I'm going to first tell you something that in my grandmother would've elicited a five-oy alarm: "Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy."
(Laughter) And here it is ... are you ready?
OK.
I have stage IV lung cancer.
Oh, I know, "poor me."
I don't feel that way.
I'm so OK with it.
And granted, I have certain advantages -- not everybody can take so cavalier an attitude.
I don't have young children.
I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful.
I don't have huge financial stress.
My cancer isn't that aggressive.
It's kind of like the Democratic leadership -- (Laughter) not convinced it can win.
It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money.
(Laughter) (Applause) Oh, and the best thing of all -- I have a major accomplishment under my belt.
Yes.
I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago.
And here's what they said: "You are responsible for the pussification of the American male."
(Laughter) (Applause) Not that I can take all the credit, but ...
(Laughter) But what if you don't have my advantages?
The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality.
You couldn't have a worse relationship with reality than I did.
From the get-go, I wasn't even attracted to reality.
If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over.
(Laughter) And reality and I -- we don't share the same values, the same goals -- (Laughter) To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies.
They're exactly like goals but without the hard work.
(Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a big fan of hard work, but you know reality -- it's either push, push, push, push, push through its agent, the executive brain function -- one of the "yays" of dying: my executive brain function won't have me to kick around anymore.
(Laughter) But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality.
So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone -- but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator ...
private yoga lessons -- I ended up with a development bmcmillan@example.com.
And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive -- (Laughter) which reality thought I should be proud of ...
(Laughter) And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival -- not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse (Laughter) with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic.
(Laughter) And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described ...
"Life-sized."
(Laughter) And that's when I knew.
Reality wasn't "reality."
Reality was an imposter.
So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie -- yes, finally finished -- about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year -- two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits.
Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set.
It turned out I was great at actual reality.
I didn't just come to terms with it, I fell in love.
And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ...
I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax -- (Laughter) I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction.
(Laughter) But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box."
(Laughter) They're gaslighting me.
(Laughter) (Applause) But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science.
I have this -- not a scientist myself -- but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science -- (Laughter) which is math.
But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me.
The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny -- I call it "The Big Twang."
(Laughter) Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ...
you know?
That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong.
Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space -- time, mass -- energy and life and death.
So I don't understand -- I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death."
How do you do that?
How do you defeat death without killing off life?
It doesn't make sense to me.
I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful.
I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift -- life -- but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead.
You know, it's the beef -- the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date.
Death is the deal breaker.
I don't get that.
I don't understand -- to me, it's disrespectful.
It's disrespectful to nature.
The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect -- no, I don't think so.
I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have -- well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but -- (Laughter) You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore.
We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything.
Nature is like a self-driving car.
The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke -- I don't know if you've heard it.
An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light.
And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything.
And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?"
And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"
(Laughter) (Applause) So ...
and now, I'm going to take a mental leap, which is easy for me because I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps; my license plate says, "Cogito, ergo zoom."
I hope you're willing to come with me on this, but my real problem with the mindset that is so out to defeat death is if you're anti-death, which to me translates as anti-life, which to me translates as anti-nature, it also translates to me as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature.
And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition."
And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men.
Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world.
Whereas labor is associated with the body.
It's associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor.
So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor.
So here's how it looks from a banana-peel-universe point of view, from my mindset, which I call "Emily's universe."
First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal.
I have no interest in having my name live on after me.
In fact, I don't want it to, because it's been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they turn on you.
(Laughter) And I have actual proof of that.
A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all."
(Laughter) Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe.
That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration.
"I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern.
To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.
You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy.
You're given this enormous gift, life, you enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back.
And, you know, Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet" -- well, I've eaten my fill.
I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed.
I'm going into the ground just the way I am, and there, I invite every microbe and detritus-er and decomposer to have their fill.
I think they'll find me delicious.
(Laughter) I do.
So the best thing about my attitude, I think, is that it's real.
You can see it.
You can observe it.
It actually happens.
Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that -- but my life has certainly been enriched by other people.
By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog.
I don't have to use the executive brain function ...
Ha, ha, ha, I win!
(Laughter) And I am so grateful to you.
I don't want to say "the audience," because I don't really see it as we're two separate things.
I think of it in terms of quantum physics, again.
And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle.
There are different theories -- the collapse of the wave function, decoherence -- but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction.
(Voice breaking) So do you.
And every audience I've ever had, past and present.
Thank you so much for making my life real.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
I work with a species called "Bonobo."
And I'm happy most of the time, because I think this is the happiest species on the planet.
It's kind of a well-kept secret.
This species lives only in the Congo.
And they're not in too many zoos, because of their sexual behavior.
Their sexual behavior is too human-like for most of us to be comfortable with.
(Laughter) But -- (Laughter) actually, we have a lot to learn from them, because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society.
And sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they sort of set aside.
It permeates their entire life.
And it's used for communication.
And it's used for conflict resolution.
And I think perhaps somewhere in our history we sort of, divided our lives up into lots of parts.
We divided our world up with lots of categories.
And so everything sort of has a place that it has to fit.
But I don't think that we were that way initially.
There are many people who think that the animal world is hard-wired and that there's something very, very special about man.
Maybe it's his ability to have causal thought.
Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to have language.
Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to make tools or to have mathematics.
Well, I don't know.
There were Tasmanians who were discovered around the 1600s and they had no fire.
They had no stone tools.
To our knowledge they had no music.
So when you compare them to the Bonobo, the Bonobo is a little hairier.
He doesn't stand quite as upright.
But there are a lot of similarities.
And I think that as we look at culture, we kind of come to understand how we got to where we are.
And I don't really think it's in our biology; I think we've attributed it to our biology, but I don't really think it's there.
So what I want to do now is introduce you to a species called the Bonobo.
This is Kanzi.
He's a Bonobo.
Right now, he's in a forest in Georgia.
His mother originally came from a forest in Africa.
And she came to us when she was just at puberty, about six or seven years of age.
Now this shows a Bonobo on your right, and a chimpanzee on your left.
Clearly, the chimpanzee has a little bit harder time of walking.
The Bonobo, although shorter than us and their arms still longer, is more upright, just as we are.
This shows the Bonobo compared to an australopithecine like Lucy.
As you can see, there's not a lot of difference between the way a Bonobo walks and the way an early australopithecine would have walked.
As they turn toward us you'll see that the pelvic area of early australopithecines is a little flatter and doesn't have to rotate quite so much from side to side.
So the -- the bipedal gait is a little easier.
And now we see all four.
Video: Narrator: The wild Bonobo lives in central Africa, in the jungle encircled by the Congo River.
Canopied trees as tall as 40 meters, 130 feet, grow densely in the area.
It was a Japanese scientist who first undertook serious field studies of the Bonobo, almost three decades ago.
Bonobos are built slightly smaller than the chimpanzee.
Slim-bodied, Bonobos are by nature very gentle creatures.
Long and careful studies have reported many new findings on them.
One discovery was that wild Bonobos often walk bidpedally.
What's more, they are able to walk upright for long distances.
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh (video): Let's go say hello to Austin first and then go to the A frame.
SS: This is Kanzi and I, in the forest.
None of the things you will see in this particular video are trained.
None of them are tricks.
They all happened to be captured on film spontaneously, by NHK of Japan.
We have eight Bonobos.
Video: Look at all this stuff that's here for our campfire.
SS: An entire family at our research centre.
Video: You going to help get some sticks?
Good.
We need more sticks, too.
I have a lighter in my pocket if you need one.
That's a wasps' nest.
You can get it out.
I hope I have a lighter.
You can use the lighter to start the fire.
SS: So Kanzi is very interested in fire.
He doesn't do it yet without a lighter, but I think if he saw someone do it, he might be able to do -- make a fire without a lighter.
He's learning about how to keep a fire going.
He's learning the uses for a fire, just by watching what we do with fire.
(Laughter) This is a smile on the face of a Bonobo.
These are happy vocalizations.
Video: You're happy.
You're very happy about this part.
You've got to put some water on the fire.
You see the water?
Good job.
SS: Forgot to zip up the back half of his backpack.
But he likes to carry things from place to place.
Video: Austin, I hear you saying "Austin."
SS: He talks to other Bonobos at the lab, long-distance, farther than we can hear.
This is his sister.
This is her first time to try to drive a golf cart.
Video: Goodbye.
(Laughter) SS: She's got the pedals down, but not the wheel.
She switches from reverse to forward and she holds onto the wheel, rather than turns it.
(Laughter) Like us, she knows that that individual in the mirror is her.
(Music) Video: Narrator: By raising Bonobos in a culture that is both Bonobo and human, and documenting their development across two decades, scientists are exploring how cultural forces (Laughter) may have operated during human evolution.
His name is Nyota.
It means "star" in Swahili.
(Music) Panbanisha is trying to give Nyota a haircut with a pair of scissors.
In the wild, the parent Bonobo is known to groom its offspring.
Here Panbanisha uses scissors, instead of her hands, to groom Nyota.
Very impressive.
Subtle maneuvering of the hands is required to perform delicate tasks like this.
Nyota tries to imitate Panbanisha by using the scissors himself.
Realizing that Nyota might get hurt, Panbanisha, like any human mother, carefully tugs to get the scissors back.
He can now cut through tough animal hide.
SS: Kanzi's learned to make stone tools.
Video: Kanzi now makes his tools, just as our ancestors may have made them, two-and-a-half million years ago -- by holding the rocks in both hands, to strike one against the other.
He has learned that by using both hands and aiming his glancing blows, he can make much larger, sharper flakes.
Kanzi chooses a flake he thinks is sharp enough.
The tough hide is difficult to cut, even with a knife.
The rock that Kanzi is using is extremely hard and ideal for stone tool making, but difficult to handle, requiring great skill.
Kanzi's rock is from Gona, Ethiopia and is identical to that used by our African ancestors two-and-a-half million years ago.
These are the rocks Kanzi used and these are the flakes he made.
The flat sharp edges are like knife blades.
Compare them to the tools our ancestors used; they bear a striking resemblance to Kanzi's.
Panbanisha is longing to go for a walk in the woods.
She keeps staring out the window.
SS: This is -- let me show you something we didn't think they would do.
Video: For several days now, Panbanisha has not been outside.
SS: I normally talk about language.
Video: Then Panbanisha does something unexpected.
SS: But since I'm advised not to do what I normally do, I haven't told you that these apes have language.
It's a geometric language.
Video: She takes a piece of chalk and begins writing something on the floor.
What is she writing?
SS: She's also saying the name of that, with her voice.
Video: Now she comes up to Dr. Sue and starts writing again.
SS: These are her symbols on her keyboard.
(Music) They speak when she touches them.
Video: Panbanisha is communicating to Dr. Sue where she wants to go.
"A frame" represents a hut in the woods.
Compare the chalk writing with the lexigram on the keyboard.
Panbanisha began writing the lexigrams on the forest floor.
SS (video): Very nice.
Beautiful, Panbanisha.
SS: At first we didn't really realize what she was doing, until we stood back and looked at it and rotated it.
Video: This lexigram also refers to a place in the woods.
The curved line is very similar to the lexigram.
The next symbol Panbanisha writes represents "collar."
It indicates the collar that Panbanisha must wear when she goes out.
SS: That's an institutional requirement.
Video: This symbol is not as clear as the others, but one can see Panbanisha is trying to produce a curved line and several straight lines.
Researchers began to record what Panbanisha said, by writing lexigrams on the floor with chalk.
Panbanisha watched.
Soon she began to write as well.
The Bonobo's abilities have stunned scientists around the world.
How did they develop?
SS (video): We found that the most important thing for permitting Bonobos to acquire language is not to teach them.
It's simply to use language around them, because the driving force in language acquisition is to understand what others, that are important to you, are saying to you.
Once you have that capacity, the ability to produce language comes rather naturally and rather freely.
So we want to create an environment in which Bonobos, like all of the individuals with whom they are interacting -- we want to create an environment in which they have fun, and an environment in which the others are meaningful individuals for them.
Narrator: This environment brings out unexpected potential in Kanzi and Panbanisha.
Panbanisha is enjoying playing her harmonica, until Nyota, now one year old, steals it.
Then he peers eagerly into his mother's mouth.
Is he looking for where the sound came from?
Dr. Sue thinks it's important to allow such curiosity to flourish.
This time Panbanisha is playing the electric piano.
She wasn't forced to learn the piano; she saw a researcher play the instrument and took an interest.
Researcher: Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'm listening.
Do that real fast part that you did.
Yeah, that part.
Narrator: Kanzi plays the xylophone; using both hands he enthusiastically accompanies Dr. Sue's singing.
Kanzi and Panbanisha are stimulated by this fun-filled environment, which promotes the emergence of these cultural capabilities.
(Laughter) Researcher: OK, now get the monsters.
Get them.
Take the cherries too.
Now watch out, stay away from them now.
Now you can chase them again.
Time to chase them.
Now you have to stay away.
Get away.
Run away.
Run.
Now we can chase them again.
Go get them.
Oh no!
Good Kanzi.
Very good.
Thank you so much.
Narrator: None of us, Bonobo or human, can possibly even imagine?
SS: So we have a bi-species environment, we call it a "panhomoculture."
We're learning how to become like them.
We're learning how to communicate with them, in really high-pitched tones.
We're learning that they probably have a language in the wild.
And they're learning to become like us.
Because we believe that it's not biology; it's culture.
So we're sharing tools and technology and language with another species.
Thank you.
You know that little pink thing nestled in the corner of your eye?
It’s actually the remnant of a third eyelid.
Known as the “plica semilunaris,” it’s much more prominent in birds and a few mammals, and functions like a windshield wiper to keep dust and debris out of their eyes.
But in humans, it doesn’t work.
It’s vestigial, meaning it no longer serves its original purpose.
There are several other vestigial structures like the plica semilunaris in the human body.
Most of these became vestigial long before homo sapiens existed, quietly riding along from one of our ancestor species to the next.
But why have they stuck around for so long?
To answer this question, it helps to understand natural selection.
Natural selection simply means that traits which help an organism survive and reproduce in a given environment are more likely to make it to the next generation.
As the environment changes, traits that were once useful can become harmful.
Those traits are often selected against, meaning they gradually disappear from the population.
But if a trait isn’t actively harmful, it might not get selected against, and stick around even though it isn’t useful.
Take the tailbone.
Evolutionary biologists think that as the climate got drier and grasslands popped up, our tail-bearing ancestors left the trees and started walking on land.
The tails that had helped them in the trees began to disrupt their ability to walk on land.
So individuals with mutations that reduced the length of their tails became more successful at life on land, surviving long enough to pass their short tails on to the next generation.
The change was likely gradual over millions of years until, about 20 million years ago, our ancestors’ external tails disappeared altogether.
Today, we know human embryos have tails that dissolve as the embryo develops.
But the stubby tailbone sticks around, probably because it doesn’t cause any harm— in fact, it serves a more minor function as the anchor point for certain other muscles.
Up to 85% of people have a vestigial muscle called the “palmaris longus.”
To see if you do, put your hand down on a flat surface and touch your pinkie to your thumb.
If you see a little band pop up in the middle of your wrist, that’s the tendon that attaches to this now-defunct muscle.
In this case, the fact that not everyone has it has helped us trace its function.
Vestigial traits can persist when there’s no incentive to lose them— but since there’s also no incentive to keep them, random mutations will sometimes still eliminate them from part of the population.
Looking at our primate relatives, we can see that the palmaris longus is sometimes absent in those that spend more time on the land, but always present in those that spend more time in trees.
So we think it used to help us swing from branch to branch, and became unnecessary when we moved down to land.
The appendix, meanwhile, may once have been part of the intestinal system our ancestors used for digesting plant materials.
As their diets changed, those parts of the intestinal system began to shrink.
Unlike other vestigial structures, though, the appendix isn’t always harmless— it can become dangerously inflamed.
For most of human history, a burst appendix could be a death sentence.
So why did it stick around?
It’s possible that it was very slowly on its way out, or that mutations simply hadn’t arisen to make it smaller.
Or maybe it has other benefits— for example, it might still be a reservoir of bacteria that helps us break down food.
But the fact is, we’re not really sure why the appendix persists.
Evolution is an imperfect process.
Human beings are the result of millions of years of trial, error, and random chance— and we’re full of evolutionary relics to remind us of that.
I'm a protein designer.
And I'd like to discuss a new type of medicine.
It's made from a molecule called a constrained peptide.
There are only a few constrained peptide drugs available today, but there are a lot that will hit the market in the coming decade.
Let's explore what these new medicines are made of, how they're different and what's causing this incoming tidal wave of new and exciting medicines.
Constrained peptides are very small proteins.
They've got extra chemical bonds that constrain the shape of the molecule, and this makes them incredibly stable as well as highly potent.
They're naturally occurring, our bodies actually produce a few of these that help us to combat bacterial, fungal and viral infections.
And animals like snakes and scorpions use constrained peptides in their venom.
Drugs that are made of protein are called biologic drugs.
So this includes constrained peptides, as well as medicines like insulin or antibody drugs like Humira or Enbrel.
And in general, biologics are great, because they avoid several ways that drugs can cause side effects.
First, protein.
It's a totally natural, nontoxic material in our bodies.
Our cells produce tens of thousands of different proteins, and basically, all of our food has protein in it.
And second, sometimes drugs interact with molecules in your body that you don't want them to.
Compared to small molecule drugs, and by this I mean regular drugs, like aspirin, biologics are quite large.
Molecules interact when they adopt shapes that fit together perfectly.
Much like a lock and key.
Well, a larger key has more grooves, so it's more likely to fit into a single lock.
But most biologics also have a flaw.
They're fragile.
So they're usually administered by injection, because our stomach acid would destroy the medicine if we tried to swallow it.
Constrained peptides are the opposite.
They're really durable, like regular drugs.
So it's possible to administer them using pills, inhalers, ointments.
This is what makes constrained peptides so desirable for drug development.
They combine some of the best features of small-molecule and biologic drugs into one.
But unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to reengineer the constrained peptides that we find in nature to become new drugs.
So this is where I come in.
Creating a new drug is a lot like crafting a key to fit a particular lock.
We need to get the shape just right.
But if we change the shape of a constrained peptide by too much, those extra chemical bonds are unable to form and the whole molecule falls apart.
So we needed to figure out how to gain control over their shape.
I was part of a collaborative scientific effort that spanned a dozen institutions across three continents that came together and solved this problem.
We took a radically different approach from previous efforts.
Instead of making changes to the constrained peptides that we find in nature, we figured out how to build new ones totally from scratch.
To help us do this, we developed freely available open-source peptide-design software that anyone can use to do this, too.
To test our method out, we generated a series of constrained peptides that have a wide variety of different shapes.
Many of these had never been seen in nature before.
Then we went into the laboratory and produced these peptides.
Next, we determined their molecular structures, using experiments.
When we compared our designed models with the real molecular structures, we found that our software can position individual atoms with an accuracy that's at the limit of what's possible to measure.
Three years ago, this couldn't be done.
But today, we have the ability to create designer peptides with shapes that are custom-tailored for drug development.
So where is this technology taking us?
Well, recently, my colleagues and I designed constrained peptides that neutralize influenza virus, protect against botulism poisoning and block cancer cells from growing.
Some of these new drugs have been tested in preclinical trials with laboratory animals.
And so far, they're all safe and highly effective.
Constrained peptide design is a cutting-edge technology, and the drug development pipeline is slow and cautious.
So we're still three to five years out from human trials.
But during that time, more constrained peptide drugs are going to be entering the drug development pipeline.
And ultimately, I believe that designed peptide drugs are going to enable us all to break free from the constraints of our diseases.
Thank you.
(Applause)