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

This one’s for the peace-makers:

On Alex Tabarrok’s interview with the TEDBlog:
TED talks are supposed to create debate, not end them.. Seems this one was a success then? — Oli

On Nathan Wolfe’s interview with the TEDBlog:
Bird flu is essentially a veterinary problem. Swine Flu is essentially a human health problem, and so is alarmism and fear. But not information and prevention, those are on our side and also on our side is the augmentation of average temperatures in the coming months and…wash your hands! — Manel via facebook

On Laurie Garrett’s TEDTalk: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?:
I thought this was particularly insightful given the evolution of the H1n1 virus in Mexico this past week. I heard people are reusing masks even those found in the trash cans. They wash and re-sell them, this is one case where ignorance kills and spreads a flu — Juan via facebook

On Nate Silver’s interview with the TEDBlog:
But yes, he is not pinheaded nor racist. He _is_ a nerdy dude who is big on analyzing and finding relationships within information… public speaking is not his forte. — Toby via facebook

And, sometimes, the community glue is the speaker themselves:

On Brian Cox’s TEDTalk: What went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider:
If the Higgs bosun particle (God particle), when found, is as congenial as Brian Cox, I think we can all agree to presuppose why the elementary particles cohere. — Adrian

Thanks for keeping the debate alive.

Swine flu has made this a busy week for virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, who spoke at TED2009 about preventing the next pandemic. His groundbreaking Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (supported by grants from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation and others) monitors people in close contact with animals (such as subsistence hunters in central Africa) to catch new diseases before they spread. We caught up with Wolfe yesterday by phone, before his appearance on CNN with Anderson Cooper (who plays a cameo role in Wolfe’s TEDTalk), and asked him about this latest outbreak.

SARS, avian flu, swine flu … what’s going on here? Why are we suddenly seeing so many more outbreaks of viruses from animals?

Viruses have always passed from humans to animals. In fact, the vast majority of human diseases have animal origins. But the human population is different from what it once was. For most of our history, we lived in geographically disparate populations. So viruses could enter from animals into humans, spread locally and go extinct. But the human population has gone through a connectivity explosion. All humans on the planet are now connected to each other spatially and temporally in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of vertebrate biology. Humans — as well as our domestic animals and wild animals we trade — move around the planet at biological warp speed. This provides new opportunities for viruses that would have gone extinct locally to have the population density fuel they need to establish themselves and spread globally.

We’ve created a “perfect storm” for viruses. And we’ll continue to see — as we have in the past few years — a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. But we have to stop being surprised by them. Right now, global public health is like cardiology in the ’50s — just waiting for the heart attack, without understanding why they occur or the many ways to monitor for them, detect them early and ultimately prevent them. Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu — like the vast majority of new outbreaks — comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

Can we stop swine flu? Or is it too late?
If you catch one of these outbreaks early on, there may be the potential to do what we call containment, where you limit the outbreak to a particular site. But the reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you’ve lost the ability to contain it. There are ways to decrease the spread of the pandemic, but by that point, it can’t be contained. (Editor’s note: See Larry Brilliant’s 2006 TEDTalk for more on the importance of early containment.)

The more fundamental question is: How do we prevent these pandemics from occurring? There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

At the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, our approach is to take it a step back. If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage — when they’re first entering human populations, preferably before they’ve had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they’ve had a chance to spread — we can head off pandemics altogether.

Swine flu may or may not end up being an important human pandemic. But it’s a perfect illustration of the need for a paradigm shift in the way we approach global disease control.

In your TEDTalk, you lay out plans for monitoring humans who have close contact with animals in African jungles and Asian “wet markets.” Should you be monitoring pig farms as well?

Absolutely. What we do is all of the above. We monitor people with contact with wild animals as well as domestic animals. Chickens, ducks, pigs, monkeys … wherever people have contact with animals, that’s where we want to be, so we can catch potential pandemics at the moment that they’re born.

The good news is: For a variety of reasons, the percentage of the human population that’s in direct contact with animals is decreasing. So that gives us the potential to put a substantive percentage of that population into regular monitoring. Maybe we won’t catch everything, but we can create a much more substantive safety net for capturing these things before they go international or global.

READ MORE: Nathan Wolfe talks about why swine flu victims are dying in Mexico but not yet in the US; how swine flu is a “cosmopolitan virus”; and more … Your Global Viral Forecasting Initiative is expanding worldwide, but mainly in Asia and Africa. If you were in Mexico, how might things have gone differently?

In this case, we would have hoped to catch and contain swine flu when there were just dozens — instead of hundreds or thousands — of cases in Mexico, and before it spread globally.

GVFI’s objective is to monitor the portal of entry for new diseases into human populations — that means looking at the point at which humans and animals interface. We work with people who have high exposure to animals throughout the world, whether that means exposure to domestic animals — as with farm workers — or wild animals, as with people who hunt bushmeat in Africa or people who work in live animal markets in Asia. The minute we see new viruses that are entering into humans, we make this information available for the public health community, so we can develop drugs and diagnostics and potentially vaccines based on them.

When we see new diseases spreading in local communities, we monitor them very closely. If we were working in Mexico — and we were doing our jobs correctly — we would have caught this thing, perhaps in rural villages, before it made it to a site like Mexico City, and before it went international.

How do we understand the difference between the cases reported in Mexico, where many have died, and those in the US, which seem very mild?

There is a striking anomoly between what appears to be a very low rate of mortality and illness among the American cases and what appears, on the surface, to be a higher rate of illness among the Mexican cases. It could, of course, be the result of a difference in the viruses, although that doesn’t necessarily appear to be the case. It could be a difference in host populations, although again, that’s difficult to explain.

One possibility is that because we’ve looked more carefully for cases in the States, we’re more likely to see individuals who are mildly ill. We might find that if we looked more comprehensively in Mexico, we’d see the same number of people who were very ill — because they’re easy to find — and a much larger number of people who were mildly ill. That would reduce the actual rate of mortality to a much lower number, and that may be more compatible with what we would see if the number increased in the American epidemic.

As the number of cases climb worldwide, many people are comparing this swine flu outbreak to the 1918 flu pandemic. Is that an apt comparison?

Well, they both represent novel introductions of influenza into human populations that were capable of spreading substantively. The 1918 flu was notable in the sense that it spread comprehensively, globally, and it had a very high rate of mortality — affecting not only the very old or very young (who have weak immune systems) but also people in the prime of their lives, who are overcome by their body’s own immune response.

Whether or not this happens with swine flu remains to be seen. Initially, it does not appear to have the level of deadliness that the 1918 flu had.

I love bacon. Am I at risk?

Go ahead and have that BLT. It’s not a problem. You can’t get swine flu from eating pork. You’d have to have close contact with a living, breathing, infected pig to get this virus — or rather, in order to have contracted the original pig virus. The interesting and important thing about this “pig flu” is that it’s now spreading from human to human. It’s become a human virus.

So people should take the usual precautions: Stay away from individuals who are sick. Wash your hands frequently. And the less you touch your face, nose and eyes, the better.

Take us back a step or two: How did swine flu enter into the human population?

Swine flu has been known since at least the early part of the 20th century, since the 1930s. It was originally a virus of bird origin — all influenza viruses were originally bird viruses — and it probably spread to humans before it was in pigs.

Now, we still haven’t received definitive information on the underlying genetics of this particular virus. But initial reports suggest that it may be what’s known as a “mosaic virus,” which includes components of swine influenzas, bird influenzas and human influenzas. A cosmopolitan virus like that wouldn’t be unprecedented. (Editor’s Note: see Joe DeRisi’s 2006 TEDTalk for more on state-of-the-art virus detection.)

But in any case, this is a virus that appears to come from pigs, and pigs in close proximity spread the flu in much the same way that humans do — coughing, sneezing, and so on. The virus probably initially entered into human populations through people who work with livestock.

Is swine flu here to stay?

Whether this particular virus will sustain itself and become a permanent part of the human landscape is unclear, but that’s certainly what we’re watching for. As it is, the virus may just disappear because of the weather; summers aren’t good for flu viruses.

So this heat wave is working in our favor?

It might be. The virus has had a good start, from the flu perspective, considering that this is really the end of the season. But the unseasonably hot weather may bode poorly for this virus’ potential to establish itself definitively and cause a pandemic. Had this happened in September or October, it would be much more concerning.

Having said that, it’s not impossible that a virus like this might “go into hiding” — in the southern hemisphere or the tropics — and might come to light again next year. So there will be a lot of discussion about expanding the fall flu vaccine to try to control it next cycle.

Is it really possible for us to prevent future outbreaks like this?

Yes, I believe it is. We spend tons of money trying to predict complex phenomena like tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes. There’s no reason to believe that a pandemic is harder to predict than a tsunami. And we’d be foolish not to include forecasting and prevention as part of our overall portfolio to fight these pandemics.

Unsurprisingly, almost half of the National Geographic Explorers, as well as a few members of their staff, have given TEDTalks. Below the jump is a list of links to all the talks that bring TED and National Geographic together.

Here’s National Geographic Explorer and TED Prize 2009 winner Sylvia Earle:

National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence:

Robert Ballard, Oceanographer
Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean’s hidden worlds

Jared Diamond, Scholar
Jared Diamond: Why societies collapse

Louise Leakey, Paleoanthropologist
Louise Leakey: Digging for humanity’s origins

Paul Sereno, Paleontologist
Paul Sereno: What can fossils teach us?

Jane Goodall, Primatologist and Environmentalist
Jane Goodall: What separates us from the apes?

Jane Goodall: Helping humans and animals live together in Africa

Wade Davis
Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world

Wade Davis: The worldwide wed of belief and ritual

Tierney Thys, Marine Biologist/Filmmaker (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Tierney Thys: Swim with giant sunfish in the open ocean

Spencer Wells, Genographer (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Spencer Wells: Building a family tree for all humanity

Zeresenay Alemseged, Paleoanthropologist (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Zeresenay Alemseged looks for humanity’s roots

Joseph Lekuton, Teacher (a 2006 Emerging Explorer)
Joseph Lekuton: A parable for Kenya

Corneille Ewango, Tropical Botanist (a 2007 Emerging Explorer)
Corneille Ewango: A hero of the Congo Basin forest

Nathan Wolfe, Biologist (a 2009 Emerging Explorer)
Nathan Wolfe: Hunting the next killer virus

National Geographic staff

Frans Lanting, National Geographic Photographer-in-Residence
Frans Lanting: A lyrical view of life on Earth

Keith Bellows, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Traveler
Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel

David Griffin, Director of Photography, National Geographic Magazine
David Griffin: Photography connects us with the world

Using genetic sequencing, needle-in-a-haystack research, and dogged persistence (crucial to getting spoilage-susceptible samples through the jungle and to the lab), Nathan Wolfe has proven what was science-fiction conjecture only a few decades ago — not only do viruses jump from animals to humans, but they do so all the time. Along the way Wolfe has discovered several new viruses, and is poised to discover many more.

The TED Blog interviewed Wolfe over the phone shortly before his appearance at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. He discusses the fact that vaccines often act as a crutch after the failure of preventative measures against disease, the need for a “global immune system” implemented through communication technologies such as SMS, and occasions when it’s professionally acceptable — and socially crucial — to eat rodents. Here’s a snippet:

I think about the secondary effects of diseases like AIDS that cause a population’s immune system to be suppressed, as a whole. I think of this as a tear in the planet’s meta-immune system. This tear increases the possibility that a new virus will enter. With immunosuppressed hunters, a virus that normally couldn’t survive or adapt to human populations might get a few extra generations and be permitted to adapt to these individuals and humanity.

Read the full interview, after the jump >>Transcript of interview with Nathan Wolfe (3/27/09):

Given an extra couple of minutes on the TED stage, what might you have said?

I talked about bushmeat, and obviously I feel strongly about how hunting wild game in central Africa and elsewhere is a crisis for humanity — a conservation crisis, a public health crisis in relation to diseases like HIV that came about through that sort of activity — and also a food security crisis.

I also emphasized that it’s unfair to ask one small, impoverished population to take on the burden of addressing the behavior change and the economic costs associated with diminishing those risks. But I didn’t really talk about how we’d go about doing it.

One interesting approach is developing domesticated wild game. Grasscutters — large grass-eating rodents that you find throughout West and Central Africa — are easy to grow, non-endangered and tasty. They have the potential to provide livelihoods for rural populations. At the same time, they’ll decrease hunting of wild animal populations, such as species of non-human primates.

Do you partake of the bushmeat?

Bien sûr! J’aime beaucoup la viande de brousse. Yeah, I definitely do. Let’s say you show up in a rural village, and somebody who normally would not even be indulging in meat serves something in honor of your visit. You’re often in a very complicated situation, personally and professionally.

I avoid taxa of species that are endangered or those for which I feel like I really need to make a point about the health risks in eating them. But I’ve eaten a whole range of things, from snake to rodent to you-name-it. I’ve eaten much of it in the field.

Tell me about some new places your research is going.

At GVFI we’ve had some interesting findings that tell us how pandemics enter human populations. A smaller and smaller percentage of the world’s population is responsible for the majority of human-animal contact. We can create the equivalent of a safety net — an equivalent of an immune system for the planet — by having these particular sentinel populations telling us what’s pinging us from these animals, and documenting this viral chatter.

We need to move from this point where we have four or five pilot sites to 20 or 30 around the world. We’ll work with WHO, CDC and bring it up to scale.

What or who inspires you to do this work?

Many of my heroes are those who discovered new life on the planet, the unseen microscopic world.

Anthony Leeuwenhoek, by inventing the first optical microscope in the 17th century, transformed the way we think about biology on the planet, for the first time recognizing bacteria and microorganisms. And subsequently we’ve realized that these are the dominant forms of life on our planet.

There’s Martinus Bejernek, a Dutch microbiologist, one of those credited with the discovery of viruses at a time when only bacteria were known. He was fascinated by tobacco diseases. His father had been a tobacco merchant who had gone bankrupt because of tobacco diseases. He was interested in what we now know as the tobacco mosaic virus. He simply strained the juices of infected tobacco plants through a filter with holes so small he knew it would block out all bacteria. Even after that filtration, he could still infect new plants with the juices. He recognized there was an organism that must be smaller than bacteria that was still infectious.

Another person who’s not often credited is a woman named Tikvah Alper, who was key to the discovery of prions. It was unclear what was causing diseases which we now know of as prion diseases. She subjected them to intense UV radiation and found that they still survived. That meant they could include no DNA or RNA, and so she postulated that what they must be is transmissible protein agents — which is of course what they ended up being.

What’s next? What are you excited about?

If the Internet is the global nervous system, and you have companies like Google pushing forward its evolution, part of what we’re trying to do is create the equivalent of the global immune system.

One thing I’m excited about is mobile phones. How are we going to work with populations that are in geographically distant spots and link them together, to know when they’re sick?

I’m fascinated by revolutions that come from adapting technologies like text messaging. For example, people can text message surveillance information, and we can respond and put credit on their phone, which means even populations that are very poor, if they have proximity to cell phones, can have access to healthcare.

What worries you?

People often ask me what keeps me up at night. Not much keeps me up at night, because I’m a fairly good sleeper and I don’t get upset about these things.

I do think about the secondary effects of diseases like AIDS that cause a population’s immune system to be suppressed, as a whole. I think of this as a “tear” in the planet’s “meta-immune system.” This tear increases the possibility that a new virus will enter. With immunosuppressed hunters, a virus that normally couldn’t survive or adapt to human populations might get a few extra generations and be permitted to adapt to these individuals and humanity.

What are your thoughts on the possibility of an HIV vaccine?

Vaccines are and always will be a critical element for human disease control and public health efforts. But, having said that, I do think we rely on them as a crutch. We very much think, “We’re going to wait until diseases occur and then create vaccines and drugs against them.”

HIV has been a perfect example of how vaccine development is by no means an eventuality or a rapid inevitability. AIDS was first noted as a syndrome in 1981. The virus that causes AIDS was first identified in late 1983. The Deputy of Health and Human Services pretty much said “We’ll have a vaccine within a year.” Here we are, 30 years later, and arguably we’re not necessarily much closer to a vaccine than we were then.

Global disease control should be pushed to an earlier point. Instead of waiting for these viruses, we need to catch them earlier.

HIV existed in human populations in the early 20th century, and yet it took 70 years to know about it. Had we been studying in the right places, the world would have been a very different place in the ’70s when the virus started going global. We would have seen that it was a syndrome, that it was transmitted in a number of ways — also heterosexually, which would have changed the entire political dynamic of the outbreak. Reagan didn’t even say the word AIDS until ’86 or ’87. We would have known about the global distribution, about the ways to stop it, control it.

Is there a virus you would characterize as “good”?

I would call Vaccinia a good virus.

Here’s a useful metaphor to think of the world of viruses. There’s the universe of viruses — even just pathogens or microbes — in general. You have known galaxies, say retroviruses. That’s a known galaxy. Or orthopoxviruses, such as smallpox. Those are known galaxies. Part of our job is to look for unknown galaxies. Or to look for unknown stars in known galaxies.

Obviously, galaxies that we would label pathogenic are important. In the orthopox galaxy, we have smallpox, which is one of the deadliest pathogens of human history. If you move out a little bit from that star and look for neighboring stars, what you’ll see is Vaccinia, which is cowpox. That virus is actually the smallpox vaccine. It’s sufficient to cause immunity but does not cause disease. Viruses that are very close to deadly ones can act as vaccines. We can use proximity to help identify possible vaccine candidates, or new microorganisms that might point the way towards new vaccines.

There is a large DNA virus which works in a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic wasp. This is a wasp that makes its living by laying its eggs on the backs of caterpillars. There is an evolutionary tension between the caterpillar and the wasp, because the caterpillar’s defenses change against the wasp eggs, and then the wasp eggs develop the capacity to counteract or work around those caterpillar defenses. But then a third player in this is a virus that coats the wasp’s eggs. That virus limits the ability of the caterpillar’s immune system to detect those wasp eggs.

This is a microbe’s world. The majority of the mass and diversity of life on our planet is made up of microorganisms. It would be odd to imagine all these viruses and bacteria that are part of our bodies are exclusively negative. We know that’s not the case, but we haven’t been on this systematic search for them. If we did, we would likely find a whole range of mutualistic viruses.

What’s going to be the next big thing to come from this field of work?

Finding a new HIV in humans. That’s something I think we — or another group — will find in the coming years. To date, we haven’t seen it.

Watch Nathan Wolfe’s 2009 TEDTalk >>

Image credit: TED.com / Asa Mathat
Interview credit: TED.com

Watch Nathan Wolfe’s talk from TED2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks — including more talks about medicine without borders.

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