Science Friday - Building A Ghost Heart, The Effect Of Big Tech. Feb 14, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

The human heart is one of the most complicated organs in our body. The heart is, in a way, like a machine—the muscular organ pumping about 2,000 gallons of blood in an adult human every day. But can we construct a heart in the lab? Some scientists are turning to engineering to find ways to preserve that constant lub dub when a heart stops working. One team of researchers created a biohybrid heart, which combines a pig heart and mechanical parts. The team could control the beating motion of the heart to test pacemakers and other devices. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances in January. Mechanical engineering student Clara Park, an author on that study, talks about what it takes to engineer a biohybrid heart and how this model could be used in the future to develop implantable hearts and understand heart failure. At the Texas Heart Institute, Doris Taylor is developing a regenerative method for heart construction. She pioneered the creation of “ghost hearts”—animals hearts that are stripped of their original cells and injected with stem cells to create a personalized heart. So far, Taylor has only developed the technique with animal hearts, but in the future these ghost hearts could be used as scaffolds to grow transplant hearts for patients. Taylor talks about how much we know about the heart and why it continues to fascinate us. Last month Microsoft announced it is opening an office to represent itself to the United Nations. But what’s a tech company have to do with the U.N.? Meet the “Net State.” In her book The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World, Alexis Wichowski writes about how big tech companies are becoming much more than technology providers, and what it means for world citizens when powerful government-like entities—the “Net States”—transcend physical borders and laws. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, a look at how tech companies are behaving more like countries supplying electricity, intranet, and food, services that are traditionally administered by national governments. So what happens that they decide it's no longer in their best interests to do so? We'll discuss. But first, Valentine's Day, for those who participate, is designed as a day of romance, an affair of the heart. as the song says. And so, for some of you, that may, well, may mean, unfortunately, a broken heart. I'm sorry if that's you. But for us, this is an opportunity. What better time than now to explore how scientists are looking at mending human hearts.

And we're not talking about those bad breakups. Researchers are looking for ways to engineer the heart by building mechanical hearts and creating something called ghost hearts. It's aimed at making better heart parts, understanding the inner workings of the human heart. And my next guest is part of a team of researchers who hasn't lost a beat, creating a hybrid heart out of a big heart and mechanical parts that can simulate a beating heart outside of the body. The findings were published in the journal Science Robotics. Clara Park is lead author on that study, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at famous MIT. She joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me.

Now, just to be clear, the heart you engineered was a pig heart, correct? Yes, that is correct. And there were two different systems you needed to build. Tell us about how you designed it. Yeah, sure. So what we did was we had a dead pig heart, and we left the inner heart layer intact, but remove the muscle layers,

which were no longer functional because it's outside the body. and replace it with a robotic artificial muscles to restore the motion of the beating heart. So you had basically sort of the skeleton left of the pig heart then? That is correct. And you put your own what onto that skeleton? So the skeleton part was the inner heart layer. So the reason why we did that was because the heart by its nature has very detailed structures in the heart, like the heart valves and things like that, which are important to its function.

So that's what we kept. And then the robotic part was where we replaced the dead muscles with the soft robotic muscles to recreate the motion of the beating heart so that we can reanimate it even outside the body. Soft robotic muscles. What exactly are they made of it? So soft robotics as opposed to rigid robotics is made out of soft materials. So they are friendly materials like silicone, for instance, that are soft to touch with. And they are good for replicating complex motions, like biological motions. Were you excited? Did it work well? How well did it work in mimicking a live heart?

Yeah, so it did work pretty well. So we did make it to be like a real living heart. So it does mimic the pumping motion of the real heart. So it's a so usually a healthy, healthy physiological heart would pump about 70% of its volume and ours did achieve to that amount. So we are very happy with that. All right. Now that you have this prosthetic beating heart, what do you use it for? What kinds of useful things can you do with it to learn? So our goal was to use it as a bench stop simulator as our first school. So for instance, there are a lot of people with the heart diseases

and one of the common diseases that you can have impaired function of your heart valves. And in that case, you'd get prosthetic valves, which is designed to mimic a real heart valve to help the blood circulate throughout the body. And when engineers design such devices, they need to make sure that there are no leakages or it doesn't wear away

as you have them implanted in your body. So they usually first test them in simple bench top simulators and then in animals, which can be very time-consuming and expensive process. So then we realized that there were no machines that could simulate the heart accurately enough for the device designers. So we try to change that by having a real heart fuse with robotic muscles to kind of mimic the realistic motion and anatomy of the heart. So hopefully that could reduce the amount of animal testing in the future

or even allow the engineers to iterate the designs more quickly. So I understand that you're a mechanical engineering student. How did you start thinking about this from an engineering point of view? So my current training is a mechanical engineering. But my undergraduate degree was also in biological engineering. So I've really been at the intersection of the two. And the heart is, I think of it as both biological and mechanical machine. So it was a particularly exciting and exciting organ for me to engineer.

And I think having that dual background kind of allow me to recognize the limitations and advantages in the two fields and kind of let me combine the two to make a biohibrate heart. Did you ever get frustrated? Did you have a roadblock is sort of, oh no, how am I going to get past this sort of moment? Yeah, so I think at the beginning when I started this project, I think it was a little hard because I had this heart, but I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't have any medical background and stuff like that, but I was just really started off with dissecting the heart. So I just literally spent a few months doing that. But in the process, I did learn a lot about the heart,

and I got really intrigued by the fiber architecture of the heart. So, yeah, I was just really amazed by how it was organized in a such efficient way to pump the blood, so that actually became the inspiration later on to design the robotic muscles as well. Did you get a renewed respect for how complicated and intricate the heart works? Yes, every time I see it, I'm still really amazed by how it works. Wow, that's cool. Well, we're very happy to have you on Science Friday, and thank you so much for joining us. And good luck with your Ph.D. work.

Thank you so much. Clark Park is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT, and this is an amazing video. We have a video of the Hart G. Engineered in action on our website at Science Friday.com. It's really kind of cool. Now, another way to fix a heart is to grow your own. Yeah, my next guest works with something called Ghost Hearts, and she's growing and reviving them in the lab using stem cells in the hopes that one day we can create copies of our own personalized hearts and organs. Doris Taylor is the Director of Regenerative Medicine Research at Texas Heart Institute.

Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Taylor. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. What did you think of Clara Parks were? What a great combination of engineering and biology. You know, that's what I call bringing a Renaissance approach to science, asking a question and doing whatever it takes to answer it. It's really cool.

It is cool. Let me give out our number 8. 447-24825 or our audience can tweet us at Cy Freight. I mentioned this thing called a ghost heart. I mean, why call it a ghost heart? What is it? A ghost heart is essentially a heart from which we've removed all the cells, leaving the scaffold behind where the cells normally reside.

And if you look at it, it looks like a heart and still has all the the components of a heart except the cells. So it looks like a white, translucent, but opaque, heart. And hence the term ghost heart. And then so, okay, you have the ghost heart. It's a white and opaque. What do you fill it up with? So the ghost heart is basically what we call the extracellular matrix protein. And what we do is once we've removed all the cells, is we transfer. plant, stem cells back in. One of the cool things about the heart is that it needs an inordinate blood supply, an inordinate amount of blood. Our heart beats 24-7, 365, and every heart muscle cell is surrounded by about four capillaries, four small blood vessels. And so we had to rebuild

the blood supply in the heart first. We did that with vascular cells. And then, And then we transplant back in human-induced pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that we've differentiated to become immature heart cells. Now, I've seen heart cells growing in petri dishes where they sort of link up themselves and beat in unison. Is that what happens when you put the stem cells in? You know, they can. They do.

They beat. But we actually have to train them. The really remarkable thing about these hearts is that they need a physiology. They need to know they're in the, the cells need to know they're in the hearts. We have to give them a blood pressure. We have to give them a blood supply. We have to give them oxygen. And we essentially have to create an artificial body in which these hearts have mature.

So we have to pace them until they grow up and learn how to be together synchronously on their own. And we have to give them a blood pressure to beat against so that they mature. So they have to think that they're inside a body somewhere? Absolutely. Wow. Nature is pretty smart. And these cells are pretty smart. If we give them the right cues, they do the right things.

the scaffold in and of itself is part of the right cues. Our motto is give nature the tools and get out of the way. We're never going to figure it all out, but the cells seem to learn what to do when we put them in the right environment. This is a great time to take a break. We're going to come back. That's a great give nature the tools and get out of it. I'm getting out of the way for the break we have to take, talking with Doris Taylor, a number eight. 844-724-8255. So much to talk about with The Heart. And you can also tweet us at SciFRI.

We'll be right back with Doris Taylor after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about engineering the Heart. You heard it. The Heart. Good Valentine's Day subject.

Doris Taylor, Director of Regenerative Medicine Research at the Texas Heart Institute is my guest. Our number 844-8255. Dr. Taylor, I remember you joined us way back in 2008 when you were first working on ghost hearts and rats. What have you learned in the last 12 years? It was sort of a stupid question to ask, but I'm wondering. You know, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I thought it would simply be a matter of scaling up, taking bigger scaffolds and enough cells, putting them in,

And by now, we'd be transplanting these in people. Boy, was I naive. However, what we've done is move from rat hearts to pig hearts and human hearts. We've removed the cells from those routinely now. And as stem cell technology has evolved, and as we've, you know, the whole problem and the whole reason we need to grow new hearts is that heart cells don't divide. They don't grow by themselves, or if they do, it's at a very, very slow, low rate. And so growing the number of cells we need, billions and billions and billions,

to transplant into a human-sized heart, has taken us 10 years. And truthfully, if human-induced pluripotent stem cell technology hadn't evolved, we probably wouldn't be where we are today. So I've learned how to grow billions of cells. My team, and I have to say, this is not me. This is a phenomenal team at the Texas Heart Institute doing this work. We've had to learn how to build the artificial body, the bioreactor, to put these. We've had to build our own pacemakers.

We've had to build our own artificial lungs. because none of these tools existed 10 years ago. Do you think, yeah, I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt. But then do you think it's beyond their capability when it took you 12 years just to figure out how to get all these, to create all these heart cells? It's beyond our abilities to actually create an artificial but human-celled heart for transplanting? You know, we've made more progress in the last year and a half than we have in the last nine. So two years ago, I might have said, well, we're close, but we're not that close.

And I have said that. But I have an amazing team. We've made huge amounts of progress. And finally, the biology, the engineering, the technology, the ability to create, the ability to create. the kinds of products you just heard about with the bio-hybrid heart means that we're finally at that tipping point. I absolutely believe it's possible. I absolutely believe it's doable. And I believe within the next two years, we will be automating this process in a way that makes it possible for not just my team, but a lot of teams to begin to. to do this.

Let me go to the phones. 844-724-8255. Brad in Columbia, Missouri. Hi, Brad. Hey, hi, Ira. Glad to be on the air. I was wondering if the researcher could share any thoughts she might have on growing neural tissue and how her work on the heart and scaffolding might impact the ability to

regrowth spinal nerves. Good question. Dr. Taylor? You know, the cool thing. about the decelularization technology to generate these scaffolds that we use to make the ghost heart is that we can do it with anything that gets a blood supply. Absolutely it can be used to create scaffolds from spinal cord from brain. And we and others have decellularized a number of different tissues and organs for exactly that purpose. What is so,

exciting is that we're learning that human stem cells respond to their environment in ways that we never anticipated. And I think you're asking exactly the right question. I think we're at the beginning of a revolution in regenerative medicine as a result. You know, we routinely for burn victims and the people who need skin patches, we take skin patches from other parts of the body and we move them around. Can you use your heart structure to create like a patch that we could put into a person's heart and patch it up? Absolutely. One of the things that we started out doing a few years ago was saying exactly that, okay, let's put humans, if we don't have the billions we need to grow a whole heart, let's take the millions to billion we need to create part of the heart.

and we re-cellularize the ventricle. And we said, let's do that and cut it out and use it to make a patch. We and others soon realize that that works. We absolutely can build a patch with the blood supply today. And we can create rings, slices of heart that we put human cells. And you can watch them beat in the laboratory. It's phenomenal. It's amazing.

So, yes. But there's a shoe, there's another shoe dropping here. Well, no, the other shoe is that every 10 minutes a new person joins the waiting list for an organ. Okay, let me ask you this question then, because I'm running out of time. Do we need, could you with a sort of Manhattan project, sort of where we say we can do this, we can make lots of heart sales and patches, but you in your little laboratory, Dr. Taylor, we need a thousand Dr. Taylor's out there making, heart pieces and we can move this much more forward. We need that and we need to automate and close the process. So it's not about me just hiring more people and more students.

And it's also about resources. The hearts have to eat 24-7, 365. And somebody has to be there right now to feed them. My team does that. They're amazing. They never stop. But building the capacity you do it robotically and all. automating the process, putting enough resources into it, we'd solve this problem. Absolutely.

Now, we know the heart is an organ. There's a bigger association with it, though, because in songs and books, the heart is seen as the soul of the body, right? How is your view of the heart changed after working with it so long? You know, it's humbling. The first time you touch a human heart, at least for me, I cried. And I suspect a lot of surgeons will tell you the first time they held a human heart in their hands. It was humbling. It's a privilege to do what we do. It takes a team to do what we do. And I have to say that I've also had the privilege of working with artists to talk about the art and science of building a heart. And it's, it's, you know, it's, you know, sometimes there are no words for the privilege we have of doing what we do every day.

And if we can make a difference in one person's life by doing this, then that's why we are here every day. And thank you for making it accessible. Well, you're welcome. I'm getting misty just talking about us with you. And, you know, it's interesting to follow. I know you know we follow scientists on over years. We've been on almost 30 years and we follow a lot of scientists and where they're going. So please stay in touch.

Would you, Dr. Taylor? Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. And it's a great topic for you to bring us on Valentine's Day talking about real heart research. Thank you for your work. And we have all kinds of photos and videos of hearts. We've talked about in action on our website at Science Friday.com. Next up, the United Nations has 193 member states, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe and almost everything in between.

But last month, a tech company, Microsoft, announced it would be opening an office in New York to represent itself to the UN. So it can build relationships with UN representatives from around the world. It's a sign, my next guess says, of how tech companies like Microsoft wield an influence that far as soon. surpasses software or search engines. Take another tech giant. Google. It has its own counterterrorism office. Isn't fighting terrorists the domain of the U.S. government in spy agencies? Well, not anymore. My next guest says we're living in the era of the net state. Her name for tech companies that have grown so large, they resemble hugely powerful national governments in scope. Don't forget about Tesla, automaker, energy company, satellite system, neuroscience lab, all rolled into one.

So let me introduce my guest. Alexis Wichowski is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Innovation for the City of New York, adjunct associate professor at Columbia University. Her new book is The Information Trade, How Big Tech Conquers Countries Countries, Challenges Our Rights, Transforms Our World. We have an excerpt on our website at sciencepriday.com slash information. book. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much. I sort of took a stab at defining the net state. Tell us how you flesh that out. Sure. So I think that your description was right on. It's the term that I've used to describe tech companies, sort of the next stage of evolution, where they've

gone beyond their primary products and services and into areas that used to be the sole domain of governments, things like defense, diplomacy, infrastructure building, and citizen services. And And there's only a handful of net states, I think, out there in the world, but they wield just massive global influence and think that we need to really think about them not in the same way that we think about traditional corporations. Well, let's talk about how are they different from, say, GM, Coca-Cola, McDonald's. Those are mega-company. They absolutely are, and they have a global presence.

But in some ways, it seems almost absurd to think of McDonald's with a counterterrorism unit, or GM opening up a diplomatic office at the United Nations. So one of the things that distinguishes net states is their ambition to cross sectors into areas that really used to be just something that the nation state dealt with. I want to bring up an example of that, but first let me alert our listeners to our phone number,

844724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI, 8447248255 talking about NetStates on ScienceFRI from WNYC Studios. Joining me is Alexis Wachowski, author of her new book. It's the information trade. It's an interesting book. All right, let's talk about how things are moving outside of their domain.

Let me bring up, for example, Vermont. Tesla is transforming Vermont, but not with the cars themselves. Right, that's right. Elon Musk and Tesla have created another company called PowerPack, Powerwall, that deploys power packs. These are solar energy panels and arrays and batteries that can store power from the sun. And the state of Vermont has now had such a widespread deployment

of these power pack batteries that they're able to not rely on traditional generators when they lose power. So they've created a grid. Their own electric grid is something that the state or region might do on its own. It's gone into that business. Exactly, exactly.

And it's not the only place. There's now about 18 countries that have deployed grids powered by PowerPack and PowerWall around the world. And the question is, do the citizens of these states and countries, are they aware that it's a private company providing their power to them? Does it matter to them? Or as long as somebody's providing it, is that okay? I think that a lot of people don't think about the things that government does for them until something goes awry. And so I think that it's important to be aware of the fact that in some instances, something as basic as your energy that fuels your home is being run by,

in some cases, an automaker. Is it unregulated then? It's not to say that it's not subject to regulation, but it's very clear when you read the terms and services for Powerwall that they collect certain amounts of user data about when energy is used and how it's used. And as we've seen with other tech companies of this size, what happens with that user data? data is not regulated. And then you also talk about Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, after the hurricane in 2017 Hurricane Maria, the entire island lost electricity.

And the U.S. government was very slow to respond. So Tesla stepped in with its power packs and said, we can power your island and brought in a whole system of power packs to supply energy to a children's hospital within just the first week or two after the hurricane. You know, when I think about this, I think of one side, I have two sides to all these battles. And when I think about it, I say, what a great thing they have done, you know, helping people out. Then my other shoulder says, it's all about the money, isn't it? I think it's a combination of both in some ways. It's certainly a good PR move. It makes the company look really good to swoop in after a disaster and help out. But I think that more than that,

What we're seeing is these opportunities are kind of proof of concept. Tesla is showing that they can compete in this way, that they can be taken seriously as an energy supplier, and perhaps hopefully other countries will adopt them at a larger scale. But what's to prevent them from saying, oh, this was a bad business investment. We're just going to pull out. Too bad you lose your electricity. Well, this is exactly the reason that I think we need to be conscious about who's supplying our basic infrastructure services. because governments are required to take care of their citizens to a certain degree and supply certain kinds of services and protections.

The private sector is not. They may do so for a time because it seems like a good move, but they could change their mind at some point. And you say one of the differences is as simple as not my responsibility, right? Right. There's no government there, you know. Who are you going to vote for to bring them back? Exactly.

We don't vote for their leadership. There's no constitutional rights. outlined that we can take advantage of. And so we have, I think we do have some power, but it's not something that we recognize because we don't even really understand who is behind the scenes. Yeah. You researched all the acquisitions by tech companies since their inception, and you made a great grid of all those companies and analyzed how many of these aren't straightforward internet infrastructure. They're buying all kinds of stuff. Absolutely. So I did some research from the inception date of six companies and looked at, and these are the big tech companies,

Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Google, and Facebook, and looked at all of the other companies they've acquired and found that something like 20% of their acquisitions were not related to their core digital services. They were in biotech and health and wellness and infrastructure in food. They were in these areas that were very different than their main products and services. And it's not strange for a company to diversify and invest in other things that they think are going to make the money. But what is strange is that the scale of it, the scope of it, 20% is not a drop in the bucket. It's a lot of money. It's billions and billions of dollars.

We used to call that horizontal diversification in the old days. We're going to take a break and come back and talk. And this is so exciting and necessary to talk about with Alexis Wichowski, author of her new book is called The Information Trade, How Big Tech Conquers Countries Countries Countries. Challenges our rights. Transforms our world. Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI.

Lots more to come. Stay with us. We'll be right back. You're listening to Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with Alexis Wachowski, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Innovation for the city of New York. And her new book is The Information Trade,

how big tech conquers countries, challenges our rights, and transforms our world. And just reading your pedigree here, I'm wondering, you work for the city of New York. I do. How does the city of New York tackle this problem of these big tech companies? So this is something that's more at the federal level that we're talking about. And the kind of legislation and regulation that we would need would be from the federal government. And it's something that we see in other countries and we see in Europe with the GDPR. We are seeing states start to tackle this.

Like California has recently adopted some user protection laws. Well, that brings me to an interesting point that you talk about in your book is that a consortium of these big tech companies wanted to create. They knew there's a problem developing in their own infrastructure. And they said, well, we should discuss this with the federal government and created a meeting with the federal government. And you tell us what happened. So, yeah, a number of the major tech companies in Silicon Valley got together to talk about the number of challenges that they were experiencing countered. They are terrorist activities proliferating on their platforms, the instability around elections and the information that was being spread, the misinformation. So they got together and invited members of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

And from the reporting in the New York Times about this meeting, it didn't go so well. There was not really an appetite to cooperate with or really collaborate with the tech companies. So they got the message, I think, that they're really in this by themselves. And so I think this is one of the things that led them to create their own counterterrorism teams internally. Facebook's counterterrorism team is larger than the State Department's. Say that again. Facebook's counterterrorism team has more people working there than the State Department's counterterrorism team does. Is that that scary?

I think that one of the reasons for this is that they feel like they're on their own. Government is not stepping in the way that I think we would expect to in a traditional kind of conflict. I think they look at cyber conflict as sort of the domain of the cyber companies. Is this because they're just ignorant about the threats and what's going on? I don't think that there's a total ignorance about it. I think there's an awareness that this is certainly an issue that needs to be dealt with. But I think there may be this sense that the tech companies, being the experts of their domains

are probably in the best position to deal with this on their own. All right, let's move on to, this is mind-boggling on some different, many different levels. Let me talk about if big tech companies are acting more like big government. If you wrote a digital bill of rights

governing your online presence, what rights would it include? And you talk about that in your book. And we asked our listeners on the Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, and David and Anchorage said, a bill of rights would need a few prerequisites. A prerequisite for any digital bill of rights would be the right to access the internet.

Many of us don't have access to cable, and internet providers now can determine access based on payment and who can pay the most. What do you think of that? I think it's absolutely true. Even here in New York City, there's a number of 18 percent. and of New Yorkers don't have internet access in their homes. This is something that's still a really big problem. And I think with mobile phones, we're leapfrogging in some cases the need for home internet access, but it's still something that's not universal. It's not a given.

Let's go through your Bill of Rights that you wrote. Let's go through them one by one. Sure. So I think that there's really just a few basic principles we need to think about in terms of our rights. Number one being that we should have the right to choose what our data is worth and how we for it. Some people may say, you know what, I don't want to pay any money. I'm willing to give away my data in return for free use of some sort of online service or platform. Other people may choose that their data is worth something that they want to exchange some sort of, there be some sort of monetary exchange for their data. The second one is... Let me just stop you there for a second. We have a constitution. We have a Fourth Amendment

in it. Do we need to update that then in this society we live? I think that people have not paid much attention to the fact that the Fourth Amendment could apply to our data. I think there's this question of what is our data? Is it of us? Is it part of us? Is it like our personal physical property? Or because it can be replicated without a loss to us? Is it something different entirely?

I think that we need maybe an expansion or reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment for our modern times. Let's go to your second bill. Sure. So the second one is quite straightforward, and this is in the GDPR as well, is the right to know how our data is being used. So to make sure that we understand what companies are doing with our data and that that could be reported back to us. And in fact, the Wall Street Journal had an investigation out last week, which revealed that the Department of Homeland Security is buying cell phone data to track people for immigration enforcement purposes, which sort of seems like they're sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. rights. Yeah, they're just, they're moving around the legal issue by just making that purchase. And I think that this is something that needs to be looked at really carefully because I think that when you look at the, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to the legal issue, but the spirit of the Fourth Amendment,

it seems that this would qualify, that this law enforcement, if they are intentionally going around the legal channels they have to access this data, there's probably a reason for it. Maybe it wouldn't hold. You're right that, quote, Our world needs a pact that establishes citizen user protections from net states, a set of principles, sort of UN for net states, right? Right now there's really nothing that's there for us. The terms of service that we sign and agree to are there to protect the tech companies. They're not there to protect us.

And so I'm saying that it would be in all of our best interest to have something that's really to represent the citizen. Let's go on to your third. Sure. And this one, this is this idea of being able to clean up our own content. So one of the things that's really challenging about the internet is that things live on it forever. Something that you write 10 years later, it's as if you wrote it yesterday. Even if you don't believe in it or subscribe to it anymore, even if you feel that maybe it was a mistake, if your thinking has evolved or changed, there's nothing you can do about your own content on the public record. And this is probably one of the most controversial of the three because, this is not to say that we should censor our own content, but this is to say that we should have some sort of control over how that content is displayed. And the thing about this is,

and we have a caller who called in and said, he wants to say that these companies aren't elected. We didn't elect these people, but we give over to them, and you might say, well, it's your choice to give over whatever you writes, you read the Yula, the end-user license agreement, but in a world where we all connected,

it really is not much choice. Is there? There really is, it would be very difficult to somehow avoid the six major tech companies I write about in the book, not just because of the reach that they have, but because they themselves have acquired 673 other tech companies and other businesses. To avoid all of them, you'd have to essentially live in a cabin. You know, it's amazing because years ago I used to talk about this. I said that the game changer will be, loss of privacy will be, when they can all recognize our face wherever we are.

That has now happened. Yeah, we have facial recognition technology that's gotten quite good with certain subsets of the population. And people are selling that data. There was a story out a few weeks ago about two billion faces were up for sale. That's right. And this is one of the things that I think when we uploaded our photos onto Facebook and Instagram 10 years ago,

It's not something we were thinking about as a possibility. When you had your license picture taken at the DMV, you weren't thinking of that. Absolutely. As a possibility. And the question is, should the right to drive be connected to this agreement that your face is now public domain material? It's something that I think that we need to really look at. And how do we do that? How do we have that conversation?

I think part of the way we have that conversation is for citizens to mobilize. We have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for. Maybe individually, if I stop, if I protest Google or if I protest Facebook in the way that they're using my data, it's not going to do very much. But we've seen collective movements online make real difference in the world. The Me Too movement came through an online, it came online first. So I think that if we were able to organize and mobilize, we could actually make it a case that we have some sort of way to push back against how our data is being used. Is there a political issue here? We're in a political year.

Is there someone, I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but I mean, should this become part of a political discussion that we're having? I think it should be part of the political discussion because this is something that affects just about every citizen in the country. It's a global issue. It's a foreign policy issue. It's a national security issue. It's a basic human right.

So I think that this is something that would behove the people who are running for elected office to take up and pay. attention to. 844-7-24-8255 is our number. You write about the hacking of governments. This is just an amazing concept. Like the city of Atlanta, hospitals, mission-critical infrastructure. We have stories about ransoming.

You want your data back a hospital? Pay us a million bucks. Yeah. This is something that's happened to cities all over the country. And in the case of Atlanta, it was not actually a lot of money. It was somewhere around $50,000 they were being ransomed for, but it brought the entire city to a standstill. And one of the things that was significant about this

is that the people they called for help weren't necessarily just the federal government. It was also companies like Microsoft because they were the ones that had the technical expertise to really get them out of the trouble there. And that seems to be the thing. If I get held up, if I'm being held for ransom, you know, you call the police and they come and bring their talker in

who'll try to talk to. But we're not calling the police. We're calling a tech company. Exactly, exactly, because they're the ones that are, A, stepping up, and B, have the expertise to actually help us out. And this is where I think the federal government is also really needs to modernize and catch up with the times. We can't just throw our hands in the air and say, okay, the tech sector will have the corner on expertise. I think that we really need to make sure that expertise makes it into government. 844-7-24-8255 is our number.

So we just in a few minutes left, do you have a roadmap how we could move forward to become better? Yeah, I think one of the things that we can do is by looking at the way these different net states operate, identify the ones that are being more responsible and hold them up as examples. So one of the reasons I mentioned Microsoft earlier is because they have, they're sort of the elder of the net states. they've been around the longest, and they have kind of understandably evolved to the point where they are taking user data much more seriously. So when they had to comply with the GDPR in Europe, in the European Union, they extended those rights to all of their users around the world. So anybody could sign up to say, I want those same user protections that people in the EU have.

So I think that we need to celebrate the companies that are doing well by users and look at companies who are sharing or selling user data without our knowledge a little bit more carefully. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Alexis Wischowski, who is author of this. It's a great book, The Information Trade, How Big Tech Conquers Countries Countries, Challenges Our Rights, Transforms Our World. I don't know how I ask this question, but I will. I mean, in the age of the net state, why do we need nation states? So, you know?

This is, I think, one of the fundamental questions about what government's there for. Yeah, I mean, we have a constitution that's insured domestic tranquility, all of that stuff. Yeah, yeah, here's the thing. And I remember this puts me very well by a mayor in Brazil. He said, anybody can do good. Anybody can make the choice that they're going to do good. What's really hard is to be fair, and that is government's responsibility. We can see net states coming into people's aid after disaster, providing infrastructure, energy, telecommunications,

but they may decide that they don't have to, and that's fine. They can do that. But government has to. That's their responsibility. That's why they exist, is to serve their people, to take care of the people. For the disadvantaged people. Exactly. For the most vulnerable among us.

And to make sure that services are equal. accessible to everybody. And how do we ensure that happens? This is something that citizens need to, I think, pay more attention to. You know, it's really hard. We're overwhelmed. There's so much information out there. We're all very busy. So I think that it's not realistic to say we're going to

mobilize in the streets. But there are things that we can do, even online, using the tech tools that got us into this hot water in the first place. Give me an example. Oh, well, the Me Too movement was a great example of how an online campaign turned into a global phenomenon that had real world consequences. And I think that if there were some sort of similar mobilization online to bring tech companies to account, it could make a difference. So there needs to be a movement. I think so. I think so. I think it's not enough to say, oh, my privacy is gone too bad. I'm really sad about that, but there's nothing I can do.

Do you think your book has started a movement or created one? Well, I would like to see that happen. I would like to think that it makes a contribution and in that direction. Well, I want to thank you for making that contribution here today. Thank you so much. Alexis Wichowski is Deputy Chief of Technology Officer for Innovation for the City of New York, adjunct associate professor at Columbia University. Her new book is The Information Trade, How Big Tech Conquers Countries Countries,

Challenges Our Rights, Transforms Our World. We have an excerpt on our website at Science Friday.com slash information book. You were with us a few years ago, right? I was here three years ago, that's right. And this was the impetus for creating this book. It was because of I was on this show, somebody heard me in San Francisco, a book agent in San Francisco, reached out to me and said, that was a great program, and would you like to turn this into a book? And now, here I am three years later with the book. Maybe it kicks off a movement.

Maybe it does. Maybe it does indeed. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Of course, if you missed any part of our program, you want to hear it again, you subscribe to our podcast. day now is Science Friday. One important thing before we go, we have, you know, a farewell to say, and some farewells are harder, harder than others, especially when you're saying goodbye to a colleague and a friend of 12 years. Christopher and Taliatta is departing from our SciFri family this week. His first chore at SciFri, I remember this clearly, was making sure we gave his last name the

correct Italian pronunciation it deserved, but it was just a hint of the kind of journalistic detail, rigor, and hard work he would demand from all of us as he was senior producer. He challenged all of us to be better and mentored an entire team of crack producers in the process. His quiet but sure hand at the helm will be missed. We wish him well. Good luck, Chris. Science Friday Vock Pop App, we want your teeth questions. Yes. What do you wish to understand about teeth, dental care, related science. It's ask a dentist. We're going to have one on Science Friday Vox Pop app. Go to the app, download it, get on there, answer the question. What do you wish you understood about teeth, dental care, or related science? What is this thing about dental transplants?

All kinds of stuff like that. And you can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, anything, anywhere you are. You can also ask a smart speaker now to play Science Friday, and you'll get our last podcast there. We're moving forward in all social communities. Have a happy. I was, well, happy Valentine's Day. I can't go away without saying that to everybody. I'm Ira Flato in New York.