Are we ready for neoevolution Harvey Fineberg
[Music]
how would you like to be better than you
are suppose I said that with just a few
changes in your genes you could get a
better memory more precise more accurate
and quicker or maybe you’d like to be
more fit stronger with more stamina
would you like to be more attractive and
self-confident how about living longer
with good health or perhaps you’re one
of those who’s always yearned for more
creativity which one would you like the
most which would you like if you could
have just one creativity how many people
would choose creativity raise your hands
let me see a few probably about as many
as there are creative people here that’s
very good
how many would opt for memory quite a
few more how about Fitness few less what
about longevity ah the majority that
makes me feel very good as a doctor if
you could have any one of these it would
be a very different world is it just
imaginary or is it perhaps possible
evolution has been a perennial topic
here at the TED conference but I want to
give you today one doctor’s take on the
subject the great 20th century
geneticist TG dodging ski who was also a
communicant in the Russian Orthodox
Church once wrote an essay that he
titled nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution now if
you are one of those who does not accept
the evidence for biological evolution
this would be a very good time to turn
off your hearing aid take out your
personal communications device I give
you permission and perhaps take another
look at Catherine Schultz’s book on
being wrong because nothing in the rest
of this talk is going to make any sense
whatsoever to you
but if you do accept biological
evolution consider this is it just about
the past or is it about the future does
it apply to others or does it apply to
us this is another look at the tree of
life in this picture I’ve put a bush
with a centre branching out in all
directions because if you look at the
edges of the Tree of Life every existing
species at the tips of those branches
has succeeded in evolutionary terms it
has survived it has demonstrated a
fitness to its environment the human
part of this branch way out on one end
is of course the one that we are most
interested in we branched off of a
common ancestor to modern chimpanzees
about 6 or 8 million years ago in the
interval there have been perhaps 20 or
25 different species of hominids some
have come and gone we have been here for
about a hundred and thirty thousand
years it may seem like we’re quite
remote from other parts of this tree of
life but actually for the most part the
basic machinery of ourselves is pretty
much the same do you realize that we can
take advantage and commandeer the
machinery of a common bacterium to
produce the protein of human insulin
used to treat diabetics this is not like
human insulin this is the same protein
that is chemically indistinguishable
from what comes out of your pancreas and
speaking of bacteria do you realize that
each of us carries in our gut more
bacteria than there are cells in the
rest of our body maybe 10 times more
I mean think of it when Anthony Damacio
asks about your self-image do you think
about the bacteria our gut is a
wonderfully hospitable environment for
those bacteria it’s war
it’s dark its moist it’s very cozy and
you’re going to provide all the
nutrition that they could possibly want
with no effort on their part it’s really
like an easy Street for bacteria with
the occasional interruption of the
unintended force rush to the exit but
otherwise you are a wonderful
environment for those bacteria just as
they are essential to your life they
help in the digestion of essential
nutrients and they protect you against
certain diseases but what will come in
the future are we at some kind of
evolutionary equipoise as a species or
are we destined to become something
different something perhaps even better
adapted to the environment now let’s
take a step back in time to the Big Bang
fourteen billion years ago the earth the
solar system about four-and-a-half
billion years the first signs of proto
life maybe three to four billion years
ago on earth the first multi-celled
organisms perhaps as much as 800 or a
billion years ago and then the human
species finally emerging in the last
hundred and thirty thousand years in
this vast unfinished symphony of the
universe life on Earth is like a brief
measure the animal kingdom like a single
single measure and human life
a small grace note that was us that also
constitutes the entertainment portion of
this talk so I hope you enjoyed it
now when I was a freshman in college I
took my first biology class I was
fascinated by the elegance and beauty of
biology I became enamored of the power
of evolution and I realized something
very fundamental in most of the
existence of life in single-celled
organisms each cell simply divides and
all of the genetic energy of that cell
is carried on in both daughter cells
but at the time multi-celled organisms
come online things start to change
sexual reproduction enters the picture
and very importantly with the
introduction of sexual reproduction that
passes on the genome the rest of the
body becomes expendable
in fact you could say that the
inevitability of the death of our bodies
enters in evolutionary time at the same
moment as sexual reproduction now I have
to confess when I was a college
undergraduate I thought okay sex death
sex death death for sex
seemed pretty reasonable at the time but
with each passing years I’ve come to
have increasing doubts I’ve come to
understand the sentiments of George
Burns who was performing still in Las
Vegas well into his 90s and one night
there’s a knock at his hotel room door
he answers the door standing before him
is a gorgeous scantily clad showgirl she
looks at him and says I’m here for super
sex
that’s fine says George I’ll take the
soup
I came to realize as a physician that I
was working toward a goal which was
different from the goal of evolution not
necessarily contradictory just different
I was trying to preserve the body I
wanted to keep us healthy
I wanted to restore health from disease
I wanted us to live long and healthy
lives evolution is all about passing on
the genome to the next generation
adapting and surviving through
generation after generation from an
evolutionary point of view you and I are
like the booster rockets designed to
send the genetic payload into the next
level of orbit and then drop off into
the sea I think we would all understand
the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed
when he said I don’t want to achieve
immortality through my work I want to
achieve it through not dying evolution
does not necessarily favor the
longest-lived
it doesn’t necessarily favor the biggest
or the strongest or the fastest and not
even the smartest evolution favors those
creatures best adapted to their
environment that is the sole test of
survival and success at the bottom of
the ocean bacteria that are thermophilic
and can survive at the steam vent heat
that would otherwise produce if fish
were there sous-vide cooked fish
nevertheless have managed to make that a
hospitable environment for them so what
does this mean as we look back at what
has happened in evolution and as we
think about the place again of humans in
evolution and particularly as we look
ahead to the next phase I would say that
there are a number of possibilities the
first is that we will not evolve we have
reached a kind of equipoise and the
reasoning behind that would be first
we have through medicine managed to
preserve a lot of genes that would
otherwise be selected out and be removed
from the population and secondly we as a
species have so configured our
environment that we have managed to make
it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it
and by the way we immigrate and
circulate and intermix so much that you
can’t any longer have the isolation that
is necessary for evolution to take place
a second possibility is that there will
be evolution of the traditional kind
natural imposed by the forces of nature
and the argument here would be that the
wheels of evolution grind slowly but
they are inexorable and as far as
isolation goes when we as a species do
colonize distant planets there will be
the isolation and the environmental
changes that could produce evolution in
the natural way but there’s a third
possibility an enticing intriguing and
frightening possibility
I call it neo evolution the new
evolution that is not simply natural but
guided and chosen by us as individuals
in the choices that we will make now how
could this come about how could it be
possible that we would do this consider
first the reality that people today in
some cultures are making choices about
their offspring there in some cultures
choosing to have more males than females
it’s not necessarily good for the
society but it’s what the individual and
the family are choosing think also if it
were possible ever for you not simply to
choose the sex of your child but for you
in your body to make the genetic
adjustments that would cure or prevent
diseases what if you could make the
genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or
Alzheimer’s or reduce the risk of cancer
or eliminate stroke
wouldn’t you want to make those changes
in your genes
if we look ahead these kinds of changes
are going to be increasingly possible
the human genome project started in 1990
and it took 13 years it costs 2.7
billion dollars the year after it was
finished in 2004 you could do the same
job for 20 million dollars in 3 to 4
months today you can have a complete
sequence of the 3 billion base pairs in
the human genome at a cost of about
$20,000 and in the space of about a week
it won’t be very long before the reality
will be the $1,000 human genome and it
will be increasingly available for
everyone just a week ago the National
Academy of Engineering awarded its
Draper prize to francis arnold and
willem stemmer two scientists who
independently developed techniques to
encourage the natural process of
evolution to work faster and to lead to
desirable proteins in a more efficient
way what Francis Arnold calls directed
evolution a couple of years ago the
Lasker prize was awarded to the
scientists Shinya Yamanaka for his
research in which he took an adult skin
cell a fibroblast and by manipulating
just four genes he induced that cell to
revert to a flurry potential stem cell a
cell potentially capable of becoming any
cell in your body these changes are
coming the same technology that has
produced the human insulin in bacteria
can make viruses that will not only
protect you against themselves but
induce immunity against other viruses
believe it or not there’s an
experimental trial going on with vaccine
against influenza that has been grown in
the cells of a tobacco plant
can you imagine something good coming
out of tobacco these are all reality
today and the future will be evermore
possible imagine then just two other
little changes you can change the cells
in your body but what if you could
change the cells in your offspring what
if you could change the sperm in the OVA
or change the newly fertilized egg and
give your offspring a better chance at a
healthier life eliminate the diabetes
eliminate the hemophilia reduce the risk
of cancer
who doesn’t want healthier children and
then that same analytic technology that
same engine of science that can produce
the changes to prevent disease will also
enable us to adopt super attributes
hyper capacities that better memory why
not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings
especially if you can augment it with
the next generation of the Watson
machine why not have the quick twitch
muscle that will enable you to run
faster and longer why not live longer
these will be irresistible and when we
are at a position where we can pass it
on to the next generation and we can
adopt the attributes we want we will
have converted old-style
evolution into neo evolution will take a
process that normally might require a
hundred thousand years and we can
compress it down to a thousand years and
maybe even in the next 100 years these
are choices that your grandchildren or
their grandchildren are going to have
before them will we use these choices to
make a society that is better that is
more successful that is kinder or will
we selectively choose different
attributes that we want for some of us
and not for others of us will we make a
society that is more boring
and more uniform or more robust and more
versatile these are the kinds of
questions that we will have to face and
most profoundly of all will we ever be
able to develop the wisdom and to
inherit the wisdom that we’ll need to
make these choices wisely for better or
worse and sooner than you may think
these choices will be up to us thank you
[Applause]