s what quantum compares with??? for work.
And a normal question is, where is the red card?
Classical computer search would take two in a quarter guesses on average
to find the red card.
Because of the properties of quantum computing, actually,
you can pick simultaneously under all the cards at the same time
and it takes much less time in one try.
So what’s the future?
What are the applications which quantum computing will be important?
For one thing it will find prime factors,
because important thing is to have numbers which is important aspect of
cryptography in unbelievably fast time.
Look at the difference.
And in many other areas there are amazing possibilities for applications
but, you know, one thing is certain, we don’t know what the applications
will be because every time there are breakthroughs of this magnitude,
there are???? discoveries.
When the laser was invented, who knew it was gonna be used for eye surgery?