Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me.
One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey?
You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.
Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash "35" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit -- those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment.
So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied.
So there seems to be a complete disconnect here.
So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title -- I'll come to this a little later -- and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language.
Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people.
Let me give you one example of this.
You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time.
It may still be, for all I know.
Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged.
Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all?
So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay?
By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small.
This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set.
Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things.
What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, "I reckon I can heist these."
However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, "Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class."
(Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience.
Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar.
Has anybody stayed there?
It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift.
Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor.
It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four.
It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues.
You have a series of buttons.
You actually choose your lift music.
My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max.
It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life.
Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept.
But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke.
And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing.
It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event -- I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone.
But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated.
It's a tiny, tiny thing.
If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, "So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty?"
you're not really confident standing up there saying, "I've got it cracked; it's the lentils," are you?
Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them.
And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied.
But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality.
So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget.
And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on.
What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no webblaura@example.org.
(Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward.
Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes "Terminal 5 syndrome," which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic.
You come out of "Arrive" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says "Trains" and it's in front of you.
So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying "Trains."
No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says "Heathrow Express."
I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film "Airplane."
A yellow sign?
That's exactly what they'll be expecting.
Actually, what happens in the world increasingly -- now, all credit to the British Airport Authority.
I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, "Okay, what can you do?"
So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning.
One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay?
Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film.
(Laughter) So these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well.
But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly.
But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions.
Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as "strategy" to actually solve them.
I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking.
They said, "Can we do an advertising campaign?
What can we do and encourage more online banking?"
I said, "It's really, really easy."
I said, "When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at.
The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance."
I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen.
Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news?
Okay, you simply wouldn't.
I said, "If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.'
If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often."
Let's face it, most of us -- how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine?
And you're pretty rich by the standards of the webblaura@example.org.
Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it.
But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid.
And yet, it never happens.
Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things.
And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now.
And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained.
Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity.
But what is happening is that effectively -- and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this -- business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy.
It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate.
It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success.
That's the world people actually want.
In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand.
Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all.
But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world.
But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach.
That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role.
You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot.
And I'd be wrong to dis that completely.
Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy.
(Laughter) I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way.
I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model.
He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing.
So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure.
Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing.
That's called trivia.
But there's a fourth thing.
And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff.
We don't know what to call it.
And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause.
So the first thing I'd like is a competition -- to anybody watching this as a film -- is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right.
And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that.
That's why I call for the "Chief Detail Officer."
Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail.
The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English.
And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves.
Thank you very much.
Where does the end begin?
Well, for me, it all began with this little fellow.
This adorable organism -- well, I think it's adorable -- is called Tetrahymena and it's a single-celled creature.
It's also been known as pond scum.
So that's right, my career started with pond scum.
Now, it was no surprise I became a scientist.
Growing up far away from here, as a little girl I was deadly curious about everything alive.
I used to pick up lethally poisonous stinging jellyfish and sing to them.
And so starting my career, I was deadly curious about fundamental mysteries of the most basic building blocks of life, and I was fortunate to live in a society where that curiosity was valued.
Now, for me, this little pond scum critter Tetrahymena was a great way to study the fundamental mystery I was most curious about: those bundles of DNA in our cells called chromosomes.
And it was because I was curious about the very ends of chromosomes, known as telomeres.
Now, when I started my quest, all we knew was that they helped protect the ends of chromosomes.
It was important when cells divide.
It was really important, but I wanted to find out what telomeres consisted of, and for that, I needed a lot of them.
And it so happens that cute little Tetrahymena has a lot of short linear chromosomes, around 20,000, so lots of telomeres.
And I discovered that telomeres consisted of special segments of noncoding DNA right at the very ends of chromosomes.
But here's a problem.
Now, we all start life as a single cell.
It multiples to two.
Two becomes four.
Four becomes eight, and on and on to form the 200 million billion cells that make up our adult body.
And some of those cells have to divide thousands of times.
In fact, even as I stand here before you, all throughout my body, cells are furiously replenishing to, well, keep me standing here before you.
So every time a cell divides, all of its DNA has to be copied, all of the coding DNA inside of those chromosomes, because that carries the vital operating instructions that keep our cells in good working order, so my heart cells can keep a steady beat, which I assure you they're not doing right now, and my immune cells can fight off bacteria and viruses, and our brain cells can save the memory of our first kiss and keep on learning throughout life.
But there is a glitch in the way DNA is copied.
It is just one of those facts of life.
Every time the cell divides and the DNA is copied, some of that DNA from the ends gets worn down and shortened, some of that telomere DNA.
And think about it like the protective caps at the ends of your shoelace.
And those keep the shoelace, or the chromosome, from fraying, and when that tip gets too short, it falls off, and that worn down telomere sends a signal to the cells.
"The DNA is no longer being protected."
It sends a signal.
Time to die.
So, end of story.
Well, sorry, not so fast.
It can't be the end of the story, because life hasn't died off the face of the earth.
So I was curious: if such wear and tear is inevitable, how on earth does Mother Nature make sure we can keep our chromosomes intact?
Now, remember that little pond scum critter Tetrahymena?
The craziest thing was, Tetrahymena cells never got old and died.
Their telomeres weren't shortening as time marched on.
Sometimes they even got longer.
Something else was at work, and believe me, that something was not in any textbook.
So working in my lab with my extraordinary student Carol Greider -- and Carol and I shared the Nobel Prize for this work -- we began running experiments and we discovered cells do have something else.
It was a previously undreamed-of enzyme that could replenish, make longer, telomeres, and we named it telomerase.
And when we removed our pond scum's telomerase, their telomeres ran down and they died.
So it was thanks to their plentiful telomerase that our pond scum critters never got old.
OK, now, that's an incredibly hopeful message for us humans to be receiving from pond scum, because it turns out that as we humans age, our telomeres do shorten, and remarkably, that shortening is aging us.
Generally speaking, the longer your telomeres, the better off you are.
It's the overshortening of telomeres that leads us to feel and see signs of aging.
My skin cells start to die and I start to see fine lines, wrinkles.
Hair pigment cells die.
You start to see gray.
Immune system cells die.
You increase your risks of getting sick.
In fact, the cumulative research from the last 20 years has made clear that telomere attrition is contributing to our risks of getting cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer's, some cancers and diabetes, the very conditions many of us die of.
And so we have to think about this.
What is going on?
This attrition, we look and we feel older, yeah.
Our telomeres are losing the war of attrition faster.
And those of us who feel youthful longer, it turns out our telomeres are staying longer for longer periods of time, extending our feelings of youthfulness and reducing the risks of all we most dread as the birthdays go by.
OK, seems like a no-brainer.
Now, if my telomeres are connected to how quickly I'm going to feel and get old, if my telomeres can be renewed by my telomerase, then all I have to do to reverse the signs and symptoms of aging is figure out where to buy that Costco-sized bottle of grade A organic fair trade telomerase, right?
Great!
Problem solved.
(Applause) Not so fast, I'm sorry.
Alas, that's not the case.
OK.
And why?
It's because human genetics has taught us that when it comes to our telomerase, we humans live on a knife edge.
OK, simply put, yes, nudging up telomerase does decrease the risks of some diseases, but it also increases the risks of certain and rather nasty cancers.
So even if you could buy that Costco-sized bottle of telomerase, and there are many websites marketing such dubious products, the problem is you could nudge up your risks of cancers.
And we don't want that.
Now, don't worry, and because, while I think it's kind of funny that right now, you know, many of us may be thinking, "Well, I'd rather be like pond scum," ...
(Laughter) there is something for us humans in the story of telomeres and their maintenance.
But I want to get one thing clear.
It isn't about enormously extending human lifespan or immortality.
It's about health span.
Now, health span is the number of years of your life when you're free of disease, you're healthy, you're productive, you're zestfully enjoying life.
Disease span, the opposite of health span, is the time of your life spent feeling old and sick and dying.
So the real question becomes, OK, if I can't guzzle telomerase, do I have control over my telomeres' length and hence my well-being, my health, without those downsides of cancer risks?
OK?
So, it's the year 2000.
Now, I've been minutely scrutinizing little teeny tiny telomeres very happily for many years, when into my lab walks a psychologist named Elissa Epel.
Now, Elissa's expertise is in the effects of severe, chronic psychological stress on our mind's and our body's health.
And there she was standing in my lab, which ironically overlooked the entrance to a mortuary, and -- (Laughter) And she had a life-and-death question for me.
"What happens to telomeres in people who are chronically stressed?"
she asked me.
You see, she'd been studying caregivers, and specifically mothers of children with a chronic condition, be it gut disorder, be it autism, you name it -- a group obviously under enormous and prolonged psychological stress.
I have to say, her question changed me profoundly.
See, all this time I had been thinking of telomeres as those miniscule molecular structures that they are, and the genes that control telomeres.
And when Elissa asked me about studying caregivers, I suddenly saw telomeres in a whole new light.
I saw beyond the genes and the chromosomes into the lives of the real people we were studying.
And I'm a mom myself, and at that moment, I was struck by the image of these women dealing with a child with a condition very difficult to deal with, often without help.
And such women, simply, often look worn down.
So was it possible their telomeres were worn down as well?
So our collective curiosity went into overdrive.
Elissa selected for our first study a group of such caregiving mothers, and we wanted to ask: What's the length of their telomeres compared with the number of years that they have been caregiving for their child with a chronic condition?
So four years go by and the day comes when all the results are in, and Elissa looked down at our first scatterplot and literally gasped, because there was a pattern to the data, and it was the exact gradient that we most feared might exist.
It was right there on the page.
The longer, the more years that is, the mother had been in this caregiving situation, no matter her age, the shorter were her telomeres.
And the more she perceived her situation as being more stressful, the lower was her telomerase and the shorter were her telomeres.
So we had discovered something unheard of: the more chronic stress you are under, the shorter your telomeres, meaning the more likely you were to fall victim to an early disease span and perhaps untimely death.
Our findings meant that people's life events and the way we respond to these events can change how you maintain your telomeres.
So telomere length wasn't just a matter of age counted in years.
Elissa's question to me, back when she first came to my lab, indeed had been a life-and-death question.
Now, luckily, hidden in that data there was hope.
We noticed that some mothers, despite having been carefully caring for their children for many years, had been able to maintain their telomeres.
So studying these women closely revealed that they were resilient to stress.
Somehow they were able to experience their circumstances not as a threat day in and day out but as a challenge, and this has led to a very important insight for all of us: we have control over the way we age all the way down into our cells.
OK, now our initial curiosity became infectious.
Thousands of scientists from different fields added their expertise to telomere research, and the findings have poured in.
It's up to over 10,000 scientific papers and counting.
So several studies rapidly confirmed our initial finding that yes, chronic stress is bad for telomeres.
And now many are revealing that we have more control over this particular aging process than any of us could ever have imagined.
A few examples: a study from the University of California, Los Angeles of people who are caring for a relative with dementia, long-term, and looked at their caregiver's telomere maintenance capacity and found that it was improved by them practicing a form of meditation for as little as 12 minutes a day for two months.
Attitude matters.
If you're habitually a negative thinker, you typically see a stressful situation with a threat stress response, meaning if your boss wants to see you, you automatically think, "I'm about to be fired," and your blood vessels constrict, and your level of the stress hormone cortisol creeps up, and then it stays up, and over time, that persistently high level of the cortisol actually damps down your telomerase.
Not good for your telomeres.
On the other hand, if you typically see something stressful as a challenge to be tackled, then blood flows to your heart and to your brain, and you experience a brief but energizing spike of cortisol.
And thanks to that habitual "bring it on" attitude, your telomeres do just fine.
So ...
What is all of this telling us?
Your telomeres do just fine.
You really do have power to change what is happening to your own telomeres.
But our curiosity just got more and more intense, because we started to wonder, what about factors outside our own skin?
Could they impact our telomere maintenance as well?
You know, we humans are intensely social beings.
Was it even possible that our telomeres were social as well?
And the results have been startling.
As early as childhood, emotional neglect, exposure to violence, bullying and racism all impact your telomeres, and the effects are long-term.
Can you imagine the impact on children of living years in a war zone?
People who can't trust their neighbors and who don't feel safe in their neighborhoods consistently have shorter telomeres.
So your home address matters for telomeres as well.
On the flip side, tight-knit communities, being in a marriage long-term, and lifelong friendships, even, all improve telomere maintenance.
So what is all this telling us?
It's telling us that I have the power to impact my own telomeres, and I also have the power to impact yours.
Telomere science has told us just how interconnected we all are.
But I'm still curious.
I do wonder what legacy all of us will leave for the next generation?
Will we invest in the next young woman or man peering through a microscope at the next little critter, the next bit of pond scum, curious about a question we don't even know today is a question?
It could be a great question that could impact all the world.
And maybe, maybe you're curious about you.
Now that you know how to protect your telomeres, are you curious what are you going to do with all those decades of brimming good health?
And now that you know you could impact the telomeres of others, are you curious how will you make a difference?
And now that you know the power of curiosity to change the world, how will you make sure that the world invests in curiosity for the sake of the generations that will come after us?
Thank you.
(Applause)