From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We assumed matter was fundamental when we probably should have prioritised consciousness. If we viewed consciousness as the prima materia of reality itself, I think we'd know a lot more about these intelligences and hidden agents than we do today.
What makes HIV so challenging is its ability to integrate into the host genome and establish latency. This is why we haven't been able to cure it yet - the virus literally becomes part of us.
To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible. This is one of the big advantages of BitCoin – the ledger is practically unhackable.
My impression however is that the rate of change in society is accelerating as a result of rapid developments in science and technology. Science today is a huge, industrial scale activity and has a far greater impact on society than it did a few hundred years ago.
It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination.
DNA is not life. A single chemical molecule has nothing to do with life. DNA is merely a storage system. Nobody would ever say that the 'Divine Comedy' is the actual paper and ink on which one of its copies is printed, however many influential scientists have supported this nonsensical viewpoint.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
The discovery of an effective HIV vaccine is the nirvana for all our efforts to prevent AIDS.
Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.
Limiting sleep to just 4-5 hours for one single night will drop levels of critical anti-cancer fighting cells, called natural killer cells, by 70%. That's a rather alarming state of immune deficiency, and it happens after just one night of short sleep.
Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations- changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing.
Here's the simple truth everyone should know: 'race' doesn't exist. In 1950, UNESCO held a commission with the world's top evolutionary biologists, ethnologists and cultural anthropologists examining the scientific evidence for this so-called concept of 'race'. Their conclusion was clear: race doesn't exist – there's no evidence to support it.