How to read the genome and build a human being

The next 60 minutes,
I'm going to take you on a journey

that is probably the biggest dream
of humanity:

to understand the code of life.

So for me, everything started
many, many years ago

when I met the first 3D printer.

The concept was fascinating,

a 3D printer needed three elements:

a bit of information, some raw material,
some energy,

and it can produce any object
that was not there before.

I was doing physics, I was coming back
home

and I realized that I actually always knew
a 3D printer and everyone does.

It was my mom.

(Laughter)

My mom takes three elements:

a bit of information, which is between
my father and my mom in this case,

raw elements and energy
in the same medium, that is food.

And after several months, produces me,

and I was not existent before.

So a part from the shock of my mom
discovering that she's a 3D priner,

I immediately got mesmerized
by that piece, the first one, the information.

What amount of information takes
to build and asemble a human?

Is it much? Is it little?

How many thumb drives can you fill?

Well, I was studying physics
in the beginning

and I took this approximation
of a human

as a gigantic lego piece.

You can imagine that the building blocks
are little atoms

and there is a hydrogen here, a carbon here,
a nitrogen here.

So in the first approximation,

if I can list the number of atoms
that compose a human being,

I can build it.

Now you can round some numbers

and that happens to be
quite an astonishing number.

So the number of atoms,
the file that I will save in my thumb drive

to assemble a little baby

will actually fill an entire Titanic
of thumb drives.

Multiplied 2,000 times, this is
the miracle of life.

Every time you see from now on
a pregnant lady,

she's assembling the biggest
amount of information

that you will ever encounter.

Forget big data, forget anything
you heard of.

This is the biggest amount
of information that exists.

(Applause)

But nature, fortunately, is much smarter
than a young physicist

and in 4 billion years, managed
to pack this information

in a small crystal we call DNA.

We met it for the first time in 1950
when Rosalind Franklin,

an amazing scientist,
a woman,

took a picture of it.

But it took us more than 40 years
to finally poke inside a human cell,

take out this crystal,

unroll it, and read it for the first time.

While the code comes out to be
a fairly simple alphabet,

four letters: A,T,C and G.

And to build a human,
you need 3 billion of them.

3 billion, how many are 3 billion?

Doesn't really make
much sense as a number?

So I was thinking how
I could explain myself better

about how big and enormous
is this code.

But there is...I'm going
to have some help

and the best person who is
going to help me introduce the code

is actually the first man
to sequence it, Dr. Craig Venter.

So welcome on stage Dr. Craig Venter.

(Applause)

Not the man in his flesh,

but for the first time in history

this is the genome of a specific human
printed page -by-page, letter-by-letter,

262,000 pages of information,

450 kilograms shipped from
the United States to Canada

all the thanks to ?,

it was an amazing feat.

But this is the visual perception
of what is the code of life,

and now, for the first time,
I can do something funny.

I can actually poke inside it
and read.

So let me take some interesting book
like this one.

I have an annotation, it's a
fairly big book.

So just to let you see
what is the code of life.

Thousands and thousands
and thousands

and millions of letters.

And they apparently
make any sense.

Let's get to a specific part.

Let em read it to you:

(Laughter)

"AAGAATATA."

To you it sounds like mute letters,

but this sequence gives
the color of the eyes to Craig.

I'll show you another part
of the book.

It's actually a little more
complicated.

Chromosome 14, book 132:

(Laughter)

As you might expect.

(Laughter)

"ATTCTTGATT."

This human is lucky, because if
you miss just two letters in this position,

two letters out of 3 billion,

he will condemned to
a terrible disease:

cystic fibrosis.

We have no cure for it, we don't
know how to solve it,

and it's just two letter of difference
from what we are.

A wonderful book, a mighty book,

a mighty book that helped me understand
and show you something