Let 's pretend right here we have a machine , a big machine , a cool , TED-ish machine , and it 's a time machine .
And everyone in this room has to get into it .
And you can go backwards , you can go forwards ; you cannot stay where you are . And I wonder what you 'd choose , because I 've been asking my friends this question a lot lately , and they all want to go back .
I don 't know .
They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or " American Idol . "
I don 't know .
I 'm convinced that there 's some sort of pull to nostalgia , to wishful thinking .
And I understand that .
I 'm not part of that crowd , I have to say .
I don 't want to go back , and it 's not because I 'm adventurous -- it 's because possibilities on this planet , they don 't go back , they go forward .
So I want to get in the machine , and I want to go forward .
This is the greatest time there 's ever been on this planet by any measure you wish to choose : health , wealth , mobility , opportunity , declining rates of disease .
There 's never been a time like this .
My great-grandparents died , all of them , by the time they were 60 .
My grandparents pushed that number to 70 .
My parents are closing in on 80 .
So there had better be a nine at the beginning of my death number .
But it 's not even about people like us because this is a bigger deal than that .
A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago .
Think about that .
It 's an incredible fact .
And why is it true ?
Smallpox .
Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet .
It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has .
It 's gone .
It 's vanished .
We vanquished it .
Puff .
In the rich world , diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist , hardly .
Diphtheria , rubella , polio ... does anyone even know what those things are ?
Vaccines , modern medicine , our ability to feed billions of people , those are triumphs of the scientific method .
And to my mind , the scientific method , trying stuff out , seeing if it works , changing it when it doesn 't , is one of the great accomplishments of humanity .
So that 's the good news .
Unfortunately , that 's all the good news because there 's some other problems , and they 've been mentioned many times , and one of them is that , despite all our accomplishments , a billion people go to bed hungry in this world , every day .
That number 's rising , and it 's rising really rapidly , and it 's disgraceful .
and not only that , we 've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe .
Potable water , arable land , rainforests , oil , gas : they 're going away , and they 're going away soon , and unless we innovate our way out of this mess , we 're going away too .
So the question is : Can we do that ?
I think we can .
I think it 's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on .
I think we can power this world with energy that doesn 't also destroy it .
I really do believe that , and , no , it ain 't wishful thinking .
But here 's the thing that keeps me up at night -- one of the things that keeps me up at night .
We 've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now , never , and we 've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today .
We 're on the verge of amazing , amazing events in many fields .
And yet , I actually think we 'd have to go back hundreds , 300 years , before the Enlightenment , to find a time when we battled progress , when we fought about these things more vigorously , on more fronts , than we do now .
People wrap themselves in their beliefs , and they do it so tightly that you can 't set them free .
Not even the truth will set them free .
And , listen , everyone 's entitled to their opinion ; they 're even entitled to their opinion about progress , but you know what you 're not entitled to ?
You 're not entitled to your own facts .
Sorry , you 're not .
And this took me awhile to figure out .
About a decade ago , I wrote a story about vaccines for " The New Yorker , " a little story .
And I was amazed to find opposition , opposition to what is , after all , the most effective public health measure in human history .
I didn 't know what to do , so I just did what I do , I wrote a story and I moved on .
And soon after that , I wrote a story about genetically engineered food .
Same thing , only bigger .
People were going crazy .
So I wrote a story about that too , and I couldn 't understand why people thought this was " frankenfoods , " why they thought moving molecules around in a specific , rather than a haphazard way , was trespassing on nature 's ground .
But , you know , I do what I do .
I wrote the story , I moved on .
I mean , I 'm a journalist ; we type , we file , we go to dinner , it 's fine .
But these stories bothered me , and I couldn 't figure out why , and eventually I did .
And that 's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren 't actually fanatics at all .
They were thoughtful people , educated people , decent people .
They were exactly like the people in this room .
And it just disturbed me so much ... but then I thought , you know , let 's be honest : We 're at a point in this world where we don 't have the same relationship to progress that we used to .
We talk about it ambivalently .
We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it : " Progress . "
Okay , there are reasons for that , and I think we know what those reasons are .
We 've lost faith in institutions , in authority , and sometimes in science itself , and there 's no reason we shouldn 't have .
You can just say a few names and people will understand .
Chernobyl , Bhopal , the Challenger , Vioxx , weapons of mass destruction , hanging chads .
I mean , you know , you can choose your list .
There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right .
So be skeptical .
Ask questions , demand proof , demand evidence .
Don 't take anything for granted .
But here 's the thing : When you get proof , you need to accept the proof , and we 're not that good at doing that .
And the reason I can say that is because we 're now in an epidemic of fear like one I 've never seen and hope never to see again .
About 12 years ago , there was a story published , a horrible story , that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles , mumps , and rubella vaccine shot .
Very scary .
Tons of studies were done to see if this was true .
Tons of studies should have been done ; it 's a serious issue .
The data came back .
The data came back from the United States , from England , from Sweden , from Canada , and it was all the same , no correlation , no connection , none at all .
It doesn 't matter .
I doesn 't matter because we believe anecdotes , we believe what we see , what we think we see , what makes us feel real .
We don 't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data , and I do understand that , I think we all do .
But you know what ?
The result of that has been disastrous , disastrous because here 's a fact : The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down .
That is disgraceful , and we should be ashamed of ourselves .
It 's horrible .
What kind of a thing happened that we could do that .
Now , I understand it .
I do understand it .
Because , does anyone have measles here ?
Has one person in this audience ever see someone die of measles ?
Doesn 't happen very much .
Doesn 't happen in this country at all , but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year .
That 's a lot of death of measles , 20 an hour .
But since it didn 't happen here , we can put it out of our minds , and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like Oprah and Larry King Live .
And they can do it because they don 't link causation and correlation .
They don 't understand that these things seem the same , but they 're almost never the same .
And it 's something we need to learn , and we need to learn it really soon .
This guy was a hero , Jonas Salk .
He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us .
No fear , no agony , polio , puff , gone .
That guy in the middle , not so much .
His name is Paul Offit .
He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people .
It 's save the lives of 400 , 500,000 kids in the developing world every year .
Pretty good , right ?
Well , it 's good , except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining .
And he actually says it that way .
So , Paul 's a terrorist .
When Paul speaks in a public hearing , he can 't testify without armed guards .
He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school .
And why ?
Because Paul made a vaccine .
I don 't need to say this , but vaccines are essential .
You take them away , disease comes back , horrible diseases , and that 's happening We have measles in this country now .
And it 's getting worse , and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it 's just a numbers game .
And they 're not just going to die of measles .
What about polio ?
Let 's have that .
Why not ?
A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident .
No one 's ever said that before .
She wasn 't going to vaccinate her kid against polio .
No way .
Fine .
Why ?
Because we don 't have polio .
And you know what ?
We didn 't have polio in this country yesterday .
Today , I don 't know , maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning , and he 's flying to LAX , right now he 's over Ohio .
And he 's going to land in a couple of hours , he 's going to rent a car , and he 's going to come to Long Beach , and he 's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight .
And he doesn 't know that he 's infected with a paralytic disease , and we don 't either because that 's the way the world works .
That 's the planet we live on .
Don 't pretend it isn 't .
Now , we love to wrap ourselves in lies .
We love to do it .
Everyone take their vitamins this morning ?
Echinacea , a little antioxidant to get you going .
I know you did because half of Americans do every day .
They take the stuff , and they take alternative medicines , and it doesn 't matter how often we find out that they 're useless .
The data says it all the time .
They darken your urine .
They almost never do more than that .
It 's okay , you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine , I 'm totally with you .
Dark urine .
Dark .
Why do we do that ?
Why do we do that ?
Well , I think I understand , we hate big pharma .
We hate big government .
We don 't trust the man .
And we shouldn 't .
Our health care system sucks .
It 's cruel to millions of people .
It 's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it .
So we run away from it , and where do we run ?
We leap into the arms of big placebo .
That 's fantastic .
I love big placebo .
But , you know , it 's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap , and we spend billions of dollars on it .
And I have all sorts of little props here .
None of it -- ginkgo , fraud , echinacea , fraud , acai , I don 't even know what that is but we 're spending billions of dollars on it , it 's fraud .
And you know what ?
When I say this stuff , people scream at me , and they say , " What do you care ?
Let people do what they want to do .
it makes them feel good . "
And you know what ?
You 're wrong .
Because I don 't care if it 's the secretary of H.H.S. who 's saying , " Hmm , I 'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms , " or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas .
When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science , you end up in a place you don 't want to be .
You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa .
He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS .
Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease .
Please , don 't tell me there are no consequences to these things .
There are .
There always are .
Now , the most mindless epidemic we 're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite .
It 's an idiotic debate .
It has to stop .
It 's a debate about words , about metaphors .
It 's ideology , it 's not science .
Every single thing we eat , every grain of rice , every sprig of parsley , every brussel sprout has been modified by man .
You know , there weren 't tangerines in the garden of Eden .
There wasn 't any cantaloupe .
There weren 't Christmas trees .
We made it all .
We made it over the last 11,000 years .
And some of it worked and some of it didn 't .
We got rid of the stuff that didn 't .
Now we can do it in a more precise way .
And there are risks , absolutely .
But we can put something like vitamin A into rice , and that stuff can help millions of people , millions of people , prolong their lives .
You don 't want to do that ?
I have to say , I don 't understand it .
We object to genetically engineered food .
Why do we do that ?
Well , the things I constantly hear are : Too many chemicals , pesticides , hormones , monoculture , we don 't want giant fields of the same thing , that 's wrong .
We don 't companies patenting life .
We don 't want companies owning seeds .
And you know what my response to all of that is ?
Yes , you 're right .
Let 's fix it .
It 's true , we 've got a huge food problem , but this isn 't science .
This has nothing to do with science .
It 's law , it 's morality , it 's patent stuff .
You know science isn 't a company .
It 's not a country .
It 's not even an idea ; it 's a process .
It 's a process , and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn 't , but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we 're afraid , is really very deadening , and it 's preventing millions of people from prospering .
You know , in the next 50 years we 're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now , 70 percent .
This investment in Africa over the last 30 years .
Disgraceful .
Disgraceful .
They need it , and we 're not giving it to them .
And why ?
Genetically engineered food .
We don 't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff , like cassava for instance .
Cassava 's something that half a billion people eat .
It 's kind of like a potato .
It 's just a bunch of calories .
It sucks .
It doesn 't have nutrients , it doesn 't have protein , and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now .
And then people would be able to eat it and they 'd be able to not go blind .
They wouldn 't starve , and you know what ?
That would be nice .
It wouldn 't be Chez Panisse , but it would be nice .
And all I can say about this is : Why are we fighting it ?
I mean , let 's ask ourselves : Why are we fighting it ?
Because we don 't want to move genes around ?
This is about moving genes around .
It 's not about chemicals .
It 's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones , our insistence on having bigger food , better food , singular food .
This isn 't about Rice Krispies , this is about keeping people alive , and it 's about time we started to understand what that meant .
Because , you know something ?
If we don 't , if we continue to act the way we 're acting , we 're guilty of something that I don 't think we want to be guilty of , high-tech colonialism .
There 's no other way to describe what 's going on here .
It 's selfish , it 's ugly , it 's beneath us , and we really have to stop it .
So after this amazingly fun conversation , you might want to say , " So , you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward ? "
Absolutely .
Absolutely , I do .
It 's stuck in the present right now , but we have an amazing opportunity .
We can set that time machine on anything we want .
We can move it where we want to move it , and we 're going to move it where we want to move it .
We have to have these conversations , and we have to think , but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead , we 're going to be happy we do .
I know that we can , and , as far as I 'm concerned , that 's something the world needs right now .
Thank you .
Thank you .