Danny Hillis Understanding cancer through proteomics

Now Danny Hillis sort of framed the problem.

Danny Hillis The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B

This is Danny Hillis, and he's figuring out a design problem.

And then Danny says a really great journey will have a secret payoff.

You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago.

Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem.

In fact, Danny Hillis can estimate altitude by how much math he can't do in his head.

Danny Hillis actually has an update on that he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet.

My friend Danny Hillis says kind of a similar one, he says, Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

Now, this is a funny sort of conceptual thing, and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis' 10,000 Year Clock.

Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club.

Designed by Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose. It's presently in London, and is ticking away very deliberately at the science museum there.

Well known producers with concrete projects regarding Cuba, and the will to take them forward, include Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderberg, Randa Haines and Danny Glover.

Now, Danny and I were up at this same area one day, and Danny looked over to the right and noticed something halfway up the cliffs, which is a kind of a porch or a cliff shelf with bristlecones on it, and supposed that people going up to the clock inside the mountain could come out onto that shelf and look down at the view.

And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software.

Here's Danny Hillis in the midst of a bristlecone pine forest on Long Now land. I should say that the age of bristlecones was discovered, led by a theory.

Based on parts of it are based on an algorithm that Danny Hillis developed, so that a peal of 10 bells makes a different peal every day for 10,000 years.

We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system.

So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before.

And the third is the experience from the mountain, which is really dominated by the view shed of the spring valley there behind Danny, and if you look off to the right, out there, 15 miles across to the Schell Creek range.

But Danny Miller, who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines, was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype, and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype.

Danny Hills makes a case for the next frontier of cancer research proteomics, the study of proteins in the body. As Hillis explains it, genomics shows us a list of the ingredients of the body while proteomics shows us what those ingredients produce. Understanding what's going on in your body at the protein level may lead to a new understanding of how cancer happens.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a generous spirit suffused the Internet, whose users were few and far between. But today, the net is ubiquitous, connecting billions of people, machines and essential pieces of infrastructure leaving us vulnerable to cyber attack or meltdown. Internet pioneer Danny Hillis argues that the Internet wasn't designed for this kind of scale, and sounds a clarion call for us to develop a Plan B a parallel system to fall back on if or when the Internet crashes.