Biotechnology: Humanity’s Promising Future - Harvey Lodish | Endgame #118 (Luminaries)

look it's all education yeah it's all higher education and the willingness of the governments and the politicians to put the money in there right Ai and biology are merging and that will become very important in the future it's already becoming important [Music] hi friends and fellows welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses including Stanford University the purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you I want to thank you for your support so far and welcome to the special series it's such an honor to have Professor Harvey ludish who is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and also professor of biology and biomedical engineering at MIT Harvey thank you so much for the time it's a pleasure to be on your show and look forward to talking with you thank you thank you I want to I want to explore a little bit about where and how you grew up you came from Ohio and of all the great universities that you could have gone but you chose to go to a small College tell us right I was a very good student in high school and everyone assumed I would go to Harvard I applied to Harvard it was the only school I applied to I got in I got a nice scholarship but I had visited Harvard and I realized it was simply too big too impersonal I suppose at the time I was pretty insecure and I went to my high school guidance counselor and said where should I go to study chemistry and Mathematics and she suggested Kenyon College uh at the time it was an all men's school right about 400 students it's now 1600 and it's co-ed but I went there spent a lot of time with a couple of the professors and realized that I could get exactly the education I wanted I could organize my own class schedule and take the courses that I wanted I double majored in chemistry and Mathematics and graduated in three years uh two other courses there were only two students and one of the courses I put together I had to do three semesters of physical chemistry in one and the physical chemistry professor was on sabbatical but they had a visitor who had just done a PhD in biophysical chemistry and I talked with him and we agreed to have a course there was a book that had just been published called biophysical chemistry that neither he of course nor I had read and we agreed that for the course we would read the book together he would give me lots of problems to solve and in parallel I would read the standard textbook on physical chemistry which I found slightly boring anyway I learned biophysical chemistry and physical chemistry and did it very efficiently on a one-on-one course with a professor and that's the kind of thing you get in a small liberal arts college you simply can't get it in a large University so I'm forever grateful to Kenyon that it was really a privilege to be there and have that kind of education I can relate to this a lot because I'm sort of a product of a liberal arts education earlier and what the world doesn't know is that liberal arts colleges certainly in the united well they're almost unique to the United States that's the first point most of them started as church-related institutions to train ministers in the new Wilderness that America was expanding into and yet they produce a large fraction of our leading scientists yes yeah for exactly the sorts of classes that I just talked about yeah we'll get to that in a bit but let's you know there's been some great personalities coming out of Canyon College including yourself of course a great actor president yeah but button went in I was in a Kenyan uh movie development movie uh where we were together although I've never met I've never met him but um my daughter Heidi went there she met her husband there right their daughter Emma just graduated from Kenya and I've talked there I've taught a seminar Class A number of years ago on stem cells and I hope to go back to Kenyon and teach a short course on biotechnology this coming fall so it's always been a big part of my life I also served on the Board of Trustees again for almost 20 years you went on to Rockefeller University I did which is a great University that unfortunately not a lot of people in Asia are aware of well they should be because a lot of the students in Rockefeller are foreign okay and again I picked Rockefeller over well let me go back I went to graduate school I started graduate school in 1962. and molecular biology was an emerging field it was not even an established part of biology there were only three or four universities in the United States that had substantial research in molecular biology Rockefeller being one Berkeley in Stanford being the others in a sense I was taking a risk by going into a brand new field but there was something about understanding biology at a molecular level that appealed to me and Rockefeller was again a perfect place for me the whole graduate class that I entered with was about 20 students and even to this day several of them are my best friends yeah many of them are Nobel laureates too um I I have friends there uh I mean I remember the story of your encountering well I'll tell you uh it was my first my I should say my parents were very very conservative and were quite upset that I wasn't in medical school which is where they thought I should be and it got worse during my first day of Rockefeller because I was shown into my single room but I was sharing a bathroom with the next room and the person in the next room was empty I mean he seemed nice enough but my mother's parting words were you know Harvey he's not our man you shouldn't have anything to do with him now 13 years later when that hippie David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize of medicine then it was completely different the message all over Cleveland exactly you know my son's best friend just won a Nobel Prize okay and David to this day is still one of my best friends right and this is 60 years ago almost but that's the atmosphere then I mean these were a lot of very bright very creative very interesting people who were going into molecular biology and I was privileged to know and work with many of them right so on my thesis committee were two Nobel laureates and Tatum and Fritz leipman and then later I was privileged to be a postdoc at the molecular biology laboratory in Cambridge England um probably the world's leading Center for molecular biology where I was able to work with Francis Crick who had just one of the Nobel Prize for Indiana structure and also with Sydney Brenner who was going to win a Nobel Prize and one or two of my classmates did one of Nobel prizes from there and and you you got an offer to teach at Berkeley and you somehow well no no okay I was in my last year at rock well I'll tell you I was in no it's because of Ronald Reagan that I'm at MIT okay so my last year Rockefeller in 1966 I was invited to give a series of lectures at Berkeley which turned out to be a job interview and they offered me a faculty position that I would take up in 1968 after my postdoc and I actually accepted the job that summer right I had to sign a loyalty oath and explaining to a British Barrister when an American loyalty or if it's something else but I was actually listed on the faculty of the University of California Berkeley but that was 1967 this was the peak of the Vietnam War peak of the anti-war movement um the peak of students for Democratic Society SDS and so forth and that fall Ronald Reagan got elected governor of California and started putting the screws on Berkeley particularly that the faculty should spend more time with students and not politicking and so forth and I was very concerned I was in England and I resigned and then God blessed him salvadoria who you know was on The Faculty at MIT then again a future Nobel Laureate recruited me to MIT well and I've been here my whole professional career it's been the most fabulous place in the world to be able to do research and in particular I get to work with some of the literally brightest students in the world you've tell us about what you've been doing all this time you know the the field that you've been working on yeah it it's called molecular biology when I was trained as a graduate student in postdoc the research was almost entirely on bacterial cells and viruses that infect bacterial cells because experimentally that's what we knew how to handle there was very little if any work on what we call eukaryotic cells cell cells are the true nucleus that would include yeast but more importantly include you know humans and fruit flies and worms and things of that sort experimental and we were just beginning to work on these higher cells so soon after I arrived at MIT my laboratory started working on the formation of red cells and particularly on the protein hemoglobin which is the major protein in red blood cells I mean to give you an idea we didn't know how proteins initiated in higher cells we knew that a methional TRNA was the initiator of bacterial cells but we really had no idea what amino acid if any was the specific initiator in higher cells and I had a brilliant graduate student David Houseman who figured out how to solve the problem and uh I think it was three years after I joined the MIT faculty we published a paper showing that it was methionine and that really was the last letter of the genetic code and then at that time I had my first sabbatical visitor who was then a young MD from Children's Hospital named named David Nathan so he was a hematologist who I guess it heard that molecular biology was going to be the future of academic medicine and came to my lab and together we studied a disease of hemoglobin synthesis which you may know is quite common now in Southeast Asia beta thalassemia where one of the two globin chains is not made in the right amount and we figured out this is 1970 so we're talking about over 50 years ago we designed an experiment to show that it was an insufficient amount of the messenger RNA that made the beta globin now we of course had no cloning or anything like that but we could establish that the message just wasn't there the small amount of message that was there function normally but it didn't make a sufficient amount of the beta globin so you had the disease so it was the beginning of using molecular biology to understand medicine yeah yeah and that started for me a 50-year involvement with Children's Hospital you you you said pretty much the foundation for molecular biology talk talk a little bit about how but the process of writing that molecular cellular biology book oh the textbooks yeah which which is a precondition for anybody that wants to be in this field um all over the world well it's a graduate level textbook yeah uh we use it in undergraduate courses at MIT um that came later yeah um in the 70s I taught molecular analogy but it was mostly molecular biology or bacterial cells because again that is what we knew and then 77.78 I was in sabbatical in London and then when I came back I started teaching with Mary Lou Pardue a faculty colleague the first cell biology course at MIT there's never been a course in cell biology until 1978 and we taught the first one which was sort of a combined graduate undergraduate class and I accumulated enough notes that I thought it would be useful to have a textbook you thought it would be easy to to write it well uh it was a long story I'll try to shorten it but basically I wrote the first two editions with David Baltimore right right and uh Jim Darnell who was a was is a distinguished Professor Rockefeller and Jim and David handled the nuclear part that is the structure of DNA and how DNA is copied into Ina and all of the sort of molecular aspects and my part covered the rest of the cell the cytoplasm protein synthesis protein secretion uh what we knew back then about how cells move how they muscle cells contract how they interact with other cells that sort of thing and yes I said you know I can write I forget 10 chapters in six months which indeed I did the problem and I was a good writer and then I went to Kenya and I really knew how to write and I wrote well but as a textbook it was a disaster and they finally they the publishers Scientific American Press then got me a scientific editor who worked with me chapter by chapter and pointed out you know Harvey you know in this heading you said that uh in this section I'm going to cover a b and c and there were five pages on a and a page on B and you never quite got to see you say and you know I just wasn't conscious of how to put together a textbook right but I learned quickly right and the first two editions as I said I did with Jim and David and then um they decided to step back and we started recruiting a number of other authors and I have to say writing his book particularly with my co-authors has been very enriching experience before we were there nine Editions and before each Edition we would meet for a couple of days and just talk you know what's new in science what should we include what are the hot new things that are solid enough that they belong in a textbook right you see and what could we exclude what's old are there techniques that we're covering that people aren't using now and that sort of thing so those discussions were very very informative and figured out who is going to write what chapter um each chapter has a major author but each chapter is read by one or two other authors so it's really a community effect it's been translated into you know it's been translated in a number of languages it's in 14 languages my gosh when when is the Indonesian version going to come out um we'll have to ask Nova uh I would love it uh the Vietnamese Edition came out oh my gosh the last they got ahead of us no do you do you know there's a Vietnamese Edition I I heard about it yeah you know again it was a student of mine Midler who is now a professor at National University in Singapore but she grew up in Hanoi and she organized the Vietnamese translation of the book and really found about a dozen Vietnamese who were fluent enough in English and knowledgeable enough about the science to translate it so it came out do I see any of them here I had a couple on my on this is the English version that's the English the fourth edition there's one this one oh no no that's Japanese anyway um now well we gotta work on translating into Bahasa or Indonesian well and my understanding correct me if I'm wrong is that that would work also in Malaysia yeah you say in some parts of Thailand too okay well what we worked out for the Vietnamese Edition it was published in five small paperback books okay each one costing about four or five dollars so the idea was to make it very inexpensive and make it accessible to everybody right and um nobody made money on it so I arranged that there were no royalties to the authors either the authors of the American Edition or of the Vietnamese Edition the Publishers in New York got no revenue from it right there was an excellent publisher uh Trey and uh Ho Chi Minh City that of course did earn money on it uh it was when back in 2019 I was there for celebrating the publication of the last two volumes and I was a bit of a celebrity they had uh you still are well no I mean this was I can't believe the picture was on a huge bulletin board on a Major Street in Ho Chi Minh City and the street was filled with about 500 students and there was a band yeah it was really quite rewarding and I sat there for about two hours autographing copies of the book and I mean it sounds hokey but you know these were students who were standing in line to get a copy of the book so that they could read it and this is a science book this is not again your book is the holy book for anybody well it's not holy it's not religious uh I mean it's it's well you know it's the metaphor of a Bible it is one of the most used books in in graduate courses and this and it covers a lot of areas from uh transcription and DNA replication and everything to do with gene expression and regulation to stem cells to how the nervous system functions how the immune system functions so it's used very broadly and at a personal level our daughter used the fourth edition when she was in medical school and one of my grandsons just graduated from the University of Virginia and used Grandpa's textbook in his cell biology course but he has a different last name than me okay so uh did you go for any tutorial well no no I think Isaac no Isaac was very talented put it that way his name is in the book in the acknowledgment section but nobody reads it so his Professor had no idea that his grandpa wrote the book but that's okay oh and I want to push on this uh it's it's uh I think it's important for for people to understand a little bit better about the process of Education you've you've grown up you've been working with so many Nobel laureates even to the point where you've actually mentored a couple of two no couple of Nobel lorries two of my postdoctoral fellows here in Chicago and James Rothman went on to win the Nobel Prize yes and uh eight of my students are in the U.S National Academy of Sciences I don't know that it's a record but I think it is I'm very proud of their accomplishment okay as as a Southeast Asian I'm I'm sort of vested and what it would take for Southeast Asia to be up there you know in terms of being recognized at that kind of level you need to build top level universities and put in the money to generate the facilities that will attract and retain world-class people from from anywhere around the world from anywhere around the world but particularly from Indonesia you know I'm staring at one of them right now you know one of the most talented undergraduates from Indonesia right uh Valentino right you know came to MIT he's now in graduate school at Stanford uh he's getting a fabulous education now whether he will go home to ending Indonesia is an interesting question and if he does are there facilities universities Laboratories where he could do his research and train Indonesians students at this sort of high International level and it's much deeper than just saying we need a great University I mean countries like well every country they have diseases that are common particularly genetic diseases that are common uh or abundant in a particular area perhaps an island there are agricultural issues that need modern Technologies improving yields of crops that kind of thing um biological Technologies as part of climate remediation um where you really want your own talented students to stay there and do research that will benefit the country specifically right you know Indonesia should be able to make many of its own Pharmaceuticals yeah we for instance the disease like beta thalassemia is endemic in many parts of Indonesia as it is throughout Southeast Asia and we have Gene therapies for it that work in the United States but these are very expensive very complicated Technologies and can one develop Gene therapies that could be used on a mass level to eliminate the suffering of beta thalassemia right it's just as an example of the kind of thing that could be done that requires highly trained people with a lot of facilities so when I'm asked this question I always look at the universities to start with right and you know in parallel to develop the secondary schools that will train the people at a high enough level so that they can do this work at a high level in the universities well you know what Valentino's doing what Nova is doing they're they're an extension of what you've been doing right oh yeah and I think the application of what they're doing will be so tremendous for not just Indonesians but many people around the world oh absolutely I mean they're both working at you know the highest level in the different institutions I mean Nova is now the CEO of a company that is developing novel treatments for certain autoimmune diseases right and these areas is relevant to a lot of situations in Indonesia well it's relevant uh autoimmune diseases are common throughout the world no ethnic group is spared correct and yet the work right now has to be done in the United States because there aren't facilities on the other hand um we're talking about establishing a manufacturing facility for some of these recombinant proteins in Indonesia now that would be new there but again it would be an example of what could be done but we'd have to train the people inside in the country to run these machines yeah do you see biotechnology more as a remedial technology as opposed to something that could be augmenting upon a pre-existing condition well right now we see it as long-term Therapies particularly therapies for diseases that are lethal or very very debilitating yeah and the two that my lab is focused on and several of my company's focus on are sickle cell disease which is endemic in Equatorial Africa right and then beta thalassemia which is you know endemic in South Southeast Asia I mean these are huge public health problems right and much of courses that I teach in biotech focus on these and the gene therapies are spectacular and they do work but they're very expensive and they involve long-term hospitalizations and they will cost in the millions of dollars which may be tenable in the United States but it's certainly not tenable in any lower middle income country I want to talk to you about crispr what's what's your take on crispr I mean that that's been proven to be good for sickle cell disease yeah crispr is a kind of it's actually not one technique it's several techniques it's basically a way of bringing a protein to a specific piece of the DNA of the genome and in the original iteration when it goes to that side of the genome it cuts the DNA but modifications of it means it can change one base it can induce expression of that region of the gene a lot of clever things that crispr can do that aren't in the public press and a lot of groups are trying to develop this into real therapies the difficulty is getting the crispr itself into the right cells once it gets there it can do great things but getting it into the cells cells normally don't like to take up foreign protections say say you have to use tricks or they don't like to take up foreign DNA which could construction cell to make the protein so it's complicated and yet it is working in several companies and it will be very useful but how we're going to pay for it is another issue you see it as being transformative in the near foreseeable future um yes if a lot of these technical problems can get some it will be in how many diseases for what purpose remains to be seen pediatric blindness is another right yeah yeah I think diseases right now everyone's talking about either lethal or very debilitating diseases I mean sickle cell is not generally lethal but it can be debilitating right and it certainly shortens the half-life the lifetime of the person right um but you know we talked earlier I have a grandson with gaucher disease and he is being treated quite successfully with enzyme replacement therapy and we don't know the long-term risks of gene therapy I mean I could make a gene therapy for him in my laboratory technically that's not all that complicated right but when I subject him to this right now the answer is no because we don't know the long-term effects perhaps in 10 years when there's more safety profiles and things like that these are brand new technologies you say yeah well you know you hear stories about genetic editing right yeah well this is part of it sounds a little bit scary because people tend to interpret it as something that I could actually augment Humanity increasingly well okay you have to be careful with what you mean uh we are not Gene editing the Drone cells in other words the only cells that we have that pass on genetic information to our offspring of the sperm and the X and right now these are not being edited and there are prohibitions everywhere so that you don't do that um it can be done technically that's not the issue right so it's done on what we call the somatic cells the cells that form our tissues and organs but are not passed on to our Offspring and my instincts out of that rule is going to stay for quite a long time in most countries hopefully in all countries hopefully in all countries you don't see the geopolitics of things reshaping there's no rational the line gets drawn there's no reason you would want to change the DNA of your offspring there are other ways to preventing passing on bad genes to your offspring and for the record there's no easy way of doing gene therapy and sperm or egg cells anyway okay but what about conversations that talk about potentially increasing somebody's IQ that is far in the future if it will ever happen uh there is no single Gene that controls IQ um there are certainly mutations that cause intellectual disability and one might want to treat those in a young child I mean in fact for instance one of my companies is focusing on gene therapy for drave which is a pediatric epilepsy but also the children have enormous developmental defects now it may be that our gene therapy would correct the developmental defects and the children would be able to speak which they currently cannot do or do or do so poorly on the other hand that trait would not be passed on to The Offspring so you'll be again somatic gene therapy in this case to the brain right and their one would argue sure if you can take a non-verbal child and get her to talk that would be huge you say so again we're talking about correcting genetic defects and not trying to improve therapeutic yeah exactly and you know the studies of intelligence have clearly said that there's no easy way of putting a gene in and increasing your intelligence and for that matter even measuring intelligence is complicated and there's a lot of discussion about what that means so it's not something I can see happening in the near future now I want to get to the business side of things right you you've been exposed to you know combining signs in business since the 60s and 70s and you've been a big part of making Boston or Cambridge the way it has turned out well a few decades I mean in 1961 right I was working in an organic chemistry laboratory at Stanford I was a Kenyan undergraduate and the head of the lab called your ass who was a Kenyan graduate one of the world's great organic chemists right but he had also realized that starting from a particular chemical in a Mexican tree he could synthesize the molecules that became the basis of the oil contraceptive the birth control pill and when I was at Stanford in 61 I would visit Centex essays company right because his graduate students would work part-time there and part-time in the Stanford lab and I could see what was going on it never occurred to me that I would be part of this sort of thing about 20 years later when cloning was coming along and there was for the first time the ability to isolate the gene for any protein and manufacture the protein that the first generation of Biotech was which were all recombinant proteins or monoclonal antibodies so that's when I got involved together with seven colleagues from MIT and founding genzyme which made the first enzyme replacement yes it turned out okay it came so big Yeah well yeah well we did but this was the vision not of age science mirror Who was the build a company on recombinant enzyme replacements for rare genetic diseases um as I may have mentioned my grandson is Goshay who's been on the gensan drug for what nine or ten years now now it's covered by insurance but his insurance pays about two hundred thousand dollars a year for the product so it's not inexpensive on the other hand it's allowed him to lead a perfectly normal life right tell us a story about how you first discovered money right how I do you're you're a scientific Pursuit was actually worth a lot more than you thought when you met up with investment banker well this was at the very beginning when I was talking this is well before genzyme when you met a lady well no she was our next door neighbor Linda right and we were just talking about um talking about the possibilities of biotechnology if you worked for a small investment Bank in downtown Boston and brought me there one day for lunch I'd never been in this kind of environment but I was sitting at a lunch table with a group of bankers and just talking in general about the research in my laboratory making recombinant proteins and so forth and at one point the head of the bank turned to me and said you know Harvey we like you and we like your research and we'd like you to start a company and we'll give you five million dollars now that was a lot of money and simply more than I had ever heard of in my life so I was kind of stunned by it and didn't know what to say so I said nothing and the gentleman seeing my unease turned to me and said well you know if money is a problem I'm sure we can get you 10 million dollars and this is not a joke I realized what I was worth the laboratory that I had built and the research that we were doing had measurable value in the commercial world and I never followed up on that but it was that conversation that led me to talk to a lot of my faculty colleagues at MIT many of whom were given similar offers and eight of us formed um this is pre-genzyme we formed a professional Consulting Group called Bia bioinformatics Associates where we did a lot of Consulting throughout the world on biotechnology we actually positioned ourselves as Strategic Management Consultants to advise multinational corporations on the impact of Biotech on their Core Business right and that taught us a lot I mean there are five of us spent a whole wonderful week in Paris and the food conglomerate but I'm not joking I mean they took us to the Stella Artois Brewery just amazing and asked you know what what impact will bioteank have on the boot in the beer industry because there were Notions that you could use the yeast to make recombinant human proteins which made no sense anyway the simple answer is it has no effect and they're willing to pay handsomely for it but this was the group that wound up putting Gentile together so you know it was a very Interactive Group no we were all from different fields I was a cell biologist there were organic chemists there were biophysical chemists food process Engineers bioreactor designers and so forth and we really worked together as a group to put together genzyme and then to serve as a scientific Advisory Board what what did you learn in terms of having the ability to combine signs and Entrepreneurship and and I want to take this a little bit further the Biotech Industry has just blossomed for me right and there's what you said is key that is what I've learned and what I try telling governments throughout the world the key is actually faculty entrepreneurs yeah you know faculty members in his lab certain discoveries were made that the realized could be converted into a therapeutic or a diagnostic who then work with the business folk yeah to set up and run a company and you know as you may know I've started probably a dozen companies but when I say start I will serve on a Scientific Advisor board I'm not allowed to actually run the company and I'd be incompetent to a company that's not my skill my skill is evaluating science and figuring out how to make things work better and so forth yeah um the business end I leave to the business people how easy is it to replicate faculty entrepreneurship because we teach it all the time I mean I learned here but but you know I'm sure there are so many countries out there that want to replicate what Cambridge no no no when I joined the Children's Hospital Board of Trustees I work with a technology licensing office and they set up really mini courses for faculty you know most faculty have no idea what a patent is we can start there you see what what exactly is in a patent what's the patent what protection does a patent give you there's a patent allow you to sell your product no it prevents other people from following your invention well that's very different you see so you know a one or two hour course on what is a patent becomes very important what is Venture Capital how do you fund a company you see that's something that is mysterious to our faculty outside of a few even in the United States right you say so that's what I try to do when I go to countries like I mean where have I been recently Japan Singapore France China China India well I was in India but as a tourist although I have been there on that when I was in Calcutta right um I was in I've been all over I've been to Chile I've been to other countries we got to talk about your visit to Indonesia you were there quite recently I've been a couple times didn't it I know but as a tourist what was your take on a country which which parts of Indonesia did you visit and what what turns you off or what turned you on well I like I should say when I say I mean my wife you and the family yeah and um we like going off the Beaten Track so one of our first visits I went to we went to borobador because it's you know Target is the largest Buddhist monument in the world in fact much of the base is Hindu right but um and I'm proud of the fact when I saw the complex the the monument I I recognized what what it actually was but anyway Buddhism was first in Indonesia before Hinduism came over no the foundation is Hindu oh yeah I mean the foundation go by hundreds yeah yeah yeah that would have been in India yeah yeah but the base of the statue the base of barobador the the whole flower leaders on the ground floor you know it is not Hindu influence it is Hindu okay fair enough it is Hindu and then the second layer is Buddhist anyway um I like this kind of stuff yeah and on that so that trip was verobador and then we went to taraja hang on you went to prambana also probably not yeah yeah I like what you would have been Hindus yeah well there were three temples correct and uh then we went to taraja and you know it's just fascinating you survived the seven hour car ride or you stopped over somewhere we drove from Microsoft a penny penny stayed the night and then drove up to taraja you know if you want to visit interesting places you takes time to get there but then more recently I my wife and I went back with three of our young grandchildren well yeah and um we spent quite a bit of time in Bali where I officiated at the wedding of Nova one of my students on the beach in Denpasar but then the whole wedding party got on two boats we flew to Forest Island and got on two boats and visited the Komodo Island in Komodo dragons and it was fabulous so you know as a tourist it's a fabulous place to be and you know the people are very hospitable yeah [Music] every place we went it was just very very pleasant and interesting you know I remember particularly in taraja we went for long walks into the villages and so forth and we would just meet people and they were just the most open you know Wonderful hospitable people I mentioned that because it is a Muslim country and no but it's diverse it's very you know several of our friends were concerned that we were going to a Muslim country I'm telling you this they were watching the wrong Channel they were watching the wrong channels in the United States and I kept saying no this is not what Islam is and Indonesia was entirely safe and of course that's that's a general observation about Indonesia here's here's the fourth most populous country in the world third largest democracy in the world yeah but nobody talks about it enough well this is why I was privileged to spend time there yeah and to see it and to meet you know some of the people of course and I've had many Indonesian students here well I mean there should be more if not a lot more I mean the representation of Indonesia through the Valentinos of the world the novas of the world could be more compared to some other countries of scale no I agree with you many countries send more of their top young people abroad right um and that certainly would help but again I argue that you really want to build the universities I agree that you know many countries that visited Indonesia and for that matter in South America the elite all send their children abroad share share your thoughts or observations about the Indian universities and the Chinese universities yeah well again I've been to probably a dozen in each country um India I was very sad when I visited the ones I visited really were 20 30 40 years out of date just in terms of the facilities the government just doesn't spend enough money there and what I learned is at least a few years ago when I checked it it was something like point seven percent of the GDP in the country was spent on Research Which is far lower than the g20s and then on the other hand I've been to China probably a dozen times in the last 10 years and when I first visited China in 1995 the universities and the research institutes were really struggling from the aftermath of the cultural revolution and what I learned is there were only about 10 million University students in the entire country China albeit not a democracy has built dozens if not more universities and several of them are absolutely world class correct particularly Peking University qingwa chudan or you've been here you've taught there I've like well I've lectured that several and I have many I mean for instance one of my former postdocs uh Wu Hong is the dean of biology at Peking University and you know she's hired literally dozens of top faculties right you know just just to give you a picture when when I went to school here in the 80s we had about 16 000 Indonesians all over the us at any given point okay right now it's less than nine thousand and so it's dropped it's dropped and I would I would argue that some of the drop is attributable to some rotational Behavior to other countries yeah yeah but you know that number should have been in the 100 000 at least you know you've got 450 000 Chinese in the US you've got probably 150 to 200 000 Indians studying it and Indonesia's at that level of populations it's not a small potato it's 280 million people yeah you you're probably likely to see more singaporeans at any campus Which is less what five million people 5.5 million yeah you probably now likely to see more Vietnamese you know yeah at MIT you know Vietnam has a lot smaller population less than 100 million people oh yeah yeah and it's uh so it's a game of scale right for the benefit of all of Southeast Asia look it's all education yeah it's all higher education and the willingness of the governments and the politicians to put the money in there right I the United States our education system works because it's largely private right most certainly not all but most of the top universities are private right and they're run by philanthropy by grants and a variety of other things a few of the states like California have extensively supported the university so Berkeley University of Virginia or Wisconsin or many others are absolutely world class but not all the states do it yeah Harvey this this has been great but I want to ask you one last question this is on a topic of artificial intelligence versus biological intelligence artificial intelligence seems to have grown quite exponentially right oh it absolutely has and do you foresee the kind of exponentiality with which works on biotech will be moving well I mean AI is heavily influencing biology and the most spectacular recent ones were AI programs that predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their Amino acidity wow which is a Google offspring it was done at Google and they can predict the which is something academic scientists could never do but actually predict with a great deal of success uh molecular structure proteins and that can greatly expedite drug development because if you have the structure of the protein you can begin imagining how a small molecule might interact with it and change its properties inhibited or turn it on or whatever as a drug so the future is pretty bright and you see biotech not being able to grow as exponentially as well okay I there I can't help you uh biotech is growing by Leaps and Bounds it has AI is growing by Leaps and Bounds AI is influencing biotech in great ways you know another is in Diagnostics that is in Radiology looking at an x-ray and trying to decide if the patient has lung cancer AI programs can often do that better than the most highly trained Radiologists okay amazing so Ai and biology are merging and that will become very important in the future it's already becoming important okay I'm glad to hear that good any final message for all of us in Southeast Asia build up your education and train people locally in these modern techniques these new developments in biotech and Ai and whatnot to help the country solve whatever problems it has biological problems medical problems agricultural problems and so forth it all hinges on better education systems thank you so much Harvey well thank you for coming to my office oh man it's interviewing me it's swept okay that was Harvey lodish from the my an Institute thank you end game oh very good oh my gosh that was okay thank you so much my man okay listen I'm Dr sober that's me I'll text you later yeah no no I'll just show you when we were in Vietnam and he so he took this is my granddaughter and and there was another guy on the boat besides the crew he introduced his it wasn't his cut there's a picture of me my family

2023-01-30 10:25

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