[00:01.160 --> 00:09.860]  When we get the technology going, we're going to be talking biohacking, but I'll tell you right now that there's a technology called TouchDNA.
[00:10.280 --> 00:12.660]  We're just stalling for time here, let's face it.
[00:12.860 --> 00:33.580]  There's a technology called TouchDNA, and one of the biggest proponents of it is a person named Madonna, because Madonna has an assistant, this is my trained assistant here, who goes around behind her, yeah, goes around behind her every time she drinks from glass and wipes the DNA or wipes all the saliva and spittle off it,
[00:34.020 --> 00:38.720]  because after all, otherwise, she might leave enough DNA around for you to have her babies.
[00:39.360 --> 00:43.540]  So, think about that when you drink from glass like this, and this one does look kind of sketchy.
[00:58.440 --> 01:08.340]  If those guys had Fitbits or something on now, you would see their heart rate is getting quite high because they're back there sweating and doing all the good things.
[01:08.340 --> 01:12.080]  So, let's have a round of applause for the audiovisual guys for doing their work.
[01:20.710 --> 01:22.270]  That being said...
[01:31.490 --> 01:32.570]  You got any...
[01:32.570 --> 01:33.390]  You got a brand...
[01:33.390 --> 01:33.530]  Yeah.
[01:33.850 --> 01:35.770]  We have a biohacking meeting just after this.
[01:35.930 --> 01:36.870]  Come up here and tell everybody.
[01:37.270 --> 01:37.410]  Sure.
[01:37.950 --> 01:38.690]  Say your name first.
[01:39.330 --> 01:39.610]  All right.
[01:39.750 --> 01:41.890]  Hi, I'm Patrick, one of the other biohackers here.
[01:42.630 --> 01:48.470]  We're going to have a biohacking meetup at 5 o'clock right after this talk in Hoover, just around the corner here.
[01:48.630 --> 01:49.770]  So, you're all welcome.
[01:50.370 --> 01:51.650]  If we can squeeze you all in there.
[01:53.210 --> 01:56.150]  Are any of you going to DEFCON this year by any chance?
[01:56.430 --> 01:56.870]  Yeah!
[01:57.290 --> 01:59.290]  There's going to be a biohacking village there.
[01:59.510 --> 02:00.850]  It looks really good.
[02:01.530 --> 02:03.050]  Again, to give these guys...
[02:03.050 --> 02:04.270]  Take the pressure off a bit.
[02:04.430 --> 02:06.790]  I'll tell you a bit of a story from last year at DEFCON.
[02:06.890 --> 02:09.410]  There was a fellow there who had a t-shirt on.
[02:09.510 --> 02:12.710]  My t-shirt plugs my book, Technocreep.
[02:12.810 --> 02:16.570]  His t-shirt said, Bacteria is the new black.
[02:16.570 --> 02:22.450]  And this guy swears that he has not had... he has not had a bath in two years.
[02:22.870 --> 02:23.150]  Okay?
[02:23.410 --> 02:26.250]  And getting up close to him, I sort of confirmed that.
[02:27.830 --> 02:31.050]  And he... his whole theory is that we have... we're too clean.
[02:31.230 --> 02:33.610]  We use too much hexathlorephine soap and stuff like that.
[02:33.670 --> 02:37.650]  And as a result, our bodies are actually unhealthy.
[02:37.650 --> 02:39.070]  So what does he do?
[02:39.810 --> 02:43.270]  He takes the occasional sponge bath or something like that.
[02:43.430 --> 02:46.490]  But in fact, he doesn't really ever take a bath.
[02:47.050 --> 02:49.190]  Now, he gave me some stuff.
[02:49.350 --> 02:50.970]  You know, as he was cleaning out his booth, he said, Here!
[02:51.170 --> 02:51.650]  Take this!
[02:51.710 --> 02:52.390]  Take this shampoo!
[02:52.610 --> 02:54.290]  Take this bacterial culture!
[02:54.530 --> 02:58.170]  I have a 1984 Volkswagen Westphalia camper.
[02:58.510 --> 03:01.630]  To begin with, that's a suspicious-looking vehicle.
[03:01.890 --> 03:04.710]  And I live in Canada, so there's a thing called a border.
[03:05.130 --> 03:08.250]  About 20 meters from the border, I remembered this stuff.
[03:08.470 --> 03:09.210]  Good morning, everybody.
[03:09.590 --> 03:11.730]  If you could come on in and please take your seats.
[03:11.950 --> 03:13.830]  We're gonna try to get started in just a moment.
[03:14.170 --> 03:14.470]  Welcome.
[03:16.450 --> 03:16.670]  You're seated.
[03:18.790 --> 03:20.090]  There's a ghost in the machine.
[03:20.990 --> 03:21.890]  Is this your slide?
[03:22.070 --> 03:22.970]  That was not me.
[03:23.170 --> 03:23.710]  No, it's this.
[03:23.810 --> 03:24.530]  Is this your slide?
[03:24.710 --> 03:25.690]  That is my slide.
[03:25.830 --> 03:26.430]  Okay, thank you.
[03:26.670 --> 03:27.210]  Thank you.
[03:27.630 --> 03:28.630]  All right, thanks, guys.
[03:28.750 --> 03:29.390]  Thanks very much.
[03:29.930 --> 03:30.990]  So, no, it's lovely.
[03:31.390 --> 03:46.230]  So, to get to the point of the biohacking crossing the border, I did not want to be the University of Calgary professor who was suddenly found bringing a biohazard substance across the border because that could well be what they decided.
[03:46.490 --> 03:53.130]  The fellow who had the bacteria as the new black shirt said, call it a cosmetic when you cross to the border.
[03:53.410 --> 03:59.750]  So, instead, I took it and all the fruit and other things you are not allowed to bring across the border and toss it out.
[03:59.750 --> 04:11.550]  So, this talk is very much inspired by standing in the same place two years ago, talking about something a little bit different, but I was preceded by two very brilliant young scientists.
[04:11.730 --> 04:12.570]  One is from McGill.
[04:12.710 --> 04:14.030]  Is he here by any chance?
[04:15.110 --> 04:29.470]  Okay, that guy who was about this tall, he was probably in his 20s, had some amazing ideas about things that they were actually doing in their basement lab where they were doing some fairly interesting work with genetics.
[04:30.230 --> 04:32.710]  And what I did is I teased him a bit.
[04:32.830 --> 04:36.370]  I said, you know, what you do could be used for evil.
[04:36.550 --> 04:38.590]  And he said, oh no, I would never do that.
[04:38.650 --> 04:39.710]  I have the highest ethics.
[04:45.010 --> 04:48.670]  Does anybody know why something is speaking through here?
[04:49.210 --> 04:51.070]  I'm going to turn the sound down on it.
[04:53.780 --> 04:55.380]  Oh, it's the other room coming through?
[04:55.900 --> 04:56.700]  All right, fine.
[04:58.440 --> 04:59.020]  I'm sorry?
[04:59.200 --> 05:00.720]  Do you have a web browser on the live screen?
[05:01.320 --> 05:02.220]  I don't do it.
[05:02.320 --> 05:03.080]  No, I don't actually.
[05:04.860 --> 05:06.460]  But we're being haunted here.
[05:09.720 --> 05:12.100]  Do either of the AV guys know how to fix this?
[05:12.260 --> 05:15.260]  Because otherwise I'm hearing another talk coming through my ears here.
[05:21.100 --> 05:23.000]  Coming out of the speakers of my machine.
[05:23.440 --> 05:23.960]  All right.
[05:28.560 --> 05:29.820]  I'm going to mute my audio.
[05:29.820 --> 05:33.320]  We're going to talk about a sort of scholarship in a straight face.
[05:33.460 --> 05:36.520]  So I think that this is sort of part of our mandate as an idea.
[05:37.240 --> 05:38.200]  This is just part of the sort of thing.
[05:38.860 --> 05:41.500]  I think you'll have to be fine in the summertime.
[05:41.980 --> 05:42.560]  Come on, man.
[05:43.120 --> 05:44.180]  We've got some cross talk.
[05:44.620 --> 05:46.080]  We've got some speakers in the back.
[05:46.640 --> 05:47.420]  This topic was interesting.
[05:48.140 --> 05:50.280]  Part of what we got started, I remember that.
[05:50.280 --> 05:54.200]  Does anybody have a little pin plug that I can shove into the earphone jack of this?
[05:54.400 --> 05:54.520]  Yeah.
[05:54.800 --> 05:55.680]  You got one of those?
[05:56.000 --> 05:56.900]  You're the man.
[05:57.120 --> 05:57.980]  Thank you so much.
[06:04.960 --> 06:06.760]  Remember to come back for your headset later.
[06:15.440 --> 06:15.840]  Okay.
[06:15.960 --> 06:19.640]  As I said, this was kind of inspired by those people here two years ago.
[06:19.800 --> 06:22.600]  And an amazing amount has happened in those two years.
[06:22.780 --> 06:24.020]  I came out of here.
[06:24.120 --> 06:31.260]  To finish the story, I did say, well, I totally believe that you would never do anything unethical with this knowledge that you have.
[06:31.420 --> 06:33.500]  But you weigh about 97 pounds.
[06:33.640 --> 06:37.140]  A bad guy could pick you up, carry you away, and make you do something unethical.
[06:37.360 --> 06:47.060]  So I think the idea is that, although we always intend technology for good, all of us in this room have the mindset of just how it could be misapplied.
[06:47.060 --> 06:57.360]  And to kind of put us in the mood for that, a buddy of mine recently had the experience of flying from Los Angeles to London, and there was a huge commotion on the plane.
[06:58.120 --> 07:05.660]  And soon they saw something moving through the plane, and it turned out to be a bird that had gotten on board.
[07:05.940 --> 07:08.920]  And I won't tell you the whole story except to say he called his wife.
[07:08.920 --> 07:16.600]  And apparently it happens often enough that United Airlines has someone on staff to deal with this.
[07:16.680 --> 07:18.060]  They have a zoologist.
[07:18.160 --> 07:19.840]  And the zoologist gave the answer.
[07:19.960 --> 07:21.400]  Everyone had to be very quiet.
[07:21.580 --> 07:27.000]  They had to turn off the lights on the plane and leave one lavatory door open.
[07:27.200 --> 07:34.600]  And sure enough, the bird flew into the lavatory and was trapped there for the remainder of the flight from San Francisco to London.
[07:35.080 --> 07:36.460]  Now that's the good part of the story.
[07:36.460 --> 07:44.160]  The really interesting part is this guy calls his wife, and she immediately said, Oh, how's the bird?
[07:44.320 --> 07:45.200]  Is the bird okay?
[07:46.040 --> 07:49.500]  And he said that was very characteristic of what his wife would do.
[07:49.820 --> 07:55.900]  But all of his professional friends immediately said, That proves that there's a serious security hole in the system.
[07:56.140 --> 07:59.760]  Because after all, if a bird can get on there, what else could get in?
[07:59.860 --> 08:02.580]  And apparently it flew in as they were loading the food.
[08:02.580 --> 08:06.980]  So I suspect most of you in this room would care more about the security hole than the bird.
[08:07.700 --> 08:14.980]  So the definition of biohacking is, this is a slide that I found that illustrates it, because it talks about being an art and a science.
[08:15.180 --> 08:16.260]  And that's really true.
[08:16.480 --> 08:22.160]  There is certainly an artistic component to it, and very much a scientific component as well.
[08:23.980 --> 08:29.560]  I certainly would argue that biohacking is the natural successor to computer hacking.
[08:30.140 --> 08:34.810]  And just to give you my own personal background, before there was computer hacking, there was phone hacking.
[08:35.050 --> 08:41.240]  So years and years, we worked at the radio station WKCR at Columbia, and we'd get bored sometimes late at night.
[08:41.290 --> 08:47.810]  We didn't have computers or the Internet, but we didn't have a button with a telephone with six buttons on it.
[08:47.810 --> 08:51.000]  And there was an interlacing between those that you could take out.
[08:51.160 --> 08:53.310]  And we would do that quite often.
[08:53.430 --> 09:00.670]  And if it was four in the morning, it could be very entertaining to call the night mayor of New York City, which we would do.
[09:01.040 --> 09:08.310]  But instead of talking to him, we might just conference him on to another phone call, something like dial a prayer or something like that.
[09:08.480 --> 09:10.740]  So we discovered that there were good things.
[09:10.740 --> 09:11.900]  We also did experiments.
[09:12.170 --> 09:20.160]  We would find the phone numbers of brothers and even identical twins and call them at about 3.30 in the morning and have them call each other.
[09:20.380 --> 09:26.170]  And we used to have a little bit of a pool as to how long it would take, you know, screaming at each other.
[09:26.190 --> 09:26.900]  Why'd you call me?
[09:26.950 --> 09:27.500]  Why'd you call me?
[09:27.550 --> 09:28.120]  It's 3 in the morning.
[09:28.160 --> 09:28.640]  Who are you?
[09:28.760 --> 09:29.520]  What is this?
[09:29.640 --> 09:33.240]  For somebody to realize that, hey, it's my brother I'm talking to.
[09:34.070 --> 09:35.690]  More formally, there used to be...
[09:35.690 --> 09:38.210]  There is, I'm sure, a 2600 group in New York.
[09:38.210 --> 09:40.070]  And where they used to meet was very interesting.
[09:40.500 --> 09:48.280]  And again, I'm telling you this because many of you probably weren't in the hacker community back then in the, I guess it was late 60s, early 70s.
[09:48.500 --> 09:52.050]  They met at a building not far from here that had a food court.
[09:52.210 --> 09:54.830]  And the food court had a row of 24 telephones.
[09:55.020 --> 10:01.240]  And periodically, somebody would come up with something very interesting that you could possibly do with the telephone system.
[10:01.240 --> 10:10.830]  And lo and behold, somebody would run off to those phones and verify if you actually could route a call through 13 cities and make the phone over ring.
[10:11.240 --> 10:13.140]  So phone hacking was kind of the original.
[10:13.290 --> 10:14.880]  And then, of course, computers came along.
[10:15.070 --> 10:17.240]  And computer hacking, we had...
[10:18.000 --> 10:19.810]  That happens to be the computer of my high school.
[10:19.920 --> 10:21.540]  I went to the Bronx High School of Science.
[10:21.920 --> 10:26.120]  Two of my classmates from my year have Nobel Prizes in physics.
[10:26.120 --> 10:28.070]  I was more interested in biology.
[10:28.420 --> 10:31.450]  So I don't have a Nobel Prize, but I'm interested in biology.
[10:31.930 --> 10:35.310]  And one of the things is that computer time like that was very scarce.
[10:35.670 --> 10:37.520]  We had to line up for it.
[10:37.570 --> 10:38.950]  We had to sign up for blocks.
[10:39.330 --> 10:44.970]  But I moved from there to actually being in charge of the University of Calgary's big mainframe computer.
[10:45.290 --> 10:49.540]  We used to have a few students who thought they were stealing computer time from us.
[10:49.660 --> 10:51.290]  You know, and they were kind of lurking around.
[10:51.330 --> 10:55.830]  And when nobody was looking, they'd shove a deck of punch cards in with a false name.
[10:55.830 --> 11:02.320]  Or, you know, they would go off and they would get onto our timesharing terminals, which we were trying to debug.
[11:02.710 --> 11:04.900]  And they would shove their programs in that way.
[11:05.090 --> 11:07.350]  And they thought they were getting away with it.
[11:07.440 --> 11:09.020]  But we kind of knew who they were.
[11:09.140 --> 11:15.470]  And I should tell you that one of them was a man named James Gosling, who went on to be basically the creator of Java.
[11:15.780 --> 11:21.020]  So I definitely think that a certain amount of playful encouragement is a heck of a good idea.
[11:21.020 --> 11:27.700]  And I don't want in any way you to think that my talk is going to be negative about experimentation.
[11:28.120 --> 11:31.350]  And of course, when personal computers came along, the Commodore...
[11:31.350 --> 11:33.940]  So I heard somebody mention Commodore 64 today.
[11:34.080 --> 11:35.460]  And that kind of tweaked me.
[11:35.580 --> 11:37.300]  The Commodore PET, the Apple II.
[11:37.710 --> 11:40.140]  We even had little Timex Sinclair 1000s.
[11:40.710 --> 11:44.330]  They were wonderful computers because they had 2K of memory on them.
[11:44.330 --> 11:49.090]  And they had a keyboard with all the commands for the basic language.
[11:49.380 --> 11:56.520]  But the point is that now nobody had to go out there and hijack a mainframe computer or sneak into a computer center.
[11:56.780 --> 12:01.560]  People could actually do things on their own computers and make them do all kinds of cool stuff.
[12:01.830 --> 12:05.180]  And once you got a modem, it got even more interesting.
[12:05.500 --> 12:12.380]  So I was once called to meet with a 15-year-old boy who said, Look what I can do with my 1,200-bar modem.
[12:12.470 --> 12:19.780]  And he then proceeded to open the floodgates of the Dixon Dam, which is near Red Deer, Alberta, causing all kinds of havoc.
[12:19.970 --> 12:30.350]  So, you know, as we move from isolated computers to 1,200-bar modems and then to the Internet, things got incrementally more interesting.
[12:31.060 --> 12:34.700]  My favorite story, and this fellow was a former student who is now a friend.
[12:34.960 --> 12:37.520]  He actually is very wealthy.
[12:37.520 --> 12:41.460]  He sold his company to Cisco for $80 million when he was in his 20s.
[12:41.560 --> 12:44.320]  And he had the hacker mindset in the purest sense.
[12:44.830 --> 12:47.800]  You probably all know that the word hacker used to be a very...
[12:47.800 --> 12:49.210]  an honorific term.
[12:49.380 --> 12:53.800]  The person who, if you couldn't figure out something, they would say, Well, take it to that hacker over there.
[12:53.900 --> 12:55.000]  He'll figure it out.
[12:55.350 --> 13:07.080]  And then the media, namely Time Magazine, hijacked the word hacker to be the evil guys who want to steal your money and who want to do nefarious things and take your identity and all that.
[13:07.080 --> 13:09.320]  And for a while, there was a pushback.
[13:09.680 --> 13:12.440]  And we all tried to use the word cracker.
[13:12.580 --> 13:13.700]  Those people are crackers.
[13:13.970 --> 13:15.780]  But that name just didn't work.
[13:15.900 --> 13:19.090]  It's got bad connotations in the south of the U.S.
[13:19.180 --> 13:20.820]  And it just did not work.
[13:20.940 --> 13:24.940]  So the reality is we lost the word hacker, or at least we have to share it.
[13:25.080 --> 13:29.580]  But this guy was the perfect embodiment of the good hacker mentality.
[13:29.580 --> 13:35.620]  He took his Commodore 64 and he made all the pagers at the University of Calgary go off all at once.
[13:35.900 --> 13:39.180]  And it had that clever little fun prank quality.
[13:39.400 --> 13:43.880]  Though, of course, if you think a little deeper, he could have caused some kind of mayhem.
[13:44.120 --> 13:50.820]  Maybe the university needed those pagers at that particular moment while he was busy making them all ring.
[13:51.730 --> 13:59.460]  If you take the same mindset and apply it to biology, the same thing we do with computers and telephones, it gets very interesting.
[14:00.060 --> 14:03.240]  And I really think that the time for biohacking is right now.
[14:03.500 --> 14:06.970]  All of a sudden, the tools and the knowledge are becoming available.
[14:06.970 --> 14:15.280]  And we used to have to, as I said, go to physical meetings or, you know, share things in Usenet groups and things like that.
[14:15.470 --> 14:22.850]  Now all you have to do is go to any one of a number of DIY bio sites and you can find out all kinds of useful information.
[14:23.780 --> 14:27.210]  I want to just mention what I think are a few successful biohacks.
[14:27.420 --> 14:30.760]  I have a buddy who, and I didn't know this, he has sleep apnea.
[14:31.000 --> 14:34.740]  And he said, I have to have this machine to help me sleep every night.
[14:34.740 --> 14:37.960]  And it has, it's called a CPAP machine.
[14:38.200 --> 14:40.380]  It puts positive pressure in his airway.
[14:40.760 --> 14:42.760]  I said, that's not interesting.
[14:42.880 --> 14:45.320]  He said, no, what I did with it is interesting.
[14:45.580 --> 14:47.960]  There are all these forums on how to hack it.
[14:48.040 --> 14:51.780]  So now I have it so it tapers up the oxygen level and does this and does that.
[14:51.780 --> 14:53.660]  He said, and I'm getting a great night's sleep.
[14:53.740 --> 14:59.680]  So he has improved this off the shelf device in ways that the manufacturer probably never intended.
[15:00.190 --> 15:02.900]  Probably voided the warranty, but that's another story.
[15:02.900 --> 15:06.700]  I noticed, did anybody buy any Soylent downstairs right there?
[15:07.090 --> 15:09.060]  Soylent is this ridiculous beverage.
[15:09.320 --> 15:11.940]  You know, the movie, it was made out of human bodies.
[15:11.960 --> 15:18.420]  But the one now apparently is actually made out of all kinds of algae and so on.
[15:18.520 --> 15:20.140]  But it's a total food replacement.
[15:20.460 --> 15:22.330]  So there is a fellow who's invented it.
[15:22.440 --> 15:25.380]  And he claims he lives on it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
[15:25.380 --> 15:33.200]  And we had this funny story that we all worked on a few years ago on the sociology of living off Soylent.
[15:33.300 --> 15:41.300]  And does it mean that you're such a nerd that you don't even want to stop for a meal with somebody, that all you want to do is drink this chalky liquid?
[15:42.640 --> 15:45.940]  However, not far away from that, anybody tried the bulletproof diet?
[15:46.410 --> 15:48.300]  My son turned me on to this thing.
[15:48.460 --> 15:49.880]  There's a guy named Dave Asprey.
[15:49.960 --> 15:54.560]  And what makes him a biohacker is he got really, really rich in Silicon Valley.
[15:54.780 --> 15:56.240]  And he also got really fat.
[15:56.240 --> 15:57.560]  He was 400 pounds.
[15:57.760 --> 15:59.780]  And he was in terrible physical health.
[15:59.900 --> 16:07.880]  And he decided to spend $500,000, that's what it wound up costing, to study his own body, to come up with all kinds of things.
[16:07.880 --> 16:11.440]  Now, you know, he's crazy like a fox, because he now has a company.
[16:11.440 --> 16:13.470]  He has a book called The Bulletproof Diet.
[16:13.710 --> 16:16.850]  He sells you the special powders to make this stuff.
[16:16.900 --> 16:18.820]  But I'll tell you how to make it really simply.
[16:18.820 --> 16:22.300]  In the morning, the first thing you should have is a cup of coffee.
[16:22.400 --> 16:24.180]  Well, you know, we're all down with that already.
[16:24.440 --> 16:28.850]  And then what you need to put into it is some butter and some coconut oil.
[16:29.020 --> 16:33.780]  Now, he'll say you're a special short-chain monocyclic oil, but it's coconut oil.
[16:33.780 --> 16:39.090]  And anyway, the logic behind that, and it actually does work, is that you will get so sick.
[16:39.180 --> 16:41.900]  You know, you will be so full of butter in the morning.
[16:41.920 --> 16:43.940]  You don't want to eat till afternoon.
[16:45.160 --> 16:52.760]  We got this from being in Tibet or Nepal or somewhere, where the Sherpa brought that disgusting yak butter tea.
[16:52.850 --> 16:54.900]  And I was corrected by a grammatical friend.
[16:55.820 --> 16:58.500]  By definition, there is no such thing as yak butter.
[16:58.590 --> 16:59.280]  Anybody know why?
[17:00.020 --> 17:01.460]  A yak is a male.
[17:01.460 --> 17:02.060]  That's right.
[17:02.320 --> 17:03.460]  It's the butter.
[17:03.460 --> 17:05.640]  So the female of the species is D.
[17:05.940 --> 17:11.320]  So if you get butter by somehow milking a male yak, that's not a good scene at all.
[17:12.120 --> 17:15.040]  So D butter is what you want, not yak butter.
[17:15.380 --> 17:16.900]  And it is disgusting.
[17:17.020 --> 17:18.300]  They put all the salt in it.
[17:18.380 --> 17:24.970]  But the observation from that that was so much fun is these Sherpas who drink this stuff go all day.
[17:25.140 --> 17:27.020]  They don't really eat a big meal until the evening.
[17:27.020 --> 17:30.200]  So obviously getting that hint in the morning did something.
[17:30.780 --> 17:33.240]  So Dave Asprey has gone out and you can read his book.
[17:33.380 --> 17:37.470]  He's had all kinds of sophisticated MRIs and other tests on his body.
[17:37.710 --> 17:40.840]  And he thinks that indeed, you know, you can hack yourself that way.
[17:41.280 --> 17:43.960]  And a lot of people are doing this quantified self.
[17:44.120 --> 17:45.340]  They're wearing fitness monitors.
[17:45.540 --> 17:46.400]  They're crunching the data.
[17:46.400 --> 17:51.540]  I gave credit in my presentation to a few slide sources that I got from.
[17:51.660 --> 17:53.420]  But this is just the whole constellation.
[17:53.840 --> 18:05.420]  What one guy is using to track his genetics, his symptoms, his diet, his meditation, his hydration, probably his urination and everything else that all gets logged by different apps.
[18:05.660 --> 18:10.140]  And of course, a lot of companies like Google would like you to give all that information to them.
[18:10.140 --> 18:11.400]  And then please, thank you very much.
[18:11.520 --> 18:15.020]  And then we will sell you the, you know, whatever you need.
[18:15.340 --> 18:17.200]  And, you know, two things apropos that.
[18:17.320 --> 18:18.700]  We did have a case in Canada.
[18:18.900 --> 18:20.960]  We have a thing called the privacy commissioner.
[18:21.140 --> 18:24.940]  In fact, we have provincial and territorial privacy commissioners.
[18:25.020 --> 18:28.720]  And then the big poobah, Danielle Terian, who's the federal commissioner.
[18:29.000 --> 18:34.520]  And someone actually complained that an illegal use was made of his health care information.
[18:34.760 --> 18:38.900]  And ironically, it comes back to sleep apnea and the CPAP pump.
[18:38.900 --> 18:43.820]  Because he was trying to get targeted ads served up by Google AdWords for that.
[18:44.000 --> 18:46.860]  And he said, how do they know I have sleep apnea?
[18:47.780 --> 18:49.660]  Well, it doesn't really matter how they know.
[18:49.880 --> 18:53.100]  It's illegal in Canada to pass that information around.
[18:53.320 --> 18:58.760]  It's personally identifiable health information that is specifically private information.
[18:58.960 --> 19:02.360]  So Google got a big fat slap on the wrist in Canada for that.
[19:04.540 --> 19:05.600]  There can be issues.
[19:05.660 --> 19:07.660]  I know you all know the story, but I'll tell you again.
[19:07.660 --> 19:10.120]  And your fitness monitor knows when you're having sex.
[19:10.420 --> 19:14.400]  If it is 2.30 a.m., you have just burned 150 calories.
[19:14.400 --> 19:17.580]  If you are a typical male, you took zero steps.
[19:18.740 --> 19:23.240]  The FuelBand, FitBand, Fitbit, whatever, is going to know what you're doing.
[19:23.640 --> 19:26.220]  It also has Bluetooth, wireless, whatever.
[19:26.500 --> 19:28.960]  The only question is who is it going to tell?
[19:29.240 --> 19:30.560]  Who is it going to rat out?
[19:30.560 --> 19:33.380]  Hopefully, you're in the bed with the person you're supposed to be.
[19:33.520 --> 19:36.640]  But if not, that person might be getting an SMS message.
[19:37.220 --> 19:49.100]  So I put this in partly because it's fun, partly because it points out that the data that we gather actually can be quite revelatory of our activities and the state of our body.
[19:49.730 --> 19:55.460]  In my little book, Techno Creep, I talk about the toilets in Japan that do instant urinalysis.
[19:55.680 --> 20:02.160]  So you will get a phone call, apparently, from your doctor that says, you better come in, your blood sugar is off the charts, that type of thing.
[20:02.220 --> 20:08.880]  And it's because you took a pee this morning or maybe you had a guest in the house who took a pee and it got counted as yours.
[20:08.880 --> 20:14.120]  On a somewhat scarier note, I was reading a report on connected cars.
[20:14.740 --> 20:20.100]  You probably know about the recent self-driving car accidents.
[20:22.040 --> 20:23.660]  Those cars know a lot about you.
[20:24.000 --> 20:27.040]  They know whether your hands are on the wheel or not.
[20:27.180 --> 20:28.820]  They know how much pressure you were applying.
[20:29.060 --> 20:32.340]  They know the weight of the person who was sitting in the driver's seat.
[20:32.520 --> 20:36.660]  So this constellation of information about us is being collected everywhere.
[20:38.360 --> 20:40.920]  Business wants this information on...
[20:40.920 --> 20:41.320]  Excuse me.
[20:44.000 --> 20:49.080]  Business wants your bio information in the worst way and they're offering incentives.
[20:49.600 --> 20:57.540]  So the John Hancock Insurance Company is saying, if you wear the fitness tracker that we give you, you might get a discount on your life insurance.
[20:57.720 --> 21:04.440]  Because we'll keep track and if you work out a certain amount per week or whatever, you'll qualify for the healthy person rate.
[21:04.440 --> 21:10.400]  If you go on the treadmill 14 hours a day and have a heart attack, then you'll collect on your insurance immediately.
[21:12.800 --> 21:14.240]  This is Kevin Warwick.
[21:14.400 --> 21:15.220]  He's a wonderful man.
[21:15.220 --> 21:22.320]  He has made waves in 1998 by having a chip surgically implanted in his hand.
[21:22.940 --> 21:27.840]  And Kevin then was able to have a mechanical hand mimic his.
[21:27.840 --> 21:33.180]  And I did interview him on the subject and I said, tell me what was the most fun you had.
[21:33.260 --> 21:34.600]  And I'm sure you guys can guess.
[21:34.620 --> 21:37.260]  He said, well, you know, I was in London.
[21:37.520 --> 21:38.980]  My wife was in New York.
[21:39.780 --> 21:41.000]  You can take it from there.
[21:41.100 --> 21:43.660]  He invented teledildonics in 1998.
[21:46.340 --> 21:47.720]  It was probably done earlier.
[21:48.840 --> 21:54.420]  This is kind of a whole new thing where stuff is being either put on as temporary tattoos.
[21:54.700 --> 21:59.540]  So there are tattoos you can buy that act as your password or even permanent tattoos.
[21:59.560 --> 22:01.180]  This one is magnetically readable.
[22:01.660 --> 22:07.220]  And Regina Dugan from Google is actually sporting some of these tattoos, I see.
[22:08.080 --> 22:10.260]  You don't just have to have a tattoo, of course.
[22:10.260 --> 22:13.880]  You can even have a whole phone tattooed on your skin.
[22:14.120 --> 22:22.420]  So this is a patented by Motorola telephone, which means that you will never say to the boss again, oh, I couldn't answer the phone.
[22:22.460 --> 22:27.520]  I forgot my phone today because your phone is going to be on the inside of your forearm.
[22:28.460 --> 22:31.800]  And speaking of Regina Dugan, there she is with the password pill.
[22:32.080 --> 22:45.160]  So she was advocating for a while that we should all come into work in the morning, open up our desk drawer, take out a pill, swallow the sucker, big drink of water.
[22:45.600 --> 22:58.840]  It would start emitting radio waves from our digestive tract, which would log us onto our computer, open up all the doors that are authorized to, track our movements through the office, probably find out if we're sleeping on the job and so forth.
[22:59.160 --> 23:02.780]  And people just said, no, that is creepy.
[23:02.780 --> 23:08.720]  I do not want a pill within my digestive tract talking to my employer.
[23:08.800 --> 23:09.740]  Thank you very much.
[23:09.940 --> 23:18.780]  And also, it makes viewing tomorrow's password as simple as, oh, I think I'll go into Fred's desk drawer and take out tomorrow's password pill.
[23:18.960 --> 23:22.140]  Now for the duration of tomorrow, I am Fred.
[23:23.960 --> 23:27.900]  Okay, I promised when I wrote the description for this to talk about wire heading.
[23:27.900 --> 23:32.060]  When I wrote the book, I actually was shy about wire heading.
[23:32.200 --> 23:32.900]  And I haven't tried it.
[23:32.960 --> 23:34.020]  Who's tried wire heading?
[23:34.140 --> 23:35.200]  Come on, hands up if you have.
[23:35.360 --> 23:35.640]  Good.
[23:35.800 --> 23:36.060]  Okay.
[23:36.180 --> 23:36.800]  Well, maybe you will.
[23:37.680 --> 23:39.620]  It's electrical stimulation of the brain.
[23:39.720 --> 23:45.780]  Now it's not the stuff that you see in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where they put a lot of electricity through your brain.
[23:45.940 --> 23:47.780]  This is mellow, gentle stuff.
[23:47.940 --> 23:51.580]  And it's supposed to make you smarter, less depressed, and so on.
[23:51.760 --> 23:59.680]  In the book, I actually just coyly said, and people are doing this, and if you want to know more, go off and Google wire heading.
[23:59.960 --> 24:11.120]  Well, today I get to tell you more about it because I actually interviewed someone who, A, has done it to himself, B, is a medical doctor, and C, made a pretty amazing discovery about it.
[24:11.240 --> 24:18.480]  So we're talking about self-medicating, kind of the way people take Adderall, you know, if they're going to take an exam and so on.
[24:19.420 --> 24:23.000]  So I grabbed this directly from The Economist because it's such a good description.
[24:23.000 --> 24:30.960]  You position the electrodes correctly, you choose the right current, so the idea goes, and you can boost or suppress all kinds of things.
[24:31.380 --> 24:47.840]  Some researchers have reported that transcranial direct current stimulation can reduce pain, ease depression, treat autism and Parkinson's disease, control cravings for alcohol and drugs, repair stroke damage, and accelerate recovery from brain injuries.
[24:47.840 --> 24:51.520]  To say nothing of improving memory, reasoning, and fluency.
[24:51.780 --> 24:54.460]  Probably you can just suddenly start speaking Russian or something.
[24:55.040 --> 24:58.120]  Remarkably, some effects seem to persist for days or even months.
[24:58.320 --> 25:03.540]  And the closer that scientists look at TDCS, the more they seem to find.
[25:03.880 --> 25:07.560]  Scientific papers about the technology appear at an ever faster rate.
[25:07.700 --> 25:10.080]  So that's a pretty concise description of it.
[25:10.080 --> 25:14.540]  That's what, you know, the $59 version of the Internet looks like.
[25:14.720 --> 25:19.000]  A battery, some electrodes that you moisten and put on your head.
[25:19.200 --> 25:22.280]  And you crank it up and crank it down and stuff happens.
[25:23.180 --> 25:24.980]  Good stuff, bad stuff, who knows?
[25:25.160 --> 25:26.620]  I mean, you have to try it for yourself.
[25:26.980 --> 25:30.300]  This fellow that I met, though, was quite interesting.
[25:30.460 --> 25:32.060]  As I said, he was a medical doctor.
[25:32.060 --> 25:36.340]  And that's kind of the headline about his research.
[25:36.700 --> 25:42.080]  Brain zapping therapies might be hitting lefties on the wrong side of the head.
[25:42.780 --> 25:46.300]  So the guy I interviewed is Daniel Casasanto.
[25:46.660 --> 25:48.640]  He's a researcher from the University of Chicago.
[25:48.980 --> 25:53.280]  And he said, look, a lot of people get relief by wireheading.
[25:54.080 --> 25:56.060]  He didn't use that word, by, you know, TDCS.
[25:57.140 --> 25:58.780]  But there are some people who don't.
[25:59.280 --> 26:00.520]  In fact, they seem to get worse.
[26:00.520 --> 26:03.960]  And he said, I kind of got interested in why.
[26:04.160 --> 26:05.640]  And we did some analysis.
[26:05.800 --> 26:12.380]  And we found that all the studies that showed that this was good use the standard exclusion criteria.
[26:12.640 --> 26:14.020]  And I didn't even know these existed.
[26:14.280 --> 26:21.380]  But, for example, when you do medical research, you exclude pregnant women because you don't want the liability and all that.
[26:21.800 --> 26:25.180]  You exclude left-handed people because they're sort of different, you know.
[26:25.840 --> 26:27.900]  Now, that's kind of interesting.
[26:27.900 --> 26:35.620]  As it turned out, many of the people who did not benefit from this for depression were left-handed.
[26:36.560 --> 26:40.780]  So Daniel reversed the electrodes, stimulating the opposite hemisphere.
[26:41.020 --> 26:41.780]  And guess what?
[26:41.880 --> 26:42.540]  It worked for them.
[26:42.760 --> 26:48.540]  So I thought that was, you know, not Nobel Prize quality work, but a pretty interesting little experiment.
[26:48.740 --> 26:50.960]  Other researchers have said, you know, wait a minute.
[26:50.980 --> 26:51.960]  You didn't prove it.
[26:51.960 --> 26:54.600]  You've just kind of uncovered an interesting fact.
[26:54.820 --> 26:56.640]  But I think it is probably true.
[26:56.840 --> 26:58.880]  And he's got some good science to back it up.
[26:59.020 --> 27:04.140]  And certainly, the people who are left-handed now are putting the electrodes on the other side of their head.
[27:06.180 --> 27:12.980]  There are a number of consumer-grade mind readers, if you will, or EEG readers, like Neurosky.
[27:12.980 --> 27:16.980]  And people are now talking about using that as a possible identifier.
[27:17.360 --> 27:28.760]  So the idea is that in the future, what you might do for your password is just think of somebody you like, or somebody you don't like, or some really great scene in a movie, or who knows what you might think about.
[27:28.940 --> 27:32.100]  But you would enroll that as your thought.
[27:32.100 --> 27:37.080]  And my only caution is, if that's going to be your past thought, choose carefully.
[27:37.280 --> 27:38.480]  My wife is Australian.
[27:38.760 --> 27:46.820]  As a result, when she enters the United States, she submitted to biometric identification, which is called the U.S. Visit Program.
[27:46.960 --> 27:48.080]  They take a picture of her.
[27:49.140 --> 27:50.500]  It used to be two fingers.
[27:50.620 --> 27:51.640]  Now it's all her fingers.
[27:51.840 --> 27:55.680]  And as she was entering through Vancouver once, she had a Band-Aid on her finger.
[27:55.820 --> 27:57.620]  And she said to the woman, so what do I do?
[27:58.140 --> 27:59.640]  The woman said, take the Band-Aid off.
[28:00.060 --> 28:01.040]  Well, it might bleed.
[28:01.040 --> 28:01.720]  Oh, no, no.
[28:02.140 --> 28:02.540]  Biohazard.
[28:02.660 --> 28:03.660]  Don't bleed on my machine.
[28:04.140 --> 28:05.280]  Well, what should I do?
[28:05.380 --> 28:07.780]  And the woman said, well, I guess give me another finger.
[28:07.960 --> 28:10.200]  So Carrie being Australian said, will this finger do?
[28:11.040 --> 28:17.140]  And the U.S. border control person said, as long as you get this same finger when you leave the United States.
[28:17.920 --> 28:21.620]  But here's the computer science sequel to that.
[28:21.780 --> 28:30.940]  For the next nine times while entering the U.S., she failed the identification because she was now using her index finger, which of course is different from her.
[28:31.040 --> 28:35.640]  middle finger with the result that she was sent off for secondary inspection.
[28:35.940 --> 28:37.920]  So it's a moving average.
[28:38.100 --> 28:39.760]  And eventually it corrected itself.
[28:40.020 --> 28:44.540]  But having a little bit of fun with border control people is probably not a wise thing to do.
[28:45.620 --> 28:48.400]  One of my favorite new identifiers is body odor.
[28:48.400 --> 28:50.300]  Hey, that smells like Frank.
[28:50.560 --> 29:00.420]  And the University Polytechnic in Madrid now has a pretty good system, a digital nose, if you will, that identifies people by their body odor.
[29:00.700 --> 29:01.740]  So that's kind of cool.
[29:01.920 --> 29:05.980]  So again, a lot of research going to biometric alternatives to passwords.
[29:06.980 --> 29:10.500]  A company in Toronto called NIMI is measuring your heart rate.
[29:10.500 --> 29:14.000]  It turns out that that is a characteristic signature.
[29:14.300 --> 29:16.000]  We all have abnormalities.
[29:16.240 --> 29:20.660]  You know, you watch the medical shows and the heart rhythm looks so regular and so on.
[29:20.820 --> 29:27.880]  If your heart rhythm was truly regular, you would be dead because there's a certain amount of chaos that's necessary.
[29:28.380 --> 29:35.340]  It turns out you can quantify that chaos and you can possibly, at least NIMI is betting on it, use that for identification.
[29:37.060 --> 29:43.700]  Now, most people agree that where the action is going to be in biohacking is probably in genetics.
[29:44.220 --> 29:44.660]  Okay.
[29:44.820 --> 29:47.380]  Many people are already sending their DNA off.
[29:47.500 --> 29:49.900]  Now, I say, or their dogs or their cats.
[29:50.280 --> 29:54.620]  Certainly, when I sent DNA away, I made sure that it was anonymous.
[29:55.680 --> 29:56.700]  Now, how do you make it anonymous?
[29:56.960 --> 30:10.880]  Well, obviously, you pick a name like your cat or your dog or something like that and a made up surname, but then you also have to go down and buy the visa card that's, you know, a prepaid visa card and use that to pay for it and so on and so on.
[30:11.040 --> 30:19.280]  The irony is that I actually forgot the password and I was in San Francisco airport right near the headquarters of where 23andMe does this work.
[30:19.600 --> 30:25.500]  So, I call them up and I said, well, I need you to like recover my password and blah, blah, blah.
[30:25.600 --> 30:28.200]  And they said, okay, fax us a copy of your passport.
[30:28.300 --> 30:30.120]  I said, no, that's not going to happen.
[30:30.580 --> 30:32.900]  That was the whole point of doing it anonymously.
[30:33.060 --> 30:37.200]  So, I did ultimately meditate and remember the password, which was good.
[30:37.580 --> 30:47.200]  Now, the reason people are sending their DNA in is because they want to know about their ancestry, do they have some Icelandic blood, their ethnicity, health problems.
[30:47.340 --> 30:48.780]  And that was a little controversial.
[30:49.220 --> 31:01.000]  23andMe got a cease and desist letter from the FDA for kind of practicing medicine without a license because they were telling people, well, you know, you're going to go bald, but you have a lower than normal risk of prostate cancer.
[31:01.240 --> 31:08.500]  And of course, that could end badly if the person was exposed to an environmental carcinogen and got prostate cancer.
[31:09.120 --> 31:09.700]  And...
[31:09.700 --> 31:10.840]  Hmm?
[31:12.680 --> 31:22.740]  So, the idea that 23andMe would give you medical advice has been pulled back and now they just give you kind of more statistical advice.
[31:22.740 --> 31:26.560]  The other thing that a lot of people are doing is finding their genetic relatives.
[31:27.220 --> 31:33.060]  I think last time I was here, I told you about a student who was able to find his birth father.
[31:33.060 --> 31:39.740]  He was adopted through DNA records, even though his father had never given a DNA sample.
[31:40.560 --> 31:47.480]  And it turns out that was because there were enough statistical predictors that it could come down to a particular surname.
[31:47.480 --> 31:51.200]  So, your DNA is certainly something you want to guard closely.
[31:51.420 --> 31:53.520]  There are companies that will do it online.
[31:53.520 --> 32:02.860]  So, if you are in doubt about who your daddy really is, you can send in a sample of your saliva and daddy's saliva and get the results on the Internet.
[32:03.100 --> 32:07.620]  If you just can't wait since we're in New York, there is a mobile DNA testing bus.
[32:07.720 --> 32:20.960]  A guy named Jared drives around and he says the reason he created the Where's Your Daddy in an RV is because rents in Manhattan are so ridiculously high that he decided to have a mobile testing center.
[32:21.160 --> 32:24.780]  So, he does on-the-spot paternity immigration and DNA testing.
[32:25.040 --> 32:36.020]  He is also working on a reality television series called Tales of the Swab, in which he will reveal interesting things that have happened in the back of his Winnebago.
[32:39.360 --> 32:43.100]  So, 2016, big year for genetic biohackers.
[32:43.420 --> 32:43.900]  Why?
[32:44.080 --> 32:47.620]  Well, first of all, you can buy so much good stuff.
[32:48.380 --> 32:50.640]  Universities are always hurting for money.
[32:50.780 --> 32:53.600]  So, what do we do with our old lab-grade equipment?
[32:53.760 --> 32:54.920]  We sell it online.
[32:54.920 --> 32:55.820]  Of course we do.
[32:56.320 --> 32:58.080]  Now, there's a story behind this one.
[32:58.220 --> 33:04.040]  This isn't the exact model, but I once went to the Alberta government surplus with the television crew.
[33:04.040 --> 33:08.520]  These are people who sell off old desks and filing cabinets and things like that.
[33:08.720 --> 33:16.060]  And I said, I need a good TV story on what you... the oddest thing you ever sold.
[33:16.240 --> 33:18.480]  And they said, you know, we sold cattle and stuff like that.
[33:18.560 --> 33:20.040]  I said, no, no, keep trying.
[33:20.180 --> 33:22.120]  They said, well, there was the x-ray machine.
[33:22.420 --> 33:23.980]  The Picker x-ray machine.
[33:24.460 --> 33:25.020]  Excuse me.
[33:27.080 --> 33:30.740]  I will never forget that x-ray machine, said the guy at surplus.
[33:31.420 --> 33:32.780]  We sold it to this guy.
[33:32.880 --> 33:33.580]  He took it away.
[33:34.140 --> 33:39.080]  And then we got reports that he had it set up in his house.
[33:39.540 --> 33:42.320]  But it wasn't the way it was supposed to be.
[33:42.360 --> 33:43.120]  It wasn't vertical.
[33:43.420 --> 33:46.660]  It was horizontal and pointed out a window at his neighbor's house.
[33:47.100 --> 33:51.700]  Because this guy was trying to build an x-ray death ray to eradicate his neighbor.
[33:51.940 --> 33:57.320]  And the only thing that saved the neighbor was this thing requires 240 volt three-phase power.
[33:57.320 --> 34:00.500]  And he had already ordered the electrician to come in and do it.
[34:00.680 --> 34:08.460]  And so now it is required that if you're going to buy medical or dental x-ray equipment, you produce a license.
[34:08.740 --> 34:11.020]  You're a doctor, you're a vet, you're a dentist, or whatever.
[34:11.360 --> 34:12.900]  So I looked a little bit on eBay.
[34:13.160 --> 34:21.180]  And here is a, you know, interesting piece of gear that's used in DNA analysis, selling for princely $109 or so.
[34:21.180 --> 34:26.160]  And this one, actually, I picked because there is a disclaimer at the bottom.
[34:26.720 --> 34:28.360]  It's half cut off.
[34:28.620 --> 34:31.000]  This is the... I didn't mess the screenshot up.
[34:31.060 --> 34:33.520]  It literally is partially cut off.
[34:33.620 --> 34:36.340]  And it essentially says, you can only buy this.
[34:36.500 --> 34:39.260]  This product is subject to FDA regulation.
[34:39.300 --> 34:40.920]  So you can only buy this.
[34:40.940 --> 34:44.040]  We only sell this to you if you're approved by the FDA.
[34:44.320 --> 34:46.860]  It doesn't really say how they're going to check.
[34:46.860 --> 34:49.580]  As I said, the disclaimers have cut off.
[34:50.080 --> 34:53.320]  And I found other ones of these that have no such disclaimer.
[34:53.600 --> 34:59.200]  So if you want to buy any kind of medical lab equipment on eBay, you're probably going to get away with doing it.
[34:59.380 --> 35:01.420]  And ain't nobody going to ask for your license.
[35:02.600 --> 35:05.280]  The way you get your knowledge, that's pretty easy.
[35:06.320 --> 35:09.080]  There is online, you know, online forums.
[35:09.800 --> 35:14.160]  Increasingly, there are maker spaces devoted to do-it-yourself biology.
[35:14.160 --> 35:17.860]  So most cities in Canada have one now where you can go.
[35:17.960 --> 35:19.340]  And they already have some of the equipment.
[35:19.360 --> 35:20.600]  And they have the technique.
[35:20.940 --> 35:29.620]  The other thing is that if you're at all familiar with software, there's a kind of plug-and-play free program called Gene Designer.
[35:29.860 --> 35:33.080]  And you just go out there and make the gene that you want within reason.
[35:33.320 --> 35:34.240]  You design it.
[35:34.320 --> 35:39.000]  And then you send it away with some money to a company called DNA 2.0.
[35:39.000 --> 35:45.660]  And they send you back your plasmids or whatever the product is that you need to make whatever you're making.
[35:45.900 --> 35:47.700]  Now, it's not always going to work.
[35:47.840 --> 35:50.500]  You can design a woolly mammoth or something like that.
[35:50.600 --> 35:52.380]  And maybe it's not going to work.
[35:52.520 --> 35:54.380]  It has to have some reality.
[35:54.580 --> 36:03.760]  But there's been a big breakthrough in the last few years because of the thing that's down there at the bottom, CRISPR-Cas9.
[36:03.760 --> 36:05.080]  So I'll just mention this.
[36:05.220 --> 36:07.240]  The knowledge is proliferating.
[36:07.340 --> 36:09.140]  The biohacking spaces are helping.
[36:09.760 --> 36:16.640]  And GeneDesk is the free open-source program that allows you to design sequences and have them created.
[36:17.100 --> 36:19.620]  But the CRISPR-Cas9 is the big one.
[36:19.760 --> 36:24.040]  It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat.
[36:24.360 --> 36:26.860]  And I didn't know really much about this at all.
[36:26.960 --> 36:32.900]  But then I was lucky enough to go to the AAAS conference, which is a big meeting of 20,000 scientists.
[36:32.900 --> 36:34.680]  And I heard the people invented this.
[36:34.840 --> 36:37.600]  And I also heard them talk about the ethics of it and so on.
[36:37.780 --> 36:41.840]  So it turns out what this is is something that's been around forever.
[36:42.100 --> 36:45.800]  It's a natural part of the immune system of bacteria.
[36:46.140 --> 37:00.140]  And so what they do is if they get infected by a bacteriophage, which is a virus, they have a technique for getting rid of it that involves these cutting up genetic material using these CRISPR sequences.
[37:01.520 --> 37:09.200]  In 2007, the first application of it was made by humans to make a particular bacterium resistant.
[37:10.020 --> 37:14.420]  Today, 2016, there are researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
[37:14.800 --> 37:17.020]  And what they're doing is an interesting project.
[37:17.300 --> 37:18.960]  They have some mouse embryos.
[37:18.960 --> 37:31.360]  They're editing the genes in them to make them resistant or to make them solve a genetic problem that, to the best of their knowledge, only one person in the world has.
[37:31.580 --> 37:36.280]  He has a very unusual, obviously, form of multiple sclerosis.
[37:36.280 --> 37:45.620]  And they actually intend to inject him with these mouse cells from the mouse embryos and possibly cure his genetic deficit.
[37:45.880 --> 37:50.080]  So he has an extra copy of a gene and they think they can knock it out that way.
[37:50.080 --> 37:52.220]  And these are the two heroes.
[37:52.580 --> 37:57.500]  These are wonderful women who actually both claim to have invented this.
[37:57.640 --> 38:01.280]  So there's going to be an interesting catfight at some point about who really did.
[38:01.360 --> 38:02.920]  And a lot of money on the line here.
[38:03.060 --> 38:06.180]  I think it's between MIT and Stanford now.
[38:06.340 --> 38:09.060]  You know, they've sold their interests off to their universities.
[38:09.380 --> 38:13.320]  But essentially, they're the ones who discovered how this works.
[38:13.320 --> 38:17.260]  And it was only in 2015 that they actually published their key work.
[38:17.620 --> 38:18.980]  And this is what it looks like.
[38:19.100 --> 38:20.560]  And I'm not going to explain this slide.
[38:20.680 --> 38:21.500]  A, I can't.
[38:21.620 --> 38:23.000]  And B, it would take an hour.
[38:23.820 --> 38:27.640]  I did watch them explain it to me and I understood it at the time.
[38:27.860 --> 38:31.000]  But essentially, here's what you need to know about.
[38:31.120 --> 38:36.640]  You create a little sequence of RNA that cuts in the right places.
[38:37.000 --> 38:40.860]  And that way you are able to edit the gene like a word processor.
[38:40.860 --> 38:43.020]  So you can do a kind of cut and paste.
[38:43.300 --> 38:45.320]  That's probably the best way to understand it.
[38:46.060 --> 38:51.000]  Also, like the original word processors that didn't always work right, it's not perfect.
[38:51.300 --> 38:54.180]  So there's what's called off-target effects.
[38:54.380 --> 38:57.040]  So you may think you're fixing one end of the gene.
[38:57.100 --> 39:01.820]  But because there happens to be a match far away, you're also making a change there.
[39:02.080 --> 39:04.340]  So, ooh, that's where we get into trouble.
[39:04.560 --> 39:08.220]  It's not the precision tool that people thought it might be.
[39:09.540 --> 39:18.920]  But what they are thinking about is going out there and doing some work on monkeys and then injecting those cells into human beings and through in vitro fertilization.
[39:19.200 --> 39:29.740]  And someone made the point that we actually know a lot more about fertilization in humans than we do in monkeys because there are all these IVF clinics and research around that.
[39:29.740 --> 39:35.520]  So, you know, wow, modifying sperm and eggs to fix genetic issues.
[39:35.640 --> 39:36.900]  Now, I did have a little bit of fun.
[39:37.060 --> 39:42.640]  There was a very pompous professor, I try not to be one of those, speaking at the AAAS meeting on this.
[39:42.860 --> 39:46.160]  And I raised my hand and I said, don't you think, you know, this could be misused?
[39:46.160 --> 39:58.360]  If we get to the stage where we're actually allowing sperm cells, egg cells and so on to be modified, you know, some teenagers in their basement could do terrible things with this.
[39:58.640 --> 40:01.820]  He said, well, they'd never have the technology in any way.
[40:01.960 --> 40:04.140]  They'd have to get access to the cells.
[40:04.680 --> 40:09.620]  I pointed out that certainly on the sperm side, there was no problem getting access at all.
[40:10.220 --> 40:13.100]  That teenagers probably had lots of that available.
[40:13.420 --> 40:15.220]  And he sat down.
[40:17.620 --> 40:23.040]  But one of the big gurus who was also in the room at the time is George Church of Harvard Medical School.
[40:23.280 --> 40:27.800]  And he said, I know people who are already self-medicating.
[40:27.820 --> 40:36.080]  And I don't think he means in the sperm and egg type of self-medicating, but who are already doing gene therapy on themselves, which I thought was interesting.
[40:36.480 --> 40:43.560]  And he also said, look, you know, people complain about the ethics of this, but people complain about the ethics of abortion.
[40:44.240 --> 40:51.600]  If you think in many cases that there might be a baby who has a genetic disease, a common strategy is for the woman to go have an abortion.
[40:51.820 --> 40:54.800]  And some people think that's okay, and some people don't think it's okay.
[40:55.280 --> 41:01.120]  It might be ethically preferable to say, well, you know, there's a 25% chance of this.
[41:01.120 --> 41:01.580]  disease.
[41:02.080 --> 41:03.620]  Let's go correct it.
[41:03.700 --> 41:12.320]  Even if we can't detect it yet, let's do the genetic intervention that would be necessary to present it based upon the fact that the parents have the risk factor.
[41:12.560 --> 41:18.340]  So we said, you know, that's an intervention, but it's not as catastrophic an intervention as an abortion.
[41:18.620 --> 41:29.600]  And so he was suggesting a kind of subtle, not an all or nothing, but that maybe 10 years from now or so, we'll actually think this is the ethically preferable way to do things.
[41:30.220 --> 41:32.100]  But it is hugely controversial.
[41:32.120 --> 41:37.340]  Most countries have banned gene editing on human embryos or germ cells.
[41:38.180 --> 41:44.140]  One of the fears I'm hearing is that in vitro clinics will start offering designer babies.
[41:44.380 --> 41:49.200]  And I got to be a bit of an expert on that when I was researching for a chapter of my book.
[41:49.340 --> 41:53.680]  I actually studied an in vitro clinic down in Alexandria, Virginia.
[41:53.680 --> 41:55.840]  And it is an amazing industry.
[41:55.840 --> 42:01.700]  If you have never dealt with it, you can, for example, specify the traits of the sperm donor.
[42:01.980 --> 42:02.280]  Okay.
[42:02.300 --> 42:03.460]  This is a donor clinic.
[42:03.500 --> 42:10.380]  So you can say, I want someone who has a PhD degree and is between six foot two and six foot four and has blonde hair.
[42:10.660 --> 42:13.280]  And they will go through their database as they can.
[42:13.460 --> 42:15.900]  And for a premium, they will give you that donor.
[42:15.900 --> 42:19.320]  You could actually select someone that you want it to look like.
[42:19.600 --> 42:22.140]  So if you want, you know, a particular look.
[42:22.260 --> 42:25.900]  So I sent them a picture of Brad Pitt, actually, and they found four matches.
[42:26.220 --> 42:32.340]  Then to test whether their computer was actually doing anything, I checked the additional box, African American.
[42:32.820 --> 42:38.760]  And to their credit, it came up there were no African American Brad Pitt matches, which is good.
[42:39.560 --> 42:48.060]  So anyway, the fear is that these clinics, which are in it for the money, will start using these techniques to make some kind of designer baby.
[42:48.560 --> 42:52.960]  And we don't know if that can be done or not, but it's certainly a possibility.
[42:53.760 --> 42:57.120]  The off-target effects that I told you about are a big worry.
[42:57.360 --> 43:01.780]  And even the proponents of this spend a lot of time thinking about that.
[43:01.920 --> 43:05.840]  So there are many papers on minimizing off-target effects.
[43:05.840 --> 43:08.580]  And, of course, something could get out into the wild.
[43:08.820 --> 43:15.520]  You know, what's going on now in basement labs is people are making, you know, rabbits that glow in the dark.
[43:15.720 --> 43:22.200]  So they're taking a gene from a fish that glows in the dark, inserting into the rabbit, and they have bunnies that glow in the dark.
[43:22.360 --> 43:24.120]  And everybody goes, that's pretty harmless.
[43:24.340 --> 43:30.840]  But, you know, if there are bunnies that glow in the dark and harbor the Zika virus or something like that, it's not so funny anymore.
[43:31.380 --> 43:36.420]  The other big thing that they're talking about is whether we can bring back extinct species.
[43:37.240 --> 43:42.660]  So George Church, that same Harvard biologist, is busy trying to bring back the woolly mammoth.
[43:43.240 --> 43:48.860]  And people are a little bit, yeah, maybe, you know, it's not such a great idea to have the woolly mammoth walking up Sixth Avenue.
[43:49.220 --> 43:52.220]  But, on the other hand, some people think it's a great idea.
[43:52.460 --> 43:58.080]  What most people do agree, though, is it's okay to use these technologies to prevent extinction.
[43:58.080 --> 44:06.540]  So, if there's a species that's going away, the way of the dodo, maybe it's okay to intervene using gene editing.
[44:08.140 --> 44:10.500]  So, what can these gene hackers do now?
[44:10.680 --> 44:13.780]  Well, that one guy there, and this is a real, such a millennial thing.
[44:14.000 --> 44:17.700]  He's angry at his boomer parents because they smoke in the house.
[44:18.020 --> 44:21.960]  So, he has created these plants that suck up their smoke.
[44:21.960 --> 44:25.000]  Okay, so this is from an article on that.
[44:25.560 --> 44:27.980]  And there's another fellow whose goal...
[44:28.880 --> 44:30.740]  I'm not sure I'm reading my own slide here.
[44:31.240 --> 44:32.680]  There are two examples.
[44:32.800 --> 44:34.540]  The first one is the guy who's...
[44:35.560 --> 44:41.020]  Oh, yes, the other guy who's mentioned in this article, he's obsessed with blue roses.
[44:41.540 --> 44:46.600]  Now, we all know that blue roses can be made by dipping roses, white roses in dye.
[44:46.600 --> 44:48.480]  He wants to grow blue roses.
[44:48.740 --> 44:50.980]  So, these are the kind of little fun projects.
[44:51.120 --> 44:55.960]  You know, deal with your parents' cigarette smoke and make blue roses that are actually happening out there.
[44:56.580 --> 44:57.880]  What are the pros doing?
[44:58.160 --> 44:59.740]  Well, this is a pretty famous one.
[44:59.920 --> 45:01.440]  How many of you know Raymond Kurzweil?
[45:02.160 --> 45:07.880]  Every time Ray speaks, our parents speak lots of times, he's getting fat against one thing.
[45:07.960 --> 45:13.800]  And he goes, you know, we're going to add one year to the human lifespan for every year that goes by soon.
[45:13.800 --> 45:16.520]  And I challenged him once and I said, you're full of it.
[45:16.640 --> 45:19.840]  You're going to add like one year to a baby's lifespan.
[45:20.060 --> 45:26.380]  So, a newborn baby, yes, I can see that the lifespan might go up by more than a year in the next year.
[45:26.540 --> 45:28.080]  Because of all the great things we're doing.
[45:28.240 --> 45:29.080]  He said, no, no, no.
[45:29.740 --> 45:32.560]  I'm thinking about the kind of diseases that you and I have.
[45:32.720 --> 45:34.320]  You know, diabetes, obesity, whatever.
[45:34.620 --> 45:40.920]  And then he told me about the Joslin Research Center, which is located in Boston.
[45:40.920 --> 45:44.520]  And they actually have done a gene knockout on some mice.
[45:44.760 --> 45:47.140]  And these are mice that would normally get diabetic.
[45:47.420 --> 45:49.860]  And the mice continue to eat like little pigs.
[45:50.140 --> 45:53.300]  They get fat or they should get fat.
[45:53.420 --> 45:57.220]  But in fact, they don't because they've knocked out the fat storage gene.
[45:57.420 --> 46:04.800]  So, in an evolutionary sense, Ray says, we had this gene that said, look, you know, there's a famine coming.
[46:04.800 --> 46:06.680]  And there's a lot of food at this buffet.
[46:06.880 --> 46:10.240]  I better eat everything on the buffet table, because there's a famine coming.
[46:10.800 --> 46:13.000]  Because the hunting might not be so good next year.
[46:13.300 --> 46:17.120]  But, you know, the hunting at the Safeway is probably going to be pretty good next year.
[46:17.140 --> 46:18.140]  We sort of know that.
[46:18.300 --> 46:21.240]  So, this gene has become dysfunctional.
[46:21.260 --> 46:22.960]  That's the reason why people are fat.
[46:23.180 --> 46:30.720]  So, at the center, they've actually done, in mice at least, a knockout of that gene, with the result that the mice don't get fat.
[46:31.660 --> 46:41.960]  What's a little more scary is they're also making human-animal chimeras, which means they are basically taking genetic material and crossing it over, for example, between humans and pigs.
[46:42.220 --> 46:44.320]  There are research farms that are doing this.
[46:44.500 --> 46:46.840]  And the goal there is organ donation.
[46:47.180 --> 46:51.900]  So, you know, maybe a pig doesn't have much saying whether he's going to donate his liver to you.
[46:52.160 --> 46:54.480]  And that might be the way to do it.
[46:54.540 --> 46:56.480]  The rest of him becomes pork chops and bacon.
[46:56.640 --> 46:57.060]  Thank you.
[46:57.280 --> 46:58.880]  The rest becomes pork chops and bacon.
[46:58.880 --> 47:00.780]  And he goes on to give you his liver.
[47:02.480 --> 47:05.940]  A recent conference at MIT was called Forbidden Research.
[47:06.320 --> 47:08.840]  And you can actually watch the live stream of it.
[47:08.900 --> 47:10.740]  It's eight hours and 42 minutes.
[47:11.120 --> 47:11.960]  Some is boring.
[47:12.020 --> 47:12.760]  Some is great.
[47:13.020 --> 47:17.640]  But in it, George Church discussed human embryo editing.
[47:18.000 --> 47:23.780]  And he said that there might actually be, as I mentioned, a chance that people would prefer to other things.
[47:23.940 --> 47:25.960]  It might become morally acceptable.
[47:26.540 --> 47:28.300]  So, here's the optimistic outlook.
[47:28.300 --> 47:31.020]  We're going to cure all our diseases with personalized medicine.
[47:31.200 --> 47:32.320]  We're going to feed the world.
[47:32.500 --> 47:34.160]  We're going to eliminate all pests.
[47:34.480 --> 47:35.700]  Well, maybe not all pests.
[47:35.900 --> 47:36.020]  Okay?
[47:36.760 --> 47:39.860]  The naked cowboy, you guys know that he's a few blocks from here.
[47:40.040 --> 47:41.780]  He's a fixture in Times Square.
[47:42.060 --> 47:42.940]  He's a pest.
[47:43.000 --> 47:45.580]  And we probably will not eliminate the naked cowboy.
[47:45.580 --> 47:49.400]  In fact, if Ray Kurzweil gets his way, the naked cowboy will live forever.
[47:49.680 --> 47:52.980]  Until he's taken out by the M104 bus someday.
[47:53.260 --> 47:57.260]  And that's how we're all going to go, is in front of a bus.
[47:57.440 --> 48:04.820]  Because if we fix enough diseases, it'll be something catastrophic, like not looking the right way when you're in London, England, or something like that.
[48:04.820 --> 48:06.260]  Passimistic outlook.
[48:06.400 --> 48:09.060]  Giant glowing bunnies are going to eat all our food.
[48:09.600 --> 48:15.420]  Major companies are going to take over our brains for mindless tasks, like running around catching Pikachu.
[48:16.000 --> 48:16.580]  Okay?
[48:16.800 --> 48:20.760]  Some people say mindless tasks like that are already becoming common.
[48:21.860 --> 48:24.940]  Pikachu does not appear in my presentation for copyright reasons.
[48:25.860 --> 48:27.980]  Terrorists will create buyer ransomware.
[48:27.980 --> 48:36.100]  I am afraid the first person to have said buyer ransomware, at least at this conference, and maybe in a broader sphere as well.
[48:36.720 --> 48:40.660]  But my university paid $20,000 in ransom.
[48:41.280 --> 48:44.820]  Because they got their files encrypted because somebody got phished.
[48:45.200 --> 48:45.940]  Are they dumb?
[48:46.140 --> 48:46.560]  Yes.
[48:46.900 --> 48:48.040]  Have they improved things?
[48:48.200 --> 48:48.440]  Yes.
[48:48.660 --> 48:49.720]  Did they have insurance?
[48:50.000 --> 48:50.420]  Yes.
[48:50.760 --> 48:52.400]  That was one of the few bright things they did.
[48:52.520 --> 48:53.640]  They had cyber insurance.
[48:53.980 --> 48:55.500]  But, you know, I don't much care.
[48:55.500 --> 49:01.760]  And their argument for paying the ransom, by the way, was, some professor's life work might be on that computer.
[49:02.100 --> 49:08.660]  And the answer is, he can't be much of a professor if he's trusted your dopey computer with the only copy of his life's work.
[49:09.780 --> 49:14.040]  But anyway, with bio ransomware, you know, you might be held hostage.
[49:14.480 --> 49:19.240]  Somebody might, you know, if you have an implant or something, they might find a way to take control of that implant.
[49:19.440 --> 49:23.420]  Or if it's a nanobot implant, you know, what are you going to do about it?
[49:23.460 --> 49:24.340]  You might lose your life.
[49:24.340 --> 49:37.560]  And what George Church says that's more subtle, what we're worried about is something that we do that could be very attractive in the short term, but have some triggering mechanism or some slow events that occur in the future.
[49:37.940 --> 49:39.680]  So, in other words, we worry about the future.
[49:39.960 --> 49:47.360]  My own research into techno-creepiness, and there's the quick plug for the book, says that most people don't understand why things are creepy.
[49:47.360 --> 49:48.780]  There are wheels within wheels.
[49:48.780 --> 49:57.160]  So, when you look at a watch on eBay, and then you go to Facebook, and that watch is trying to sell itself to you, it's because you were sold in a real-time auction.
[49:57.360 --> 49:59.680]  Well, the same thing is going to happen with our bio data.
[50:00.060 --> 50:01.620]  Most people don't understand this.
[50:01.800 --> 50:04.360]  And note, there are creepy people out there.
[50:04.600 --> 50:05.700]  Okay, definitely creepy.
[50:05.860 --> 50:07.080]  But I work with some of them, I know.
[50:08.580 --> 50:09.980]  That's a framework that I have.
[50:10.080 --> 50:16.320]  And the only thing I'll say about it is that one of the dimensions of it has to do with how well people understand this technology.
[50:16.680 --> 50:19.240]  So, it's one of the reasons I enjoy talking about it.
[50:19.400 --> 50:25.460]  But I also have to say that there's going to have to be a lot of public education, because it's kind of like quantum physics.
[50:25.640 --> 50:27.740]  People get it, but they don't really get it.
[50:28.500 --> 50:29.920]  So, last slide here.
[50:30.160 --> 50:41.240]  The Media Lab conference I told you about, Forbidden Research, it was the one where Snowden appeared by video length and said that he's going to make a phone that knows when you're being spied on.
[50:41.240 --> 50:44.480]  But the session on Messing with Nature is worth looking at.
[50:44.660 --> 50:52.220]  It talks a lot about how we change the perception of science so that, in fact, we know what's going on and the public understands.
[50:52.520 --> 50:56.560]  I always end with the same slide, which is a real ad from before the Internet.
[50:57.100 --> 51:02.980]  Free to get home, beautiful six-month-old kitten, or handsome 32-year-old husband.
[51:03.520 --> 51:06.320]  Funny, personable, good job, but doesn't like cats.
[51:06.780 --> 51:10.020]  Come and see Jennifer and pick which one you would like.
[51:10.660 --> 51:12.540]  Why do I show you this silly ad?
[51:12.760 --> 51:15.220]  Because the reality is we're going to have to make choices.
[51:16.080 --> 51:18.060]  Societally, we'll have to make choices individually.
[51:18.500 --> 51:25.720]  What I hope I've done here today is at least tweak your interest in biohacking, and probably two years from now, we'll be talking a lot more about it.
[51:25.880 --> 51:26.500]  Thanks very much.
[51:33.550 --> 51:35.050]  Master, is there time for questions?
[51:36.030 --> 51:36.830]  No questions?
[51:37.110 --> 51:37.890]  Come up and see me.
[51:38.510 --> 51:41.030]  Come to private confession if you want to have a question.