Great Ideas Debate: Peter Thiel and William Hurlbut

[Music] we could start to start to pull it together here for a sec if we could take our seats and wrap up conversation my name is Charlie Copeland and I'm the president of the intercollegiate Studies Institute and I want to welcome you all here this evening we are streaming this with Facebook live and so we would like everybody who is so inclined to share this event so you go to eyesize Facebook page and let your friends know that you're here and since I'm looking out of this crowd and I know I saw lots and lots of these little PDA sort of technological whiz-bang devices called a smartphone if you could just take your moment right now come on pull it out get the Facebook app going I know the Facebook app eats a lot of a lot of RAM and a lot of memory but you know just go ahead share it so that people know you're here and that we're here so thank you so welcome to tonight's debate technology should treat death as an enemy this debate is a result of a partnership between the intercollegiate Studies Institute the Abigail Adams Institute along with the Diana Davis Spencer foundation the purpose of the partnership is to sponsor a debate on an issue of major importance to the contemporary West the intercollegiate Studies Institute is a nationwide higher education based nonprofit focused on ensuring that bright deep thinking intellectually curious conservative and libertarian students have a chance to discover embrace and advance the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous across this country on college campuses of all stripes free and open debates and thought are more often than not suppressed in the mistaken theory that being ignorant and happy is better than being intelligent with your eyes open so if you enjoy debate like this one and you want to see more free speech that challenges your thoughts and for it forces you to sharpen your own thinking please consider joining and/or supporting AI sigh if you were a student a faculty member perhaps an ISI alumni or even just somebody wants to learn more about the foundational ideas you can go to join dot is Iorg and and join as a student member or faculty or alumni or other if your campus does not have an ISI Society please contact Thomas PAC Thomas where and right over there Thomas pack and get get one started on your campus it's your life it's your education and it's your brain so what are you waiting for if you'd like to support ISI you can just go to is I dot o-r-g is AI dot o-r-g just seven characters right and and click that donate button ISI builds and supports an intellectual community that wants this community wants to think live free so tonight's to debate the modern day night is is doctor patron avec he is the director of the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts the Institute provides supplementary humanistic education to the Harvard intellectual community by exploring questions of deep human concern that cut across the boundaries of academic disciplines previously dr. Padova patron of it has taught political science at Duke University and Yale University he is currently writing a book contracted with the Yale University Press about the three decade duel between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas which resulted in a fundamental transformation of American nationhood dr. Petrovitch is a frequent public speaker in the Boston area and in the colleges universities and lectures on subjects ranging from Aristotle's best regime and American Founding to the foundations of political economy and Alexis de Tocqueville politics and sociology he is frequently seen in Harvard's Kirkland house where he is a dedicated member of the senior common room vanilla Thank You charlie for that introduction and thank you to the Intercollegiate studies Institute for partnering with us to put on today's event thank you to the Diana Davis Spencer foundation for making this a bountiful event and more personally I like to thank mr. Thomas back who for his leadership in pulling this event together Thank You Thomas the great ideas debate this evening raises the question concerning the essence of technology resolved that technology should treat death as an enemy as we all know technological progress has brought impressive sometimes astounding improvements in our lives the forward-looking nature of modern man has inspired feats never imagined by men of different eras we've cured diseases discovered worlds built cities powered economies invented machines mastered more of nature but as more has been seen to be possible some people have become squeamish and uneasy about various new applications of tech to life concerns about the ethics and morality of the technological dispensation are now voiced from the traditional left as well as the right even in the United States heretofore the most tech bullish of Western nations so how are we to think about the essence and purpose of technology what are the principles passions and interests in forming this conversations can we better integrate technology to serve human ends and what should it have to do with that great primal truth of death all right well those are some of my own framings and questions our first great fantastic debaters will naturally set the agenda in the way the best suits their purposes Peter Thiel will speak first in defense of the resolution then after some back and forth with Professor Hurlbut which would go on for 30 or 40 minutes I suspect you the audience will have a chance to submit your questions so you should have or you'll be getting soon the four by six cards that our team will be distributing and and and Gabby will be doing that they're coming down please write legibly and Bigley and be succinct so that I can read them and incorporate them in the conversation so that's it the speakers introductions I'll be brief these gentlemen you can find them online they're there they're there [Music] you canyou can find them easily William B Hurlbut is consulting professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical Center after receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford bill completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics his primary areas of interest involved ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology the biological basis of moral awareness and studies in an integration of theology with the philosophy of biology he's the author of numerous publications on science and ethics including the co edited volume altruism and altruistic love science philosophy and religion in dialogue bill is also was also co-chair of to introduce appointee faculty projects at stanford becoming human the evolutionary origins of spiritual religious and moral awareness and brain mind and emergence in addition of teaching at Stanford bill has also worked with NASA and project in astrobiology and was a member of the chemical and biological warfare working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation from o2 2:09 bill served on the President's Council on bioethics welcome bill and Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor he started at PayPal in 1998 led it as a CEO and took it public in 2002 defining the new era of fast and secure online commerce you know for he made the first outside investment in Facebook where he serves as a director the same year he launched Palantir technologies a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts and fields like national security and global finance he has provided early funding for LinkedIn Yelp and dozens of successful technology oops many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed quote the PayPal mafia he's partner of Founders Fund a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb and he started the teal fellowship which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling and he leads the Tila Foundation which works to advance technological progress and long term thinking about the future Peter is also the number one New York best-selling author of zero to one notes on startups or how to build the future thank you for your patience and now I turn it to Peter and for my opening or sit or what do you prefer okay great and Bill and I have been friends for decades out in out in California so it's really terrific that we're gonna be able to do this event tonight and hopefully have a wide-ranging discussion because this is a this is sort of a very broad topic there's you know there's obviously sort of a question about what's going on in science and technology and in biotechnology what should be going on what the arc of progress looks like and and I and then of course it's also what this you know what does this have to do with larger questions about the meaning of life you know the the arc of the west of Western civilization I I think that I think you know one of the ways I think these DVDs this whole bundle is very positively linked is that you know early modernity modern science was was focused on this question on the relief of man's estate that life should be more than nasty brutish and short that you know Francis Bacon Benjamin Franklin they were all sort of very very intensely intensely concerned with us and and you know a tremendous amount of progress was reached as you as he pointed out in the centuries and you know from you know 1840 onwards on you know life expectancy was increased by something like two to two-and-a-half years a decade in in the Western world and it you know in a nearly a nearly linear fashion from 46 in 1840 to like high 80s in Sweden or scan Scandinavia or Japan for for women and and and yet the question I think we have to start with who were to be honest is that things are not quite that healthy today that that in recent decades the progress has been frustratingly slow you know Nixon declared war on cancer nineteen seventy one forty eight years later you know were forty eight years closer to the goal but it doesn't feel like when I'm defeated in five years which was the initial goal was gonna be defeated by the American bicentennial of 1976 and so there's been very slow progress in a number of other kinds of diseases uh it feels like we're completely stuck on things like dementia Alzheimer's think things like that and then perhaps even more disturbingly in in recent years we've actually seemed have taken some steps backward where we've had this you know really shocking fact of declining life expectancy in the United States not other Western countries but but the US and it's a it's against or this complex web of you know scientific technological but also spiritual and cultural failures you know it's obesity opioid addictions suicides in a whole range of things that are contributing to this this very strange trend you know I'm not gonna argue that you know the quantity of life is the same as quality precisely but but I do think there these things are proxies for one another and one of the reasons quantity is is a good thing to focus on is that it's easier to measure it's more precise and so when things are when people's lives are shorter are getting shorter we have a sense that something is deeply wrong and that our you know our society is very sick I think you know I think that you know one way that you could rephrase the resolution in in sort of a more practical way is with respect to any single disease should we be doing more should we be doing more on cancer so we're doing more on Alzheimer's should we be doing more for Grandma should we be doing more for arthritis and and it strikes me that the you know the moral answers always to is almost always going to be yes on all these all these specific particulars the the and this is sort of this is something that I think somewhat new about the sort of the frontier of Medicine today and and different from let's say 17th 18th 19th century where you could say that the frontier was not quite as linked with questions of ageing and mortality and death it was you know you had infant mortality was a serious problem or you had you know sort of these uh massive infectious diseases like bubonic plague or you know I'm tuberculosis or think things like that it sort of affected people pretty independent of age whereas today the the really big killers and again I'm focused on the West on the United States Western Europe the big the big killers here are are these epidemics of old age you know cancer is a disease where you have a you have a one in a thousand chance of getting it when you're thirty years old you have a one in ten chance of getting it when you're 80 in the next year of your life you know a same with dementia same with arthritis heart disease all these things are are you know highly correlated with aging and that's why I think that if we were going to tackle these diseases seriously we have to also think about this question of aging and mortality they're they're incredibly tightly deeply linked and and they need to be you know studied studied a lot more one one other way I would reframe the resolution is you know um technology to treat death as an enemy is technology should destroy death or should learn why it can't do that there's not science and technology either destroyed or we should we should we should learn why we can't do it and and sort of the you know I think the sort of a pessimistic account would be well it's just impossible it's an impossible task and and this is where I'm you know somewhat a little bit more on the optimistic side I think I think we have no idea we have no idea what really drives these things we have no idea whether you know it's it's um in our there's some sort of genetic code that automatically means that we're going to die or whether these things can be fixed and to what extent they can be fixed certainly it's progressed more than people would have thought in 1840 there was more progress possible and then I would submit we have we have no idea I think that the problems are not ones of nature but our ones of culture that we have that the the problem with the culture of science today is not Promethean hubris you know we're not we're not in the world of Los Alamos in 1945 we're in a world of epicurean hedonism at the Kurian complacency where the dominant idea is is that there's not much you can do you should just accept it you should accept the stagnation of your lives the stagnation of the West you should accept the idea that the younger generation will do less well than their parents and that's sort of the the light motif of our time and so you know I I think we can probably find all kinds of evil forms of science that we think shouldn't happen and you know I'm I don't think we should be doing Nazi experiments or CCP experiments or you know not sure we should be doing dr. Frankenstein experiments but but that's not that's not really what's going on in our world what's the dominant thing that's going on is is nothing at all and it's it's sort of this this senescence of scientific culture it's a you know the bites by one measure we have about a hundred times as many scientists today as we had in 1920 about a hundred times as many people with PhDs on a most generous count progress is about at the same rate as then probably quite a bit slower and so the productivity of these people has gone has gone way down I think and I think it's not because we've hit natural limits I think it's because there's something deeply wrong with the university culture with the academic culture with the sort of peer review funding culture where you can only do incremental things there's no room for heterodox thought no room for really big breakthroughs and so it's it's I see it as linked to this sort of this sort of cultural thing if we look at sort of the the big aspects of stagnation our society more generally you know it's these sort of addictions and the disease is it's like you know it's marijuana its opioids it's it's you know too much yoga it's it's a people locked in their 20s living in basements playing video games and these are these are not the diseases of an accelerating technological civilization there the diseases of a stagnating civilization where the stagnation dominates it you know I mean lost almost people probably took too many amphetamines and and you know in the 1960s people smoked cigarettes because you didn't Nick a teen so you could work harder and be smarter those are not the problems we have today there's sort of very very difference I think I think it's always this question of stagnation what we can do to get out of it and because the stagnation is is cultural this it's a difficult problem to solve but you know it's ultimately something that I think is possible and I think you know the the kinds of counter points that dr. Hilbert will make will be some version of it's not about culture it's about nature you can sort of have nature in two forms you can have nature as a limit or nature as a standard that you know there are limits that Nature has set and we shouldn't overstep them or or it's sort of a standard that tells us what's what what's right in some sense or other and you know I you know I often think this argument was in some ways summarized by Shakespeare when he said that all that lives must die which is sort of a statement about a description of the world this is just nature and it's also a normative description it's it's it's right that it's this way this is the way things should be but if you look at the original Shakespeare of course Shakespeare never said anything in his own name is all the solut characters and the character who said that in Shakespeare was Gertrude in Hamlet who was the evil mother and it was an evil thing to say because she was trying to get Hamlet's not to pay attention to how his dad had died under mysterious circumstances how she was indifferent to it and and so when we say that all that lives must die we have to always ask is this a statement about nature or natural limits or is it a rationalization of the rottenness that is Denmark or the rottenness that is the university academic research system in 2019 so I think and so I think you know we because coming back to this culture question I think that you know we have this this this owl that nature in the worry I have is that it's an for what's gone wrong it's like people would like to rationalize things and the scientists that have not made progress on cancer you know they like to say we didn't get enough money no they got plenty of money the next line of defense is nobody could have done better it's just too hard a problem and I think we should be skeptical of these of these of these alibis and these rationalizations and that's that's sort of fundamentally the way the way these things are these things work in our society you know let me um let me end with sort of a theological point and I know both bill and I are Christian and I think there's always sort of this question about how how this the set of ideas intersects with with with Christianity in in various ways and the the understanding I would I would give is that you know Orthodox Christianity Christ is a healer he heals the blind the Deaf the lame he he doesn't follow all the Pharisee achill rules and doing so he does it on son on the Sabbath he will do it he will do it you know and and he will do it in all these ways that are very uncomfortable um you know healing that the communities are used to people being sick they want them to stay sick that's that was sort of the cultural context and Christ does not care about the cultural context and yes and there's no limit to it it's a you know it includes resurrecting Lazarus or it includes the story of Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament where he do not die at all so there is no limit the greatest good is is is is his eternal life and there's there's there's no limit at all I think that Christ is not some kind of epicurean philosopher where you sort of think think through your death and rationalize your death and it's not interested in in this sort of rationalization it's not interested in you know explaining away the the evil philosophizing rationalizing evil the the the interest of the biblical god of Christ is in destroying evil destroying death and I think we should we should work really hard to do the same thank you all right well I don't have much to disagree room or anything to disagree with with that but the the interesting challenge tonight is to is to speak into the the title which is should technology regard death as an enemy and and so of course I'm a physician after all I agree with all of those comments about overcoming disease and breaking social constraints that provoke disease it's interesting we're having this conversation this week because as you may be most severe too young to know this but Peter and I know this is tax week and so you know death and taxes and so can we get rid of death and just have taxes left it's also Holy Week a week where we traditionally paused to consider the meaning of our life our mortal life our death and of course one week from days is Good Friday so it's a very poignant conversation to have in this context so some years back I I had a opportunity to talk with a woman who was a hundred and four years old and it was very fascinating she was very articulate very sound and body and mind she could walk well she could think well and and she told me that the happiest years of her life were after she turned 80 because after that she stopped worrying about dying young so but then she got a little wistful and she said but my husband died 56 years ago all of my children have died and all of my grandchildren have died what a poignant reality we we'd well in this amazing drama of life and death Abraham Lincoln made the memorable comment that we suffer the brutal bombardment by the silent artillery of time wow what a phrase that is by its very nature living being is precarious being passionate and purposeful only by effort do we hold on to existence over and against the forces of destruction and death everything material decays even nonliving things decay individual organisms die but whole species also dies also die some of them live for as long as a couple hundred hundred million years but eventually they die out at least historically and last time I was in Boston one of my former students took me to the park Church Cemetery Revolutionary War Cemetery and I noted that even the tombstones were dying so something about this reality stirs us at the very core something in us repels we sense that we were not made to die that we have a transcendent purpose in a transcendent destiny Michael Toth said everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die astonishing advances in biomedicine through understanding the material mechanisms mathematical modeling so forth have brought us amazing advances in putting into effect the Enlightenment dream explicitly stated as Peter said by Francis Bacon and and Rene Descartes so so now we have come to see all of living nature as mere matter and information to be reshuffled and reassigned in projects of the human will ready any of us to entrust ourselves to the Google God's in the confidence that aging and even death may have a technological solution with William Hazeltine founder of Genome Sciences at the founding of the Society for Gina for regenerative medicine commented the real goal is to keep people alive forever why not currently our our armamentarium of pharmaceuticals targets about 250 protein sites there are an estimated 20,000 protein coding genes which means there are thousands and thousands of protein sites yet untouched what might be possible with all that and certainly as Peter said it's unknown what could happen so we barely if if you think of technology as a continent we've barely stepped off of Plymouth Rock yet when we pause to consider more deeply this whole arena it's clear that the advances that it seems so dramatic to us of the 20th century were largely accomplished through kind of intelligible operations on the natural world sanitation improved nutrition very easy to understand targeting of external infectious agents operating on us so this this preserved a sense of the order of nature we were basically attacking those things which were impinging on us not reworking the very center and core of ourselves and therefore the biblical statement of life threescore and ten or by reason of strength force core can be said to be true still except that we've got a little more advanced and there are some people living it seems like the maximal lifespan is about 150 120 and by the way it's interesting in looking Genesis 6:3 and it says that that God proclaims that his spirit will dwell in human beings only to the hundred and twenty years it's very quite fascinating so what is going on here well do we have the possibility of intervening to not just Concord terrible diseases but to actually extend our lifespan dramatically more and perhaps by some lights even conquer death itself well if you look at the actual science undergirding all this it's a little more complicated we use these very simplistic models the idea that like a car with replaceable parts but in cars the moving parts interact with you know two or three interlocking parts that's about it whereas the 50 trillion cells of the human body have perhaps as many as 10 million active types of molecules that interact at an estimated three billion chemical interactions a second so we're talking about something quite different than the machine model moreover each cell is a part of tissues and tissues parts of organs systems within subsystems hormones circadian rhythms cycles within cycles and cycles within seasons all within the coordinated coherence of an integrated unity of an organic being we are quite a bit more complicated than anything we used for a model and it's moreover clear that we are constructed by time we dwell in time but were made by time very process of our developmental biology is scaffolded and the scaffolds are removed and the architectures remain you can't simply just pick things out and put things back in without the dynamic processes of development that have formed them and when we look back at the history of life it's clear moreover that evolutionary process has not been indifferent to the notion of longevity from bacteria we gained a million fold in life span from multicellular life we gained a thousand fold mammals live vastly longer than other creatures on average now some exceptions human being primates live longer and human beings live longer than the average primate so nature is actually favored longevity in a complex organism such as a human person so we may already possibly be the culmination of the combination of organic complexity and longevity it may be that our medicine is on its way slowly but we're getting there to perfecting the creature in its full inherent lifespan potential it's a sort of a hard concept to grasp that we could be a physically perfectible creature for the lifespan we are made for and that's it there's no other further options some things do get perfected in existence for example the spoon so why not humans but more deeply the lifespan has co-evolved with a sense of meaning the context and contours of our natural limitations we are psychophysical unity inseparable and body and mind located and given meaning within the exigencies of time we by our very nature have a sense of a narrative arc an autobiographical sense of story about who we are and what we are why we are we have the sense that we are somehow encased within our natural lives in the exigencies of their necessities and the opportunities of their relationships and that it is that within the context of time that gives our life meaning the Roman physician Galen said the physician is only nature's assistant and by this idea it could be that our technology will pose the possibility of superhuman ization but might actually end up dehumanizing us something we need to take quite seriously the cure could be worse than the disease do we really want to stay alive by head transplants or cryopreservation do we want to harvest the young in the form of embryonic cells or fetal cells tissues or organs just to promote lengthen human life it's a strange dilemma isn't it and yet we also know that by some mystery we are co-creators within the operations of the world that we whatever else happened we operate on the world like no creature ever did and John Stuart Mill speaking of the idea that the world was created by supreme goodness a beneficent deity he said nor can any such person whatever kind of religious phrases he may use fail to believe that if nature and man are both the works of a being of perfect goodness that being intended nature as a scheme to be amended not imitated by man so we must ask ourselves at the foundation of this discussion what is the relationship between the given and the good I agree life is to be cherished and death is to be the ultimate enemy we have that on good authority for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet the last enemy to be destroyed is death yet it is equally clear it is a spiritual transformation not a purely technical operation on our corporeal being I tell you this brethren flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable Martin Luther King said if there's nothing you will die for you've never really been alive and say to agustin said he have made us for himself our hearts are restless until they rest in him well thank you Bill and thank you for those opening statements I will ask Gabby an ant to collect the first round of your questions and while they're doing that I will let Peter respond and then bill will he'll have another go at it and we continue thank you both so much in there you know I the emotional response I'm tempted to give us something that whenever someone mentions Darwin's theory of evolution I should reach for a revolver or something like that because you know it's it's it's we're not talking about the evolution of trilobites or you know different populations of speckled moths or the extinction of the dinosaurs here we're talking about human beings and there's always a question you know how far one should apply evolutionary logic the evolutionary paradigm to to humans you know certainly in a business context whenever someone mentions evolution they're about to do something extremely cruel they're about to fire somebody for no good reason at all and and and then I that's that's sort of what what what that what that that makes me think you know yes there is some continuity between humans and other animals there also are discontinuities one of the one of the great discontinuities is that is that we are aware of our deaths we are aware that this is going to happen you know I still remember when this when I first experienced this as a three-year-old child is sitting on this rug in my parents apartment building and it was sort of a I said it was weird the rug come from it was the skin of a cow what happened to cow the cow died this was extremely disturbing and but I can't I can't go back to when I was two years old I can't become a cow and and I don't think but I don't think I also don't think any of these naturalistic frameworks work for rationalizing death I don't think you know the cruelty of Darwinism works I don't think the madness of Nietzsche who you know try to bring back nature it's like we live in a scientific technological world and Nietzsche said we need to bring back nature we need to make the world more cruel we need to need to go back to that I don't think those are those are the possibilities and yes there are all these sort of mythological stories that we've told in our in our world about how the meaning of life is death you know um you know ideological myths tell us you can't break some eggs make an element without breaking some eggs that's Vladimir Lenin you know the you know the nationalist myths tell us that it's sweet and fitting to die for your country that's horace classical you know greco-roman world you know sort of non-christian religious myths tell you that you should worship the ancestral the spirits of the Dead I think things like that but I I don't think I don't think that works anymore but that's not where meaning is to be found you know meaning is not to be found in death yeah I'm with that I I think I completely agree with that and moreover even if you look at it and naturalistically you have to acknowledge that as Peter said human beings are in vastest kanuha T with so much of what else you can see in nature it's as though we're trying to understand ourselves in terms of something that is less than ourselves which is a big mistake yes of course we're biological beings and we have to live according we have to read survive and we have to reproduce we also are mysteriously mental or ideational or spiritual if you look at the thrust of of historical life process there is there is a trend not just toward longer life and cephalization with it's capable mental capacities but at the human level at least there is the emergence of the mind in its mental operations not just its fixed action pattern reactions we're the creature that can conceptualize essences that we can I better be careful er Peters training philosophy you may come after me on that but he it's it's clear that we that we lift ourselves mentally above the flow of the natural world to the realm of ideas we don't just see the pixels or the patterns we get the picture and that picture is ideas we're a creature that actually operates not according to reactions so much as principles principles of ideas and that culminates in in a kind of a spiritual nature which is places us in a very mysterious spot being both both physical beings with with a mind and a heart that longs for something of transcendent order I I agree we need to leave at some levels we need to leave the evolutionary paradigm behind at least in thinking beyond it well it's a lot a lot we can talk about one you know one one as I do think that you know we live in a mental spiritual world and and there's always you know it's it's both you know my mind and body and you know one thought I have on this sort of mental part of it is that it's it's profoundly teleological it involves it involves stories about the future about how our future world will look and and and and will and will function and and it is there's stories about how our stories are not going to end and if you if you try to warp that and destroy that you destroy the teleology and this is probably one of the things that's sort of at the heart of the cultural malaise of the West is there's no longer a teleology is no longer the sense of a limitless open future you know of our society you know that the things we do will will will last forever and in some sense and that and so I yes I agree with this but I think I think it's always super tightly linked to this this strong sense of teleology which has been has been eroded by the sort of Darwinist Nietzschean you know return to nature's it's not and we're not just stuck in some sort of eternal cycle that that's the past that's been abolished yes I'm you know I I'm not ashamed to say I believe in a grand narrative I believe in the Christian grand narrative and and I believe that the material world that both the material and the moral will poured forth from a single creative source and that this whole mysterious process of of physical existence is by some inexplicable way related to its very source and significance at once material and sacramental in the sense that it is our very lives and the processes of them that are a kind of provider kind of divine pedagogy if you will for the processes and purposes which deliver a magnification of soul if we open our hearts to it but I also believe that that we can't make sense of this unless we unless we accept the notion that as pope john paul ii said when god gives the gift of life he gives it forever and so the question then comes up how does all this relate to the powers and possibilities in our Biotechnology do we do we thrust forward with our technology and aim to conquer death I mean maybe that's not a bad idea I'm not worried about it by any sense whether it's right or wrong because to worry about that we might conquer death in an inappropriate way in other words break through the barrier of the cherubim with the flaming swords that protects the Tree of Life in Garden of Eden you remember that East of Eden so I'm not worried about it it'd be sort of like worrying about a that a better pole would put the pole vaulter into orbit let's roam over the moon I think we aim to a death as an enemy and we do the best we can but then the question becomes how how do we focus our lives do we do we focus them in a technological quest or do we give proper do in my mind to the spiritual meaning of our lives and if we give a proper mind to the spiritual meaning of our lives how does that relate to our relationship with death itself well the but you know the question is sort of what what the balance of all these things is you know how much evil science is going on so you know we're not interested in you know turning people into zombies or vampires and so it's not we're not talking about the undead here so there's obviously a lot of a lot of catastrophic approximations that are possible that we're not really interested in and you know there's a lot of you know there's a lot of bad science where it's not even science it's it's sort of fake it's people promising things that don't happen that's that's what I find myself much more concerned about it's more stagnation than acceleration but I I think there is also you know there's also the possibility for a lot of things that are you know very good and positive that they can still be done I don't I don't think that we are at the limit of scientific technological knowledge where everything beyond the limit is either fake or evil you know it's not like you know it's yes yes that the first of you know of you know the first of Goethe it's evil science the past of Marlowe it's sort of bad science it's not even science but the the the the choices we have are not only between those two thousand more there's a lot more we can do is obviously like in a very complicated relationship between you know the judeo-christian inspiration and and the sort of sign logical conquest of mortality I tend to think it's positively correlated I don't think it's like some sort of anti Christic parody I think it's it's you know it happened in the West it was and it was and I think it had think that one of the reasons we had you know the scientific technological impetus in our civilization was that we did not accept the pagan rationalizations that the death is natural all that it's going to happen that all that lives must die that's that's why it happened in our civilization that's that sort of the intellectual history I would I would tell him what I'm alarmed about is not frankenstein-like experiments today I'm alarmed by how little people are trying to do and I think that's again correlated with this this decline of the judeo-christian element in our society so so I see them as very positively linked obviously intellectual history is always a super complicated thing but you know it had the the idea that science technology had to work on this problem was something that happened in the judeo-christian well West and not anywhere else that's a that's a really interesting question as to how science emerged in the West and how medical science emerged of course you probably all know the first hospitals were were set up as hospitality Christian homes welcoming people were traveling and then sick people and it's also interesting the relationship between the the Christian tradition and its its metaphysical frame of existence Francis st. Francis was born in 1182 his his whole sense of attention to the tiny things not to the grand scheme of things only but to the little particulars it said that as his brothers said that he would walk along those the road and he picked the worms off the table stone say brother wormy must not go across the cobblestones you get crushed so Francis and Dominick interacted and Dominick of course was the founding source of Aquinas as the order requires was in and from from those early processes Roger Bacon was a Franciscan I believe and Galvani Faraday I believe modern science emerged within that context but it was also framed not just by a particular way of viewing the natural world with the spiritual world as well so the story of st. Francis is that he he was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and he was living a kind of frivolous life I I suppose what we would call today a kind of bon vivant or maybe a Playboy even and and he but he kept noticing the poor in the alleyways and stuff and one day he was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant he had lots of money his father wanted him to have the dignity of nobility and one day Francis who was going along the road and he came to a leper and he got down from his horse and he gave the leper a coin and perhaps he tossed it at him because he had a huge dread of leprosy as it was common by the way in the Middle Ages in Europe and then it said that he turned back and he embraced the man desiring to love him just as God loved each of just as Francis believed God loved him and Francis said that from that moment all that he dreaded became for him the source of a great sweetness he'd overcome his deepest fears including his fear of death and now is free to live in the service of love so I think it's though that spiritual frame that makes possible Western attitudes toward technology and medicine and I think that's a frame we need to keep if we're to successfully navigate modern biotechnology well I if that's all right I'd like to get to some of the questions and we have some very good ones and we'll do another round in in a few minutes Peter I think Peter mentioned that how does your Christian faith and your belief in eternal life alter your perspective on the resolution if Heaven exists shouldn't efforts be focused on getting more people there rather than extending more to life well I I certainly I certainly don't think these things are exhaustive in any way so I think you can do you can do both you know and and and certainly you know the the the default atheist alternative is to do neither that you know you're not going to worry about an afterlife and you're not you don't think you can you can do anything anything about this life you start with the you know the default atheist position ends up being Epicureanism it's you know eat drink be merry for tomorrow you may die and is is a sort of complacency and and so I think again I think these things are not alternatives I think they're positively linked and you can perhaps see it through the atheist version where if you think you can't do something you eventually give up you don't try and so I I don't know you know I I don't know how fast the progress we're gonna make I don't you know I think obviously you know I don't know if I'd I think that it's quite likely I will not live forever because of scientific and technological progress and that it's something that that will benefit other people if I thought that was the end of the story if it was only the Atheist project it would collapse you know atheists are very motivated when they're young I have nothing against atheists have nothing against old people don't like old atheists they just don't they don't work very hard anymore so Peter let me ask you you you yourself have invested in some of these companies working on longevity research if if you hypothetically because I don't think it'll be easy but if you could extend the life span two to three hundred years Peter and I both are are acquainted with acquaintance with Aubrey de Grey you've probably seen me as a long beard is Ola Rip Van Winkle Aubrey de Grey as I debated him the Civic Center last year in San Francisco and arboreus says if he can just live 35 more years he will live long enough so that longevity escape velocity will allow him to continue to live because advances will follow advances and then he will live and he believes that it's possible that he could live to be a thousand so let me ask you Peter how long would you live in nology theoretically could take you there well I left that I left that as an open question because III was quite clear we don't know how much science or technology can do we don't know what what the limits are I think it's a question we should be studying I think it's it's part of the decadence of our society that we are we we're not really putting that much you know that much effort into it and and you know it's it's easy to make make make fun of are buried agree but I don't think that's really that's really the zeitgeist you know ours like the zeitgeist of our time it's not Promethean science it's he looks weird because it's hopeful so so far outside the zeitgeist the zeitgeist is marijuana its opioids it's video games it's it's um it's narcoleptic drugs to lull us to sleep it's to sort of spend our lives amusing ourselves to death that's that's the zeitgeist of our time yeah I didn't mean to make fun of all but you're great just to say what he says but and it's also true and Peter says you know we may have a lot of technology but we're as they say we're dying of deaths of despair now but let me shift it back to use sort of the counter question I I think you know I think where these problems come to light it's it's not in the abstract it's not you know do you get a pill that can make you live to 200 or 300 or a thousand it's that that's like a little bit too abstract an ideological way to frame it I think it's you know can we do things concretely about cancer about about dementia should we be doing more about these things and I think all the concrete questions you know you know just about all of them the answer seems yes not you know there's probably some ethical limits there's some you know there's some things that you know are fake treatments we shouldn't be doing but but directionally you will always lose this debate if you own the specifics so the general one makes me sound weird so I'm not answering the general question but but on the specific ones you also don't want to take the other side on any on any other specifics because that will make you look very cruel we're not that interesting we agree on too much let's see if we can sharpen some this agreement here's another question from one of our students what is your view on the soul for both is it eternal is it physical or metaphysical well it's it's these are all like slightly above though the pay grade I I think that I think there's sort of a you know the the floss the sort of philosophy answer on this is is this question about cartesianism whether whether you know we have both the material and immaterial mind body whether there's sort of two different substances or or not and I think you know I I find the Cartesian arguments relatively compelling even though philosophical arguments are not actually the way to think about these things um but but you know it's if you if you sort of shift it a little bit to the the phenomenon of consciousness you know it's almost as as mysterious as the question the soul you know we we still you know we still don't understand it I think the the biases are are sort of in eliminative materialism and so I'm always contrarian so I would be you know biased against it you know the way neurobiology research goes it's always reductionist it's it's it's materialist that's how you construct the experiments and and I think we we need to sort of remain open to the sort of Cartesian alternative I'm sympathetic with that I mean you know we talk about living forever but the truth is we have trouble curing toenail fungus it's it's amazing how little we know in medicine and how little we know in science and we really literally have no idea where that sense of qualia that sense of subjective awareness comes from that we call consciousness but and and actually if if you talk with physicists my brother has a PhD in physics and I talked with him about these matters I only understand about two percent of what he says but I mean we're living in a huge mystery actually and we don't even know how matter relates to to mind in the first place whether somehow mysteriously the material world is grounded in in ideas I think when I think of the soul I think of more resilient notions the souls the principle of life within the body and organizing principle of being but it's not eliminative materialism or physicalism I I think it's it's a sense in which there is an element of us that is it is truly immaterial in the sense that we exist in the mind of God I mean this ideas of Philo of Alexandria and for a century and I I think there's something to be said for that here's one for you address you directly can bill make a non theological case for mortality well why would I want it okay let me make a non theological account I think it's possible that the material world with its trajectory of life its limits its pattern has framed our meaning and I think it does this for everybody and in the sense that the exigencies and the opportunities of our life are intimately related to to the the time of our life in the sense in the sense that we're born we we live in this struggle of life for the vast majority of people they end up in some kind of relationship producing children there they go from dependency to nurture and then back to dependency at the end of their life a normal human lifespan allows all three categories of relational dynamics child parent grandparent we we live in this poignancy of the drama of of death and love where we feel ourselves drawn us as true even people don't have children they feel themselves drawn into the urgencies of the expression of love and they will give themselves in some kind of a love so in that sense I think you you actually can make a case for some kind of non theological no although everybody has some kind of a back-up priori sense of meaning most most people want their lives to matter beyond the matter of their body and and in that sense even if they only feel like they're living for the sake of the future of their culture they want to leave some kind of good in the world so so I think you you can sort of make that case I think the case is more fully made if we see both the giving of our lives in on the earth as echoing the paradigm of what of the magnification of soul to the ascent of spirit that makes more sense to me man bill you always make all these incredibly ugly Darwinists things sound so beautiful and we should just we should just you know not forget the ugliness and I I don't I don't believe it works on a meaning or motivation side you know it's that does our mortality motivate us to work harder or does it D motivate us I remember a conversation I had with my granduncle Yves about 80 years old at the time he'd been retired for 15 years and was like you know I could have gotten four PhDs in retirement but I didn't do it because I figured I was gonna live this long and and I think that's that that sort of strikes me as the way the motivational structure actually works it's it's a it's a you know it's it it it it's it you know it's there is no meaning in death there is no meaning in in Darwinism or or the you know you need to try Darwin tried this is not the way to go for us human being something Peter here's one for you aren't you curious yes we've got we've gotten above but thank you we've got a bunch of questions about the practical consequences of life extension and what a society with that kind of a society be incredibly in egalitarian and exasperate some of the worst social trends that we've seen and in the contemporary West may be that Peter can take that one first well you know there's of course this whole litany of criticisms that if you know people live too long it would increase inequality it would maybe they would get bored you know maybe wouldn't create enough space for young people to get new positions the sort of our certainly is you know a long list of things like this we can hypothesize I I would you know I would submit these are all problems we want to have rather than you know and and and that's that's always you know what I what I'd like to do you know if you're if you're talking to you know five-year-old who says they're bored you know the answer is not you know I hope you're gonna die soon you know and and you know if you're if you're concerned about inequality which i think is exaggerated as a problem but let's let's say it's the single be all end all the most important problem the world is inequality you know the response is not well fortunately everybody dies so that's you know we're all equal Matt you know that's that's not the correct response so jumping back to what Peter's comment about evolution I really not framing my thinking that way Peter I think I mean dobzhansky says nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution well I also think nothing in human life makes sense apart from an awareness of God as our source and significance of being so when I when I make these kinds of comments about how the the meaning of our life is in some way wrapped up in the actual processes and transactions of our life I don't think of that because evolution made it I think of that because that's the way God made the world and in that sense I don't I'm not trying to deny the the anguish that is in in the material world the the the panorama of phylogeny is just filled with with cruelty and contingency and sorrow I mean it's it's an amazing thing to look at it you know Darwin some people think Darwin lost his faith because he he he saw that there was a kind of moth that lay or wasp it lays eggs and a living moth the larvae hatched and that they ate them living moth from the inside but I I don't think of life as coming only from cruel contingencies of evolution I see it as as autopoietic that there was that the destiny of life was in the molecules that there was an unfolding process and who knows what kind of hand of intervention in the formation of life I'm just trying to make the point that I think with even within the constraints of a secular perspective there is something to be said for the given world and it's it's frame of time you know in brave new world everybody cites a brave new world you got to be careful using brave in the world but but if you haven't bred it by the way I think you should know well that's an assignment but there's a place in in brave new world where Lenina and Bernard or their helicopter hovering over and they're there trying to decide what they're gonna do that night and and Lenina typically jejune she says let's go play electromagnetic golf and and Barnard says well that would be a waste of time and Lenina says well what's time for well time is of the deepest significance and I think it's within the frame of time that we start to understand who we actually are one point in defense of Darwin I'm against Darwinist ideology but I think Darwin believed it much less than than you do and one of the ways the way I understand the actual you know sort of part of the motivation of Darwin you know for for the Origin of Species was you know these reflections on the cruelty of nature and this was why creationism why intelligent design the problem with him was from Darwin's point he was not primarily scientific it was theological it was and you needed a theory where God was not that proximately involved in the world because you know sort of like you know if God created the HIV virus then you'd say well that's that's that's providential that's good if God did if God was involved that's specifically in the creation it leads to a much greater problem of evil and so so I think what you know what motivated Darwin to come up with naturalistic explanations was to sort of shift the problem of evil away from from God and and that that part of I think makes sense and that's why you know I think the Darwinian story is broadly correct but but it's it's his move was the exact opposite it was never to look for meaning in in in those places it was to really decouple it oh that's a that's a very interesting comment but I think we still are thrown back to the question of then how does the natural process of life relate to our spiritual purposes and and I mean that there's a whole tradition in in Christian history of sacramentality of the sort of high points of meaning that comes through the actual material processes of life now I mean I I'm perfectly you keep you keep invoking nature nature nature nature and this was I was trying to preempt with my you know with my opening comment that it's it's it's you know it can be true it can be the case that all that lives must die like you know the evil mother Gertrude says or it can be an alibi for us ignoring some cultural problems in our society and I I want to keep submitting that you we need to take this this alibi more seriously you know that it is it is um you know there's there's sort of a sense in which we're in this period of secular stagnation in the West you know living standards are not rising anymore you know it's much broader than just than just biotechnology and the thing of the generational question you know for the boomers you know eventually for people in my generation Gen X you know the general racial question is why didn't we do more why didn't we do more to leave our society in a better place than then we had it since you know since the Enlightenment you know one of the ways the our society worked generationally was that parents expected their kids do better than themselves it stopped with the Boomers - stop with your generation or you know you're the generation comes after you build and and Gen X is making the same same mistake that's and then we were desperately looking for these alibis to excuse to excuse this failure and and you know the the biggest alibi is always we couldn't have done more we couldn't do better and and that's that's why I'm sort of I want to always really push back against that well that's good I'm a doctor too I don't I'm not in favor of those alibis and I I'm not in favor of this essentially the implicit killing that goes into taking that attitude where you accept death that's that's not my point but but I still believe that that there is meaning within the material world I mean there are some threads of Christian history that believe that all of time and space and material being are not out of God's purview not out of God's plan but the arena of redemption that the very process of our journey through life with all of its struggles and troubles and death itself is a participation in a process of re identifying re-establishing our unity with God's nature that it's it's in this drama of of love and death that we relocate ourselves not that we relocate ourselves but we restore our sense of unity with God in recognizing our dependence on God that to me that that is what makes sense of it otherwise you you feel like somehow it's escaped the orbit of God's purposes and yet the whole sense of the Incarnation is that the world was somehow the arena for the apprehension of love I mean Christ would have meant nothing to a troupe of chimpanzees it took human beings or their capacity to relate to feel in the other empathic capacities it took human beings to understand God so in a sense creation culminates with a creature who can apprehend their Creator but more importantly it set the arena for the condescension or descent of God into the world to transform the world's purposes allowing henceforth a participation in the very purposes of God it's the Incarnation and then of course the resurrection that that delivers to humanity the the solution in it I mean in a strange sense the material world poses a question it can't answer how can there be both in the realm of a of an omniscient omnipotent and benevolent God how can there be both suffering in love and the answer to that is not some kind of theodicy some kind of rational explanation it's the presence of God on the world to to draw us in and and make that dynamic of struggle suffering and death into meaning he restores the intelligibility of the cosmos cosmos means an ordered whole interesting the word cosmos in greek carries about it the meaning of beauty as well but now we're sliding back to Greek philosophy cosmos is not a biblical concept the word nature does not occur once in the entire Old Testament you know so so I think I think you know yes we can from the pagans we can take science we can take you know some of the things they developed we should not be taking their pagan philosophy and we should not be exporting that into into Christianity so you know the sort of the Hobbesian word for was Aristotle D which is a sort of horrific synthesis of Aristotle and you know medieval Catholicism and I feel that's that's that's that's what we're getting you know the you know even if everything that you say is is correct and on some level even I think it's you know it's it's it's all like this this weird conflation of a Greek and Christian thought it's it's not that what I'd want to hear from you if I was your patient you know I and and I don't I don't think that's unreasonable that you know if I'm seeing a doctor I want them to to work on curing me and if I if I heard the speech that you just heard even if it's all true as a patient I I would think that you weren't doing your job well that raises the issue of what the role of the physician actually is and and we're we could as physicians use a lot of different technologies but as I mentioned in my opening comments it seems to me that the role of the Christian physician is to apply only those technological answers to questions that comport with the highest purposes of human life the purposes of love and I think that's where again how much the question is how much of it is like that is if all of science is like that then we should go straight to your your your theological speech for every patient everything every single thing you can do is fraudulent or evil therefore just you know get ready for your afterlife no but but because you're always going to the negative things you know it's it's it's it's Frankenstein experiment it's all these things that are there that are that are wrong and and I think you know the the concern and I'm not trying to make this ad hominem anyway you know the concern is that this is you know this is the general attitude of our of our culture of our society it's you know there is nothing we can do and so we stop trying and that's that is what I see is the dominant zeitgeist of our of our time I certainly don't believe there's nothing we can do I think there's a great deal we not only can do need to do and I'm very in favor of biomedical research and I'm very in favor of new therapies emerging but I do think that we have to develop them and apply them only within the context of some larger vision of what life is for or less we've degrade the very humanity we're trying to heal look the question is you know the question is how much you know do we need to be worried about that versus how much do we need to be worried about about the stagnation I try to put numbers on it I would say it's you know 99% fake stagnation 1% maybe Frankenstein research that's that's the way that's the way I would quantify it and and you know you're all you're doing your side a disservice when you always go straight to the evil Frankenstein arguments on you know one of the reasons the social conservatives lost the stem-cell debate was because you know they framed it as evil science and it should have been framed if you wanted to win the debate you we're supposed to frame it as bad science and we inject stem cells and people they get cancer it doesn't work it's bad science it's not even science that's the way the Conservatives won the arc debates in the 90s it's not even art it's bad art it's not even science it's bad science once you conceded that it was evil science that you know everyone thought wow it's really gonna work and therefore we should we should push it really really hard that's that's the way the actual history of the of the bush bioethics council work it accelerated it accelerated these developments because it it conceded the most important point which was that it actually worked and that was that was the point that should have been questioned much more we're achieving some excellent differentiation here and I will wants to take it because I mean I Peter I think is actually not representing my position during the stem-cell do they properly knows very well that I I was the guy on the President's Council that said made a defense of both the science and the moral principles that that were intention and that I put forward a proposal to solve it so that the goods of both sides could be met I you know maybe just sort of where where you live and where I live I live entirely almost entirely in a Medical Center and so I I speak you speak to the philosophical social errors and I think of I'm cautious like a good physician above all do no harm I'm cautious at the level of the kind of thinking that underlies the medical agenda but I'm certainly mostly in favor of what's going on and by the way I do not have hostility toward my colleagues at Stanford or any other Medical Center I think they're for the most part very virtuous people very dedicated to what they're doing I'm very in favor of biomedical science I just think it it needs to be framed within something other than the current secular concepts of what life is and where it came from including by the way the Darwins but we need we need to always go back to this question of how much of it is is fake versus evil versus versus good and let me submit to you that the the you know an idea that's really taboo is this idea that a lot of it is is fake and problematic you know one of them one of my one of people have got to know at Stanford was a professor Bob Laughlin he got a Nobel Prize in Physics in the late 90s and he suffered from the supreme delusion that once he had a nobel prize in physics he would have academic freedom and that he could therefore research any area he wanted to and you know he decided to research an area that was far more controversial than let's say you know questioning climate science or questioning evolutionary theory he decided to start by investigating how much research was actually being done by his fellow colleagues at Stanford and his basic premise was was that they were all stealing money from the government that they were all engaged in fraudulent research it sort of started you know they cited they you know and we won the Nobel Prize so he had a right to have a little bit more leeway and freedom so it started with they decided to go after the Stanford biology department first that was like the most degenerate part of the the scientific world and it's sort of you know you sort of can imagine how the movie ended you know it sort of it devolved into you know he he was no longer able to get any funding nobel prize didn't protect him his graduate students couldn't get PhDs those got vetoed by other faculty and and you know I when I first heard of a lawful ins thing I thought you know it's kind of a crazy thing to say and suggest but you know whenever whenever you have ideas that can't be asked or can't be questioned you know you have to suspect there might be more more truth to them than then then then not and you know it's we're spending like crazy amounts you know we're getting very little out um you know even on the on the stem cell thing where it's it's it's not translating to therapies or you know the genomics revolution in the late 90s it was supposed to translate quickly it's been you know maybe something's about to happen but it's it's again 20 years 20 years later and it's you know the the real problem you know that I keep coming back to is not that much is going on and that is that is the really taboo that is the really forbidden idea to articulate you say that you get sidelined even if you have a Nobel Prize in Physics so you think Peter that that the basically that the biomedical science community is not pursuing the the avenues of opportunity or I mean my perspective is quite different on that I I first of all I think there's a we're right at the threshold vast increases in the power of operation and biotechnology mainly through advances that will follow CRISPR coastline the new gene editing tool and I welcome that because there are at least 10,000 single cell single gene diseases that have 90 percent of them have no treatment or cure whatsoever and some of them are horrible including leshan Diane's disease where the children chew their fingers off but I look at the community and I'm pretty melt while in touch with what's going on at Stanford and quite a bit of the of the general national and international science and I I see a great deal of work at the very cutting edges of what's possible I don't see people saying maybe there's not quite enough opportunity for unconventional attitude but we've been we this is what they've been saying for 50 years we're five years away from curing cancer it's just around the corner that's an area for after your kids yes I agree this is what people say this is the this is the propaganda narrative they have to tell because you're you're in a Malthusian struggle against your fellow scientists to get money from the government and the way that Malthusian struggle works is you lie and exaggerate more than your fellow scientists and and we can ask how big the discount is that we need to attach to it but surely we have to attach you know we have to attach some some sort of discount you know I invest like as an investor I've invested both you know NIT and I've invested some in biotech biotech is much harder and it's just and you know one of the problems you run into in biotech investing that you don't run into in on the IT side is there is just crazy amount of stuff that is borderline fraudulent you know it it doesn't quite work the way people represent it and and if you and if you don't ask the fraud question you know you're you're really um again fraud you know lying to others lying to yourself it's all these different permutations but that's you know I you know and again there's always whenever we talk about the stagnation there's always a tendency to shift the topic to the near future it's about to accelerate it's about to take off really fast it's just around the corner and you know that's that's harder to evaluate I think it's easier to evaluate you know the progress we've had in the last 40 50 years and that's been that's been slower and harder than before and we can then get through these complicated public policy debates why that is is it you know is it nature again is it is it that it's it's actually gotten harder the low-hanging fruits been picked or is it is it there's something wrong with you know with with culture with the funding you know almost no grants go to younger scientists you know when it's scientists under age 40 that discovered make most of the big discoveries 2% of NIH grants go to scientists under age 40 that seems like a little bit off you have a peer review process where where anything heterodox can't get funded you have you have sort of a publish or perish dynamic where you have to do small incremental to publish lots of articles that don't add up to anything ever and and and and so I do think we can we can explore a lot that's that's wrong with you know the culture of science and again my sort of libertarian cut on on what happened would be you know the history was that we had you know we had a healthy scientific world that was non governmental it was decentralized it was idiosyncratic different people were doing different kinds of things and in the 1930s 1940s it got centralized and accelerated in the Manhattan Project was the big impetus space program and and you and there was actually a way you could accelerate science temporarily by adding tons of money and centralizing the New York Times editorial 1945 week after Hiroshima was um you know hopefully um you know we people will no longer they will no longer be able to complain talking about libertarians who say that the army can't just tell scientists what to do and get things done if you'd left it's the prima donna science we've taken them fifty years to bring this invention the world that the army could get them to do in three-and-a-half years so the centralization worked but to use a ecological metaphor it worked by creating a monoculture and that monoculture and we're now two generations in to we're on that monoculture has been you know has been just catastrophic and and it's it's not a healthy ecosystem at all anymore well you know Peter I got a Peter I I mean this is great I I think you oughta I think you ought to I'm gonna propose you to take over the FDA left and and maybe the NIH I mean I think Peters right there could be vast changes and but I have to also say this that that the my colleagues in the biomedical research community are very intelligent very sincere and very earnest to do good it's one of the one of the problems that that people generally have is they don't appreciate the complexity of biology which is why I started my comments about the the intrinsic difficulty of it when I I was as you heard I was educated at Stanford Medical School and my my biochemistry teachers but two of them Paul Berg and Arthur Kornberg at Nobel Prizes i sat there and i listened to where the future could go and it was astonishing to think of what might be coming in the next 50 years and and yet as I went through my clinical training I realized oh this is a little more complicated than the textbook version of it so I chose not to invest in biotechnology whenever I had any money here I'm giving you some investment tips Peter when I had money I put it in do into more information technologies and electronics and so forth because I realized it was it was linear whereas biology is networks and it's exceedingly complex I knew that yeah you could invest in things like like screening and you know lab apparatus but if you're gonna invest in in clinical therapies you're gonna run against all the complexities of this strange creature that is so variable that you can barely make predictions and therefore it's very hard to get through the FDA and and so my point is only this just you've mentioned this stem cell why haven't we got you know cures for one hundred and forty three million people like they promised 15 years ago well Peters absolutely right it was grantsmanship it was full of hype the reason we don't have those cures is because it never was gonna happen no matter how well ordered the research was it it was it was grantsmanship in the sense that one domain of science wanted to control more money and that happens all over the place and so therefore they over promised what it could produce I'm very was very good friends with another Nobel laureate Barwick Bloomberg and it was this was going on he kept saying to me everybody needs to calm down it's not gonna work this way I've seen it too many times and that's the truth I mean biology is really really hard that's why we've done a lot in physics we've done a lot in chemistry you know now we're entering the developmental biology we've sequenced the genome we're now no figuring out how the organism is put together but it's really something else it's not easy yeah but you know you're saying two slightly different things I want to sort of disentangle them a little bit is biology political or is it hard and maybe it's both and I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's you know extraordinarily political and you have grantsmanship and you have all sorts of you know cool the socks that you get people revved up on you know the complexity question the hardness question you know I would submit is a bit more of an open question and you know it's obviously you know in some sense it's it's it's it's very different from chemistry and physics I don't think you know I might my sort of proof that it can't be quite as complex as you make it out to be is you know you have 50 trillion cells in a human being and you say well how can you get all these cells to fit together and if you do the combinatorial math you know it's like it would require a computer the size of the universe to calculate that and and nobody can ever figure that out and yet we know there's a you know moderately complex not that not you know universe scale computer complexity there's a moderately complex algorithm or something like that that must do that and and and life is the proof for this this is you know they're all these sort of you know it's it's if you if you and if you take too reductionist approach an approach it will look too complicated if you think of it in terms of you know if you think of biology in terms of chemistry it's unbelievable that anything works at all you'd think there'd be all sorts of crazy confounding reactions and and you know it it shouldn't work and you we could have all these proofs that you know the origin of life is impossible but you know more generally that life is impossible and so I think the fact that we're here you know if there's a scientific explanation for it I would submit it's one of only moderate complexity and and that the question we have to take more seriously as is just you know is there something is there something really really wrong with this one one of one of this is a little bit you know the ad hominem critique would be you know do we have less talented people going into biology than other other fields you know if it's if you need math one of one of my biology scientist friends said you know well it's um you know it's you know I'm a biologist because I bad math genes Darwinian selection process for people with bad math genes now the hope is that that's not what it's going to take but but I think we have to ask all these questions about is it simply the complexity versus is it you know the politics the sociology all these other factors that may go into it one more believe it or not we're running out of time keep going you guys are modeling a very robust intellectual discussion thank you very much Peter this one's for you an invitation to speculate shifts the ground a little bit if human beings plan our lives around a narrative schema will the lack of an end lead many from existentialism to nihilism well I well I think again I your end is a is a sort of an ambiguous word so it's always you know and you know the end of history the end of science the end of X the end of something it always means you know and can always mean termination or a culmination and and so we have to start by disambiguating the word and so so if and so does end as calm as termination mean you know end in terms of all these other ways and I think they're very very different and so I think it's that that's why I that's why I try to that's why I try to frame things in this more teleological sense that it's it's you know there's sort of some orientation to the future it's when we lose that that you have both existentialism and nihilism my my my suspicion is that when you have an end in the sense of termination that's that's actually the problem because that destroys teleology but it's always you have to always disambiguate to be disambiguate that word bill one more for you or do you want to take a crack at that one I really agree with Peter about teleology you know Darwinism is very negative about teleology and I think it everybody operates with a with a story in their life and I think it's just silly to displace you know there's a saying about it's not a very nice saying but I heard it from a Catholic Cardinal so I'll tell you he said teleology is like a woman of ill repute repute okay teleology is like a woman of ill repute nobody wants to be seen with her during the day but many use her at night maybe we should wrap it up on that on that on that note that's a good that's a good one why don't we do that then even know there was a car there behind us somewhere but something is happening let me let me invite Peter or bill if they want to wrap it up or say something else in conclusion what last question do you want one for you that's very good you want it okay all right one more for bill provoked to Professor her but what difference is there between dying of a geriatric disease at 80 or dying at 22 because it's a brachial osis if I should be permitted to take life-saving medicine in the case of the latter what should prohibit me of taking life-saving medicine in the case of the former nothing I'm I'm in favor of people trying to live as long as they can and by the way I do not think we should reduce this discussion to a therapy versus enhancement I think there are perfectly legitimate uses of enhancement in human existence for example if a surgeon were to take a drug to steady his hand while he operates on the eye of a child to make a very sentimental case I think that's a legitimate use of enhancement even if it takes something a week or two or a month off of the surgeons life if the if the purposes are serious I I actually think that that we should pursue the cures of things and I think we should figure out how to use biotechnology for things beyond therapy that are clearly coherent with the ethical good but for both of those frames you have to ask yourself what is it we're aiming what are we doing I mean keeping life alive is obviously a good thing if that life has within itself a coherence of purpose I mean there as I said at the beginning there are certain sense in which the the cure is worse than the disease and I we're learning that in the intensive care units now and we we've started making our way through that and but but here's the larger point and this is coming back to our original thesis here technology should regard death as the final enemy I believe that death is the enemy I believe that the I believe that that life is about life that that death is something that needs to be conquered but I don't believe that it will be conquered by technology I think we can help we use our technology in the coherence of our larger spiritual frame but in the final end I believe in something that's very unpopular to believe in in a place like the one I work in and that is that that life has a transcendent purpose and that we we align our technology in the best way we can with that purpose now I mentioned new gene editing tool CRISPR caste 9i I am doing a project with with Jennifer Doudna discovered that technology and she's a very good person in my my experience she's very concerned about the proper use of it and she realizes as too many of my colleagues that we're venturing now into territory where the powers of operation on human life are going to be vast and I think Peter I think you're going to find they really quote could in the proper political environment advanced very rapidly because the tools are so much greater I just just take a moment and give you an example of how great the tools are I'm friends with Rudolf jaenisch who made the first transgenic Mouse and it he told me that it took him two years the postdoc of course two years 200,000 dollars and he altered one gene and recently told me he can do that same operation for $2,000 in three weeks and he can't change six to eight jeans at a time that is more than a quantum leap that's an astonishing advance that's gonna filter in it every level of bile by a medical inquiry it's going to rapidly illuminate and the basic mechanisms of things the way they have tractable engagement sort of like our new genetically engineered approaches to cancer it's just the beginning I mean as I said we've just barely stepped off of Plymouth Rock but I I still will hold to my thesis here and I'm not I'm not negative about technology and I'm and I hope I'm not hysterical about its dangers but when you get the capacity to operate at so many levels of human life as will emerge in the next half a century you have to have a frame of ethics to threaten to set it in its proper course otherwise the ambitions and appetites that are open-ended human desires so dangerous in some senses and so wonderful and others that's that's a equation for degradation disaster as much as it is for for aspiration and exaltation all of this has to be ordered with some sense of meaning and purpose of human life and it's a finish on this there's a saying that that we can do what we do but mother nature are always bats in the bottom of the ninth and I think we need to take that seriously and another saying this is my last call there's a there's a saying that the first principle of intelligent tinkering is to never throw away any of the parts well you certainly don't want to throw away the parts that are the physical basis of our freedom our extraordinary human capacities but neither do we want to throw away those parts that are the aesthetic philosophical theological foundation that makes that freedom truly free the preservation of our civilization may depend on this Peter final word well I look I think I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree I think I think the problem is one no no no I think the problem is one of stagnation and and you know it's it's uh I think I think the sort of the sort of accelerating narrative is just not believed by people anymore I mean there's a Silicon Valley version of this let's just frame the context a little bit differently where um you know silicon this is the reason Silicon Valley is sort of culturally politically in trouble in this country is because they have been there's been this Google propaganda that's accelerating the story of accelerating technology they've been talking about self-driving cars for ten years and you know I'm not sure how important self-driving cars are but it's it's been 10 years not much you know the progress has been anemic ly slow and and I think this is uh this is sort of this is the sense in which you know the the broader public is is is getting more skeptical of the things the scientific and technological community is telling them because and they because they rightly sense it's been too much propaganda it's it's it's it's it's not actually this does not mesh with people's common sense experience with the way they see their their date day to day lives and and that's that's why you know I think again we're you know we're not in a you know we're not in a Promethean science moment like it lost almost in 1945 we're in the opposite world we're in an epicurean world of stagnation you know bureaucratize ation politicization and and that's the that's the cultural battle that that I I believe we need to fight first and foremost to traverse the decline of the West before you join me in thanking our debaters for an excellent conversation like thank you for your questions we couldn't get to all of them we at the Abigail is to privilege big questions bold questions adventurous questions and thank you for those there many others here as well but I also like to commend the debaters not for of course their brilliant minds but they're also very rhetorically able and and skilled skilled debaters so that was very nice to see as well thank you very much and thank you again to the ISI and to the Diana Davis Spencer foundation for making this possible have a good evening [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Abigail Adams

Views: 33,162

Rating: 4.7948718 out of 5

Keywords: technology, death, thiel, hurlbut, silicon valley, debate, great idea, idea, enemy, immortal, biology, biotech, biotechnology, cambridge, boston, abigail adams

Id: qYSnVR7d4VE

Length: 103min 3sec (6183 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019