Photos: Ryan Lash

Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, wants us to think about why we can’t (or think we can’t) solve big problems anymore — what is our generation’s moon landing? Some people blame the culture of Silicon Valley, or VCs unwilling to invest in big problems, but Pontin doesn’t buy this excuse. The real problems are that humanity’s big challenges are hard, our political systems are unwilling, and too often we don’t really understand the real issue. Landing on the moon, it turns out, was relatively easy. “The solutions of our future will be harder won,” he says. A sobering start to the morning.

In a hilarious talk, David Pogue shares some basic tricks for using our technology — tricks that you might think everyone knows, but they don’t. For example, hit control (or command) and “+” to make the text in a web browser bigger. When writing, double-click a word to highlight just that word. (We’re asking him for the list.)

2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant, the president and CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, is here to tell us the good news about pandemics. Hurray! This is important; as he and his team helped to lay out in the movie Contagion, which they advised on, pandemic viruses are a huge, insidious threat to humanity. But with social media, participatory surveillance, better policy and better regional cooperation, global pandemics might become a thing of the past. “I think we can end pandemics in our lifetimes,” he says.

Ghislaine Maxwell gives a stirring call to care about the oceans — a resource that is held by law to be for the benefit of all, but in reality is being exploited by the few. She proposes six things we can do to help: 1) Enforce the Public Trust Doctrine; 2) Demand more marine public areas; 3) Adopt models that produce more revenue without as much waste; 4) Ban wasteful fishing practices; 5) Fish sustainably; and 6) Come together as a community around the seas. We are all citizens of the oceans, after all.

“Look to the person to your left; look to the person to your right,” instructs Scott Noggle, director of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory. ”One of you will get Alzheimer’s by the time you are 80.” This is not a cheery thought. “This is a catastrophe,” confirms Noggle. Yup. He’s here to tell us about his work, which involves taking living cells from cadavers of those who died from Alzheimer’s. He and his team have figured out how to re-create stem cell lines, and therefore brain tissue, to try and figure out how the disease starts and develops–with the end goal of creating more effective therapies to treat the disease. Astonishing.

Dan Miller, Managing Director of the Roda Group, is concerned with the growing food crisis facing the world — and is looking for solutions. He’s found one possibility: hydrogels, chemicals that can hold 100 times their weight in water. These can be put into the soil at the same time as seeds and fertilizer. Because of the way the gels retain water near the plants, this could increase yield while reducing water use. Some convincing tests on broccoli make his point.

Jessica Green is here to talk about the microbes that both define who we are and that exist in their own ecosystems on everything we touch. She’s been working with architects and biologists to take samples from rooms at the University of Oregon to get a deeper understanding of the microbial community within space. “Bathrooms are like a tropical rainforest,” she says. “Offices are like temperate grassland.” The implications for designers of this genre she calls “bio-informed design,” particularly for those thinking about designing air systems or working in health care, are huge.

Tony Tjan studies entrepreneurs, and tries to work out what makes them successful. He has found four attributes that each can contribute: Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck. He says there is no one way to success, but a key is the self-awareness to understand which part is their own primary driver.

Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, is here to talk about how politics is changing, and in particular about what will be important in 2016. On his list: micro-targeting; micro-listening; micro-media buying. We’re going to get a lot more focused, in other words. Other challenges: voter suppression; voter contact; and potential cyberattack, Reed’s biggest fear. Did you know this: The presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Mitt Romney were hacked by a foreign entity. “We were safe, because we invested in security,” he says, but he doesn’t think it’ll be so easy next time around. The solution? Trust the experts. Get the right people in the right place, and let them do their jobs to the best of their ability.

TED Fellow Julie Freeman is an artist who thinks about how to represent data in art. She was asked to curate a set of artworks based on data for the Open Data Institute, and she found some remarkable examples, such as a vending machine that only dispenses snacks when there is news of an economic downturn.

David Peterson creates languages for a living, including the language Dothraki, which he developed for the television series Game of Thrones. He’s here to give us an insight into how he does it, and to take us on a whistlestop tour through the evolution of language. Why go to all the trouble? Fans, of course. Every single detail of a hit show like GoT is analyzed in depth; results are shared instantaneously, and they’ll realize quickly if a fake language is systematic or just gibberish. This respect for viewers might be the difference between a hit and a multimillion-dollar flop. That’s why it matters.

And finally, David Pogue, who turns out to be a former Broadway conductor as well as technology writer for the New York Times, returns to sing his new composition, ”The Twitter Song.” a show tune take on living in the 140-character age.

Will the next generation think about diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes the way we think about polio and the whooping cough? Susan Solomon, the co-founder of the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF), certainly hopes so. In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Solomon delves into the foundation’s work on research with stem cells, which she calls the “black boxes for diseases.”

“[Stem cells] are our bodies’ own repair kits. They are pluripotent, which means they can morph into all of the cells in our bodies,” says Solomon. “Right now there are some really extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells that are completely changing the way we model disease, our ability to understand why we get sick and even develop drugs. But … this field has been under siege, politically and financially.”

While much of the fray is about embryonic stem cells — still the gold standard when it comes to cells — Solomon explains that another type of pluripotent stem cell (called iPS cells) can now be created by, essentially, reprogramming skin cells. These cells hold great promise for allowing researchers to see how diseases develop in humans, rather than in rodents.

Currently, developing a drug takes an average of 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. And because it’s impossible to test a new drug on a large and representative sample of the human population, even a drug that tests well with many people will have side-effects for others, based on their genetic makeup. This is a problem that’s sometimes not apparent until the drug is on the market and being prescribed to patients — like in the tragic case of Vioxx.

“That’s a terrible business model, but also is a horrible social model,” she says. “The way we’ve been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store and no one asking what size you are … They just say, ‘Well, you have feet. Here are shoes.’”

From the TEDGlobal stage, Solomon outlined an exciting new approach—her team at NYSCF has developed a machine that creates stem cell lines that, until now, had to be crafted by hand. NYSCF expects to produce 2,500 stem cell lines by the end of the year. The idea is to eventually produce a comprehensive array of 25,000 stem cell lines — which act like avatars for a wide sample of people — that researchers would have access to as they test new drugs. This could help avoid disasters and also let people know ahead of time of what side-effects they, specifically, can expect with a given medicine.

Two months after her talk, Solomon tells the TED Blog that interest in NYSCF work is growing. Pointing to a recent article in The New York Times about how future lung cancer treatments could be tailored to individuals, Solomon said, “It’s really the leading edge of where this field is going.”

But Solomon stressed that it will be extremely difficult to change the current systems of drug development.

“All the established companies have been using mouse-and-rodent testing forever,” she said. “A lot of people’s careers are staked to a method that is outdated. It’s like the tech sector; this is really the high-tech sector for biomedical research.”

To hear more about the NYSCF, watch Solomon’s talk. Below, watch 9 more talks about the incredible promise of stem cells.

Susan Lim: Transplant cells, not organs
As a woman, surgeon Susan Lim had to fight for the right to perform the first liver transplant in Asia. But she began to question the morality of such work given that — with donor organs in such short supply — many are coerced or forced to donate. Lim began looking at another approach: transplanting cells, rather than organs. In this talk, given at the INK Conference, she describes her work with adult stem cells derived from fat.

Daniel Kraft invents a better way to harvest bone marrow
Pediatrician and stem cell researcher Daniel Kraft has created a device to collect bone marrow in a way that is far less painful for both the patient and the doctor. In this talk from TED2009, Kraft shows how the stem cells found in this marrow could be used to treat heart disease and Parkinson’s.

Eva Vertes: Do stem cells cause cancer?
Microbiology prodigy Eva Vertes was 19 years old when she spoke at TED2005 about a theory that cancer might be a repair response to damaged stem cells in the lungs, liver, bones, etc. The implication she is testing? “It’s possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could think of cancer being used as a therapy.”

Alan Russell: The potential of regenerative medicine
Not for the squeamish, in this talk from TED2006, medical futurist Alan Russell shows a video of stem cells being removed from a patient’s hip and injected directly into their heart — and how this procedure has gotten much more precise over a short time. Such cell regeneration therapies will keep improving, Russell says.

Noel Bairey Merz: The single biggest health threat women face
While heart disease is often thought of as a “male disease,” Noel Bairey Merz explains that it is actually the biggest killer of women. In this talk from TEDxWomen 2011, Merz gives a call to arms for women to think of heart disease in the same way we do breast cancer, and talks about some exciting possibilities for treatment, including stem cell therapy.

Daniel Kraft: Medicine’s future? There’s an app for that
Kraft, chair of the FutureMed program at Singularity University, talks about some of the big innovations coming down the pipeline in medicine. Near the end of this talk given at TEDxMaastricht, Kraft talks about cancer stem cells and how understanding them could lead to an era of personalized oncology — “the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient.”

Juan Enriquez: The next species of human
Futurist Juan Enriquez believes that some big changes are coming, and that the next generation of humans could potentially be considered a different species. Why? In this talk from TED2009, he looks at the ability to engineer both cells and tissue, and describes some shocking ways researchers are using stem cells.

Kevin Stone: The bio-future of joint replacement
Arthritis affects more adults than cancer, says Kevin Stone in this talk from TED2010. While therapies using human tissue have been very promising in helping joint damage, there simply isn’t enough donor tissue to go around. Stone explains a process which uses cartilage from a pig, loaded with a person’s own stem cells, to ease pain and immobility.

Iain Hutchison: Saving faces
In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010 — which contains some images of badly injured and disfigured faces that may be disturbing — facial surgeon Iain Hutchison gives a look at his groundbreaking work. Towards the end of the talk, he describes an promising area of research — tissue engineering — which uses a patient’s own stem cells, taken from their hip, to help heal facial damage.