President Paulson, members in the faculty and the student body, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot refrain from calling your attention, especially those who missed the first session in the chapel, in a few rather unusual and celebratory words, on the earth speaker. He admonished all of us, especially the younger members of this audience, and listened with care and concentration. Open your minds for once, as he said, but keep your mind open to opinion as opposed to knowledge, and so on. I think that is extremely important because, as I have taught in young people and others, I mean that they do not yet know a tremendous amount, about the subject that we discuss today and tomorrow. They are in awe and fear rather than wonder, and therefore, because they have a tremendous responsibility and a tremendous opportunity in a and tomorrow. Enorm judgments. It is especially wise of our first speaker to ask everyone of us, young or old, and listen when more care, perhaps, you know, listen to anything here or there. The subject is that important. It is my privilege to introduce the first formal lecture of this first Nobel Symbolium. He is Dr. Selman Reed, Professor of Zoology at the University of Minnesota, and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics. Professor Reed is a New Englander by birth, a name of Vermont. He is measured by years and by the scope and vigor of his activities, I should say vigor, of his activities. He is still a young man. At the right U.S. U. of Montpellier High School, he went to Dartmouth, from which he right U.N. in 1932 with others called Lottner. Then he went to Farmer on his master's degree in 1933 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1935. And after that, 30 years ago, he began his career as a teacher and as a geneticist.  Four years first at McGill University as a humble lecturer in genetics. Then back to Harvard as a assistant professor of biology, two years before and two years after the war. The M.M.V. guy that Dr. Reed kindly gave me at my request says nothing about the years 1942 and 1945, but I can tell you that he spent those three years in the Navy. Since 1947, that is, for the past 18 years, he has been at the University of Minnesota. When he seemed to be holding the University of Ireland in length while living in St. Paul, perhaps not a bad idea. At the University, first assistant professor and then old professor of zoology, although I'm not sure what an old professor is all of, and then director of the, as I say, of genetics, human genetics. He's an author, an investigator, an executive of numerous scientific societies in learning the greatest ones in his field and the nation as well as in the state. He has long been at the top of his profession. He's been honored by many state and national organizations. He's been the first one in the recipient of many research grants. And I understand his hobbies and his sport, and one sentence I don't quite understand when it looked at me is that it ran fully with the sex life of houseplants, which might be interesting. His art with some life seemed to me an emanation to understand and explain human behavior. But it's definitely of anything more important for the peace and welfare of the world for all of us to understand the behavior of ourselves in relation to ourselves and everyone else. What are the mental injunctions of the art and the art have been? Know myself, and in my own superior self, be true. With the help and guidance of Professor Reed and men like him, we may someday, oh well, not solve a responsibility for Professor Reed. I'm in trouble already with this device, but I guess we'll be able to solve the problem. Thank you, President Carlson, Dr. Hinch, the other nobel laureates, and my wife, Dr. Reed, for accompanying me, and all 800 participants each and every one. Every time that I visit Gustavus, I fall more in love with it, and it is a pleasure to be here today. My assignment is to present the essence of the science of human genetics so that the subsequent speakers will not have to pause to explain the simple facts of heredity basic to their discussions. I will spare you the detailed didactic description which my hundreds of beginning genetic students have endured, because those invited to this symposium have had some previous acquaintance with genetics and realized that the dominant gene is not made of red chalk and the recessive of green. What I propose to do is to describe one or more examples of the most important genetic mechanisms in terms of reproductive fitness and eugenic significance. Gregor Mendel demonstrated the behavior of dominant and recessive traits without ever having heard of a chromosome. He realized that each offspring receives half of its heredity from its father and the other half from its mother. He could see that heredity depended upon simple manipulations of pairs of traits and was thus a function of the number two. The recent recognition of human genetics as an important discipline has been due in large part to the impact of the beautiful pictures of human chromosomes which are a proof of the reality of the Mendelian laws of heredity in man. Most every physician since 1900 has known that Huntington's career behaves as a Mendelian dominant trait. This means that one member of a pair of an affected person's chromosomes has the gene on it which disturbs the person's physiology in such a way that the person behaves in a psychotic fashion, decreases in intelligence, and loses motor control of the muscles. The grimacing and spectacular muscular incoordination resulted in the branding of the Korea as a witch in colonial days, but the psychological disturbances due to this gene are more harmful to the patient than the muscular malfunctions. The most interesting of the early papers on Huntington's career to me is Bulletin 17 of the Eugenics Record Office by C.B. Davenport and Elizabeth B. Munsey M.D. This study was published in 1916. It traces the genealogies of the descendants of the original Korean patients who came to Long Island and to Massachusetts. There were about six of the original persons with Huntington's career who came during the 17th century and with their descendants accounted for the 962 Koreacs identified by Davenport and Munsey in 1916 either as living patients or ones for whom records of their disease had been preserved. It is quite clear that this dominant gene has had remarkable fitness even though the patient dies a horrible death. The reason for the spread of this deleterious gene is that it does not usually incapacitate the patient until after the child bearing period is over. The Eugenics Record Office Bulletin includes a fascinating map which shows the migration of the dominant gene for Huntington's career from the east to the west coast with steps of one generation or more on the way. It is important to remember that in past generations Korean and normal persons could expect to have significantly more children than were necessary for mere self-replacement. This permitted a rapid spread of the gene for Huntington's career as the country grew. Furthermore, if the gene should have a disproportionately large representation in the lower socioeconomic groups we could expect it to have a higher frequency than would otherwise be the case because of the higher reproductive rates of the lower socioeconomic groups. These considerations do not indicate that someday everyone will have Huntington's career. They merely suggest why the gene persists in some individual family lines for at least 15 generations as in Davenport's material and why its frequency is far above the replacement value due to new mutations. The frequency of the gene for Huntington's career in the lower peninsula of Michigan has been estimated by T.E. Reed and Chandler to be about 1 per 10,000 persons. T.E. Reed and James Neal estimated the mutation rate for this gene to be about 5 times 10 to the minus 6 mutations per locus per generation and 5 per million. This means that not more than one case in 10 results from a new mutation while the other 9 out of 10 were transmitted from an affected parent in each case. The gene for Huntington's career is rare in the population but it is of great interest as a direct challenge to practical eugenics. In counseling young persons who have a 50% risk of having this gene in each of their cells I do not have the conviction to urge them to refrain from having any children. Instead I equivocate and suggest that the risks are so great that they should expect to be satisfied with a small family. The reason for this of course is that half of these individuals will not have the gene for the disease and will not have any affected offspring. But if we cannot bring ourselves to control this most insidious of genes we need not expect society to attempt to control less terrifying traits. The heredity of a dominant trait such as Huntington's career is simple. A patient passes the dominant gene to half his offspring who eventually develop the disease. The other half of the children receives a normal gene partner from the affected parent and as they got the normal gene only they will have only normal children. The genetic basis for Huntington's career is simple but we still have come to no decision as to how to prevent the transmission of this gene which every sensible person would consider to be an absolutely undesirable gene. We must move on to the recessive type of inheritance. We remember that a person's chromosomes come in pairs one member of each pair from the person's father and the other from his mother. If two genes at the same place on the chromosome pair are chemically different one of them may produce a result that you can see such as Korea and is therefore considered to be a dominant gene. The other member of the gene pair may not give a visible effect and because it is not evident in the person even though present it is called a recessive. If two people marry who both carry the same recessive gene at the same geographic position on the chromosome one quarter of their children would be expected to have this recessive gene on both members of their appropriate pair of chromosomes. When the recessive gene is present on both members of the chromosome pair its effects will no longer be concealed as it was in the carrier person but will express itself and result in a trait such as albinism. Half of the children of the carrier parents will be carriers also while one quarter of the children will not have the albino gene present on their chromosomes at all nor transmit it to future generations. The albino child usually is produced by normal but carrier parents while one out of four children from two carrier parents will be albinos. Most marriages are between persons without the albino gene so that in Caucasian populations we find that only about one birth in 20,000 is an albino. You may be astonished to learn that while only one person in 20,000 is an albino one person in every 70 is an unwitting carrier of the recessive gene for albinism. The picture is very different among some tribes of Indians of Central America and Southwestern United States where about one in 200 persons is an albino and one in eight is a carrier. The reader is referred to the paper of Keeler in 1964 and that of Wolf and Grant in 1962 for the details of the gene frequencies which are remarkably similar for the affected tribes in Panama and in Arizona. We do not know why these Indian tribes differ so sharply from other Indians and Caucasians in their astonishingly high frequency of albinism. However, it is impossible to prevent me from speculating as follows. First, the Panama and Arizona Indians must have had some ancestors in common many centuries ago. Some one of these founding fathers must have had a mutation to the gene for albinism which has been transmitted to his descendants perhaps being lost in some lines of descent but becoming well established in others as a result of genetic drift. Genetic drift is the process by which a gene can get a foothold as a result of random sampling in numerically small populations. Even a deleterious gene such as albinism with a fitness of perhaps only 50% could conceivably become frequent as a result of genetic drift alone. Second speculation, it is fairly certain that metastases from skin cancers and failure to find mates because of the albinism itself cut the reproductive fitness of the albino very significantly. However, it is possible that the normal carrier of this particular gene for albinism may have a slight reproductive advantage over the normal person who is not a carrier. Wolf and Grant produced the arithmetic to show that if the reproductive success of the albino is only 50% of that of the normal carrier and the success of the normal who is not a carrier is 96.2% of that of the carriers, then there would continue to be one albino in every 200 persons indefinitely. What we are saying is that if the normal carrier of the gene for albinism has a slight reproductive superiority over the non-carrier, the continuing production of albinos will be assured. Presumably this is also the case for the albino gene in Caucasians where we must choose between an unreasonably high mutation rate or a small reproductive advantage of the carrier over the non-carrier in order to explain the frequency of this deleterious gene. The carrier of the albino gene in Caucasian groups does not have as great a relative advantage as does the carrier in the Indian tribes. This may be related to the considerably greater identity of the chromosomes in the small inbred Indian tribes compared with the Caucasian populations. However, this is sufficient speculation about albinism for now. A second recessive gene, which I'll bring to your attention, is that for fibrocystic disease of the pancreas. I was among the first to show that this disease behaves as a good Mendelian recessive in 1949. With this disease, one can detect the carriers in some proportion of the cases, though not in all cases. Some carriers excrete in their sweat excessive amounts of chlorides as do all the patients and thus may be identified. Fibrocystic disease is present at birth or appears during the childhood years. It is an unusually pernicious disease because it keeps the child in the hospital about half of the time. The child was expected to die of the disease in the past, but now he often survives as the result of improved and continuous medical management. Only the very wealthy could afford the tremendous expense involved so that in almost all cases the cost is borne by society, via Blue Cross or other community resources. The disease is also relatively frequent, being present in as many as one per thousand of Caucasian births. The financial burden for each case to society is so tremendous that it is legitimate to bring it to your attention. The damage from the psychological trauma to the family and patient is of even greater concern than the economic aspects of the trade. Fibrocystic disease was selected as an illustration of a recessive trade because it is one of the few of eugenic interest where some of the carriers could be identified with certainty in premarital tests. I would suggest that the simplest version of the SWET test be made available for all persons upon application for a marriage license. It is possible that two persons found to have abnormally high chloride values might decide not to marry. Legislation to this end does not seem very likely to appear, which indicates how little concern exists for the birthright of each child. Indeed, in Minnesota, there is no required premarital blood test which would reduce the incidence of syphilis and other diseases. Everyone is much concerned about the health of the 40 whooping cranes which live in Louisiana during the winter, but few people give much thought to the 80 children who are born each year in Minnesota with fibrocystic disease, at least from the point of view of prevention of the disease. There is always intense interest in cures for diseases, but not so much concern about their prevention. We have spent perhaps too much time on the sharply defined Mendelian recessives and dominance, which fortunately are rare traits. Our most frequent traits, such as height and intelligence, are different from the clearly Mendelian ones, such as the blood groups. One can be completely lacking in antigen B of the blood groups and have excellent health. On the other hand, no one could exist with zero height and a person with an IQ of zero would not be conscious. Thus, frequent traits are not all or none propositions, but are a variable in expression and, when measured, produce a skewed curve or often a normal curve. These quantitatively variable traits must depend for their expression upon more than one pair of genes and, therefore, are said to be polygenic traits. The most valuable kind of polygenic trait which we possess is that of intelligence, as measured by tests of any kind. Intelligence is not a single characteristic and we cannot measure all of it. Nonetheless, we can talk about intelligence in general terms and the word means about the same thing to me as it does to you. The clamor resulting from the nature-nurture misunderstanding seems to have obscured the obvious relationship between the evolution of the cerebral hemispheres and the basic intelligence of each species. The chimpanzee is smarter than the cat and the cat is brighter than the canary. The differences in intelligence between these animals are primarily genetic and, obviously, multifactorial and polygenic. One can view the astonishing expansion in size and efficiency of the forebrain from the modest organs of our insectivorous-like ancestors to the really incredible mental equipment of Homo sapiens man the wise. Let us speculate about man's breeding structure during the major part of the evolution of his intelligence. It is the consensus that agriculture began to develop sometime around 8,000 B.C. Man's survival and increase was greatly enhanced as a result. Previous to this time, there could have been only hunting and food-gathering groups with no established urban life. Each breeding group had to be relatively small with considerable inbreeding being inevitable. In such small groups, favorable new mutations for higher intelligence could have been established quickly and spread rapidly to other neighboring clans or tribes. Presumably, the evolution of higher intelligence, as distinguished from the lower intelligence of the apes, occurred during the last one million years or so, which would encompass about 35,000 generations, a little less than 30 years per generation. Let us now face the baffling problem of the rate of evolution of higher intelligence. There were no IQ tests for cavemen. However, there is little harm in assuming that our ancestors of 35,000 generations ago had an average IQ of at least 30 in present-day terms. If we assume that the average intelligence evolved from an IQ of about 30, equated to the present average of 100, there has been an increase of about 70 IQ points in about 35,000 generations. This is two-thousandths of an IQ point for the average rate of change per generation. This figure is an absurdity, in a sense, in that it is not realistic to think of any average rate of change persisting for 35,000 generations. However, this extremely small rate of change, whatever it might have been, does serve notice that even during the greatest spurts of man's evolution, the largest change in any one generation must have been modest indeed, only some small fraction of an IQ point. The world population has now reached 3 billion persons, and it will take only 15 years more to reach the fourth billion. It should be clear that no large genetic changes in the average intelligence of the people of the world are likely to occur in one generation. If striking fluctuations are reported, one should discount them to some extent. They are likely to result from bias due to the use of different psychological tests, different sampling methods, or other pitfalls rather than from fundamental environmental or genetic changes. Let me present an excellent example of the ease with which scientists can be mistaken. One of the main concerns of the eugenics movement depended upon the peculiar misconception that the mentally retarded more than replace their numbers while the most brilliant citizens fail to marry or have few children. If this were true, the average intelligence of the nation should be falling, and man would be losing the trait which makes him intellectually superior to all other species. The basis for the eugenic concern was the well-established fact that the larger the family of children, the lower the average intelligence of those children. One investigator had calculated that the intelligence of one area of England was dropping by about four IQ points per generation. This could not continue for long without ensuing disaster if it were true. It occurred to me in 1949 that the eugenic premise might be based on a seriously faulty design of the experimental method employed. All members of each generation with no children had been omitted from the studies of the past, which might lead to a large enough bias to vitiate the possible significance of the negative correlation between the number of children in the family and their average intelligence. My most helpful wife, Dr. Elizabeth Reed, and later a graduate student, James B. Higgins, and I set out to explore the problem. We found that it made a striking difference when the childless members of each generation were included. Our study profited from an extensive earlier project at the state school and hospital for the retarded at Faribault, Minnesota. The 1911 to 1918 work was an evaluation of the intelligence and social characteristics of about 500 patients and their relatives. We excluded some of the family groups because the patient was not actually retarded or because he was an epileptic. The 289 pro bands re-retained seemed to be genuine cases of mental retardation without major complications other than those due to their retardation. We studied the grandparents and all of their descendants in these 289 kinships, as well as the persons who married any of the descendants. This gave a population of 82,217 persons. The 289 pro bands were an insignificant fraction of this sample of humanity, which seemed to us to be practically identical with any random sample of this size which might have been selected by any other means. The results of interest here concerned the 1016 families where an IQ value was available for both the father and the mother and at least one child. These amounted to a total of 4,071 persons with known IQ values in this sub-sample. We are well aware that the value of a single intelligence quotient may be slight. However, in a large collection of IQ values the errors in the individual tests should largely cancel out. The sharp differences to be presented are certainly not the result of testing errors. These data provided the expected negative correlation of minus 0.3 between the number of children in the family and their intelligence similar to the findings of previous investigators. We found that the low average intelligence of the children in large families was anticipated by low average intelligence of their parents as measured when the parents were children themselves. Thus, the future mothers of the 370 families each with two children had an average IQ of 104.5 while the future mothers of the 5 families of 9 children averaged only 90. The intelligence quotients for both fathers and mothers showed a substantial negative correlation with the size of the families they produced some years later. This last point is very important and it had not been demonstrated quantitatively before. It is also worth noting that the important and sharp drop in the intelligence of the parents occurred in those who produced 6 or more children. It is also significant that only 39 out of the 1016 families or 3.8% had 6 or more children. This sounds as if the least intelligent were rapidly outbreeding the remainder of the population with the higher intelligence ratings. However, we have committed a gross statistical error by ignoring the fact that these parents had a sizable number of brothers and sisters who remain childless. Everyone in the parental generation must be included in the sample if it is to have any statistical validity. The previous workers had omitted one of the most important single classes of persons in the parental generation, the childless. The necessary innovation of including the childless brothers and sisters of our parents results in a striking change in the picture. This is because there is an extremely important differential intelligence in intelligence between the childless and those with children. There is also a difference between the married and the unmarried in the population.   This should not be interpreted as a reflection upon the intelligence of single persons.   The average IQ for the unmarried was only 80.46 while the IQ for the married was above 100. This is the kind of thing that was mentioned by Professor Cush this morning when he said that all of the speakers were semi-loom-fixed, which in my case is not true. I'm only schizophrenic. Our findings have been confirmed by Bajima, who studied the subsequent reproduction of a complete sample of children in the Kalamazoo public school system. The Minnesota and Michigan studies show clearly that if we take all the persons in one generation and arrange them according to their IQ values, then the average number of children for the persons with IQ values of 70 and below is only 2.09 while the average number of children for all persons with an IQ of 131 and above was 2.98. The retarded then produced only 2.909 children on the average when all of the childless ones were included while all of the persons with IQ's of 131 and above produced 2.98 children. Thus when the experimental design is correct, there is no excess of children produced by the mentally retarded. Indeed, the data which are given in detail in our forthcoming book gives some hope that the evolution of higher intelligence may be still continuing. It would be impossible to prove that there is any genetic change either for better or worse in intelligence because the rate of change for a single generation must be so terribly small in the world as a whole. So while we cannot prove that the IQ is rising, we can show clearly that the eugenic fears of the past that the IQ was falling rapidly were based upon an error in experimental design and therefore without scientific basis. Let us return to our central topic of the study of genetic changes in relatively stable physical environments. This subject is often called population genetics. We have seen that the genes for Huntington's Korea and Albinism persist for longer or shorter periods of time because these genes are transmitted from generation to generation with the need for only occasional new mutations to replace those lost because some of the affected persons fail to produce their quota of children. It is more important to know what is happening with a polygenic trait such as intelligence for many obvious reasons. Man has achieved his place as the species which has subdued all the others not because his muscles are more massive but because his brain is better. The record is clear that his intelligence has been improving at an extremely slow rate for millions of years. Presumably the genetic mechanisms for many of the small parts of intelligence are fundamentally the same as the mechanisms for Huntington's Korea and Albinism. The greater complications are due to the fact that many more pairs of genes and many more environmental factors are interacting to produce the trait we call intelligence than is the case with a mental disease such as Huntington's Korea. Perhaps the greatest boon resulting from the disciplines of evolution in population genetics is the realization that the ortho-selection for higher intelligence is probably continuing today much as it has in the past. Are there any ways in which this extraordinarily slow process can be accelerated? Could we cause a more rapid increase in the proportion of genes for higher intelligence with a corresponding decrease in the proportion of genes for lower intelligence? It is not necessary to accept any specific theory for the basis of intelligence to conclude that it can be improved. Those oriented toward the environmental philosophies expect improved education, the war on poverty, and other social actions to bring this about. All must agree that no large genetic change is likely to occur in the whole human species in one generation. The important question from the practical point of view is how to manipulate society so that the genetic gains and the environmental improvements will both be optimal. The aspirations of mankind are committed to this goal. The practical problems of how to guide our evolution for physical and mental improvement during the many generations of the scientific future are the greatest importance now. It is these problems that the succeeding speakers will struggle to resolve in their own ways as well as can be done at this stage of our knowledge. Thank you all. There isn't too much time, but if you want to... We have, I think, 15 minutes, and I sure will bring the questions. Dr. Reed will try to answer them. And he can answer. I won't try to answer. While we're waiting for the calculation of the reasoning, are there any questions from anyone here in front? It's obvious to me, Dr. Reed, that we can have society and develop markedly its interests and success in scientific investigation without changing the IQ very much. Is that right? With a world population of three to four billion people that no genetic change can proceed very fast because these changes must come about family by family, that is. Although every family in the world might change its ideas, perhaps, somewhat. The genetics and their behavior somewhat. The genetics would not change at a terrifically fast rate and we look back to the past to see that this must have been the case that the change was slow. If we have a rapid genetic change in some trait, this very likely is localized in some area and not worldwide. And presumably in the long run, we are concerned with the worldwide change rather than the smaller ones that might come about though naturally some smaller places would have to serve as models for the world as a whole. In other words, society can improve greatly without having any material change in its IQ. Sorry? Society can improve greatly without having any material change in its IQ. Yes, certainly the environmental opportunities are immediate whereas genetic improvement is in the future. I'll see which ones I can give a basic one. Is IQ completely a result of heredity or does the environment education and so on have a significant effect? Of course it does. There isn't any question about this and we have some ideas as to the amount of effect that the environment can cause under usual conditions. We should state our platitude or truism that no one could exist without both his heredity and environment. There would be utterly impossible to be present without either one. If you had the heredity of an amoeba, you would then be an amoeba and the environment of the amoeba would not be particularly conducive to getting a PhD. Here is a question which says please discuss pile up of deleterious genes as mentioned by Muller. This question implies that relaxed natural selection permits the increase of genes for specific abnormalities and it is quite possible that it does. On the other hand this change worldwide must be very slow indeed and presumably it would be very slow in most communities. There is a change quite certainly in the kind of natural selection that goes on. In the past it was much concerned with infectious agents and death due tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and so on. The infectious agents are now not as important by any means as the genetics of the circulatory system that is more than half of all deaths now result from a breakdown of the circulatory system which while the genetics for this are still foggy indeed must have an obvious relationship. It is again you can't have a person without the genetics for a circulatory system. I see I am getting too many of them here. Is there any evidence that man had more intelligence at one time in prehistoric areas? The difficulty we have of finding out what the IQ of the caveman was I of course don't know whether he did or whether he didn't but I assume that it was not greatly more than it present because the paleontological studies of skulls of previous man do not indicate any greater intelligence in the past than we have at present. Obviously I am not going to have time to answer all of these selecting ones that seem to be more interesting to me. I have a question here which will undoubtedly come up before we are finished with the sessions. Since the increased use of birth control it seems that those who practice this are of the more educated and higher socioeconomic groups. Do you think this could have an effect on the overall intelligence? I would think yes that it might but again the effect is going to be small in the long range and presumably we would assume that eventually every couple will have the understanding to control their reproduction and it will not longer be socioeconomic privilege. Is it true that at least one mutation occurs in every person? Yes I think it is probably quite true that more than one mutation occurs in every person. We don't know the precise value for this but to return to Mueller he has estimated that one out of every 10 eggs or one out of every 10 sperm has a new mutation in it. The figure may of course not be precise on the other hand within some order of magnitude it is correct. Here is a nice hot one. Is there any significant difference in IQ between any two races? Those of you who read the scientific literature realize that there has been a considerable amount of discussion at this point but in my opinion it is fair to say that we are not yet able to separate the results of heredity in an environment sufficiently so that we could come to any conclusion as to whether there was any difference in IQ between two races as we know that every race has the complete normal curve distribution of IQ values but there is also unquestionably a very important environmental difference in the habitats of various races. Could man be a mutation of the ape? That was one you were going to answer. No biologist assumes that man is a direct descendant of any ape as now known. The ancestors of both man and apes would go back to a common at some point but no one assumes that we are descendants of any ape at present time. The chimpanzee can count to seven which is better than some humans can do but that doesn't mean that we are a mutation from a chimpanzee. Do you actually think the so-called war on poverty is going to help our environment enough to produce a distinct genetic change? Well, this is a speculative question. I would not think that it would have any larger immediate effect on the genetics of the 180 million people in this country but it certainly could improve their IQ from a purely environmental way and this is the thing that we have been asked to do. Well, this is a very good question. The title of my talk is the mental process of genetic change in a stable physical environment. Now this topic was assigned to me and I must admit that I wasn't really quite sure what it meant that is what a stable physical environment is. I decided that what it meant was a relatively stable physical environment. Do you think enforced prevention of the spread of deleterious genes is advisable in my more or less of a hobby which has been genetic counseling the question of course has often been asked of me whether the enforced prevention of the spread of deleterious genes is advisable. In a sense we do this already as we enforce the prevention of the spread of deleterious genes by institutionalizing people who are socially unable to look after themselves so that while we do this on sociological grounds it must have an effect from a eugenic point of view though again it isn't going to change the world population broadly. In other words the effect whatever it may be will be a rather slow one but we do already in our in all societies generally bring pressure against the individual with deleterious genes either by not selecting him as a mate because he is not pleasing to look upon in some cases where civilization looks after everyone and provides institutions for those who cannot look after themselves then as a byproduct of this we would certainly get a small eugenic effect. This question what is the life expectancy of the patient after Huntington's career first develops? The I am looking at this question primarily because we have studied Huntington's career in this state. Dr. John Pearson who is right there has carried out a careful search for all Koreas in the state and has worked out their pedigrees tracing them back to the ancestral families in all cases where this is possible it is my impression from the work that he has done and that others have done that the life expectancy of the patient after the career has been detected is something in the order of 15 years is that yes he says that's reasonable here is the question on what basis was the estimate of the IQ of 30 some 35,000 generations ago determined well as I pulled out of my hat as we of course have not any idea what the IQ was and it wouldn't have been possible to measure it with any test now available what I was trying to do there is that whatever you considered to be if you even wanted to consider it zero which is nonsense because all of our many of our non-primate ancestors that lived 45 million years ago must have had some amount of IQ but if you consider that they had none then you still would have arrived after 35,000 generations only at the 100 we have at present so if you divide the 100 instead of 70 by this number of generations you still get such a low rate of increase per generation that as such it is relatively ridiculous because it is such a tiny number such a small increase per generation and probably some generations had a greater increase than others particularly the farther back you go where the population was smaller at the beginning of agriculture it has been estimated that there are probably not more than 20 million people in the whole world which is a very small number indeed compared with the fourth billion that we will arrive at soon it is now 12 o'clock oh well this is a we can open up a I will not say what I was going to say this question says do you believe there are mutations for ESP well this of course is assumed in the first place that I believe in ESP and I am not sure that I do there was a I have seen a manuscript on this subject whether it will ever be published I am not sure but I think I will stop with ESP it has a good point thank you very much I have been a very ill question is not answered but in my opinion some of them are very interesting and I will suggest that Dr. Reed looked them over and we have them in the moderator and perhaps in the answer by Dr. Reed later or some other member of the panel during the last part of the program the panel itself and little to whose meeting challenged the expert here but I am going to challenge him on his one statement because I knew it all in school and I am sure I am going to send it from an 8 that is the end


Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit 2016. Brought to you by Hortonworks. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back. And we're here live in Silicon Valley in San Jose for Hadoop Summit 2016. Soon it'll be called DataWorks Summit and to announce the new name change. This is theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We're about to advance and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, next guest is Joey Etchier-Varia, platform technical leader at Rokana. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So Rokana is one of those companies that has come out of the DNA of this ecosystem. Omar, Don, whole team, Eric, Eric Sammer, former Cloudera guys, but also they've been doing big data. And I remember when you guys started, it was interesting, because Splunk had just gone public or around that time, pre-public. It was pretty clear that the data value was there.  Give us the update, because now it's all about instrumentation. It's all about ops. Exactly. Give us the update on Rokana. Well, basically what we're seeing out there in the marketplace is our customers that are a lot of traditional Fortune 100, Fortune 500, they're trying to compete with these really digital native companies. You know, we've got retailers that are competing with Amazon and they really need to change the way that they do business. They need to go away from individual monitoring of systems to what we call IT operational total visibility or digital transformation and actually collect all of the data, not leave any of it on the floor that allows new use cases, like year over year analysis and things like that. Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking about that DockerCon last week, Docker madness is going crazy, but one of the things that was common on theCUBE was, you have Airbnb and then you have like, you know, the Hilton or Marriott's website. Yep. I mean, it's stark comparison between, you know, cutting edge, cool, a lot of dynamic action, a lot of data driven, a lot of social graph, very cool, relevant, and then kind of the boring hotel sites. Right. And so I use that as an example, but this is the phenomenon you're referring to that a lot of these enterprises, the existing enterprise that need to get modern, they need the agility. So the ops has kind of been now embracing the DevOps. Yep. Win, DevOps is one, basically.  Yep. That's going to put a lot of pressure on IT ops. Oh, definitely. And so that conflict between Dev and ops has always been the beginning, but now that DevOps has kind of won that battle, ops has got to transform, but they're not going to reduce their SLAs. They still got to have security. How do you guys help that?  Absolutely. I mean, we're really focused on scalability, security, all of those concerns that IT ops is going to have, especially as their operational data is merged with business metrics. They're not just going to do IT system monitoring to know that a server's been down. They care how it's impacting their customers, how it's impacting their bottom line. And so one of the things that we've recently announced with our 1.5 version is a brand new search engine. It lets us scale to volumes of data that none of our competitors have been able to reach, makes that data instantly searchable, and allows long-term retention. And the way that we store the data is actually designed so that you could have years upon years of data retention without a loss of performance on the query side. So give me an example of how deep you guys go on the storage versus the query. So obviously latency is key. Yeah. What's the kind of performance and kind of depth of range of dates? Yeah, I mean, so we've done testing internally and have hit 400,000 events per second on 24 commodity nodes pretty easily. And we've tested data retention on the order of, you know, three or four years because we only ever touch data that's actively being queried. The archived indexes don't impact the performance of the live indexes. So give us an example of what this means for the customer. Yeah, it means that you can actually do year-over-year analysis. You can compare what you were seeing a year ago, a week ago to what you're seeing now. And that's really critical for new analytics like anomaly detection. One of the systems, or one of the features built into our system is anomaly detection across every metric we collect. So that way you don't have to think about what do I want to model? What do I not? What do I care about? Everything is available to you at your fingerprint. So does IoT get you guys excited because you guys are doing something that's kind of a real cutting edge category called embedded analytics. Yes, exactly. This is what we're talking about. In real time, data, value. Exactly. And putting the value data or wherever a store could be pulled in, that is key. We'll talk about what that is. Let's spend a minute to describe that dynamic of embedded analytics and the impact, whether it's IoT or whatnot. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all these big data systems are great, but if you're not getting results that matter to you, then it's not as useful. It's not contextualized. And so we really focus on going beyond search and giving you things like anomaly detection, built-in real-time analytics so that you're being notified when something is going wrong and you're actually able to use the analytics to drive you to root cause analysis rather than having to rely on just sort of dumpster diving in a giant search endo. So if you had to boil it down, what main problem do you guys solve? I mean, when you guys go into the customer base, what's the main problem? Yeah, it's really about that visibility of the data, the ability to archive all of the data. I mean, we've got customers that are using us to monitor the real-time traffic on their websites, make sure that if something starts to go wrong or something starts to deviate from the norm, that they're able to jump on that immediately and get to it before there's an impact on revenue. What does total visibility mean to you guys? I know it's something you guys talk about a lot. Yeah, it means that you can collect all of your IT operational data. You don't have to pick and choose what you think is important. This is really critical for security use cases. Most intrusions aren't detected until nine months after the fact. And by that point, your normal IT operational systems have dropped all of that log data, and you can't do any kind of retrospective analysis. Is security driving a lot of value prepositions for you guys? That seemed to be a big market right now for this kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Security is really big. It's top of mind with our customers. It's driving the need to retain the data. It's driving the need to analyze older data, compare it to new data. So it's definitely a big driver. So you guys are doing really well right now. Give an update on the company. What brocon is up to? Growth, headcount, kind of customers here. Yeah, sure. So we've got 59 full-time employees. We've got three customers in production, near a dozen customers and active POCs, and a huge pipeline, ton of interest, just constant activity. The thing I love about your company is you've got a lot of seasoned vets out there. Omar, Chane, Eric Sammer, Don Brown. A lot of technical depth at the management team, but also down and through the company. So I've got to ask, when you guys go to your off-site meetings and talk as a group, when you look at this ecosystem that's happening now, and obviously Hortonworks event, Hadoop Summit's being renamed, DataWorks, which really speaks volumes to this transformation in the industry. What is some of the, I won't say old timers, because it's only been 10 years, but I know Omar's been around me. What's the discussion internally share? Some of the conversations like, oh, the ecosystem's a mess, it's transforming, where's the value? How do you guys talk about this ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, we definitely see the shift from the ecosystem from a batch-only world to a real-time streaming world. That's where all the innovation is, that's where all the demand is. We're constantly seeing evolution of the Hadoop system and related technologies from a security perspective. In the early days, security was, don't let anyone in, because we don't have any control over it. So the newer features there around being able to control your data sets and apply sort of rich labels to them, and control access that way is really powerful. So I'm going to ask you the question about cloud, because obviously hybrid cloud is where a lot of your enterprise customers are moving to or building. How does the instrumentation and embedded analytics affect your offering and or the customers' move to the cloud? That's a great question. So we very specifically provide our software as a downloadable that our customers can install, because we know that they have infrastructure in the cloud, they have infrastructure in on-prem data centers. We don't want to restrict their usage of our platform, and they really want to bring all that data together and enrich it, because they don't want to have to explain, well, we didn't know that this part of our system was down because it's in the cloud, we don't have monitoring on that, we only have monitoring on our older internal data centers. So that sort of hybrid approach and that sort of unified approach really means that you have to bring all that data together and analyze it in real time and prevent and present those analysis results to the users of the system so they can take action right away. So that doesn't put any constraints on the customers because you're basically saying, this old school technique, you know, when everything's sass and a platform's a service, but realistically, they're embedding it into their architecture, they don't have to worry about what you guys do as a business, and they don't have to make any adjustments. Is the feedback positive on that? I mean, give me an example of a use case. Yeah, I mean, the feedback's been really positive on that. I mean, a big part of our messaging is we're built on open source technologies, we're built on open data, we store all of our data in open source formats, we don't think that we're the owners of your data, we're not the gatekeepers of it. Customers depend on that. If they're going to be storing data in these systems for the next seven or 10 years, they need to know that it's going to be around regardless of what happens out there. Yeah, it's interesting, Joey, the API economy's been a word that's been kicked around. Okay, we all get that. The perimeter's gone. It's going to increase your value on the security side, but also we're an event notification economy. And no one's really kind of talking about that because it's got means different things.  Absolutely. How is customers looking at that trend because you could have a zillion notifications going off and you really got to start thinking about which ones are more important. I'm assuming you guys must have some machine learning, there's some stuff going on. How do you guys look at this whole tsunami of alarms and events and all these notifications? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really about taking the power of complex event processing and making it accessible to the end user. You don't want to deluge them with just a million additional alerts and events that they need to look at. You want to surface up to the top the things that are really relevant. And we've actually done a lot of work on our anomaly detection engine to specifically look for deviations that are of significance. Not just relative to what normal data is, but relative to the sort of amplitude of the data. So you have a lot of signals in your data center that don't necessarily, that are usually more noise than signal and we can actually differentiate those. We don't send you a bunch of alerts on those where sudden spikes may actually be the norm versus other data that's a lot more stable and if it deviates a little bit, you want to know right away.  Exactly. So you have to kind of understand the signal ratio. Is that what you're talking about the anomaly? Exactly, yeah, yeah. We basically can, you know, using the signal to noise ratio in the actual metric streams that we're getting gives us enough information using a technique called predictive intervals in order to provide contextualized alerts that really matter versus noisy alerts based on every change. So we're going to ask you about the cost because one of the things that it seemed at the beginning when you guys launched that you guys have a price model that's disruptive to other competitors where, you know, they're trying to ratchet up their prices because, you know, I mean, Splunk's a public company so they got to produce earnings. So imagining, you know, they got to increase their value and change their product. How do you guys compare to the competition relative to pricing value? That's a great question. So we price per user. The reason why we do that is our system is designed to make your users 10 times more efficient. And so we're really letting you invest in those users. And we think that that's the right unit to measure you on. We don't measure your data ingest. We don't restrict how much data you can have archived. We don't use any of those kinds of things. It's really just based on the total user account that you want to access. So you guys are betting on the long game, pretty much. Exactly. Give the customer some value, lower the surface area of value and allow them to get in. And hopefully if it works, your premise is you're betting on happy users. Yep, that's exactly right. Happy users drives our business. And so how's that going? I mean, you're funded so you got a lot of cash. You're not going to run out of business sending out cash anytime soon. But I mean, how's that tracking? It's been great. I mean, the number one reason why customers come and talk to us is oftentimes our business model. They hear about the business model. They get it instantly. They're like, yes, that's exactly what I need. I don't want to have to pick and choose what data I can bring into the system because if I bring more data, it's going to be more expensive. I want to make sure that I'm paying for the value that I get out of it. And they can measure that value based on the capabilities that users actually get. That's an ethos kind of philosophy because the concept of open data is increased to surface area or observation space for the customer. Exactly. So why wouldn't you want more, more the better, right? I mean, that's the whole purpose of big data. Oh, absolutely, 100%. All right, Joey, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your Rokana.  Yep, we're hiring across the board, rokana.com slash careers. All right, Joey's here inside theCUBE, breaking it down to Hadoop Summit 2016. We're live in Silicon Valley. We'll be right back with more after this short break.


Rwy'n dweud ddyfodol fod wedi gwaith sy'n cyfnoddol a chyfwyrd. A'r ddewodd如果你ad ar gweithio'r ffordd. Rwy'n dod os ymchwilio'r ddewodd a'r ddewodd nad oedd gennym eu cyfwyrd, ydych chi'n mynd i'r ddiwedd o ddyddyr o'r dweud o'r ddewodd. Rwy'n addysg gyfru, mae'r ddewodd yn ei gweithio'r ddewodd? Ieithi d****r ddewodd i chi mewn cyfeithio ddewodd? Y cwyl yn ar-eged. I'm Barry Rooney. I've worked with MSF for about 10 years in the field as a volunteer on sleeping sickness. Sorry, we're not hearing you so well. There's a microphone on. I'll speak closer into it. That might also be enough. Is it on? Hi, I'm Barry Rooney. I've worked for about 10 years in the field with MSF on sleeping sickness. So, diagnosing sleeping sickness, as you may know, involves lumbar punctures. My day job, as it were, is as a scientist in a lab working in biotechnology. So, the last couple of years, I've been working on making better oddities and diagnostic tests. So, bioengineering antigens based on the whole genome information that's there. So, that's possible and we need better, more specific antigens and tests and new variants. Now, the problem that we have, and there's a group of us scientists without borders who work on this project, and the problem we have is getting, there's two issues, maybe Terry or whoever could address this. One is having availability of good samples, so biobanks, serum samples from field isolates, up to date, not isolates that came from 30 years ago. And then the other thing is obviously, when you make a prototype, it's quickly testing this and again all the other speakers have addressed that. If you make a prototype and we often make maybe 10 different things in six months, we want to check them off really quickly. So, that's biobanks and access to those samples, which is a major issue. And the other then is access to field trials for prototypes. Thank you. Thank you. And the question here, and then we'll go, there's a question at the back, just at the middle. Yes, so my name's Ciaran from MSF. This is a message, a question for Pete, with a message in it. Thank you. No, so the approach of using Josie and Annab, when they weren't actually in the field, that makes sense from the HR point of view in that you're not pulling people out of the field to be part of a design team. But I wanted to ask, did you feel there were any shortcomings in not actually physically running the whole design process in the field? And how did you overcome that? Okay. And then the last, actually last question at the back. Yeah. Vanessa Stair from MSF. I was wondering with, do you ever have, for MSF's suite and the innovation team, do you ever have companies that come to you with their own innovations for the field? And is there any, I guess, conscious in working with these companies that might be in conflict with the work we're doing? Wonderful. Thank you. So let's start with those three. Mike, turn to Terry first on the first question around sleep and sickness diagnostics. Yeah. So you're certainly not the first person to have asked for this. I mean, I speak to many manufacturers, and these are the two things they always ask. Can MSF help with samples? And can they help test prototypes? And I haven't had that much luck intersectionally with this. So I think there's a broader question to ask of MSF. Do they want to get involved more upstream in both the design? So coming from the target product profile already, which, as we've seen from the talks this morning, has been hugely valuable. Do we actually want to wait until a product is launched and more difficult to redesign before we start going, oh, we wish we could tweak that or do this? So how much upstream do we want to be involved right from the target product profile stage? That would be the easiest. And how much do we want to contribute to biobanks and prototype validation in our fields and based on what? Episodes are really doing a lot. For example, for the multiplex, they have biobanks and they will contribute towards studies in the field, including prevalent studies. Beyond that, beyond the episodes, there's not such great availability. It's also quite difficult to have a biobank. You need big freezes, it's minus 80, it's a lot of electricity, it costs a lot of money. There are other organisations like FIND that work through other biobanks, so they just pay a fee to a professional biobanking organisation like Zeptometrics, whose job it is to hold these biobanks and ensure the quality of samples. But for Hep C, for example, they couldn't get any recent samples. I mean, manufacturers were battling to find anything before like 1997 in terms of sampling from bloodbanks, so it's a real problem that I think we need a broader discussion in them and so forth. Also, in terms of some of the, I just wanted to mention, I think some of these questions involving contract, how do we approach contracts with manufacturers and so on? Some of it might be that they've approached you because they want to do something for the social good, which is wonderful, but I think also it's about the leverage that we have. So how much are we putting into it and so how much can we ask for? And I don't know how to define that very well, but if we don't want them to have a patent, if we wanted to be open source, if we wanted to be including all the excess provisions, we would usually want to see that often comes down to how much leverage we have in terms of demonstrating how much we've put into it to ask for what we want. So like on that, actually me and Pete have just starting up a project focused around looking at the options for partnerships with commercial partners and also IP questions, the aim being that we can better define early on what we do want to get out of it in terms of licensing and putting these in place. And I think we ran a workshop two days ago on this and just by seeing some of the current cases which we're engaged in and how advanced some of them are when it comes to IP questions compared to some other ones where no IP lawyers have been engaged and things like that. I think what we intend to do is like a mapping of some of the existing projects around the movement really to see where we are and the best way of moving forward to formalise that more. Anything to add from the panel on access to samples and field testing before we move on? My question is kind of on field testing anyway. So it's important to note that although the participants felt it was a successful prototype it was only a successful prototype. It's not a product because it hasn't been field tested. So this would need to happen. That would be part of the process. Alan, the GD of Fasem in the interview afterwards had said beforehand he thought this was kind of the poor cousin of sending a designer to the field having MSF staff come to the workshop. However, by the end he'd actually flipped that over and he thought actually it was much more valuable to bring the MSF experience in first so that you do have a prototype that you have a high level of confidence in before investing that kind of time and money and resource in going to the field. So actually I think it was a positive thing that it started outside the field. Interestingly we completely shot ourselves in the foot because we'd planned in the project planning that the two MSF design team would also have a field partner in North Kivu who they could bounce ideas off. But obviously one of our barriers is that MSF staff don't have any time so they didn't end up bouncing any ideas back. But actually even though that was the case we're still confident that this was the right way to go about this. Thank you. Next batch of questions. So we have a cluster on this side, those three. Okay. Raphael from MSF Brussels. I think a general question to the panel. Would you say that MSF is a good environment for innovation in general? We've got four successful examples of successful innovation but then my inner epi yells reporting bias because you wouldn't be sitting here if you weren't successful. So would you say in general is this the four examples that you gave is this typical of your experience with innovation or are these kind of cherry picked successful examples? And maybe as a corollate to that question are there certain codders or departments in MSF which are more amenable to innovation? I mean is it more the medicals? I have the impression that it's often the logisticians, the Watsons which are the more creative ones. Is that a general truth or is that my personal bias there? Thanks. Okay. So why do you think about that? Another two. Nils from Pearson. I wondered Louie if you had any feedback from the manufacturer that you worked with on the value of the input from MSF innovation and the stakeholders that you spoke to compared with their usual process, the usual process they would set about designing a new product. There was one more question on that left side. Hi, I'm Kira Anderson from Services Design Agency, SNCC. This is a question for Andres. I am an equal measure enthusiast and sceptic of hacks, I think as any that's been involved in one is. And I really agree with what you're saying about the importance of follow up and feedback loops. So I just wondered if you had any examples of outcomes from MSF hacks, not necessarily innovations but maybe relationships, partnerships and how you've supported those and how you've been able to move those forwards afterwards. Okay. And one last question from our online audience, I think. We have an online question for Pete Masters. Can you really expect a nurse or midwife with a good idea to also have project planning or management skills? Okay. I would like to kick off. I mean my gut response is that our MSF is that the R&D is not the core and yes this is kind of an exception but then just thinking off the top of my head how many projects we're currently involved in with R&D or innovation or have at least initiated and have been taken up by others. I mean we have the three piece which is the push pull pull for TB drug development. We have DNDI. We have the mini lab for feasible blood culture. We have the multiplegs that I just presented. We have Child's Play which is an episome posterior collaboration for a pathogen test for fever diagnosis in children under five years. We have the Elmanac which Clotill can tell you more about which is for fever diagnostic on a tablet. It's basically an easy flow system for nurses to use whereby all the complicated thought processing that would usually be done by a more specialised physician is built into the back end and so you can simplify fever diagnosis on the front end so there's actually plenty and I think we can be very proud of what we've been involved in in much more upstream ways. Also one example I wanted to give on hackathon was actually the access campaign office in the US had hackathon to try and get shareholders who had pension funds invested in for example Pfizer as shareholders to put pressure on Pfizer to drop the price of PCV which was part of the fair shot campaign so I'm sure others have other examples that work pretty well. Louie, did you want to answer the question about your... Yeah, so that's quite an easy question to answer because Ludovic is here, if you raise your hand. You can speak to him and find out he's from MDS, the manufacturer. Wonderful, so Andreas on hacks? Yeah, I would just say that I agree. I'm also enthusiastic and sceptic and I think what I find when I talk to people about this it's a mixed bag to be honest and I don't want to point out some specific things like this solution is a great example because people might hurt me afterwards but I mean the missing maps people, Pete and others with the map at hand so obviously that's concrete results. We had people reporting on body bags that have been designed and now are getting scaled up. IT systems apps, personal protective equipment and so on but everyone, even those that would be considered successful they point to the problems of implementation. So the prototype is not the implementation. The prototype even with this autoclave that we have in the field it's not the final thing. It's quite a long gap or large gap even after that. So if you can't sustain it, if you can't support this prototype if you don't have a plan for how to scale it and how to support it, it's a nice prototype and it's a success so to speak as a prototype but it's not the final solution. And Pete. Yeah, just like for the epidemiologist I think I agree and I think last year Scientific Day was the first time a failure had been presented and I think we have anecdotal evidence of failures and successes but actually we don't really have any kind of view of a portfolio of MSF design and innovation and it's something we're actually trying to address and that sharing of success, whatever that means but also the lessons learned is equally valuable so I think it's a really good point and I'd just like to point out that we met fearsome at a mapathon. Okay, so next batch of questions. So we have a gentleman here and a lady here. We'll take those two first. Okay, I'm Jeff from MSF and I have a question for Terry. Is that for the pathogens identification is there any opportunity maybe in the future to look also at pathogens in water because here it's all for patients which I think is okay but also for water in hospitals especially where we have outbreaks that might be something to consider. Thank you. The second question was just a bit further up. Yes, Sylvia from MSF and I have two questions, one for Pete and one for Andreas. For Pete is how you see the adoption of this innovation approach in MSF and for Andreas is related to the scoping of the challenges. You said it's a key element so did you see in the study some criteria of the type of challenges presented that are more suited for this type of techniques? Okay. There are a couple more questions on this side. A gentleman just here in the green. Hi. Hello. Hi. I just have the previous MSF now, NHS, on the medical microbiologist. I'm very interested by Terry's talk. We are currently evaluating multiplex commercial PCR for viral and bacterial infection on CSF. Have you got any partnership with big microbiology labs? Because we could help basically with any organisms on that list apart from probably this, living sickness, sorry. So, yeah, I mean I just would like to ask you that. Thanks. Last one, just a couple of votes forward. This lady here. Hi. I got from Missing Maps events team as this question for Andreas. I was wondering, we don't seem to have much trouble generating the initial enthusiasm and interest in the project, but I was wondering if you had any insight on how to then encourage people to take up more advanced training and kind of move up the ladder in the hackathon, makeathon, mapathon community. Okay. Well, I think that's the questions we'll get to answer. So, Terry, do you want to start us off for the two? Sure. And so the initial cartridge that is being envisaged is for patient use, but really the sky's the limit. And one of the big reasons why we want this to be an open platform also because it's in line with MSF principles and not having monopolies, but also because it's very customizable and any cartridge could be developed for anything. So we have to have very transparent... Basically, we have to be very transparent in terms of how the instrument works, what is the interoperability, how the cartridge will be designed so that the moulding would be standard, but then whatever you want to load on that is fine. And in fact, there are really prototypes like that, like the lab disk from University of Freiburg. It's already following that concept, so it's not unprecedented. Yeah, sure. And then the partnerships, yes. So there are of course some labs in MSF, but the product development partnership would be with FIND, and they already have very well-established partnerships with key laboratories, but they're also contributing towards a biobank for fever from a globally representative laboratories' insights. OK. So I'll go to Pete next. A question about adoption. Yeah, thanks, Sylvia. So one of the things to note is that this isn't... We haven't taken this to its conclusion yet. We're at a prototype stage, so as an approach it's not complete. So there are various kind of mechanisms that are doing innovation in MSF. Some of them are funds, and one of them is called the sapling nursery, which is run from the UK. And one of the criticisms of the sapling nursery is it gives you time and it gives you money, and then that's it.  So we see this possibly as being kind of a recipe that can help people within MSF to make more of the time and money that is available to them. But we've just kind of finished doing it, so what the next step side, I don't know, documenting it is important and making it available and showing what can be done maybe and talking about how to develop it further. Thank you. And Andreas, the last couple of questions then around scoping challenges. Yes, the scoping challenge. Do you hear me, by the way? Well, let's create clean water for everyone, very broad. If you can code whatever you want for 24 hours, I mean that happens, that people do make a thumbs and hack a thumbs with those kind of very broad challenges. I think, you know, as the overall headline for the thon, that might be the thing. But to scope it down to, you know, the specific context, the specific constraints, what kind of, are we talking rural, Nigeria, are we talking this small village, are we talking, you know, city, big cities and what are we talking about. And basically having clear scenarios, I would say, is a good way of doing it because in those particular scenarios you can find a way to talk, okay, we now talk about this specific person or this mother of two and the specific things rather than, you know, solving climate change in a workshop. So that's a suggestion for me. When it comes to this moving up the ladder a bit, for example, missing maps and other activities that you might get initial enthusiasm and then you've done it once and you might not come back or that kind of stuff. I think that's, at least from the people I talk to, that's a huge problem, obviously. But one thing that I heard that some are talking about is you need to allow these enthusiasts as well to kind of create their own kind of hacks or make a thumbs and that kind of stuff. So you're not controlling everything that needs to be done by MSF where everything needs to be done because you're afraid that they will run off with your brand. I mean, if you will give them some freedom as well to do that then I think missing maps have been able to spread the word, so to speak. But in general to allow people that are super enthusiastic to kind of create their own, you know, make a thumbs and hack a thumbs, that seems to be quite successful because then they feel ownership and not only like I'm a participant. I'll wrap up now. Thank you to the panel. It's clear that MSF has a lot of opportunity to find innovations in ways the market hasn't quite solved. And I guess that some of the lessons here are around taking those learnings forward and making sure we can move beyond prototype for some of those great ideas. Thank you for your questions and now I'll pass over to Javits. Yes, thank you all. Wasn't that an incredible session about learning about innovation? I think some potential game changes there and real frameworks about which to bring innovation along. So round of applause.


here at Talking Tax downtown Honolulu in beautiful Hawaii anyway. I'm Mark Coleman, and I'm the co-host of Talking Tax, this week's Talking Tax episode here on Think Tech Hawaii with Tanyama Chika, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. I'm with the Grouch Rood Institute of Hawaii. And we both here today are going to talk about the fear of the unknown in the tax world. Actually over at the legislature where they fool around with taxes endlessly year after year. And the problem this year, as Tom writes about in his weekly column, as you wrote about in his weekly column recently, is that they have apparently, I'm not sure how old this practice is, but they're starting to produce bills. They've already gone through a first or second reading with blanks instead of numbers where there once were numbers related to tax increases. So they're proposing bills that now are suggesting they're going to raise our taxes, but they're not like saying how, like by how much. So how do you comment on a bill like that, Tom? What brought this to your attention? What prompted you to write about this? Well, it's something I've actually been writing about for many years now. Oh, so it's a long going practice? Yeah, at least for the past five or six years. It kind of started with small things, leaving blanks and appropriations so the amounts could be filled in later. But now it's kind of getting into tax bills in a way that really makes the tax bill almost unintelligible. Let's talk about some concrete examples. There's a bill that's advanced pretty far. It's probably going to pass called relating to the stabilization of property insurance. And what that bill does is it is attempting to increase the transient accommodations tax, increase the conveyance tax, increase the insurance premiums tax, at least in the current version, and reinstate a mortgage recording fee. But we don't know by how much because most of the amounts are left blank to give you an example. For the conveyance tax, they are proposing in a House Bill 2686 a surcharge for sale of properties. And the bill text goes something like this. Blank percent for properties having a value of less than $600,000. Blank percent for properties having a value of at least $600,000, but less than $1 million. Blank percent for properties having a value of at least $1 million, but less than $2 million. Blank percent for properties having a value of at least $2 million, but less than $4 million. And the list goes on. Yeah, yeah.  Right, right. And it's kind of becoming a real problem because the more blanks they insert in these bills, the more unintelligible it becomes, you know, at some point you don't know whether you're talking about a tax increase or a tax decrease. That's true. That's true. Yeah, it makes it hard to go in and say, I support this bill or I don't. To the extent that it might be just a new tax period and we're just waiting to find out how much of an increase it's going to be, that's problematic. But if there's a possibility that it could actually be a decrease of an existing tax, I don't know if that's at play really right now, but well then, you know, you'd want to support that no matter what the number is there, at least that we would at the grassroots. Yeah, let me give you another example. This is the current version of the green affordability plan.  Alice being asset limited income constrained and employed. So basically lower to lower middle class. And, you know, they came in to their credit with a bill that had numbers in it. House draft one, which came out of house finance is the tax shall be blank plus blank percentage of the excess of income or $5,280 blank plus blank percent of the excess over $10,560 blank plus blank percent of the excess over $2,000 at $21,120. So each and every one of the tax brackets is replaced with a blank. So there's blanks for married filing jointly blanks for Hannah Palshold blanks for single. How do you even talk about this stuff? Well, how do they what I mean? You're over there a lot in the big square building. What is your take on why they're doing this so often? Well, number one, they know that the bill cannot be enacted in this form. Okay. So it could be a good thing? Is it a subterfuge to try to sabotage the bill? I think it's a subterfuge to prevent public comment. Well, yeah. Because what I think practically happens is, you know, they wait until the last minute to find out how much revenue impact can go into this bill. And then they fill in the numbers in conference committee at which point no public comment is allowed. You pointed out in your article that this would, if that's true, that that would violate the requirement that a bill has three public hearings. But how can a public hearing where there's no money figures involved count as a public hearing, right? Yeah, that's, I think the question that has to be asked. I mean, when we have a constitutional requirement that a bill be read throughout three times in each house. And that is at least in theory to allow for debate on the bill's contents and for the public to weigh in. Well, how can the public weigh in on a bill with a blank? Or lots of blanks. Right. 50 to 100 blanks. You know, at some point, if it's going to be like what we call the short form bills, you know, short form bills are bills that say, you know, the purpose of the bill is X. The Hoyer revised taxes are amended to conform to X purpose. It's a valid bill. Okay. But in practice, what happens with a short form bill is it gets heard and recommitted to the committee that brings it up for the purpose of inserting substantive provisions. And then the committee hears it again with the substantive provisions inside so they can have public comment. And that's what they're supposed to do, I think. And that's what they should be doing with bills that they want to put blanks in.  When you were talking about the, well, about the green-fee thing, you're saying that that, excuse me, is there a green-fee bill in there? Is that what you were talking about? Or were you talking about the green-affordability plan, which is basically changing the income tax rates? Right, right. And brackets. Right. But we don't know what the rates in the brackets are, because they're all blank. Yeah, so there's that. And then there's the insurance stabilization. And then apparently there's also, they're also doing this with HB2364, which is the conveyance tax by proposing new tiers for conveyance taxes and an entirely new classification for multifamily residential, all of which was blanked out in a later version after initially having fairly substantial tax hikes proposed, which just, again, seems fundamentally unfair. You know, this makes me think of the practice where they pass a bill that maybe they're not too happy about, or maybe they want to think about a little bit more. But they just want to pass it for whatever darn reason. And instead of saying, you know, shall be effective, you know, December 31st, whatever, of the current year, or even July 1st, they'll put 2035 or even 3,000. There's even bills going through the legislature right now that won't be effective until the year 3,000, which is really strange. What kind of tactics are these that are going on over there? Is this some kind of a way to adapt to the rulings against gut and replace? No, no, that practice has been around for a long time, too. I mean, it's basically a way, and we call that a defective effective date. It's a way to make sure the bill goes to conference. Oh, uh-huh. Okay, so look, if you're the house, you pass the bill with a defective effective date, but because you're not entirely 100% sure that you want to pass it in that form. But you want to see what the Senate does and then talk to them about it. So you pass it with a defective effective date. The Senate does their thing. And you have the chance, because they've changed it, to ticket up with them in conference. Because as we all know, if you pass a clean bill, you send it over to the Senate. The Senate thinks it's okay. And the Senate doesn't amend it. It goes straight up to the fifth floor, to the governor's office. So the house doesn't see it again. And so that, I think, is what they wanted to prevent. They wanted to take one last crack at the bill before it goes up to the fifth floor. Okay. I mean, that is, it may be a little bit problematic, but at least with a defective effective date, you can have a reasonably intelligent discussion about what else is in the bill. But with blanks in the key areas, even that is tough. Yeah, I checked in with our policy director, Amelia Hill, before we talked here today, before we joined to talk about this. And she was suggesting these blanks let the legislature take advantage of the fact that you're not supposed to make any substantial changes to a bill during conference committee hearings because, arguably, they're just compromising on the amounts. But if the bill went through both, one or both houses with a bunch of blanks, are they really just negotiating? Or are they effectively writing the bill? Yeah. No, I mean, at least with the relating to property insurance bill, the indication that I got from watching the testimony was that they're really not sure how much of a problem they're going to need. Right. And the insurance commissioner really hasn't tossed out a number. Industry really hasn't tossed out a number.  And in that case, why are they moving the bill? So they're waiting to find out, for example, if they're going to get money from one of the relief funds, like the rainy day fund. Is that one of the problems we were talking about? Well, I don't think so. What they are trying to do in that bill is to basically create a, like a Hawaii Hurricane Relief Fund. So insurers can tap into it if they have, if they're covering a disaster.  I mean. Well, one thing we said about that particular bill in our testimony was that I think it involves a surcharge on the transient accommodation tax. Is that what it was? Oh, that it involves that among other things. Yeah. And that alone. And that's blank too. Pardon me. And that's blank too. Oh, yeah. That's blank too. But also, you know, they're like, according to the law, there has to be an excess between the tax and the use of the money. Right. Is that, would you consider that a fair nexus to be taxing tourism to fund an insurance stabilization program? I don't think there has to be a nexus. I mean, people make that argument, but it really doesn't have to be there. I mean, you can impose a tax for the general operations of government and shuttle the money to a general fund. And that's what we do all the time. But also wouldn't that be considered somewhat of a special fund if you were to tax a particular program and instead of sending it to the general fund, you're sending it to an insurance stabilization program. That's what they're saying, right? Yeah. I think when you are creating special funds, there are requirements in the financial statutes that we have about what constitutes a special fund or when a special fund is allowed. There you do have to have basically an argument that the fund's going to be self-sustaining and that the outflows of the fund are going to be somehow related to what you're taking in. And from where you're taking it in. And from where you're taking it in. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, that aside, we still have this issue of running bills through the legislature without money amounts. What do you think should happen in this case? What do you think the future of all this should be? Well, I mean, it took, I think a courageous couple of organizations to step up, file suit, and end the practice of gotten replaced. Yes. Uh-huh. So I, you know, congratulations go to League of Women Voters and Common Cause Hawaii for that. Mm-hmm. And maybe somebody's got to come up and, you know, step up and file suit and get this before the courts to end the, you know, the pernicious practice of blankety-blanking. Yeah. That sounds like where it has to go unless the legislature could be persuaded, I suppose, to do its own house cleaning. What do you think the chances of that would be?   Some of them are not so good. Like, you know, this year they apparently got into the habit of inserting into almost every bill with money implications, a clause that exceeds the constitutional spending ceiling. Right. I noticed that. Uh, and my point about that is why do you need that? You only need that in one bill every year. And that's what they used to, you know, provide. What bill would that be? The budget bill, right? Well, it could be the budget bill. It could be something separate. I see. Well, I, are all these people saying, I know that if you add this little straw to the haystack that, or to the back of the camel's back, it's going to break the, it's going to break the camel's back.  So, so what difference does it make to say that in there, do you think? I don't think it makes any sense really. I mean, all you need is to pass one bill, and the money committees were good about passing one bill every year.  And, you know. We know it's not, right? Yeah. You know, if, if legislators consider it and, and then take an informed vote, that's one thing. If, if the, you know, routinely vote to break it every year. I think it's, it's just basically taking advantage of a loophole. That's right. Well, please clarify for me. I'm not sure why, why do that? Why are they saying this in each bill? That, that this will, if this bill is passed, it will exceed the budget limit. That beats me. Because one bill doesn't do it, right? It's the, it's the combination of all the bills. And so what you really need is once every, all the bills are passed, then you have someone say, well, this total is in excess of the state spending limit. And that's what we're looking to do. We're looking to all vote on whether that's good or bad, or somebody goes through and line items out things. I don't understand how that, what they... Yeah. That, that makes a lot more sense. That's not how we, that's not how we do things here in Hawaii. Well, I'm looking forward to having some groups step up on this too. Unless somebody can propose a constitutional amendment. Somebody would have the gall, the gall, or the courage to submit a constitutional amendment. But similarly. That would, we should, we're talking about, we're talking about the blankety blanks, right? That's what we're talking about again. If somebody would step up and propose that this is not acceptable, this is just totally, for example, we, the Graduate Institute of Hawaii on this, I think it was the insurance stabilization fund. We just submitted a testimony yesterday. I think they're having a hearing today on that bill that, you know, the first time this went through, I think we commented on it that we didn't support it because it had, it was more taxes, you know, basically. And there's other ways of dealing with it. And now the second round is like, well, geez, now we really don't support it because we don't even know what you're talking about anymore. You know, at the very least put the language back in so that we can figure out what you're talking about.  And, you know, it'd be really nice to know by how much and maybe that could cool the gist of some people that might be opposed to it, but... Yeah, I mean, that's, I think a key, a very key point right there. Even if you have a bills that you know is a tax increase, you got to know by how much. Some people will say, well, it's probably okay if it's under a certain amount. But if it's 100%, 200%, then people are going to go, who, who, you know? Right, right, right. Are there any legislators that you're aware of that find this practice weird or reprehensible even? Who are the reformers that we could talk to at the legislature about something like this? Well, I'm not sure that the reformers would be able to do something given that leadership is, and by leadership I'm talking the powerful committees are the ones putting these blanks in. Yeah, let's see. Which committees are we here talking? Oh, do you think it was the committee that's hearing these today that did that? Or like this is Committee on Ways and Means and Senate Committee on Judiciary now. Was it, do you think it was people in those committees that did that? Or was it the committee that heard them previously? Well, in House Bill 204, the committee that put, you know, a jillion blanks in the bill is House Finance. Oh, huh. And I'm not trying to single out any committee in particular because it's a widespread practice on both sides of the aisle. It's become ingrained. So what do you do about something like that? That's a problem. At the grassroots, we have, you know, our paying attention as closely as you have been for so long is more of a recent phenomena. We've really ramped up our paying attention to what's going on at the legislature only in the last few years in terms of specific bills and submitting lots of testimony. And so I had never noticed that prior. And I bet money that most people have no idea that this is going on all the time too. So this has been real educational for me to see it and it certainly strikes. I wonder if the 1,000 friends and the League of Women Voters know that this is going on. You know, this might be their next, maybe this should be their next, and maybe what kind of awards could we, you remember the rusty bucket or the rusty scalpel board? Yeah, maybe what would be the equivalent here? The missing calculator award. The incomplete award. Oh yes, that's right. That was the title of the episode. Even the title of your column was Fear of the Unknown, which, you know, makes it all kind of spooky, but the title of the episode on the screen was the incomplete legislative bills. Yeah, there you go. So moving forward, what do we do about, what do we say when we go to testify on these bills? We, in our case, we said, basically, please put the language back in. We can't really talk about it. We had a headline on one of our testimonies that said we can't comment on this anymore. We don't know what the numbers are. What do you- Legislative committees in the public ask all the time, you know, what's the revenue impact of the bill, right? Right. And you can't give one if the numbers are not there. Did you submit testimony on this bill, Tom? Yes, we did. And what did you say? Pardon me for not knowing, pardon me for not having it at hand, but what did you say? No, we talked about that the brackets, the income tax brackets in current law, many of them have been in place since the 60s and inflation has done a lot since then. And now the tax brackets at the low end are, you know, what, you've got two or three different tax brackets for income under $10,000? I mean, it's meaningless. When money used to mean something.  So why have them in the code? I mean, it just makes life more complicated for everybody. But they didn't take them out of the code. And they've added more brackets or something, right? Yeah, so now we have like 12 or 13 total, which is I think one of the most complex in the country. Yeah, I think it will be if that happens. Well, it looks like the legislature needs to be revamped a little bit in what they do if they want to be fair to the public, in terms of being able to comment on legislation that might be affecting their lives. Any last word, Tom, we've got 15 seconds. Blankety blank. That's right. Well, thank you very much, Tom. Good talking with you again. Thank you very much, everybody, for tuning in. I hope that you learned something and maybe you can do something about it because it sounds like something that needs to be fixed. To everybody out there, thank you very much again. If you'd like to show, hit the like button and we'll see you at least one more time, we hope. And here, right here, I think that Kawhi. Aloha, everybody. Have a great day. We want to announce that Think Tech Hawaii is moving into a new phase and will not be producing regular talk shows after April 30th. We will retain our website and YouTube channel and will accept new content on an ad hoc basis. 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