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Good afternoon.
Today, I will talk to you about the ultimate taboo:
our death. When are we going to die?
This is the evolution of our life expectancy in the past 250 years.
It has already tripled. From 25 years in 1750, to more than 80 years now.
Today, our life expectancy increases by three months every year.
This means that as we get one year older,
we only get 9 months closer to our death!
How far can death be pushed back?
It is an essential question
at an individual and a group level for our own future.
There are four scenarios:
the green arrow is the pessimistic scenario, what some ecologists fear,
it is a decline in our life expectancy,
because of pollution, GMOs, global warming.
We have a second scenario, which is the white arrow,
which is a stop in technology, because it would have reached plateau,
it would've reached its limits. The blue scenario is the scenario of continued
slowing increase of our life expectancy until it reaches 120-130 years old.
In addition, there is a fourth scenario, which is the red arrow.
It is a scenario of technological revolution,
with a very rapid increase of our life expectancy, right from the 21st century.
Life is tremendously complex.
Our cells, our tissues, our organs,
are extremely complex.
Not so long ago, to analyze,
understand and handle our biological functions was considered an insurmountable task.
But today,
the technological reality is changing. What we call the NBIC technologies
will allow us to combat death, aging and disease,
thanks to combat medicine that has a power,
which was unimaginable just a few decades ago.
NBIC technologies: N is for Nanotechnology,
these are technologies that act on billionth of a meter.
B is for Biotechnology, I for Information Technology
and C for Cognitics, the science of the brain that you heard about earlier,
and artificial intelligence.
With NBIC technologies,
yesterday's science fiction will become reality medicine.
We will be able to repair our organs on a constantly smaller scale.
Modeling, changing our DNA, repairing our cells,
creating whole artificial organs,
inserting electronic implants, developing robotic surgery,
being healed with nanomotors, thanks to nanosensors and nano-implants.
Deep within our tissues, within our cells.
And of course, thanks to modeling,
which is key. Modeling, that is analysing and decoding the living
with powerful computers.
Moore's law is the basis of this technological revolution.
Gordon Moore was the founder, co-founder of Intel,
microprocessors, and as early as in the sixties, he had predicted
that computer power would double every eighteen months.
It has never been denied.
A single chip, such as the one you see, which fits in the palm of your hand,
performs one trillion operations per second.
The biggest computer servers carry out fifteen million billion operations per second.
Billion billions operations per second will be achieved in 2018th.
It's called the hexaflop.
These truly colossal computer powers enable us to do something
that we couldn't imagine a few decades ago: to understand and model the life.
We must be aware that each of us has one hundred trillion cells,
which are basically small factories with biological tool machines just a few nanometers in size.
Yet, the nanotechnology revolution allows us to act precisely
on that billionth of a meter scale. We'll be able to decrypt and repair our DNA,
rebuild our cells and tissues, increase our capabilities,
we will be able to reprogram our organs,
and then, as Professor Lledo talked about at length earlier,
we are starting to manage to interface our cells with electronic components,
including our neurons.
Why aren't we familiar with this technology?
Why didn't we see it is coming?
Two reasons:
first, we are still in the underground stage:
there have been few visible realizations for the general public
of what is produced in the labs.
For twenty years, we have learned to decipher the living,
including our genome,
we have gradually developed the main bricks
permitting us to manipulate the living, to tinker it,
but the democratisation stage of these technology and tools
is only just starting now.
The democratization of tinkering living things will begin in 2015,
and that is why you are not familiar with these developments.
The second reason, is that the scientists themselves
have not anticipated all this.
The great Jacques Monod, the founder of modern molecular biology,
wrote in 1970 -- he was a deeply respected Nobel Prize winner among biologists --
"The DNA size probably forbids us forever to modify the genome, i.e. the chromosomes."
Six years later, in 1976, the first genetic manipulations began.
More recently, in 1990, 12 years ago,
geneticists around the world would agree that they would never sequence, analyze
all of our DNA, all of our chromosomes.
The most optimistic ones thought it would take 3 to 5 centuries.
In fact, this program was completed in 2003.
Today, things are changing. The NBIC revolution emerges from the shadows
and the first realizations visible to the general public are coming with DNA sequencing.
A geneticist in a lifetime would make a sequence
of just a few thousands out of the three billion chemical bases of DNA.
Today, such a sequencer sequences an entire genome in four hours.
Tens of billions of base pairs of DNA!
In 13 years, the cost of sequencing DNA went from three billion dollars
-- and it had only been made on one person at the time --
to one thousand dollars, and soon we will go down to one hundred dollars.
The cost gets divided by 50% every five months; and it got divided by three millions in November.
This is truly a technological tsunami: we will all be sequenced.
This will develop a personalized medicine
guided by our genetic characteristics, and this is particularly important in oncology,
since unfortunately, one in four of us will have cancer.
These trends were not expected.
They caught the specialists themselves wrong-footed.
Had we been told that, in 2000, we could have as I have it on this USB stick,
our entire genome, we would have been considered a utopian.
A science fiction writer
Or even discredited by the scientific community, yet it is a reality.
The waves of technological innovations will accelerate now.
Three main waves are coming:
first the revolution of medical electronics; after cochlear implants,
in the 90s, to treat deaf children,
brain implants to treat Parkinson's disease, to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders,
and severe eating disorders.
Now depression, and experimentally, Alzheimer's disease are coming.
Being developped right now are the first artificial retinas to treat blind people;
the first artificial heart that should be implanted next year,
robotic surgery is growing, and by 2030,
we can assume surgeons will be experts in biomechanics and computing
and will no longer touch their patients.
Even more dramatic: bioengineering at DNA level
by manipulating DNA to reprogram our cells at the cellular level,
tissue regeneration by stem cells -- Fabrice told you about that earlier,
and in tissues, tissue engineering, which aims to produce entire organs --
and a few months ago, the first organ (larynx) created entirely artificially
was implanted in a patient who had no larynx.
Finally, the nano-medicine is coming.
The first International Congress of nano-medicine,
that is Medicine on a billionth of a meter scale,
was held in 2012.
And we are beginning to get smaller and smaller implants
that will gradually be able to act deep within our tissues and cells.
You will benefit from these three innovation waves by 2020.
We will be able to surf from one technological wave oto the next.
With the technology coming out of the labs to you by 2020,
we can add several healthy decades to our lives.
Around 2050, we will have other technological waves,
perhaps even more dramatic than those that come out of the labs today.
With that we can get a few more decades,
and leap by leap, we may get a life expectancy
that we cannot even imagine today.
So, are you thinking like some experts
that Man could become immortal in the short term?
My personal belief is that some of you in this room will live a thousand years.
Thank you.
(Applause)