The era of personal DNA testing is here | Sebastian Kraves

95,124 views ・ 2016-10-13

TED


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Imagine that you're a pig farmer.
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You live on a small farm in the Philippines.
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Your animals are your family's sole source of income --
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as long as they're healthy.
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You know that any day,
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one of your pigs can catch the flu,
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the swine flu.
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Living in tight quarters, one pig coughing and sneezing
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may soon lead to the next pig coughing and sneezing,
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until an outbreak of swine flu has taken over your farm.
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If it's a bad enough virus,
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the health of your herd may be gone in the blink of an eye.
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If you called in a veterinarian,
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he or she would visit your farm and take samples
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from your pigs' noses and mouths.
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But then they would have to drive back into the city
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to test those samples in their central lab.
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Two weeks later, you'd hear back the results.
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Two weeks may be just enough time for infection to spread
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and take away your way of life.
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But it doesn't have to be that way.
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Today, farmers can take those samples themselves.
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They can jump right into the pen and swab their pigs' noses and mouths
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with a little filter paper,
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place that little filter paper in a tiny tube,
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and mix it with some chemicals that will extract genetic material
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from their pigs' noses and mouths.
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And without leaving their farms,
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they take a drop of that genetic material
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and put it into a little analyzer smaller than a shoebox,
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program it to detect DNA or RNA from the swine flu virus,
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and within one hour get back the results, visualize the results.
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This reality is possible
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because today we're living in the era of personal DNA technology.
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Every one of us can actually test DNA ourselves.
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DNA is the fundamental molecule the carries genetic instructions
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that help build the living world.
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Humans have DNA.
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Pigs have DNA.
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Even bacteria and some viruses have DNA too.
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The genetic instructions encoded in DNA inform how our bodies develop,
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grow, function.
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And in many cases, that same information can trigger disease.
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Your genetic information
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is strung into a long and twisted molecule, the DNA double helix,
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that has over three billion letters,
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beginning to end.
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But the lines that carry meaningful information
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are usually very short --
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a few dozen to several thousand letters long.
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So when we're looking to answer a question based on DNA,
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we actually don't need to read
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all those three billion letters, typically.
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That would be like getting hungry at night
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and having to flip through the whole phone book
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from cover to cover,
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pausing at every line,
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just to find the nearest pizza joint.
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(Laughter)
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Luckily, three decades ago,
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humans started to invent tools
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that can find any specific line of genetic information.
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These DNA machines are wonderful.
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They can find any line in DNA.
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But once they find it,
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that DNA is still tiny, and surrounded by so much other DNA,
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that what these machines then do is copy the target gene,
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and one copy piles on top of another,
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millions and millions and millions of copies,
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until that gene stands out against the rest;
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until we can visualize it,
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interpret it, read it, understand it,
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until we can answer:
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Does my pig have the flu?
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Or other questions buried in our own DNA:
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Am I at risk of cancer?
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Am I of Irish descent?
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Is that child my son?
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(Laughter)
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This ability to make copies of DNA, as simple as it sounds,
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has transformed our world.
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Scientists use it every day to detect and address disease,
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to create innovative medicines,
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to modify foods,
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to assess whether our food is safe to eat
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or whether it's contaminated with deadly bacteria.
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Even judges use the output of these machines in court
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to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty based on DNA evidence.
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The inventor of this DNA-copying technique
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was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.
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But for 30 years,
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the power of genetic analysis has been confined to the ivory tower,
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or bigwig PhD scientist work.
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Well, several companies around the world
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are working on making this same technology accessible
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to everyday people like the pig farmer,
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like you.
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I cofounded one of these companies.
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Three years ago,
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together with a fellow biologist and friend of mine,
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Zeke Alvarez Saavedra,
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we decided to make personal DNA machines
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that anyone could use.
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Our goal was to bring DNA science to more people in new places.
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We started working in our basements.
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We had a simple question:
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What could the world look like
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if everyone could analyze DNA?
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We were curious,
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as curious as you would have been if I had shown you this picture in 1980.
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(Laughter)
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You would have thought, "Wow!
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I can now call my Aunt Glenda from the car
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and wish her a happy birthday.
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I can call anyone, anytime.
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This is the future!"
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Little did you know,
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you would tap on that phone to make dinner reservations
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for you and Aunt Glenda to celebrate together.
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With another tap, you'd be ordering her gift.
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And yet one more tap,
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and you'd be "liking" Auntie Glenda on Facebook.
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And all of this, while sitting on the toilet.
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(Laughter)
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It is notoriously hard to predict where new technology might take us.
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And the same is true for personal DNA technology today.
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For example, I could never have imagined
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that a truffle farmer, of all people,
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would use personal DNA machines.
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Dr. Paul Thomas grows truffles for a living.
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We see him pictured here,
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holding the first UK-cultivated truffle in his hands, on one of his farms.
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Truffles are this delicacy
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that stems from a fungus growing on the roots of living trees.
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And it's a rare fungus.
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Some species may fetch 3,000, 7,000, or more dollars per kilogram.
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I learned from Paul
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that the stakes for a truffle farmer can be really high.
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When he sources new truffles to grow on his farms,
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he's exposed to the threat of knockoffs --
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truffles that look and feel like the real thing,
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but they're of lower quality.
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But even to a trained eye like Paul's,
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even when looked at under a microscope,
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these truffles can pass for authentic.
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So in order to grow the highest quality truffles,
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the ones that chefs all over the world will fight over,
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Paul has to use DNA analysis.
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Isn't that mind-blowing?
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I bet you will never look at that black truffle risotto again
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without thinking of its genes.
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(Laughter)
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But personal DNA machines can also save human lives.
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Professor Ian Goodfellow is a virologist at the University of Cambridge.
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Last year he traveled to Sierra Leone.
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When the Ebola outbreak broke out in Western Africa,
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he quickly realized that doctors there lacked the basic tools
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to detect and combat disease.
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Results could take up to a week to come back --
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that's way too long for the patients and the families who are suffering.
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Ian decided to move his lab into Makeni, Sierra Leone.
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Here we see Ian Goodfellow
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moving over 10 tons of equipment into a pop-up tent
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that he would equip to detect and diagnose the virus
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and sequence it within 24 hours.
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But here's a surprise:
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the same equipment that Ian could use at his lab in the UK
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to sequence and diagnose Ebola,
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just wouldn't work under these conditions.
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We're talking 35 Celsius heat and over 90 percent humidity here.
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But instead, Ian could use personal DNA machines
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small enough to be placed in front of the air-conditioning unit
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to keep sequencing the virus
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and keep saving lives.
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This may seem like an extreme place for DNA analysis,
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but let's move on to an even more extreme environment:
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outer space.
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Let's talk about DNA analysis in space.
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When astronauts live aboard the International Space Station,
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they're orbiting the planet 250 miles high.
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They're traveling at 17,000 miles per hour.
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Picture that --
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you're seeing 15 sunsets and sunrises every day.
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You're also living in microgravity,
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floating.
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And under these conditions, our bodies can do funky things.
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One of these things is that our immune systems get suppressed,
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making astronauts more prone to infection.
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A 16-year-old girl,
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a high school student from New York, Anna-Sophia Boguraev,
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wondered whether changes to the DNA of astronauts
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could be related to this immune suppression,
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and through a science competition called "Genes In Space,"
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Anna-Sophia designed an experiment to test this hypothesis
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using a personal DNA machine aboard the International Space Station.
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Here we see Anna-Sophia on April 8, 2016, in Cape Canaveral,
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watching her experiment launch to the International Space Station.
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That cloud of smoke is the rocket
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that brought Anna-Sophia's experiment to the International Space Station,
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where, three days later,
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astronaut Tim Peake carried out her experiment --
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in microgravity.
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Personal DNA machines are now aboard the International Space Station,
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where they can help monitor living conditions
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and protect the lives of astronauts.
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A 16-year-old designing a DNA experiment
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to protect the lives of astronauts
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may seem like a rarity, the mark of a child genius.
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Well, to me, it signals something bigger:
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that DNA technology is finally within the reach of every one of you.
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A few years ago,
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a college student armed with a personal computer
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could code an app,
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an app that is now a social network with more than one billion users.
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Could we be moving into a world
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of one personal DNA machine in every home?
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I know families who are already living in this reality.
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The Daniels family, for example,
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set up a DNA lab in the basement of their suburban Chicago home.
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This is not a family made of PhD scientists.
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This is a family like any other.
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They just like to spend time together doing fun, creative things.
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By day, Brian is an executive at a private equity firm.
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At night and on weekends, he experiments with DNA
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alongside his kids, ages seven and nine,
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as a way to explore the living world.
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Last time I called them,
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they were checking out homegrown produce from the backyard garden.
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They were testing tomatoes that they had picked,
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taking the flesh of their skin, putting it in a test tube,
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mixing it with chemicals to extract DNA
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and then using their home DNA copier
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to test those tomatoes for genetically engineered traits.
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For the Daniels family,
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the personal DNA machine is like the chemistry set
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for the 21st century.
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Most of us may not yet be diagnosing genetic conditions
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in our kitchen sinks
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or doing at-home paternity testing.
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(Laughter)
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But we've definitely reached a point in history
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where every one of you could actually get hands-on with DNA
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in your kitchen.
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You could copy, paste and analyze DNA
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and extract meaningful information from it.
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And it's at times like this that profound transformation
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is bound to happen;
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moments when a transformative, powerful technology
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that was before limited to a select few in the ivory tower,
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finally becomes within the reach of every one of us,
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from farmers to schoolchildren.
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Think about the moment
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when phones stopped being plugged into the wall by cords,
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or when computers left the mainframe
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and entered your home or your office.
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The ripples of the personal DNA revolution
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may be hard to predict,
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but one thing is certain:
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revolutions don't go backwards,
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and DNA technology is already spreading faster than our imagination.
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So if you're curious,
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get up close and personal with DNA -- today.
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It is in our DNA to be curious.
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(Laughter)
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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