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Course: High school biology - NGSS > Unit 10
Lesson 1: Creativity in biologyThe future of creativity in biology
Hear from biology professionals as they talk about the future of creativity in biology. Created by Khan Academy.
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- First Official question
In Sal's second sentence of Transcript: "but we have the power to control it", is that like a part of speech or is it necessary?(2 votes)- When he says “we have the power to control it” I believe he is referring to genome editing.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Sal Khan here. I think we're about to enter
what will be considered the golden age of biology, where not only do we understand
or are starting understand the genetic basis of things, but we also have the power to control it. And if you're controlling it then the creativity gets
to a whole other level. So in the decades to come,
creativity and biology, and also other areas of STEM, like mathematics and
computing are all going to converge to really transform
humanity as we know it. But don't take my word for it, I'm about to introduce
you to some close friends who can even better draw this link between the future of biology
and the future of creativity. (upbeat music) - I think it's really exciting how biology and creativity have combined, particularly in the area
of health and outcomes and how do we help people with blindness? How do we help people who are paraplegic where we can start to read
the electrical activity of their intended movement
and have a robot do that. So they can gain, you
know, that activity again and have that power in their lives again. I think that is a classic
and beautiful example of the combination of
biology and creativity making our lives better every single day - Butterflies use something
called structural color which involves bending
light to generate color instead of using a bunch of pigment. So it definitely saves the
butterflies a bunch of energy in making that pigment. But now, because of some observant and innovative scientists,
it's saving us energy too. It's being used in
screens around the world to make them more efficient
at projecting color, which reduces the carbon footprint as some of our most common electronics. And how about the
creativity of using mRNA, which is pretty much just
biological text messages to give our bodies a heads up that they need to recognize
dangerous viruses. It's the technology being used in some of our most
innovative vaccines right now. (upbeat music) - I think it's going to
be even more important to have the widest range of
skill sets that you could have. So less specialization,
more a jack of all trades, including design, design
thinking, design work, together with that programming experience. So that you can jump into the
new technological advances that are being made every day. We're gonna be so much
more in virtual reality, can you not just use it,
but can you program it? - I think the most important
ones will be curiosity and keen eyed to observational skills. See, curiosity fuels the question why which is an essential
part of every innovation, and keen observational skills allow us not to waste our efforts
reinventing the wheel. Life has already solved so
many of the toughest problems that the world can possibly throw at it. So why not figure out how
biology has overcome an obstacle and adapt or improve on that? (upbeat music) I'd encourage every single
one of you to spend some time immersed in a different culture or maybe even spend some time working in a totally different part of the world from where you grew up. Now, it doesn't have to
be quite that drastic. It could be as simple as
investing in relationships with people from other parts of the world. And while you're at it, I'd encourage you to learn
a different language. Both of those experiences, I think, will stretch your mind in ways that help you consider
other possibilities. - Students can expand their creative and scientific skill sets by thinking beyond the classroom
and beyond the textbook, using that information from
classroom and from the textbook and from other formal information sources and expanding that to learn
more about both today's world and the world that you
imagine for the future. That involves using those
skills such as communication and problem solving and critical thinking to wonder not just about
what is already known, but to wonder about what is not yet known, which involves using creativity
to think and to wonder. And that also means
communicating with other people to see how they wanna
shape the world as well. (upbeat music) - We have the opportunity to work together with a variety of different voices, colleagues from all over the world who have different
strengths that they bring, different perspectives
that they bring about life and about how the world operates. And only when we bring
those voices together, will we have a more complete picture about how the living world works. So in order to really solve
the problems of the future, we're going to need to work
together as a global community - Problems are not solved in isolation, they're solved in collaborative
groups with other people and they're solved to be realistic. So you have to consider not
just your own discipline or your own science, but also
some economics and ethics and other things that
relate to the real world, to help you reach a real
world, but sensible solution. So it requires combining all those different ways of thinking, being communicative and problem solving and working with other people so that you can reach solutions that actually benefit the world. Because some solutions are
gonna be great on paper, but in practice, they
aren't really practical. So that's why using new ways
of thinking to solve problems is really important. - As an example, for
me, in my PhD project, even though my background
has been in biology, the problem that really
captured my interests and that I wanted to pursue
involves mechanics and physics. And so it required learning
a lot of some deep theories and ideas in physics that I
wouldn't have thought of before. And now I kind approach, it sort of changed the way that I approach biological problems. Now I have this physics lens
that I didn't have before, and that expands the of
experiments I can think of or hypotheses that I could
have for how something works. (upbeat music) - What are those biological solutions that can be solved with creativity that would change the world? And I always go to those
health, biological changes. The cure for cancer,
the cure for blindness, the cure for name, Alzheimer's
disease, for example. The modulation of our crops that would allow us to
feed the world, everybody, so there's no starvation. That is the goal that
all of our creativity, kind of taken together, is headed towards. I think that's inspiring,
I think that is doable, and with all the tools that
we've been talking about, technology, storytelling, and inspiration, all of that together is
going to get us there. - A creative approach to biology can help solve the problems of the future. I mean, if you think
about natural systems, they don't have any waste,
they recycle everything. Everything that goes into a natural system is used completely. And there are a lot of areas
in which we can learn from that as people and the systems
that we create and design. So if we can design ways to
more efficiently use water, recycle and reduce the
amount of waste we produce, that's gonna be one of the
most important innovations of the future, right? Providing fresh and clean water to a growing population for this world. - New innovations that I
think will help us approach science creatively in the future, really involve data
such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, and using data to help humans
make decisions collaboratively with either other humans, but also with artificial intelligence. There's so much data
that exists in the world, collected from scientific
and engineering observations, that we can take this information to help us make better
decisions in the future. Because it's gonna be a
combination of people thinking but also machines thinking, and that can help us make
more powerful conclusions.