YouSaid · the spoken record

Susan Hockfield

lines on the record: 83
first: 2019-05-31
most recent: 2019-05-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, me too. Well, this is a fascinating read. This is Susan Huckfield. Her book is called The Age of Living Machines, including machines that will help us have cleaner water, more sustainable energy, and I don't know, a dating app. I don't know. What is the dating app of a living machine? It's a person. Anyway, how biology will build the next technology revolution? I urge you to read it. Thank you very much, Susan.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If an asteroid were coming toward Earth, don't you think we'd mount every possible defense to send it off its course rather than say asteroids don't exist? Of course we would. So it's simply folly to my mind not to step up and invent the technologies that are going to prevent us from the ravages of climate change that we're inflicting on the planet or frankly, whether it's us or anyone or some other natural operation. It's our job to protect ourselves so that we have a better future.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get that, and it terrifies me. So we have to continue to insist on an apolitical realm. Politics are never out of it entirely. We have to insist on understanding that there are people who understand areas that are better than we do I don't pretend to be an engineer. I don't pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they've figured out gravitational waves, I'm going to trust them more than I'm going to trust myself to imagine whether or not they're gravitational waves. But this idea that there are people with expertise that we should. Value and value their opinions greater than others. I understand that people might debate. But the fact is that the best science indicates that we're in trouble.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think water is critical. I think energy is absolutely critical. If we don't figure out how to provide sustainable energy, our planet is doomed And one of the things I really do worry about is this current lack of confidence in experts and expertise. It's what science is about. We test ideas, we contest ideas, and if we don't believe that there are things that are more right than others, which is where we place our bets now, we have no way of making it into the future.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, what a great question. I don't know that I have a favorite. I am, you know, I always say that my crystal ball gets a little fuzzy five years out And I'm not sure if there were some people who 25 years before that computer that wrote on Apollo 11, right? Which was an amazing achievement. There were people probably who thought there could be a computer like that. It's a step-by-step evolution. So I see a lot of potential in all the technologies I've called out and well beyond. There is some kid in some lab at MIT or in any place anywhere in the country who has an idea, a new idea of a living machine. That you or I couldn't”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Review. So he understood that it was the community of scientists, community of engineers who knew best where the frontiers would emerge from. So you can say it's top down because it's federal funding, but it's top-down mediated. By the community who are at the leading edge, a brilliant of where it's going.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are a lot of components to it, and I haven't given up hope that the United States will be a leader in this. There are things that we do in our culture that are absolutely fantastic, are insisting on scientific integrity, our sense of real competition, internal competition to figure out what kind of technology is going to win. I love the idea, although I think it should be funded differently, of people making bets, different people making bets on various technology that it's not all government. Government isn't saying what we do and what we don't do. One of the recipes that Vanderburg Bush laid out in his Science the Endless Frontier blueprint was about federal funding. How is federal funding distributed”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sustained economic growth. So finishing up, how do we do that? How do we dominate the age of living machines? Because it worked out pretty well. The last technology booms were pretty, or is it just a global? It seems like it still isn't a global situation for anybody. It's a Chinese situation or American situation or a European. How do we get our arms around?”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China and other smaller countries, but China's putting the kind of money behind this that is stunning. You know, when our Chinese colleagues came with the same question, they were enormously insightful because many of the others would say, we just want to know how to build engineering. We need engineering departments because that's where the tech transfer comes from. We understand that's how technology gets developed. But our Chinese colleagues would say, we get it. We're going to build the best physics departments. We're going to build the best math departments. We're going to build the best biology departments. We're going to do basic science because we understand that that's at the foundation of the engineering of the technologies for the future. A very broad understanding of the intellectual backdrop for economic growth.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you help us understand how we can build something like MIT? Because we understand that is part of the recipe to build an economy like the United States has enjoyed. It is exciting. It's awesome that other countries want to build these things, but what it means is we've got competition. Right. And if you look at investments, exact China.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, there is evidence of these being the catalysts of war. And so motivating the nation to understand that we have an opportunity not just to, for the promise of peace, But also for the promise of the next generation of economic growth. I'll tell you Following World War II, the United States played this game essentially by ourselves, what might have been our rivals in Europe were building rebuilding their countries after the war. We had emerged from the war without the need to rebuild our destroyed cities. So we had that advantage. But now Everyone understands the recipe that the United States used. And while I was president, there was hardly a week that would go by when someone from some other country wasn't in my office saying, we understand what the United States did, we want to do it in our country.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So where is that now? Because these things do come out of war. They come out of conflict and things like that. And there are obviously controversies in Silicon Valley about funding a lot of war related stuff. But we are not in a state of war. We haven't been in a state of major war for a very long time, luckily. How do you get that kind of urgency then to create things for peace, I guess? Because that's where it really is. We will have wars over water. We'll have wars over resources. We'll have wars over energy. It seems that those are the wars to come going forward if I'd had to guess, one would have to guess.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happens through incentives, and there are a number of things that we've done in the past to encourage those kinds of incentives and to privilege those kinds of companies. Right now, there is hardly an incentive to do that. The big accelerant for the second half of the 20th century. Coming out of World War II, where we had poured federal dollars into research that created the technology marvels of World War II. And toward the end of the war, FDR turned to Vanervar Bush, his primary science advisor, and said, can we not figure out how to transform this strategy for war into a strategy for peace? And Bush laid out a blueprint for the second half of the 20th century in America that actually put all the pieces together and produced not just a research enterprise, an educational enterprise, and an industrial enterprise.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how do you do that? How do you get that to people thinking like that? I mean, you have people with plenty of money, there's plenty of money all over. They tend to fund universities or long-term research progress, but how do you get people thinking like that?”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truth be told, you can do that less expensively someplace else. So we want to be able to design a new manufacturing sector. Makes use of these new ideas. But for that, we need long term investment”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build a new battery company, similarly difficult. And so you have to have long term investments. You have to set up conditions that encourage people to put in the money and have the stamina to last through all of the wrong blind alleys and failed pursuits that you're going to do before you actually get to the promised land. Currently, we don't privilege long term investments. Investments get the same kind of tax advantage if you invest for a year or two, if you invest for 20 years. That's not a recipe for success for these really tough technologies. We talk about building a new manufacturing base in the United States. We've got a start by building the technologies that we want to manufacture. We can go back to the technologies of yesteryear, but...”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then we've got to get these technologies out of the lab into the marketplace. And this is a place where I think also our national policies are misaligned. The kinds of technologies I've just described are what we at MIT call TuffTech. They are tough. Let me give you one example of just how hard it is to take a biologic from a lab into the marketplace So her septin is nichentech drug for a variant of breast cancer. That was a death sentence. It's called Her2 positive. It has a particular marker on it. And the her2 gene between the discovery of the her2 gene and the FDA approval of her septin 20 years. And not because no one was trying. Working as hard as they can and standardly for any biological product, you know, the guess is that the estimate is it's not a guess, it is overall. It's about 10 years in a billion dollars.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And provided jobs and futures for our nation. We can come back to that later if you like. But the agencies themselves can organize themselves. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has played a role in making that happen. My own view is we need a go-to strategy rather than reinventing it episodically to deal with some particular issues.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to fund it. We understand its importance. If you look through our history, this is the source of not just medical cures, this is the source of the technologies that have built our economy.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. We've got And so, how would this be that way? I mean, how is, and it requires the administration also to be, or maybe not. Maybe these things just go on, these various institutes. How do you get the”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and from time to time, we mount fantastic cross-agency collaborations. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the United States was nowhere in nanotechnology. Until we realized that we had to get moving and across agency collaboration was built to make that happen. The Human Genome Project, cross-agency, it required development of great technology and great biology. We figured out how to do that. But it's episodic. It's new brain initiative is another great example of crossing agencies. It's from time to time. So we don't have a standard way.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fantastic. But you're right. Mobilizing government to take a particular issue seriously takes a nation's enthusiasm. So, the NIH does biomedical and biological research, the National Science Foundation does engineering research and some physics research and some math, the Department of Energy does a lot of physics research. And if you think about how are you going to fund a project that crosses these disciplines, that is really hard to do because none of these agencies is really set up. Do that.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basic research funding. We talked earlier about how biologists and engineers are raised in very different disciplines with very different vocabularies and creating opportunities for these people from different cultures essentially to come together is a challenge, but it's a challenge that I think we can meet in more and more places are trying to figure out how to actually make that happen in terms of bringing people together. But if you think about how these activities are funded, our federal funding agencies have done truly a magnificent job in catalyzing discovery. But they were set up along, let's just say a 20th century model. So, the National Institutes of Health, which has delivered incredible things. I mean, HIV AIDS was a death sentence, and within a decade. Became a”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There hasn't been. No, so this is a very big challenge, and there are two pieces of this. There's the funding of the fundamental research that leads to A possible opening in the marketplace”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can detect it. Now we all happen to be familiar with over-the-counter pregnancy tests. We already know how to do that. And detecting something in urine is so much easier than detecting it in blood. Blood is full of other proteins. Urine, normal urine, has no protein background, essentially no protein background. And what she and her team have shown is that at least animal models, this synthetic biomarker that she's designed can detect cancers when they're about a tenth the size of current detection. Techniques, and that one would anticipate a fraction of the expense. So, very powerful techniques”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Sangeeta thought, ha, if we could detect that enzyme, we could actually say whether there's a cancer or not. So the nanoparticle has a little stretch of protein on it that contains the site for that cancer enzyme. So, the idea is you put this decorated nanoparticle into a patient if there isn't any cancer, that nanoparticle stays whole, eventually will... Degrade, but if there is a cancer, the cancer's enzyme will clip off those protein fragments. And she's designed it so that the protein fragment is small enough Be filtered by the kidney into the urine”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, can we move earlier? One living machine that Sangeetabhati here at MIT has developed is using nanoparticles that detect the earliest signs of cancer, that is the changes in the biology of the cancer. For a detection method. This is just, I love this. This just blows my mind. So let me see if I can explain. I'm waving my hands, but without a whiteboard or a blackboard. So you take a nanoparticle and decorate it with a short stretch of a protein. One of the hallmarks of many diseases is they make disease-specific processes and disease-specific enzymes. An enzyme is a kind of protein that cuts other proteins, we'll just say for now. And for a cancer to grow, it's got to grow in an environment that's very dense. It can't grow unless it cuts up the material standing in its way. So cancers make particular kinds of enzymes.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, we can come back to that if you want. The second best strategy for many diseases, not for all, is early detection. So, particularly for cancer, if you can detect a cancer early, your probability of actually curing someone for cancer is much higher than if you detect it late after a cancer is spread from its primary location and metastasized to other locations. Our technologies for detecting cancer right now have gotten better and declining death rates from cancer finally after decades of trying resulting from reduced smoking, but also from diagnostic procedures like colonoscopy and mammography. Are late, actually. So by the time you can detect a cancer using those methods, cancers are pretty far along.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Water is going to be critical, but health. You know, we have endless conversations in the United States about how we can deliver health and health care to our population at more reasonable cost and with better access. And for many diseases, not all, but for many diseases, You can make a lot of progress. Obviously, number one is prevention. If you can prevent a disease, that's great. That's vaccination. So if we could persuade everyone to get vaccinated,”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you need to feed more people. Food and water is rate limiting for population. In any case, we're at a similar point now. We've got to figure out how to provide for 9.5 billion plus people without provoking war and famine and all these terrible things in the past. So energy, we talked about energy.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when there are too many people, there's war, there's famine, there's epidemics, there are ways of reducing the population and that's coming basically, you know, the world is ending. What he didn't recognize is that new technology for agriculture were already in place. Four-field crop rotation. And these ships that were going around the world exploring things were coming on islands that were actually not much land mass, but a huge amount of bird poop, guano.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fine. I'll probably be dead then too. But we've got kids, enormous issue. And we are already stressing our planet to provide the energy, the water. The food, and by the way, the health and health care that we need to have a vibrant and productive global population. And so we have to We can be hysterical about it, or we can say we're going to develop new technologies to meet these challenges. This has been a refrain throughout human history. Many people are familiar with the name of Malthus. In 1798, did this fantastic demographic study That population growth was faster than the growth in agricultural production. We're all going to starve. And then he went back and looked through time and said, We always face this problem.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that we have over seven and a half billion people on the planet and very Sage predictions have it that we will be over 9.7 billion by 2050. That's right.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a really big problem, of course, is, let me just back up. The biggest problem that we face right now outside of people not getting along the biggest technological problem is”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is all really important to have batteries that really work. She told me recently. Everyone who reads any kind of technology section of the newspaper will understand that if we are sticking with lithium or cobalt, we're not going to get very far because these are expensive and dangerous metals to have around.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They work just like regular batteries. It's just that the cathode is built with a virus. The anode is built with a virus. You package them together. You have a battery. The batteries that she's building now have the same charge density of state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries. And the most importantly, they recharge over the same number of cycles as standard lithium IFS.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a highly ordered structure, which again makes it perfect for batteries. And so she has these viruses that bind battery components make sheets naturally and that she then packages into the standard coin cell battery cases that”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build wires that could have some different kinds of designs in our current wires. And then she realized that the things that viruses organized well, metals, made them perfectly designed for building batteries. And so she's done a couple of things. She has selected, she mutates viruses and then select those that bind to, let's just say, cobalt, right? Carbon nanotubes. There are various things that you want to put in a battery to make them work better. Some of it she does just through kind of random mutation and selection. And some of them she does by targeted genetic manipulation. So she has a library of viruses that organize components of batteries. Because these viruses have a rod-like structure, they're almost like crystals. And so you can get them to lie down in sheets.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's use the. So Angie's question is Could we use the proteins on the surface of a virus not to bind biological things, not to bind organic things, but to bind metals? Her first application was actually could we use viruses to build wires? Simple problem compared to batteries. So she did that and then realized that.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While viruses organize organic materials, that's what they do. They bind to your cell, they interact with the world around them through the proteins on their surface.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what a battery is a carefully organized, a closely organized set of materials, you know, lithium, cobalt, whatever you want to put it, but they have to be organized. It's not all jumbled up together. They have to be organized into essentially layers and components and be separated. The standard method is a chemical method, but Angie looks at the abalone shelf. Abyone can build this. Can't we get living things to build what we need? And she has used viruses, standard lab strains of virus that she has modified so that they bind the metallic components of batteries. Now, we knew they bound organic components, so biological”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Angie Belcher, a faculty member at MIT at the Coke Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, by the way. You can talk about her cancer research also, has figured out how to get viruses to organize battery components. So her lab now can make lithium ion batteries essentially lithium batteries using viruses. But they make them at room temperature without any toxic byproducts. So that potentially”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Produces a huge amount of toxic waste. And, you know, that's not really sustainable if you do a full accounting. That's not sustainable at all. So we need better ways of making batteries.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the components change a little bit. So the lithium ion battery that is now kind of state of the art, great batteries. But the problem with lithium ion batteries is to make them consumes a huge amount of energy.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's so funny. I just had a discussion with, I don't mean to drop names, but Elon Musk was going on about this. It's like it's just a storage vehicle. And then he was saying it hasn't changed at all. It hasn't changed in any way.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me get your battery again. So energy, sustainable energy is a really big problem for us. We love the idea of alternative energies to get off fossil fuels, but truth be told, wind and solar are not viable. Really at scale. Without storage Sometimes the sun doesn't shine, sometimes the wind doesn't blow, and then what are you going to use So without really phenomenally efficient and effective energy storage, Wind and solar are not going to be really replacement technologies for fossil fuels. And so batteries is what energy storage devices are called. And the technology for batteries is basically the same that Volta invented over 200 years ago.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything We have to find them. But we now have the technology to find them. We have technologies to understand them. And you know, we know how to change them to fit our purposes. So the molecular biology revolution. That decoded how information is carried in a cell. And then the second biology revolution, genomics, which allows us to tackle genes and proteins in enormous number. Allow us to figure out how we might manipulate a protein if it doesn't perfectly fit our needs, how to change it a little bit. So it more exactly fits the needs that we might want it to fit.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only, only. And so the concept is that there are millions of these machines living in biology, zillions and forever. Everything in biology is a machine. It's some kind of machine that solves a problem and that we just have to look at them. They're there. We just have to look at them.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Potentially more efficient. Potentially more specific than the kind of Then the water purification methods that we've used before.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And And the components of machines have jobs too. And basically that's what proteins. Proteins are the components that form the whole machine of a cell. But the proteins themselves act as little machines. Some of them are more active than others. Some are just kind of passive pores. In any case, so filtering water is a very difficult task. And with the discovery of this water channel called aquaporin, it was discovered by Peter Agre, another fascinating story, how he got to it. But the idea is that rather than racking our brains to figure out how to build new Channel that would be selective for water. Why don't we just use what nature has given us? And so aquaporin AS is a company outside of Copenhagen that's building water filters using the aquaporin protein. And it's a very different way of thinking about how to purify water.”
2019-05-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Susan Hockfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT