So I wanted to welcome you all to this webinar at the Eden European Open and Distance Learning Week 2020. My name is Ebba Ocean-Elsson. I'm a professor in innovation and open online learning. And I'm also in the Eden EC, the Executive Committee. And I'm also sharing the Eden Special Interest Group on Quality and Technology Enabled Learning. So this webinar, besides it's due in the EODL week 2020, it's also on behalf of the Special Interest Group of Quality and Open Online Quality and Intel and Innovation. So we have a webinar for one hour. And I would like to, if you like, present yourself in the chat where you are coming from. And as usually for the Zoom meetings, we have the chat where you can write things or share links. And we have also the Q&A function where you can raise questions. In case you would like to post something on social media from this event, the hashtag is hashtag EODLWE 2020. So you're most welcome to do so. We will have one hour and we will have approximately 30 minutes of the presentation. And then we have plenty of time for discussion and question and answers and dialogue. The session is recorded and you can find the recording at the Eden webpage. And then you will also find it afterwards in the emails. So once again, I would like to welcome you all to this webinar. I'm Epocha Nilsson from Eden EC and I'm based in Sweden. And this webinar is on Promoting Digital Education in the Commonwealth. And we are very happy to have Dr. Sanjaya Mishra here together with us today. He is an Education Specialist in the Commonwealth of Learning based in Canada. Dr. Sanjaya Mishra joined the Commonwealth of Learning as Education Specialist. E-Learning at his headquarters in Canada on the 2nd January 2015. Previously he served the Commonwealth of Learning as Director of the Commonwealth Education and Media Centre for Asia. It used to be called SAMCA. From 1st July 2012 to 31st December 2012 to 1st December 2014. Dr. Mishra is one of the leading scholars in open distance and online learning. So I'm very, very happy to have you here. It's a great pleasure. And prior to joining Commonwealth of Learning he was Program Specialist, ICT in Education, Science and Culture at UNESCO in Paris. Dr. Mishra has over 25 years of experiences in design, development and management of open and distance learning programs with a blend of academic and professional qualification in library and information science, distance education, television production and training and development. He has been promoting the use of education with the media, e-learning and the use of open education resources, OER and open access to scientific information around the world. During his service in different capacities at the India Gandhi National Open University amongst many innovative activities and programs he developed the OER-based one-year postgraduate diploma in e-learning. So Dr. Mishra is a very, very well known worldwide and he contributed a lot to the field of open education. And right now at this moment he is also the Fallen Walls finalist, 2020. It's very exciting and it is so well-deserved. So I wish us a very fruitful and interesting conversation together with Dr. Sanjay Mishra. So now I give the floor to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Iba. I will start immediately with sharing of my presentation to move forward. So it's a privilege and honor to be speaking at an event organized by Eden. Eden is one of the leading distance and e-learning network around the world and its activities are always path-breaking in a sense that it focuses on the real needs of its members and institutions. So thank you, Eden, for giving me this opportunity to speak about the work that we do at the Commonwealth of Learning. And of course without the invitation of Dr. Iba who is quite active in the field especially in the distance education network and open educational resources. She is always probably scouting for and of course she is one of my long list in person for whom I know for a long time and we are in the same network. So thank you Iba for this opportunity to be with this group of people and thank you everyone. Welcome everyone. I joined Iba in welcoming you all to this presentation on European online and distance learning week. This is the best way of celebrating of what contributions people in the field of open and distance learning are doing. So I'm really happy and I would like to proceed with my presentation especially what the kind of work that I have been doing at the Commonwealth of Learning and out of that I will focus only on one particular project which is digital education in the Commonwealth. Many of you may be knowing that Commonwealth of Learning was established in 1987 by the Commonwealth head sub-government. We are an intergovernmental organization based in Vancouver with one another office in Delhi. Our main goal is to promote open distance technology mediated education to improve access to quality education and training in the Commonwealth. But many of our activities and work span across the globe and the kind of work that we do are having strong relevance and appropriateness for many other countries including Europe. Particularly our work in the field of open educational resources has always been widely acknowledged along with our work in collaboration with UNESCO. And ICDE and many other organizations in this sphere. Without much elaboration about our work I would focus on the typical example of digital education in the Commonwealth and the title of this presentation is promoting digital education in the Commonwealth but I will be giving you a glimpse of this initiative that Commonwealth of Learning is doing and how it is having impact across the globe and more specifically in the Commonwealth countries. So this is the main page of the website that we have created and Dr. Eba pointed out that this has been a finalist in the World Science Summit which is called Falling Walls which will be educated sometime this week but I am really happy and excited that we are one of the finalists for this summit which is important because digital education is getting more and more and when we started this activity not much many people were talking about digital education per se so what is digital education? We started this initiative in 2015 but we were looking for something that we should be having digital skills training at a scale now there was a huge recognition that digital skills are important for lifelong learning digital skills are important but the way to accelerate the pace of digital skills training was not enough because the scalability of teaching and learning approaches through the face to face training was limited so we were looking for something that we can scale up to a large number of people and we thought that a web-based platform to start with would be a good way and then we also looked at that while more and more students are having more adequate ease of using digital tools teachers are not having the same kind of skills so we thought about focusing on both teachers in offering the skills training and then we thought that whatever activities we are doing should lead to lifelong learning and of course it will improve student success in a long-term approach so C-Delta is a platform for digital education which provides a scalable platform for both students and teachers to be a continuous lifelong learners we started the whole development in 2015 as an international collaboration of experts so it was not just something that we developed on our own but we banked on the expertise of people from both commonwealth and non-commonwealth countries initially the conceptual framework was developed by colleagues from the University of Cape Town but they were also enriched by the advice from people around the world so we had an international advisory group which looked into content development and review of the learning materials that were prepared then once the learning materials were prepared we moved that into a technological platform that is C-Delta.call.org this platform is a secured platform which provides a dashboard for the user where the user can take pre-test, post-test and continuously do self-learning or in bages involved in social media to share the work done and of course that certification at different levels of fluency so what is the whole contours of digital education that commonwealth digital education leadership training in action C-Delta in brief so we conceptualized digital education leadership as a holistic approach where digital literacy is a center digital education is built around digital literacy and digital leadership is the overall framework of things that everything covered within digital education and digital literacy so basically we start with digital literacy is a social practice that digital literacy would enable people to undertake various activities of their life including education and training and lifelong learning so it's a social practice where people are involved and engaged and therefore that becomes an integral part of their life but then we looked at digital literacy is not enough digital literacy is necessary but not sufficient to become a good digital education leader or digital education person digital educated person in that sense so what do you mean by that you may be efficient in using social media but you may not be knowing how to use social media for teaching and learning so that's where the key aspect comes in or you may be knowing to code something but how do you know to code those things for developmental purpose so just to give an example we are largely on using digital tools for education and training so digital literacy is not enough so you need to learn how to make use of digital tools for education and training and the third and the most important thing is that everyone can become a digital education leader a digital education leader is one who has the competency of digital literacy and digital education skills but also able to influence others in his or her sphere of network so the digital education leader is one who is not only master of the skills but also is an influencer in the community that he or she works for the teachers, schools and education system for the students it could be in their own network and beyond in the society so digital education leaders if we believe that anyone can become a digital education leader irrespective of the position it is not necessary that you just need to be a principal or a head teacher to become a digital education leader so that's the whole framework on which it works but it has several components to it the structure is that leadership and digital education are in the leadership is looked at four different dimensions which is announcing access developing capacity making informed decisions and cultivating innovation whereas digital education is looked at how do you mobilize resources how to develop digital identities and footprints and of course how do you engage critically within and with the networks so that you use the power of the network to your learning and success overall and as a lifelong learner so the whole curriculum C delta is based on these seven areas and therefore there are seven modules in the course which the students take a module one to three whereas the teachers take all the seven the idea is that the students workload is limited because their focus needs to be on their curricular subject and this is an additional learning material that they are expected to do during their curricular learning whereas for the teachers we have focused on all the seven modules primarily because we want them to have a higher level of understanding of what is digital education and of course they are the one who will be influencing learners and the community more so they need to cover the whole contours of the learning materials of course these are all self learning and our experience shows that the engagement with all the learning modules are not equivalent for all the learners in the platform we have different types of users technically we consider everyone in the platform as a learner but we look at the categories of learners in two groups primarily as learners and teachers and practitioners based on which the modules are allocated for learning on an automatic process your profile decides which content you are going to learn and of course because of the implementation process which is focused on institutional implementation as well as implementation in a specific country we have group managers who actually look into how the learners in the platform in a particular group are being engaged and these group managers provide many a time scaffolding to both the teachers in the ecosystem and also the learner in the ecosystem so the group managers play a critical role in enhancing the completion rate on the platform of course besides that we have the super admin who has all the controls on the platform there are modules there are seven modules all these modules are accessible to anyone through the C-delta platform but that only happens when you complete the pre-test depending on the taking of the pre-test and your profile the modules gets opened and then you can learn through these interactive modules through your own self-learning self-paced way there is no limit when you can start and when you can complete when there is no cohort based approach it's an open platform for anyone to join in and learn anytime the whole idea is that to have mastery learning so there are a lot of practice within the learning modules that you can do again and again until you think that you are very confident to take on the post-test and improve your score on the platform you can do a lot of experience sharing on the platform about things that you do as you engage through the learning materials or you are engaged with different tools and get engaged with different softwares and from that any learning or any experience that you can share in the network the whole sharing approach is to encourage creation of open educational resources and learning objects that can be utilized by other members and you can use any platform for that purpose that you can link for use by others so trying to create a culture of sharing on the platform so what happens since this is an open platform there is always a chance of people getting registered and not completing the course so we have tried to create badges on when the learner completes the module going through all the activities of the module the learner gets badges that are reflected on their dashboard and when they complete the course whether in the pre-test as a minimum gets 40% of the grades scores then they get a certificate so the certificates are at three levels also to encourage motivation so you get scores between 40 to 59 you get a beginner's level certificate and then you are encouraged oh I got a beginner's level certificate let me read the learning materials more carefully again and again and then do the post-test again and improve my score to the intermediate level or to the fluent level so we keep on building on learner motivation through badges and the certification process of course there is a support mechanism through email anybody writes email to us and we help provide technical help and support on this particular platform the overall expected outcomes on the platform of Commonwealth digital education leadership training and action can be categorized into three key components that anyone who is undergoing this specialized training on digital education skills would develop a sense of digital identity and recognize his or her own digital footprints online this is more about digital safety and safety privacy and data etc on the network so it helps people to understand how the digital tools on the network works and the second important part is the people develop appropriate skills to create and share digital artifacts and these digital artifacts are not just photos of our selfies but about how these photos and selfies or anything that you do could support learning so because this is a teaching learning and digital education the focus is on creating digital artifacts and sharing digital artifacts using probably an open license so the whole effort is creating and sharing and the third and most important is that help people to engage in personal learning networks and be leaders and lead by example and how do you read by example by creating and sharing and helping each other so you create a sphere of influence for yourself not only on the platform but creating on your own digital artifacts on platforms on blogs on social media presence so when you are in a position to do all these things you are a true fluent digital education leader or digital education skilled person that is the whole outcomes that we are working at how does this the implementation work so far we have been able to reach about 52 countries so far of which about 30 are Commonwealth countries interestingly and over 99% of the registrations come from 30 Commonwealth countries meaning that only a limited number of people from the other 22 non Commonwealth countries have registered on the platform this is primarily because we are focusing largely on a country implementation in the Commonwealth countries but through the social media there are people who are interested about exploring digital education skills on the platform from the Commonwealth countries and do join on the platform so the number of students and teachers if you see is that largely the number of registrations are from the students that is something good so we would like to have more teachers as well but going by the number of proportion of teachers and students in our schools and colleges I think it's important the numbers are very significant and useful at the same time if you look at the gender balance I think it's quite satisfactory to look at 48% female and 51% male responses even though we would like to be more 50-50 but I think it's a true representation of what is happening currently on the platform and of course in the society in general. This is something I would like to elude a little more we have about 43% of people on the platform who have completed and we have over 10,000 learners on the platform and that number is quite substantial if we look at even the completion rate we would like to make more but if we compare to the normal massive open online course the percentage of success and completion that happens in MOOCs are much lower to the completion rate that we are seeing on this platform generally because we are self-paced and the learners can do this course on their own whenever they want to do the MOOCs are most cohort-based and have a starting and ending time and therefore are more restrictive for people to complete and we have overcome that barrier by creating an online presence of anytime, anywhere learning leveraging on the power of the asynchronous learning capacity of the platform if you look at the graph on the right side we are presenting the learning improvement in the course for pre-test and post-test for all the people in the platform and some 10 identified countries if you look at the overall the growth rate on pre-test to post-test have increased about 38% which is quite significant in terms of understanding the impact on the students or the learners achievement on the platform but whereas if you look at the 10 targeted countries which I will come into details immediately after this we have about 30% increase on the pre-test and post-test course both the numbers are quite significant and shows that there has been a good impact of the course on student achievement broadly what it shows is that most of the learners who came to the platform had a level of understanding of digital education but when they completed the post-test those who completed the post-test they are overall increased to an intermediate level to a large extent and this is the summative picture of this thing but not just going into details of how individual learners improve or their learning or achievement in learning in the pre-test and post-test course. Coming to the 10 targeted countries these are some of the countries where CALL had direct intervention through partner institutions whether it was government or civil society or educational institution so what we found is there is a consistent increase in the post-test score in all these 10 countries and this ranged the post-test score ranged from about 52% to about 76% in South Africa the post-test score of 52.52 and in Bangladesh the post-test score was 76.45 so that's the kind of range but overall if you look at the post-test score consistently increased in these 10 countries one of the important thing that I want to highlight that this the whole platform can help us provide something called digital or index for the country as such if you take the number of students currently we have taken the 10 countries where we have interventions through partner institutions but overall if the platform goes more scalable to large number of countries and we get a sampling mass of learners from a particular country we can easily create digital education skills index using the platform if we use these 10 countries if you see the digital education skills overall including both pre-test and post-test scores Bangladesh comes number one out of this followed by Antigua and and then of course Uganda, India and so on and so forth so this is an I would say that it's an outcome for us to see that in future probably if we have more learners on the platform we could probably use this to measure the digital education skills and help students to strategize what kind of inputs they would like to put in to make their country, their learners and teachers in their country move from one score to another score we can also look at what kind of investment that would require in making that kind of transition so we have a robust platform which can guide students and educational institutions in future so apart from that impact what really has this platform achieved, we actually concluded an evaluation of the C-Delta platform and it highlighted some important aspects when C-Delta started there was not much being talked about digital education skills today there are several institutions who are offering programs on digital education skills but this is probably the only one which is available as an open resource or open educational resource as an open platform we have achieved, in my personal view we have reached moderate success on the platform considering the number of people and number of countries that we have reached we have applied limited marketing efforts from our side the completion rate is something quite satisfactory and this has happened because of the in-country implementation model that we applied the evaluation indicated that the simplicity of the platform has led to the overall satisfaction of the learners and the impact this platform has is significant from to make transformation in the pedagogical practices of the learners and teachers in that sense there is a significant example from Sri Lanka where the teachers have created a resource using storytelling about what they did and what they have made to their learners students actually used non-digital approaches to create their own sphere of influence to educate others about the importance of digital education skills in the process this is just a Sri Lankan example but similar examples are also available in St. Lucia, South Africa Antigua and Barbuda, Kenya and of course in Bangladesh too so let me quickly recapitulate some of the strong points vis-à-vis the European Union digital education action plan I think this is something that is coming up in Europe is very significant currently it is focused on digital competency framework but wants to plans to develop a new digital education framework which we already have a framework in Commonwealth digital education leadership training and action our framework is largely digital competence plus so we are looking at digital identity digital content creation and sharing personal learning networks and how we are to lead in the community some of these things are already covered in the digital competency framework European digital competency framework and of course the teaching and learning aspects would also come out in the whole process of deep that is being planned currently so I see the similarity in the thought processes and the activities in these two initiatives what are the key implications and way forward for us we have seen that access to internet is key wherever students and learners have access in the school or at home they have been able to use the platform quite successfully digital access access to network has been a major challenge and particularly during the pandemic so the enrollment from the schools and institutions have been slow during the last few months what we have seen that the the learners engagement on the platform are much more than the teachers engagement on the platform even though the workload of the students are beyond the curricular load they all normally take which means that the students are getting more interested in on the platform in order to mitigate the challenges more and more governments need to jump into support wherever there were government support we found that the implementation was more successful particularly in Sri Lanka in Bangladesh in St. Lucia we had in Antiquan, Burbadan places where there were support letters issued from the government or directly involved from the government things were much but better implemented the C-Delta was better implemented we also found that the we have developed a scalable platform but reaching out to the people who need it is more important so probably we need to do more marketing to reach out to also attract more people on the platform moving forward we would also like to track and understand how the skills of digital education are having impact on student success in other areas other fields other subjects does the skills of digital education have more supporting influence direct or indirect on competency building in other other areas so we would like to definitely look into some of those things in future so with this I would like to stop here and thank you and look forward to your questions and clarifications I would like to be happy to respond thank you so much Dr. Mishra it was fantastic presentation and so interesting and it's fantastic to also see the impact that the C-Delta has and has had to have presentation and I can just see from the chat also that attendances are really appreciating what you're doing and the presentation you have just done for us very many are pointing out about the batches and the modern approach and also about the nice impact on the high completion rate it's impressive I was also happy to hear that you pointed out that everyone can be a digital leader I think that is a very important message I use myself to when I have presentations especially on leadership I use to always finalize with be the leader you want to have because everyone can be a leader and have to show up there has indeed become a lot of questions both in the chat and also in the Q&A I would like to start with a question from the Eden president Sandra Kuzina Softik she wrote we often experience government support as a declarative but with no real action how to change this I think this is quite challenging but because we are an intergovernmental organization our engagement with the government is quite substantive in the commonwealth countries and many a time we are able to reach out to the right person and request them to issue a letter of support at least to a local institution or a local NGO which actually goes back with that letter of support and goes to the schools and principals and take our this platform and influence there so what happens that in this program the governments have not so far been involved in investing funding and therefore there is more support in countries like Mauritius Bangladesh, Sri Lanka they have been support letters issued whereas in country like St. Lucia and Antigua and the governments were directly involved because they see that this is something of significant value so I think it's a very challenging issue to some extent for us it has been easier but I really agree that engagement with governments are very challenging and because they would even if there is a policy the funding support from the government for a particular project becomes limited because of competing issues and challenges thank you there is a reflection from Livia van der Brande she is first saying in one comment at the difference with the digit comp and the C-delta the C-delta is for countries they get combis for individuals and then she say I'm sure that the DicComp follow up framework like DicComp for educators as well as Selfie for schools could give interesting inputs we have a majority score for region or country but in the EU this yet doesn't exist but of course this would require quite some research and maybe these efforts would be taken across the world and not only on a European scale and I also appreciated that you made some kind of not comparison but you showed what is going on in Europe the actual plan which was launched a few weeks ago can you reflect on something about what Livia is saying I think I agree with the comments and in fact when I saw this digital equation action plan 21-27 I found that's really interesting and this is something that we have been doing we looked at this and I really found the whole approach is building on a systematic process to scale of digital education that's the whole thing but currently it is focusing on digital competencies but it has an intention to build a digital education framework which we already have and we are looking at from our perspective the experience shows that we can actually develop a skills index framework digital education skills index framework but it's true that it is early to look at we need to do more research on to it and of course anything that is done in a European Union scale always should in my personal view the kind of investment that comes in should lead to work at some later point and there are experiences like C-Delta could be used to enrich the European experiences that are being planned in the next six years so I am actually looking forward to this kind of initiative that a digital education will get the more prominence in the future not just digital literacy so we have a question we have a lot of questions here in Q&A for example we have people are asking about if the seven modules are downloadable and if they are free or about the batches the modules are freely available on OASIS on our institutional repository and you can download this they are all CCBYSA materials the platform is also free for anyone to register and if you are registering on the platform you go to an interactive learning environment where you do pre-test and post-test and download the certificates but if you don't want to do that you can go to the repository and learn on your own but you won't get the interactivity of the platform that you want to do so you can make use of the resources interestingly these course materials that we have developed are being used extensively in other institution and resource countries I would cite one one future Learn Book which is being used as a resource within the course so it is already being used by many institutions in their courses here is a question again from Live Fundabunder does the Commonwealth have projects whereby they connect teachers across countries to an open platform we are engaged in different community of practice as such we don't have one platform for all the countries but we have different community of practice for specific projects like for example of course this platform is a community of practice and itself where people are sharing their own understanding on digital education and what they are doing but other than that there are other platforms where there are technological learning community of practice where currently we have about 12 countries 12 institutions from 10 countries so there are different platforms where we are connecting with institutions as well but not specifically one where everyone is there for all particular, all purposes we have thematic communities of practice so then we have actually two reflections from Arun Mohanad the first one is how can we put the feeling in learning to online education I want to feel in the teachers and materials and also the question reflection about how do you make sure that when you make one platform of e-learning education that each person get the same quality of education very challenging question the whole purpose is online learning is considered to be dehumanizing because you are learning on your own but as an educationist my approach has always been to promote blended approach to teaching and learning using online learning in the blended fashion so if you look at the C-Delta implementation our focus on these 10 countries were largely blended so we work through teachers we train teachers on the platform and ask them you now are trained go to your school, recruit students to be online and provide mentorship to the students and to also your other teachers to develop your digital education leadership skills so in a process that this platform tries to build those blended learning opportunities in the whole process even though the platform is online we are probably trying to treat both paths so for example if you are registering as an individual on the platform probably you don't get a mentor or do not get connected a little bit through the social approach but there is a limitation but when we are going to institutional implementation or a country implementation we have a more blended approach so we are trying to take the best of the both worlds possible but definitely inculcating the emotional part on teaching and learning is a challenge but it's still possible to do through different means including using online tools to do that there are different ways of doing things I don't think it's important now to elaborate on some of those things but it is possible to do even online there is a lot of comments on appreciations of your presentation and your work you are doing really there is a tendency that he or she has got to the course and found it very useful some of the modules there is one reflection of comment here from Dhanaswara Harishandan from India how to promote digital literacy effectively among the rural population Yes, thank you Professor Harishandan I think the challenge that we are finding today is access to internet people do have mobile phones but do not have the data and if they have the data the bandwidth is low so the important aspect is that while we keep promoting digital education skills digital literacy as an important part a lot of things need to be done at the ground level in most countries in most low and middle income countries is to upgrade the technological infrastructure to create the last mile of access of course there are tools like Calls Aptus which provides offline access to the online world through the local server and those kind of implementations still can be done for many of our activities but it's important to recognize that digital skills needs access to digital tools so if we want to empower learners I think we need to focus on this and particularly the whole approach should be going mobile and anything that we develop should be more about mobile first approach and then what happens most more and more people these days are having mobile applications or mobile phones so then it helps us to reach more people in rural areas as well but it's easier said than it's a long way to go in most countries so thank you so much I covered most of the questions and reflections of course the discussion can go on for longer but we have got a very nice introduction and very deep information about the Sea Delta and as I said earlier I can see from the chat that people are really really appreciating this webinar and what you have shared together with us and I'm sure that the conversation will continue in one or another way please if you like share your thoughts on social media and use the hashtag EODLW2020 and I'm also sure that the conversation will continue in different ways not at least in social media and maybe also directly to you Sanjaya and Commonwealth of Learning so people who have attended this webinar will follow up on Commonwealth of Learning what you are doing and to follow you on also social media because it's really a lot of good things you are doing and that is also why you have been awarded the Fallen Walls 2020 so we are really keeping the thumbs for you and keep the flag high hopefully let me see there were just so many comments right now so by that we are together with all the participants thank you so much for being part of this webinar for the EDEN European Online Distance Learning Week 2020 it has been great to have you here and that you shared your experiences and insights and the impact of Sea Delta and I'm sure we will follow it many of us so by that I will close this webinar for today and thank you all for being here for all your questions all your thoughts from the attendance and I will also remind you that we have a new day tomorrow and at 3 o'clock Central European time we will have a discussion for the AUDL 2020 tomorrow 3 o'clock CET and the topic is that we are all in this together rising to the challenges and please follow the very interesting webinars during the week it will continue even on Monday the week after so it is a prolonged week this year and I will thank you all very much for being here and for your contribution and most of all to you and I wish you all the best all of you take care and be safe and stay healthy and all the best to you thank you very much thank you Ibar, it's a pleasure


Hi, everyone. Welcome to our session. Thank you for being here. My name is Nicola Saqlampanakis. I am the Tech Lead for Blockchain and DLT in Digital Incubation Fujitsu Central and Eastern Europe. Hi, everyone. My name is Adekubilai. I'm software engineer for Blockchain and DLT also at Fujitsu Central and Eastern Europe, Digital Incubation Department. Thank you all for showing interest and joining our session, Critical Reporting Chains with Hyperledger Fabric. Okay, let's start with talking about critical reporting chains and why they're so critical. To get us into context, we can first talk a bit about critical infrastructures and to give those a few examples, we can name transportation, water systems, defense, infrastructures, energy-related installations, industrial units, so on and so forth. Now let's take transportation, for example, and take an airport and imagine there is an alarm being raised for a potential fire that could eventually result in significant harm to public safety or any other kinds of dramatic consequences. What happens next is theories of entities with different levels of handling and different sorts of long and complex protocols will be involved and at the very end of it, there might be an auditing process by an auditing body taking place to determine if each level of handling has been done correctly or not. Nicolas? So based on what Ege just described, let us consider a simple scenario. Let us imagine an incident taking place in a train tunnel in the subway, close the subway station, for example. This tunnel is monitored by some devices, by some monitoring equipment that raise the alarm and as Ege described after this, we have a process of different stakeholders being involved into different stages to intercept it. So the first one in our scenario could be the local security department in the station that need to start taking actions, they need to start following their own processes and it could be that they send some security personnel to check on the situation, evaluate it, report back and based on the knowledge and the understanding of the situation that has been gathered, they need to make a decision. It could be that it's something insignificant or it could be something critical that needs to be escalated to the next stakeholder, which in our scenario could be a public emergency service. The public emergency service intercepts this piece of information and they need to start acting accordingly. So they start acting as their protocols dictate, which means they maybe need to shut down traffic around the station, probably they would need to dispatch some emergency units that are around the area to take over the handling of the emergency on the spot where the alarm was created. At the end, we have the auditing body involved where it needs to audit if everything were according to what was expected from all the stakeholders that were involved. They need to investigate and see if things were as expected. So we have identified several challenges in this and a major one is that the actors are expected to make critical decisions based on information that originates beyond the boundaries of their own organization and of their own control. In the case of something going wrong, each actor must prove that they acted according to the protocol. In the case of something going wrong, every actor has the motivation, of course, to deny wrongdoing or deny any negligence that requires to liabilities. And obviously, this makes the auditor's job very, very hard. The auditor must make conclusions based on collective evidence to investigate in each stakeholder. Each stakeholder makes the claims from his own perspective. And this makes the audit a process of high complexity, high effort and high risk for the involved parties. Eja? So we as the digital incubation department at Fujitsu partnered with Hexagon to try and address these challenges that we just talked about.  We're located in Fujitsu Central Europe, CTO's office. And we are basically a group of experts in novel technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and digital annealing. What we do is we identify use cases with high potential of scaling from business perspective and work with early adapters from different market segments for co-creation of POCs and MVPs. We then pass this to production. And Hexagon is an established global company who is a pioneer in making of next-gen sensors. And they are domain experts in IoT monitoring fields. Nicolas? All right. So let us have a look how the monitoring ecosystem looks like. A core component is the IoT platform of Hexagon. The IoT platform integrates sensors and gathers information that provides to the dashboards for the different operators that need to make decisions. The IoT platform can collect and combine data to build context and enhance the situational awareness of the operator. The IoT platform can also perform actions based on rules that are defined in its configuration and utilize computer vision, AI, and for example, decide by itself that the information that it receives from the sensors is critical enough to automatically escalate the alarm. Another interesting component that we work with into this project is the BLK247. The BLK247 from Hexagon is a next-gen multi-sensor device. It comes with a lot of very interesting features like laser radar. It has thermal scanners on it. And we work on that. And that's a device that is integrated with the IoT platform like the rest. But being so advanced, it can also directly speak to the monitoring dashboard of the operator. And for example, stream some data there. When we are into this situation, the operator is expected to evaluate the data that is represented to him by the dashboard, start following the process that he has to do from the perspective of his own organization. He starts following his protocol. He evaluates the information that he is in, the context that he is in. And one decision could be that he needs to escalate. And that means he would involve the next stakeholder that needs to intervene and take over the situation if it is so critical. And we should assume that this is an out-of-bounds communication because the next stakeholder, the next organization is not necessarily tightly technically integrated with him. So in order to address the challenges that we described before, we introduced a layer of hyperledger fabric that goes across and it is crossing the boundaries of each individual organization, of each individual stakeholder. And we integrated all the relevant components on it. First, the BLK247. The BLK247 being a smart and next-gen device was able to be integrated. And what we get there is that the alarms, the alarming event themselves and the relevant data are being recorded in timestamped and secured by the ledger. The device itself generates some transaction transmitted to the ledger. This brings in not cancelling out the pre-existing communication channels but brings the additional benefit of having additional communication channels where we can address things like managing the middle attack and the communication channels with a backing. Because imagine that potentially this is a really edge device in monitoring a location that might be targeted for malicious actions. So this is important. An interesting feature of BLK247 that is also interesting with combination with using a DLT is the fact that BLK has anti-tompering security measurements on it. So if you try to mess with its own operation and tamper it with, it will raise an alarm over the ledger saying to the whole ecosystem that is involved, you should not trust me from now on so much. You should consider twice about the data I'm transmitting and we can trigger counter-measures on that. The next component is the IoT platform. This is obviously also integrated. The IoT platform can intercept alarms that are generated by fabric-integrated device like the BLK247. It can also create alarms on behalf of sensors that cannot be integrated to fabric, serving as the trust anchor for the blockchain and for the DLT. Moreover, the IoT platform can enhance the context of an alarm as it is received on the ledger or it is on the ledger, it's being recorded on the ledger, by providing additional information. And this is important because it can enhance the information and the situational awareness of the operator that will take place in the process later on. As we described before, the IoT platform can even drive own decisions based on the data it receives and based on its configuration. So these decisions from the IoT platform are also recorded on the ledger. So if a decision is taken from the IoT platform to escalate, we know exactly who decided and why and in which context to escalate that. The next component that gets integrated is the dashboard of the operator. Now we can cross verify the information that we receive from the IoT platform and from device like the BLK that transmit to us against the ledger. We enhance the security. We know exactly how the context has been gradually built. We know that in this context we need to make some decision as operators and proceed with the situation that we are handling. Now if we manage to integrate this, the obvious next step would be that we integrate next stakeholders that previously were not tightly integrated. Because of the decentralized nature of the DLT, we can enable APIs that enable the involvement directly on the technical level for the additional entities, which previously was not possible maybe. And this is granted and enabled by DLT in the decentralized nature. We know that we can in essence grow beyond the single organization boundaries. This obviously can continue as long as the chain of involvement and engagement demands the situation to be handled. At the very end, we have enabled the audit to be done and performed not against assumptions or indications or claims of individual stakeholders, but on cryptographically verifiable and undeniable facts. As I reported on the ledger, we know exactly who made what decision, in which context, in which time. And we have a tight context of the situation that the operator was working in when he made the given decision. And everything is timestamped and all the information leads back to everything on the ledger. So we are managing to record the whole critical reporting chain on the ledger with undeniable ways, cryptographically verifiable facts and actions. And this reduces the risk and the effort that is required to perform an audit. Because we do that, and in this way we address these challenges, we claim that it's a smart monitoring ecosystem. So to recapitalize, let's see the major benefits of DLT enablement in this. We have the alarms and the relevant data recorded on DLT. The handling is recorded on DLT because we have the whole process recorded there. And the process itself is enforced by rules of the chain code. So the application enforces the rules. Who is required to engage in which way and when. The decision and the relevant context is tightly bind to the time that it was taken. And this leads to the auditing being greatly enhanced. We reduce the risk. Actors who perform does the protocols dictate are out of risk. They do not need to prove it. It is easy also to identify wrongdoing if this is the case or negligence in a non-disputable way and address potential liabilities. Finally, the technical ecosystem is extensively decentralized way. Stakeholders can be integrated to Hyperledger Fabric and enjoy the same benefits. So let's see how this works again. Typically we have the Fabric framework components that are relevant for each organization. So we have peer certificate authorities, databases and so on for each. And also the ordering service. Each integrated component for each individual organization is integrated through an API gateway. We follow the API gateway pattern. The API gateway externalizes Fabric calls to traditional APIs that are meaningful for such more mainstream applications, let's say. And our API gateway is deployable in flexible fashion. It can be deployed as a single binary or it can be built up as a container. To see how this is actually possible, let's have some insights about the API gateway itself. So what the API gateway is at the end is a modular application. And it is modular because it has flexible internal components. These components are actually playable from us as developers. We can choose exactly the services that are relevant for the integration that we need to provide. Typically it will provide some external APIs, enabling other actors to call it. And typically it will also provide a Fabric line so that it enables the interaction with the Fabric infrastructure there. If it is required to handle configuration, connect to databases externally and so on, perform business logic and so on, this is something that we can choose depending on what we integrate. And this flexibility is what makes it so great for us because we can stay in micro level and we can create a binary that we deploy directly on the BLK247 on the device. But we can also build it up and be really a containerized cloud application that provides enterprise level APIs to other solutions like the IoT platform, the dashboards or whatever other infrastructure is required to be integrated from the different stakeholders involved. At the end of the day, it externalizes APIs, performs its own business logic, potentially works with other components, and provides Hyperledge Fabric functionality, Fabric calls on that. And we have written it in Goal line. Ege? Yeah, last but not least, it's matching perfectly with our project requirements. We definitely needed a permission network. Fabric offers modular architecture, hence maximizes the flexibility and the resilience of our solution. Fabric follows enterprise paradigms, thus meeting modern business demands. Finality of transactions is not an issue as they're instant. Fabric offers features like channels, transaction anonymity, data access scoping, privacy regarding who can access what sets of data. Hence, we do not have to implement this from scratch ourselves. And all in all, it is certainly meeting our project's expectations in regards to overall performance. Nicholas, I think it's time for a little demo. All right. Let us try to make a little demo, as Ege said. And we can stay back in the context of the example we brought before. Let us consider that we are handling some alarms in a train station or in a tube station, where we have two virtual BLK247 devices installed. In this example that we see here, we have the monitoring dashboard of a subway security operator in a subway station in central Munich. We see the two virtual devices that are there. We see a dashboard for the local police department. And we see at the end information from the dashboard of the authority that we need to audit how the whole process went. We have a demo control environment here that we can raise alarms from the two simulated devices that we have. The sensor one, the first one, can raise fencing alarms, fencing violations. That means it can raise alarms that match the scenario where a perimeter that is defined with a laser radar has been compromised, and that for an alarm needs to be raised. The second one is working with computer vision. It can recognize a piece of luggage, for example, that has been left unattended for too long in the train station. And that for it raises an alarm, it requires intervention. Let's try to play with it a bit. So I'll try to create a fencing violation first with the sensor number one. Bear with me. I think I didn't register the link. I'm going to refresh. All right. And we see that an alarm is generated. And as I said, it's an early preview of the dashboards that we are working with for storytelling reason. The call makes it a bit slower to load, but let us see. So typically now we should be receiving the information of the alarm on our dashboard of the operator. The map loads a bit slowly. I think it's being affected by the fact that we have an in-browser call and sharing the session and it makes it very slow. So all right. It loads. Let's wait for it to render a bit nicely. So we have now information about the alarm, the nature of the alarm for the storytelling perspective. We have skipped the specifics, but you hear typically what you would have is that information specific to this alarm is being passed to the operator's dashboard. And okay, here we see only a summary of that. We are skipping big information. Oh, this is glitching over the connection, I think. All right. So we see who created the alarm. It's coming from the BLK device. It is a kind of fencing violation in a realistic environment. We would have much more information there. So actually what we have in the bug ones, we have geolocational information, more technical information coming directly from the device and communicated here. And the operator is expected to make some decision based on that. For example, escalate the alarm because she says, well, it's critical. We followed our protocol with this guy, despite some guys. And this alarm should be coming to the dashboard from police now because it has been escalated. And the police, it's intercepted. They see that there is an alarm that is coming in. And they need to handle it. First of all, they acknowledge that an alarm has been communicated to them. And they start following their own protocols here. They, for example, maybe need to shut down traffic to the station and so on. Dispatch some emergency units to the spot. And when the units get there, for example, hearing a simple story, we say, okay, this is, I think that the sharing of the browser, the session is a bit killing the, all right. So the unit has arrived. And this concludes, let's say, the story. This is again a very simplistic story that we have, only to make the demo. The process has been concluded. So we can make an audit on that. So we can filter by dates here. So all right, we are in today. We see the events that were created today. We can choose the relevant timestamps and apply the filter. And then we see exactly what happened, when, and from whom. We see that an alarm was created. There was a fencing violation from this sensor that was being managed by, I apologize, from Hexagon. We see that it has been intercepted by the subway security operator. There was some decision to escalate it and start some emergency process. We see that the police, the local police department has acknowledged it, started following their own protocol and that an external unit that was dispatched has arrived on the spot. Obviously, this is a very, very simplistic workflow that we describe here, more for storytelling purposes. And when we have skipped the internal information that come from the sensors and so on. So obviously, we can have also other decisions, like for example, the subway operator deciding not to escalate an alarm, handling it internally, and so on. And this at the end becomes always transparent to the end. And this audit view comes directly from retrieving data from the ledger. So even if we require some analytics to be performed, we can all the time do that because every stakeholder that is involved has its own cryptographic material that signs transaction that identifies his actions on this series of events that handle the alarm. So that was our small demo. And I'm happy to see if you have any questions. Please use the Q&A session to address any questions that you might have or what we just presented to you. So to maybe... Hey, I think we already have three questions, Nicolas. I don't see them in my dashboard. I can read them for you if you'd like. Yeah, please. Sure. Could you tell me the advantages you have in using fabric instead of a shared database? Yes. So if you would have a shared database, it would make the auditing process, let's say, a bit more complicated. So the benefit that we have here is the decentralized nature and the fact that the actions of each stakeholder that could lead to liability, so they could have big impact, are cryptographically bound to the entity that makes the decision. These entities are liable for their actions, potentially. I actually described before that we might be talking about major events that come into critical infrastructure. Take this example we brought. Assume that the local security guards have decided that they handle the internal... They handle the event internally, the alarm internally that happened in that tunnel. And this concluded to serious damages. It ended up with some accident on a train, with people's lives or health being at stake and so on. That is something major. So you really want to have the possibility to nail down and exclude any possibility that might have contradicting claims. The way that you decentralize this and you can really bind the identity of the actor against the action that he took and the context that he had at hand. On the ledger is the benefit here that enables for the process. The benefit also counts for the actor himself. If he didn't have the ledger that directly shows that he acted as he should, as the protocols dictate and so on, he would have to prove it himself. Now he doesn't really have to because it's cryptographically evident on the ledger. What happened? I hope this is answering the question. Okay, one more. How quick is the escalation to police? Is there a latency? So with fabric we have the possibility to really define how fast we want to finalize transactions. I just spoke about the instant finality that we have. We don't have to wait for a generic timeframe that dictates how long it should take. We are flexible to be finding ourselves when we address the use case and we can be also confident that when we get a transaction through the system, when we get the block and everything, it is really a final block. Because of how fabric works, it cannot be that we are on a split of the chain or something like this that could happen with a public Ethereum chain, for example. So with finality, it's practically instant. What you saw in the demo took place in real time so we can define, for example, that the decision to escalate an event, generate a transaction, have it finalized in a block and being transmitted to the relevant stakeholder takes one second. I hope this is answering the question. I don't have access to the Q&A. Unfortunately, it's not shown to me. I see one more. Does not posting the alarms to the ledger represent a privacy violation? So we are talking about a controlled network. We are not talking about the public network. We are talking about a permission network. So we can define exactly who has access to it. One of the reasons we used fabric is because we can, out of the framework, have tooling that really defines who has access to which data. And this diverges from situation to situation. So we can make private collections that only the relevant entities have access to or we can use channels and have responsible organizations that need to, let's say, transfer the sequence from one channel to the other and the channels group different stakeholders that need to be involved and have different kinds of access to that channel. So we are really flexible and obviously do not expect that we are writing on the ledger any pictures from phase or something like this. It has to do with the event. It has to do with a thermal sensor that detects high temperature. For example, it could indicate fire. Okay. We have one more question. Who is running the nodes of the fabric network? Are we running out of time? We are almost running out of time. Again, this depends on the scenario that we are addressing. We don't have a generalized and we are not trying to provide a global ledger where everybody or all alarms in the world need to be recorded to be handled with. We try to provide the bespoke private network with the relevant entities that are involved and they should be able to provide peers. If this is not possible because of how fabric is modular, we can come with alternative scenarios. But we are running out of time to discuss with all this. Thank you for joining our session. Please feel free to get in touch with us and organize additional calls to address further questions or if you have any ideas for such applications or provide feedback, we are happy to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.


Welcome, I'm Mark Uptegrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. While the LBJ Presidential Library is close to the public in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're pleased to continue to bring you thoughtful, inspiring conversations through our virtual series. On behalf of our co-host, Humanities Texas, welcome to an evening with best-selling author Walter Isaacson. Walter is a professor of history at Tulane University, and has served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, Chairman of CNN, and Editor of Time Magazine. He is the best-selling author of biographies on Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger. This evening, we'll be exploring his newest book, The Codebreaker, Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Now, please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson, welcome. We are delighted. I've been trying to get you to the LBJ Library for years. This is the next best thing, but welcome. We're delighted to have you. Hey, I can't wait to get over there. I'm down in New Orleans. It's not too far away. And I love the LBJ Library. Well, count on an invitation to come to the actual edifice, Walter, when we reopen. But it's wonderful to see you, albeit virtually. And congratulations on the publication of The Codebreaker. It is a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to talking with you about it. But I want to talk about the subtitle, which is Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. We'll talk about the very light subject of the Future of the Human Race in a moment, but let's start with Jennifer Doudna and Gene Editing. How does one relate to another? Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize last October, did so for creating a tool that will edit our genes. And what it's called is CRISPR. And it's based on a technology that, you know, bacteria, they've been using it for a billion years. And what bacteria do is they have clustered, repeated sequences, hence the name CRISPR, in their DNA that record every time a virus attacks them. And then if the virus attacks again, the CRISPR system has a scissors called an enzyme that can chop it up. Now, this is of course very useful in this age when we're being attacked by virus pandemics, but what Jennifer Doudna and her partner, Emanuel Schopenche, figured out is how do you take this system that bacteria have and make it into a tool that can edit our own DNA at whatever location, whatever gene we pick that we want edited, this CRISPR tool can do it. It can also be used to fight cancer, it can be used to fight viruses. So it's going to transform medicine and for that matter the human race. So let's talk about Jennifer Doudna, talk a little bit, Walter, about her background and how it led her to become this breakthrough chemist. Yeah, she was born and raised in Hawaii and she was sort of an outsider because she was in a small village called Ila Hawaii and all the other students were Polynesian, but she was a tall, blonde, lanky girl from the mainland. And so she felt like a bit of an outsider, which is the way a lot of great creative people always look at life from both the inside and the outside. And when she was in the sixth grade, her dad left on her bed a book called The Double Helix. I'm sure, Mark, you remembered it was James Watson's wonderful book about how he and Francis Crick using some images by Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. And Jennifer Doudna read it as a young girl, noticed the character of Rosalind Franklin and said, wow, women can become scientists. And so she decided she wanted to become a scientist, but her guidance counselor at school said, no, no, no girls don't do science. Well, she persisted. It made her more all the more want to become a scientist. So she becomes a scientist and she specializes in RNA, which is, you know, the brother or sister of DNA, the sibling of DNA, but it's a molecule that actually does work. You know, DNA just sits there in the nucleus of our cell not really doing anything except for guarding our genetic code whereas the RNA actually takes that code and makes proteins. And it turns out to be a much more useful molecule. That's why we use it to make the vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna have developed that are saving us from coronavirus. And that's why Jennifer also used it to make this tool that can add genes. I want to talk about her background for one second and go back to what you said about her feeling like an outsider. You write that most creative people, including people I have chronicled, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs grew up feeling alienated from their surroundings. Jennifer Daubler, as you said, is no exception. How does that feeling of alienation contribute to the creativity and innovation of these iconic figures?  And as a young kid, he moves from the village of Vinci to Florence and they embrace him. The Medici family think that he's the most talented kid they've seen, but it also allowed him, but it allowed Jennifer Daubler, Steve Jobs, who was adopted as a child and felt out of place in the home in which he was raised. It makes you question, think out of the box, say, what is my role in this cosmos? How do I fit in? And all of the people I write about want to learn everything you can possibly know about almost any subject, including how do we fit in? I want to go back to Jean editing in a moment, but more broadly, you write in the book's introduction, the invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten the transition in the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from discovery, beginning just over a century ago of the three fundamental kernels of our existence, the atom, the bit and the gene. Talk about these revolutions and how they have contributed to human history. Well, as you say, the atom, the bit and the gene, they're just fundamental kernels. And they're all discovered sort of around the beginning of the 20th century, and each sparks its own revolution. The first half of the 20th century was a revolution in physics based on the papers of Albert Einstein in 1905 and the notion of the atom and its particles. And from that, you get everything from atomic bombs to space travel to semiconductors. And I wrote about that in my Einstein book, but the second great revolution of our time begins around the 1950s with the invention of the internet, the computer and the microchip, all based on the notion of bits, which means binary digits, on-off digits. And it turns out you can encode all information, whether it be pictures or sounds or words or numbers, in bits and you can manipulate them in circuits with on-off switches. That leads to the digital revolution and that's what my Steve Jobs book was about and the book The Innovators was about. Well, around the year 2000, we finally finished sequencing the human gene, a genome. In other words, all the three billion latter pairs in our DNA. And that didn't actually get us very far. It just showed us where our genes were. But beginning with that, we learned how to rewrite some of those genes and that's what my book is about. It's about using tools such as CRISPR to be able to rewrite our genes so that we can do things like fight genetic diseases, fend off coronaviruses or other viruses or for that matter, bacteria or any infection, fend off cancers. All of these things will be the most consequential invention of the first half of the 21st century and also the deepest moral question, which is when should we edit our genes? When should we design our children to have genes that we would prefer? These are gonna be really tough questions and they're not, the science isn't difficult but thinking through the moral implications is difficult, which is why I want people to understand it. You can go on this journey of discovery with me and Jennifer Doudin and the other wonderful characters in the book and it'll be very clear how all this works and then the rest of us then can then discuss, all right, now, what do we do with this technology? Talk about the process by which CRISPR was developed, Walter, what does that look like? Well, you know, great discoveries are usually based on curiosity, curiosity about basic science and basic science often leads in unexpected ways to inventions and technologies. So CRISPR begins generally, you could start with the story of a Spanish graduate student named Francisco Mojica who is there in Alcheante, Spain on the Mediterranean coast and he's sequencing microorganisms like archaea and bacteria that live in very salty ponds and in weird places. And he notices that they have clustered repeated segments in their DNA. He says, what's this all about? And then he finally figures out that maybe it's from fighting off viruses that have attacked them. He names them CRISPR. He starts working with two people at a yogurt company, Dinesco, why? Because yogurt and cheese companies, their big product is these starter cultures of bacteria that make the yogurt, make the cheese, but they often get attacked by viruses. So the people there were saying, all right, let's look at how they fend off viruses. Anyway, this is a wonderful story of all this basic curiosity, but even as the journey begins, we're starting to see useful things like, hey, we can protect the yogurt better. And then eventually when Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Sharpentay and Julian Banfield and then Feng Zhang at MIT and Harvard get involved, they say, here's how we adapt it to become a tool to edit our genes or detect coronaviruses. So what I'm hearing here is it takes a village and you write in the book that the discovery of CRISPR was really around a team and that science is essentially a team sport, but you also assert that it helps to be fiercely competitive, stubborn and inquisitive. It's just team sport and creativity is a collaborative effort, but it's not all just about great groups of people doing things. I'm always amazed at the difference that individuals can make. People like Jennifer Doudna who are persistent and stubborn and push and get things done. So when you write history and when you write an adventure story like this, you have to both weave in all of the really interesting people like George George and Feng Zhang and Julian Banfield and Emmanuel Sharpentay who are part of this process of creating CRISPR, but you also wanna show that individuals can, put their finger on the surface of history and it ripples. How does a business play a role in all this? You have basic science, you have academics, you have government that funds these things, but you also have business and business is an incredibly key part of it. Way back in 1945, the government science advisor Vannevar Bush talked about how he had to have a partnership between government-based and funded basic research, academics and business. And he understood what he was talking about. He had founded Raytheon. He had been Dean of Engineering at MIT and then he helped oversee science like the Manhattan Project and World War II. So America benefits from having this three-legged stool of which business is an important part. As I said, it's the Denisco food-making company based in France and in Madison, Wisconsin that helped figure out, okay, not only what is CRISPR, I mean, what is it supposed to do in bacteria, but then how do we make it a tool? And then secondly, when Jennifer Doudna discovers how to make this gene editing technique, and so does Emmanuel Sharpenther and so does Feng Zhang, they form companies, including Mammoth Biosciences which Jennifer Doudna formed and Sherlock Biosciences which Feng Zhang formed that are now creating these home test kits we could use in 10 minutes to see if we have the coronavirus. So in the end, we see that if you wanna make something practical, and by the way, if you wanna fund basic research, people like me, I believe in patents and an electoral property and business, because that's the way things move from bench to bedside. And by that I mean the lab bench where some genius can seize it to the bedside where it gets applied to a patient. One of the purposes of the book you write is to convey the importance of basic science, meaning the quest, you mentioned this earlier, that are curiosity driven rather than application oriented. What do you mean by that? I think that sometimes we say, well, let's pursue this question just to be useful, we're gonna find some tool, it's gonna have some application, and that's great, you wanna do that. But most great scientific advances just out of curiosity driven research that then after we've discovered something based on pure curiosity, we say, oh, I get it, that can have an application. People in the 1930s and early 1940s at universities around America and Europe, Bell Labs and other places, are trying to figure out how do electrons dance on the surface of semiconductor material? Einstein even went to Bell Labs and Einstein's theories of quantum mechanics go into exactly how do things work on the surface state of semiconductor materials? That's just basic curiosity, you know what that was gonna lead to. Well, it leads to the transistor which becomes the microchip, which becomes the engine of the digital revolution. So I think that if we abandon research that's just pure curiosity driven, we're gonna fail to have the seed corn that will grow into technologies in the future. So how do you nurture that, Walter? Let me put it another way. Are we doing a good job of nurturing that in our businesses and in our universities? Yes, I think America does a great job of research and development at universities in particular, partly because of Vannevar Bush and others in World War II who said, instead of government building its own labs, the way it did for the atom bomb with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, instead, let's have government fund basic research at great research universities. University of Texas is really, really high on the list of places that gets government grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA, which is a lot of funding for pure basic research. And we do that very well. For example, a lot of basic research was done on RNA without people knowing what it was going to lead to. And eventually at the University of Pennsylvania, you have a couple of people, Professor Carrico, she discovers I can take the RNA that serves as a messenger telling ourselves what proteins to build and I can tweak it to tell ourselves to build other types of protein. And I can make sure I can configure it in a way that our body's not going to reject it. That was a while back. That was just sort of pure research. But then a few years ago, a company named Madonna decides, all right, I'm going to buy the rights to that discovery and I'm going to see if I can make drugs and vaccines. And thus you get the mRNA vaccine, the messenger RNA vaccine. So this is what I mean. And we do it well in this country. Now, sometimes a couple of political things happen.  Sometimes we just cut back on research and science. We say, we got to cut the budget, let's cut the National Science Foundation. I mean, we can do without studying RNA and bacteria or let's cut the National Institutes of Health. Nobody's really saying that right now in the middle of a coronavirus crisis. Nobody's saying, let's cut Francis Collins and Tony Fauci's budget. But a few years ago, people were saying that. And sometimes what they say, and everybody from Harry Truman to Newt Gingrich to the Senate does not partisan, they'll say, let's not focus on basic research. Let's just focus on practical applications. And that's understandable. They'll make fun of something in the science budget like studying how bubble bees do something or how bacteria do something. But when we make those cuts, we sacrifice, as I said, the seed corn. That will be the discoveries that will lead to future technology. I was on the Director's Council of the National Institutes of Health and I saw some of the cutback and it meant a lot of research projects and universities weren't getting funded, especially by young researchers. And by the way, the ones at University of Pennsylvania studying messenger RNA, Professor Carrico and others had trouble getting funding. Well, I tell you, if that research had been totally cut, we'd be in a pickle right now.  Do you have a favorite story within the broader story that you're telling in the code breaker about gene editing? Well, one important story is, this is an amazingly useful technology to be able to help the health of our species. But one day Jennifer Doudna had a nightmare, she told me. And the nightmare was somebody wanted to learn about the technology. So she goes in the room to meet this person and the person looks up and it's Adolf Hitler. And she says, okay, this could fall into the wrong hands. People could use gene editing to create what they might think is a master race or even we well-intentioned humans could say, oh, let's modify our children. I want my kid to be taller or have more muscle mass or maybe better memory and things like that. And for her, it became a question of, how do we wrestle with these moral questions? She gathered scientists, but it's not just up to the scientists. She gathered people, everybody from politicians to just regular people to talk about, this is a good technology. We really want it because our kids or our family suffer from Alzheimer's or sickle cell or cystic fibrosis. But we also want to have some guardrails. So people aren't just paying money to enhance their children in ways that might not be good for the species or we're not editing out the diversity of our species. So that's one of my favorite stories because it just shows a scientist pivoting and saying, let me consider the moral implications. Another favorite story is the one the book leads with and then is near the end, which is exactly a year ago, March, 2020. Jennifer Doudna takes her only child, a 17-year-old boy named Andy, to the train to go compete in a robot competition, building competition in Fresno, California. She wakes up in the middle of the night. She knows Berkeley is about to close because of the coronavirus that's spreading. She wakes up her husband, they jump in the car, find an all-night gas station and go pick up Andy at this camp, this robot competition. He's an only child, as I said, so he was really unhappy to see his parents if he's embarrassed. But as they were driving away, they get a text that says robot competition canceled, all kids are supposed to go home. And that's when she knew she should turn her attention with all the things she had been doing with CRISPR and gene editing, said, okay, now let's turn our attention to fighting this pandemic. And so that to me shows two pivot points where a really interesting person says, I've done this and you have to pivot to doing that. I want to go back to the moral and ethical implications of gene editing. We write that figuring out if and when to edit our genes will become one of the most consequential questions of the 21st century. There are immense implications in all that. And you further quote James Watson who discovered the double helix with Francis Crick as saying, if scientists don't play God, who will? So what role does science play in all this and how do they play God but do so in a benevolent and responsible manner? Well, I answer James Watson's question not with scientists are the ones who are supposed to play God. My answer is nobody's supposed to play God but when it comes to determining how we're going to use this technology it's not up to just the scientists and it's not up to just the politicians. It's going to be up to all of us. We're going to have to do it and by we, I mean, you Mark and me because it's a social moral question we're all going to have to wrestle with which is should we allow it to fight off bad deadly genetic diseases? Of course we should. Should we edit our children so that our human race will no longer be susceptible to certain viruses? Well, that sounds like science fiction but in 2018 the Chinese scientists did that edited twin embryos becomes twin girls so they wouldn't be susceptible to HIV the virus that causes AIDS. Well, that was pretty horrible at scene people, you know, wave their hands and said this is, you know, we're not ready for this but now having gone through this virus pandemic we have to ask that question. If we could edit our species so that we were less susceptible to viruses and we can do it safely, should we? Now, I don't answer all these questions in the book if you're going to skip to the last chapter and say tell me, where's the answer sheet? No, I say we've got to walk hand in hand and I do some case studies, some thought experiments and I tell you and I hope I guide the reader saying here's where I come out. First of all, let's only do it if it's medically necessary let's not try to enhance our species before we fix things that are medically necessary and let's try to do it in patients who can give consent before we try to do it in embryos that'll be inheritable at it. But these are questions that you and I are just as good as answering as the scientists are or the politicians are but before we answer that I want you to go on this journey of discovery with me so that you can understand what the questions are.  I come out joyful and celebratory at the things we are going to be able to do to fight things like coronavirus pandemics to eliminate horrible diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Heimington's, multiple sclerosis. And I come out of it hopeful about ways that we can make ourselves safer as a species maybe prevent even things like Alzheimer's or memory loss from occurring in the next few decades. But having said that, I also see the potential for misuse gets into the wrong hand. If somebody decides to create a mosquito that's a super mosquito in a spreader, hey, that can be that or even as Vladimir Putin has said, we could use CRISPR, he said this to a youth group. We could use CRISPR to create super soldiers who don't feel pain and are unaffected by radiation. Well, we got to have some international rules of the road about how we use these things. So how do you regulate? What's the regulatory body by which you monitor this and ensure that there isn't somebody rogue who develops something along the lines of what Vladimir Putin was proposing? Well, first of all, we can't sort of say we should only do it if we can absolutely assure that it'll never, no rogue person will ever do it. I mean, all throughout everything we do, we try to make rules and regulations even though some things will fall between the cracks or slip through. We have laws against shoplifting and laws against trafficking and elephant tusks or sex trafficking or everything else. And yeah, some, a few bad actors may do it, but we're able to keep it under control if all of us as a society say, this is something we don't wanna have happen. People who do it are outlawed. People who brag about doing it are shamed, shamed, we can try to have social and legal and international sanctions. Specifically, all medical procedures in the US are pretty much regulated by the FDA. You can get off-label vaccines. You can probably go to, you know, different countries and try to get, but generally most of the medicine, most procedures we use come from the FDA. Likewise, around the world, there are FDAs in every different country. There's also science foundations in each other countries and Royal Academies of Science and National Academy of Science. Jennifer Douda enlisted all of these international scientific and regulatory societies, including those in China, Russia, Europe, United States, come together every six months or so in a summit to try to figure this out. And that includes work by the World Health Organization. So Mark, I can assure you will ever have regulations that nobody will ever violate. But I think like almost anything, if we have the will to, we can keep it under control and say let's use it for good, but let's try to prevent people from using it for things we decide, we, meaning us, decide are not moral uses of this technology. You mentioned, Walter, that Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Emmanuel Charpentier, another renowned scientist who you mentioned earlier. But until 2020, I'm shocked to find out in your penultimate chapter that until 2020, only five women had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry beginning with Marie Curie in 1911. So of the 184 honorees, only five or less than 3% were women. Does Jennifer Douda's enormous success in this area change things for women in the sciences? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I hope so. She in sixth grade read that book, The Double Helix, noticed Rosalind Franklin, who by the way, died before the Nobel Prize was given and was never given the prize for DNA. It goes to Watson and Crick, but she has a role model and that's Rosalind Franklin. I hope a new generation, not only of the readers listening to this podcast, but their kids, when they put something on their bed for their kids to read, will read books like this. And whether it's a daughter reading the book or a son reading the book, they'll say, yeah, that's a role model. That's somebody I want to follow. When Jennifer Douda was told by her school guidance counselor, girls don't do science. The great refutation now is biographies like the one I've done, but more importantly, Nobel Prizes that say, you know what? We can all do science. The CRISPR was a breakthrough, obviously, in science, but we live in a country where science is routinely questioned. We've seen that in the last year with COVID and global warming. So how can scientists engender the trust of Americans in science itself? Well, that's another reason I wrote this book because I think the best way to engender trust in science is to make it understandable. And we can all walk along on a journey of discovery with people who are engaged in science because if something is mystifying then it becomes a bit scary. But if you understand, okay, this is how vaccines work. And if you understand, this is how they develop these technologies, then boom, you're going to feel more comfortable with it. I think we have gone through a very bad period where people have lost faith in all sorts of experts or institutions and whatever. And they've also, for some reason, reduced their reliance or faith in science. I think that the coronavirus pandemic will change that because there was great skepticism about vaccines. But whoa, this is a miracle that within a year we got vaccines that are beating back this pandemic. You're watching it in Texas, I'm watching it in Louisiana. Boom, I've been vaccinated.  But 80, 90% of the people will say, hey, okay, I've now decided I want that vaccine. So I think coming out of the coronavirus pandemic and many other things and reading, I hope, books like the book I've written, people say, you know what, nature is beautiful and science is beautiful. I had the great pleasure of working with you at Time Magazine in the latter part of the 20th century. And you embarked on a project as editor of Time Magazine in which you endeavored to name the 100 most important people of the 20th century. It became the Time 100, which has become a time franchise. I've got this book, Walter, another book that you did with Dan Rather in this case, in which you profile those 100 people. But you had to come to the decision about who was the most important person of the 20th century. And you arrived at Albert Einstein for the very reasons you suggested earlier because the atom was such an important development in the 20th century. But we've only gone through a fifth of the 21st century, Walter. If you were to name the most important person of the 21st century to this point, who would it be? You know, we're always tempted to pull a politician out of a hat or a leader and you work at the LBJ library.  We're talking about LBJ and how consequential he was. Michael Eric Dyson was at dinner. We're talking about the 64 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, how one person can be that consequential. And politicians tend to be very consequential.  But in the end, even more important than Napoleon, let's say, you'd probably say Charles Darwin. He put us on a path that we understand things. So I think sometimes science is not recognized and technology is not recognized at the moment it happens as being so consequential.  So if you remember when you and I were at Time Magazine, whether it was the person of the year or the person of the century, I often shied away from the obvious politician. And we picked Andy Grove, for example, as a person of the year one year. David Ho. David Ho, who did the AIDS cocktail. But Andy Grove was a businessman and an engineer and a scientist who created Intel into the world's great corporation. And the creation of ever more powerful microchips changed our world a lot more than most political leaders do. So I always keep one eye to it. And that's why I picked Jennifer Doudna. She may not be the person of the century, 80 years from now, but people, somebody like her, who invents ways to edit our genes and fight off viruses, will say, well, that person had a bigger impact than even Donald Trump or Joseph Biden. I wanna quote you, you mentioned your last chapter and how you sum up the book and science in general. And you write, I now see the promise of CRISPR more than the peril. But as you look at our future, what gives you the greatest pause? The greatest pause? All of our technologies can be used for good or bad. It takes not only moral processing power, but social will to do it. We talked at the beginning of this discussion about Einstein. Now he comes up with a basic theory. And we all know it, E equals MC squared. And from basic science, you get many steps in between an atom bomb. Now he thought that that was going to be a technology that would help defy Hitler. That's why he writes a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, explaining how it could work. But after the bomb has dropped, he creates a union of concerned scientists and others to say, how do we put this genie back in the bottle? How do we stop the spread of nuclear weapons? And it took enormous will that we still each year have to exert to try to stop the proliferation of atomic weapons. Likewise, people in the digital revolution, they created all sorts of things. Amazon being one, mostly good, but there's a peril in what Amazon can do to Main Street, what it can do to business. Likewise, this Facebook and Twitter, they connect us.  And so too with the life sciences technology for all the promise of anything from atomic power to connecting the world through social networks to creating new drugs and gene edits through the life sciences, there's an enormous promise, but it's only as good or as bad as we are. And it's only as good or as bad as we understand the technology and decide the uses of it. I want people to understand the promise of quicker and gene editing. I want them to understand and marvel at the simplicity and beauty of the science and the adventure that God is here, but that way they can understand better. All right, what's the peril that we're gonna also try to prevent? We wanna do it before the atom bomb has dropped, so to speak, or before we have elections that are hacked by social networks. Let's try to get this one where we understand it before we unleash it. Well, so let me talk about another scientific issue which represents an existential crisis which is global warming. Can, do we have the tools scientifically and do we have the will as a species to fend off global warming? Yeah, I think climate change has got to be addressed on multiple fronts and that includes technology. And I think we have to be open to a lot of technology. For example, I worry about climate change but some of the people I know on the far left have a deep disagreement with because I believe nuclear energy is something we have to develop into a safe source of energy. I look at what Bill Gates is doing with smaller nuclear plants and ones that don't have high pressure or water pressure so they can't explode that we purpose the material so we don't have the waste product. We're pretty good with technologies. We got to figure out ways to make nuclear better. Just down in Texas, you've had the debate over this but we have to have a lot better battery technology because every now and then we're gonna have cold snaps and wind storms and things where natural gas pipelines are gonna freeze and wind turbines aren't gonna be working quite as well. And so creating battery storage technologies are huge. Also just carbon capture is an important thing. We can figure out ways to do direct air capture of carbon but these I work with Halliburton Labs, a great Texas company with a great clean energy and new energy type lab. And Halliburton Labs is looking at everything from batteries and nuclear to whatever and keeping an open mind. That's what we have to do as well as of course all reducing our carbon footprint, all figuring out ways that solar and wind and renewables can be more of the mix but not getting ideological about it.  We have to be more like the scientists in a way and say, let's not get into some ideological corner and start having strong opinions about solar energy or nuclear energy or gas mileage or everything else, just because it's ideological. Let's figure out all the things that could work. Let's innovate and let's not have knee jerk ideological reactions to everything. Then of course we can solve climate change. Walter, what will you turn your attention to next? What will your next book be about? I don't know, I really don't. This book is published this month in March. I always give myself five or six months to chew on things. They're really interesting people in the world today including Bill Gates we mentioned and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos we mentioned. There are people in history that are interesting to me. You mentioned Madame Curie, not only wins a Nobel in chemistry but also in physics. So I think they're very interesting people. Louis Armstrong in my hometown of New Orleans, I've always wanted to crack the code there. But give me six months, Mark. How do you ultimately choose, Walter? What is that decision process look like? Oh, I throw a whole lot of things up in the air.  Say, what do you think of this? And they'll say, and all of them said, Jennifer Doudna, who's she? And I said, let me do her, you'll find out. Jennifer Doudna will be a whole lot more famous despite the fact that she's already won the Nobel after this book, Walter. And it's a testament to your great credibility as an author. The book is the code breaker. Our guest is the great Walter Isaacson, my friend, Walter. Thank you so much for being here today. And thank you, Mark. And thank you for being my friend. Delighted to see you.


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