(Portuguese): The lovely and hospitable capital
of the state of Minas Gerais.
Good afternoon,
I won't speak in Portuguese because
I don't speak Portuguese.
And I don't want to invent the first talk in Portuñol.
So I'm going to speak English.
I come from Mexico.
So, thirty years ago, I was born in Mexico City
and as you may know, Mexico is the country where corn,
maize, was born centuries ago.
We call it the land of corn.
And actually, corn is very important in our culture,
but not just in our culture,
but mainly in our gastronomy.
And maybe some of you have been going to
Mexican restaurants, eating tacos, maybe.
Maybe burritos, although burritos
are not really Mexican, sorry.
But they mostly use what we have here,
which are tortillas.
These tortillas are made out of corn, and in Mexico,
corn consumption is quite big.
As you can see there, from the statistics from the FAO,
per person, per year, a Mexican
eats around 120 kg of corn.
So, it's not just important in terms of the culture,
but is very important in terms of nutrition.
So, by knowing that, when I was 15 years old
I started having dreams, and my dream at that stage was
to help creating an enhancement,
a nutritious enhancement in corn.
So, my fellow citizens, Mexicans that eat a lot of tortillas
every day, like bread, will have a better nutrition, ok?
That was my dream when I was 15.
And I suppose people like me when I was 15
and you have a dream like that, the first thing you start to do
is to decide to study science, engineering,
so that's what I did.
So step by step I started studying biochemical engineering,
graduated, and quite fast, at the age of 23,
I was already working as a research associate
at the University of Canterbury
in the Biological Science Department.
I quickly started to participate in projects
related to research on biotechnology, which made sense,
if I come back to my previous dream.
So, I don't know, if you think a lot about inflexions in life,
those moments that suddenly change the direction,
the current trend of your life, and transforming
all deviating into a new one.
To me, this happened in 2005.
In 2005 I had the opportunity to go to the Solomon Islands.
I don’t know if many of you know the Solomon Islands.
Well, the Solomon Islands is actually a country,
that is situated in the Pacific.
It is part of the Pacific Islands.
So, this is a picture that I took from the plane,
this is what it looks like.
It is a very interesting place with the highest concentration
of ethnicities and languages in the world.
And despite of all of that we don’t know it too much.
We actually know more about the Solomon Islands
because this was the place where lots of the navel battles
during the Second World War happened
and lots of divers go, for example,
but not many other people.
So, I was actually invited there by a conservation biologist
from the Solomon’s called Patrick Pikatcha.
He brought me to an island that is called Choiseul Island,
which it is in the Solomon Islands but it is next to the border
with Papua New Guinea, and this is how it looks.
Very beautiful and it will probably look like
some other places here also in Brazil.
So, we went there because Patrick was doing some work,
trying to monitor a native species,
in particular he likes to study frogs.
So, I don’t know why, but scientists like him,
biologists, like to work at night, maybe because frogs
usually go out at night
like some people here also in Brazil, and Latin America.
Well, just like frogs, we had to go outside at night,
with Patrick, and we were looking for these frogs
and just after 30 seconds of getting out of the field station,
I realized that this was not my environment, completely.
I was completely blind. Imagine this dark to me,
I was completely like a blind man.
I already wear glasses. Imagine me in here.
Because I am very used to cities, for example,
but not really this kind of environment.
It was even more interesting, my experience,
when I started to see that Patrick was using his lantern on the river,
starting to spot some of the different frogs.
For me, it was completely invisible.
But the most interesting thing here, is that the boy,
the teenager that was leading the expedition,
he was actually spotting the place where organisms
were going to appear, even before the expert,
even before Patrick.
And at that moment I started to realize
that something interesting was happening,
and I started to look on how this non-expert, this teenager,
had a different sight, definitely, compared to mine,
but also different from the real expert, from Patrick.
But the Solomon Islands do not only have a forest,
they also have cities.
And in the city of Honiara, which is the capital,
we and some colleagues from the University of Canterbury,
like professor Jack Hyneman, my friend and colleague
from the Solomon Islands Paul Roughan,
started to organize some
capacity building initiatives to discuss biotechnology
in the Solomon Islands and discuss biology in general.
The person you see here is Naneth Tutua.
She is a business woman from the Solomon Islands.
What she is [holding] there is a DNA extraction
from a papaya.
She was able to visualize DNA.
So how did this happen?
Because Solomon Islands is considered
one of the least developed places in the world.
So, there are no real laboratories for molecular biology there.
But what we had to do is to improvise.
To do a different kind of experiment in order to extract DNA
and so, Ms. Naneth could see what DNA looks like,
and by looking at this, she was able to demystify DNA.
And DNA was just not something
that is abstract and she cannot understand,
this time she was able to see it, understand it,
and when someone wants to talk about biotechnology,
she has somehow, some confidence to talk about this.
She seems quite proud of doing her extraction.
And naturally, DNA extractions, I don’t know if you know,
but are quite easy to do.
You just need salt, detergent and alcohol.
So I started to use these three ingredients,
put it in my bag and started to travel around,
doing exactly what we did in the Solomon’s,
repeating the experience, bringing
the demystification of DNA.
This happens in different places of the world
but definitely my most important experience
was when last November, a DNA extraction was featured
in a Chilean soap opera called Decibel 110.
A low cost kitchen DNA extraction
was part of this meet-up between Francisco
and his prohibited love, Cindy.
We didn’t stop at the DNA extraction, we suddenly started to play also
with instruments of molecular biology.
Here you have some pictures of workshops
that we’ve performed in Philippines, where we actually
started to develop basic molecular lab equipment,
as you can see there, it looks quite basic,
but it's actually some of the equipment
that is mostly used in laboratories.
So, once I started to build up this kind of motion
and instrument and trying to work out
with these local's technology, and the demystification
and with all those travels,
I suddenly found myself in West Africa.
And West Africa was also an inflexion point for me.
The reason for that, is that in West Africa
I found for the first time a hub of people
that were thinking a bit like me.
That were asking questions about the experts,
that were asking questions about technology.
What kind of technology? For whom?
They were asking questions about
what Africa can bring to the world.
The interesting thing here, is that they were
mainly social scientists, but also farmers,
and artists, talking about this.
So we decided to stay more, and I’ve been going
to West Africa every year since 2007.
And the basic question of it, is based on this picture.
As you can see we have a plane.
A plane represents technology, I think,
and as we can agree, planes have changed
the way we move, the way we communicate,
but also the way diseases are transmitted
and also passed.
But what is important here is not just to look at the technology,
but to look at the context surrounding it.
And maybe for some of you this will look quite nice.
For me, it allows me to make the questions about
what is the context about.
What this technology can offer to the context?
Does this technology fit into the context?
And those were the questions used
as a base for our documentary:
(Music)
(Video) Man (French): If science say so, it counts as "the gospel".
Science is made by man.
Science must be made by man
for man.
Woman: Why do we do research?
Who does the research?
For what purpose?
Man: And the specialists hide
in their offices, in their sects,
to decide for everybody.
Man: To create an agricultural policy,
without the farmers
it means that we are not discussing agriculture.
Man: The farmer needs to consider himself as a researcher
as someone who works in a laboratory.
Woman: It is not enough to research inside a laboratory.
Man: Today, we will extract DNA from plants.
Woman: Is not enough to do research inside an institution.
Man: We will use some salt,
some detergent,
we have alcohol and test tubes.
We are able to extract DNA. We saw it.
I saw the DNA, our friends saw the DNA.
Without any electron or optical microscope.
Woman: We have to deinstitutionalize the research!
Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran: So, this is just a fragment of the documentary
“Autrement” (“Differently”), that we did in West Africa,
and, as you can see, it just raises questions
about technology, science, but based on the context in West Africa.
And as you can see there is an empowerment of it.
There is a message that Africans want to say
about what they can offer.
So, after building kind of a boat,
with instruments and methods, we started to use them
in different parts of the globe,
then I decided also to observe.
And this comes from a so called expert that is known
now to talk about the non-experts.
Usually the non-experts are kind of invisible
in this generation of knowledge.
Mostly, non experts are consumers or users
of knowledge, of technology, of science.
We have had several technological revolutions
starting with Information Technology,
starting also in agriculture, lots of technical revolutions.
But most of the people in the world, and I'm talking here also of countries,
have been mostly consumers and users.
This is a list of the technologies
that Peter Diamandis, from Singularity University,
proposed at the last TED.
This list, which is quite interesting,
he proposes are the technologies that will change
and that are already changing the future.
And among these technologies,
he also talks about the crowd, and the power of the crowd.
He actually introduced the term cyber citizens,
which are normal citizens, people like us,
that participate via online, and in his example,
it was in a game of folding proteins.
Not only for the pleasure of playing a game
but actually to solve medical problems.
And this is where we are now, in a world where
the non experts are not just consumers and users,
but they are transforming themselves into contributors.
We heard today, this morning, a very good example of it
happening here, in the Amazon.
But some of these are also what we call the Crowd-X,
or crowdsourcing, or crowdfunding.
A very good example is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a contribution of the non-experts.
And we have lots of examples like that.
The citizen science, the bio-hackers,
this is happening right now.
The Who is changing.
The non-experts are contributing right now.
However, I am here to propose
something more radical, than just being contributors.
I want also to raise questions regarding the What.
What kind of technology?
Is that the only list of technologies that will shape the future?
I don’t think so.
I don’t think there is only one way to see
how we're going to develop ourselves into the future.
I actually think that we need more and we have more.
We need knowledge that starts to develop
from the context, context-based.
We heard some examples from West Africa
and the Solomon's.
Those are different contexts and they can develop
new ways to see generation of knowledge.
We probably need to unable,
not to say: science is just this,
and if you start to bring some art into this,
then it's not science, you can't talk about that.
Maybe we have to start unlabeling things.
For example, in our documentary,
we talk about science and development
but we use contemporary African dance to talk about that, why?
Because if you talk about contemporary dance in Africa,
things make sense.
If you don’t use the culture, things do not make sense.
It is important to work out in the demystification,
in the democratization, decentralization.
I think we can have very good examples for research
coming from these places.
Solomon Islands, this tiny archipelago, could become,
for example, the best observatory,
monitoring of global changes in the world.
And these could be the new research centers
happening around the world,
maybe these are the new contributors.
I actually believe that we have passed
from the technological revolution to, right now,
in a crowd revolution, but we need something else.
We need a humble revolution. We need humbleness.
We need to reduce our ego.
Those who consider themselves specialists, or experts,
we need to reduce the ego.
Once we reduce the ego, we are able to identify
the potential among our peers,
among those that we call the non-experts.
And, by doing that, we will be able to start new directions.
New directions for science, for technology,
you can call it the way you want.
I will just finish with this slide,
which to me represents empowerment,
because I am here, standing in front of you,
and that dream that I had when I was 15 years old,
I want you to remember, that dream has changed.
That dream has actually expanded.
I don’t want to build, with a bunch of experts,
a technological tool to help the population of my country.
I want to create something new.
I want to expand my horizon, and this is all.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)