humanity's struggleagainst death has been our mostenduring fight. history has given us one weaponin this existential battle. we fight back with medicine. tens of thousands of years ago,
3d printing of microscopic bacterial communities, our ancestors scavengedthe natural world for remedies. imagine the incredible leapsof faith we had to take in an effort to ease the pain, mend the broken,and revive the sick.
medicine was a dark art, full of false startsand false gods. but when we struck uponsome form of relief, it swept like wildfirethrough humankind. we built on every success until medicine becamea form of science, that's when we discoveredthe real killers within us. microscopic armies hiddenwithin our bodies waging war on our speciesfor thousands of years.
medicine is our great weaponto fight back against invisible,unthinkable death. from superstition to science, medicine has become one ofhumanity's most powerful tools. and though with eachnew challenge we may stumble, we find a way to getstronger and smarter, to beat back fatal diseasesand extend our lifespans. even crack openour genetic code. this is the story of howour fight against death
has determined our fate, how it became the driving forceof our evolution. how our tireless pursuitof medicine has made us modern and even made us superhuman. this is origins. it's the greatest adventure story ever told, the story of humankind and how we created the modern world.
we're going back in time to explore key moments, origin moments, that changed the course of our shared history. in the beginning, survival was key, not just from the violent threatof instant death posed by predators... no...
survival fromall the little things that we take for granted today. infection, bacteria, disease. let's be honest,anytime before the last century, the common cold or a bug bite could kill you. medicine is the name that we gave to the magic that allowed us to cheat death
again and again and again. and how we learned to fight,how we have managed to survive. in fact, all the little miracles that medicine brings us today, all of it adds up to a storyabout who we are as a species. these are moments in time, origin moments that offerirrefutable proof, medicine has made us modern. and it's been a key weaponin our fight for survival
for thousands of years. we didn't know how oldmedicine was until 1991. imagine, you're hikingthrough the eastern alps and you spot somethingin the snow. it's an ancient mummy, the oldest and best-preservedcorpse in history. we call him otzi man, andhe's more than 5,300 years old. otzi man hasgiven us an understanding of the origins of medicine.
when we evaluated him, we're able to documentancient humans' best efforts at treating the human body. so, otzi man has given usa glimpse on how he lived, but we also got an understandingof how he died. otzi man lived in a timeof brutality between humans. ancient tribes oftenfought to the death over life's most preciousresource, food. we know otzi was a fighterfrom the scars on his body,
but we also know that he andhis tribe were true believers in the mysterioushealing powers of nature. medicine was largely a matter of whatever was at hand. herbs, tree bark,those kind of things that may have a healing effect, but it was really kind ofcatch-as-catch-can. today, we're inventingmedicines in the laboratory. to do that, we needed thousandsof years of trial and error.
plants and nature are thefoundation of modern medicine. otzi lived in a worldof unforgiving violence, but otzi man and his peoplehad learned the earth had remediesfor their pain. natural therapies passed downfrom generation to generation, each one improving on the last. otzi man put his trust,his faith, in the healing powersof the earth. but natural medicinecould not protect him
from human brutality. otzi man was found face-down with a flint arrowheadin his shoulder. we think he died of blunt forcetrauma to the head. otzi man comes froma farming community that was only 5,000 yearsinto modern man. as a 45-year-old shepherd, otzi man is a living document,so to speak, of the good and the badof those societies.
in some sense, the agriculturaleconomy that they were living in was great in termsof letting them flourish and have stable livesand growing families, but then they hadto come to grips with what are calledmismatched diseases, such as tooth disease,dental disease, heart disease. all of those things thatwe now think of as human life and kind of what a lotof people die from is attributable tothe civilization we've created.
all of a sudden, otzi and his people werefaced with new diseases because of the inventionof agriculture. they needed new remedies. and their only resource isthe natural world around them. otzi man is sort ofa champion survivalist. it's a testamentto how well he did that he made it into the 40s, given how harsh the environmentmust have been.
in his stomach,there were eggs of parasites. his toes had remnantsof frostbite. he didn't have the medicalfirepower we do now, but he carried with himessentially a first-aid kit. inside it was a mushroom,birch polypore, which could have beena treatment for his intestinal parasite. everyone thoughtthat these ancient folk remedies from thousands of years agohad nothing left to teach us.
but now that these syntheticdrugs have reached a plateau, scientists are beginningto realize that maybe in orderto go forwards, we need to go backwards and discover what naturehas to offer us. but the best medicines, the most effective medicineswere discovered from nature. we learn from plants and nature, and then we go to the laboratoryand try to copy them.
our ancestors'surprisingly modern and inventive medical treatments have left scientists scouring the earth and reaching back in time for forgotten cures. about 80%of the world's population relies on plants asa major form of medicine. looking around in this habitat,
you might see justsome trees and weeds, and not really think thatthere's anything special about this area. but what i see is different. i see medicines. i see cures from the pastand hopefully, for our future. the brazilian pepper tree berryhas a unique mechanism of action that we've juststarted to uncover. it could be the sourceof the next big medicine
in treating really nastyinfections like mrsa in the future. plants make these compoundsto protect themselves. it works not by killing thebacteria, but by disarming it. so, we're harnessing toolsthat are already in use to manage human infections. we're not looking fora needle in a haystack. we know that people have usedthese plants as medicines for hundreds andhundreds of years.
every traditional society had encyclopedic knowledgeof the medicinal properties of the plantsin their environment, because that was the onlymedicine they had. during the american civil war, soldiers would make teasout of the oak bark and use it to rinsetheir wounds and infections. spanish moss has alsobeen used as a tea to treat fever and chills.
so, all around us,we actually are surrounded by many interesting plants thatcould serve as future medicines. a lot of this information, which may seem bizarrefolk medicine to us, in fact, is pharmaceuticallypotentially extremely valuable. i think there are many,many more areas of medicine that can benefit fromimproving our understanding of how these ancient remediesactually work. these days, we can treatwounds and cure diseases
that not too long ago wouldhave meant certain death. but the medical skills thatmade us who we are today were built by the doctorwho got his start the hard way, patching up gladiators ina second century fight club. humanity is cursed by theknowledge of our own mortality. the terrifying realizationthat life is a fickle flame that we, and all our loved ones,are destined for the grave drives us to find solace. religion told us deathis not the end.
the flesh is weak,but the soul survives. we could be reborn in infiniteloops of reincarnation or live foreverin the kingdom of heaven. to our ancestors, religionoffered more than solace. it offered to cureour suffering. for thousands of years, we invoked the supernaturalin search of remedies. medicine and superstitionwere woven tightly together. we turned to divination,shamans, and white witches
to guide us to long life. for the ancients,no remedy was too strange. the egyptians mixed spellsand natural cures into magical remedies. they pioneered bloodletting, a cure-all around the worldfor 2,000 years. even in our deepest desperation,we pushed on, slowly uncovering the truthbehind our suffering. the pain of losing loved onesdrove us forward.
over time, the answers beganto reveal themselves. superstition was givingway to science. medical science has come a long way in the last century. to our ancestors, things likect scans and laser surgery might look like magic. the medical skills thatmade us who we are today were built on a slow and steady accumulation of knowledge
over centuries. medical knowledge the world overcame to a head here in ancient greece. an empire of organized learning where the ruins ofmedical treatment centers still stand today. if you were going to besick in the ancient world, i think you really wanted to betreated by the ancient greeks. for one thing,they had temples of healing.
these were called asclepeion, which were basically the world'sfirst teaching hospitals. so, we are here in the most famous sanatoriumof the ancient world... but not just a priestwho might say an incantation or wave a piece of smoky featheraround you and hope that the spiritswould leave you. this was based ontrial and error. medicine was morethan just magic.
patients would visitthis ancient teaching hospital, they would actually spendthe night and the next day, report their dreams, which guided the doctors tofinding the next treatment. they actually inventedand developed scalpels. we can see evidenceof minor surgeries when we look at the patientsthat were treated during that time. greek medicine actuallycreated a structure
for human diseaseand human experience that we still use today. the greeks created the ritualand the process of diagnosis. everything that we have today is built on the giant shouldersof those that came before us. every step, every innovation,is held on to. that is the scientific method. but we're continuing to build on the legacy of thousandsand thousands of years
for the fundamental advancesfor tomorrow. this trial and error approach became the scientific method, the basis of all modern medicine. observe, experiment, formulate a hypothesis, and then test it again and again until it's proven false or true.
it's a method passed down to us by the most famous graduateof the asklepion, galen of pergamon. roughly 200 years afterthe birth of christ, galen helped lay the originsof modern medicine. galen was a fight doctorwho actually managed to write down his best practices and writing downwhat he knew to be true. he created a corpus thatwas not just useful,
but was in factrevered for centuries. with each procedure, galen was diving intoundiscovered territory. lucky for us,he kept detailed notes and recorded all his successesand his failures. the tradition beforegalen was so bad that you were actuallygenuinely likely to die if you went to see a doctor, which is why galen himselfis such an important doctor,
because he wasn't in there simply to magic something upand hope for the best. he had a reasonfor treating a patient, and that patienthe expected to get better. starting with galen, the history of medicineis really an effort to see inside the human body, to perceive what we can't see. his discoveries and his bookswere incredibly powerful,
because it allowed thatknowledge to be transferred and disseminated to arabia,to europe eventually, and became reallythe code of medicine for the next thousand years. unfortunately, all of hisautopsies were done on animals, not on humans. for about a thousand years, galen colored modern medicine and the treatments andpeople's approaches to it,
but there was an awful lotthat was wrong, for the principal reason thatgalen couldn't do dissections. religion didn't permitpeople to do dissections. andreas vesalius,who was a belgian doctor, he came along at a time when it became possibleto do dissections, and to actually lookat the human body and how it was put together. leonardo da vinci, for instance,with his anatomical drawings,
really began to createan environment in which medicineand human anatomy was looked at scientifically. when people actuallystudying with, essentially with an open mind,how the body works. it's an immensely complicatedthing that we, even now, we don't really understandin a lot of detail. i mean, nobody reallyunderstands exactly how the brainis working, for instance.
but it was the beginning. it was when we startedto get a handle on all this. the inventionof the x-ray machine, the invention of ct scans, it is all a process of tryingto see what we could not see, of trying to lookinside our bodies. thousands of years ago,they only looked at the surface, and then galen got us a littlebit deeper inside the skin, into anatomy.
when i think aboutmy surgical practice now, it wouldn't existif it were not for galen. and now with the tools we have, we're relying ongenetics and dna and even atomic interactionswithin our body. so the progressin modern medicine is in parallel with the progressin modern technology. they go hand in hand. better tools meansa better understanding of us.
galen had a seismic effect on how your doctor treats you. challenging established ideas,figuring out those missteps, using science toprove them wrong. our knowledge base is builton thousands of years of trial and error, and it all adds up to who we are now. we have mastered
the repair of our bodies. we can come back from what wasonce deemed almost certain death and be remade, almost good as new. and yet, one enemy is always lurking, always evolving, always surprising us withsickness and deadly disease. we could have been wiped out as a species,
if not for a few origin moments that gave us a fighting chance against unseen,almost undetectable killers. the healers of the past fought blindly against diseasefor ages. but in the 17th century,their hidden enemy was revealed. beneath the microscope, a strange new worldcame into focus. we had our firsttantalizing glimpse
of the hidden realm inside us. under the lens, flesh becamea latticework of nerves, capillaries, and blood, each playing a unique rolein the concert of life. everything we thoughtwe knew about medicine, about life itselfwas cast into doubt. as we plunged deeper, we came face to facewith an alien universe filled with miniscule creatures.
we had revealedthe realm of bacteria. trillions of them live and diewithin every one of us. they are centralto our survival, yet among them are the killers that have plagued us withcholera, tuberculosis, and the black death. looking deeper still, we discovered something evenmore sinister, the virus. secret agents in our system thathijack the mechanics of biology.
these microbes areour oldest enemies. a force we have foughtfor centuries. over the ages, these tiny armieshave killed billions. with medicine,we bring the fight to them. we live in the information age. an epoch where information can spread to billions of people around the globe instantaneously.
information that can illuminate, entertain, and save lives. in the recent outbreaks of sars,measles, and ebola, transmission of informationwas crucial to stop disease in its tracks. but imagine finding yourself stripped of all accessto information and in the midst of one of the deadliest plagues
known to humankind where over the courseof a few centuries, half of the entire populationof europe was lost. this was europein the 16th century. black death stoleup to 200 million lives. it was an invisible,relentless tidal wave washing over the worldfor hundreds of years. medicine inthe early middle ages in europe was pretty rudimentary.
a lot of it was to dowith superstition rather than any sortof rational treatments. you might as well have expectedif you had a bad wound to have someone pressa dead rat to it in the hopes thatthat would cure it. in 1528, one young doctorwas determined to fight the plaguewith science. his name wasmichel de nostredame, better known as nostradamus.
when we think of nostradamus, we think aboutall his prophecies, but actually he was a plaguedoctor taking care of the sick, as a young clinician. we know now the black deathis an infection, but back then they didn't know, so they blamed everythingfrom god to foreigners and even earthquakes. nostradamus'contribution to the black death
was getting peopleto boil water, was getting people to burytheir dead. this led to a whole newawareness for sanitation and its link with health. the invention of sanitation, the recognition thatwe needed to have sewers, that we neededto take human waste and move it as far as possiblefrom human settlements. that was in many waysthe greatest invention
one would say of medicine. what separatestown dwellers from nomads, people who livein nomadic societies can just get up and walk away. town dwellers can't. and why this is importantis because town dwellers have to deal withtheir own refuse. that required organization. it required politics.
it required a systemof sanitation. you're seeing the beginnings ofwhat we now call civic society. if you want to just countthe number of lives saved, sanitation is perhapsone of the greatest discoveries we've ever made. the plague pandemicsare a prime example of how lack of knowledge and the inability to spreadaccurate information can lead to false assumptions.
at every turn in our existence, the quest for truth by examination has provided the keyto our survival in the face of disaster. when we started to geta clearer picture of our body and how our system works, we discovered we are not alone. we now know we carrylife-forms within us,
trillions upon trillions, manyof them good, some of them bad. the first discovery of these microbes opened a whole new battlefront in the war against disease. it's a fight thatcontinues today, attacking the origins of illness itself, beating backthe specter of death!
we know today that our macroscopic world is controlled by microscopic beings. most of them help us, but some microbes are killers. medical technology is now so powerful we can see them in fine detail. but in the 19th century,
doctors had no ideawhat caused epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, influenza, measles, diseases that ravaged the most sophisticatedmodern societies on earth. a lot of the very finest minds put themselves to the challengeof understanding the human body and illness and how they work. but the problem isthat the human body
is a very complex thing, and they didn't understandone of the basic mechanisms, which is that a lotof what determines how healthy we are or notis invisible, it's microbial. imagine whatit must have been like to look into a microscopeand see for the first time organisms invisible to the eye, operating in our blood,within our bodies. but how would you knowif you were looking at
the product of a diseaseor its cause? this was the central questionfacing a young doctor working in the outskirtsof the german empire in 1875. his name was robert koch. robert koch was a countrydoctor in a small town that was filledwith sheep farmers and had an outbreak of anthrax. they asked him to find out whatwas killing the local sheep. so koch starteda series of experiments.
robert koch believedthe germ theory of disease, that disease could spreadby means of microbes, these things we observedunder microscopes. people had observed bacteriafor many hundreds of years. there was no way to prove that that had anything to dowith causing the disease. in fact, it was thoughtthat they resulted as a consequence of the disease. so koch took the bloodof the local sheep,
and he moved itto another animal. and that animal died. he saw bacteria in the bloodthat had an outbreak of anthrax. after he had reproducedthe disease in 20 or 30 animals, and in each case seen the bloodgo from pure and clean to infestedwith these pathogens, koch had actually createda chain of evidence that had identified thatthere was in fact one bacteria, one pathogen thatcaused this disease.
the germ theory of disease became a true breakthroughof medicine. right up until the time of koch, a common notion was thatmaladies were caused by bad air. miasmas, as they were known. i mean, malaria means 'bad air.' it just seemsso counterintuitive, the idea that somethingsmall and invisible could make you illand even kill you.
eventually,robert koch started to make this amazing patternof discoveries. typhus, anthrax, tuberculosis. all these diseases that causedmillions of deaths a year were suddenly cataloguedand identified as being caused by bacteria. and so robert koch signs upto give a lecture in a library in berlin. the doctors in the roomwere there to challenge koch.
they had staked their careerson arguing against germs. and he finished his lecture, andthe room was completely silent. paul ehrlich, another famousscientist who was in the room, said he knew that he hadwitnessed a pivotal moment in medical history. and the world hadsuddenly changed. the ability to identifyand prevent infectious diseases is the key to almost allof modern medical science. without it, humanity can diein a matter of months.
led us to the creationof vaccines, and that was a pivotal moment. we haven't yetconquered death, obviously, but one of the thingsthat we have conquered thanks to vaccinations is the insane infant mortalityrate that used to exist. a hundred years ago, familieshad to be of, you know, three, four, five,seven children, because at least half of them
weren't going to make itto adulthood. and of course it prevented womenfrom having careers, having lives outsideof the family. but thanks to vaccinations, we can be pretty sure thatthe children we give birth to are going to make it. suddenly, you now only needto have one or two children. women are no longer just babymachines, they are human beings. and so you havethe rise of feminism.
you get the riseof the middle classes. so in fact, there's this hugesocial revolution that comes out of thismedical revolution. the collective wisdomof all of humankind led to the medical advancements that made us modern. we're attacking the things thatharm us on a microscopic level. we're finding new waysof preventing disease every day. the question is,how far can we go?
what seems to befantasy and sci-fi in the world of healthand the human body is actually just rightaround the corner. imagine having your own personalcatalog of replacement tissue sitting on a shelf. we can tweak a skin celland turn it into a brain cell and rebuild your body parts. that's the horizon,and it's not far away. it's not 50 years away.
it's going on right now. this lab is to genetics what the printing presswas to written word. here inthis lab, we synthesize dna, so a lot of people have heardabout the human genome project where dna was decoded, but here what we're doing isactually building pieces of dna. the dna code in every cell is not only a sourceof information,
for example, your eye color,your hair color, your height, but it's alsoa source of control of different processesin your body, things like regenerating cellsat different speeds in different parts of your body. it's an incredible,incredible technology. our overarching goal ismaking dna ubiquitous, to make it availableto everyone. the things thatwe're working on right now
we know can be game changing, better, more specific drugs,personalized drugs. we're enabling a lotof different types of projects. but i always like to thinkabout the people that are studying cancer. there's been a lot of cancerin my family. cancer is a verydynamic disease. but if you canaccelerate research, then you can actually createa designer therapy
for a specific tumor. and the faster you can do that,the earlier you can intervene, and that's everything in cancer. in the worldof synthetic biology, it's either going to bethe thing that saves humanity or the thing thatkills humanity. so we're part of an organization that self-policesin the industry. we have different protocolsto ensure that none of us
will design and build somethingharmful to humanity. i think as we thinkabout medicine, this is the next revolutionin medicine. this is the ability to reallycreate personalized medicine. it's an opportunityto help humankind. with the discovery of dnaand the mechanisms of genetics, we have discoveredthe language of life. we have realized that we arelinguistic all the way down. dna is code,and we are diving deeper
into what makes usuniquely human. we are repairing flaws that have built up over millennia of evolution, so we can chase off death and thrive in this modern worldtoday and beyond tomorrow. as alan harrington once wrote, 'any philosophythat accepts death must itself be considered dead,its questions meaningless,
its consolations worn out.' across time,the advancement of medicine has done more than save lives. it has given usa new understanding of ourselves and our world. we have graspedthe inner workings of our bodies and our minds. we have gazed upon the verybuilding blocks of life, the clockwork of biologythat makes us tick.
we have even discoveredan entirely new way of thinking. through medicine, powerful ideasabout logic and reason have taken root andblossomed into science. even when the unknownoutweighed the known, even as we foughtan invisible enemy, we refused to acceptthe inevitable. with medicine,we have seized our own fate. we owe it all to the visionariesof medicine, the healers and thinkerswho paved the way.
we have come far. our species is on the vergeof medical revolutions that will change whatit means to be human. as we turn to face the future, we fight death with more powerthan ever before,
standing on the shouldersof giants. we are ready to facethe unknown. we will fight until we seethe end of disease... and just maybe,the end of death.
