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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-12-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKopW86CCJo
and I want to talk to you about a mystery four billion years old that is being investigated by a community of pioneers from around the world together we are using advanced computer systems to investigate complex and ancient alien technology and it turns out that this alien technology is inside every living thing in the planet secrets make even give us insights into the deepest of human emotions
love from early on as children we come to feel like we understand the difference between things that are alive and things that are just machines however as science continues to reveal how life works we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not are actually created by complex interacting molecular machines these microscopic machines are
as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch but instead of being run on two years and springs are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry our understanding of the precise coiling on coiling of the DNA molecule or the way that one molecule can literally walk almost robotically along the tight rope of another molecule continue to show us again and again this molecular clock work
is real and pervasive now what's most unsettling to me about this is that we didn't build these machines as someone originally trained as an engineer I don't doubt the I kinda hate this I mean as the most clever species on the planet and we kinda like to think of ourselves as the builders of the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe right I mean we let
the written language in and the printing press that you know we cured polio would send a man to the moon I mean heck we even took savage beasts and turn them into kittens in the bulk of global communications network to share pictures of I mean that's pretty impressive and yes when I look at through a microscope at our humble bacterium by the way is ancestors we're
on the planet a billion years ago billions of years ago I still wonder how it really works because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we've ever built it is biological gears and springs but they feel you know rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscopic landscape that's bustling with activity I mean on the one hand it's extremely well organized but
on the other hands the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel like you know I stumbled on to an alternate landscape of technology that's built by an engineer a million times smarter than me I mean the more that I search for principals beyond the ones we've already learned the more I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that this
stuff was built by alien okay not literally I don't literally mean that I think little green men and women came down from the earth and see that life here like a billion years ago well we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years right the results of evolution confused even our smartest engineers we try to understand how we could build
what biology has evolved what if life has good engineering principles and we just haven't figured out yet I mean could studying biology give us the ability to extract new engineering principles that maybe then we could use to solve the world's intractable problems our experiments only give us glimpses into what happens in these tiny spaces but what happens there has huge implications for the future in the
twenty first century and beyond for example our species is learned over time to share information from generation to generation early societies invented the oral history later systems of writing later the printing press radio ga television and in today's society we have the digital %HESITATION ability to send information all kinds of exciting way now in the early days of human communication as anyone who's ever played the
game of telephone knows information could get lost books can get burned history is re written even forgotten now in the nineteen fifties we found out how biology had solve the same problem of transmitting information from generation to generation that's what the DNA molecule does so and we struggled with that hundreds of thousands of years so how good is DNA at doing that well current estimates are
that the error rates copying is one mutation for every ten billion base pairs that are replicated honey put them in perspective for you in the entire history of the world we think that there's been about a hundred billion people that ever walked on the planet so if we had been as good at transmitting information of the course of history the DNA is that means that only
ten people in all of history would ever miss communicated and we would be living in a very different world than the one we live in today that's alien technology and there's so much we have yet to learn about it so I told you that inside of us there these tiny machines that are made out of molecules that make us up but can we really be machines
I mean we don't really think of ourselves that way and we don't go to the mirror in the morning and see the same kind of futuristic android looking out at us that we see in the movies and yet at the micro level biology keeps telling us that same events that make up that bacteria you know fancy words you learned about biology capitalism and protein translation DNA
replication but all the same things are happening inside ourselves so four to accept that we are machines what kind machines are weak and if we'd better understood how those machines work could we better fix ourselves when we break or as we call it could we do a better job of understanding how to harness the energy of our planet more efficiently and cleanly could we even understand
love to being trained as an engineer I went on to graduate school to study neuroscience and about the same time the father of my best friend passed away and I consider these questions in the context of that event they say that those who we love who passed away live on inside of us for neuroscientists this is not just an abstract romantic idea but a matter of
physical reality each time you come in contact with a new person see a newborn child for the first time or phone love without fetching somebody we know that the cells of your brain are for ever changed I forming new connections activity patterns come to represent that person inside your brain cells tiny precise molecular machines averting the same laws of physics and chemistry is in that bacterium
reorganize themselves in specific patterns ports those connections that are at the root of that emotion like impression in soft wax your loved ones leave a physical mark on your lives that are literally etched into the structure of your brain cells when you remember them later on a similar pattern of activity that occurred when you were with them lights up again and this continues on as long
as you remember them your loved ones and the emotions that you thought when they touch your life literally do live on inside you because the love you have for them happens in your body and in your brain would you like to know how that's what happens and how those marks are left I would how what happens and how it works to many of us seems miraculous
and it seems like it outside of the realm of the noble but in fact it is a series of complex but specific and noble events that happened inside your body only a fraction of which we understand let me say this a different way they're gonna send biology much like understand chess you learn how to play chess by learning the rules on how the individual pieces move
and what they can do similarly in biology we've learned that there are lots of pieces millions of pieces but they also have rules for how they work and what they do on a regular basis these molecular machines make moves based on these rules that you could call an event series all these molecular events happening in precise concert on a vast microscopic chessboard gives rise to the
activity of a living cell and consequently of every living thing on the planet but the number of these pieces and rules that we fully understand is still small and our ability to understand how all the events play out is still limited thankfully in twenty first century we have tools credible tools to help us understand the complex events of the natural world computers Steve Jobs called computers
a bicycle for the mind when he talked about how they let us make exceptional leaps of understanding this led to huge progress for the world and continues to transform our lives and our society in a global revolution of efficiency what if we could better harness the use puter is to unlock the each of mysteries of life and to begin to understand this alien technology what if
we could understand all life by playing with virtual replicas inside computers the same way we play with lego blocks this is the idea behind a new revolution called digital biology that way computer plays chess is to consider hundreds of thousands even millions of different possible moves very quickly digital biology uses powerful simulation software to reproduce the basic functions of life all those events that happen as
a result of those pieces of life moving about that means that a computer program inside of it we can see and modify hundreds of thousands even millions of the events as they happen virtual replicas of DNA of cells of tissues of organs a whole organisms just as they do in the real thing within the computer we can watch the DNA on coils and we can watch
the molecule move around we can see all the clockwork play out learning how this works in simple cells is the first step to understanding what happens inside the cells of your brain when you fall in love but no order to figure out how that works we have to start somewhere small as a start researchers at Stanford have recently built a computer model of a simple microbe
that accounts for all of its known molecular events when they test how closely it matches examples of the real living microbe doing things reliving microbes do they find the best match with real data ever reported by complex computer models there's a lot more to be done but this new approach to reproducing biological events inside of computers gives us a chance to understand malfunctions of human life
such as disease and aging helps us to better unlock the secrets of clean biological energy production or host of technologies not even yet dreamed up what if the production of this incredible new technology was not just done behind the closed doors of academia what could be done in the public high using open science a new approach to organizing scientific investigation on the internet after I left
graduate school I was able to co found and helped organize a project it's been pushing on the boundaries of digital biology and open science that we call open worm open worm is dedicated to creating the first digital organism in a computer in a completely open science manner specifically we're using C. elegans a microscopic worm as our focus of investigation he's about as long as a hair
on your head is wide and he has only about one thousand sells his whole body it's been the focus of research for three Nobel Prize winners because it carries incredible insight into all life including that of humans hundreds of contributors from countries around the world have been helping us to build a detailed computer model of this it's one of the best understood animals in all of
biology when you give an example of how this works this is Pedro Tanaka he lives in Brazil and he's a student of engineering a year ago he came across the open or project and log on to the project online rallying point on get up have you not familiar with it had and like a nerdy version of Facebook I'm Peter programmers he reached out to us via
email and we talked to him via Google hangout across four time zones and thousands of miles never met in person before we found a small slice the project he felt comfortable taking on two weeks later he submitted to the project code that solve the problem that the whole community was able to see four months later he was a co author on a publication at a scientific
conference Stockholm open signs is a bridge that brought pagers efforts over a few weekends from sao Paulo to a global scientific community this is Andre Pauline out and Sergei Hyrule they live in Novosibirsk Siberia and work in a research institute as scientists three years ago with open arms just getting off the ground they had just uploaded to YouTube a video of their latest design for a
computer simulation of a war the same time a single tweet had caused a small group to coalesce around the similar idea to build a computer simulated work and excitedly Andre and Sergei received an email from this group excited about their video and ask if they could help and if they would join a project called open three years later there were combined with that of many others
has been featured in many scientific publications and conferences has been BBC news and the science section of the economist and it's helped exceptionally crowdfund a Kickstarter campaign open science is the bridge that enabled a few passionate thinkers with similar ideas to find each other in ways that we've been highly unlikely before the internet for such a problem this is really needed because we need as many
people from as many different backgrounds as possible to be able to find each other to work on these individuals and many more like them are donating their time and effort to build computer models are to feed their own curiosity about this ancient mystery of how life works and they're taking advantage of modernisations in computing power and communications to do it while the starting with a tiny
creature that may seem unimportant and let's face it mental gross they understand the same alien technology that makes it work the same moves I'm rules and events that happen inside the cells of the worm are the same kinds of events that happen in all of life across the planet they understand that what separates this worm from you or I is not so much that they have
completely different chess pieces and completely different chess moves but in fact they're the same they're just playing out on a different board and with different combinations their generosity towards volunteering their effort in this common endeavor powers in international open science community that continues to grow so as I have gone from engineering to neuroscience open science the biggest misunderstanding that I hear that most people have about
the natural world is this people commonly tend to believe that boiling down what happens in our bodies to chemistry makes us less special but I think exactly the opposite is true I think that this extra understanding only adds to the incredible beauty of the world as part of this planet you are part of a symphony other events that are happening inside of you and all around
you don't miss it the mistake of the past would have called this a factor would explain this effective being part of a global energy put here by divine forces it and that's not a bad metaphor but in the twenty first century we have the opportunity perched sue a much deeper and more specific understanding of this mysterious ancient alien technology that's driving the incredible microscopic events of
the natural world we now have the opportunity to explore together this brave new space together as one interconnected global community we can come together unified by our curiosity our generosity and our passion to unlock the secrets of disease a promise of clean energy and maybe someday a deep and beautiful mystery of love thank you
