Biotech is about to change your world

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. About twenty five years ago, the first draft of the Human Genome Project was completed. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey. Then president Bill Clinton, surrounded by scientists and world leaders most wondrous map ever produced by humankind. Praised the breakthrough project from the podium at the White House. But today's historic achievement is only a starting point. It took another twenty years to sequence the last 8%. But meanwhile, this genetic map of the human body has led to major breakthroughs in cancer treatments, prenatal testing and our understanding of rare diseases. It's considered a massive scientific accomplishment. And today, researchers want to go even further. So in the human genome project, we only had to handle that genome. But remember, one genome yields many, many, many different kinds of cells. This is computational biologist Aviv Regev. And so instead of just having to map this one static genome that kind of stays the same throughout the lifespan, when you look at cells, they actually change. My cells today are not the same as the cells that I had twenty years ago or ten years ago or the ones that I will have in ten or twenty years from now. Aviv is the cofounder of a project to map all of the types of cells in the human body. The project is called the Human Cell Atlas. She and researchers all over the world are cataloging how our cells change and interact. The goal is to use it to develop highly personalized medical treatments. And one of the critical things we need to navigate in the human body is our diseases. For example, I need an address for a cell if I want to go and target it with a therapy. Biologists have tried to do this for a very long time, but there's about 37,200,000,000,000 cells in an adult human body, and they do different things and behave in different ways. And there's 20,000 genes in the genome, and these genes combine to act in different ways that are not predict. If I know what happens about gene a and I know what happens with gene b, it doesn't mean that I can predict what will happen when I put a and b together. So when you start calculating the number of ways our cells and genome could combine, the possibilities are …