the collective wisdom of all of
humankind led to the medical
advancements that made us modern we're
attacking the things that harm us on a
microscopic level we're finding new ways
of preventing disease everyday question
is how far can we go
what seems to be fantasy and sci-fi in
the world of health and human body is
actually just right around the corner
imagine having your own personal catalog
of replacement tissue sitting on a shelf
we can tweak a skin cell and turn it
into a brain so and rebuild your body
parts
that's the horizon and it's not far away
it's not 50 years away
it's going on right now this lab is to
genetics what the printing press was to
written work
here in this lab we synthesized DNA so a
lot of people have heard about the human
genome project where DNA was coded but
here what we're doing is actually
building pieces of DNA the DNA code in
every cell it's not only a source of
information for example your eye color
your hair color height but it's also
sort of control of different processes
in your body things like regenerating
cells at different speeds in different
parts of your body it's an incredible
incredible technology our overarching
goal is making DNA ubiquitous to make it
available to everyone the things that
we're working on right now we know can
be game-changing better more specific
drugs personalized drugs
we're enabling a lot of different types
of projects but i always like to think
about the people that are studying
cancer there's been a lot of cancer in
my family
cancer is a very dynamic disease but if
you can accelerate research then you can
actually create a designer therapy for a
specific tumor and faster you can do
that the earlier you can intervene and
that's everything in cancer
in the world of synthetic biology it's
either going to be the thing that saves
humanity or the thing that kills
humanity so were part of an organization
that self police's in the industry we
have different protocols to ensure that
none of us will design and build
something harmful to humanity and I
think as we think about medicine
this is the next revolution in Madison
this is the ability to really create
personalized medicine it's an
opportunity to help humankind
