 Good evening Could I ask everybody to come on in good evening and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies? Good evening. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz I'm our senior vice president for external relations here at CSIS Welcome to our beautiful building on this gorgeous warmer night We're so happy to have everybody here. I want to thank everybody for coming I want to thank internews for putting this on with us our great partners I want to thank Anthony Garrett who's somewhere around here who's helped plan all this Karen Powers as well. I want to thank that. I think there's 50 people on the host committee So I want to thank all of them. So actually all of you are here on the host committee. That's good I want to thank everybody on the host committee and I especially want to thank Jamie for Having us host this wonderful event, you know You can't turn on the TV these days without seeing Jamie because he's such an important voice in national security and foreign affairs And we like to think that we here at CSIS get that get out there a little bit, too But I am really fortunate to have Jamie Metzl here tonight with that well without further ado though I want to introduce somebody who knows Jamie far better than I do and can do a far better introduction a man who is Given a lifetime of public service to this country And someone who I respect very very deeply. Would you please give a big round of applause for mr. Richard Clark? Thank you Thank you. I think you're in for a treat tonight And I've been encouraging Jamie not to give us a short presentation tonight Because Other people have been suggesting, you know people don't want to hear you drone on yes You do right you do you do because the subject he's going to talk about is absolutely fascinating It may be our future. In fact, it probably is our future and what he's done is taken an issue that is frankly very controversial and Served it up to us in a delicious way He's taken a very controversial and very technical issue Which none of us would buy a book about if it the book were nonfiction Maybe Josh would But nobody else here would but because he has made it a really fun read as a novel You enjoy yourself While your mind is being expanded and you are learning about the very near future It's very hard to do this. I've tried and failed as a novelist trying to do this But using fiction as a way to raise social issues political issues ethical issues is a very very tough thing to do and For those of you who haven't read the book yet. I won't I won't destroy any of the secrets, but You'll find when you read it No, you'll enjoy it. You'll find when you read it that he is a master at raising all of these technical and ethical issues Without you even knowing that he's doing it and then when you're done you think wow That could happen that could happen. I don't know how Jimmy finds time to do these novels. This is his second and The secret is there's a third coming Because every time I look on his Facebook page or call him he's running a super ultra duper marathon or an iron person something or other or He is in Asia meeting with the new leaders of some Asian countries in Mongolia or North Korea It's very hard to keep up with Jamie And I'm told he actually has a job and in addition to all of that So without further ado Let's let's hear from the author Thank you so much dick dick has been a friend and a mentor for so many years since I showed up Very very green in Washington and had this incredible opportunity To be dick's White House fellow which for people who aspire To be part of the the Washington system and to learn not just about government But how to really make things happen in government? There's no better person over so many years who's who's done that as dick so it's it's really I mean then he's it was my boss and Mentor and still mentor and a great great friend and a fantastic novelist don't believe a word of what he said And I'm thrilled to be here at CS is Andrew Which and the team at CSIS have just been so welcoming and this building is absolutely Incredible and for how important all of us He were who are here think that just raising ideas and we're here because we believe in ideas We love ideas to build this monument to ideas in a place where people can come together and debate and engage is really Fantastic, I'm also so grateful to the host committee Which is pretty much all of you and you fell for the old host committee trick. It's an old one It's an old Kansas City trick, but I'm so Grateful, but especially Anthony Garrett Because where's Anthony? Oh, there he is. I thought I was a pushy person But the number of calls that I got from Anthony saying like what are you doing? Have you sent another email to the host committee? It's just to get People's mind share here in Washington is a tough task and Anthony really was the key person in putting all of this together And I'm so grateful to him and to all of you for being here And there's something about writing a novel when I do when I talk about Writing a novel as dick knows this bad metaphor that I use It's like you have a wet towel and you're kind of squeezing the towel and this liquid comes out of the towel and this horrible cliched metaphor that that Towel is your soul and you squeeze and you squeeze and squeeze and this liquid that comes out that Congeals into some other kind of consumable substance that substance is your book and then your book becomes this physical thing and then other people take it and they Consume it in their own way on their own terms and there's something that's very Nerve-wracking about that. There's something that's very exciting about that And so what I always say is if you read the book and I'll be so honored if you do and if you don't like the book I really encourage you to engage in quiet meditative reflection Thinking about the book. What could be better? Maybe do you have some shortcomings that are preventing you from from liking the book? You never know But if you like the book, I encourage you to tell all your friends Recommended for your for your book club You can get little temporary tattoos with the image of the of the cover and it can go on your forehead Or if you have small children, you can just put it all over there all over their bodies But but it really is just such a pleasure and an honor to be here Talking about the novel but more importantly about the issues that underpin the novel and after 200,000 years of our evolution as a species we Homo sapiens although I'm part Neanderthal I know from my 23 and me test, but I'm sure you guys are far less Neanderthal than me But we Homo sapiens are on the verge for the first time in our history of taking active control of our evolutionary process and that's so fundamental It's not that we haven't evolved we've evolved and we've evolved in fits and starts and sometimes it's been faster and sometimes It's been slower, but we are right on the verge of Rewriting our genetic code and you don't need we don't need any kind of revolutionary Inventions we don't need any major Innovations to make this happen as a matter of fact we could freeze science today We could freeze science and say all we're going to have is incremental improvements in technologies that already exist at Roughly the same pace or even slower than the rate of improvement in these areas to date And if we did that if we froze science today, it's very likely that the first genetically enhanced human beings will be walking or should I say crawling amongst us in about one year Which is the date that the British Parliament votes on mitochondrial transfer Which is supposed to be December and assuming that it that it passes and then somebody getting a person with mitochondrial disease Getting impregnated and having the mitochondrial transfer process And then that person will give birth to a person who will technically have DNA from three parents So we're right on the verge of this radical transformation And we have all seen these stories in the news that have individually caught our attention We saw the story from a few weeks ago about Google and Facebook paying for egg freezing You've all seen the stories about IVF in vitro fertilization and a couple of weeks ago There was a story about the price of IVF has been cut in half Because they have a new contraption that rather than incubating the blastocyst the early-stage embryos outside of the Outside of the mother they give this is a little graphic, but they can now insert it inside of the mother where the where the conditions are exactly what you would need for For the development of that that embryo so IVF is cut in half We all know about the human genome project and I'll talk about that in a moment and every day our ability to understand What our genes and what the genome is telling us is Increasing and we all know the joke about the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters but an infinite number of genomes with and Improved because of Moore's law greater and greater computing power We're going to know more and more and more about what our genome is is telling us And so right now in the United States and other countries around the world We are at phase one of this process that will ultimately lead to genetically enhanced human beings Because right now we have a process pre-implantation genetic diagnosis PGD, which just means that in the IVF process When let's say there's there's ten eggs which are extracted from the woman fertilized with the man's sperm Let's say you have ten that are outside of the mother You can grow them for roughly five days and then you extract one cell from each of those And then you can do a full genomic reading of each of those individual cells and again, you know each Each genome each gene has the full blueprint blueprint for the whole human and based on What we know how to read the genome will be able to say right now you can do it You can choose for gender you can select against Down syndrome and other single-cell mutations But we're very very close to moving up the scale to understand not just single-cell mutations, but multi Multi-gene Polygenic mutations that take more and wise matter if I was just talking with somebody yesterday Who's a scientist in Michigan one of the leading genetic researchers and he believes that within two years? Based on the work that they're already doing will be able to very closely predict somebody's height and height has maybe a thousand gene markers But they will be able to predict somebody's height just by looking at their genome and Because of that then it's just there there's a philosophical debate about whether humans are infinitely complex Which you would probably believe if you are a person of faith or That humans are just very massively complex which is what I believe and if we are only very massively complex and Maybe that's a strange use of the word only That means that humans are ultimately a big data set and a big data set again Moore's law We're gonna have more and more computing power and as more and more people have their genomes being read And it will be inevitable that that will be the case because we've all heard about personalized medicine And so we'll all have our gene digit genes digitized and on file That means that over time we're going to be able to compare people's genes with their real-life experiences And if you have one billion two billion three billion people and you compare what their genes say and what their Life experience is whether it's how tall how intelligent all these other things We're going to know a lot and humans. We're more than our genes But our genes and twin studies show this our genes are a pretty important part of of of who we are so step one of this process is Being smarter and smarter about genetic selection in the IVF process And knowing more and more about what we're selecting step two will be right now the log jam IVF is the female eggs the average I don't know if we can say this at CSIS But the average male ejaculate has hundreds of millions of sperm But eggs in human mammals are are much more difficult and they're very difficult and painful to to extract But embryonic stem cells Already are used in mice that you can take an embryonic stem cell or it can be an induced embryonic stem cell So any skin cell or any other cell and then you induce that cell to be a stem cell That's that cell to be an egg cell and that cell to be an egg And now you have a thousand eggs or 10,000 eggs however many eggs eggs you want and then again Sperm is dime a dozen and then let's say let's pick a thousand you have I Was giving a talk and I just her somebody wasn't paying attention and I picked on this I won't do that I won't do that here But if I did I would pick on Zachary and So now you have a thousand blast assists early-stage embryos And now you do the full genomic reading of each of those Thousand and then you get a readout and you know that you know these ten percent have a have markers that indicate extreme intelligence These X percent are likely to have Down syndrome and all the things that we can read on the genome You're going to be able to know about and right now There's an initiative in China at a company called BGI Shenzhen Called the cognitive genomics initiative where they're trying to sequence the smartest people that they can find to try to Understand the genetic footprint of very high intelligence So matter of fact the same scientists who I was talking with yesterday told me that he was talking with people in China at this At this huge company and they have all illegally downloaded my book and are reading it Which I was very I was very excited about actually my publisher found out And he wanted to sue them. I said good good luck with that one So so we're going to be able to do genetic selection at a much larger scale And you think even with ten embryos or with a thousand the range between your lowest IQ Blast assist embryo and your highest IQ blast assist again These are your own natural children will be really high And so the Chinese believe that that they can increase IQ through genetic selection by the people who are participating by 20 to 30 points per generation And then the next step beyond that again things that are perfectly possible right now Will be to do genetic selection But also to mix and match genes and I'm giving a talk next Monday at the 92nd Street Y with a Harvard genetics Professor George Church who's developed a process called CRISPR that allows for just gene editing that just to take something out and replace it So we'll be able We'll be able to mix and match our own genes We'll be able to bring other genes whether synthetic genes or genes from the animal kingdom in and so we are right on the verge of just this Radical transformation of how not only how we reproduce of what we think it means to be a human being we're so used to this somewhat random process of Birth and of procreation, but one of the reasons why my book was featured in Cosmopolitan magazine Not just because of the great sexual positions that I that I feature in the book Is that that I met the editor and I said look what we're talking about is the end of sex It's the end of sex as a form as a tool for procreation among Advantage to people people will do it because for religious reasons as Joe knows people People will do it Because they're poor and don't have and don't have access but for advantage to people people will first select their embryos and Secondly, they will genetically enhance their embryos and then wait you say we don't want to do this That's not our future and that's a perfectly legitimate view and we in the United States We decided to opt out of stem cell research in the Bush administration, so we decided we opt out our best scientists left They went to Singapore they had they nothing really stopped in the science, so we can opt out It's a perfectly legitimate choice for us to opt out, but If we do it's not go other countries will do it and if all countries stop it'll happen My next book has scientists working on it on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the high seas So this science We will continue and the challenge that we have is that the science is advancing exponentially It's this massive J curve our imagination About this science just understanding what its implications are is only advancing linearly and the regulatory Framework for thinking how do we deal with this is only inching forward glacially and a little bit is happening on the National level and very little is happening on the international level, so the science will get there before The countries get there before the law gets there and when we look at what happened with Ebola Zachary is an Africa expert so Ebola is a huge issue in Africa and for years a few small number of people have been saying Hey, this is this is really important But it took somebody showing up here with Ebola for people to say holy moley This is a big deal and because of that when that person showed up We couldn't have the conversation that we needed to have which was about what's happening in Africa We had this insane conversation about three people with the Ebola here in where it's perfectly Containable and that's the the challenge that we face is that these issues are so huge And we're not having the conversation now about what we About how to deal with them and how to think about them So let me let me then take a step back and talk a little bit about about the novel itself as I mentioned I work for Dick in the National Security Council in the second Clinton administration and Dick at that time always used to say that if everybody in Washington is focusing on one thing You can be sure that there's something ten times more important that they're not focusing on and for him He had these two issues that he was Banging away at as you all know and those two issues were terrorism and cyber and People I mean they didn't say it to his face because they were afraid of him But people say like this guy is insane. He's gonna get us all killed. Why would we go and bomb? People in huts in Afghanistan. What can they what can they do to us? And you know how the history plays out and so Dick really is the inspiration for me behind this whole this whole book And so after I work with with dick I was just thinking what are those issues and the more I thought about it the more I felt that issues of genetics and the Biotech revolution were those kinds of issues and I thought about it I started reading everything I could and then in a in a I'm sure an arrogant narcissistic sort of I thought Well, maybe I should start writing articles about it And so I wrote an article Don McDonald is here who works for congressman Brad Sherman and in 2008 Congressman Sherman gave me a call and said I just read your article and I think it's really important This is something that people aren't talking about would love to do hearing. Can you come up and be the lead witness? so I did that and After that was contacted by an agent and the agent said We'd like to do a book a nonfiction book and I worked with him I did it I did a proposal Oxford University Press accepted it But the more I started working on that proposal the more I realized that wasn't the book that I wanted to write The book that I wanted to write was just the preface of that book Which was an imaginary meeting between an NSC staffer and the president and the staffer comes in and says sir We've just learned that China has a secret genetic enhancement program and the presences Well, what are the implications that well if they do it and we don't 30 years from now We think we won't be able to compete. Can we stop them? No, can we match them? Well, it's really difficult. We have these legal and cultural And political and if you if you just say that we're gonna do that You'll be thrown out of office in five minutes. Well, that's terrible. What what what are the what can we do? Well, it's like well, sir Well, we have this secret thing We're going to perch set up a front company and purchase a small chain of fertility clinics and People who come in for fertility treatments in these clinics will be impregnated with their own embryos But we'll just make some small changes so their kids will be these incredible geniuses No one will be worse off and everyone's going to be going to be happy So that was that was where I where I started and that's that's so this book. It's set in Kansas City in the year 2023 and the main character who's an Armenian American reporter for the Kansas City star was a PhD in philosophy and Had had done three postdocs got disgusted with this abstract life wants to throw himself into the nitty-gritty of life And he's living his life kind of at 20,000 feet and at sea level ground level simultaneously and kind of tripping over Tripping over himself when he starts investigating the death of this young woman and then he starts piecing together this much bigger story This and the bigger story where it's this woman was not only She was dead, but she was killed and she was carrying a genetically enhanced embryo at the time when she was killed Which is a technology that people that hasn't been used in humans at least So far and so he starts digging and he can't let go and the more he digs The more kind of all hell breaks loose and he's suspended from his job at the newspaper and increasingly Running for his life and he starts to put together a much bigger story involving US intelligence and Chinese intelligence and a group of evangelical ministers who are Supporting a right-wing Republican candidate trying to take the presidency of the United States And as he's running trying to learn the story He learns that there are more women like this who've been impregnated with these genetically enhanced embryos And they're being hunted down and murdered one at a time And so he needs to figure out who's killing these women and why and are there any others like them who may still be alive And when he does he comes to realize That the skill sets that he's lived He's he's proud of and has used in his life aren't enough and that there's a part of his Humanity that's missing just based on who he is and the way that he's lived his life And so he has this group of friends including his ex-girlfriend Who he needs to rely on more than anybody he's ever Relyed to for him to stay alive and to do what he needs to do to try to save Try to save these other women and so the book is in many ways a About this technology But it's also very much a love story because it's about that we all have We're all made up of code and these codes are critically important part A critically important part of who we are But at the end of the day there's an element of our humanity which is greater than that that code and as we as a species wrestle with this fundamental transformation of our understanding of ourselves and this ability to change ourselves in ways That would have been unthinkable for all of our all of our ancestors We're going to be engaged in this dialogue with each other with ourselves About what does it mean to be a human being and as far as I can tell the core thing of being a human being is To love to connect and so this character, and I hope the readers This character and I and I hope the readers will will think about this because we are right on the verge of This fundamentally important conversation, which we're going to have about what does it mean to be a human being in an age of genetic malleability and so my my humble goal for this book is that people will read it We'll have conversations with each other and that it will be play one small piece of Spurring on a conversation that we need to have sooner rather than later And I'd rather have it now where we can be a little more relaxed than in the future When the genetically modified people start showing up among us so With that, thank you so much. We have time for maybe a few questions. So thank you. Yeah Homeland yeah Well, that's something that we need they were going to be debating. I mean right there's debate Yeah, I know you reference Monsanto with the GMO debate It's a huge debate over who owns what and if you modify the DNA of a crop Can you own that and the people who are anti GMO and I'm probably more comfortable than a lot with GMO than a lot of Anti GMO campaigners. That's one of the things that they say do we want companies like? Monsanto owning pieces of our of our genetic code and so we don't have an answer to that But we need to have a process for thinking through those kinds of questions Yeah Yeah It's that is such a fundamental and important issue. I think that that Certainly genetic selection will be spread because Governments and insurance companies will have an enormous Incentive for everybody to do it because the cost of genome sequencing will in very short order move towards zero And so when governments and insurance companies do the cost-benefit analysis of how much does it cost to sequence pre-implantation? Genes pre-implantation embryos and how much does it cost to care for somebody for the entirety of their life who has Some kind of genetic disorder there'll be a big push, but there will be a fundamental unless we really Not only have the conversation, but think about this this issue The HG Wells type scenarios of our species dividing is very very real. I mean if these these Chinese Numbers are right 20 IQ points per generation is really a lot. I mean we have limitations of just how smart a human can be I Think but who knows and so the equity issues are really really important. Yeah We're not that far behind the question is and this book it deals a lot with us China and the issue is Different societies will organize themselves in different ways and have different restrictions and we For sure have and will have more restrictions than the Chinese So like for example when I was talking with this genetics researcher yesterday In China for us to get a million people and we have this in our veterans So every time when you join the armed forces You take an IQ test so we have people who've all taken IQ tests And there's a thing called the million Veterans program where they're trying to get a million veterans to agree One to have their genes sequenced and two to have their medical records open for Researchers so it we may get there and then like I said before the bigger the data set the more information We're going to have but in China if China decides that we want to get 10 million people and be and to have them sequenced and track them over the course of their lives Which they haven't done yet I think it's it's inevitable that they're going to do this when I started writing this book four years ago There weren't all these stories that have now come out and wired and the New Yorker about what the Chinese are doing It just it was a thought experiment that I was making what seems like the kind of thing that they would do So the United States is there and some states have less regulations than than others But the applications issues are going to be very very sticky And if we start having controversies around them There's going to be a lot of pullback certainly in societies like ours who at some deep level believe that there's some divine power That has ordered the universe versus China which thinks of a lot of issues as engineering problems And whether that's the one-child policy or three gorgeous dam or anything They're much more comfortable with societal engineering than than than we have time for for maybe one more All right two more because we're going to do one in that and one other thing that So when you guys I hope we'll all read the book You're going to notice that there's a very important character the lead character is dick Ron Azadi and the reporter But the second most important character is the police inspector named Maurice Henderson. Where's Maurice? so there's a real Maurice Henderson and The real or Maurice Henderson is one of my my great friends and when I first started writing the novel I just put in placeholders I didn't want to think about what everybody's name would be and I thought well I'll just change it and then I just had such warm feelings towards Maurice That I'd finished the first draft of the novel and that care It's not that it's exactly the same as Maurice, but I thought God it's Maurice I can't take Maurice's name. Who would I be so anyway, there's the real Maurice Henderson who's not he's not the same as the imaginary Maurice Henderson, but they do have The same name and I I had to call Maurice and ask for his permission to to steal his name Exposed guys two more. Thank you Yeah, yeah Yeah, so Yeah, yeah, so two things in terms of the reading I read some But I read much more of the science stuff than I did of the the other Fiction because like when I read fiction I like the Japanese stuff and kind of weird esoteric stuff But I I'm kind of embarrassed to say to say that in terms of Process as my my girlfriend Malika knows I'm Unfortunately, and I would trade a million novels if somebody can cure me An insomniac and when you wake up at like three o'clock in the morning You're pissed off for the first 15 minutes or you try to go to bed for the first few days Then you're pissed off for about 10 minutes, and they say as good I may as well write a novel or do do whatever But I I yeah, but I certainly believe and I will say this that every single person in this room has a Great novel in them and the only thing that you need to do is as Rocky and I have talked about for a long long time is sit your I'll use the Latin term sit You're took us down in the chair and start writing and then edit and edit and edit and edit and Until you're there and like my first book. I mean Rocky has been an essential partner in two books now The first book took seven years from start to finish this one took four. I've written a first draft of the sequel I'm hoping that will be faster But there are impediments out there in the world that I that I haven't yet internally Morning night when once I get into the rhythm, then I kind of can't stop done Yeah, that used to mean for sure when we were talking about when you and I don't we're talking about that six years ago That was the line that everybody said therapeutic genetic manipulation so like addressing tumors then that's okay and germline Heritable manipulation where you're doing something that passes down generation to generation. That's not okay But right now I mentioned his vote that's happening in a month in the UK that is germline Heritable and there's there are strong cases to do it. I Probably support doing it. I do support doing it but that already we've already are about to cross the germline and so these issues where we the Neat divides that we've made in the past are no longer neat and so that's why one of the things that I've been talking about with you Don is to have a structured National and even global dialogue where there's a congressional commissioners and the only mission that they have is to frame a series of the most important questions provide some background materials and then reach out to universities and civil society Organizations and others around the country so that we can have an informed conversation and then feed what comes from those conversations Back to this to this body, but these issues are so difficult and so and so fundamental So I think with that. I know there's other people who want to have questions But there's other people who want to have wine maybe more than the people who've already had questions so I'm gonna be I think just outside at this table and I would love to Hear your thoughts sign your books or whatever, but thank you all so it means so much to me to be here with all of you. Thank you