Name: 【TED】Saul Griffith: Hardware solutions to everyday problems
Uploaded: 2014-07-13T15:23:54.000Z
Duration: 15 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I usually say to people, when they say, "What do you do?"

because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do.

And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some

Valley event, to which he replied, "How quaint."

And I really should have said something smart.

And now I've had a little bit of time to think about it,

and we've seen all these problems in the last few days,

most of the big issues -- clean water, clean energy --

and they're interchangeable in some respects --

and cleaner, more functional materials --

they all look to me to be hardware problems.

This doesn't mean we should ignore software,

And that's in fact probably what I'm going to try and tell you about.

So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things

and what are the new ways that we're going to make things in the future.

Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you're a speaker

about "do this, do that" and you fill out all these forms,

and you don't actually know how they're going to describe you,

and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist.

And I've always been nervous about the term "futurist,"

because you seem doomed to failure because you can't really predict it.

And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have,

and said, "You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?"

And George Homsey, a great guy, said, "Oh, the future is amazing.

We're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut,

and we're going to make your poo smell like peppermint."

So, you may think that's sort of really crazy,

but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening

So, this isn't my work, but it's work of good friends of mine at MIT.

This is called the registry of standard biological parts.

This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight

and a few other very, very bright individuals.

Basically, what they're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system.

Literally, think of proteins as subroutines

that you can string together to execute a program.

Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea.

This is a state diagram. That's an extremely simple computer.

So that's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches.

And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich

And from the results of the same competition last year,

a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria

so that they can detect light and switch on and off.

So this is interesting in the sense that you can now

do "if-then-for" statements in materials, in structure.

because we used to live in a world where everyone's said glibly,

"Form follows function," but I think I've sort of grown up in a world

-- you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday;

I was in a lab associated with his -- where it's really a world

where information defines form and function.

but to show you the power of art over science --

this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called "HowToons."

I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta.

and about that many pages to describe what I was doing,

and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker.

He's an interesting little kid -- and his sister, Celine --

is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl.

And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things,

changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity.

In theory, if you program those sufficiently,

you should be able to do something pretty interesting

In this case, he's done self-replication of a complex 3D structure.

And that's what I thought about for a long time,

because this is how we currently make things.

that's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up.

The feature side is -- you know, people will say,

[unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now.

That's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans.

And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers,

We could do a lot more with computers and things generally

The secret to biology is, it builds computation

into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase,

is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA.

And the ribosome here is another little computer

that helps in the translation of the proteins.

in the sense that it's great to build in biological materials,

Can we get self-replicating-type behavior?

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【TED】Saul Griffith: Hardware solutions to everyday problems

literally

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