The decline of trust in science “terrifies” former MIT president Susan Hockfield

If an asteroid were spotted hurtling toward Earth, we wouldn’t be arguing over whether asteroids exist. But that’s basically what the politicization of science has done to the public discussion about climate change, says former MIT president Susan Hockfield.

“I understand that people might debate the fine points of climate change, but the fact is that the best science indicates that we’re in trouble,” Hockfield said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, adding, “It’s simply folly to my mind not to step up and invent the technologies that are going to prevent us from the ravages of climate change that we’re inflicting on the planet, or frankly whether it’s us or anyone or some other natural operation.”

Hockfield said that even though politics and science are often intertwined, with government funding driving progress in research, the scientific community must “insist on an apolitical realm.” And that means accepting that some people are experts in their fields and we should trust their opinions more than others’.

“We test ideas, we contest ideas, and if we don’t believe that there are things that are more right than others, which is where we place our bets now, we have no way of making it into the future.

“We have to insist on an understanding that there are people who understand areas better than we do,” she added. “I don’t pretend to be an engineer. I don’t pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they’ve figured out gravitational waves, I’m going to trust them more than I’m going to trust myself to imagine whether or not there are gravitational waves.”

Hockfield’s latest book, which she discusses at length in the new podcast with Swisher, is The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution.

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Susan.

Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as someone who has AirPods in her ears so often, I might as well be a cyborg, but in my spare time I talk tech, and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today in the red chair is doctor Susan Hockfield, the former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. She’s also a neuroscientist who has studied the way cancer spreads in the brain, and is the author of a new book, called The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution. We’re actually here taping at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, on the very rainy campus today. I was visiting the Media Lab, Joi Ito at the Media Lab, but Susan, welcome to Recode Decode.

Susan Hockfield: Thanks, it’s a thrill to be here with you.

There’s so much to talk about, I want to get a sense ... I don’t travel to Boston that often, but obviously Harvard, MIT, all the others are doing incredibly groundbreaking work in a lot of areas in technology, and Silicon Valley sort of sucks up all the oxygen, but there’s so much stuff being done here, especially at MIT. Talk a little bit about your background, because running MIT is a big deal for a lot of people, there’s a lot of people who are in Silicon Valley that went to MIT or Stanford or one of the big institutions. Talk a little bit about how you got here and why you decided to write this book.

Yeah, MIT is a really amazing place, and our country is blessed with a lot of phenomenal universities, places of fantastic research and great education. MIT is a little different from many of them. I spent 20 years at Yale University before coming to MIT, I often make the comment, perhaps a little too cheeky, that MIT and Yale are reciprocal institutions. Both are known for great strengths, Yale the humanities and social sciences, MIT for the sciences and engineering, and yet even with those great strengths, we have, both institutions, really strong representation in the other disciplines.

So I joined Yale on the faculty as a neuroscientist and spent most of my career there, my scientific career there, and then was recruited into academic leadership by the then-president Rick Levin, and that’s a story by itself. MIT recruited me to be its president, I joined MIT in 2004.

And what did you think at the time when you were going to do that? Going to be the president of MIT. I mean, there’s a different track of someone who’s a neuroscientist doing their work, right? Which you need to work on, and then running an institution, what was your thoughts when you were doing that?

So the real transition for me happened when Rick Levin invited me to be Dean of the Graduate School, and like many faculty members, many scholars, many academics, I had not really considered taking on any kind of academic leadership role, because that seemed to me to be really kind of on the sideline of what really mattered, which was teaching students and doing cutting-edge research.

When he first approached me, I demurred, and I went home and thought about it, and I realized that the reason I had had such a spectacularly interesting, successful, and productive career as a scientist and educator was that people had stepped up into these roles and it was about time for me to step up for the next generation.

My graduate education changed my life, dramatically changed my life, and opened worlds that I didn’t even know existed to me; and I felt it was time for me to do the same for others, so I told Rick that I would be Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for three years before going back full-time to my research. Needless to say ...

I did not return full-time to my research, but then moved on to be provost at Yale, and then from there to come to MIT was an interesting transition. People often remark on my having been the first woman to be president of MIT.

But perhaps the more … interesting first was that I was the first life scientist to be president of MIT.

And that was in some ways, a little...

Which is known for engineering, and really computer engineering, in particular.

Materials, you know electrical, we’ve got a full array of spectacular engineering departments, a great school of engineering; but very, very strong science. That strength in science really dates to the time before World War II, when a physicist became MIT’s president, Karl Taylor Compton was invited to be president of MIT to build strength in the sciences, recognizing that this pairing of science with engineering was critical to developing technologies for the future, and indeed that is the 20th century technology story.

Similarly, this strength built, not just in the physical sciences, but also in the life sciences, a number of our faculty have won Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine for their discoveries in fundamental biology.

Anyway, so by the time I was recruited to be MIT’s president, I had already made the transition from being a full-time researcher and educator to being, essentially, a full-time academic leader.

Right, talk a little bit about that, how you create, innovate. Because you’ve worked at places, especially MIT, where you create innovation, and you both work for the government, you have people that go into startups, it’s sort of the way people move into these companies. How did you think about it when you came here? Because you came in 2000...?

2004, so it was sort right after the internet bubble burst, and then it was back pre-Facebook, pre- a lot of the most recent things. How did you look at your role of what you were supposed to do for your students?

The biotech revolution had begun, but hadn’t reached the kind of intensity that it now has. So MIT has a different founding history from Yale: MIT was founded in 1861 to deliver technologies for America’s industrialization. No question, that was what William Barton Rogers, our founder, wanted to do. He felt there was no education available for the people that were needed to take this nation into the industrial age. So MIT, Rensselaer [Polytechnic Institute], West Point, we were all founded about the same time with the same kind of mission, so I often say that MIT was founded with tech transfer in our DNA.

Right, the idea that this would be commercialized, that this would be...

So, while at other schools, this business of moving from the academy into industry is a little awkward, at MIT, it is as smooth as just about any place.

And it’s respected, faculty who live both lives are respected. One of the things that surprised me when I joined MIT is that a lot of our faculty/entrepreneurs, will leave to start a company for a little bit of time, and come back until they have figured out how to start their next company.

Leave to start a company and then come back. I hadn’t seen that at Yale. Faculty who started companies basically left and pursued that and never really returned.

So this idea that it’s a two-way street, that you can both pursue fundamental research, drive it into applications, take those applications into the real world of the marketplace, and then come back is a really powerful force for MIT.

Absolutely, and when you think about that, but a lot of the action was happening in the west, how did you relate to that when you were thinking of that? Because there was some, you know, I visit here a lot, and there was some Boston companies, but really it had moved really dramatically West with a lot of the bigger companies locating there.

Yeah, well, digital technology we kind of lost, so a lot of the computer revolution began here.

And we lost it. And one of the things I studied when I came to MIT is AnnaLee Saxenian’s book on regional advantage because I wanted to understand the difference between the Boston region’s innovation economy and Silicon Valley’s innovation economy; and she’s quite insightful about what it takes to build those kinds of vibrant economies, vibrant ecologies, and I thought it was really interesting.

So regional advantage somehow got inside my brain and has become something that I’ve actually pursued and tried to foster, and regional advantage in terms of what we do on campus, in terms of how we interact between campus and our industrial neighbors — frankly, how we build bridges across the academic institutions so that we can do more with our resources than we could do on our own. Truth be told, if there’s a theme for my presidency, it really was that.

Among the things that we started when I was president was the MIT Energy Initiative, a cross-campus activity, because when I arrived, I heard from almost everyone I talked to, when I asked the question of, “What were MIT’s opportunities and responsibilities for the next decade?” The answer I got invariably was, “We should be doing more to invent a sustainable energy future.”

It was not an idea that I brought to MIT, it was an idea that was here, and as I explored it, I discovered dozens of fantastically important energy research projects that were not yet seeing the light of day because it was one by one ...

Yeah, economics and the business school and mechanical engineering and chemistry, I mean really, everywhere I looked, there was someone, or many people, with an interest in designing a sustainable energy future. So we launched the MIT Energy Initiative as this cross-campus activity. Ernie Moniz and Bob Armstrong started out a co-directors, but Ernie became the director and Bob the associate director and really engendered a kind of, not just enthusiasm, but the, again, the regional advantage to, I think, really advance technologies, policies, economics for a sustainable energy future.

So when you left, you were getting back to your roots, you had built a building, right? You had built this center for cancer ... I don’t have the full name.

The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Right, and so what were you, you had been part of creating that, correct?

Yeah, so that was another example of this kind of idea of bringing together different disciplines to attack a problem. So the other theme — so the primary theme I heard was climate and energy, and the second thing was the opportunities around the convergence of biology with engineering.

When I first came to MIT, I was talking to everyone I possibly could to understand what was going on, and again, what the opportunities and responsibilities were. The Dean of Engineering at the time, Tom Magnanti, told me that of the almost 400 faculty in the School of Engineering, a third of them were using biological parts in their work, and as a sometimes know-it-all, I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, bio-medicine.”

And he said, “Uh-uh, you don’t get it. Way beyond bio-medicine.” And so that door began to open for me to understand what was going on: Engineers building technologies out of biological, rather than physical, parts.

That became the second major theme of the presidency, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research is one example. So the Center for Cancer Research was started in 1974, here at MIT. Salvador Loera, who had already won a Nobel Prize, was the founder of that, he recruited 12 faculty in the department of biology to be the founding members, and they did spectacular work. Four of those original 12 have a Nobel Prize at this point, and my guess is that others of those 12 will win the Nobel Prize before time is out on that.

The then-current director of the Center for Cancer Research, Tyler Jacks, came to talk to me, as everyone did who had promises from the previous administration, and said that the Center for Cancer Research had been targeted to have either a renovation or a new building and would I be committed to that also? And I said, “Well, tell me what’s going on.”

He described a turn in the Center for Cancer Research to cancer nanotechnology — basically, the application of engineering concepts in the study of cancer, and I found that very intriguing because it resonated with this thing I had been hearing, and I said, “We could do that.” And that was kind of the founding conversation for what has become the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. The thesis is, take the 12 cancer biologists that were in the Center for Cancer Research, pair them with 12 engineers, put them in the same building, get this conversation going, and see whether we can accelerate progress to finding new ways to diagnose, treat, prevent cancer, to accelerate progress on cancer which has been, I mean, we’ve been making progress, but can we make progress faster?

It has proved to be successful beyond anything I could’ve imagined.

So to have this conversation ...

How so? Talk about what was the concept, is that you brought them together for them to percolate ideas together.

So, what I’ve learned is you don’t just throw people together and say, “Mix it up, have fun.”

This cancer thing’s been a problem, we need some solutions.

Yeah, can’t you engineers find solutions? So the 12 engineers were hand picked, engineers will work on any problem with their technology, and so most of the engineers who joined the biologists worked on cancer and other things.

One of my favorite examples is Angela Belcher, who works on building batteries, using viruses to build batteries.

Yeah, I want to talk about that in a minute, yeah.

But also using viruses to build cancer detection systems. So a set of 12 engineers ... but understanding that foundationally people who are raised in a discipline have a certain vocabulary, they have a certain perspective on what a problem is, they have a certain perspective on what a great solution would be, and it’s different. So we started out with basically conversations between the engineers and biologists, so they could understand one another’s worlds, develop a kind of vocabulary that would allow them to approach problems in a different way.

Right, to be thinking of them, and we’re going to talk a little bit about this, because this leads right into your book, The Age of Living Machines, that you discuss the virus battery, would you call it the virus battery? I don’t know what you call it, whatever.

In our next section we’re going to talk about this. So you decided then to focus on this idea, this idea of living machines, the combination of biology and technology?

And the physical sciences. The Koch Institute is one example. The Ragon Institute is similar, a kind of mash-up of clinicians, biologists, and engineers to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS and other things.

We started a new center called The Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, similarly can we figure out ways to bring biologists, clinicians, and engineers together around some of the really big problems ...

And you think this is where the answers are, because you do say, “how biology will build the next technology revolution.”

Talk a little bit about how you decided to do this. I mean, you had been running institutions like Yale and MIT for years, you had abandoned what you were studying, or what did you want to do when you got out? Like the idea of studying, you’re a neuroscientist.

During my academic leadership at Yale I had kept my lab, but had spent less and less attention on it. My mind had migrated from problems in the lab to problems in the university.

We can talk about fundraising, because I found that to be incredibly exciting.

And interesting to meet people who were capable of giving us enormous gifts, but they were capable of doing that because they had fantastic ideas that had changed the world.

And when I moved to MIT from Yale, I decided not to move my lab, realizing that I would not have enough time in the day to be president, never mind time to be president and run a lab, so I left my research. I decided it was time to close the lab, which I did, and came to MIT, and this theme of the convergence of biology with engineering had started when I was at Yale. We invented a new department of biomedical engineering that was a hybrid between the medical school and the FAS campus. I felt really good about that, until I arrived at MIT and realized the scale of the enterprise was tenfold different.

There was more going on here than I had ever imagined, so the idea of the age of living machines kind of emerged, and it didn’t really take concrete form in my mind until I spent a sabbatical year, and at the close of that sabbatical, I was at the Belfort Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard, I was invited to give the Godkin lecture, and I used this idea of the convergence of biology with engineering as the theme of that lecture, and realized with some encouragement from some close colleagues that it should be a book, and it should be a book.

What do you mean by “living machines?” Define that for people who have some idea, I mean people have ideas in their heads about robots who are sentient, you know, from sci-fi or Star Trek or wherever they’re watching their things. And then of course you have the visions of robots that are all over — Boston Dynamics, there’s all kinds of robot stuff going on, but what does “living machines” mean? Define it.

So this is very different from what you’ve just described.

I know that, I’m saying, when you say, “living machines,” people think, I don’t know, Data from Star Trek or whoever.

So I can hold up my cellphone and say, “This is a machine, built with physics.”

Or I could hold up an abalone shell, and say, “This is a machine built with biology.”

And what an abalone does is gather up components of the stuff in the seawater and creates an incredibly strong yet light and sufficiently flexible shell. Well, why can’t we build things that way? When the abalone dies, the shell falls apart into pieces and provides the resources for the next generation of abalone. So why can’t we build things using the principles of biology?

Rather than the principles of physics.

Rather than the principles of physics. But you know, at the end of the day, the biology is based on principles of physics. But why can’t we fast-forward? Let me give you an example from the book.

One of the great challenges for humankind, going back thousands of years, is clean water.

Probably the most important one going forward.

Worse and worse problem because our fresh water becomes contaminated. There is less and less available for more and more people. And so we still rely on the same purification methods that were used 1500, 2000 BC, so filtration or distillation. These are energy-intensive, they’re slow, they’re expensive. Can we not do better?

So one of the ideas that I talk about in the book is using nature’s genius to filter water. And it ends up that all of our cells have a protein in their membrane, in the cell membrane, that is the conduit for water to pass into and out of the cell. And it’s a little biological machine that only allows water to pass. It’s a great filter of water.

Let me ask you, why do you call it a “machine?” I agree with you, but explain why you call it a machine versus people think of these as biological processes. Biology’s never thought of as a machine.

It’s interesting. This was my insight as ... I have to say, my background is in neuroanatomy. I am fascinated by structure and how structure gives rise to function. So it was a bit of a stretch, when I became a molecular neurobiologist, to understand what a gene was, to understand what a protein was. I mean, these things just didn’t ... Yeah, I didn’t know what they were. And for me, the breakthrough understanding about proteins is they’re little machines. They’re machines that can move and do jobs for us, but they’re built from biology. So a channel, as I said, is a pore in a cell. It’s a protein. But the protein is a string of amino acids that winds itself up into a structure that carries out a job.

The job that they’re doing, and machines have jobs, either general machines or very specific machines.

Yeah. And the components of machines have jobs too, and basically that’s what proteins are. Proteins are the components that form the whole machine of a cell. But the proteins themselves act as little machines.

Some of them are more active than others. Some are just kind of, you know, passive pores. In any case, so filtering water is a very difficult task. And with the discovery of this water channel called aquaporin — it was discovered by Peter Agre, another fascinating story, how he got to it. But the idea is that rather than racking our brains to figure out how to build a channel that would be selective for water, why don’t we just use what nature has given us? And so Aquaporin AS is a company outside of Copenhagen that’s building water filters using the aquaporin protein.

And it’s a very different way of thinking about how to purify water. Potentially more efficient, potentially more specific than the water purification methods that we’ve used before.

And so the concept is that there are millions of these machines living in biology. There’s zillions. Or everything is, and everything in biology is a machine, is some kind of machine that solves a problem. And that we just have to find, look at them, they’re there. We just have to look for them.

We have to find them. But we now have the technology to find them. We have technologies to understand them. And you know, we know how to change them to fit our purposes. So the molecular biology revolution that decoded how information is carried in a cell, and then the second biology revolution, genomics, which allows us to tackle genes and proteins in enormous number, allow us to figure out how we might manipulate a protein if it doesn’t perfectly fit our needs, how to change it a little bit so it more exactly fits the needs that we might want it to fit.

So the concept is that we have to ... That this biology, that we could find these machines in whatever areas we’re looking to solve, such as water purification. What else? Talk about some more examples. The battery. Go into the that. The battery gets ...

Sustainable energy is a really big problem for us. We love the idea of alternative energies to get off fossil fuels. But truth be told, wind and solar are not viable, really, at scale without storage. Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. And then what are you going to use? So without really phenomenally efficient and effective energy storage, wind and solar are not going to be really replacement technologies for fossil fuels.

So batteries is what energy storage devices are called. And the technology for batteries is basically the same that Volta invented, what, over 200 years ago.

It’s so funny. I just had this discussion with, I don’t mean to drop names, but Elon Musk was going on about this. Like, “It’s just a storage vehicle.” And then he was saying it hasn’t changed at all. It hasn’t changed in any way.

Right. So the components changed a little bit. So the lithium ion battery that is now kind of state of the art, great batteries. But the problem with lithium ion batteries is to make them consumes a huge amount of energy.

And produces a huge amount of toxic waste. And you know, that’s not really sustainable if you do a full accounting, that’s not sustainable at all. So we need better ways of making batteries.

And Angie Belcher, a faculty member at MIT at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research — by the way, you talk about what her cancer research also has figured out how to get viruses to organize battery components. So her lab now can make lithium ion batteries, essentially lithium ion batteries using viruses. But they make them at room temperature without any toxic byproducts. So that potentially ...

So talk about the science of it. I mean, I think it’ll be too hard for everyone to understand, but the science of it is using viruses. Explain that.

So what a battery is is a carefully organized, a closely organized set of materials. Lithium, cobalt, whatever you want to put in. But they have to be organized. It’s not all jumbled up together. They have to be organized into, essentially, layers and components and be separated.

The standard method is a chemical method, but Angie looks at the abalone shell. If abalone can build this, can’t we get living things to build what we need? And she has used viruses, standard lab strains of virus, that she has modified so that they bind the metallic components of batteries. Now, we knew they bound organic components. So biological ...

What was the inspiration from? What were they doing before that she saw this? What was their machine purpose before?

Well, viruses organize organic materials. That’s what they do. They bind to your cell. They interact with the world around them through the proteins on their surface.

So let’s use them for this.

So Angie’s question is, could we use the proteins on the surface of the virus not to bind biological things, not to bind an organic things, but to bind metals? Her first application was actually, could we use viruses to build wires? A simple problem, compared to batteries. So she did that and then realized that the ...

This is to manufacturer wires, right? That we might use different kinds of wires.

To build wires that could have some different kinds of designs than our current wires. And then she realized that the things that viruses organized well — metals — made them perfectly designed for building batteries. And so she’s done a couple of things. She has selected, she mutates viruses and then selects those that bind to, let’s just say cobalt, or carbon nanotubes or various things that you want to put in a battery to make them work better.

So some of that she does just through kind of random mutation and selection. And some of them she does by targeted genetic manipulation. So she has a library of viruses that organize components of batteries. Because these viruses have a rod-like structure, they’re almost like crystals. So you can get them to lie down in sheets with a highly ordered structure, which again makes it perfect for a battery. So she has these viruses that bind battery components make sheets, naturally, that she then packages into the standard coin cell battery cases that ...

That then hold ... They work just like regular batteries. It’s just that the cathode is built with a virus. The anode is built with a virus. You package them together and you have a battery. The batteries that she’s building now have the same charge density of state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries. And most importantly, they recharge over the same number of cycles as standard lithium ion batteries.

This is all really important to have batteries that really work. She told me recently that the new batteries that they’re building are built without lithium and without cobalt, which everyone who reads any kind of technology section of the newspaper will understand that if we are sticking with lithium or cobalt, we’re not going to get very far because these are expensive and dangerous metals to have around.

And so they become made out of what?

I’m not sure what she’s using, but it’s not lithium and it’s not cobalt.

All right. So it’s getting these cues from nature. Give me some more examples of what a living machine would look like. Take a big problem, even if it’s not being made right now.

A really big problem, of course, is ... Let me just back up. The biggest problem that we face right now outside of people not getting along...

The biggest technological problem is that ...

That’s why we have to get rid of the living and just replace them with living machines. But go ahead.

... is that we have over seven-and-a-half billion people on the planet and very sage projections have it that we will be over 9.7 billion by 2050.

Susan, that’s when I plan to die. But go ahead. Keep going.

It’s fine. I’ll probably be dead then too.

But you know, we’ve got kids.

No, population is an enormous issue.

And we are already stressing our planet to provide the energy, the water.

The food. And by the way, the health and health care that we need to have a vibrant and productive global population. We can be hysterical about it, or we can say we’re going to develop new technologies to meet these challenges. This has been a refrain throughout human history. Many people are familiar with the name of Malthus.

In 1798, he did this fantastic demographic study showing that population growth was faster than the growth in agricultural production. Said, “We’re all going to starve.” And then he went back and looked through time and said, “We always faced this problem.”

And when there are too many people, there’s war, there’s famine, there’s epidemics, there are ways of reducing the population, and that’s coming. Basically, you know, the world is ending. What he didn’t recognize is that new technologies for agriculture were already in place for field crop rotation and the ships that were going around the world exploring things were coming on islands that were actually not much land mass, but a huge amount of bird poop, guano. And those ships were bringing this back for fertilizer. Fantastic fertilizer. So agricultural productivity in Britain ...

Fixed the problem. And of course, population actually grew even faster than had been predicted.

Because of the technology, because of the ability to feed more people, food and water.

Food is rate-limiting for population. In any case, we’re at a similar point now. We’ve got to figure out how to provide for 9.5 billion-plus people without provoking war and famine and all these terrible things.

So energy, we talked about energy. Water can be critical. But health, we have endless conversations in the United States about how we can deliver health and health care to our population at more reasonable costs and with better access. And for many diseases, not all, but for many diseases, you can make a lot of progress. Obviously, No. 1 is prevention, right? If you can prevent a disease, that’s great. That’s vaccination. So if we could persuade everyone to get vaccinated, we’d ...

It’s an uphill battle these days. But go ahead.

Unfortunately. We can come back to that if you want.

The second-best strategy for many diseases, not for all, is early detection. So particularly for cancer, if you can detect a cancer early, your probability of actually curing someone of cancer is much higher than if you detect it late after a cancer has spread from its primary location and metastasized to other locations. Our technologies for detecting cancer right now have gotten better. And declining death rates from cancer, finally, after decades of trying, resulting from reduced smoking but also from diagnostic procedures like colonoscopy and mammography.

Those are late, actually. So by the time you could detect a cancer using those methods, cancers are pretty far along. So can we move earlier? So one living machine that Sangeeta Bhatia here at MIT has developed is using nanoparticles that detect the earliest signs of cancer. That is, the changes in the biology of the cancer for a detection method. I love this. This just blows my mind. So let me see if I can explain it. I’m waving my hands but without a whiteboard or a blackboard.

So you take a nanoparticle and decorate it with a short stretch of a protein. One of the hallmarks of many diseases is they make disease-specific processes and disease-specific enzymes. An enzyme is a kind of protein that cuts other proteins, we’ll just say for now. And for a cancer to grow, it’s got to grow in an environment that’s very dense. It can’t grow unless it cuts up the material standing in its way. So cancers make particular kinds of enzymes.

So Sangeeta thought, “Huh, if we could detect that enzyme, we could actually see whether there’s a cancer or not.” So the nanoparticle has a little stretch of protein on it that contains the site for that cancer enzyme. So the idea is you put this decorated nanoparticle into a patient. If there isn’t any cancer, that nanoparticle stays whole, eventually will degrade. But if there is a cancer, the cancer’s enzyme will clip off those protein fragments. And she’s designed it so that the protein fragment is small enough to be filtered by the kidney into the urine.

And so you can detect it.

You can detect it. Now, we all happen to be familiar with over-the-counter pregnancy tests. We already know how to do that. And detecting something in urine is so much easier than detecting it in blood. Blood is full of other proteins. Urine, normal urine, has no protein background, essentially no protein background. And what she and her team have shown is that, at least in animal models, this synthetic biomarker that she’s designed can detect cancers when they’re about a tenth the size of current detection techniques, and at, we anticipate, a fraction of the expense. So very powerful technique.

So a machine that would go in your body and then pee out, essentially.

Which would give you the information. All right, that’s fascinating.

How do you shift the thinking on this? Because I think so much has been focused on computing and digital and things like that. How do you shift the idea that we move into this era?

Now, there’s some analog stuff going on, like self-driving cars and all kinds of things like that. So there’s more analog and tech computing coming together and analog activities and in health care. How do you shift the idea that this is where the investment should be made and this is where the big money should be spent? Because it hasn’t been.

No. So this is a very big challenge, and there are two pieces of this. There’s the funding of the fundamental research that leads to a possible opening in the marketplace. And then there’s the funding of the passage into the marketplace.

So, let me first talk about the basic research funding. We talked earlier about how biologists and engineers are raised in very different disciplines with very different vocabularies, and creating opportunities for these people from different cultures, essentially, to come together is a challenge, but it’s a challenge that, I think, we can meet. And more and more places are trying to figure out how to actually make that happen in terms of bringing people together.

But if you think about how these activities are funded, our federal funding agencies have done, truly, a magnificent job in catalyzing discovery. But they were set up along, let’s just say, a 20th century model. The National Institutes of Health, which has delivered incredible things, I mean, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence and within a decade, became a treatable ...

Took a long time. The government, I mean.

I’m talking about the government to focus in on ...

Yes, yeah. No, initially, the Reagan Administration ... the focus on it, to focus and mobilize on it.

But if we think about when HIV/AIDs was described as a disease ...

No, it was in the ’80s.

Fantastic. But, you’re right, mobilizing the government to take a particular issue seriously takes a nation’s enthusiasm.

So the NIH does biomedical and biological research. The National Science Foundation does engineering research and some physics research and some math. The Department of Energy does a lot of physics research. And if you think about, how are you going to fund a project that crosses these disciplines, that is really hard to do.

Because none of these agencies is really set up to do that.

Right, and they have NASA doing space, right?

Yeah. And from time to time, we mount fantastic cross-agency collaborations. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the United States was nowhere in nanotechnology until we realized that we had to get moving, and a cross-agency collaboration was built to make that happen.

The Human Genome Project: cross agency. It required the development of great technology and great biology.

We figured out how to do that.

The New Brain Initiative is another great example of crossing agencies. But it’s from time to time, so we don’t have a standard way of creating opportunities to cross disciplines.

We’ve got to get better at that.

And so, how would this be that way? I mean, and it requires the administration to also be, or maybe not, maybe these things just go on, these various institutes. How do you get the ...

So, it certainly helps for the administration to be enthusiastic about research and about science.

I think you can safely say this one is not.

This one is not, has not demonstrated enthusiasm for it. But Congress continues to step up to the plate and say ...

”We’re going to fund it. We understand its importance. If you look through our history, this is the source of not just medical cures, this is the source of the technologies that have built our economy.”

”And provided jobs and futures for our nation.” We can come back to that later if you like. But the agencies themselves can organize themselves. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has played a role in making that happen. You know, my own view is that we need a go-to strategy, rather than reinventing it episodically.

To deal with some particular thing.

That’s a really good way to put it, episodically.

That would be great. So that’s on the funding, the initial part of it.

The government, the government where ...

But then, we’ve got to get these technologies out of the lab, into the marketplace. And this is a place where I think, also, our national policies are misaligned. The kinds of technologies I’ve just described are what we at MIT call tough tech. They are tough.

Let me give you one example of just how hard it is to take a biologic from a lab into the marketplace. So Herceptin is a Genentech drug for a variant of breast cancer that was a death sentence. It’s called HER2-positive. It has a particular marker on it. The HER2 gene, between the discovery of the HER2 gene and the FDA approval of Herceptin, 20 years.

And not because no one was trying. They were working as hard as they can and, standardly for any biological product, the guess is — the estimate is, it’s not a guess — it is overall, it’s about 10 years and a billion dollars.

To build a new battery company, similarly difficult.

And so you have to have long-term investments. You have to set up conditions that encourage people to put in the money and have the stamina to last through all of the wrong, blind alleys and failed pursuits that you’re going to do before you actually get to the promised land. Currently, we don’t privilege long-term investments.

Our investments get the same kind of tax advantage if you invest for a year or two as if you invest for 20 years. That’s not a recipe for success for these really tough technologies. We talk about building a new manufacturing base in the United States. We’ve got to start by building the technologies that we want to manufacture.

We can go back to the technologies of yesteryear, but truth be told, you can do that less expensively someplace else.

So we want to be able to design a new manufacturing sector that makes use of these new ideas. But for that, we need long-term investment.

So, how do you do that? How do you get that, the people thinking like that? I mean, you have people with plenty of money. There’s plenty of money all over. They tend to fund universities or long-term research projects, but how do you get people thinking like that? Where does that ...

Yeah, we’re talking about bigger money, actually, and we’re talking about industrial productivity. There’s some argument about whether tax incentives are sufficient to actually drive people to fund things, and I think it’s worth the bet.

Okay, so putting the amazing amount of money into it, how does that happen?

It happens through incentives, and there are a number of things that we have done in the past to encourage those kinds of incentives and to privilege those kinds of companies. Right now, there is hardly an incentive to do that.

The big accelerant for the second half of the 20th century was coming out of World War II, where we had poured federal dollars into research that created the technology marvels of World War II. Toward the end of the war, FDR turned to Vannevar Bush, his primary science adviser, and said, “Can we not figure out how to transform this strategy for war into a strategy for peace?”

And Bush laid out a blueprint for the second half of the 20th century in America that actually put all the pieces together and produced not just a research enterprise, an educational enterprise and an industrial enterprise that was unrivaled in the world.

So, where is that now? These things do come out of war. They come out of conflict and things like that. And there are obviously controversies in Silicon Valley about funding a lot of war-related stuff, but we’re not in a state of war. We haven’t been in a state of major war for a very long time, luckily.

How do you get that kind of urgency then, to create things for peace, I guess? Because that’s where it really is. We will have wars over water. We’ll have wars over resources. We’ll have wars over energy. It seems that those are the wars to come going forward, if I had to guess, if one would have to guess.

Yeah, well there’s evidence of these being the catalysts of war. And so, motivating the nation to understand that we have an opportunity, not just to ... for the promise of peace, but also for the promise of the next generation of economic growth.

I’ll tell you, following World War II, the United States played this game essentially by ourselves. What might have been our rivals in Europe were rebuilding their countries after the war. We had emerged from the war without the need to rebuild our destroyed cities. So we had that advantage.

But now, everyone understands the recipe that the United States used. And while I was president, there was hardly a week that would go by when someone from some other country wasn’t in my office saying, “We understand what the United States did. We want to do it in our country. Can you help us understand how we can build something like MIT because we understand that is part of the recipe to build an economy like the United States has enjoyed.”

It is exciting. It’s awesome that other countries want to build these things, but what it means is that we’ve got competition.

And if you look at the investments ...

China, China, China, and also China.

China, China, China, and other smaller countries, but China’s putting the kind of money behind this that is stunning. You know, when our Chinese colleagues came with the same question, they were enormously insightful because many of the others would say, “We just want to know how to build engineering. We need engineering departments because that’s where the tech transfer comes from. We understand that’s how some technology gets developed.”

But our Chinese colleagues would say, “We get it. We’re going to build the best physics department, we’re going to build the best math departments, we’re going to build the best biology departments. We’re going to do basic science because we understand that’s at the foundation of the engineering of the technologies of the future.” A very broad understanding of the intellectual backdrop for economic growth, for sustained economic growth.

So finishing up, how do we do that? How do we dominate the age of living machines? Because it worked out pretty well, the last technology booms were pretty ... Or is it just a global ... It seems like it still isn’t a global situation for anybody. It’s a Chinese situation or an American situation or a European ... How do we get our arms around owning this part of the future?

Well, there are a lot of components to it and I don’t ... I haven’t given up hope that the United States will be a leader in this. There are things that we do in our culture that are absolutely fantastic. Our insisting on scientific integrity, our sense of real competition, internal competition to figure out what kind of technology’s going to win. I love the idea, although I think it should be funded differently, of people making bets, different people making bets on various technology, that’s not all government. Government isn’t saying what we do and what we don’t do.

One of the recipes that Vannevar Bush laid out in his Science: The Endless Frontier blueprint was about federal funding. How is federal funding distributed? Peer review. So he understood that it was the community of scientists, the community of engineers who knew best where the frontiers would emerge from. So, you can say it’s top-down because it’s federal funding, but it’s top-down mediated by the community, who are at the leading edge. A brilliant solution.

So, finishing up, what would be the most exciting living machine you could conceive of?

Wow, what a great question. I don’t know that I have a favorite. I always say that my crystal ball gets a little fuzzy five years out. And I’m not sure if ... There are some people who 25 years before that computer that rode on Apollo 11, right? Which was an amazing achievement. There were people, probably, who thought there could be a computer like that.

It’s a step-by-step evolution. So I see a lot of potential in all the technologies I’ve called out and well beyond. There is some kid in some lab at MIT or in any place, anywhere in the country, who has an idea, a new idea of a living machine that you or I couldn’t ...

But what one would you make?

I think water is critical. I think energy is absolutely critical. If we don’t figure out how to provide sustainable energy, we are ... Our planet is doomed.

And one of the things I really do worry about is this current lack of confidence in experts and expertise. It’s what science is about. We test ideas, we contest ideas, and if we don’t believe that there are things that are more right than others, which is where we place our bets now, we have no way of making it into the future.

I agree. The truth is now political, you get that? So you have to be political.

I get that and it terrifies me. So we have to continue to insist on an apolitical realm. Politics are never out of it entirely. We have to insist on an understanding that there are people who understand areas better than we do. I don’t pretend to be an engineer. I don’t pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they’ve figured out gravitational waves, I’m going to trust them more than I’m going to trust myself to imagine whether or not there are gravitational waves.

But this idea that there are people with expertise that we should value and value their opinions greater than others. I understand that people might debate the fine points of climate change, but the fact is that the best science indicates that we’re in trouble.

If an asteroid were coming toward Earth, don’t you think we’d mount every possible defense to send it off its course, rather than say, “Asteroids don’t exist?” Of course we would. So it’s simply folly to my mind not to step up and invent the technologies that are going to prevent us from the ravages of climate change that we’re inflicting on the planet, or frankly whether it’s us or anyone or some other natural operation.

It’s our job to protect ourselves so that we have a better future.

Absolutely. Or maybe we’ll just learn our lesson. It’s probably the way it’s going to go, unfortunately the way it’s going to go.

Yes, me too. Well, this is a fascinating read. This is Susan Hockfield, her book is called The Age of Living Machines, including machines that will help us have cleaner water, more sustainable energy and I don’t know, a dating app? I don’t know, what do you think? What is the dating app of a living machine? It’s a person. Anyway: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution. I urge you to read it. Thank you very much, Susan.

Thank you, Kara. It’s fun talking with you.

Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.