This TED Talk features genomics researcher June Wang, recorded live at TED 2017.

Today I'm here actually to post you a question. What is life?

It has been really puzzled me for more than 25 years,

and probably will continue in doing so for the next 25 years. This is the thesis I did

when I'm still in undergraduate school. When people, while my colleagues, my classmates,

still treat computer as big calculator, I start to teach computer to learn. I built a digital native beetles

and tried to learn from real native beetles

just to do one thing, search for.

And after a very simple neural network, genetic algorithms and so on,

look at the pattern, it almost identical as the real life.

A very striking learning experience for 20 years' boy.

Life is a learning program.

When you look at all those wonderful world, every species has its own learning program.

The learning program is genome, and the code of that program is DNA.

The different genome of each species represent different survival strategy.

It represents hundreds of millions, years of evolution.

The interaction between every species' successor and the environment.

I was really fascinated about the world, about the DNA,

about language of the life, the program of learning.

So I decided to co-founded the Institute, to read them, I read many of them.

Probably we read more than half of the plant animal genomes in the world, I mean, up to date.

We did learn a lot. We did sequence also one species many, many times, human genome.

...