The most important gift your mother and father ever gave you was the two sets of three billion letters of DNA that make up your genome.
But like anything with three billion components, that gift is fragile.
Sunlight, smoking, unhealthy eating, even spontaneous mistakes made by your cells, all cause changes to your genome.
The most common kind of change in DNA is the simple swap of one letter, or base, such as C, with a different letter, such as T, G or A.
In any day, the cells in your body will collectively accumulate billions of these single-letter swaps, which are also called "point mutations."
Now, most of these point mutations are harmless.
But every now and then, a point mutation disrupts an important capability in a cell or causes a cell to misbehave in harmful ways.
If that mutation were inherited from your parents or occurred early enough in your development, then the result would be that many or all of your cells contain this harmful mutation.
And then you would be one of hundreds of millions of people with a genetic disease, such as sickle cell anemia or progeria or muscular dystrophy or Tay-Sachs disease.
Grievous genetic diseases caused by point mutations are especially frustrating, because we often know the exact single-letter change that causes the disease and, in theory, could cure the disease.
Millions suffer from sickle cell anemia because they have a single A to T point mutations in both copies of their hemoglobin gene.
And children with progeria are born with a T at a single position in their genome where you have a C, with the devastating consequence that these wonderful, bright kids age very rapidly and pass away by about age 14.
Throughout the history of medicine, we have not had a way to efficiently correct point mutations in living systems, to change that disease-causing T back into a C.
Perhaps until now.
Because my laboratory recently succeeded in developing such a capability, which we call "base editing."
The story of how we developed base editing actually begins three billion years ago.
We think of bacteria as sources of infection, but bacteria themselves are also prone to being infected, in particular, by viruses.
So about three billion years ago, bacteria evolved a defense mechanism to fight viral infection.
That defense mechanism is now better known as CRISPR.
And the warhead in CRISPR is this purple protein that acts like molecular scissors to cut DNA, breaking the double helix into two pieces.
If CRISPR couldn't distinguish between bacterial and viral DNA, it wouldn't be a very useful defense system.
But the most amazing feature of CRISPR is that the scissors can be programmed to search for, bind to and cut only a specific DNA sequence.
So when a bacterium encounters a virus for the first time, it can store a small snippet of that virus's DNA for use as a program to direct the CRISPR scissors to cut that viral DNA sequence during a future infection.
Cutting a virus's DNA messes up the function of the cut viral gene, and therefore disrupts the virus's life cycle.
Remarkable researchers including Emmanuelle Charpentier, George Church, Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang showed six years ago how CRISPR scissors could be programmed to cut DNA sequences of our choosing, including sequences in your genome, instead of the viral DNA sequences chosen by bacteria.
But the outcomes are actually similar.
Cutting a DNA sequence in your genome also disrupts the function of the cut gene, typically, by causing the insertion and deletion of random mixtures of DNA letters at the cut site.
Now, disrupting genes can be very useful for some applications.
But for most point mutations that cause genetic diseases, simply cutting the already-mutated gene won't benefit patients, because the function of the mutated gene needs to be restored, not further disrupted.
So cutting this already-mutated hemoglobin gene that causes sickle cell anemia won't restore the ability of patients to make healthy red blood cells.
And while we can sometimes introduce new DNA sequences into cells to replace the DNA sequences surrounding a cut site, that process, unfortunately, doesn't work in most types of cells, and the disrupted gene outcomes still predominate.
Like many scientists, I've dreamed of a future in which we might be able to treat or maybe even cure human genetic diseases.
But I saw the lack of a way to fix point mutations, which cause most human genetic diseases, as a major problem standing in the way.
Being a chemist, I began working with my students to develop ways on performing chemistry directly on an individual DNA base, to truly fix, rather than disrupt, the mutations that cause genetic diseases.
The results of our efforts are molecular machines called "base editors."
Base editors use the programmable searching mechanism of CRISPR scissors, but instead of cutting the DNA, they directly convert one base to another base without disrupting the rest of the gene.
So if you think of naturally occurring CRISPR proteins as molecular scissors, you can think of base editors as pencils, capable of directly rewriting one DNA letter into another by actually rearranging the atoms of one DNA base to instead become a different base.
Now, base editors don't exist in nature.
In fact, we engineered the first base editor, shown here, from three separate proteins that don't even come from the same organism.
We started by taking CRISPR scissors and disabling the ability to cut DNA while retaining its ability to search for and bind a target DNA sequence in a programmed manner.
To those disabled CRISPR scissors, shown in blue, we attached a second protein in red, which performs a chemical reaction on the DNA base C, converting it into a base that behaves like T.
Third, we had to attach to the first two proteins the protein shown in purple, which protects the edited base from being removed by the cell.
The net result is an engineered three-part protein that for the first time allows us to convert Cs into Ts at specified locations in the genome.
But even at this point, our work was only half done.
Because in order to be stable in cells, the two strands of a DNA double helix have to form base pairs.
And because C only pairs with G, and T only pairs with A, simply changing a C to a T on one DNA strand creates a mismatch, a disagreement between the two DNA strands that the cell has to resolve by deciding which strand to replace.
We realized that we could further engineer this three-part protein to flag the nonedited strand as the one to be replaced by nicking that strand.
This little nick tricks the cell into replacing the nonedited G with an A as it remakes the nicked strand, thereby completing the conversion of what used to be a C-G base pair into a stable T-A base pair.
After several years of hard work led by a former post doc in the lab, Alexis Komor, we succeeded in developing this first class of base editor, which converts Cs into Ts and Gs into As at targeted positions of our choosing.
Among the more than 35,000 known disease-associated point mutations, the two kinds of mutations that this first base editor can reverse collectively account for about 14 percent or 5,000 or so pathogenic point mutations.
But correcting the largest fraction of disease-causing point mutations would require developing a second class of base editor, one that could convert As into Gs or Ts into Cs.
Led by Nicole Gaudelli, a former post doc in the lab, we set out to develop this second class of base editor, which, in theory, could correct up to almost half of pathogenic point mutations, including that mutation that causes the rapid-aging disease progeria.
We realized that we could borrow, once again, the targeting mechanism of CRISPR scissors to bring the new base editor to the right site in a genome.
But we quickly encountered an incredible problem; namely, there is no protein that's known to convert A into G or T into C in DNA.
Faced with such a serious stumbling block, most students would probably look for another project, if not another research advisor.
(Laughter) But Nicole agreed to proceed with a plan that seemed wildly ambitious at the time.
Given the absence of a naturally occurring protein that performs the necessary chemistry, we decided we would evolve our own protein in the laboratory to convert A into a base that behaves like G, starting from a protein that performs related chemistry on RNA.
We set up a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest selection system that explored tens of millions of protein variants and only allowed those rare variants that could perform the necessary chemistry to survive.
We ended up with a protein shown here, the first that can convert A in DNA into a base that resembles G.
And when we attached that protein to the disabled CRISPR scissors, shown in blue, we produced the second base editor, which converts As into Gs, and then uses the same strand-nicking strategy that we used in the first base editor to trick the cell into replacing the nonedited T with a C as it remakes that nicked strand, thereby completing the conversion of an A-T base pair to a G-C base pair.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) As an academic scientist in the US, I'm not used to being interrupted by applause.
(Laughter) We developed these first two classes of base editors only three years ago and one and a half years ago.
But even in that short time, base editing has become widely used by the biomedical research community.
Base editors have been sent more than 6,000 times at the request of more than 1,000 researchers around the globe.
A hundred scientific research papers have been published already, using base editors in organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to mice to primates.
While base editors are too new to have already entered human clinical trials, scientists have succeeded in achieving a critical milestone towards that goal by using base editors in animals to correct point mutations that cause human genetic diseases.
For example, a collaborative team of scientists led by Luke Koblan and Jon Levy, two additional students in my lab, recently used a virus to deliver that second base editor into a mouse with progeria, changing that disease-causing T back into a C and reversing its consequences at the DNA, RNA and protein levels.
Base editors have also been used in animals to reverse the consequence of tyrosinemia, beta thalassemia, muscular dystrophy, phenylketonuria, a congenital deafness and a type of cardiovascular disease -- in each case, by directly correcting a point mutation that causes or contributes to the disease.
In plants, base editors have been used to introduce individual single DNA letter changes that could lead to better crops.
And biologists have used base editors to probe the role of individual letters in genes associated with diseases such as cancer.
Two companies I cofounded, Beam Therapeutics and Pairwise Plants, are using base editing to treat human genetic diseases and to improve agriculture.
All of these applications of base editing have taken place in less than the past three years: on the historical timescale of science, the blink of an eye.
Additional work lies ahead before base editing can realize its full potential to improve the lives of patients with genetic diseases.
While many of these diseases are thought to be treatable by correcting the underlying mutation in even a modest fraction of cells in an organ, delivering molecular machines like base editors into cells in a human being can be challenging.
Co-opting nature's viruses to deliver base editors instead of the molecules that give you a cold is one of several promising delivery strategies that's been successfully used.
Continuing to develop new molecular machines that can make all of the remaining ways to convert one base pair to another base pair and that minimize unwanted editing at off-target locations in cells is very important.
And engaging with other scientists, doctors, ethicists and governments to maximize the likelihood that base editing is applied thoughtfully, safely and ethically, remains a critical obligation.
These challenges notwithstanding, if you had told me even just five years ago that researchers around the globe would be using laboratory-evolved molecular machines to directly convert an individual base pair to another base pair at a specified location in the human genome efficiently and with a minimum of other outcomes, I would have asked you, "What science-fiction novel are you reading?"
Thanks to a relentlessly dedicated group of students who were creative enough to engineer what we could design ourselves and brave enough to evolve what we couldn't, base editing has begun to transform that science-fiction-like aspiration into an exciting new reality, one in which the most important gift we give our children may not only be three billion letters of DNA, but also the means to protect and repair them.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart.
I'm here to tell you a few tales of passion.
There's a Jewish saying that I love.
What is truer than truth?
Answer: The story.
I'm a storyteller.
I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them.
Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
In the last 20 years I have published a few books, but I have lived in anonymity until February of 2006, when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy.
That made me a celebrity.
Now people recognize me in Macy's, and my grandchildren think that I'm cool.
(Laughter) Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame.
One of the organizers of the Olympic ceremony, of the opening ceremony, called me and said that I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers.
I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because I'm as far as you can get from being an athlete.
Actually, I wasn't even sure that I could go around the stadium without a walker.
(Laughter) I was told that this was no laughing matter.
This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag.
Five women, representing five continents, and three Olympic gold medal winners.
My first question was, naturally, what was I going to wear?
(Laughter) A uniform, she said, and asked for my measurements.
My measurements.
I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak, looking like the Michelin Man.
(Laughter) By the middle of February, I found myself in Turin, where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 Olympic teams was in the street.
Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games.
They all deserved to win, but there's the element of luck.
A speck of snow, an inch of ice, the force of the wind, can determine the result of a race or a game.
However, what matters most -- more than training or luck -- is the heart.
Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal.
It is all about passion.
The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics.
Passion lives here.
Isn't it always true?
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.
That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart.
I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
People like all of you in this room.
Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters.
(Laughter) They only make good former spouses.
(Laughter) (Applause) In the green room of the stadium, I met the other flag bearers: three athletes, and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren.
Also, two women with passionate hearts: Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prizewinner from Kenya who has planted 30 million trees.
And by doing so, she has changed the soil, the weather, in some places in Africa, and of course the economic conditions in many villages.
And Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution.
When she was 14 years old, her grandfather sold her to a brothel.
She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from AIDS.
And of brothels where children are forced to receive five, 15 clients per day, and if they rebel, they are tortured with electricity.
In the green room I received my uniform.
It was not the kind of outfit that I normally wear, but it was far from the Michelin Man suit that I had anticipated.
Not bad, really.
I looked like a refrigerator.
(Laughter) But so did most of the flag-bearers, except Sophia Loren, the universal symbol of beauty and passion.
Sophia is over 70 and she looks great.
She's sexy, slim and tall, with a deep tan.
Now, how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles?
I don't know.
When asked in a TV interview, "How could she look so good?"
She replied, "Posture.
My back is always straight, and I don't make old people's noises."
(Laughter) So, there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth.
No grunting, no coughing, no wheezing, no talking to yourselves, no farting.
(Laughter) Well, she didn't say that exactly.
(Laughter) At some point around midnight, we were summoned to the wings of the stadium, and the loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag, and the music started -- by the way, the same music that starts here, the Aida March.
Sophia Loren was right in front of me -- she's a foot taller than I am, not counting the poofy hair.
(Laughter) She walked elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah, holding the flag on her shoulder.
I jogged behind (Laughter) -- on my tiptoes -- holding the flag on my extended arm, so that my head was actually under the damn flag.
(Laughter) All the cameras were, of course, on Sophia.
That was fortunate for me, because in most press photos I appear too, although often between Sophia's legs.
(Laughter) A place where most men would love to be.
(Laughter) (Applause) The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic stadium.
My husband is offended when I say this -- although I have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes -- (Laughter) -- so he shouldn't take it personally.
I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes, because I don't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells.
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics -- passion.
So here's a tale of passion.
The year is 1998, the place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo.
By the way, 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls.
We can call this place in Congo a death camp, because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation.
The protagonists of this story are a young woman, Rose Mapendo, and her children.
She's pregnant and a widow.
Soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed.
Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive, and a few months later, she gives birth to premature twins.
Two tiny little boys.
She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick, and ties it with her own hair.
She names the twins after the camp's commanders to gain their favor, and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them.
When the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter, she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go, even when they hold a gun to her head.
Somehow, the family survives for 16 months, and then, by extraordinary luck, and the passionate heart of a young American man, Sasha Chanoff, who manages to put her in a U.S. rescue plane, Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix, Arizona, where they're now living and thriving.
Mapendo, in Swahili, means great love.
The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo.
I don't make them up.
There's no need for that.
I look around and I see them everywhere.
I have worked with women and for women all my life.
I know them well.
I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family.
No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist -- although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.
(Laughter) I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom, and for questioning the patriarchy.
But I was happy to pay it, because for every blow that I received, I was able to deliver two.
(Laughter) Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on.
We had a memorable fight.
Feminism is dated?
Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor -- they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
They have no control over their bodies or their lives.
They have no education and no freedom.
They are raped, beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity.
For most Western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult.
Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.
(Laughter) Feminism is not dead, by no means.
It has evolved.
If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake.
Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it.
So here's another tale of passion, and this is a sad one.
The place is a small women's clinic in a village in Bangladesh.
The year is 2005.
Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation.
She's prepared to clean teeth, but when she gets there, she finds out that there are no doctors, no dentists, and the clinic is just a hut full of flies.
Outside, there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated.
The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars.
Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth.
She's not licensed for that; she has never done it.
She risks a lot and she's terrified.
She doesn't even have the proper instruments, but fortunately she has brought some Novocaine.
Jenny has a brave and passionate heart.
She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation.
At the end, the relieved patient kisses her hands.
That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth.
The next morning, when she comes again to the so-called clinic, her first patient is waiting for her with her husband.
The woman's face looks like a watermelon.
It is so swollen that you can't even see the eyes.
The husband, furious, threatens to kill the American.
Jenny is horrified at what she has done, but then the translator explains that the patient's condition has nothing to do with the operation.
The day before, her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him.
Millions of women live like this today.
They are the poorest of the poor.
Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
They are paid less than men for the same work if they're paid at all, and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence, and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence and abuse.
It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society.
If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off.
If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.
Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya.
She talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees.
She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop.
In a matter of five or six years, they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved.
The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.
Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy.
For every dollar given to a women's program, 20 dollars are given to men's programs.
Women are 51 percent of humankind.
Empowering them will change everything -- more than technology and design and entertainment.
I can promise you that women working together -- linked, informed and educated -- can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
In any war today, most of the casualties are civilians, mainly women and children.
They are collateral damage.
Men run the world, and look at the mess we have.
What kind of world do we want?
This is a fundamental question that most of us are asking.
Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order?
We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.
In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings at the UC Berkeley library.
No museum or gallery in the United States, except for the New York gallery that carries Botero's work, has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison.
They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power, in the voluminous Botero style.
I have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart.
What I fear most is power with impunity.
I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules.
The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly.
Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom.
Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom.
Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse -- a woman or a child.
I'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender, income, race, and class.
I think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization.
But for real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world.
We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.
I'm talking about men with young minds, of course.
Old guys are hopeless; we have to wait for them to die off.
(Laughter) Yes, I would love to have Sophia Loren's long legs and legendary breasts.
But given a choice, I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai, Somaly Mam, Jenny and Rose Mapendo.
I want to make this world good.
Not better, but to make it good.
Why not?
It is possible.
Look around in this room -- all this knowledge, energy, talent and technology.
Let's get off our fannies, roll up our sleeves and get to work, passionately, in creating an almost perfect world.
Thank you.
(Piano) (Singing) It was done When the benediction had been sung Firelight gently woke us from our golden night My surprise I can turn to see your open eyes And I know You are alive I know that smile Nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath The war Nobody ever even asked what for Up above Nothing matters but the ones you love So get out with me Now you've got enough with me Just the two of us you see And nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh, we after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh Oh Oh Oh Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thanks.
I love a depressing song ...
(Laughter) you know?
I've been writing them for 15 years now, and to be honest, over that time, I've come to kind of believe that they're not really jfox@example.org.
In fact, I think they're kind of the most important songs we have.
Songs that sing of sorrow, of grief, of longing, of the darker side of love, the underside of being alive, these are the songs I just never tire of hearing and I never tire of writing, because they make me feel less alone.
They speak to a very real part of being human that can often be hidden in fear and shame and pushed deep down where it lingers and rots.
But I think in listening to these songs -- really listening -- can allow us to refeel these hard emotions, but in a cathartic and healing way.
In a way that reminds us, as we listen, that we're not alone in darkness.
There's a Japanese phrase known as "mono no aware," which roughly translates as "the bittersweet poignancy of things," or the pathos or "ahness" of things.
It's a valuable awareness of impermanence, both a kind of gentle, transient sadness as things pass by in life, but also a deeper, softly lingering sadness about the impermanence of all reality.
"Mono no aware" can be manifest in lots of life stories and moments and songs.
One example in Japanese culture is the celebration of the cherry blossom.
The cherry blossom in and of itself is no more impressive than that of an apple or orange tree, but what sets it apart is its brevity.
Cherry blossoms fall within a single week -- can be whisked away on the gentlest breeze -- and it's this that makes it more beautiful.
It's utterly fragile, and fragility gives life its poignancy.
Now, being a cheery chap, nothing speaks to me more than this, and -- (Laughter) you know, I think it's been the essence of my songwriting for years, of what moves me to write, what inspires me to sing.
Because pain and grief and doubt, when it's made manifest in music, in song -- when it's made beautiful in poetry and painting, it can build a community and a kinship in the knowledge that we are none of us alone in darkness.
My next song is one that I call "Killing Me," and as the name suggests, it's not a dance floor favorite.
(Laughter) But it isn't miserable.
It's full of love and hope.
And I think it exemplifies everything I've been talking about.
And it's the first song I've written from the perspective of somebody else, specifically my grandmother, as she lives on without my late grandfather, as she experiences new things in her life -- her grandchildren getting married, having their own children, speaking at TED -- all the while she lives without, and all the while she misses her soul mate.
Thank you.
(Piano) (Singing) Sweetheart would you wake up today?
I promise you would recognize my faith I want to show you how I've grown in this place In this place I'm not alone And I know I'll be OK But it's always harder When the winter comes to stay And I can't help remember all the words I never said And it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty And you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully.
(Piano) Oh, everything is taller these days Maybe I feel smaller and time rushes away So much I could show you How all the great-grandchildren Have been laughing like we did when we were young I've been laughing like we did when we were young Oh, it's killing me that you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully Thank you very much.
(Applause and cheering)
Now I'm going to give you a story.
It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey.
Let me begin with my parents.
I'm a product of this visionary mother and father.
Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s -- '50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India.
They belonged to boys.
They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married.
My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique.
We were four of us, not one, and fortunately no boys.
We were four girls and no boys.
And my parents were part of a landed property family.
My father defied his own grandfather, almost to the point of disinheritance, because he decided to educate all four of us.
He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education.
As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school.
Children don't choose a school.
They just get the school which parents choose for them.
So this is the foundation time which I got.
I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters.
And my father used to say at that time, "I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world."
I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened.
I'm the only one who's left in India.
One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian.
So we are four of us in four corners of the world.
And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me.
One, they said, "Life is on an incline.
You either go up, or you come down."
And the second thing, which has stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in your life, good or bad.
Out of 100, 90 are your creation.
They're good.
They're your creation.
Enjoy it.
If they're bad, they're your creation.
Learn from it.
Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing.
It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake.
You can't do a thing about it.
You've got to just respond to the situation.
But that response comes out of those 90 points.
Since I'm a product of this philosophy, of 90/10, and secondly, "life on an incline," that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got.
I'm a product of opportunities, rare opportunities in the '50s and the '60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique.
Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities.
I thought I must tell you this.
Why I said this, is the background.
This is what comes next.
I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc.
But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing.
For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect.
This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India -- the power to prevent.
Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it, or power to punish.
But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up.
How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10?
So this was how it came into my service, and it was different from the men.
I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different.
And I redefined policing concepts in India.
I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey.
What you see, if you see the title called "PM's car held."
This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket.
(Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it.
It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever.
And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice.
That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service.
I had other options, but I didn't choose them.
So I'm going to move on.
This is about tough policing, equal policing.
Now I was known as "here's a woman that's not going to listen."
So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no.
I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer.
Normally police officers don't want to do prison.
They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, "Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to.
Let's lock her up."
Here I got a prison assignment.
This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals.
Obviously, it was.
But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women -- 10,000 -- 9,000 plus about 600 were men.
Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters -- some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside.
And then how did I deal with them?
The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to jfox@example.org.
And I said, "Do you pray?"
When I looked at the group, I said, "Do you pray?"
They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit.
I said, "Do you pray?"
And they didn't say anything.
I said, "Do you pray?
Do you want to pray?"
They said, "Yes."
I said, "All right, let's pray."
I prayed for them, and things started to change.
This is a visual of education inside the prison.
Friends, this has never happened, where everybody in the prison studies.
I started this with community support.
Government had no budget.
It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world.
This was initiated in Delhi prison.
You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class.
These are hundreds of classes.
Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program -- the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten.
We converted this into an ashram -- from a prison to an ashram through education.
I think that's the bigger change.
It was the beginning of a change.
Teachers were prisoners.
Teachers were volunteers.
Books came from donated schoolbooks.
Stationery was donated.
Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison.
Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole.
That's the second landmark.
I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world.
One, the numbers you'll never get to see.
Secondly, this concept.
This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners.
One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation.
This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor.
And this is what transformed.
You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana."
You will hear about it, and you will love it.
And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you.
Let me show you the next slide.
I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison?
Because crime is a product of a distorted mind.
It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control.
Not by preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind.
I took the same thing to the police, because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was "we" and "they," and that the people don't cooperate.
This worked.
This is a feedback box called a petition box.
This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints, listen to grievances.
This was a magic box.
This was a sensitive box.
This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison.
If you see somebody in the blue -- yeah, this guy -- he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher.
And you see, everybody's busy.
There was no time to waste.
Let me wrap it up.
I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which is thousands -- India is all about thousands.
Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India.
That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India.
Friends, you will hear a lot about it.
That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole.
For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago.
Our song, "This Is Not Our Home," it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole.
(Music) Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman.
I'm a grandmother.
I'm a daughter.
I have a son.
I'm not an angel.
I'm not the devil.
I came to jail when I was so young.
I spend my time here inside these prison walls.
Lost friends to death, saw some go home.
Watch years pass, people come and go, while I do life without parole.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here.
This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see my family or die alone?
As the years go by, I hold back my tears, because if I cry I'd give in to fear.
I must be strong, have to hold on.
Gotta get through another year.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here.
This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see my family or die alone?
I'm not saying that I'm not guilty, I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay.
All I'm asking is for forgiveness.
Gotta have hope I'll be free someday.
Is there a place for me in the world out there?
Will they ever know or care that I'm chained?
Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days?
Because I've changed.
Lord knows I've changed.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here.
This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see my family or die alone?
Will I see my family or die alone?
I'm known to you as Inmate 008106.
Incarcerated 29 years.
My name is Brenda Watkins.
I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina.
This is not my home.
(Applause) Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472.
I've been incarcerated for 27 years.
My name is Thelma Nichols.
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A.
This is not my home.
(Applause) DH: 008494.
I've been incarcerated for 27 years.
My name is Dannielle Hadley.
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home.
(Applause) Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309.
I've been incarcerated for 27 years.
My name is Theresa Battles.
I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home.
(Applause) Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080.
I've been incarcerated for 30 years.
My name is Debra Brown.
I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
This is not my home.
(Applause) Joann Butler: 005961.
I've been incarcerated for 37 years.
My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia.
This is not my home.
(Applause) Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634.
I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years.
My name is Diane Hamill Metzger.
I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause) Lena Brown: I am 004867.
Incarcerated 40 years.
My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause) Trina Garnett: My number is 005545.
My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old.
Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause) Will I see my family or die alone?
Or die alone?
(Applause)