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Finding Genius Podcast

What If You Had the Power to Control Your Health—From the Palm of Your Hand? Eleonore Pauwels of the Wilson Center Explains How Close This Is to Reality

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.41K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2017

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Imagine this: you’re out with friends, and you’re contemplating another glass of wine despite the fact that you feel a bug coming on. Normally, you’d make a spontaneous decision based on how you think you feel both now and tomorrow. But what if you could be sure of it? In this Future Tech podcast, Genome Editing, we visit with Eleonore Pauwels, the Director of Biology Collectives with the Science and Technology Program at the Woodrow Wilson Scholar Institute in Washington, D.C. Pauwels delves deep into “the democratization of genomics and biology”, the goal of which is for people to have 24/7 control of their health and even environment—imagine being able to determine that the restaurant food that you’re about to eat is contaminated with salmonella. She also explains how such a decentralization will allow someone with a certain type of leukemia, for example, to monitor their cancer levels every 1-2 weeks from their home–convenient for someone living far from their doctor or with mobility issues. She goes on to disclose the various factors preventing this application from being widely available yet (even though the technology exists) before ending with several questions that will have you looking forward to the future.
You’ll also learn:
How one company in China could be onto a breakthrough that will revolutionize how you read and interpret all aspects of not only your biological data but also that of thousands, perhaps millions, more

How a digital avatar of yourself could monitor how you’re evolving—in real time

How the “dark side” of this power to control your health could also ruin it, as well as that of millions of people, unless you have a secret weapon—the “liquid biopsy”

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Almost Here, Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.

0:08.0

Future Technologies Boys To Transform Our Lives, for better or worse, are the focus of this podcast. Almost here

0:14.3

means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. We're just around the

0:18.8

corner from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.

0:27.0

Hi, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech Podcast.

0:31.0

Today my guest is Eleanor Paul Wills. She works at the Woodrow Wilson

0:37.1

Scholar Institute in Washington and her introduction I'm definitely going to bungle so I'm going to have her do it.

0:43.7

But Eleanor how you doing? I'm good. Thank you so much Richard. It's a pleasure to be with you.

0:48.9

Very exciting afternoon. Yeah indeed so by official terms I'm at the Wilson Center and I'm the

0:56.0

director of biology collective within the science and tech innovation program.

1:00.0

So biology collective is all about enabling the democratization of genomics and biology for

1:08.4

for and with the people basically.

1:10.5

So the kind of issues I'm dealing with is I'm playing with this idea of with the new biocitizen in an Internet of living things.

1:20.0

How do we democratize biology to empower every one of us from preserving ecosystems to personal

1:26.8

health to fighting the antibiotic crisis and pollution.

1:31.9

And so I try to think about the funding and

1:34.2

innovation model and governance model for that kind of democratization and how the

1:39.1

lab of the future will look like when we enable that form of

1:42.3

democratization.

1:43.4

So it's going to be an intelligent, connected,

1:46.3

and decentralized bio lab that can basically

1:50.1

empower every one of us to understand genomics and use biology.

...

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