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Stopping Pandemics: Larry Brilliant on TED.com

Jenny Zurawell — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:00:37 +0000

Today we present a fine 2006 reserve from physician, epidemiologist and TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant on stopping pandemics. Larry Brilliant’s background is admittedly “unconventional”, but it is precisely his avant-garde approach to life that formed the mise en scène for participating in extraordinary, world-changing projects. As a doctor in the early 1970s he joined a cross-continent hippie bus tour, spanning from San Francisco to England, in the film Medicine Ball Caravan. Brilliant then traveled over the Khyber Pass to India and studied at a Himalayan monastery…until his guru advised him to join the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate the small pox pandemic. In 1974 small pox broke out in India, so Brilliant joined a massive 150,000-person WHO campaign to conduct an old-fashioned door-to-door inquiry (jocularly referred to by Brilliant as “the surveillance system of the 1970s”) as to whether anyone in the home had contracted the virus. In order to eradicate the virus, each case of the disease had to be identified and contained, and after over 1 billion door-to-door visits, Brilliant and the team achieved the first disease eradication in history in 1980, when Brilliant presided over the last killer case of small pox. Working on the small pox campaign, Brilliant discovered the imperative for early detection surveillance systems and early response to diseases. Brilliant applied the lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to blindness and founded the Seva Foundation, which last year alone restored sight to more than 500,000 people worldwide.

For Brilliant’s TED Prize wish, he decided to capitalize on the lessons of early detection and early response to create INSTEDD, a global early-warning system to detect and respond to budding pandemics. Brilliant wanted to build upon the excellent work of an existing organization, GPHIN, which, through the process of web crawling discovered SARS and prevented it from reaching pandemic level. INSTEDD seeks to optimize today’s technologies so everyone can benefit from life-saving information. Currently INSTEDD is working on a major project in Southeast Asia to determine how new or existing software tools can help find diseases sooner and facilitate a collaborative response.

In 2006 Brilliant was appointed as the Executive Director of Google.org, Google’s $2 billion philanthropic arm that invests in some for-profit and not-for-profit projects such as renewable energy and pandemic prediction. This April, Brilliant left Google.org to be president of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, a group founded by Jeff Skoll, president of eBay, to tackle climate change, water scarcity and pandemics. Brilliant will remain an advisor to Google.org, which has a history of collaboration with Skoll’s organization that Brilliant hopes to further develop.

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2L

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New Edge videos explore the staggering potential of genetics

Matthew Trost — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:44:09 +0000

What is life? Can we create it? Customize it? Edge has just published over six hours of video from their new Master Class on the future of biology, which attempts to answer those and other provocative questions. Featuring geneticists George Church and Craig Venter, the set is a a surprising, challenging look at what science has in store for our world, from the minds of two of the field’s most fascinating pioneers.

Summarizes attendee George Dyson,

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed [...] by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way.

Visit the Edge Master Class and start watching now >>

You’ll notice several familiar faces among the class’ pupils, including TED speakers Larry Brilliant, Larry Page, Nathan Wolfe, Nathan Myhrvold and Stewart Brand.

Photo: George Church (left); Craig Venter (right). Credit: Edge.org

Google Flu Trends uses web search to track real flu

Emily McManus — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:15:00 +0000

From Google.org (headed by 2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant) comes this neat data display: Google Flu Trends. The project came about after some Google search engineers wondered if, in communities where more people searched on the term “flu,” there might actually be more flu. After talking with the Predict and Prevent group at Google.org, they came up with a tool that, they write:

uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.

An animated graph shows how, last year, Google data edges the CDC‘s. You can also visit the site to find the nearest available flu shot in the US.

Dick Clark on Jill Bolte Taylor

tedstaff — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:33:55 +0000

Among the many TEDTalks stars on this year’s Time 100 list, Jill Bolte Taylor gets perhaps the coolest biographer: Dick Clark. He writes:

Through her writings and lectures, she has done perhaps more than anyone else to explain, both to the healthy and the stricken, what a stroke is.

Read the whole list >>

Larry Brilliant profiled in Rolling Stone

tedstaff — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:30:51 +0000

2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant is profiled in the latest Rolling Stone. The long piece talks about Brilliant’s amazing life, from the hippie days of the 1960s, to his time in India helping eradicate smallpox, to his current job as head of Google.org, charged with spending some of Google’s money to solve global health crises and promote alternative energy. A fun snip from the story:

… one afternoon in the fall of 2005, while Brilliant was golfing in San Francisco, his cellphone rang. It was Chris Anderson, curator of the TED Conference, an annual gathering of scientists, thinkers and Silicon Valley elites. Anderson informed Brilliant that he had won the TED Prize, which came with $100,000 to launch a project of his choosing to make the world a better place (other winners have included Bill Clinton, Bono and scientist E.O. Wilson). Brilliant, who didn’t know who Anderson was, thought it was a crank call.

Read the whole profile >>

Why be optimistic? Larry Brilliant at Skoll World Forum, on TED.com

tedstaff — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Recorded at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford, UK: 2006 TED Prize winner and Google.org director Larry Brilliant uses a clip from an old Frank Capra movie to show that we’ve known about global warming for 50 years — yet in half a century, we’ve done almost nothing to solve it. He explores this and other megatrends that could inspire pessimism. But, he says, there is a more powerful case for optimism. (Recorded March 2007 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 21:01.)

The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, UK, is an annual gathering of innovators from all over the world who are creating positive change across critical issue areas.

Larry Brilliant’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Another Brilliant article

tedconfamy — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:26:35 +0000

Dr. Larry Brilliant, the self-proclaimed “luckiest man in the world,” has a great write-up in this week’s Pacific Sun, talking about his TED Prize wish. He says he’s open to ideas on how best to use it, and has set up a new email address – larryswish@seva.org – for suggestions.

Brilliant, Larry

tedchris — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:15:43 +0000

A wonderful evening in Woodside last night with TED Prize Winner Dr Larry Brilliant and 100 TEDsters. He shared a little of his story, his involvement in the eradication of smallpox, and his current desire to do something about the risk of an avian flu pandemic.

He was simultaneously terrifying and inspiring, and provoked a remarkable conversation around his WISH TO CHANGE THE WORLD that the TED Prize has granted him. He’s pondering ideas that could address the avian flu risk and/or other global public health issues. If you have a suggestion — one that can tap powerfully into what the TED community can offer – please email TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz, amy@ted.com, and she will forward to Larry. The conversation that began last night will continue until TED06 in Monterey, when Larry will unveil his wish.

Thanks to Arch and Shelly Meredith, Matt Venuti, Kleiner Perkins, June Cohen, all who came out on a wet night, and especially to Larry for giving us an exciting preview of February…

TED Prize Winner: Larry Brilliant

tedconfamy — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 11:33:01 +0000

It’s difficult to resist making a pun around the name Larry Brilliant. Board-certified in preventive medicine and public health, Larry lived in India for 10 years — first at a Himalayan monastery, and later as a diplomat working for the UN. He helped lead the successful WHO smallpox-eradication program and later founded the Seva Foundation, an international health nonprofit that’s restored sight to more than two million blind people. Larry also co-founded the legendary online community, The Well. His current passion surrounds the threat of Bird Flu, and he’s hinted that his TED Prize wish will lie somewhere in the realm of global health. He’s open to suggestions …