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Category: Interviews
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‘Paradise Lost’: How To Help Our Oceans Before It’s Too Late
Interview Conducted by Philip Bethge
The swarm of jack mackerel looks like a silver wall in front of the divers. Bright sunlight breaks through the water surface and makes the fishes’ scales shimmer like an artfully forged mirror. As if following an invisible sign, the animals abruptly turn and fly up before quickly returning, as one undulating mass.
Sylvia Earle, 80, glides slowly past the bodies, an underwater camera in her hand. The photo yield has been plentiful today, on the reef at Cabo Pulmo, a small coastal town on the southern end of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. The tiny village on the Sea of Cortez had once been a normal fishing village. The reef provided a decent income for a handful of families, but then the wealth of fish spread by word of mouth.
First came the recreational fishermen, then the trawlers with their longlines and nets. By 1980, the reef had been fished bare. After pressure from locals, Cabo Pulmo was declared a national park. Since then, fishing has been banned here. In the last three decades, the biomass of fish has more than quadrupled. And the people are earning good money from ecotourism.
That’s why Earle has selected Cabo Pulmo as a “Hope Spot.” She has identified about 200 of these kinds of locations through her foundation, Mission Blue. Together with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), she is working on a global action plan for marine reserves. In an interview, she explains why the ocean is so important for life on earth. ….
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Interview mit Jane Goodall: “Ö-hö-hö-hö-hö-hö”
Von Philip Bethge und Johann Grolle
Als Kind las Goodall gern die Geschichten über den Arzt Doktor Dolittle; sie entfachten ihre Liebe zur wilden Kreatur. Mit 23 brach sie nach Afrika auf, lernte dort den Paläoanthropologen Louis Leakey kennen und studierte in dessen Auftrag die Schimpansen des Gombe-Stream-Schutzgebiets in Tansania. Goodall beobachtete erstmals Werkzeuggebrauch und Kriegsführung bei den engsten Menschenverwandten und wurde dadurch zur berühmtesten Primatenforscherin der Welt. 1986 veröffentlichte sie ihr Hauptwerk, “The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of Behavior”. Kurz darauf ließ sie die Forschung hinter sich, um ihr Leben ganz dem Schutz der Schimpansen und der Erhaltung der Natur zu widmen. Als Öko-Kämpferin zieht Goodall heute an 300 Tagen im Jahr um den Globus. Das Jugendprogramm “Roots & Shoots” des Jane Goodall Institute findet in mehr als 130 Ländern statt. Die 81-jährige Britin ist Friedensbotschafterin der Vereinten Nationen und trägt den Orden “Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire”. Seit mehr als 20 Jahren, sagt sie, habe sie nicht länger als drei Wochen im selben Bett geschlafen.
SPIEGEL: Dr. Goodall, in der ersten Hälfte Ihres beruflichen Lebens befassten Sie sich mit Schimpansen, in der zweiten mit Menschen. Hat Ihnen Ihr Wissen über die einen beim Umgang mit den anderen geholfen?
Goodall: Ich glaube schon. Bei den Schimpansen habe ich viel über nonverbale Kommunikation gelernt. Was uns von ihnen unterscheidet, ist nämlich vor allem, dass sie keine Wörter kennen. Alles andere ist fast gleich: Küssen, Umarmen, Prahlen, Fäusteschütteln. All das habe ich bei den Schimpansen studiert – was mich befähigt, auch Menschen gut zu verstehen. Wenn Sie zum Beispiel jemanden ertappen, wie er einen Fehler macht, zuckt er zusammen und windet sich. Er wird Ihnen dann nicht mehr zuhören, sondern nur überlegen, wie er zum Gegenangriff übergehen kann. Um jemanden wirklich zu überzeugen, müssen Sie sein Herz erreichen.
SPIEGEL: Wie das?
Goodall: Ich erinnere mich zum Beispiel an ein Treffen mit dem chinesischen Umweltminister. Ich wollte ihn dazu bringen, unser Jugendprogramm Roots & Shoots in chinesischen Schulen zuzulassen. Aber er sprach kein Englisch, und so saßen wir da, zwischen uns ein Übersetzer, und ich hatte nur zehn Minuten Zeit. Also nahm ich all meinen Mut zusammen und sagte: “Wäre ich ein weiblicher Schimpanse, dann wäre ich sehr töricht, wenn ich ein hochrangiges Männchen nicht untertänig begrüßen würde”, und ich machte unterwürfig: “Ö-hö-hö-hö-hö-hö.” Das Männchen, so sagte ich weiter, müsse nun das Weibchen großmütig streicheln, und dabei nahm ich seine Hand. Ich merkte, wie sie sich verkrampfte, aber ich gab nicht auf und führte seine Hand auf meinen Kopf. Erst war es totenstill, aber dann begann er zu lachen. Am Ende redeten wir anderthalb Stunden lang, und seither gibt es Roots & Shoots an chinesischen Schulen.
SPIEGEL: Sie sind hier in New York, um auf dem Nachhaltigkeitsgipfel der Uno aufzutreten. Was geschieht, wenn so viele hochrangige Männchen zusammenkommen?
Goodall: Vor allem: zu viel Gerede. Ich will nicht behaupten, solche Gipfel seien pure Zeitverschwendung, aber ihre Ergebnisse sind meist enttäuschend.
SPIEGEL: Vielleicht ist der Mensch, von Natur aus eigennützig und auf kurzfristigen Nutzen bedacht, nicht geschaffen, um die Probleme des Planeten zu lösen?
Goodall: Das müssen wir aber. Wir haben uns von der Natur abgewandt. Stattdessen geht es nur um Geld und Macht. Wir müssen wieder zurück zur Natur finden, um diesen Planeten zu retten.
SPIEGEL: Wenn die Idee der Nachhaltigkeit aber unserer Natur zuwiderläuft?
Goodall: Das tut sie ja gar nicht. Selbst Schimpansen verstehen diese Idee. In einem Baum voller Früchte pflücken sie nur diejenigen, die reif sind. Die anderen lassen sie hängen. Das ist nichts anderes als Nachhaltigkeit.
SPIEGEL: Ein anderes politisches Thema, das uns derzeit in Europa umtreibt, ist die Flüchtlingskrise. Was sagen Sie als Primatologin: Liegt es in unserer Natur, Fremde willkommen zu heißen?
Goodall: Nein. Primaten sind sehr territorial. Es entspricht ihrer Natur, ihre Nahrungsressourcen, Weibchen und Jungtiere zu schützen. Das erklärt …..
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Jane Goodall Interview: ‘Even Chimps Understand Sustainability’
Interview Conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle
As a child, one of Jane Goodall’s favorite books was “Doctor Dolittle,” which helped to unleash her love for wild creatures. At the age of 23, she traveled to Africa, where she met archeologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey, who would hire her as an assistant and later ask her to study chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Goodall was the first to observe the use of tools and also the kind of warfare conducted by the species closest related to humans. Through her research, Goodall rose to become the world’s most famous primate researcher. She published her main body of work, “The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior,” in 1986. A short time later, she left scientific research behind in order to dedicate her life to the protection of chimpanzees and nature conservation. Goodall travels around the world 300 days a year as part of her efforts as a champion of the environment. The Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots youth program is active in more than 130 countries. The 81-year-old Briton is also a United Nations Messenger of Peace and carries the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She’s been so busy over the past 20 years, she says, that she hasn’t even managed to sleep in the same bed for more than three weeks at a time.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, the doyenne of chimpanzee research discusses the often minor differences between humans and apes.
SPIEGEL: Dr. Goodall, the first half of your professional life, you dealt with chimps. During the second half, you have been dealing with humans. Is there anything you learned from chimps that helps you in dealing with people?
Goodall: I believe so. The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don’t have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist. I studied those things a lot in chimps, and I suppose that’s why I’m quite good at reading people. For example, if you catch somebody doing something wrong, he will just cringe away and curl up. He will not listen anymore. Instead, he will think of how he can counterattack. So the only possible way to get somebody to change is to reach into their hearts.
SPIEGEL: How?
Goodall: I remember once meeting the Chinese environment minister. I wanted to convince him to allow our Roots and Shoots program into Chinese schools. However, he spoke no English, and so now here we were, just sitting, a translator between us, and I had only 10 minutes time. So I gathered my courage and started off saying, …….
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Interview with Edward O. Wilson on Human Evolution and the Origin of Morals
By Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle
Edward O. Wilson doesn’t come across as the kind of man who’s looking to pick a fight. With his shoulders upright and his head tilting slightly to the side, he shuffles through the halls of Harvard University. His right eye, which has given him trouble since his childhood, is halfway closed. The other is fixed on the ground. As an ant researcher, Wilson has made a career out of things that live on the earth’s surface.
There’s also much more to Wilson. Some consider him to be the world’s most important living biologist, with some placing him on a level with Charles Darwin.
In addition to discovering and describing hundreds of species of ants, Wilson’s book on this incomparably successful group of insects is the only non-fiction biology tome ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Another achievement was decoding the chemical communication of ants, whose vocabulary is composed of pheromones. His study of the ant colonization of islands helped to establish one of the most fruitful branches of ecology. And when it comes to the battle against the loss of biodiversity, Wilson is one of the movement’s most eloquent voices.
‘Blessed with Brilliant Enemies’
But Wilson’s fame isn’t solely the product of his scientific achievements. His enemies have also helped him to establish a name. “I have been blessed with brilliant enemies,” he says. In fact, the multitude of scholars with whom Wilson has skirmished academically is illustrious. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix in DNA is among them, as is essayist Stephen Jay Gould.
At 83 years of age, Wilson is still at work making a few new enemies. The latest source of uproar is a book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” published last April in the United States and this month in a German-language edition. In the tome, Wilson attempts to describe the triumphal advance of humans in evolutionary terms.
It is not uncommon for Wilson to look to ants for inspiration in his writings — and that proves true here, as well. When, for example, he recalls beholding two 90-million-year-old worker ants that were trapped in a piece of fossil metasequoia amber as being “among the most exciting moments in my life,” a discovery that “ranked in scientific importance with Archaeopteryx, the first fossil intermediary between birds and dinosaurs, and Australopithecus, the first ‘missing link’ discovered between modern humans and the ancestral apes.”
But that’s all just foreplay to the real controversy at the book’s core. Ultimately, Wilson uses ants to explain humans’ social behavior and, by doing so, breaks with current convention. The key question is the level at which Darwinian selection of human characteristics takes place. Did individuals enter into a fight for survival against each other, or did groups battle it out against competing groups?
Prior to this book, Wilson had been an influential champion of the theory of kin selection. He has now rejected his previous teachings, literally demolishing them. “The beautiful theory never worked well anyway, and now it has collapsed,” he writes. Today, he argues that human nature can only be understood if it is perceived as being the product of “group selection” — a view that Wilson’s fellow academics equate with sacrilege. They literally lined up to express their scientific dissent in a joint letter.
Some of the most vociferous criticism has come from Richard Dawkins, whose bestselling 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” first introduced the theory of kin selection to a mass audience. In a withering review of Wilson’s book in Britain’s Prospect magazine, Dawkins accuses a man he describes as his “lifelong hero” of “wanton arrogance” and “perverse misunderstandings”. “To borrow from Dorothy Parker,” he writes, “this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.”
SPIEGEL recently sat down with sociobiologist Wilson to discuss his book and the controversy surrounding it.
—–>Read Original Interview at SPIEGEL International
SPIEGEL: Professor Wilson, lets assume that 10 million years ago some alien spacecraft had landed on this planet. Which organisms would they find particularly intriguing?
Wilson: Their interest, I believe, would not have been our ancestors. Primarily, they would have focused on ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Their discovery is what the aliens would report back to headquarters.
SPIEGEL: And you think those insects would be more interesting to them than, for example, elephants, flocks of birds or intelligent primates?
Wilson: They would be, because, at that time, ants and termites would be the most abundant creatures on the land and the most highly social creatures with very advanced division of labor and caste. We call them “eusocial,” and this phenomenon seems to be extremely rare.
SPIEGEL: What else might the aliens consider particularly interesting about ants?
Wilson: Ants engage in farming and animal husbandry. For example, some of them cultivate fungi. Others herd aphids and literally milk them by stroking them with their antennae. And the other thing the aliens would find extremely interesting would be the degree to which these insects organize their societies by pheromones, by chemical communication. Ants and termites have taken this form of communication to extremes.
SPIEGEL: So the aliens would cable back home: “We have found ants. They are the most promising candidates for a future evolution towards intelligent beings on earth?”
Wilson: No, they wouldn’t. They would see that these creatures were encased in exoskeletons and therefore had to remain very small. They would conclude that there was little chance for individual ants or termites to develop much reasoning power, nor, as a result, the capacity for culture. But at least on this planet, you have to be big in order to have sufficient cerebral cortex. And you probably have to be bipedal and develop hands with pulpy fingers, because those give you the capacity to start creating objects and to manipulate the environment.
SPIEGEL: Would our ancestors not have caught their eye?
Wilson: Ten million years ago, our ancestors indeed had developed a somewhat larger brain and versatile hands already. But the crucial step had yet to come.
SPIEGEL: What do you mean?
Wilson: Let me go back to the social insects for a moment. Why did social insects start to form colonies? Across hundreds of millions of years, insects had been proliferating as solitary forms. Some of them stayed with their young for a while, guided them and protected them. You find that widespread but far from universal in the animal kingdom. However, out of those species came a much smaller number of species who didn’t just protect their young, but started building nests that they defended …
SPIEGEL: … similar to birds.
Wilson: Yes. And I think that birds are right at the threshold of eusocial behaviour. But looking at the evolution of ants and termites again, there is another crucial step. In an even smaller group, the young don’t only grow up in their nest, but they also stay and care for the next generation. Now you have a group staying together with a division of labor. That is evidently the narrow channel of evolution that you have to pass through in order to become eusocial.
SPIEGEL: And our ancestors followed the same path?
Wilson: Yes. I argue that Homo habilis, the first humans, also went through these stages. In particular, Homo habilis was unique in that they already had shifted to eating meat.
SPIEGEL: What difference would that make?
Wilson: When animals start eating meat, they tend to form packs and to divide labor. We know that the immediate descendants of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, gathered around camp sites and that they actually had begun to use fire. These camp sites are equivalent to nests. That’s where they gathered in a tightly knit group, and then individuals went out searching for food.
SPIEGEL: And this development of groups drives evolution even further?
Wilson: Exactly. And, for example, if it now comes to staking out the hunting grounds, then group stands against group.
SPIEGEL: Meaning that this is the origin of warfare?
Wilson: Yes. But it doesn’t take necessarily the forming of an army or a battalion and meeting on the field and fighting. It was mostly what you call “vengeance raids”. One group attacks another, maybe captures a female or kills one or two males. The other group then counterraids, and this will go back and forth, group against group.
‘Kin Selection Doesn’t Explain Anything’
SPIEGEL: You say that this so called group selection is vital for the evolution of humans. Yet traditionally, scientists explain the emergence of social behavior in humans by kin selection.
Wilson: That, for a number of reasons, isn’t much good as an explanation.
SPIEGEL: But you yourself have long been a proponent of this theory. Why did you change your mind?
Wilson: You are right. During the 1970s, I was one of the main proponents of kin selection theory. And at first the idea sounds very reasonable. So for example, if I favored you because you were my brother and therefore we share one half of our genes, then I could sacrifice a lot for you. I could give up my chance to have children in order to get you through college and have a big family. The problem is: If you think it through, kin selection doesn’t explain anything. Instead, I came to the conclusion that selection operates on multiple levels. On one hand, you have normal Darwinian selection going on all the time, where individuals compete with each other. In addition, however, these individuals now form groups. They are staying together, and consequently it is group versus group.
SPIEGEL: Turning away from kin selection provoked a rather fierce reaction from many of your colleagues.
Wilson: No, it didn’t. The reaction was strong, but it came from a relatively small group of people whose careers are based upon studies of kin selection.
SPIEGEL: Isn’t that too easy? After all, 137 scientists signed a response to your claims. They accuse you of a “misunderstanding of evolutionary theory”.
Wilson: You know, most scientists are tribalists. Their lives are so tied up in certain theories that they can’t let go.
SPIEGEL: Does it even make a substantial difference if humans evolved through kin selection or group selection?
Wilson: Oh, it changes everything. Only the understanding of evolution offers a chance to get a real understanding of the human species. We are determined by the interplay between individual and group selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. We’re all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group selection.
SPIEGEL: Is this Janus-faced nature of humans our greatest strength at the end of the day?
Wilson: Exactly. This inner conflict between altruism and selfishness is the human condition. And it is very creative and probably the source of our striving, our inventiveness and imagination. It’s that eternal conflict that makes us unique.
SPIEGEL: So how do we negotiate this conflict?
Wilson: We don’t. We have to live with it.
SPIEGEL: Which element of this human condition is stronger?
Wilson: Let’s put it this way: If we would be mainly influenced by group selection, we would be living in kind of an ant society.
SPIEGEL: … the ultimate form of communism?
Wilson: Yes. Once in a while, humans form societies that emphasize the group, for example societies with Marxist ideology. But the opposite is also true. In other societies the individual is everything. Politically, that would be the Republican far right.
SPIEGEL: What determines which ideology is predominant in a society?
Wilson: If your territory is invaded, then cooperation within the group will be extreme. That’s a human instinct. If you are in a frontier area, however, then we tend to move towards the extreme individual level. That seems to be a good part of the problem still with America. We still think we’re on the frontier, so we constantly try to put forward individual initiative and individual rights and rewards based upon individual achievement.
SPIEGEL: Earlier, you differentiated between the “virtue” of altruism and the “sin” of individualism. In your book you talk about the “poorer and the better angels” of human nature. Is it helpful to use this kind of terminology?
Wilson: I will admit that using the terminology of “virtue” and “sin” is what poets call a “trope”. That is to say, I wanted the idea in crude form to take hold. Still, a lot of what we call “virtue” has to do with propensities to behave well toward others. What we call “sin” are things that people do mainly out of self-interest.
SPIEGEL: However, our virtues towards others go only so far. Outside groups are mainly greeted with hostility.
Wilson: You are right. People have to belong to a group. That’s one of the strongest propensities in the human psyche and you won’t be able to change that. However, I think we are evolving, so as to avoid war — but without giving up the joy of competition between groups. Take soccer …
SPIEGEL: … or American football.
Wilson: Oh, yes, American football, it’s a blood sport. And people live by team sports and national or regional pride connected with team sports. And that’s what we should be aiming for, because, again, that spirit is one of the most creative. It landed us on the moon, and people get so much pleasure from it. I don’t want to see any of that disturbed. That is a part of being human. We need our big games, our team sports, our competition, our Olympics.
SPIEGEL: “Humans,” the saying goes, “have Paleolithic emotions” …
Wilson: … “Medieval institutions and god-like technology”. That’s our situation, yeah. And we really have to handle that.
SPIEGEL: How?
Wilson: So often it happens that we don’t know how, also in situations of public policy and governance, because we don’t have enough understanding of human nature. We simply haven’t looked at human nature in the best way that science might provide. I think what we need is a new Enlightenment. During the 18th century, when the original Enlightenment took place, science wasn’t up to the job. But I think science is now up to the job. We need to be harnessing our scientific knowledge now to get a better, science-based self-understanding.
SPIEGEL: It seems that, in this process, you would like to throw religions overboard altogether?
Wilson: No. That’s a misunderstanding. I don’t want to see the Catholic Church with all of its magnificent art and rituals and music disappear. I just want to have them give up their creation stories, including especially the resurrection of Christ.
SPIEGEL: That might well be a futile endeavour …
Wilson: There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said, “I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” That’s where science comes in. Seriously, I think we’re better off with no creation stories.
SPIEGEL: With this new Enlightenment, will we reach a higher state of humanity?
Wilson: Do we really want to improve ourselves? Humans are a very young species, in geologic terms, and that’s probably why we’re such a mess. We’re still living with all this aggression and ability to go to war. But do we really want to change ourselves? We’re right on the edge of an era of being able to actually alter the human genome. But do we want that? Do we want to create a race that’s more rational and free of many of these emotions? My response is no, because the only thing that distinguishes us from super-intelligent robots are our imperfect, sloppy, maybe even dangerous emotions. They are what makes us human.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Wilson, we thank you for this conversation.
Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle
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Interview with George Church: Can Neanderthals Be Brought Back from the Dead?
–> Update: The Interview has sparked frenetic media speculation about a supposed plan to bring the Neanderthal back from the dead. Church feels his remarks were mistranslated, but it was other media outlets that twisted his words.
George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome. In addition to his current work in developing accelerated procedures for sequencing and synthesizing DNA, he has also been involved in the establishing of around two dozen biotech firms. In his new book, “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves,” which he has also encoded as strands of DNA and distributed on small DNA chips, Church sketches out a story of a second, man-made Creation.
SPIEGEL recently sat down with Church to discuss his new tome and the prospects for using synthetic biology to bring the Neanderthal back from exctinction as well as the idea of making humans resistant to all viruses.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by “soon”? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?
Church: I think so, but boy there are a lot of parts to that. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?
SPIEGEL: Perhaps because it is banned?
Church: That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.
SPIEGEL: Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?
Church: Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.
SPIEGEL: So let’s talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.
Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.
SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?
Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.
SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?
Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?
Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.
SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.
Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.
SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.
Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were to realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).
SPIEGEL: Might it one day be possible to descend even deeper into evolutionary history and recreate even older ancestors like Australopithecus or Homo erectus?
Church: Well, you have got a shot at anything where you have the DNA. The limit for finding DNA fragments is probably around a million years.
SPIEGEL: So we won’t be seeing the return of the caveman or dinosaurs?
Church: Probably not. But even if you don’t have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you would first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask: “What’s the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands?” And you would try to identify the mutations and try to back engineer the dinosaur. I think this will be feasible.
SPIEGEL: Is it also conceivable to create lifeforms that never existed before? What about, for example, rabbits with wings?
Church: So that’s a further possibility. However, things have to be plausible from an engineering standpoint. There is a bunch of things in birds that make flying possible, not just the wings. They have very lightweight bones, feathers, strong breast muscles, and the list goes on.
SPIEGEL: Flying rabbits and recreated dinosaurs are pure science fiction today. But on the microbe level, researchers are already creating synthetic life. New bacteria detect arsenic in drinking water. They create synthetic vaccines and diesel fuel. You call these organisms “novel machines”. How do they relate to the machines we know?
Church: Well, all organisms are mechanical in the sense that they’re made up of moving parts that inter-digitate like gears. The only difference is that they are incredibly intricate. They are atomically precise machines.
SPIEGEL: And what will these machines be used for?
Church: Oh, life science will co-opt almost every other field of manufacturing. It’s not limited to agriculture and medicine. We can even use biology in ways that biology never has evolved to be used. DNA molecules for example could be used as three-dimensional scaffolding for inorganic materials, and this with atomic precision. You can design almost any structure you want with a computer, then you push a button — and there it is, built-in DNA.
SPIEGEL: DNA as the building material of the future?
Church: Exactly. And it’s amazing. Biology is good at making things that are really precise. Take trees for example. Trees are extremely complicated, at least on a molecular basis. However, they are so cheap, that we burn them or convert them into tables. Trees cost about $50 a ton. This means that you can make things that are nearly atomically precise for five cents a kilo.
SPIEGEL: You are seriously proposing to build all kinds of machines — cars, computers or coffee machines — out of DNA?
Church: I think it is very likely that this is possible. In fact, computers made of DNA will be better than the current computers, because they will have even smaller processors and be more energy efficient.
SPIEGEL: Let’s go through a couple of different applications of synthetic biology. How long will it take, for example, until we can fill our tanks with fuel that has been produced using synthentic microbes?
Church: The fact is that we already have organisms that can produce fuel compatible with current car engines. These organisms convert carbon dioxide and light into fuels by basically using photosynthesis.
SPIEGEL: And they do so in an economically acceptable way?
Church: If you consider $1.30 a gallon for fuel a good number, then yeah. And the price will go down. Most of these systems are at least a factor of five away from theoretical limits, maybe even a factor of 10.
SPIEGEL: So we should urgently include synthetic life in our road map for the future energy supply in Germany?
Church: Well, I don’t necessarily think it’s a mistake to go slowly. It is not like Germany is losing out to lots of other nations right now, but there should be some sort of engineering and policy planning.
–> Read original interview at SPIEGEL Online International
Is Church Playing God?
SPIEGEL: Germans are traditionally scared of genetically modified organisms.
Church: But don’t forget: The ones we are talking about won’t be farm GMOs. These will be in containers, and so if there’s a careful planning process, I would predict that Germany would be as good as any country at doing this.
SPIEGEL: There has been a lot of fierce public opposition to genetic engineering in Germany. How do you experience this? Do you find it annoying?
Church: Quite to the contrary. I personally think it has been fruitful. And I think there are relatively few examples in which such a debate has slowed down technology. I think we should be quite cautious, but that doesn’t mean that we should put moratoriums on new technologies. It means licensing, surveillance, doing tests. And we actually must make sure the public is educated about them. It would be great if all the politicians in the world were as technologically savvy as the average citizen is politically savvy.
SPIEGEL: Acceptance is highest for such technology when it is first applied in the medical industry …
Church: … yes, and the potential of synthetic life is particularly large in pharmaceuticals. The days of classic, small molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it is a miracle that they work in the first place. They kind of dose your whole body. They cross-react with other molecules. Now, we are getting better and better at programming cells. So I think cell therapies are going to be the next big thing. If you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible amount of sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example …
SPIEGEL: … a disease you also want to beat with cell therapy?
Church: Yes. All you have to do is take your blood cell precursors out of your body, reengineer them using gene therapy to knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can’t get AIDS any more, because the virus can’t enter your cells.
SPIEGEL: Are we correct in assuming you wouldn’t hesitate to use germ cell therapy, as well, if you could improve humans genetically in this way?
Church: Well, there are stem cell therapies already. There are hematopoietic stem cell transplants that are widely practiced, and skin stem cell transplants. Once you have enough experience with these techniques you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years old. What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered desirable.
SPIEGEL: But you haven’t got any idea which genes to change in order to achieve that goal.
Church: In order to find out, we are now involved in sequencing as many people as possible who have lived for over 110 years. There are only 60 of those people in the world that we know of.
SPIEGEL: Do you have any results already?
Church: It’s too early to say. But we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just beginning.
SPIEGEL: You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees longevity?
Church: That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have their own little advantage over everybody else. What we are looking for is protective alleles. If they each have their own answer, we can look at all of them and ask, what happens if you put them all in one person? Do they cancel each other out, or do they synergize?
SPIEGEL: You seriously envisage a new era, in which genes are used as anti-aging-cures?
Church: Why not? A lot of things that were once left to luck no longer have to be if we add synthetic biology into the equation. Let’s take an example: virus resistance …
SPIEGEL: … which is also achievable using synthetic biology?
Church: Yes, it turns out there are certain ways to make organisms of any kind resistent to any viruses. If you change the genetic code …
SPIEGEL: … you are talking about the code that all life forms on Earth use to code their genetic information?
Church: Exactly. You can change that code. We’re testing that out in bacteria and it might well be possible to create completely virus-resistant E. coli, for example. But we won’t know until we get there. And I am not promising anything. I am just laying out a path, so that people can see what possible futures we have.
SPIEGEL: And if it works in bacteria, you presumably could then move on to plants, animals and even humans? Which means: no more measles, no more rabies, no more influenza?
Church: Sure. And that would be another argument for cloning, by the way, since cloning is probably going to be recognized as the best way of building such virus resistance into humans. As long as it is safe and tested slowly, it might gain acceptance. And I’m not advocating. I’m just saying, this is the pathway that might happen.
SPIEGEL: It all sounds so easy and straightforward. Aren’t biological processes far more complicated than you would like to lead us to believe?
Church: Yes, biology is complicated, but it’s actually simpler than most other technologies we are dealing with. The reason is that we have received a great gift that biology has given to us. We can just take a little bit of DNA and stick it into a human stem cell, and all the rest of it is self-assembled. It just happens. It’s as if a master engineer parked a spacecraft in our back yard with not so many manuals, but lots of goodies in it that are kind of self-explanatory. You pick up something and you pretty much know what it does after a little study.
SPIEGEL: Do you understand that there will be people who feel rather uncomfortable with the notion of changing the genome of the human species?
Church: I think the definition of species is about to change anyway. So far, the definition of different species has been that they can’t exchange DNA. But more and more, this species barrier is falling. Humans will probably share genes with all sorts of organisms.
SPIEGEL: First you propose to change the 3-billion-year-old genetic code. Then you explain how you want to create a new and better man. Is it any wonder to you when people accuse you of playing God?
Church: I certainly respect other people’s faith. But, in general, in religion you wouldn’t want people to starve. We have 7 billion people living on this planet. If part of the solution to feed those people is to make their crops resistant to viruses, then you have to ask: Is there really anything in the Bible that says you shouldn’t make virus-resistant crops? I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally more religiously problematic about engineering a dog or a cow or a horse the way we have been doing it for 10,000 years versus making a virus-resistant crop.
SPIEGEL: Virus-resistant crops is one thing. Virus-resistant humans is something altogether different.
Church: Why? In technology, we generally don’t take leaps. It’s this very slow crawl. We are not going to be making a virus-resistant human before we make a virus-resistant cow. I don’t understand why people should be so deeply hurt by that kind of technology.
SPIEGEL: Apart from religious opposition, biotechnology also generates very real fears. Artificial lifeforms which might turn out to be dangerous killer-bugs. Don’t we need special precautions?
Church: We have to be very cautious, I absolutely agree. I almost never vote against caution or regulations. In fact, I requested them for licensing and surveillance of synthetic biology. Yes, I think the risks are high. The risks of doing nothing are also high, if you consider that there are 7 billion people who need food and are polluting the environment.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, do you believe in God?
Church: I would be blind, if I didn’t see that faith in an overall plan resulted in where we are today. Faith is a very powerful force in the history of humanity. So I greatly respect different kinds of faith. Just as I think diversity is a really good thing genetically, it’s also a good thing societally.
SPIEGEL: But you’re talking about other people’s faith. What about your own faith?
Church: I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I’d say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, “awe” was a word that was almost invented for scientists. Not all scientists are in awe, but scientists are in a better position to be in awe than just about anybody else on the planet, because they actually can imagine all the different scales and all the complexity. A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn’t see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, we thank you for this conversation.
Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle.
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Microsofts Craig Mundie: “Microsoft can be cool!”
This is an extended version of an interview published at SPIEGEL Online International.
SPIEGEL: Microsoft will presents a whole array of new products at the end of this week. Is this the beginning of a comeback to former glory?
Mundie: I believe that Microsoft never lost it’s relevance. I always tell people we’re almost 40 years old now, fighting against every venture-funded good idea on the planet in the world’s most competitive industry, and we’re still here, okay? So I say, „Do you think that’s just an accident?“. I don’t think so.
SPIEGEL: Microsofts track record at anticipating technological trends hasn’t been the best in the past. With the tablet Surface and the new Windows 8 software you are now targeting in particular the mobile market. Again ten years too late?
Mundie: My response is that we had a music player before the iPod. We had a touch device before the iPad. And we were leading in the mobile phone space. So, it wasn’t for a lack of vision or technology foresight that we lost our leadership position. The problem was that we just didn’t give enough reinforcement to those products at the time that we were leading. Unfortunately, the company had some executional missteps, which occured right at the time when Apple launched the iPhone. With that, we appeared to drop a generation behind.
SPIEGEL: What happened?
Mundie: During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering. The criminal activity in cyberspace was growing dramatically ten years ago, and Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target. In part because of that, Windows Vista took a long time to be born.
SPIEGEL: Have you learned your lessons?
Mundie: Steve (Ballmer) made many changes, starting even at the top management level of the company. For example, there’s not a single product group president here today who was here five years ago. These changes are a reflection of the fact that we gave up leadership in some categories that turned out to be very important. Today our execution is not hampered by the same errors. We have learned our lessons. That doesn’t mean we won’t make some errors someday, but we’re at least not making the same ones again.
SPIEGEL: Which role will Microsoft play in the coming decade as an IT company?
Mundie: I think it’s going to be an interesting next decade. This is my 20th year at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold hired me to develop the company’s capability in non-PC computing. In 1992, that seemed very avant-garde, but, of course, today we all live with computing everywhere around us.
SPIEGEL: How will the computer of the future look like and how will we interact with those devices?
Mundie: What we’re trying to do is to make the computer more like us and as helpful as an expert. To do that, we have to teach the computer to emulate more and more of the human senses, seeing, listening, speaking, as well as the tactile senses. We believe that our motion sensor Kinect will be a big part of that. The computers and the back-end cloud services are powerful enough now that we will see more of this type of technology very soon.
SPIEGEL: What would that mean, for example, for peoples homes or offices?
Mundie: For example, you’ll be able to directly ask the computer to help you. In the past, to work a computer program, you had to learn how to use the tool, and the tool had rigidity. In the future, it should be more like going to an assistant and saying, „Here is a document, make it look good,“ rather than saying „well, make this paragraph this point size and fit this font.“ A big emphasis at Microsoft is machine learning. The computer should not only be able to emulate your senses, but to appear to understand things based on learning or history. For example, for Office 365 that is in testing right now, we built a machine-learning-based assistant for your Inbox. The program looks at all your historical mail handling. From that, it makes judgments about what’s most important to you and groups those things together. How does it know? Because it has observed your behavior over some period of time.
SPIEGEL: Don’t people want to define themselves what’s important to them and what isn’t?
Mundie: That would require that people could actually describe their own behaviors, which we’ve learned they can’t do. They can’t tell you how they think enough to be able to put it into rules. The computer on the other hand is very well capable to observe your actions and deduce from that a set of behaviors or rules.
SPIEGEL: If you look ten years ahead, which role will the PC play?
Mundie: I think it will be about almost like it is today. However, it will be supplemented for example with intelligent whiteboards and displays for group discussions. Eventually, you will come into a room and the whole room will be the computer. In fact, people will be thinking more about computing and not computers. So for example, when you go into a space, you might have your phone in your pocket and your tablet in your briefcase. And if you set them down, they will all work together.
SPIEGEL: Right now, the whole industry seems to have made it the user’s problem to migrate what they care about from one device to the next.
Mundie: Yes, and I think that Microsoft may in fact be the company best positioned to help with this cacophonous situation, simply because we have a viable position in every product category, including a robust cloud service to connect all the different devices.
SPIEGEL: Still, the world doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to your innovations.
Mundie: I disagree. For example, if you look at the reviews, people who have a Windows phone actually prefer it over an Apple phone or an Android phone at this point. And Surface, I think, has met very strong, positive reviews and is really resonating with people.
SPIEGEL: Surface will be on online-sale in Germany from Friday onwards. Again, Microsoft seems to be very late with such a device. The iPad is on the market for years. Why should people care?
Mundie: Our experience is, despite some rhetoric, that most people who want to do any serious computing don’t want to do it trying to type on a glass screen. As a consequence, they always end up having two computers, a laptop and a tablet. Our dream was that you could have a no-compromises tablet experience and a click-on, high-quality keyboard, so that you don’t really need two computers. Surface fuses two worlds, and I think when people look at the engineering and design of the device, they will have an epiphany.
SPIEGEL: Besides the X-Box, Surface is Microsofts first in-house computer hardware. Why did you decide to go this way?
Mundie: Our marketing for many, many years was always through our partners. You never really bought a product directly from Microsoft, but from HP, Dell, Lenovo and alike. So, in a way, Microsoft always depended on its indirect representation through those companies. Now it became clear to us that we have to speak for ourselves. We have to tell the complete Microsoft story.
SPIEGEL: How much is industrial design part of this story? Apple for example puts a lot of emphasis on design. Does design become more important for Microsoft?
Mundie: I think it does. Surface for example is a product that gave us an opportunity to establish a new bar in this respect. Many people had said, „Oh, Microsoft technology is too bloated, it’s too fat, you guys don’t pay attention to these things.“ We think that Surface is a place where we can prove to people that this mythology is wrong. It’s a place where we get to speak to the public with our own voice about what’s possible, at an aspirational level. In part, the reason to do Surface was also to create a benchmark for our partners, saying, „look, there’s nothing intrinsic in our technology that won’t support products that operate at the upper tier; you just have to design them“.
SPIEGEL: By building your own computer hardware you effectively become a competitor of your own partners. Are you going to go it alone in the future, like Apple does?
Mundie: Apple has always had the luxury of being a software and a hardware company. I do describe that as a luxury, because you only have to think about yourself. But at least in the past, when you start to fan out and want to provide products for the whole world in every country, it’s very hard to do that on your own. We still think that it’s better to have a symbiotic relationship with our worldwide community of partners. And we are not alone with this model. Googles Android for example has gotten a big share fairly quickly by allowing several companies to participate.
SPIEGEL: There are other device categories in the making. Google presented its Google Glass-project lately. Is Microsoft interested in glasses with augmented reality?
Mundie: None of these things are particularly new or unanticipated. At a research level, we look at everything.
SPIEGEL: Microsoft Research has 850 Ph.D.-level researchers. The company invests hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research alone. Isn‘t there just enough innvoation for the money spent?
Mundie: And those people just don’t know what they’re talking about. I keep score every year how many things come out of research into the product group, and these transfers are counting in the hundreds. Microsoft Research is the world’s largest computer science research operation. I have seven labs, and each of them compares well to the faculty of a pretty good-size university computer science department. What this research provides to Microsoft is long-term nourishment. We think that, unless you have the ability to play with big ideas and to do fundamental research, you eventually run out of gas.
SPIEGEL: When Windows 95 was launched, in 1995, computer geeks lined up to buy the first copies. Bill Gates paid three million dollars to the Rolling Stones for rights to use their classic „Start Me Up“ as the softwares’ theme song. Nothing like that happens now. Has Microsoft losts its cool?
Mundie: It’s hard to keep your cool against young companies. But I do think it’s important to be cool. And the thing that always shows me that Microsoft can be cool is the whole Xbox business. We are worldwide number one in game consoles. This shows that when we package and present ourselves right, there is no stigma associated with being Microsoft.
SPIEGEL: The stigma seems to be more prevalent in the PC business right now. The package hasn’t been right in the past?
Mundie: I think we are able to learn. The phones and now the Surface are showing that our ability to sprinkle the fairy dust and have the coolness is growing. However, people have to understand that we are in a dilemma. A huge part of Microsoft’s revenue is to businesses, and if you’re a business, the last thing you want is us to be cool, because we’re providing you with your mission-critical infrastructure. Guys who buy infrastructure don’t buy cool, okay? Because they want you to be reliable like a rock. It is a lot easier to have the cool part emerge when you don’t have the enterprise part. But that’s a very critical part of our business.
SPIEGEL: Still, some industry experts predict that Microsoft will become the next big technology giant to slip into obscurity if the company can’t reinvent itself.
Mundie: I’ve been telling people to think about it like being in the Olympics. From the very beginning, the Olympics not only had the individual events, but they had the decathlon. Why? Well, they not only wanted to not know who could win each race in track and field, but they wanted to know who was the best overall athlete. I like to think that Microsoft will come to be recognized as the best athlete in computing.
Interview conducted by Philip Bethge
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Michio Kaku: ‘Eternal Life Does Not Violate the Laws of Physics’
SPIEGEL: Professor Kaku, in your book you write about how we will be like gods in the future. Are you saying that our grandchildren will be gods? Isn’t that a bit immodest?
Kaku: Just think for a moment about our forefathers in the year 1900. They lived to be 49 years old on average and traveled with horse-drawn wagons. Long distance communication was yelling out the window. If these people could see us today with mobile phones at our ears, Facebook on our screens and traveling with planes they would consider us wizards.
SPIEGEL: It’s still a big step to go from wizards to gods.
Kaku: So what do gods do? Apollo has unlimited power from the sun, Zeus can turn himself into a swan or anything else and Venus has a perfect body. Gods can move objects with their mind, rearrange things, and have perfect bodies. Our grandchildren will be able to do just that.
SPIEGEL: Let’s do a little time traveling. Close your eyes and imagine waking up on a September morning in the year 2112. What do you see?
Kaku: More important than what I see, is what will be omnipresent. Intelligence will be everywhere in the future, just like electricity is everywhere today. We now just assume that there’s electricity in the walls, the floor, the ceiling. In the future we will assume that everything is intelligent, so intelligence will be everywhere and nowhere. As children, we will be taught how to manipulate things around us just by talking to them and thinking. Children will believe that everything is alive.
SPIEGEL: We’ll ask the question in a different way. What will we experience on this morning in 2112?
Kaku: When we wake up, the first thing we want to know is what’s going on in the world. So we put in our intelligent contact lenses and with a blink we are online. If you want information, movies, virtual reality, it is all in your contact lenses. Then we’ll drive to work.
SPIEGEL: Driving? How boring!
Kaku: Aw, you want to fly? Cars may even fly, but we will also be able to manipulate our cars just by thinking. So, if you want to get into your car, you simply think, and you call your car. The car drives itself, and boom, there you are.
SPIEGEL: So our grandchildren will fly to work. And what will change there?
Kaku: If you are a college student, you blink and you can see all the answers to the final examination by wearing your contact lenses. Artists will wave their hands in the air and create beautiful works of art. If you’re an architect, you will see what you are creating and just move towers, two apartment buildings around as you construct things.
SPIEGEL: Why do we have to even bother leaving the house if all of our needs, questions and desires are played out virtually on our grandiose contact lenses?
Kaku: Well, you will want to go outside because we are humans, and our personality hasn’t changed in 100,000 years. We’re social creatures. We like to size each other up, figure out who’s on first, who’s on second. But technology will be able to help with that. In 2100, for example, when you talk to people, you will see their biography listed right in front of you. If you are looking for a date, you sign up for a dating service. When you go outside and people walk by you, their faces light up if they’re available. If someone speaks to you in Chinese, your contact lens will translate from Chinese to English. We will still resist certain technologies, however, because they go against who we are.
SPIEGEL: What’s an example of that?
Kaku: The paperless office. The paperless office was a failure, because we like tangible things. If I give you a choice between tickets to see your favorite famous rock star or a video of a close-up of your favorite rock star, which would you choose?
SPIEGEL: The concert tickets naturally.
Kaku: That’s the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, “I want direct contact. I don’t want a picture.” The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things.
SPIEGEL: Speaking of real things, we were fascinated by the toilet of the future described in your book.
Kaku: Yeah. You will still have to go to the bathroom because our biology hasn’t changed. But your toilet will have more computer power than a university hospital does today.
SPIEGEL: The toilet as a supercomputer?
Kaku: Your toilet will have a chip in it called a “DNA chip.” It will analyze enzymes, proteins and genes for cancer. In this way we will be able to fight cancer long before a tumor even has a chance to develop. We will be able to also detect other illnesses early and fight them. But we will still have the common cold. There are at least 300 different rhinoviruses and you need to have a vaccine for each one. No company is going to do that, because it is going to bankrupt a large corporation to make a vaccine for each of them.
SPIEGEL: What a defeat! Comfort us — did you not just refer to the perfect body of Venus?
Kaku: The nature of medicine will shift away from basically saving lives to perfection. We will be able to rearrange our own genome.
SPIEGEL: I assume that you mean to make ourselves prettier, stronger and generally better?
Kaku: Those ambitions will be there.
SPIEGEL: As we get a better handle on genetic technologies, won’t there be more of an urge to create designer babies?
Kaku: We need a debate about these issues. This is going to create societal problems. You have to have an educated public democratically debating how far to push our beautiful children and the human race.
SPIEGEL: Will we eventually be able to conquer death?
Kaku: Eternal life does not violate the laws of physics, surprisingly enough. After all, we only die because of one word: “error.” The longer we live, the more errors there are that are made by our bodies when they read our genes. That means cells get sluggish. The body doesn’t function as well as it could, which is why the skin ages. Then organs eventually fail, so that’s why we die.
SPIEGEL: What can we do about that?
Kaku: We know the genes that correct these things. So if we use genetic repair mechanisms, we might be able to repair cells so they don’t wear out, so they just keep on going. That is as real possibility. We will also be able to regenerate organs by growing new ones. That can already be done now.
SPIEGEL: Then we will get rid of death?
Kaku: In principle, yes.
SPIEGEL: Then how will we decide who gets to live and who must die? Who will be allowed to have children?
Kaku: I don’t think children or overpopulation are going to be a problem. When people live longer, they have fewer children. We see that in Japan, the US and in other countries where prosperity, education and urbanization are on the rise.
–> Read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International
‘It’s Nice to be Superman for an Afternoon’
SPIEGEL: Okay, back to the toilet. What do I do when the toilet tells me that I have cancer cells?
Kaku: You talk to the wallpaper, and you say…
SPIEGEL: Excuse me, but you talk to the wallpaper?
Kaku: As I mentioned, everything will be intelligent, even the wallpaper. You talk to the wallpaper, and you say, “I want to see my doctor.” Boom! A doctor appears on the wall. It’s a RoboDoc, which looks like a doctor, talks like a doctor, but it’s actually an animated figure. It will tell you what is going on in your body and answers all medical questions with 99 percent accuracy, because it has the medical histories of everyone on the planet available.
SPIEGEL: Will we also have robot driving instructors and robot cooks?
Kaku: Yes, of course.
SPIEGEL: But aren’t robots still rather dumb, even after 50 years of research into artificial intelligence?
Kaku: That’s true. ASIMO, the best robot around today has the intelligence of a cockroach. However, that will change. In the coming decades, robots will be as smart as mice. Now, mice are very smart. They can scurry around, hide behind things, look for food. I can see that in 10, 20, 30 years, we will start to have mice robots, then rabbit robots, cat robots, dog robots, finally monkey robots maybe by the end of the century. They will do dirty, dull and dangerous jobs for us. That means they have to feel pain too.
SPIEGEL: Are you talking about machines with the ability to suffer?
Kaku: We will have to build robots with pain sensors in them, because we don’t want them to destroy themselves.
SPIEGEL: Then won’t we have to start talking about robot rights?
Kaku: Once we design robots that can feel pain, that’s a tricky point. At that point, people will say, “Well, they’re just like dogs and cats.”
SPIEGEL: When will machines become a threat, like HAL from the movie ‘2001?’
Kaku: At some point we can plant a chip in their electronic brains that shuts them down when they start to develop dangerous plans.
SPIEGEL: But won’t they be intelligent enough to take the chip out themselves?
Kaku: Sure, but that won’t happen until after 2100.
SPIEGEL: How comforting.
Kaku: Then we always have the option of making ourselves even smarter.
SPIEGEL: Are you referring to the old science fiction idea that our brains are immeasurably smart?
Kaku: Exactly, and spending the whole day calculating Einstein’s theory of relativity. I don’t seriously believe that. It goes back to the caveman in us. What do cavemen want? Cavemen want to have the respect of their peers. They want to look good to the opposite sex. They want prestige. If we’re stuck inside a computer calculating Einstein’s theory of relativity, who wants that?
SPIEGEL: The idea that one day we will all be Supermen or Superwomen sounds really tempting though.
Kaku: I think what’s going to happen is we will have avatars. They will have all these powers that we want — to be perfect, superhuman and good looking.
SPIEGEL: Great! Does that mean we can send our avatars to meetings that we don’t want to attend?
Kaku: You will send your avatars to the Moon or on virtual trips or whatever. But you also have the option of shutting it off and getting back to normal again. The average person will not necessarily want to be Superman, but they may want the option of being Superman for an afternoon. It’s nice to be Superman for an afternoon, but then to say, hey, “let’s go out and have a beer with friends.” Do you see what I’m saying?
SPIEGEL: Yes, of course. Atavism beats out the avatar. But just how strong are these caveman impulses? Could there one day be a movement against all of this new technology?
Kaku: Such movements always accompany technological changes. When the telephone first came out, it was very controversial. Throughout history, we only talked to friends, relatives, kids. That’s it, period. Then comes the telephone. There were many voices denouncing it, saying we had to go back to talking to our families, so on and so forth.
SPIEGEL: You claim in your book that we are the most important generation that has ever lived. Doesn’t every generation think that?
Kaku: Out of all the generations that have walked the surface of the Earth, we’re the only ones to witness the beginning of the process of becoming a planetary civilization. We decide whether humanity survives.
SPIEGEL: What do you mean by “planetary civilization?”
Kaku: We physicists rank civilizations by energy. A Type 1 planetary civilization uses all the energy that is available on the planet. In a hundred years, we’ll be Type 1. We’re on our way there. We will control the weather. We will control earthquakes and volcanoes eventually. Anything planetary, we will control. Type 2 is stellar. We will control stars, like Star Trek. Then Type 3 is the entire galaxy, where we’ll control the Milky Way galaxy.
SPIEGEL: Hold on a second. We aren’t even close to that now!
Kaku: No, we are in a transition. We still get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. Carl Sagan did a more precise calculation. He figured out that we’re actually Type 0.7. So we’re on the threshold of being Type 1. We will have two planetary languages, English and Mandarin. Look at the Olympics. That’s planetary sports. Look at soccer, another planetary sport. The European Union is the beginning of a planetary economy, if it ever gets off the ground correctly.
SPIEGEL: We are having a few tiny problems with that last one.
Kaku: Well, nevertheless, when I look at the larger sweep of things, I see that we are already coming together. We’re entering the birth of a planetary fashion and we are already seeing the birth of planetary culture. Democratization of the world marches on.
SPIEGEL: What is one thing from the world you imagine that you would like to have today?
Kaku: Well, I wouldn’t mind having a few more decades to live and, for example, to see the first starship. Also, it’s a shame that I cannot live in the 11th dimension.
SPIEGEL: What do you mean by that?
Kaku: The energy of wormholes, black holes and of the Big Bang. You would have to be a Type 3 civilization before you can begin to manipulate that energy. That’s the province of my field of research, string theory.
SPIEGEL: I think that’s where we can no longer keep up. Professor Kaku, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow