 Back to ThinkTech. For the 5 o'clock block, we have ThinkTech Tech Talks with Ethan Allen, who is on our wall for memorial memorable service over the years, commendable service over the years as a host here on ThinkTech. And he's our Chief Scientist. It really is a good thing to have. Everybody should have a Chief Scientist. Thank you so much, Ethan, to be here. Thanks for having me back, Jay. It's a pleasure to be back and talking with you, as always. So we're talking today about some of the remarkable advances, discoveries, inventions, amazing things that have come out of Israel recently. And it's all sparked by a few newspaper articles, just listing all these incredible things they have done in information technology, medical technology, all altruistic contributions, you know, to humanity. It's very interesting. I know you've studied it. I wonder if we could get a handle on what it is, what they're focusing on, and why. So, I mean, a lot of what I saw, and again, I just, I haven't dug into this deeply, but a lot of what I saw based on the leads you gave me, were medical issues that are serious medical problems affecting people all around the world. And they were coming up with good, practical solutions that are wildly innovative, and yet should make the treatment of these conditions much more readily available, much more widely available to many more people. And as such, it's really admirable science, truly amazing stuff. You know, just a footnote on that to say that, you know, up till the time of COVID, at least in my imperfect view of the world, I figured that the United States was the leader in science, the leader. And we had more healthcare science, and we had more information technology than anyone else by leaps and bounds. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of people who still say that, still feel that way. But if you look around over the past year, say, you begin wondering, you know, what's going on. For example, China has a lot of technology, they have a different way of doing it. And sometimes they secrete it. Sometimes they rip it off. But they have it, and they have scientists, many of whom were trained in this country, you know, that are world-class. So they're directly competing with us to be leader in science and technology. I was telling you before the show there's a therapeutic that was announced in the paper by a group in British Columbia, which is a therapeutic nasal spray, well, sanitize. And it knocks off COVID. If you have COVID symptoms, this will knock off the disease in like one day with very high rate of success, like almost 100%. So, you know, this is quite remarkable. This is Canada. This is not the US. And then you talk about the Pfizer drug. The Pfizer drug was developed by a couple of Turks who were doing research in Germany. It's not really an American discovery at all. And so what we have is the science has permeated the globe. I mean, even Russia, for their troubles and everything, they have a vaccine. So many vaccines, not all from the US. And then, of course, now Israel. It's very innovative. We knew they were innovative. I remember. I'll stop in a minute here. I remember. They were buying these fighter planes from us. And the problem with the fighter planes that were then being manufactured is that the pilot could not see behind him in a dog fight. He couldn't see it. So the Israelis bought some rear view mirrors from an auto supply store. And they put them in a cockpit. And now the fighter pilot could look in the rear view mirror and see what was behind him. I mean, it's brilliant. And then the American manufacturers adopted exactly the same system. Sure, sure. I mean, all those are good ideas. Absolutely. So it's about innovation. And I think innovation is around the world. Science, technology is, you can no longer feel that we have a lock on these things. And it travels. Everybody copies everybody else. And science, as you know, is a completely collaborative global industry. So it could happen really much anywhere. So the Israelis, though, they are impressive. So can you talk about some of the things they've found these days? Sure. So one of the first things I read about there was this, essentially, we're just speaking of a nasal spray for Alzheimer's disease. And it's, I guess, undergoing tests. But it looks like not only can it, it can not one perhaps prevent delay or prevent Alzheimer's, but may even actually be able to reverse some of the symptoms of it, in case they're already there. Tricking chemical gets past the blood brain barrier, gets in and starts shooting away at the plaques in the brain that are thought to be associated with Alzheimer's and just sort of dissolves those away. Amazing stuff. The fact that can be delivered as a nasal spray means, essentially, it's going to be very easy to distribute it. People will be able to self-administer it. You won't need to go visit a hospital to get this treatment. Presumably, it's going to be shelf-stable and maybe require refrigeration. I didn't get that part of it, may not, but won't need anything super spiffy in terms of care in terms of the special super low temperature or anything. Doesn't need anything else, the equipment to administer it. Remarkable. And Alzheimer's is such a huge problem in this country around the world. So huge numbers of people wind up developing Alzheimer's. We've got an aging population in a lot of the western world, as well as a lot of Asia. China actually has a huge aging population right now that they're going to have to deal with. But Japan, of course, classically, yeah, so this was really an amazing technology. What I find extraordinary is the thing about the delivery system. If you want to be invasive and do brain surgery and take top of his head off, I suppose you can do stuff with all kinds of penalties to pay on that one. Once you've figured out that the end of the sinus there is very close to the brain and you can have the brain absorb whatever is in that spray and thus fix the problem, the plaque. Alzheimer's is about plaque. That's like a miracle. And you can do this at home. This is going to change the whole world of Alzheimer's. I know people whose spouses have died from Alzheimer's. They could be alive today with this. Yeah, I'll be interested to see how soon it can get approval, and make that at least into widespread trials. I mean, it is interesting to go back to a point you raised earlier. The U.S. was widely regarded as being the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic. But in 2019, they'd actually done a worldwide survey and this medical preparation group, basically, and they rated the U.S. really head and shoulders above anyone else. We were the best prepared to handle it. And it goes show you they were looking at the wrong criteria or other people are much more adaptable than we are. Other groups certainly handle it better. But again, another thing that I looked at that they got now a blood test for protecting colon cancer. I mean, again, similar to Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's who can't really detect except by symptoms or after death, really, go and dig out the brain. Colon cancer, the traditional way to find it, has been rather nasty invasive colonoscopy, which any of us of a certain age know are no fun at all. They're expensive. They're time consuming. They take a fair amount of personality. You have to do them at least in a medical facility of some sort. They have a certain amount of risk. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Perforation of colon that can happen and various different things. A blood test, much simpler. Again, they've taken that. They just took down a whole bunch. Again, I don't know how much blood. I don't know how sensitive the test is. It's computer to be quite good. But again, depending on how this is, it could be something again that could be self-administered if it just really takes a finger prick of blood. If it takes a little more blood, you're probably going to have to go to a doctor's office and get them to draw some blood. But again, it could be checked for then as part of routine, annual blood work. I mean, just one more add-on test. Just click it. Check this box and they check your blood for pre-symptomatic colon cancer. I think they could find it earlier in some cases down that the biopsies came on, you know. Yeah. And I think something like half a million people in the United States die from colon cancer every year because they don't catch it. This would be easy to catch and it would save a lot of lives. Exactly. I mean, there's a lot of people who simply because they don't want to go through the hassle of the colonoscopy, they won't go get checked. They either from embarrassment, from self-consciousness, from lack of time, being too busy, from the fact that it isn't really a pleasant procedure. The preparation is no fun and the actual procedure itself is even less so. But instead, just have a part of your yearly blood work that try to get done. All automated and that means cheap. If you have to go in for a colonoscopy and go under an anesthesia and kill a half a day with all these doctors and nurses around you, that's going to cost a lot of money for somebody. Whether it's the insurance company or you, it's going to cost a lot of money. All this money would be saved. Right. And similarly, they've now apparently developed a screening test for lung cancer based on your breath. Since you just have to breathe out into this device and it can detect the DNA, mutated DNA that is very likely and very highly associated with cancerous cells. Again, this kind of stuff builds on, and none of this stuff spring to de novo, right? It all builds on other technologies. People have gotten this DNA sequencing technology. Really, that's developed very rapidly over the past decade, better and better and better. So they can do it smaller, faster, more accurately. And now they've come with, and lung cancer, again, for a diagnosis before, typically people would wait until they get symptoms. You go in, you get at least basically an x-ray for it. You know, spots show up or they don't show up. You know, it's something of a hassle. It's certainly you're exposing yourself to your radiation risk from the x-ray, which is needless. You know, there's a... And a lot of people don't get tested. You know, they ignore the symptoms. Right. And it winds up killing them. Yeah. And again, if something like this pans out well, as I pointed out, it's very tricky because your breath is a, you know, a chemical stew, basically. And depending on what you've been doing before you breathe out, it impacts your breath very heavily, right? If you're in a smoke-filled room, or if you've just been eating or drinking or whatever, all of that is going to be reflected back in your breath. So I'm sure there's still some, you know, things to work out with this, but again, it's going to make the test so much easier, so much more broadly accessible that people will take it. They'll, hey, sure, it's worth it. You know, all you have to do is blow in a tube and, you know, 20 minutes later, you have some result. And if you know cancer runs in your family or something, I mean, suddenly it's like, hey, I'll do one of those tests every six months. I'll do one every three months, you know, whatever. You know, no fuss, no fuss. It's not invasive at all. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, it's like before we're talking about the delivery system at the nasal sprays, in this case, it's sort of the reverse of that. You're just, you're waiting for the body to deliver its message to you, and you have to be listening. Yeah. You know, it's very interesting. I don't know if you've, if you've read, there are, people have figured out there are dogs who know how, essentially, smell of cancer, basically, and people who are very good and very accurate. And so this is, in a way, it's a very logical development, right? They've figured out, probably dogs are probably smelling something very similar to what this device is actually detecting is some, you know, mutated DNA. But it's just intriguing. But again, yes, that beautiful combination of here's a big problem, a common problem. And look, this piece of it, suddenly the diagnosis of it, we can just cut through a lot of the crap and make it really simple, really easy and cheap. And so we're going to spread this technology around the world. You know, probably 10 years from now, it'll be, you know, something that everyone does. Oh, I would want it. What's the risk? There is no risk at all. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the worst it could do is give a false positive. And seems like you just take another test and it's negative. And then you say, well, the third one and best out of three, we'll call it good. I take your point about the dogs. I was thinking the same thought when you were describing this, you know, smells can tell you a lot. My wife and I are watching this serial called a body of proof. It's about a medical examiner. Not that it's authoritative on medicine, but there's a lot of medicine to learn from it. And it's about a medical examiner in Philadelphia. And she's always smelling the dead bodies because it can tell her so much. She has trained herself to smell for things just like the dogs. And so if you say that smell can tell you things about the body, it's not just lung cancer. It could be a lot of other things. There are dogs who have picked up on local tumors. That is, you know, I was reading about a case where this guy, his dog suddenly started paying a lot of attention to a spot on his left leg, you know, and we just sit there with his nose sort of pressed against this spot, you know, or the clear blue sky was doing it. And it turned out he had, he had a tumor in right under when that dog was sniffing basically. Wow, that is so interesting. If the dog can do it, and if we have found a way to do the biochemical analysis with breath and lung cancer, then we can do better than dogs on the leg as well. We can use the same technology and just convert it to other diseases and conditions. Right. That's one of the things that came out of this. Yeah, it's a nice example, right? This should be a broadly applicable technology that you could take to stomach cancer, bladder cancer, colon cancer, whatever, you know. Maybe you can even start spliting some of the really hard ones, like ovarian cancer, which typically isn't spotted until stage four, right? And it's essentially uncreatable. If you could do that, you know, again, be saving huge numbers of lives. But put me to mind one of the other pieces I read about, they have developed, again, the Israeli scientists developed this beautiful device that basically on the nano scale, you know, like your scale, and it's a it's a decoy for viruses. And apparently you can build it for any class of virus you want. And you put this in and viruses go in it sort of a hack this thing rather than your own cells. And so you get you have a far lower viral load ultimately in your body because they're all falling into this trap, basically, that eats them and destroys them. It's a mousetrap, that's right. It's a mousetrap from very small mice. You know, once you've got it, you know, who knows? I mean, there are a lot of viral diseases around, right? And who knows how many of them will be able to apply it to. It's a truly amazing technology. Well, all of these things, you know, can be extended. I mean, for example, I'm just thinking that a whole notion of the smell of biochemical analysis of air coming out of your mouth you know, what about biochemical analysis in a new way using AI, what have you, or for urine or feces? You can really learn a lot about how somebody's body is performing without any invasive procedure at all. And or sweat, you know. Sweat, there you go, the skin. This is not a start track. It really is. Oh, yeah, I can I can believe that sometimes not far from future you'll have, you know, you stick a little pad on your arm get for five minutes. And yeah, we'll do a whole analysis for a whole bunch of different diseases, including cancers of various sorts, metabolic conditions, you know, you know. And the mousetrap, you know, as we have followed the science, I mean, it's imperfect because we haven't been told enough to really, you know, become amateur scientists over the over the past year. We've learned some things about viruses, but not enough. One of the things that has come up is, wait a minute. So, you know, we had SARS and we've had what's the one in the Middle East? MERS. And, you know, we've had Ebola. Ebola is a virus too, isn't it? Yes. And, you know, these each one of these things is its own killer. And you can solve one of them, but not others. And we haven't come up with a universal virus killer. And really, that's got to be down the line because of these variants. You know, the viruses will mutate. And then we have to develop another vaccine. And that's a whole different experience. And, you know, we may not be that good that we can follow it quick enough. This was pretty good over the course of the year, but there'll be more. We live in a world of mutating viruses. In the cases, the more mutate anyway, it seems to be the mousetrap thing. Yeah. I mean, that's universal. It's universal. Right. That should be should be adaptable to almost any virus, you know, and find the specific ones. Yeah. And I mean, we live in an amazing sea of viruses that people do not realize. But every day on every square yard of this planet, something like 875 million viruses to send. That's a lot of viruses on our square yard. 65 million of them are completely harmless. It's that odd million. Yeah, exactly. That's actually very true. Most of us, we don't care about some of them are actually incredibly valuable to us probably because they stop other ones or they turn out to be doing good things for us. But yeah, sure, bacteria in your gut, right? You need them. You can't survive without them. On the other hand, if you could make a biochemical test, a smell test on what's in your gut, we know how to find out what smells in your gut. Then you can see how that bacteria is functioning and whether it's functioning properly. And you can identify antigens that way, just from the smell of what's in your gut. There's a huge interest these days in sort of called microbiomics, you know, looking at the massive populations of stuff that lives in your guts. Yeah. And they turn out to be doing a lot of important stuff. We had not even begun to suspect they are related to things as diverse as mental conditions like depression, as well as much more common sort of gut associated things like ulcers and all that kind of issue. And again, as we get better and better, we're going to be able to start fine-tuning that microbial population. And you need a little more of this species and a little fewer of these. So we're going to send in a specific, you know, bacterial or vital trap that will take out one population while extradosing you or the other and will readjust your whole microbiome up to fine-tuning, you know. Yeah. And if I were a scientist and I could live anywhere in the world, I could read up on this, I could talk to my collaborators anywhere and I could work on that theory and the theories of all of these, you know, innovations you've been talking about from Israel. So I think it's a global process. And in a few years, we're going to see people from every corner of the earth participating. A good bet also, by the way, would be India, because there's, you know, so much research going on in India. And PS, they have their own vaccine, which they are altruistically giving or selling cheap to developing countries. And they're doing a yeoman's job in containing the virus, even where the United States is not, you know, helping. Anyway, what else you got? Let's see some more of these. I'm interested in making notes, you know, and this is all going to be in the final exam you got. So another thing is that they've apparently refined the techniques of so-called deep brain stimulation. So deep brain stimulation has been recognized as a very powerful thing, but the problem is it's extremely delicate and extremely invasive. You have to go in and, you know, drill a hole in the skull and slide an electro deep in somebody's brain and hoping you're only hitting just the right spot and then crank on the current. They've apparently now developed ways of doing that from the surface. So you don't have to go deep anymore, but you can still control right where the stimulation occurs without being invasive. So again, a lot of people haven't heard deep brain stimulation. It's not as well appreciated, but it's an extraordinarily powerful technique for a lot of neurological diseases. Parkinson's is the classic one where we know there's a location that basically your brain has sort of gone bad. You know, it's what's happened and neurons have gotten screwed up, sort of, again, almost a plaque-like issue. And now if you can treat this from outside, again, it opens up the doorways to treating many, many more patients and offering it to a much broader audience. Well, again, it's the non-invasive and I think it opens up a whole new area of technology that is reaching inside with electromagnetic waves somehow and focusing, that's not x-rays, something else, and having a result, I mean, achieving a desired result without touching anybody. And I think that's what happens. I read recently about a situation where there was some very sensitive material on a computer drive and they were very concerned that the adversary, this is a true story, this is not patient, the adversary would be able to modify the computer drive right through the wall of a room. And all they had to do was focus some kind of electromagnetic, right? You know, it's a weapon, you know, you've heard of this, and thus they would be able to change or destroy the data on the drive. So in order to protect the drive, they put it in a room which was led-lined or something, which would resist this kind of electromagnetic thing. But it points out that this is a technology that's pretty well advanced. You can affect things through a wall, certainly through the bones in your head with electronic signals. And I think there'll be more of that. It's also a star trek. Yeah, I think the real take-home message to me in reading through this stuff though, and I'm so glad you shared those things with me, Jay, because it was really an inspiration and treat about them. And it speaks to me about a culture of science in Israel, and that there is a culture of science that says, science is here to serve humankind. Science is here to do good for people. And like, let's focus our energy on that idea of fun. Putting out science is going to help the world, you know, that there's going to be medicine more accessible, medicine more effective, you know, going to make it easier, cheaper to do things that are currently need to be done, but can't be done or it takes a lot of technology and a lot of help to do them. And that kind of culture is so invaluable. You know, it really, it's very different from, for instance, the Chinese system, where the party gets to determine what science happens and runs it in the U.S. system, which is very open, and everyone does whatever science they want pretty much. Somehow, there's a culture among Israeli scientists must be, let's see who can be the best thing for humanity. Yeah, well, I was I was telling you about this is back in the, I want to say the 80s. It was the time of the ADM's adventure at the airport in Uganda, where he took a plane load of people. It was an LL flight hostage. And the Israelis came down there and did a surprise raid and rescued all of them. They would have been in great trouble if the Israelis not rescued them. And the Jewish community here in Honolulu invited one of the people on that plane, on the C-130 that rescued him, there were two C-130s, I don't know, to come here and he was a doctor. And I remember he spoke at the Pacific Club and I was in the room. And one thing he said struck me was, you know, you have to understand the difference between an Israeli doctor and a medical doctor in the U.S. Nobody worships us. We don't make all that much money. We're trades people. We just do our job. We save lives. And we occupy a different space in the society. I'm just a doctor. That's what I am. I save lives. I don't intend to make a lot of money or live in a big house. I'm just a doctor. And I thought that was really interesting because this guy was, in fact, he saved some lives in that raid. And he was a doctor who was called into service for military service in order to go on the raid. Suffice to say, I think it's instructive to remember that, my experience, and to compare that with the scientists in Israel. I'm just a scientist. I do this to save lives. I do this to invent new things for the benefit of the world. I'm not going to rule the world. I'm not going to make a million billion. This is what I do. That's what my scientists are supposed to do is make humanities a lot better. Basically, that's why we ask these questions, why we develop the technologies, is to make humankind better off. And they're doing an incredible job of it. That's the gratification really. And they have developed some very good schools and scientific centers in a relatively small geographical area. They have a lot of schools and research facilities. This is something we should follow because it's coming out of there. And the question is, I don't know if we have a handle on this. The question is, all these inventions, I know we haven't come to the end of your list yet. But how do these things get into the mainstream? If I say, yeah, I want to try that. I want to take that blood test. I want to find out if I have lung cancer. I want to breathe into a tube. Do I have to travel to Israel? That's a long way. How is that going to get into the mainstream in the United States? That's one of the issues. These technologies are all at different stages of development. I'm sure that again, they run them, have some approval process before they can be even used experimentally. And then once they pass that experimental stage or improve not to be harm planned to be helpful, they'll distribute them more broadly. Presumably a lot of these things, they will then basically turn around and tell the rest of the world, hey, here's how to make this. You guys go take it, test it yourselves, play with it any way you want and put it to use. They may want to get some compensation for it, which is richly deserved, of course, to make back your development costs and all. But yeah. When I get out of this discussion, Ethan said, maybe COVID has sensitized this. The speed at which remarkable drugs can be developed, a vaccine, for example. But now also the therapeutics, I mean, wow, the therapeutics are coming on. We were delayed in that. We were so focused on the vaccines, we weren't really concentrating on the therapeutics, but there was three or four or a half a dozen therapeutics now that are remarkable, not only from this country either. So it shows you that there's an extraordinary future out there for us. And if we concentrate on it, if we work together on it, if we don't get hung up in politics and bureaucracy, we could all have the benefits of these remarkable drugs and live longer and a better quality of life. It's right out there. We can see it and touch it. What do you think? It's a likable science, you know, Jay? Yes, it is, Ethan. And if you guys are interested in likable science, go on thinktecawai.com or youtube.com slash thinktecawai and look up the playlist called likable science. And you will see, Ethan, there hundreds of times, all kinds of scientific developments around the world. Thank you so much, Ethan. It's great to talk to you, as always. A pleasure to be here. Thank you for putting me on that stuff, and thanks for having me on as we could talk about it. I enjoy it. We'll do it again. Take care. Bye.