Well, good morning everyone. Hey, can we just take a moment and welcome our family from the Portage Campus who's joining in with us. Let's put our hands together and welcome them. We love you guys as well as everybody who's joining us online. Turn with me in your Bibles while you're thinking about it to Malachi, the book of Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament. Some of you thought his name was Malachi and that he was an Italian prophet, but his name is Malachi. So turn there and we're gonna go there in just a moment. But real quickly, I wanna just bring us up to date on Seek, which is gonna kick off this Wednesday night. There's a few things that is gonna help you if maybe you've never been a part of Seek before. Every year we do this to start and calibrate our hearts right at the beginning of the year by calling a church-wide period of prayer and fasting and gathering. So January is when people hit the reset button and start new routines, working out, eating better, those kinds of things. What we have done for the last, I think 15 years is we start the year off with a season of prayer and fasting. Fasting is different than dieting. How many know what I'm talking about? Dieting will change your body. Fasting will change your soul. And that's what prayer and fasting together are. So we have a couple resources we want you to be aware of. Number one is we have, when you walked in, you should have gotten this, it is a Seek January schedule of all of our prayer meetings. For 21 days beginning Wednesday night, we are gonna have prayer meetings at both of our campuses at 12 o'clock on noon prayer and then 6.30 p.m. And these are prayer services. So there's worship, there's prayer leaders, you come and engage and it's life-changing. If you've never been a part of one of our Seek prayer meetings, this is not the old kind of prayer meetings where you show up and you stand around and look at patterns in the carpet and agonize in your soul because it's the most morning thing that you've ever been involved in. These are gonna be powerful prayer meetings and we have a schedule of those. The other thing that we have is we have produced a Seek devotional book for this year and it's really nice, our media team did it. And inside this, it has devotions for 21 days from one of my favorite preachers, Charles Spurgeon. It also has articles in here from myself, Pastor Caleb Culver, our friend David Perkins, and then Bob Sorgi. And there are all kinds of resources about fasting. So if you're new to fasting, this is gonna help you. There's scriptures on fasting, there's the different types of fasts, there is the what, the why, the where, the how of everything that you need to know about fasting. So if you've never fasted before, this will help you. And then there's a place for you to journal throughout the 21 days. So we have these available in our bookstore. They cost us $5 to produce. So we're selling them for $5. I would encourage you to pick one up. Here's the problem, they are sold out. So instead of, this is like the last one. And so normally they're $5, but I'm selling this for $2,000. So if anybody wants this last one, see me after, actually Wednesday night, when we have our Seek gathering at 6.30pm here at the Richland campus, we will have a new shipment of them. So we sold through all of them this weekend and we ordered another batch that's gonna come in.  We throughout the month of January for Seek, we have our regular weekend services, but then we also gather on Wednesday nights. We get really crazy and fanatical by going to church twice a week. We go on Wednesday nights and these are powerful prayer worship services and we have a couple of guests that are gonna be joining us. This Wednesday night as we kick it off, I'm gonna bring a message that God laid on my heart. I kind of made reference to it earlier. That is gonna set the pace for our fast and for the new year. Following week we have one of my mentors and friends. He hasn't been here in about 10 years but he has pastors in amazing church for 40 years on the east side of the state. His name is Lauren Covarrubius from Mount Zion Church. He's gonna be here the following week. Michael Miller from the upper room in Dallas. Many of you are familiar with the worship music. Michael Miller will be here in the following. The week that we close out our 21 days, that Wednesday night is gonna be a blowout night of worship and intercession over our city and then at the end when the fast is done, we're gonna have pizza waiting in the lobby because pizza is the one thing that I crave the most when I am fasting. Anybody like that?  It's like, that's the one thing the devil tempts me. If I was Jesus, which I'm not, thank God, but if I were in the wilderness being tempted, the devil would not say turn these stones into bread. He would say turn these stones into pizza. He'd probably say turn them into a pizza hot pocket. I mean, and I would have been tempted. Because of that, we will close the fast out with fasting and then we will eat pizza and it's gonna be glorious. So join us on Wednesday nights and I just wanna encourage everybody fully engage and seek this year. If you wanna set the trajectory of your life to go deeper in God, fall more in love with what Jesus falls in love with, then do something this year that you've never done before. Find a way to up the game and engage and seek. All right, you guys in Malachi? Malachi, chapter one, verse number one. We're gonna read one verse to start this morning. Here we go. The Oracle of the Word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. So Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament. It is the last book and Malachi is the last prophet that God sends to Israel before a 400 year period of silence where God does not speak to Israel for 400 years. And when he speaks again, we pick up the story of the gospel in Matthew when God raises up a man named John the Baptist who is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord and then Jesus comes on the scene. And I believe the book of Malachi is oftentimes, it seems like the only time that it's referenced is when it comes to the subject of tiding. But there's so much more in the book of Malachi because Malachi is not just the last book and the last prophet written in the Old Testament. It's a book that I think has massive relevance to all of us in the days and the times that we live in and in our walk with God when it comes to keeping Jesus as the first love of our life. And so we've entitled this series, First Love because that's what Malachi, the oracle, the prophetic word that God gives Malachi that we just read about in verse number one is all about that. It's all about God sending Malachi to God's people, the nation of Israel and calling them to return back to their first love because they've lost that loving feeling. They've departed away from their first love. They've grown cold in their walk with God. Some interesting things that you might be interested in knowing about the book of Malachi. Number one, the name Malachi, his name actually means messenger. So not only was he a messenger, but that's actually his name. The messenger of God to God's people. And Malachi, the book of Malachi was recorded during a time in Israel's history that was pivotal. It was written in around 500 BC or about 450 BC. And it was written after God had brought them, the nation of Israel, out of Babylonian captivity. Remember in the story of Daniel and Nehemiah and different ones like that, that's all surrounding the time period where Israel was wiped off the face of the earth, the temple was destroyed, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Nebuchadnezzar took all of the Jews back to Babylon and then under Persia, they were there in exile and God had prophesied it by Jeremiah, said that they would be in exile for 70 years. That 70 years came and went and God raised up men like Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of the city. Ezra who was the priest to re-institute the laws of God and then Zerubbabel who was used to rebuild the house of God. So they rebuilt the temple and they're living in a time period where they've come out of exile, they're back in the land and to the Jewish people, the land meant everything. You and I kind of live where we live but we don't have any qualms with moving because our identity is not really found in where we live. It's like I've grown up in Michigan all of my life. I was born in Pontiac, grew up in Grand Rapids, moved to Kalamazoo 23 years ago. All my life in Michigan, minus two years in those two years, I moved to Kansas City, Missouri and it took me two years to realize I wanted to move home. I love Michigan, but my identity is not found in Michigan. My relationship with God is not wrapped up in living in Michigan for the Jewish people it was because the land actually was the promise that God had given to them and to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This land is your inheritance. And as part of that land, God says you're my people and in their city of Jerusalem was the temple and the temple was the physical earth address that God lived in. So when their temple was destroyed and their city was destroyed and they were uprooted and moved to Babylon, it was like every part of their identity was challenged because not only had God given them the land but he had also given them promises of what he was going to do through them. He was gonna change the world through them. Remember the promise given in Genesis 12 and Genesis 15 to Abraham? I'm gonna bless you and make your descendants as numerous as stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore and I'm gonna bless you and through you bless all the other families of the earth. So Israel was the carrier of those promises that God was gonna raise up Israel as a nation high above all other nations. They were gonna bring the knowledge of the Lord. They were gonna usher in a golden era and the Messiah, the savior of the world would come through the line of David in the house of Israel. So everything was wrapped up in the land. It was wrapped up in the city and the temple. So when they came out of Babylon back into the land and they rebuilt the city and they rebuilt the temple they thought now God's gonna send the Messiah. And when the Messiah comes, we're no longer going to live under anybody else's oppression because even though they were in the land they didn't control the land. They were still under Persian authority and later on they would come under Roman authority.  His glory, his physical, tangible. I mean you can see it, feel it, experience it. Presence of God was once again gonna fill the temple. But they had come back into the land. They had rebuilt the temple. They'd done everything that God asked them to do and they still weren't seeing the promises. They were living after the exile but before the promises, they hadn't seen the promises. And so they did what human beings often do is they settled into a mediocre room temperature relationship with God. Their first love began to grow cold. How many know that one of the best parts of waking up in the morning is a cup of hot coffee? Anybody relate to that? If you're a tea drinker, kinda the same, not really. I'm just being honest. I mean, I have friends that live in the UK and they're just like, oh, you want a cup of tea? No, not really, like a cup of coffee. In the morning, we just got one of these Alexa devices in our house, which I swear we'd never get but now I talk to another device and I set up a smart plug so my coffee maker's plugged into the smart plug. So when I wake up in the morning, I ask Alexa, turn coffee maker on, okay. And it begins to brew the coffee and the best thing is the smell that Ethiopian Yergechev begin to flow into the carafe knowing that I am 17 steps away from a little bit of heaven in a cup. It's glorious. The best part of the coffee in the morning is when you pour it and you see the steam coming up out of it. It's like, oh, but you know, listen, you know that there is a time expiration on that cup of coffee. Because have you ever done this?  It's like, oh, now my belief is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people that microwave coffee and there are people that don't. Because there's some people on my staff who shall remain unknown and some people that used to be on our staff who still are here who shall remain unknowns and best who would take one cup of coffee and it would last them all day long because they just keep reheating it up, reheating it up, reheating it up. That is a cardinal sin. That is so wrong in so many different ways.  And then as it begins to cool down, it's not as good. A lot of times that's what happens with our relationship with God. We start off red hot. Jesus is our first love. I mean, the steam is rolling off of our passion for Jesus. Because we've just been saved. The guilt, the burdens of our sin has been removed off of our life. We have this moment where we realize that there is a God and He sees us and He knows us and He loves us. And the awesomeness and the unthinkableness of the cross is a reality that has changed our life. And we're just like, oh, I wanna love God. I wanna serve God. I'll do whatever. The passion of our young faith. And the idea that all the promises of God that are contained in this book belong to us. Man, it's unthinkable. When I was a new Christian, I've said this before, but I was so overwhelmed with the fact that God didn't just exist, but God knew me and God wanted to relate to me. And the Bible all of a sudden became interesting to me. And I went out and bought a Scofield study Bible, King James, 50-pound heathen choker. And I would read that thing for hours and hours and hours because as I'm reading it, it's like God is speaking to me. It was like, these promises are for me. And there were promises and there were this sense that God was going to do something big. And I was a part of it. But what happens to a lot of us is we start like that. But it's like a cup of coffee sitting on the counter. When it's separated from its heat source, it begins to adjust to the temperature of the room that it's in. And it doesn't happen, nobody wakes up one day and says, you know what, yesterday was hot on fire for Jesus, really want to serve God, want to do it his way, his words alive on the inside of me. When I worship, I just feel him. And then the next day you wake up and say, you know what, I think I'm done with all that. I'm just gonna walk away from God.  I'm gonna put my focus. Now, typically it happens one degree at a time. There's a guy in our church, his name is Jeff. He's a commercial airline pilot, flies for Delta. And I asked him this because I read in a book one time, an interesting fact. And so I asked Jeff whether it was true. And he said, yeah, it's true, kind of. And the fact that I read was this. He said, if you start off in a commercial airliner in LA and you want to fly to New York and you set a course for that flight, but as you're flying, you get off course by one degree. By the time you get to the East Coast, you will have missed New York and ended up in Baltimore. Just because of one degree of change. And I asked Jeff that. And he said, well, that's kind of true. He says, but here's the bigger problem. He said, the bigger problem is if you set a course from LA to New York and you don't play the curvature of the earth and you base your flight pattern on a flat earth, on a flat map. He said, then you'll actually be more than one degree off because playing the curvature of the earth, the great circle pattern, they call it. He says, if you don't every so often, every 100 miles or whatever, if you don't readjust your destination and let the computer recourse correct, then you'll really be far off. And I thought, you know, that's kind of what happens. Israel can relate to that. They started off as being God's people with God's promises, God's dwells in their midst. Can you imagine? It's like, they saw the living God. They had experienced miracles. Prophets had been raised up. David was their king, but then they experienced all this loss, but then they experienced gaining it all back and there was kind of this sense of God is bringing us back and now it's about to happen and then it doesn't. And what began to happen is one degree at a time. They got off course. And you give that one degree of change and variation long enough and you end up in a place where Jesus isn't your first love anymore and your faith is kind of waned and you're lukewarm and you don't know how you got there. You see, what happens is we read the promises of God and we read the story of God in two dimensions and it's kind of like setting a flight pattern, but we aren't playing the curvature of reality because if you've followed Jesus for very long, been a Christian for very long, you quickly realize that life has a curve to it. The timing of God has a curve to it. Your plans, the closest or the shortest distance between two points in the spirit is not necessarily a straight line. Have you figured that out? Sometimes it's walking circles in the wilderness for 40 years. And other times it's a 400 year period of silence from the last book of the Old Testament to the next book in the New Testament. Sometimes we have to play the curve of life and realize, yeah, I'm reading the promises of God, but God's timing is not my timing. God's ways and methods aren't necessarily my ways. And if we're not careful, we can find ourselves in the same place with God that Israel was in the time of Malachi where our love and our devotion to God begins to impact the way that we live our daily lives because we'll discount God and we'll put our focus on some other things. An interesting parallel, by the way, between the book of Malachi and the book of Revelation. Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament. Revelation is the last book of the New Testament. Malachi was written by a man named the messenger. And in the book of Revelation in chapter two and chapter three, Jesus, the resurrected savior, 40 years later appears to John on the island of Patmos and he says, I want you to send messages for me, from Jesus to seven churches that were all across Asia Minor and Jesus says, you sit down and dictate the letters. And Jesus says this, he says, to the angel or the messenger of the church of Sardis, of Thyatira, of Ephesus, of Laodicea, to the messenger. Last books, messages from God to messengers. And in the letter of the book of Revelation that was written to the church of Ephesus, you know, the book of Ephesians in your Bible is the church at Ephesus. A generation after Paul wrote that book, Jesus is addressing them in a letter that he gives to John and he says this to them.  How you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not. And you have found them to be false. I know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake and you have not grown weary, listen to verse four. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. That's what had happened to the Ephesian Christians. Notice it says they've got great theology. They're serving more than they've ever served before. They're being persecuted for the name of Jesus and they're not caving in on it. But something has happened to their hearts where once the fire burned bright for Jesus, now they're going through the motions because time has gone on and they thought Jesus was gonna come. They thought things were gonna be different. And just like the children of Israel in the book of Malachi, they respond to the challenges of the day that they live in by becoming disappointed in God. They respond to God in a couple of different ways. They're experiencing delay and disappointment. And the first way that they respond to God is they become discouraged. The second way is they get distracted. And then the third step in leaving our first love is they begin to develop distance. They get discouraged, distracted, and then without knowing it, there's distance, one degree at a time, and it takes them off course. Till one day, when Malachi comes to them, his prophet rolls up into town, says I've got a word from God. The entirety of the book of Malachi is about God calling his people back to himself. Return to me, return back to a first love. You see what had happened is their hearts had grown cold and it had impacted the way that they lived their lives. Have we figured out yet that the condition of our heart is not distinct and separate and compartmentalized from our behavior? Out of the heart flows the issues of life. And for Israel, this had happened. And God spends the next four chapters talking about some of these things. He says, listen, your worship is compromised. You no longer believe in my word. You begin to dismiss my word. Your marriages, you're divorcing each other because you think that if I'm not a covenant keeping God, then why should you keep covenant with the person that you're married to? It's affected your families. It's affected your worship. It's affected how you view my word. It's affected your finances. It's affected everything. And at the very end of the book of Malachi, when we get there, what we're gonna figure out is that God speaks back into them the promises of God. He says, behold, here's what I'm still going to do. I'm still going to bless you. I'm still going to bring the Messiah. And I'm still gonna rise up with healing in my wings. And I'm still gonna restore your families. I'm gonna do all those things, but you have to return to me. You've got to return to me with everything that you have. You've got to return to me. Don't allow distance to grow in your heart towards me. Look at verse number two. We're gonna read verses two through five here for just a moment. So it starts off with the Oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. And then it says this, verse number two. I have loved you, says the Lord. But you say to me, how have you loved us? It's not Esau Jacob's brother declares the Lord. And yet I have loved you, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert. If Edom says we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins, the Lord of hosts says, they may rebuild, but I will tear it down. They will be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever. The reason why God's angry at them is because they're attacking in their enemies of Israel. Then it says in verse five, your own eyes shall see this. And you shall say, great is the Lord beyond the borders of Israel. So what's interesting is God sends a messenger to call his people back to his first love. And basically what God is doing is he's calling a family meeting. And the first words out of God's mouth is not about the issues, it's about the condition of his heart. Because he's dealing with their heart. He says, you wanna know the condition of my heart? I love you. And I still love you. In the Hebrew language, it says, I have loved you and I still love you. How many of you like me grew up in a house where every so often dad would call a family meeting? Anybody? Okay, my dad would... Well, sometimes it was dad would scream up the stairs. I lived in pretext message days. So the way that we texted was you screamed. Hey, family meeting, beat out stairs. What, you heard me? Okay, that was texting. I have a thread now with all of my kids and Jane and me on there and it's just family thread. So now when we all get together, it's like, hey, everybody, it's all at once. Back then you had to scream. And sometimes the reason why we had a family meeting is because my mom would say this. She would say, wait till your dad gets home. Then you knew it was bad. We'd have these family meetings and family meetings from my experience were called when there was kind of a breakdown in communication and relationships in the family. And instead of going from room to room into room to having a conversation, because what would happen is siblings would get mad at each other. So mom and dad would go into one room and they'd say, well, Johnny did this. And so then they'd go into Johnny's room and say, but Billy did this. And then Billy would say, well, yeah, but what about Susie?  You never believe me. How many parents have heard that before? And they're just like, I believe you, but, and you just wanna get everybody in the same room. Let's get everybody together. So my parents would do that. And I kind of followed suit on that. And Jane and I were young when we had kids. And so when our kids were growing up, one boy, two girls, they would always get in arguments and somebody bit somebody, stole something, I don't know, just whatever. And so it'd just be like, oh, that's it. In the living room, family meeting. My kids would roll their eyes. Oh, family meeting. Cause there were two kinds of family meetings. A was when there's trouble and the other one was for devotions. And so a little side note, by the way, it does not work as a parent. Try and force your kids to read the Bible. I tried.  Cause my thing was my kids are gonna know the Bible. So I like laminated a Bible reading program for them. I gave them each a journal and a Bible and then we met on Sunday nights. And Sunday nights in my mind was gonna be all my kids going, there only takes a spark to keep the fire going. And like reading the Bible and praying for each other and taking communion, just being holy. No, it was not holy.  And so here's what happened. I told my kids journal what you read all week long in your Bible and then I want to read it on Sunday nights. Here's what I found out later. My kids never read the Bible. They just made stuff up and wrote it in their journal so that I would think that they did. And then when we did have meetings and they would not like engage, I got mad at them and it would erupt and it was terrible. So don't force that. Okay, the other kind of family that was just bonus material. The other kind of family meetings were when there were dysfunction and family meetings can go one of a couple different ways. They can either get worse or they can resolve the problems because it's hard to hate people that you look at. If you ever noticed that we're a culture that we're much braver by text or email than we are in person. We say things in social media that we would never say if we were looking at somebody eyeball to eyeball. And so when you get people together because you see emotions, you feel it, you can engage. So it can either get worse or it can get better.  Here's what I learned. Jimmy Evans, one of my mentors taught me this. When we would pull our kids together or even if it was a one-on-one meeting, always start the conversation with affirming your love. Okay, listen, we're gonna have a family meeting. We're gonna deal with some stuff. First thing I want you to know is I love you. Nothing's gonna change that, I love you. I'm for you. This isn't just about this thing's gonna come and this thing's gonna go, but what lasts forever is I love you. When you start like that, there's typically resolution. Why? It's because there's a foundation of love that's built. Isn't it interesting that when God has a message to speak to the nation of Israel and he sends the prophet the first words out of God's mouth to his people is I have loved you and I still love you. What's God doing? God's calling a family meeting. It's a DTR to find the relationship. You guys are my people and I am your God, but your heart has become cold and we can talk about all of the reasons why. What the book of Matthew is, think about it this way. It is the transcript between a dialogue between God and his people because it is full of statements that God makes and the book of Malachi is full of statements that God's people made against God in their disappointment and discouragement. Because when God says I've loved you, look at what they say, it says, how have you loved us? How have you loved us? So, and it goes on from there. You'll notice if you'll read through the book of Malachi you'll realize pretty quickly God will make a statement and then he will say, but you've said, and it's kind of how our family meetings go. It's like, you said this, let me tell you what I'm saying. You said this, let me tell you what I'm saying. And this is what God does to the nation of Israel, but he starts not with their behavior, he starts not with their sin, he starts with his love, affirming his love. I have loved you, I have always loved you and the reason why that's significant and it's important is because the foundation, the foundation stone for you and I relating to God rightly, relating to God, the way he wants us to relate to him is built on his love, not our ability. First John says this, in this is love, in this is love. First John 4-10, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and he sent his son to be the sacrifice for our sins. First John 3-1 says, behold, what manner of love is this that the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God? You see, God's not interested in building religious structures and systems. Oftentimes when we relate to God, we're thinking in terms of religion and if you think through the lens of religion and when I say religion, I'm not talking about spirituality, I'm talking about systems, talking about systems. What mankind does is we create systems to explain God, contain God and to impart God. So we create systems. Oh, well if you wanna be right with God, you gotta do this and if you wanna be right with God, you gotta think like this and if you wanna be right with God and it's nothing wrong with those things except it's inverted. We don't do these things to be right with God, we're right with God so that we can do these things. And the reason why we're right with God all boils down to a foundation of God's first love so that he can become our first love. God loved us first. That's what we gotta come to. God loved us first. That's called grace. Sometimes we think to ourselves, well, God has some special people that he really loves more than he loves others. But look at what he says in the rest of this verse in verse number three. He talks about Jacob, he talks about Esau. He says, I wanna remind you, he said, you ask, how have you loved us? Is not Esau, Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob. So I would love to just camp there and explain this but really what he's saying is I've loved you but you say to me, how have I loved you?  It's Genesis 25. In Genesis 25, there's a man named Abraham who then has a son named Isaac who's the carrier of the promise. Isaac has two sons. One of them is Jacob and one of them is Esau. By all rights, Esau should receive the Abrahamic blessing, the inheritance, the birthright, the blessing from his father because that's what a first foreign gets. But do you know who God chooses? He doesn't choose Esau, he chooses Jacob. What's God saying in Malachi is this, he's like, you wanna know how I've loved you? The way that you need to stir up your first love again is go all the way back to the beginning of your story. Israel, Jacob, and remember, when you didn't have a birthright, I chose you. When your parents didn't want you to receive the blessing. Remember his dad wanted Esau. He said, when everybody else's opinion was against you, I chose you. And when your behavior couldn't earn you the rights of my love, I loved you. Remember his name's Jacob.  God's saying, look, I loved you in spite of your birthright. I loved you in spite of other people's opinions. I loved you in spite of your behavior. What's God painting a picture of in those few verses? He's using language that Israel would have known and understood of saying basically, I loved you before you ever loved me and I loved you for no other reason than my own grace and my own purposes. I chose to love you. I was thinking about that statement the other day and I was thinking, that's just radical. That God would choose the unchoosable and choose to love them in spite of pedigree, in spite of resume, in spite of public opinion. Cause that's not how we love. And then God reminded me of this.   Parents, if you need to have a picture of how to comprehend God's saying to you, I've loved you in spite of all the things that are messed up in spite of your background, in spite of your pedigree.  I want you to think about it.  And then they keep you up all night long. They don't care about your sleep schedule. Wee, wee, wee, you can turn the speaker off, they're still gonna cry.  You pop that bottle and bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Who else do you love that you allowed to just squirt liquid poop all over you? Who else in your life do you let do that? Oh, bro, go ahead. That's good.  No, you don't do that. But you do that to your kids. And think about this. Your children are born in this world. They can't take care of themselves. They have nothing to offer you. They can't converse with you. They can't do anything for you. They can't make you feel better about yourself. All they do is take, take, take, take, take. And you know what?  Stop and ask, why do I love these kids so much? Because you made them. They were your plan, your purpose, and you've got dreams in your heart for your kids. You've got ideas in your heart. You've got visions in your heart. There is nothing you would not do for those children even though they have nothing to offer you. That's exactly what God is saying to Israel.  I have loved you. I've always loved you. Man, when you think about God in those terms, wow, how'd that happen? When you think of God's love in those terms, we quickly realize that the performance stuff, all the things that God's gonna address, because here's what he knows, God pursues you passionately, but God will also discipline you lovingly. All the issues that God needs to correct and discipline Israel on are secondary. The main thing that God's going after is their heart. He wants their heart returned to him. Stop looking at the idols. Stop looking at the world. Stop looking at your neighbor. Stop listening to your lowest base desires. Stop letting other things capture your attention and put your eyes back on me. Connect to the source because if I will blow on the embers of your heart, just hearing and re-encountering the love of God just one moment in your life will bring you back to God's first love. Just encountering his love one moment, just one second of your life. Re-encountering and saying, God loves me. Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are what?  Let's stand up all over this room if you would. That's as basic as it gets. Here's what I wanna tell you today. What would happen if all the disappointments, all the questions, all the things that so easily distract us, all of our other obsessions were put on mute, were eclipsed and sidelined and we just put our eyes back on Jesus? How would it change our lives? How would it change your life? We make it so complicated. We're trying to figure out the algorithm and the algebraic expression of how we can have God and everything else and listen, take your eyes off of those things, lay aside your questions, all the other obsessions, the temptations and just like a child looking up into the smiling gaze of its father or mother. What if we just with our lives just put our eyes back on him, our first love? It's a God. I wanna love you like I used to love you and I wanna love you the way you've loved me. Here's what I know. Everything else takes care of itself. It just takes care of itself. We don't have to try and improve, be a better version of ourselves and press God, earn our way back in. It will all just take care of itself if our heart is centered on our first love and over the next couple of weeks during the month of January and Seek, that's what this is about.  We've all been given a message to put our eyes back on Jesus. Wherever we're at, no matter how many degrees we're off base, just putting our eyes back on Jesus. Just want you to buy your heads with me in this room. Portage as well, I wanna pray for us. Doesn't matter who you are, where you are, whether you're watching by video or you're live in this room, if today you say, I know that there has been a temperature change in my passion for Jesus. And my prayer today is that God, I want my heart to burn brightly and passionately for Jesus again. I'm not talking about the how, I'm not talking about the why, you're just saying yes. I'm saying yes to Jesus. He's calling for my attention. He's calling a family meeting and I'm saying yes.  Just as a statement of faith, yes, I'm putting my eyes back on Jesus. There's been a pressure change. There's been a degree of alteration. There's been some distance. There's been some disappointment, but none of that matters today. I wanna put my eyes back on Jesus. Not saying you're not saved. I'm just saying you just wanna, you wanna burn bright for Jesus once again. Just lift up your hand. Lord, you see our hands, you see our hearts. The reason why we love you is because you loved us in the first place. My prayer is that you will help us to re-encounter your love, your first love, the love that changed everything, the love that rescued us, the love that pulled us out of the Myrie clay and put us on the rock of Jesus in the first place. The grace radically changed our lives. Only you can do that God and we're asking you today to do that in our lives over the next several weeks. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.


Thank you. I'm Patrick Tucker, technology editor for Defense One, and we have a fantastic discussion about weaponizing different aspects of biology to join you at lunch today. With me is Dr. Gaiman Bennett. He's assistant professor of religion, science, and technology at Arizona State University. Dr. Gary Merchant, the Lincoln professor of emerging technologies in law and ethics, also at ASU, and Dr. Michael Crowe, who's the president of ASU. So the topic of that we're discussing today, how will digital biology transform conflict? So who here today thinks they have a good understanding of what digital biology is? Raise your hand. You ambitious people. No. Okay. What is digital biology? Start that. I'll jump in first. Digital biology, like a lot of new scientific brands, means many things to many people. But maybe we could name three flavors of it at least. The first is what we might call old school digital biology, emerged in the 1990s with the genome projects. That was a time in the life of molecular biology in which just drives and computer technology made things possible in biology that weren't possible before, including creating kind of dependencies in everyday lab life between what you do at the bench and the need to organize what you do at the bench on a computer just because there's so much data. The goal there was basically can you move from biology to bits to biology. Now we're in a kind of next generation of digital biology, which is can you move from bits to biology to bits? That is to say, can you use computers to design new living systems? Can you produce those living systems in your lab? And then can you upload that information on the internet for other people to be able to play with things that you've built? Using digital, using information technology and the power that is available to us to take what we know about biology and essentially create new forms of biology is an aspect of what you just described. Is that fair? Right. The sort of outside goal of second generation digital biology is something like computer-aided design. Can you know enough about living systems to understand how their function works in relationship to the biological underpinnings? And can you build a computer-aided design program that encodes the biological functions such that you could design a new living system without really having to know very much about the underlining biology? Is there a difference between that and what is popularly now being called synthetic biology? There's a lot of overlap and certainly synthetic biology for the last ten years has been one of the sources and drivers for what could be called digital biology. It's been a kind of brand that's attracted people from outside of biology like computer engineers and physicists into biology to begin to think about how biological systems work on the model of digital systems that's created a whole set of new opportunities in biotechnology. It also raises the question of a kind of limit of how far you can take analogies. So one of the big questions in molecular biology is can you think about living systems like computer systems and how far will that get you scientifically? Can you think of living systems the way we think about computer systems and where do we so we're not when we talk about synthetic biology, we're not necessarily talking about growing you know like gigantic monsters with like huge hands to go and take our enemies and throw them like the Hulk or something like that. We're talking about developing new organisms or perhaps even just taking solutions that exist in nature and applying them to real world problems. These are I guess some of the things that present themselves as the potentials within the digital biology space. What will this do for us in ten years? What are we going to get as a result of the digital biology revolution in ten years? You know I think the way to look at these things and long before I was a university president I was a professor of science and technology policy thinking about where science and technology systems would take us in a sort of futuristic kind of way. And the way to look at this is not so much the details of what digital biology will allow. You have to assume that with the binary code that we've mastered and we have computational engines that can calculate at whatever increasing speed we can calculate that ultimately that speed will continue to accelerate on a logarithmic basis. You match that with now the mastery that we have of digital instruction systems called DNA which are reducible to four coded items. You have then six items for letters in the way that we're using them and two numbers in the way that we're using them. If you can compute at whatever speed you want to compute and you can move those things around in a set of instructions to be able to re-engineer anything therefore you can engineer anything from that and what that means then in the spirit of Craig Venter's idea of life at the speed of light. You have then the following thing that you need to think about and that is individuals ultimately being empowered to create physical biological systems capable of performing any function you'd like them to perform and transporting them and moving them in whatever way you'd like to transport and move them at relatively low cost without major facilities and so that's the thing that you need to think about. Right so this is a great example so now now we know who a digital biologist is in the real world. Craig Venter is an example of someone doing the digital biology and creating synthetic biology solutions now and his project at least as of May 2010 that's what he says he did. Right well his project right now is is unique when it's related directly to what we're talking about. He's looking for the creation of a new type of algae that can be used as a fuel. Algae is a lipid it's a you can use an olive press and you can get a burnable fuel from it but it's also extremely nitrogen it requires a lot of nutrients to grow and this is a big barrier to turning it into a really cost effective fuel solution and so if you can synthetically engineer a new type of algae if this is an ongoing military project within the navy as well then you can basically run your huge energy hungry battleships and all of your equipment and your entire economy on ponskum in addition to basically feeding it to people because it's extremely protein rich. So I've talked to this is so when we talk about what this could result from this this is a great example. I spoke to a NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell he's head of the research facility at Langley and in addition to being a rocket scientist in his spare time he talks a lot about energetics like that's what he does over there and he pointed out that you can create a type of algae that can be irrigated with salt water you can grow it in parts of Africa that we today consider wasteland and you can create economic opportunity in that place that has never existed before by creating a viable food crop a fuel crop just completely economically transformed this place. Is this realistic within the next 10 years not necessarily for algae but more broadly as a result of the digital biology revolution? Well in 10 years no but I think the way to look at this though is this you know we've sort of lived through the the century of of physics with Einstein and quantum this and quantum that and physical systems and so forth and while all of that is continuing biology now is evolving at an even quicker rate as a as a fundamental area of knowledge than physics evolved and that's leading us to the point now where you can conceptualize what you just said which is being able to transform or engineer life forms to perform whatever function we want them to perform to produce whatever chemical output physical output whatever it is that you'd like them to produce they could then have the capacity to do that in relatively short order the extent to which one can move to what you're describing which is a photonic driven a photon driven economy where you're taking the photons from the sun most of which are wasted on the earth most of which are reflected or wasted and you're take converting those photons into electrons as you want to use them into molecules as you want to use them through a plant or an engineered plant or biological system all of those things are the are the way in which everything's going to change from from what we eat to where we get it to how it grows to how we grow it to how we fight to how we fight it to how we move forward all everything will change so the notion is not so much the details of the change it's understanding that our ability to transform information and to calculate from the tools that we have whatever transformative outcome we want is accelerating so quickly that you have to be able to anticipate and expect anything positive or negative positive would be food production enhancements or medical production enhancements from microorganisms or or larger scale organisms that we're that we're driving forward in places that have access to nothing like that right now to the negative side of that which is the design construction and distribution of things that are not so good for us you can kind of say look at the algae industry you sort of see these three generations of products that I think is symbolic of the broader life sciences revolution of the first generation of just taking this enormous biodiversity that's out there already there's already thousands of strains of microalgae and so on that people have been collecting and testing and seeing if they can make products in them and now right now we're now genetic the engineering algae where we're just adding in genes or mutating genes or moving them from one species to another and then the next generation which is we're now moving towards and what people like Craig Venture are talking about is is basically designing those algae from the ground up uh that the naturally occurring variations that we can move between species now is not enough power we basically have to basically create them from scratch and that's the whole stepwise progression all the life sciences are going in right now okay can I flood just don't stay too long this question but flag two other things um first of all with regard to the challenges of producing a fuel out of um biology algae or or switch grass or whatever it is um the biggest variable right now is not the biological difficulty the biggest variable the economics of petroleum based fuels and and the cycles of investment in advanced biotechnology relative to how feasible it is for a number of reasons um second um right now it's still a big open question of how you begin to farm something like algae because of questions of environmental impact so that's still being worked out and that's a big issue right and a third variable in all of this which I think is really crucial to the question of the future of conflict which is the major biological breakthroughs around things like engineering and algae for biofuels isn't even necessarily the end product you get it's the little techniques along the way that you're beginning to perfect that allow you to do more powerful work more reliably um at less expense right which means then the barrier to access for people doing these things goes down so just the example of the venture institute's work on algae um the big threshold was dan gibson produced a means by way of which you could take a set of strands of DNA you could put them in a single pot and they would anneal together in a way that was correct and uh functionally robust yeah that used to take lots and lots of steps and lots and lots of money and lots and lots of expertise so the so-called gibson method is born right and within a few months labs all over the world are using the gibson method so these not very sexy little techniques sort of just below the surface are really what are driving capacity across domains okay so we've established so far um that the digital biology is something that's uh highly established that the potential is enormous that the uh ability to work with it is expanding as exponentially quickly as is Moore's law in the realm of information science the barrier faster than Moore's law the barriers of entry and accessibility are going down as quickly so when do we get weaponized Ebola later out and see what can we do uh though i mean if if the costs of accessibility keep going down the potential is the insist that there was going to be a wide diffusion of of different people all around the world that are going to be doing cutting-edge research no longer just in big university labs but in garages and in in hacker spaces and things like this if this is the same trajectory that was you know sort of like the hacker space is going to become the biohacker space three things what can we do to keep that from very quickly becoming as big a mess security wise as is the internet philosophy so i think i think one thing we have and i mean if you guys disagree but i think we have time and because i think it's going to be a lot slower we think if someone's one said that you know we we tend to over estimate the power of technologies in the short term and underestimate their powers in the long term that's certainly the case in this area you know biology is hard compared to mechanical or chemical or digital or cyber technologies or systems where you can control and manipulate them so much easier biology is really hard because it evolves it interacts it's grows it's by definition living and to make stable biological systems that do what you want to do is extremely challenging and difficult so the backyard you know the garage or the basement uh di wire isn't going to produce a powerful biological weapon anytime in the next 10 years they maybe you know they'll put something on a salad bar somewhere and kill a couple of people possibly that would be a tragedy but in terms of a national security threat i don't see it in the next few years so i think in the long term it is huge but not right now and i think i think gary's making a brilliant point and that is that you know when the physicists at alamogordo uh fell to the ground in july of 1945 you know we've been saying my god what have we done they hadn't had enough foresight or thought about the nuclear weapons that they that they had been party to designing and when the physicists later tried to pull back the genie that they'd let out of the bottle they were frustrated that it was too late it was already out of the bottle in biology i agree with gary that we now can see from our physical past what we are capable of doing we're now empowered on a biological front for which the consequences are even greater because we are biological and thus uh uh interruptible in in interesting ways biologically and so perhaps the way to deal with the concept of conflict which is conflict avoidance conflict resolution and so forth is to take a completely new approach to avoid a future war built around biological systems as opposed to physical systems by thinking about all of the design issues that we should put on the table right now relative to how to manage this particular area of science unlike how we didn't manage physics physics was unmanaged and you can see where that got us biology is now got more potential to have both positive and negative outcomes than physics for a lot of reasons we have the the foresight and the potential wisdom to be able to manage it to avoid conflict by by in a sense you could even code it in certain ways you could design certain things where certain outcomes are not possible but you have to be able to think about that right now at the outset well i think that this this town is founded on the notion that human beings are going to disagree about management i mean that's what this is this is a big town that that manages things and this this issue is already creeping into the debate about what to do with uh with biology here's an example in in january of 2012 the team from the university of wisconsin found that the presence of uh lysine in the 627 position of the p2b protein essentially made h5 in one an aerial weapon it it allowed it to exist in the hotter lungs of ferrets and mammals um and that was a big change that means it's very dangerous it can be passed aerially that research was funded by the government but there was a big fight in congress to um uh basically restrict it to uh there was a moratorium on on publication and even to defund different research like that so there's a moratorium right now on that research right and and there's a self-imposed moratorium among many scientists including many at our own institution that won't engage in certain kinds of research because of what the results could mean so that means that no one's going to engage in them so it doesn't it doesn't mean that but there's ways to advance this in a different way where where you can think through the process about how to guide science to certain outcomes which is considered heresy by most scientists to think about the notion of guiding science so you're self you're self-arresting though um you're you're self-alinquishing but we can't how do we create a space where everyone follows that seems to me that um the h5n1 is a great example of a number of things we've been talking about the h5n1 affair um first of all it took both the guys in wisconsin and ron fuji's lab um who is the other scientists who did this it took them specialized facilities many years millions of dollars lots of expertise but once you publish the sequences it takes far less capacity to be able to reproduce what what they do so although gary's right that things in biology remain much more difficult to do than what often gets talked about say around diy bio it it is the case that things are getting easier the bar is going down so once they've done that work it would take a competent technician a few thousand dollars in a few weeks to reproduce what they've done because they have the sequences online okay so that's the first point the second point is one of the questions i think we need to ask moving forward um around the management of these new technologies um is how do we shift from a frame of containment um to the to a framework of the fostering of the ethics of responsibility among um practicing sciences that's part of what i meant that's the code into the actual machines individuals science the process itself these abilities like is in the in the case of isaac asimov's you know notion of robotics you know there's this notion that the robot can never be designed to injure a human that's like no joke that's not a science fiction thing that's a code inside the model you saw one of the big blockages in h5n1 affair was precisely the ethics of the researchers who were doing the gain of function research they were part of an ethical community which um for better or for worse really understood what they were doing as if you will salvational they were they were engineering these strains in order to save lives but that culture didn't have attached to it um a kind of sobriety around the question of when you bring powerful new things into the world what kind of responsibility comes with it and so the attempt to critique that work often met with a kind of stonewall among some of those researchers that what they were doing was always inevitably good and the only harm that could come from it would be so-called misuse um but that belies then i think for me it belies the insufficiency of of a kind of culture of ethical responsibility within the laboratory which asks quite seriously this question when we create powerful new things that we hope bring good to the world how do we also set into motion things which might be problematic it also raises so there's two really key questions that raises that go beyond that specific example so one is do we do the experiments and as dr. crow mentioned you know some a lot of researchers are saying we don't think these are ethical but in the military context i think it's a huge dilemma for say our military because um if if we we know that there's going to be people out there who won't follow those same self-imposed restrictions to understand what those threats are and to be able to counter them do we have to create the monster ourselves and i think that's a huge dilemma whether we have to do that or not to know how to defend ourselves and to know what's possible and you could argue that both ways but i think that's a huge issue that particularly from a military national security context is there and the second one is when we do this stuff we publish it and that's what the h5 n1 got wrapped up in is you know does the government or does journal editors or the scientists themselves decide not to publish this stuff and again that's this whole issue of open access maybe again knowing about this and and having a community of scientists who are well meaning to understand this would argue in favor of more publication whereas that also creates little risks that other people will see it that that would use it from our for nefarious purposes so those two issues of should we be doing the monsters ourselves and then secondly when we do this research and find this stuff should we make it open access so so one of the ways to sort of think this through is who would have imagined that digital biology would transform conflict not immediately but eventually in ways well beyond anything we've ever experienced as a species because we've never really had you know genetic weapons or we've never really had things targeting particular groups or whatever we've never had anything like that and all of that's possible but now imagine that we we we avoid conflict in the future by rethinking how we do science now to not take away any of the notion of the fundamental discovery aspect of things but this notion of a of a tool that we've been working on at asu in our in our consortium for science policy and outcomes which is a tool called real-time technology assessment where you start thinking through and this is really hard and we're just at that we're not even a an infant yet we're still just sort of conceptualizing how you would do this how would you think about the implications of a technology at the time that it became scientifically feasible not doable but feasible how would you think through all of the implications and then how would you then guide the evolution of the technology so that you do not get these unbelievably inalterable unrecoverable outcomes which you know could affect the outcome of the entire species that's what's at scale the counter argument actually comes from the scientists themselves science once it is guided in any possible way will not produce the results that have produced so many positive things for us we can line up all of the positives that have come from physics and all of the negatives that have come from physics and they are complicated in their outcomes the biological outcomes the biologically based conflicts of the future would be wild by comparison i'll wipe out your food supply i'll wipe out your water i'll wipe out your ability to reproduce i'll wipe out your ability for your gene line to advance i'll do this i'll do this i mean i don't know how those kinds of conflicts will be dealt with but it would be better to sort of confront them now before they're feasible by rethinking how we do certain other things so one of the things you're you're saying is that in order to really feel safe from the terrifying potential of of synthetic biology in the years ahead we have to reach for a cultural change in sort of the way science is done and also the way the military seeks a strategic advantage because the military never wants to be in a fair fight everyone will say this fair fights are dumb not for us don't want it and the entire nature of scientific exploration is we will feel free to explore we must have that you know freedom and if we're going to produce results that aren't you know pre-programmed in so we have to change both science and entire military culture in order to be safe from digital biology and simulations and congress and legislation too and everything because i mean the way washington works is exactly the opposite of what dr croger just said but they're trying to do with real-time technology assessment it's a weight to the problem is already manifest and you've got a huge problem and and and then you try to fix it after the fact and we do that environment and yeah safety and everything so you have to change uh washington too but so but so those kinds of things so i my my brain doesn't go very far on those kinds of things like you know somehow so we have to change this we have to change that everything changes everything always has changed everything changes dramatically as a function of new each new input to the system the thing that you have to decide is whether or not you're going to be involved in intelligent design or random design so we have all these changes many of which are the product of random design that is the things that we're faced with the things that we're interacting the way that we're working so this notion of can we think about change in a way where it is a product of somehow intelligent forethought even if it's only limited intelligent forethought can you get a better net net outcome to reduce a potential threat and thus certain conflicts by moving in that direction and the answer would be i hope so yeah because otherwise randomness random design with these kinds of technological capabilities in the hands of x people that the outcome is is is the threat index is so high that it means we have to change even if it's hard who cares if it's hard that doesn't mean anything you just have to do it we have to figure out some way to rethink this stuff before we can no longer think about it all right in the time you have left let some open up to question then we'll shoot right to you right who has a question in the audience about there we go yes park thank you i'm sure and berk with new america could you talk to us a little bit about the state of play with the innovation globally and also the state of play with the moral dimensions you're talking about globally are these concerns shared and even if we don't create monsters are those monsters already being created somewhere else that give us a sense of how this looks globally so one thing that i do a lot of my work in is looking at sort of non-traditional governance that goes beyond legislation regulation because the problem with legislation regulation applies to jurisdictions whereas some other types of mechanisms can apply much more broadly across international borders by things like codes of conduct and other types of things that are done by scientists and other organizations that basically aren't limited to jurisdictions so i think a lot of the interesting developments is is to try to uh is a number of initiatives to look at things like you know industry code of conduct of screening dna synthesis sequences that's being applied by these voluntary programs that go beyond the united states to internationally now there's still you know one in russia and one some other outlets that may be not playing along with that so you're still going to get some bad actors but uh this idea of moving from a national system to an international because it's an international problem if someone has a terrorist weapon you know in belgium it makes just as much different as if it's in the united states if it gets to you know isis or whoever so to look at new models that basically apply things like anticipatory uh anticipation and try to real-time anticipation and try to do it across national borders and international like how worried are you about um some of these places internationally what they're doing keep are we should be we worried about what synthetic biology looks like in russia should be worried about what it looks like in the hands of a donetsk separatist i mean what is i don't know i don't know that we should be worried about scientists um in russia or try any more than scientists in the united states i don't i don't know what basis on which we would make that kind of a judgment but i would say two things with regard to the question the global dimension and the moral dimension first since the 1990s and the the publication of um uh protocols and molecular biology publication that shares how to do what you want to do um the question of governing biology through restriction was basically out the window so knowledge and know how is everywhere um u.s institutions are still the very best uh lots of biology still uh learned through tacit knowledge in the lab and and the top institutions the united states are still the best institutions in the world um but uh knowledge and know how um is everywhere basically for any number of reasons okay so then um the moral question so for about six years i lived in labs as a kind of in-house ethicist as an as an attempt to get upstream of some of the moral questions can you uh rationally design the way in which synthetic biology is headed um limited success success in that experiment in that um we learned what we could do and what was uh less possible to do um but we kept running into the problem of just the intransigent forces of how institutions work um how people are pursuing their careers how they can get their funding which companies are going to be interested in what they're doing those those questions trump last twist on this on the moral question to the extent to which synthetic biology or advanced biotechnology whatever you want to call it moves outside of familiar institutional settings the question of how you govern the ethos of those settings is going to be a wide open one we might look to things like the growth of the hacker culture in computer science but we don't know really whether or not a so-called garage biologist will uh share some of the as it were political ethos of the hacker culture so this question once this moves out of the major institutional settings and it's moving outside of the major institutional settings um what will be the techniques by way of which we can foster an ethics of responsibility I think what I would add on the moral question is that um we face the moral dilemma of our scientific capability outstripping our cognitive skills uh and so we're we're moving faster in our knowledge relative to what we can do scientifically than in how we make decisions or how we should govern this or not govern that and so one of the things I think that that that people don't completely grasp on the question of morality and I'll go to Phil Kitcher uh a philosophy or philosopher of biology who uh basically wrote in his book science truth and democracy that science being pursued without a defined objective is amoral it's not immoral it can become immoral but it is amoral and he argues vociferously against the notion of pursuing science without an outcome as your objective because of how it might ultimately be used so imagine and this is very hard to conceptualize biologists who now are advancing on biology realizing that one of the things that they have to do along the way is as they advance from science to technology they must find ways to ensure to the extent possible that weapons or other nefarious outcomes from these technologies might be at least minimized or somehow understood or protected against that's a completely different way about thinking about science and it requires us to move to a modality for science very different than the present design that we have so the design that we have was laid down by van der bar bush in 1945 in science the endless frontier which is this open-ended all things are good all outcomes are good well we know all things are not good and all outcomes are not good but we need a we need a much more sophisticated way to think about the moral basis under which we approach science and that's what's missing right now it's a it's still a discussion it's not a it's not an action-oriented agenda i'm harlan oman thank thank you very interesting panel i have more of an observation i'd like you to respond to uh some 40 years ago a very chilling novel called white plague was published in which the author who's a biologist engineered in the dna was pretty accurate the disease that killed off 90 of the female population in the world with all sorts of effects you haven't read the book it's interesting to go back the other part of my observation is we've had cyber since marconi more than a hundred years ago yet we still don't know what a cyber declaration of war would be required and it's taken us a very very long time so what would you suggest ways to come up with some kind of a system of governance or at least anticipation of what the consequences are so that we don't get into a similar position um as we have been with cyber where we have this interesting issue about which we really don't have a code of conduct or any kind of a deterrent framework well let me uh tag onto that the geneva conventions that prohibited the use of biological agents in formal warfare between formal parties um there's a lot of uh non-state actors that don't feel like the geneva convention really applies to them is this still an adequate uh international framework for the uh relinquishment of the development of biological weapons and if not what would you replace it with well see i i don't think there is one instrument and so in this area people talk about a web of prevention that that you might have some international treaties you might have statues that protect you know access to select agents and so on but you have to have a lot of other things as well you have to have uh standards and codes of conduct that are international you have to have the technology solutions that scientists trained in a different way that's right the education of the scientists and and the ethical training of scientists and all those things together is what gives us our best hope it's it's it's flimsy and it's you know unsatisfactory in so many ways but it's better than anything else and and so it's a combination of many different instruments and tools that includes international law but includes domestic law and a lot of other things as well i think one of the difficulties is if you're working on fundamental questions in biology and even in synthetic biology where it's so application oriented people are still solving some pretty basic problems it feels like there's such a distance between what you're doing in the lab and the kinds of impacts it will have in the world um that it's that i think that a real challenge is how do you get young biologists to get in their guts this feeling like biology should never be used for harm um analogy to the way in which doctors are trained if doctors are inculcated with a sensibility that i ought not do harm that i ought to be using um uh my capacity is to save people's lives uh how do you begin to foster that same kind of deeply ingrained ethic among biologists and biotechnologists especially when it's impossible to draw a straight line between what they're doing at the bench and the kinds of impacts it will have on the world and and a culture that is presently organized to take no responsibility for the implementation of what they develop by someone else yeah so you know we just did the science someone else made it bad and so it's it's a really really complicated outcome like when i was at columbia university in the 1990s as a professor i taught students who were required to take a course if they received funding from the NIH they were required to take a course on in a sense the ethics of research and their role in research and it was a one of my worst experiences in my teaching at columbia uh because students didn't want to take the course they thought that it was completely utterly a waste of their time they their responsibility was to do good science what happened to their science was someone else's responsibility and so there's this this lack of connection between the notion of the scientist and what they're ultimately responsible for and we have not even conceived of the mechanism by which you do not thwart the finding of the fundamental operations of nature while at the same time giving responsibility to the scientists we haven't figured that out yet but we we need to another question right here i'm mark hagrod at the natal academy cyber center with their other contingent here of the natal academy if i could play with that title for a second and ask you the panel to comment on what it was how will the digital biology revolution transform our warriors like this midshipman sitting in front of me it seems that that's going to be where it hits first when we begin to ask them to modify for battlefield performance and i would submit is this maybe the first step for arms control that we don't require any military member across the world to be subject to modification for battlefield performance so open question well that's definitely not the path that we're on right now we're on the path of maximum modification in whatever way necessary to produce whatever type of warriors necessary to advance and the number of projects that are underway in that realm are are significant and many and so these go back to this notion of us not being sufficiently outcome in the long run outcome oriented enough to think through all the consequences of where we're of where we're headed and i i went to my phd program was in an area called science and technology policy and every week for the years that i was there on tuesdays we had the technology run a muck movie and it was always about you know the the soldier who was genetically altered who then you know they're the jason born syndrome or the or the whatever you know it would be the modern versions of this and so hollywood has done a good job of showing us what some of these outcomes are and we all pay to go to these movies and they seem really interesting okay well at some point they'll actually be real uh and so one has to think that through i think we're already in a gray zone on some of this so just pick an example which seems innocuous there are a number of efforts going on right now to use microbiology to produce the precursors precursor chemicals to make munitions is scalable it seems like it's much more environmentally sound than using synthetic chemistry to do these things but it opens the door not to the violation of things like the the biological warfare convention but opens the door to allowing young biologists to practice their biology in a way that ultimately is oriented toward military outcomes okay so we can have a conversation about whether or not that's good or not and under what conditions we should do that but as we begin to move these capacities forward it's toward deliberate use for for military ends i think one of the questions is going to be how do we continue to foster a culture of responsibility among the biologists i just like to say i think the era of genetically engineering soldiers is decades away i mean today we'll have more like pharmaceuticals brain machine interfaces equipment psychological training and so on those are the issues today genetic modification of humans is decades out there yeah but would you would you agree though that the policies the procedures the mechanisms that we take now for modification now will influence ultimately our culture yes and the acceptance of those later genetic that's right so we shouldn't sit on our hands we need to look at it proactively but it's we got time i guess it's tricky so like what you're describing is is um manipulating that guy to make him a super soldier it would be a somatic uh little did you know that you're soon going to be super ensign right and it is i like a great book on this is uh by sir e and will meet he's the guy that clone dolly the sheep and and he uh he's really out front about how very difficult it is to um take apart a gene and decide which attributes are the ones that are going to result in super intelligence math skills you know um the ability to quickly pick up another language this sort of thing even though we do know some parts of the brain that are associated with that the technical problem just enormous absolutely huge but uh that doesn't mean that getting to your framework point um that research isn't going to be undertaken and that it isn't even unethical i mean if you look at pre-implantation genetic diagnosis now this is the very beginnings of this right um and we all agree that we actually want to bring genetic science into reproductive science more just results in healthier populations we can't begin to think about a framework yet where um uh we draw a red line between ensuring a healthier population because of by using the benefits of genetic science and uh not making super soldiers but it seems to me that that line that test won't be something that we test in this country it might be something that another country test that doesn't have quite the same uh uh uh ethics that we do but i won't name them or speculate as to which ones and uh with that i hope you guys enjoyed lunch and uh please give it up for our panel thank you guys as far as we know there's no algae in the lunch right yeah no algae no way to say


So well, I'm here with my daughter.  We're different levels. I'd have what I call a soft master gardener Okay, okay, thank you so much My name's time I lean I lean I got a good friend name Good, it's a good name. It is a good name. It is a good name. Is it spelled it? How does it spell it? I E I L E E M. That is the correct way. Okay, fantastic. We're on it. We're on a great note already So basically a five minute timer We talk about whatever you want to talk about normally the best conversations or something that like really motivates you Is there's something that you find like everyone should do or like a philosophy left around your life around or like Something you find like really meaningful anything like that like something that's important to you So I should ask you why did you choose this location? It's just really peaceful the people who walk by tend to be more in a pensive mode Okay, and if I did this in like I've done this on campuses before and the kids there have to go to school when the Bell like goes off or they're like meeting a friend This is like the people who come here have time to have a really nice time So I'm here with my daughter.   Well, we're there different levels I'd have what I call a soft master gardener Because I don't and I don't keep up with my certification every year, although I probably meet the hour requirements for the number of volunteer hours they do for Master gardening is this recognized by the state or is this like a I'm from the state of Pennsylvania. Okay, so If I kept up with it would be acknowledged by one of our Conservancies, but I do not have this date certification. Okay, okay, which is I really respect people who do it It is a little bit harder and you have to know more anatomy and support But I became a gardener because my family went through some difficult times Oh, and so I worked through everything by redoing my yard Uh-huh and to give you an idea of what a difference it makes I spent about $500 on this yard and my real estate agent told me I added $10,000 worth of value to my home for where I lived. That's good though We live here about for oh, absolutely. Yeah, but that wasn't why I did it I did it primarily to soothe my own soul and I sooth my family's soul as well What is it about gardening that makes it soothing to like Who will you are a person who had all that stuff? Well, I think if you're having a bad day and you go and sit out and see birds flying around or butterflies or the colors or If there's a water feature you have what it's all Just is a break from the concrete jungle we can all be I can feel that Can I throw something out at you? Sure. I normally ask questions that are just like If someone said they like pretzels, I'd be like you like chip or what about chips? Stuff like just like a just a devil's advocate but in like a nice way So I'm guessing like could a blind person enjoy gardening. Absolutely. I think you could because the textures Okay, okay, so there's other sensations other than sites like birds and colors and stuff that you can get out of yeah You can find soothing right is it and they have adaptive gardens some places for people for example Who may have physical limitations? Okay, they can do adjustments for that. So I don't say why Can I ask you a weird question? No. Yes. Yes. Yes. Come on. I'm thinking like You can get those joys out of gardening without having to become a master gardener. Couldn't you? Oh, yes So what motive do you need to go to that level? I started doing volunteer work because I notice I really only remember the names of plants if I've worked with them Okay, or if they really strike some fancy in me. I may remember like they really I just like wow I just love that plant the night I learn it It's probably the way that a lot. I have my family members or me Imature musicians, but okay, they like if they hear a song they like they learn how to do it I can learn how to grow plants that I'd like so as I was volunteering somebody's One of my peers was going to go through master carnival stuff. Oh come on. Come do it with me. I was like, oh, okay Okay, how how deep does your level of understanding of like a plant go? Do you like go to like the top? Metabolics and stuff like that or is it doing training, but I don't remember that I do remember More of the generalities of it And that's why you have the internet because if you know what you're looking for you don't have to remember all the details You can always go look it up again. Okay. Okay. I guess my last question is What would you say is for you a personal benefit from you know guarding like if you have to condense it down to just one thing? Like this is why everyone should do it But this is what that we discussed that already like you can get a lot of soothing but for you personally What did you get out of it like that you think no one else could like what's your unique experience with guarding that you got? I don't think I don't think that's true. I think whatever I get anybody else Could get okay, but with one word. I'd say meditative I like that cool I wouldn't thank you so much for the time You can learn about a lot of fun thing. I do I really do it's really nice. I also learned that I can talk to anybody Can too Oh what You