Promoting Development from the Lab (Transcription in English below)
TEDxUSB, Caracas, Venezuela. March 2012.
Miguel A. Modestino and Augusta E. Modestino
[Miguel M.]:
Since the beginning of times we’ve seen how humanity has faced many problems that have attempted against social development.
We’ve seen how we’ve developed technologies that have allowed us to supply from food to a growing population, that have enhanced our quality of life and have elongated our journey in this world. We’ve seen how airplanes, for example, are capable of getting me and Augusta here from San Diego and San Francisco to be with you.
On a daily basis we use cars, guided by our GPS, we use our iPods or the satellite radio. This brings us a better quality of life. We communicate every day with our friends and family members everywhere in the world; using our cellphones, sending emails.
We’ve seen how social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the way we interact and that way we can stay in touch regardless of where we are. We can plan a gathering with our friends here in Caracas, as well as we can promote changes in governments that have an effect in our social development.
Nowadays, we face big energy challenges, it’s really difficult to keep up with the amount of necessary energy without impacting our environment to continue advancing the development of our world. That is why we see the number of technologies that have been developed based on: solar energy, wind power, and biofuels, that have big promises to solve this energy problem, but at the same time they bring big problems such as intermittence in energy production, meaning that if we use solar energy we are not producing energy the whole time, bringing with it other challenges like creating technologies to store energy efficiently such as next-generation batteries. Of course, this entire thing comes up because throughout the 20th century we’ve seen that while producing emissions, fossil fuels have promoted development. From an environmental perspective we are paying for these emissions and from an economical perspective we’ve seen how big powers like China have augmented the consumption of crude oil up to 10% annually, which has pushed the price of oil to exorbitant and unsustainable levels which produced a worldwide economic crisis. That even affected small countries like ours that are oil exporters.
From Berkeley I am involved in a new center to develop artificial photosynthesis technologies and what do I mean by that? These are technologies that will allow, with direct sunlight, to generate fuel from molecules like water or CO2. They will generate molecules that have a high energetic content like methanol and hydrogen. Undoubtfully, this requires great effort and a big complexity and that is why we are working as a team between the Berkeley National Lab and Caltech, with a big number of experts in different branches to put all of the components together in such a way to accomplish this system. A lot of the proposals involve systems in the nano- and microscale that contain the multiple components necessary to carry this out. And, how would this work? One of the ideas is to have a membrane that has microcylinders that are capable of absorb sunlight, we generate a current inside of this microcylinder that will move positive and negative charges to different sides of the membrane. Positive charges move downwards, we bring water, which can react to generate oxygen and protons. These protons can later be transported to the other side of the membrane where they can react with the electrons that were formed from solar energy to generate hydrogen as fuel. This way we generate a fuel in a clean, separated, safe way. That can alleviate part of the global energy needs.
[Augusta M.]: Well, Miguel was talking about how technological developments are being utilized to combat the global energy crisis. We all know that this energy crisis is one of the protagonists in the global economic crisis. Another protagonist is health, because this represents a big cost on the global economy. Improving health not only has an economical motivation, it also improves our quality of life. So, a lot of economic resources are being invested in better health. One of them is directing us to personalized medicine.
Here, I am showing you a picture of Watson and Crick seeing the DNA molecule from when they discovered this molecule. All the rules changed after this. What did the discovery of the DNA molecule achieve? We were able to decode human genome.
Now the challenge is not only that we know what we are made of, instead we have to decode the human genome of every single one of us as individuals. Because there are 1% differences between each one of us, I can take a pill that is effective but won’t be effective to Eli Bravo, or perhaps can give Miguel a headache. So, we want you to take the pill that will be effective for you, and we want you to not have to pay for one that won’t be, or even worse, having to suffer from a side effect.
Another thing that we can do to improve the health system is prevention. If we can prevent an illness, what happens? We don’t have the illness, if we don’t have the illness, we don’t need to treat it, and if we don’t need to treat it, we don’t need to spend money in this treatment. Therefore, we improve the health system in an economic way. On top of everything, if we don’t need to suffer from things as terrible as Alzheimer, Cancer, Arthritis, without any doubt, we have a better quality of life. In the University of California at San Diego what I do is try to prevent disease by doing an early diagnosis of the illness, when it hasn’t affected you in any way, when you don’t even have a symptom, and when you barely have harmful molecules that circulate in your bloodstream. I want to detect those molecules so that you can control the illness at that point and you don’t have to treat it and you never suffer from that disease. Diagnosis is very complicated because it’s something like looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s very difficult and almost impossible to find because you have so many things that confuse you. In diagnosis, we want to search for a biomarker of the illness that is inside the blood and we want to differentiate it from other cells, molecules, proteins and all other components. Therefore, it becomes very complicated to find it. In our laboratory, we decided to detect it instead of having to find it. It’s easier to detect it than looking for something that is so small. We are particularly interested in detecting peptidase; peptidases are enzymes that eat up your proteins, so you can imagine that if you have these enzymes in a high concentration they can be very harmful, because they are eating the proteins and you are formed of proteins! So, what do we do to find it? We create a synthetic substrate that has a negative charge and then we mix it with a little bit of your blood, some microliters. This synthetic substrate is charged negatively, if the peptidase is present, it cuts the substrate and creates two fragments. One that is positive and another that is negative. The positive one has a fluorescent molecule; we can call it a light bulb. It has a light bulb that helps you visualize it. We put this in an electrical field that separates positive things from negatives. After a while we have a complete separation and we in this way we can detect the peptidase in low concentration, nanomoles. I’m talking about very very few molecules of this peptidase that you have in your bloodstream that can be detected in the first period of the illness.
Where do we go from here? We have this technology that works, and it works very well, but you need a device! and I need to be there with the pipet and it’s annoying because it takes 15 minutes and I have to wait. Instead of doing that, we want to have a technology that can go from sample to response, so everyone can use it fast. This is important because while in the US or here [“in Caracas”] there are health problems, we still have hospitals and everything needed for diagnosis. But that is not the case in rural areas, which is where I want to take it because I am passionate about helping people. To do that, we are building a device that will be small, inexpensive, and that works in a fast way. A device that doesn’t need much humans input, and that can be of simple use for anyone. Just like a glucose detector, but we are developing a device that can be used to detect many illnesses. That is the concept from sample to response.
OK, Miguel and I gave you a big summary of what we both do, him in Berkeley and me in La Jolla. We always ask ourselves why can’t we innovate in Venezuela? Why isn’t there an infrastructure where we can do this? Venezuela is an importer of technology and we import it from other places, use it, and we love it. However much we love it, this technology isn’t made for us, we are criollos and we have our ways of life and we love it. For example, if Steve Jobs had designed an iPhone for Venezuelans, we would have never used Blackberries but he just never thought of Venezuelans’ needs.
We want to be able to innovate in our country. We want the youth to have a platform to do it just like we have in our universities abroad. And we believe that this is the right time to do that, that there is a new path being created in the way that the youth, many in this university and in all universities across the country, believe that there can be a change in Venezuela. So, Miguel and I after having talked for so long planning this talk, started to think: “why is this not happening in Venezuela?” We realized that it can be summed up into two reasons, two very simple reasons. One, the infrastructure. For all those young innovators that we just saw from the Ereka Program to be able to make their ideas a reality, they need the infrastructure, they need the tools, they need something that allows them to do it. For Miguel to build the new solar cell that saves the world, he needs to have special tools, for me to make the new device to diagnose people in remote areas of Venezuela, or the world, I need some special tools. What else do we need? We need to change our perspective. Just like Simon said, we need to forget about what grandmothers told us and we need to INVENT. Just like that “Please don’t climb that tree, don’t try new tricks”, sometimes it’s our grandmother, but it can be your mother. My mom always tells me – and, sorry mom but this is true – that I need to stop doing things differently. And she tells me this all the time and mom I’m sorry, but I will invent new ways of doing things and I love it.
What do we need in the infrastructure? Honestly, what we think we need is a lot, a large investment. Yes, you do need an investment, of course you do. But it would be a building to start. And after that, we’ll see. This building can be here in the Simon Bolivar University, can be in the Central University of Venezuela or it can be in any of our universities. This should serve as a technology base for the whole country. This building would have a floor that would be an incubator where we could discuss different ideas. The young people from Eureka that come up with ideas in their home, could be working in these offices. Miguel and I understand this better than anyone else that we learn from other people’s ideas, even if they do different things. We’ve seen that in this event, where we’ve all been listening to these talks and we grow just by learning from other ideas, even if they have nothing to do with us. It’s like that. Then we need the team, we need a floor that will be about characterization, we need to be able to see nanoparticles, molecules and to be able to change them. Then we need a floor for microfabrication to make the new chips, the new phone that is going to be perfect for all of us Venezuelans. Then we will also need a series of labs that will allow us to generate artificial technology, new and stronger materials to build the houses that Octavio was talking about earlier. Then we need a floor for the biological technologies that will allow us to develop medical technologies here in Venezuela.
[Miguel M.]: Just how Augusta mentioned that we need a building where we can generate new ideas, we also need changes in the culture. And this change in culture can be born in educational centers of excellence like this University, but undoubtfully, to begin this there needs to be an economical incentive. We believe that there are a lot of investors in our country, that would be more than interested in investing that small seed that is needed to create the big future companies of our country. Creating those first products with that seal of “Made in Venezuela” that would target real problems in our society. We also believe that it’s necessary to have a network of entrepreneurs in science and technology here in Venezuela. This network will be nurtured by so much talent that exists in the universities, from students and teachers and from people like Augusta and myself, or Daniel that came from New York. We all are in love with our country and we believe in a promising future for Venezuela and we are more than ready to come here to help to build that future alongside the talent that exists internally in this country. Undoubtfully, this network needs a global vision. We need to create solutions that will help everyone in a way. Solutions that we can sell to bring economic wellness to our country. It also has to have a global vision because we can learn a lot from others outside of the country; not only from the knowhow and scientific perspective but also a practical one of generators of startups that exist worldwide that we could import to have a better way of doing things.
We are contributing to this vision with something called “TechActivator”, this is an online system that allows entrepreneurs that are interested in developing companies related to science and engineering to login in and follow existing technologies. There are thousands of them in the patent offices in universities worldwide, that are ready to be commercialized and can solve real problems existing in our society. If bring innovators with these technologies together, we are sure that we will find problems that can be solved from a technological perspective. As I said before, we really need to be in contact with investors and we will do that. We are going to bring them tools that will allow them to create their ideas from the beginning and put them in contact with mentors that already have experience. I know that Daniel is excellent in this and would be an ideal person for TechActivator. We will be contacting industries that would be interested in implementing new technologies in their commercial practices. We believe that is not that difficult to achieve this in Venezuela.
As Augusta said, we are lacking investment. But these investments are smaller than the amount of benefits that they can bring by developing technological products in our country. In this way, I believe that the conditions for this investment exist in Venezuela. We can see that it is easy to achieve ideas that have a very small impact and we base the majority of our businesses on this side of the axis, and a lot of time it’s a bad impact, we involve ourselves in businesses that implicate corruption which affects our country terribly. We believe that it’s really important to stop targeting small problems, but really focus ourselves in big things and things that will have an impact not only in our country but on a global level. We need to change the mentality that tells us that these high-impact ideas are too big of a challenge. OK, we might be naïve at thinking that we can fly to a solution, which is also probably not true. But I believe that the reality is closer to the blue line than the red line in this graph. And if we all unite our talents and find people with experience and people willing to work for our country, we will be able to achieve this type of high-impact technologies.
[Augusta M.]: To conclude, we wanted to say that with only this small seed that would be this innovation center of technology in Venezuela we could…
[Miguel M.]: … change the culture of the people in our country. See those first products with a “Made in Venezuela” seal that will start solving global problems…
[Augusta M.]: … and local problems from our own country as well.
[Miguel M.]: Thank you very much.
TEDxUSB, Caracas, Venezuela. March 2012.
Miguel A. Modestino and Augusta E. Modestino
[Miguel M.]:
Since the beginning of times we’ve seen how humanity has faced many problems that have attempted against social development.
We’ve seen how we’ve developed technologies that have allowed us to supply from food to a growing population, that have enhanced our quality of life and have elongated our journey in this world. We’ve seen how airplanes, for example, are capable of getting me and Augusta here from San Diego and San Francisco to be with you.
On a daily basis we use cars, guided by our GPS, we use our iPods or the satellite radio. This brings us a better quality of life. We communicate every day with our friends and family members everywhere in the world; using our cellphones, sending emails.
We’ve seen how social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the way we interact and that way we can stay in touch regardless of where we are. We can plan a gathering with our friends here in Caracas, as well as we can promote changes in governments that have an effect in our social development.
Nowadays, we face big energy challenges, it’s really difficult to keep up with the amount of necessary energy without impacting our environment to continue advancing the development of our world. That is why we see the number of technologies that have been developed based on: solar energy, wind power, and biofuels, that have big promises to solve this energy problem, but at the same time they bring big problems such as intermittence in energy production, meaning that if we use solar energy we are not producing energy the whole time, bringing with it other challenges like creating technologies to store energy efficiently such as next-generation batteries. Of course, this entire thing comes up because throughout the 20th century we’ve seen that while producing emissions, fossil fuels have promoted development. From an environmental perspective we are paying for these emissions and from an economical perspective we’ve seen how big powers like China have augmented the consumption of crude oil up to 10% annually, which has pushed the price of oil to exorbitant and unsustainable levels which produced a worldwide economic crisis. That even affected small countries like ours that are oil exporters.
From Berkeley I am involved in a new center to develop artificial photosynthesis technologies and what do I mean by that? These are technologies that will allow, with direct sunlight, to generate fuel from molecules like water or CO2. They will generate molecules that have a high energetic content like methanol and hydrogen. Undoubtfully, this requires great effort and a big complexity and that is why we are working as a team between the Berkeley National Lab and Caltech, with a big number of experts in different branches to put all of the components together in such a way to accomplish this system. A lot of the proposals involve systems in the nano- and microscale that contain the multiple components necessary to carry this out. And, how would this work? One of the ideas is to have a membrane that has microcylinders that are capable of absorb sunlight, we generate a current inside of this microcylinder that will move positive and negative charges to different sides of the membrane. Positive charges move downwards, we bring water, which can react to generate oxygen and protons. These protons can later be transported to the other side of the membrane where they can react with the electrons that were formed from solar energy to generate hydrogen as fuel. This way we generate a fuel in a clean, separated, safe way. That can alleviate part of the global energy needs.
[Augusta M.]: Well, Miguel was talking about how technological developments are being utilized to combat the global energy crisis. We all know that this energy crisis is one of the protagonists in the global economic crisis. Another protagonist is health, because this represents a big cost on the global economy. Improving health not only has an economical motivation, it also improves our quality of life. So, a lot of economic resources are being invested in better health. One of them is directing us to personalized medicine.
Here, I am showing you a picture of Watson and Crick seeing the DNA molecule from when they discovered this molecule. All the rules changed after this. What did the discovery of the DNA molecule achieve? We were able to decode human genome.
Now the challenge is not only that we know what we are made of, instead we have to decode the human genome of every single one of us as individuals. Because there are 1% differences between each one of us, I can take a pill that is effective but won’t be effective to Eli Bravo, or perhaps can give Miguel a headache. So, we want you to take the pill that will be effective for you, and we want you to not have to pay for one that won’t be, or even worse, having to suffer from a side effect.
Another thing that we can do to improve the health system is prevention. If we can prevent an illness, what happens? We don’t have the illness, if we don’t have the illness, we don’t need to treat it, and if we don’t need to treat it, we don’t need to spend money in this treatment. Therefore, we improve the health system in an economic way. On top of everything, if we don’t need to suffer from things as terrible as Alzheimer, Cancer, Arthritis, without any doubt, we have a better quality of life. In the University of California at San Diego what I do is try to prevent disease by doing an early diagnosis of the illness, when it hasn’t affected you in any way, when you don’t even have a symptom, and when you barely have harmful molecules that circulate in your bloodstream. I want to detect those molecules so that you can control the illness at that point and you don’t have to treat it and you never suffer from that disease. Diagnosis is very complicated because it’s something like looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s very difficult and almost impossible to find because you have so many things that confuse you. In diagnosis, we want to search for a biomarker of the illness that is inside the blood and we want to differentiate it from other cells, molecules, proteins and all other components. Therefore, it becomes very complicated to find it. In our laboratory, we decided to detect it instead of having to find it. It’s easier to detect it than looking for something that is so small. We are particularly interested in detecting peptidase; peptidases are enzymes that eat up your proteins, so you can imagine that if you have these enzymes in a high concentration they can be very harmful, because they are eating the proteins and you are formed of proteins! So, what do we do to find it? We create a synthetic substrate that has a negative charge and then we mix it with a little bit of your blood, some microliters. This synthetic substrate is charged negatively, if the peptidase is present, it cuts the substrate and creates two fragments. One that is positive and another that is negative. The positive one has a fluorescent molecule; we can call it a light bulb. It has a light bulb that helps you visualize it. We put this in an electrical field that separates positive things from negatives. After a while we have a complete separation and we in this way we can detect the peptidase in low concentration, nanomoles. I’m talking about very very few molecules of this peptidase that you have in your bloodstream that can be detected in the first period of the illness.
Where do we go from here? We have this technology that works, and it works very well, but you need a device! and I need to be there with the pipet and it’s annoying because it takes 15 minutes and I have to wait. Instead of doing that, we want to have a technology that can go from sample to response, so everyone can use it fast. This is important because while in the US or here [“in Caracas”] there are health problems, we still have hospitals and everything needed for diagnosis. But that is not the case in rural areas, which is where I want to take it because I am passionate about helping people. To do that, we are building a device that will be small, inexpensive, and that works in a fast way. A device that doesn’t need much humans input, and that can be of simple use for anyone. Just like a glucose detector, but we are developing a device that can be used to detect many illnesses. That is the concept from sample to response.
OK, Miguel and I gave you a big summary of what we both do, him in Berkeley and me in La Jolla. We always ask ourselves why can’t we innovate in Venezuela? Why isn’t there an infrastructure where we can do this? Venezuela is an importer of technology and we import it from other places, use it, and we love it. However much we love it, this technology isn’t made for us, we are criollos and we have our ways of life and we love it. For example, if Steve Jobs had designed an iPhone for Venezuelans, we would have never used Blackberries but he just never thought of Venezuelans’ needs.
We want to be able to innovate in our country. We want the youth to have a platform to do it just like we have in our universities abroad. And we believe that this is the right time to do that, that there is a new path being created in the way that the youth, many in this university and in all universities across the country, believe that there can be a change in Venezuela. So, Miguel and I after having talked for so long planning this talk, started to think: “why is this not happening in Venezuela?” We realized that it can be summed up into two reasons, two very simple reasons. One, the infrastructure. For all those young innovators that we just saw from the Ereka Program to be able to make their ideas a reality, they need the infrastructure, they need the tools, they need something that allows them to do it. For Miguel to build the new solar cell that saves the world, he needs to have special tools, for me to make the new device to diagnose people in remote areas of Venezuela, or the world, I need some special tools. What else do we need? We need to change our perspective. Just like Simon said, we need to forget about what grandmothers told us and we need to INVENT. Just like that “Please don’t climb that tree, don’t try new tricks”, sometimes it’s our grandmother, but it can be your mother. My mom always tells me – and, sorry mom but this is true – that I need to stop doing things differently. And she tells me this all the time and mom I’m sorry, but I will invent new ways of doing things and I love it.
What do we need in the infrastructure? Honestly, what we think we need is a lot, a large investment. Yes, you do need an investment, of course you do. But it would be a building to start. And after that, we’ll see. This building can be here in the Simon Bolivar University, can be in the Central University of Venezuela or it can be in any of our universities. This should serve as a technology base for the whole country. This building would have a floor that would be an incubator where we could discuss different ideas. The young people from Eureka that come up with ideas in their home, could be working in these offices. Miguel and I understand this better than anyone else that we learn from other people’s ideas, even if they do different things. We’ve seen that in this event, where we’ve all been listening to these talks and we grow just by learning from other ideas, even if they have nothing to do with us. It’s like that. Then we need the team, we need a floor that will be about characterization, we need to be able to see nanoparticles, molecules and to be able to change them. Then we need a floor for microfabrication to make the new chips, the new phone that is going to be perfect for all of us Venezuelans. Then we will also need a series of labs that will allow us to generate artificial technology, new and stronger materials to build the houses that Octavio was talking about earlier. Then we need a floor for the biological technologies that will allow us to develop medical technologies here in Venezuela.
[Miguel M.]: Just how Augusta mentioned that we need a building where we can generate new ideas, we also need changes in the culture. And this change in culture can be born in educational centers of excellence like this University, but undoubtfully, to begin this there needs to be an economical incentive. We believe that there are a lot of investors in our country, that would be more than interested in investing that small seed that is needed to create the big future companies of our country. Creating those first products with that seal of “Made in Venezuela” that would target real problems in our society. We also believe that it’s necessary to have a network of entrepreneurs in science and technology here in Venezuela. This network will be nurtured by so much talent that exists in the universities, from students and teachers and from people like Augusta and myself, or Daniel that came from New York. We all are in love with our country and we believe in a promising future for Venezuela and we are more than ready to come here to help to build that future alongside the talent that exists internally in this country. Undoubtfully, this network needs a global vision. We need to create solutions that will help everyone in a way. Solutions that we can sell to bring economic wellness to our country. It also has to have a global vision because we can learn a lot from others outside of the country; not only from the knowhow and scientific perspective but also a practical one of generators of startups that exist worldwide that we could import to have a better way of doing things.
We are contributing to this vision with something called “TechActivator”, this is an online system that allows entrepreneurs that are interested in developing companies related to science and engineering to login in and follow existing technologies. There are thousands of them in the patent offices in universities worldwide, that are ready to be commercialized and can solve real problems existing in our society. If bring innovators with these technologies together, we are sure that we will find problems that can be solved from a technological perspective. As I said before, we really need to be in contact with investors and we will do that. We are going to bring them tools that will allow them to create their ideas from the beginning and put them in contact with mentors that already have experience. I know that Daniel is excellent in this and would be an ideal person for TechActivator. We will be contacting industries that would be interested in implementing new technologies in their commercial practices. We believe that is not that difficult to achieve this in Venezuela.
As Augusta said, we are lacking investment. But these investments are smaller than the amount of benefits that they can bring by developing technological products in our country. In this way, I believe that the conditions for this investment exist in Venezuela. We can see that it is easy to achieve ideas that have a very small impact and we base the majority of our businesses on this side of the axis, and a lot of time it’s a bad impact, we involve ourselves in businesses that implicate corruption which affects our country terribly. We believe that it’s really important to stop targeting small problems, but really focus ourselves in big things and things that will have an impact not only in our country but on a global level. We need to change the mentality that tells us that these high-impact ideas are too big of a challenge. OK, we might be naïve at thinking that we can fly to a solution, which is also probably not true. But I believe that the reality is closer to the blue line than the red line in this graph. And if we all unite our talents and find people with experience and people willing to work for our country, we will be able to achieve this type of high-impact technologies.
[Augusta M.]: To conclude, we wanted to say that with only this small seed that would be this innovation center of technology in Venezuela we could…
[Miguel M.]: … change the culture of the people in our country. See those first products with a “Made in Venezuela” seal that will start solving global problems…
[Augusta M.]: … and local problems from our own country as well.
[Miguel M.]: Thank you very much.