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Eric Lander
Founding Director, Broad Institute
One summer I was finishing up a book, coming out of my thesis on a very abstract subject -- algebraic combinatorics for goodness sakes! -- and I didn't know what to do, so I spoke to my brother. My brother was a development neurobiologist and was going through graduate school, and Arthur suggested to me, "You're a mathematician. You know all about information theory. You should learn about the brain. The brain is a really great place to apply it." So being hopelessly naive, I said, "Okay, I'll learn neurobiology this summer." I got a couple of books and papers and things on mathematical aspects of neurobiology. They were interesting, but they didn't ring very true, and I, in any case, decided I had to learn more neurobiology. So I started learning about neurobiology, wet lab neurobiology. I decided in order to do that I needed to know more biology, so I decided, okay, next semester I'd learn biology.
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Eric Lander
Founding Director, Broad Institute
Eric Lander: Genes code for all the protein components of the body. Basically, genes are the information storage of heredity. The human being has a total of 100,000 genes, give or take, and that sum total of all the genetic information is called the "genome." If we can completely understand the structure of the human genome, then we have a complete component list of all of the proteins that the body makes. In a sense, that goal, the Human Genome Project, is very much akin to the revolution in chemistry that happened in the period of about 1869 to 1889, when all of matter was described in terms of a finite list, a finite chart that captured its properties. That changed the face of chemistry, because it meant that matter was predictable, through only a finite number of elements. Biology now is getting its own periodic table. In the 21st Century, we will know that the human body is composed of some set of 100,000 proteins, and all biological programs will start from that list. If you want to understand any particular thing, you've got to understand it in terms of those components. There aren't any more components to go look for, at least at the level of proteins. So the effect on biology in the next century will be much like the effect on chemistry in this century. For chemists, the predictability of matter gave rise to industries, the chemical industry. The mysteries of the periodic table, and why there were rows and columns of elements, gave rise to some of the deepest theories of this century, quantum mechanics. I think so, too, understanding the component list of the human body, the human genome, will give rise to both very practical consequences and very theoretical consequences. The students looking back, 20 years from now, will not be able to imagine what it was like to practice biology without these tools. Indeed, they'll assume they were always there. They will look back to this earlier period with a romantic notion, like 19th Century African explorers going off into the jungle with their machetes, searching for a gene and sometimes coming back triumphant with a gene in hand, and sometimes never being heard from again. But that romantic picture of exploring the deepest, darkest continent of biology will be replaced by a Landsat image with accuracy down to the single DNA letter. It will be a very different world, and it will be hard to imagine what anything was like before it.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
Once we had worked the site at 4.1 million, which is called Kanapoi, we decided that we could work at a site that was the same age as Lucy and see if we could find afarensis, or whether we'd find something else. Because again, I was still thinking that there should have been diversity at that time, and it shouldn't just be the common ancestor there, but it should go back further. So that's why we were working at that age, 'cause it was the same age as the sites from which Lucy came. What we found there was a skull, and other specimens as well. But we only named the skull because we couldn't relate the other specimens directly to the skull. But the skull had a very flat face and a very long face. Lucy's face is much more protruding and much more ape-like in many ways, actually. The face shape showed that the species was not afarensis, it was something different. So it showed that there were at least two hominid species living at the same time as Lucy. So therefore, Lucy wasn't necessarily the common ancestor. It could have been the species that we found, that we called Kenyanthropus platyops, or it can be something else that we haven't yet found. I believe sincerely that in the end, there will be several different things found at that time as there are later.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I wanted to grow grapes and start a vineyard, and people said, "You can't grow a vineyard in your area. It's six-and-a-half feet above sea level. You're on the Equator. The days are too short. How are you going to grow grapes that make good wine?" So, I said, "Well, why can't I?" and they said, "Well, it can't be done, and you'll have to think of something else." Well, we're producing very good wine today, pinot noir and chardonnay, very drinkable. First time it's been grown. In fact, a wag friend of mine wrote a book and said, "He's growing the best wine in a region twice the size of France." The fact that nobody else is growing any doesn't matter. It's a great sense of achievement, and we serve the wine now to all our friends, and they prefer it to a lot of the wine that is available commercially in Kenya. This is the challenge. If you want something done by me, suggest it can't be done, and then I will engage. I enjoy that very much.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
What struck me is -- if we developed bipedalism six or seven million years ago on the African savannas, rough, thorny country -- there can't have been a single individual who would have lived 20, 30 years who didn't at some stage have his or her leg -- or legs, one or two -- incapacitated. If one leg is incapacitated with a sprain or a break or an abscess or a thorn, unless somebody looks after you on the African savanna, brings you water, brings you food, fends off the hyenas and the lions, you won't make it. Given that everyone was bipedal, there has to have been genetic selection for empathy, for compassion. I believe that is the single strongest characteristic of being human today, and that is our propensity and natural ability to feel empathetic and compassionate and sympathetic. That is the one character that, to me, really sets us apart from other forms of life. That is the one character we really need to rely on to get us through the difficult years and to think globally as opposed to thinking nationally or racially or on the various mini-forms of bonding that we approach. So losing my legs taught me that, too, in a very real sense, and it has become a major part of my public message. Let's go back to fundamentals. We are compassionate. With compassion, we can solve a lot of the problems that threaten us today.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
If a country like Bangladesh goes under water in the next 30 years because of rising sea levels, there are 160-odd million people there, many of them poorly educated, who will be refugees. If it was only the Bangladesh country that went under water, maybe we could deal with it, but we could have a billion people on the run within the next 30 years. Where are we going to put a billion people? The U.S. is having trouble with 11 million illegal refugees, immigrants. What are we going to do when there's a billion of them? Where are we going to feed those sort of people when much of the rice-growing areas of lowland might disappear? The implications of what is coming are enormous, and most leadership is not addressing it outside the framework of their own elected terms.
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