Tag: synthetic virology

TED talk notes: Thomas Piketty on why the US is more unequal than Europe, and Andrew Hessel on making cancer fighting viruses

Every week, I share notes from some of my favorite TED talks. Here’s the complete list (pardon the load time, it’s just a continuous, single page).

Thomas Piketty: New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century

  • in the long-run, r > g (return on capital is greater than the return on economic growth), which leads to income inequality
  • in the last century, Europe and US have flipped: the US is now much more unequal
  • there are many reasons for this, including unequal access to skills, fast rise in top incomes
  • wealth inequality is always a lot higher than income inequality
  • wealth inequality is still less extreme than 1900
  • with r > g, initial inequalities are amplified at faster pace
  • there is always some level of dynamism and change (e.g., large families, poor investment decisions)
  • for most of history r > g (g was mostly 0 in agrarian society)
  • r > 0 was necessary for eventual labor diversification and societal evolution
  • both r and g have risen over time
  • long-run g is about 1-2%, we’ve seen unusually high g (3-4%) in post-war 20th century
  • long-run r is about 4-5%
  • r-g delta is caused by technology, savings rate, other factors
  • r > g particularly strong for billionaires; there are scale effects (e.g., portfolio management, financial instruments, tax evasion and lawyers and accountants)
  • main suggestion: increased financial transparency
  • if he were to rewrite the book today, he’d actually conclude that US income inequality higher than he reported

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Andrew Hessel: Synthetic Virology

  • the Pink Army Movement is the exact opposite of a traditional pharma company:
    • focused not on broad, but narrow-based drugs
    • not a closed system, but open-source
    • not for-profit, but non-profit
  • an oncolytic virus is a weak virus that can’t takeover a healthy cell, but can takeover a cancerous cell (which is by definition weaker than a healthy cell); the cancer cell then makes copies of the oncolytic virus, the cancer cell dies and the virus goes on to infect other cancer cells
  • cost of synthetically printing DNA is dropping dramatically
  • pharma is the opposite of Moore’s Law, costs of development have risen dramatically while # of approved drugs has fallen dramatically (me: a16z  jokingly calls this eroom’s law)

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Here’s the complete list of TED notes