It was November 1, 2002, my first day as a principal, but hardly my first day in the school district of Philadelphia.
I graduated from Philadelphia public schools, and I went on to teach special education for 20 years in a low-income, low-performing school in North Philadelphia, where crime is rampant and deep poverty is among the highest in the nation.
Shortly after I walked into my new school, a huge fight broke out among the girls.
After things were quickly under control, I immediately called a meeting in the school's auditorium to introduce myself as the school's new principal.
(Applause) I walked in angry, a little nervous -- (Laughter) -- but I was determined to set the tone for my new students.
I started listing as forcefully as I could my expectations for their behavior and my expectations for what they would learn in school.
When, all of a sudden, a girl way in the back of the auditorium, she stood up and she said, "Miss!
Miss!"
When our eyes locked, she said, "Why do you keep calling this a school?
This is not a school."
In one outburst, Ashley had expressed what I felt and never quite was able to articulate about my own experience when I attended a low-performing school in the same neighborhood, many, many, many years earlier.
That school was definitely not a school.
Fast forwarding a decade later to 2012, I was entering my third low-performing school as principal.
I was to be Strawberry Mansion's fourth principal in four years.
It was labeled "low-performing and persistently dangerous" due to its low test scores and high number of weapons, drugs, assaults and arrests.
Shortly as I approached the door of my new school and attempted to enter, and found the door locked with chains, I could hear Ashley's voice in my ears going, "Miss!
Miss!
This is not a school."
The halls were dim and dark from poor lighting.
There were tons of piles of broken old furniture and desks in the classrooms, and there were thousands of unused materials and resources.
This was not a school.
As the year progressed, I noticed that the classrooms were nearly empty.
The students were just scared: scared to sit in rows in fear that something would happen; scared because they were often teased in the cafeteria for eating free food.
They were scared from all the fighting and all the bullying.
This was not a school.
And then, there were the teachers, who were incredibly afraid for their own safety, so they had low expectations for the students and themselves, and they were totally unaware of their role in the destruction of the school's culture.
This was the most troubling of all.
You see, Ashley was right, and not just about her school.
For far too many schools, for kids who live in poverty, their schools are really not heather68@example.net.
But this can change.
Let me tell you how it's being done at Strawberry Mansion High School.
Anybody who's ever worked with me will tell you I am known for my slogans.
(Laughter) So today, I am going to use three that have been paramount in our quest for change.
My first slogan is: if you're going to lead, lead.
I always believed that what happens in a school and what does not happen in a school is up to the principal.
I am the principal, and having that title required me to lead.
I was not going to stay in my office, I was not going to delegate my work, and I was not going to be afraid to address anything that was not good for children, whether that made me liked or not.
I am a leader, so I know I cannot do anything alone.
So, I assembled a top-notch leadership team who believed in the possibility of all the children, and together, we tackled the small things, like resetting every single locker combination by hand so that every student could have a secure locker.
We decorated every bulletin board in that building with bright, colorful, and positive messages.
We took the chains off the front doors of the school.
We got the lightbulbs replaced, and we cleaned every classroom to its core, recycling every, every textbook that was not needed, and discarded thousands of old materials and furniture.
We used two dumpsters per day.
And, of course, of course, we tackled the big stuff, like rehauling the entire school budget so that we can reallocate funds to have more teachers and support staff.
We rebuilt the entire school day schedule from scratch to add a variety of start and end times, remediation, honors courses, extracurricular activities, and counseling, all during the school day.
All during the school day.
We created a deployment plan that specified where every single support person and police officer would be every minute of the day, and we monitored at every second of the day, and, our best invention ever, we devised a schoolwide discipline program titled "Non-negotiables."
It was a behavior system -- designed to promote positive behavior at all times.
The results?
Strawberry Mansion was removed from the Persistently Dangerous List our first year after being -- (Applause) -- after being on the Persistently Dangerous List for five consecutive years.
Leaders make the impossible possible.
That brings me to my second slogan: So what?
Now what?
(Laughter) (Applause) When we looked at the data, and we met with the staff, there were many excuses for why Strawberry Mansion was low-performing and persistently dangerous.
They said that only 68 percent of the kids come to school on a regular basis, 100 percent of them live in poverty, only one percent of the parents participate, many of the children come from incarceration and single-parent homes, 39 percent of the students have special needs, and the state data revealed that six percent of the students were proficient in algebra, and 10 were proficient in literature.
After they got through telling us all the stories of how awful the conditions and the children were, I looked at them, and I said, "So what.
Now what?
What are we gonna do about it?"
(Applause) Eliminating excuses at every turn became my primary responsibility.
We addressed every one of those excuses through a mandatory professional development, paving the way for intense focus on teaching and learning.
After many observations, what we determined was that teachers knew what to teach but they did not know how to teach so many children with so many vast abilities.
So, we developed a lesson delivery model for instruction that focused on small group instruction, making it possible for all the students to get their individual needs met in the classroom.
The results?
After one year, state data revealed that our scores have grown by 171 percent in Algebra and 107 percent in literature.
(Applause) We have a very long way to go, a very long way to go, but we now approach every obstacle with a "So What.
Now What?" attitude.
And that brings me to my third and final slogan.
(Laughter) If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will.
My students have problems: social, emotional and economic problems you could never imagine.
Some of them are parents themselves, and some are completely alone.
If someone asked me my real secret for how I truly keep Strawberry Mansion moving forward, I would have to say that I love my students and I believe in their possibilities unconditionally.
When I look at them, I can only see what they can become, and that is because I am one of them.
I grew up poor in North Philadelphia too.
I know what it feels like to go to a school that's not a school.
I know what it feels like to wonder if there's ever going to be any way out of poverty.
But because of my amazing mother, I got the ability to dream despite the poverty that surrounded me.
So -- (Applause) -- if I'm going to push my students toward their dream and their purpose in life, I've got to get to know who they are.
So I have to spend time with them, so I manage the lunchroom every day.
(Laughter) And while I'm there, I talk to them about deeply personal things, and when it's their birthday, I sing "Happy Birthday" even though I cannot heather68@example.net.
(Laughter) I often ask them, "Why do you want me to sing when I cannot sing at all?"
(Laughter) And they respond by saying, "Because we like feeling special."
We hold monthly town hall meetings to listen to their concerns, to find out what is on their minds.
They ask us questions like, "Why do we have to follow rules?"
"Why are there so many consequences?"
"Why can't we just do what we want to do?"
(Laughter) They ask, and I answer each question honestly, and this exchange in listening helps to clear up any misconceptions.
Every moment is a teachable moment.
My reward, my reward for being non-negotiable in my rules and consequences is their earned respect.
I insist on it, and because of this, we can accomplish things together.
They are clear about my expectations for them, and I repeat those expectations every day over the P.A. system.
I remind them -- (Laughter) I remind them of those core values of focus, tradition, excellence, integrity and perseverance, and I remind them every day how education can truly change their lives.
And I end every announcement the same: "If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will."
Ashley's words of "Miss, Miss, this is not a school," is forever etched in my mind.
If we are truly going to make real progress in addressing poverty, then we have to make sure that every school that serves children in poverty is a real school, a school, a school -- (Applause) -- a school that provides them with knowledge and mental training to navigate the world around them.
I do not know all the answers, but what I do know is for those of us who are privileged and have the responsibility of leading a school that serves children in poverty, we must truly lead, and when we are faced with unbelievable challenges, we must stop and ask ourselves, "So what.
Now what?
What are we going to do about it?"
And as we lead, we must never forget that every single one of our students is just a child, often scared by what the world tells them they should be, and no matter what the rest of the world tells them they should be, we should always provide them with hope, our undivided attention, unwavering belief in their potential, consistent expectations, and we must tell them often, if nobody told them they loved them today, remember we do, and we always will.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you, Jesus.
Sarah Parcak: A hundred years ago, archaeology was for the rich, fifty years ago it was for men.
But we are expanding it to the world.
I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites around the world.
By creating a 21st-century army of global explorers, we'll find and protect the world's hidden heritage.
So how are we going to do this?
[Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world.
But they couldn't do it alone.
(Voices overlapping) So, my wish ...
My wish ...
I wish ...
And now, here's my wish ...
[Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] SP: I am an archaeologist, and I specialize in using satellite imagery to map ancient landscapes.
The really fun title is space archaeology.
You of course want to record maybe how thick something is, which you can't measure from space, whether that's soil or snow.
When I won the prize, I had to present this completely crazy wish.
I had to present the case for archaeology to the world.
Why does it matter, so what?
The reality is, there aren't enough of us scientists, we've got to give more people opportunities to become explorers.
GlobalXplorer is an online crowdsourcing platform that allows anyone in the world to help map ancient sites by looking at satellite imagery.
And it's this idea that everyone in the world can make a contribution to science.
It can be anyone.
(Music) Doris Jones: I'm Doris Jones, I'm 90 years old, I live alone except for my two kitties.
And I need something to do.
I play games, I like sudoku.
And I play mahjong with friends on Friday.
(Music) And I'm an armchair archaeologist.
Why don't you want to work?
Down.
Down, let's work.
SP: Doris is one of our top contributors; she's a space archaeologist.
She's looked at many, many thousands of tiles.
People like her are just a gift to GlobalXplorer.
DJ: Right now, I'm looking at a tile, but ...
Well, it has a wall, probably for animals.
But it has a number of what look more like trails and roads.
I'll go to the next one.
SP: All you have to do is look at an image and look carefully, and you see that there could potentially be a new site there.
Doris just has this passion and energy, an excitement for exploration.
She's able to give back and really contribute in a meaningful way.
(Skype dial tone) SP: Doris!
DJ: Hi.
SP: I'm actually crying right now, because I'm overwhelmed with emotion.
DJ: Well, thank you.
SP: I just had to see your face and say, "Thank you."
DJ: I really admire what you're doing.
And I really enjoy the program.
SP: When did your love for archaeology and paleontology and science start?
DJ: Well, in the middle 50s my husband and I were in the backyard digging a garden.
It was late fall, and we were getting ready for next spring.
And I saw a strange-looking white rock on the ground.
I picked it up and he said, "Let me see that."
I showed it to him and he said, "You know what this is?"
I told him I didn't.
He said, "This is a fossil."
And we took out to the creek and started looking for fossils.
From then on, there was no turning back.
SP: That's wonderful.
DJ: So then I collected for years.
And after all those years, of course I've got all those memories.
But that's a type of thing ...
It's not just hunting the fossils but the experiences.
And you just learn and really live and enjoy.
And I think the fun is in the hunt.
You know, it's like ...
Well, like the rainbow -- at the end of the rainbow is a pot of gold.
So GlobalXplorer was kind of my rainbow.
And even at my age I can continue to hunt for lost civilizations.
SP: I want to tell you about some of the incredible things that happened as a result of your discoveries.
We're now beginning to take thousands of features that people like you have found and we're sharing them with archaeologists who work in Peru.
They're beginning to confirm the things the crowd has found.
So, in other words, the platform works.
Ultimately, this technology is helping us to rewrite our history.
DJ: We need to know our history.
We're all one peoples.
It's all our history, we're all here on this little ball of dirt.
SP: I believe we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what's left to discover.
And the greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey.
But the only way that we're going to be able to write it is if we do it together.
[Become a GlobalXplorer GlobalXplorer.org]
At a Maryland country fair in 2017, the prize pigs were not looking their best.
Farmers reported feverish hogs with inflamed eyes and running snouts.
But while fair officials worried about the pigs, the Maryland department of health was concerned about a group of sick fairgoers.
Some had pet the pigs, while others had merely been near their barns; but soon, 40 of these attendees would be diagnosed with swine flu.
More often than not, sick animals don’t infect humans.
But when they do, these cross-species infections, or viral host jumps, have the potential to produce deadly epidemics.
So how can pathogens from one species infect another, and what makes host jumps so dangerous?
Viruses are a type of organic parasite infecting nearly all forms of life.
To survive and reproduce, they must move through three stages: contact with a susceptible host, infection and replication, and transmission to other individuals.
As an example, let’s look at human influenza.
First, the flu virus encounters a new host and makes its way into their respiratory tract.
This isn’t so difficult, but to survive in this new body, the virus must mount a successful infection before it’s caught and broken down by an immune response.
To accomplish this task, viruses have evolved specific interactions with their host species.
Human flu viruses are covered in proteins adapted to bind with matching receptors on human respiratory cells.
Once inside a cell, the virus employs additional adaptations to hijack the host cell’s reproductive machinery and replicate its own genetic material.
Now the virus only needs to suppress or evade the host’s immune system long enough to replicate to sufficient levels and infect more cells.
At this point, the flu can be passed on to its next victim via any transmission of infected bodily fluid.
However, this simple sneeze also brings the virus in contact with pets, plants, or even your lunch.
Viruses are constantly encountering new species and attempting to infect them.
More often than not, this ends in failure.
In most cases, the genetic dissimilarity between the two hosts is too great.
For a virus adapted to infect humans, a lettuce cell would be a foreign and inhospitable landscape.
But there are a staggering number of viruses circulating in the environment, all with the potential to encounter new hosts.
And because viruses rapidly reproduce by the millions, they can quickly develop random mutations.
Most mutations will have no effect, or even prove detrimental; but a small proportion may enable the pathogen to better infect a new species.
The odds of winning this destructive genetic lottery increase over time, or if the new species is closely related to the virus’ usual host.
For a virus adapted to another mammal, infecting a human might just take a few lucky mutations.
And a virus adapted to chimpanzees, one of our closest genetic relatives, might barely require any heather68@example.net.
It takes more than time and genetic similarity for a host jump to be successful.
Some viruses come equipped to easily infect a new host’s cells, but are then unable to evade an immune response.
Others might have a difficult time transmitting to new hosts.
For example, they might make the host’s blood contagious, but not their saliva.
However, once a host jump reaches the transmission stage, the virus becomes much more dangerous.
Now gestating within two hosts, the pathogen has twice the odds of mutating into a more successful virus.
And each new host increases the potential for a full-blown epidemic.
Virologists are constantly looking for mutations that might make viruses such as influenza more likely to jump.
However, predicting the next potential epidemic is a major challenge.
There’s a huge diversity of viruses that we’re only just beginning to uncover.
Researchers are tirelessly studying the biology of these pathogens.
And by monitoring populations to quickly identify new outbreaks, they can develop vaccines and containment protocols to stop these deadly diseases.
In the mid-19th century, suspension bridges were collapsing all across Europe.
Their industrial cables frayed during turbulent weather and snapped under the weight of their decks.
So when a German-American engineer named John Roebling proposed building the largest and most expensive suspension bridge ever conceived over New York’s East River, city officials were understandably skeptical.
But Manhattan was increasingly overcrowded, and commuters from Brooklyn clogged the river.
In February of 1867, the government approved Roebling’s proposal.
To avoid the failures of European bridges, Roebling designed a hybrid bridge model.
From suspension bridges, he incorporated large cables supported by central pillars and anchored at each bank.
This design was ideal for supporting long decks, which hung from smaller vertical cables.
But Roebling’s model also drew from cable-stayed bridges.
These shorter structures held up their decks with diagonal cables that ran directly to support towers.
By adding these additional cables, Roebling improved the bridge’s stability, while also reducing the weight on its anchor cables.
Similar designs had been used for some other bridges but the scope of Roebling’s plan here dwarfed them all.
His new bridge’s deck spanned over 480 meters— 1.5 times longer than any previously built suspension bridge.
Since standard hemp rope would tear under the deck’s 14,680 tons, his proposal called for over 5,600 kilometers of metal wire to create the bridge’s cables.
To support all this weight, the towers would need to stand over 90 meters above sea level— making them the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere.
Roebling was confident his design would work, but while surveying the site in 1869, an incoming boat crushed his foot against the dock.
Within a month, tetanus had claimed his life.
Fortunately, John Roebling's son, Washington, was also a trained engineer and took over his father’s role.
The following year, construction on the tower foundations finally began.
This first step in construction was also the most challenging.
Building on the rocky river bed involved the use of a largely untested technology: pneumatic caissons.
Workers lowered these airtight wooden boxes into the river, where a system of pipes pumped pressurized air in and water out.
Once established, air locks allowed workers to enter the chamber and excavate the river bottom.
They placed layers of stone on top of the caisson as they dug.
When it finally hit the bedrock, they filled it with concrete, becoming the tower’s permanent foundation.
Working conditions in these caissons were dismal and dangerous.
Lit only by candles and gas lamps, the chambers caught fire several times, forcing them to be evacuated and flooded.
Even more dangerous was a mysterious ailment called "the bends."
Today, we understand this as decompression sickness, but at the time, it appeared to be an unexplainable pain or dizziness that killed several workmen.
In 1872, it nearly claimed the life of the chief engineer.
Washington survived, but was left paralyzed and bedridden.
Yet once again, the Roeblings proved indomitable.
Washington’s wife Emily not only carried communications between her husband and the engineers, but soon took over day-to-day project management.
Unfortunately, the bridge’s troubles were far from over.
By 1877, construction was over budget and behind schedule.
Worse still, it turned out the bridge’s cable contractor had been selling them faulty wires.
This would have been a fatal flaw if not for the abundant failsafes in John Roebling’s design.
After reinforcing the cables with additional wires, they suspended the deck piece by piece.
It took 14 years, the modern equivalent of over 400 million dollars, and the life’s work of three different Roeblings, but when the Brooklyn Bridge finally opened on May 24, 1883, its splendor was undeniable.
Today, the Brooklyn Bridge still stands atop its antique caissons, supporting the gothic towers and intersecting cables that frame a gateway to New York City.
For the next 16 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey that is probably the biggest dream of humanity: to understand the code of life.
So for me, everything started many, many years ago when I met the first 3D printer.
The concept was fascinating.
A 3D printer needs three elements: a bit of information, some raw material, some energy, and it can produce any object that was not there before.
I was doing physics, I was coming back home and I realized that I actually always knew a 3D printer.
And everyone does.
It was my mom.
(Laughter) My mom takes three elements: a bit of information, which is between my father and my mom in this case, raw elements and energy in the same media, that is food, and after several months, produces me.
And I was not existent before.
So apart from the shock of my mom discovering that she was a 3D printer, I immediately got mesmerized by that piece, the first one, the information.
What amount of information does it take to build and assemble a human?
Is it much?
Is it little?
How many thumb drives can you fill?
Well, I was studying physics at the beginning and I took this approximation of a human as a gigantic Lego piece.
So, imagine that the building blocks are little atoms and there is a hydrogen here, a carbon here, a nitrogen here.
So in the first approximation, if I can list the number of atoms that compose a human being, I can build it.
Now, you can run some numbers and that happens to be quite an astonishing number.
So the number of atoms, the file that I will save in my thumb drive to assemble a little baby, will actually fill an entire Titanic of thumb drives -- multiplied 2,000 times.
This is the miracle of life.
Every time you see from now on a pregnant lady, she's assembling the biggest amount of information that you will ever encounter.
Forget big data, forget anything you heard of.
This is the biggest amount of information that exists.
(Applause) But nature, fortunately, is much smarter than a young physicist, and in four billion years, managed to pack this information in a small crystal we call DNA.
We met it for the first time in 1950 when Rosalind Franklin, an amazing scientist, a woman, took a picture of it.
But it took us more than 40 years to finally poke inside a human cell, take out this crystal, unroll it, and read it for the first time.
The code comes out to be a fairly simple alphabet, four letters: A, T, C and G.
And to build a human, you need three billion of them.
Three billion.
How many are three billion?
It doesn't really make any sense as a number, right?
So I was thinking how I could explain myself better about how big and enormous this code is.
But there is -- I mean, I'm going to have some help, and the best person to help me introduce the code is actually the first man to sequence it, Dr. Craig Venter.
So welcome onstage, Dr. Craig Venter.
(Applause) Not the man in the flesh, but for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms, shipped from the United States to Canada thanks to Bruno Bowden, Lulu.com, a start-up, did everything.
It was an amazing feat.
But this is the visual perception of what is the code of life.
And now, for the first time, I can do something fun.
I can actually poke inside it and read.
So let me take an interesting book ... like this one.
I have an annotation; it's a fairly big book.
So just to let you see what is the code of life.
Thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of letters.
And they apparently make sense.
Let's get to a specific part.
Let me read it to you: (Laughter) "AAG, AAT, ATA."
To you it sounds like mute letters, but this sequence gives the color of the eyes to Craig.
I'll show you another part of the book.
This is actually a little more complicated.
Chromosome 14, book 132: (Laughter) As you might expect.
(Laughter) "ATT, CTT, GATT."
This human is lucky, because if you miss just two letters in this position -- two letters of our three billion -- he will be condemned to a terrible disease: cystic fibrosis.
We have no cure for it, we don't know how to solve it, and it's just two letters of difference from what we are.
A wonderful book, a mighty book, a mighty book that helped me understand and show you something quite remarkable.
Every one of you -- what makes me, me and you, you -- is just about five million of these, half a book.
For the rest, we are all absolutely identical.
Five hundred pages is the miracle of life that you are.
The rest, we all share it.
So think about that again when we think that we are different.
This is the amount that we share.
So now that I have your attention, the next question is: How do I read it?
How do I make sense out of it?
Well, for however good you can be at assembling Swedish furniture, this instruction manual is nothing you can crack in your life.
(Laughter) And so, in 2014, two famous TEDsters, Peter Diamandis and Craig Venter himself, decided to assemble a new company.
Human Longevity was born, with one mission: trying everything we can try and learning everything we can learn from these books, with one target -- making real the dream of personalized medicine, understanding what things should be done to have better health and what are the secrets in these books.
An amazing team, 40 data scientists and many, many more people, a pleasure to work with.
The concept is actually very simple.
We're going to use a technology called machine learning.
On one side, we have genomes -- thousands of them.
On the other side, we collected the biggest database of human beings: phenotypes, 3D scan, NMR -- everything you can think of.
Inside there, on these two opposite sides, there is the secret of translation.
And in the middle, we build a machine.
We build a machine and we train a machine -- well, not exactly one machine, many, many machines -- to try to understand and translate the genome in a phenotype.
What are those letters, and what do they do?
It's an approach that can be used for everything, but using it in genomics is particularly complicated.
Little by little we grew and we wanted to build different challenges.
We started from the beginning, from common traits.
Common traits are comfortable because they are common, everyone has them.
So we started to ask our questions: Can we predict height?
Can we read the books and predict your height?
Well, we actually can, with five centimeters of precision.
BMI is fairly connected to your lifestyle, but we still can, we get in the ballpark, eight kilograms of precision.
Can we predict eye color?
Yeah, we can.
Eighty percent accuracy.
Can we predict skin color?
Yeah we can, 80 percent accuracy.
Can we predict age?
We can, because apparently, the code changes during your life.
It gets shorter, you lose pieces, it gets insertions.
We read the signals, and we make a model.
Now, an interesting challenge: Can we predict a human face?
It's a little complicated, because a human face is scattered among millions of these letters.
And a human face is not a very well-defined object.
So, we had to build an entire tier of it to learn and teach a machine what a face is, and embed and compress it.
And if you're comfortable with machine learning, you understand what the challenge is here.
Now, after 15 years -- 15 years after we read the first sequence -- this October, we started to see some signals.
And it was a very emotional moment.
What you see here is a subject coming in our lab.
This is a face for us.
So we take the real face of a subject, we reduce the complexity, because not everything is in your face -- lots of features and defects and asymmetries come from your life.
We symmetrize the face, and we run our algorithm.
The results that I show you right now, this is the prediction we have from the blood.
(Applause) Wait a second.
In these seconds, your eyes are watching, left and right, left and right, and your brain wants those pictures to be identical.
So I ask you to do another exercise, to be honest.
Please search for the differences, which are many.
The biggest amount of signal comes from gender, then there is age, BMI, the ethnicity component of a human.
And scaling up over that signal is much more complicated.
But what you see here, even in the differences, lets you understand that we are in the right ballpark, that we are getting closer.
And it's already giving you some emotions.
This is another subject that comes in place, and this is a prediction.
A little smaller face, we didn't get the complete cranial structure, but still, it's in the ballpark.
This is a subject that comes in our lab, and this is the prediction.
So these people have never been seen in the training of the machine.
These are the so-called "held-out" set.
But these are people that you will probably never believe.
We're publishing everything in a scientific publication, you can read it.
But since we are onstage, Chris challenged me.
I probably exposed myself and tried to predict someone that you might recognize.
So, in this vial of blood -- and believe me, you have no idea what we had to do to have this blood now, here -- in this vial of blood is the amount of biological information that we need to do a full genome sequence.
We just need this amount.
We ran this sequence, and I'm going to do it with you.
And we start to layer up all the understanding we have.
In the vial of blood, we predicted he's a male.
And the subject is a male.
We predict that he's a meter and 76 cm.
The subject is a meter and 77 cm.
So, we predicted that he's 76; the subject is 82.
We predict his age, 38.
The subject is 35.
We predict his eye color.
Too dark.
We predict his skin color.
We are almost there.
That's his face.
Now, the reveal moment: the subject is this person.
(Laughter) And I did it intentionally.
I am a very particular and peculiar ethnicity.
Southern European, Italians -- they never fit in models.
And it's particular -- that ethnicity is a complex corner case for our model.
But there is another point.
So, one of the things that we use a lot to recognize people will never be written in the genome.
It's our free will, it's how I look.
Not my haircut in this case, but my beard cut.
So I'm going to show you, I'm going to, in this case, transfer it -- and this is nothing more than Photoshop, no modeling -- the beard on the subject.
And immediately, we get much, much better in the feeling.
So, why do we do this?
We certainly don't do it for predicting height or taking a beautiful picture out of your blood.
We do it because the same technology and the same approach, the machine learning of this code, is helping us to understand how we work, how your body works, how your body ages, how disease generates in your body, how your cancer grows and develops, how drugs work and if they work on your body.
This is a huge challenge.
This is a challenge that we share with thousands of other researchers around the world.
It's called personalized medicine.
It's the ability to move from a statistical approach where you're a dot in the ocean, to a personalized approach, where we read all these books and we get an understanding of exactly how you are.
But it is a particularly complicated challenge, because of all these books, as of today, we just know probably two percent: four books of more than 175.
And this is not the topic of my talk, because we will learn more.
There are the best minds in the world on this topic.
The prediction will get better, the model will get more precise.
And the more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we never had to face before about life, about death, about parenting.
So, we are touching the very inner detail on how life works.
And it's a revolution that cannot be confined in the domain of science or technology.
This must be a global conversation.
We must start to think of the future we're building as a humanity.
We need to interact with creatives, with artists, with philosophers, with politicians.
Everyone is involved, because it's the future of our species.
Without fear, but with the understanding that the decisions that we make in the next year will change the course of history forever.
Thank you.
(Applause)