TED Radio Hour - Special Delivery

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

What does it take to deliver a message, precious cargo, or vaccines — meant for exactly the right place in our bodies? This hour, TED speakers explore the often perilous journey of crucial deliveries. Guests include theater director Amir Nizar Zuabi, astrophysicist Erika Hamden, chemical engineer Kathryn Whitehead, and entrepreneur Keller Rinaudo. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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 going to 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 Anoush Zamorodi. And today we're going to begin with a little girl on a long journey. Amal. She's called Amal, which in Arabic means hope. She's very curious. She's a bit mischievous. She's got very vivid, expressive eyes.

This is Amir Nizar. She left Syria. She's from Rief Halap, from the area of Aleppo. She left her house in one of the rounds of the violence, then was in the refugee camp still around the border when she lost her family, in the mayhem of war and conflict, like many children do. I think the first thing that you see when you look at Amal is something very sad, but at the same time, very strong. But Amal isn't just any child. Yeah, this nine-year-old Syrian girl is actually a three-and-a-half meter puppet. She's three and a half meters or 11 feet tall.

She's very, very big, which is part of the idea. You know, she's very visible because a lot of these kids aren't visible. So in a way, she's lucky. You can't ignore her. And for the past several months, Amal's been walking the path that many Syrian refugees travel each year. We walked her through Turkey, then through Greece, then through Italy. Meeting people along the way. Then into France, and now we're in Switzerland, and we'll continue to Germany, Belgium,

back into France, and then across the English Channel, and from Dover to Manchester. As she walks, a whole team of puppeteers manipulate her expressions and gestures, one on stilts, two at her sides, and if she walks, a whole team of puppeteers, manipulate her expressions and few all around in order to bring a mall to life. What is very, very beautiful is she's furniture. But there's a moment where she stands up and she takes a breath. Or our puppeteers together take a breath. And she is alive.

Suddenly she's a living creature with thoughts, with complexities, with wants, with fears. And it never ceases. to amaze me that this is a moment and suddenly life is created. Amir Nizar and his team spent years getting Amal ready for The Walk. It's a project happening over the course of five months, all in an effort to deliver a very special message from Amal. It's a continuous journey of a 90-year-old girl, and she's on this quest to maybe find somebody she knows.

but she really, really loves the sensation of sun on her skin. She doesn't really like when it becomes cold and dark. And she loves jumping in puddles, which is something we discovered a couple of days ago when it started raining. She's very, very brave. And she is a representation of many others like her. She sounds very real to you the way you talk about her. She is. And yeah, I talk about her as if she's a real child because we're walking in the name of 10,000 of thousands of children.

And for me to honor this experience, I need to think of her as a singular, complicated human being. And I need to treat her that way in order for her journey to mean anything. I don't want anybody to feel sad for refugees. I want people to see themselves when they see a refugee. and the minute you treat a refugee like this, you go, she is me. They are us. So you need to think about how would you like to be treated. What are your fears?

They're not so different. They're the same. You know, we're very, very similar. So I hope the message is delivered. I hope our message is to the hearts. I hope the hearts are open and are willing to accept. But to see that people are moved by a small gesture she does in the middle of a street and says,

suddenly you look around and people are wiping their tears and that's very, very beautiful to see. Amal's message is one that clearly couldn't be delivered through a letter or email. And transporting truly precious cargo like this, it can require painstaking planning and a treacherous journey. But if it's successful, it can change, even save a person's life. And so today on the show, stories of all kinds of specials. deliveries, from launching a telescope into the stratosphere to sending a vaccine to exactly the right cells in the human body, and developing technology that can airdrop supplies into the most urgent situations. But first, back to Amir Nazar Zawabi, who was actually the child of refugees himself, brought into a divided world and raised in East Jerusalem. My father's a Palestinian and the family

has traces in Palestine eight generations back. My mom's family is from Riga and my grandparents fled Europe as World War II was starting to happen. Looking for a safe haven. And obviously their safe haven became the tragedy for the other side of my family.

I think for Jews, being a refugee has been something that is entrenched in the culture. And now being a refugee for Palestinians is unfortunately a big part of the Palestinian tragedy. And to tell you that it was easy growing up between the rock and the hard place, it wasn't. But at the same time, I grew up between the two societies. I enjoyed what they have to offer culturally. I also ached their tragedies. So it's complicated, but it's also beautiful because I got a lot out of it.

Here's Amir Nazar Zawabi in his TED Talk. When I was 14, I stumbled by accident into a theater show, and I fell in love. I fell in love with a reality that was being created in front of me, a reality that was full of possibilities, that was wilder, that was free, a reality that was an opposite contrast

of the harsh reality we were living in. And I became a theater practitioner. Becoming a theater practitioner in Palestine is like conjuring water in the desert. We don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the big artistic institutions. What we do have is a need and something to say about the world we live in.

In 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis, when hundreds of thousands of people were walking across Europe, with all the pain and the anguish that we saw, I started thinking that maybe we need to create a new model of theatre. Maybe we need to take our theatre out of the theatres and into the streets, the streets where these people were walking. And I started working with Good Chance Theatre Company. Together we created The Walk. a huge play set on an 8,000-kilometer stage with thousands of participants. And to all of them, we said Amal is a nine-year-old girl that will pass through your city.

She's alone. She's afraid. She's vulnerable. How would you like to welcome her? What would you learn from her and what will you teach her? I had this moment when I was watching you live. You were being beamed in from a Turkish town into the... the TED conference. And at first, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical. I'm not big on puppets. But when I saw her, you were standing on a balcony. And then suddenly she appeared behind you and you could hear the squeals and laughter of the children gathering around her knees. Just mesmerized by her. And then she stopped. And she had this long, dark hair and these big black eyelashes.

and she turned to the camera and she blinked at us, and then she smiled. And I just felt goosebumps. It was electricity. There was a message conveyed in her eyes that she's not a piece of furniture. She is a living creature. She's unbelievably effective and beautiful, and it's hard to ignore her. And that was intention. She needs to make you feel something profound.

artistically for me, there's something about seeing somebody you don't know and being curious about him is the first step towards empathy and caring. Because most of the time we don't. Most of the time they're invisible and we don't care and we don't want to see them. So actually, I welcome the fact that people go, who is she? What's your story? And the minute you give them a beginning of a thread, they start pulling at the thread and telling themselves the story. And it becomes very effective. So Amal started her journey in July of 2021. She's going to finish in November in the UK.

What is it that you hope she delivered? Is your hope that by having that moment with Amal, that there will be policy changes, that when you say, okay, Amal, your walk is done and you delivered your message, what will that be? What are the things that you think she will have left behind?

You know, one of my favorite sentences in Judaism is a man man is man chené, if you save one person, you have saved the world in time. because each one of us is an entire world. I don't know about policy. I'm not a politician.

I hope that we change enough people. We touch enough people that they become a mass that is unignored. Will this change the world? Will it better it? I don't know. I'm not that vain. Is it still our responsibility to try? Definitely.

I hope that for a small child in Turino, she will be an inspiration to think big and dream even bigger. I hope for our puppet amount that she goes and gets a PhD in mechanical engineering. But maybe the word I'm using most right now is, I hope and I hope and I hope. I hope she gives hope to many people. That's Amir, Nazar, Zuzar, Zuzhou. He's the artistic director of The Walk. You can see his full talk with gorgeous videos of Amal Walking at TED.com.

On the show today, special delivery. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. On the show today, special delivery. I'm imagining almost like a picture. of like a piece of the sky. And you can see in this picture, like, where the galaxies are.

And then you can see between the galaxies this, like, fuzz. And I can, like, show you this picture and say, hey, we know how the universe works. This is Erica Hamden. She's an astrophysicist. But what I really do is build telescopes. In particular, she's built an unusual airborne telescope. The telescope is called Fireball, which stands for the faint, intergalactic medium, red-shifted emission balloon. We call it Fireball, which is a nice, a nice cute little name.

And it is a balloon-borne telescope, which means that it hangs from a cable below a giant... Oh, so it doesn't go up in a rocket at all. It's not in a rocket. It's in a giant helium balloon. Oh. Okay, so you might be thinking, why would anyone do this? Why would anyone send a telescope on a giant helium balloon ride? Well, Erica says that telescope could solve a scientific mystery. So there's this huge amount of hydrogen out in the universe.

We know that it forms stars, but we actually don't know where a lot of it is. It's like in between galaxies. Okay, so you're looking for this hydrogen. You're on the hunt for it. But can you explain just for us lay folks? What is so exciting about this missing hydrogen? So, okay, so hydrogen is basically like the reason that all of us exist. I like cannot stress enough how that is not an exaggeration.

So stars are formed mostly of hydrogen and they fuse that hydrogen into heavier elements. It's also everywhere. It is by far the most, it makes up the most mass out of the regular matter in the universe. So it's like the most simple as. possible. It's really basic, but it is the building block of literally everything. Here's Erica Hamden on the TED stage. Fireball is designed to observe some of the faintest structures known. Huge clouds of hydrogen gas. These clouds are giant. They are even bigger than whatever you're thinking of, they are

huge. Huge clouds of hydrogen that we think flow into and out of galaxies. I work on Fireball, because what I really want is to take our view of the universe from one with just light from stars to one where we can see and measure every atom that exists. That's all that I want to do. But observing at least some of those atoms is crucial to our understanding of why galaxies look the way they do. I want to know how that hydrogen gas gets into a galaxy and creates a star. Fireball is weird as far as telescopes go because it's not in space and it's not on the ground. Instead, it hangs on a cable from a giant balloon

and observes for one night only from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere at the very edge of space. This is partly because the edge of space is much cheaper than actual space. I've been working on Fireball for more than 10 years and now lead the team of incredible people who built it. When Erica started this project in 2008,

the technology she needed to spot these hydrogen clouds didn't even exist. I had just started grad school when a previous version of Fireball had flown, and they had used the old style of detector, and it just was not sensitive enough. Erica and her team spent years designing and redesigning. The detectors are extremely sensitive, So, like, depending on which machine you use, you can break the detector just by, like, putting it in and turning the machine on. Which we did once. That was unfortunate.

And when they finally developed the tech they needed? It felt really good to be like, oh, wow, this is working. And so in September 2018, Erica and her team gathered in the New Mexico desert at a NASA launch site. They had done all they could to prepare Fireball for its journey. Now they just have to wait for exactly the right conditions to send it up with the balloon. And there's like actually many different layers of the atmosphere that need to be behaving correctly all at the same time. There are lots of limitations on how often this balloon can fly. And so the team only gets one chance to get their telescope up into the air to capture the data they need.

Yes. One shot. Yes. The show is up for one night only. And so we wanted to make it count. After waiting for weeks, the team finally gets the all clear from NASA. On September 21st, we went to the weather briefing, which is at 11 a.m. And they say, like, okay, the weather is looking good.

Like, do you want to take this launch opportunity? Yes or no? And we say yes. And then we all, like, start frantically getting ready. Getting the telescope ready. Yeah. And so at a certain point, they put the telescope on this crane. The crane is called Big Bill.

I love that. So now it's September 22nd. It's like 5 in the morning. They take the telescope out onto the runway and they say like, okay, we think it's good. We're going to start laying out the balloon. So they put this like ground cover down because the last thing you want is like a goathead or like a spiky desert plant to like stick into the balloon. So the cover is down.

The telescope is hanging from the crane. But the balloon isn't actually out because like once they start unfolding the balloon, They cannot use it again. Like, you can't refold it. So there's a couple of decision points where they're like, okay, we're really going to do this. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this is so stressful just listening to you tell this story.

I can't imagine how stressed out you were. Yeah, I was like definitely, I would have definitely said I was nervous. But I would also be like, well, I can't think about this right now. Like, I have too many other things to think about. So, like, I'm just going to pretend that it's not happening. Okay, so then what happened next? So once they start the inflation, that's when you know, like, oh, this is like going to happen. And the inflation actually takes about an hour.

And when it's fully inflated and like up in the stratosphere, it's basically as big as a football stadium. Oh. Oh my gosh. Wow. So it launched around 10 a.m. on September 22nd. And when you say launch, they basically let the balloon go. Yeah. Do you remember that moment?

Oh, yeah. the balloon makes this noise of like it's like plastic moving through the air you can like hear it like flapping kind of and then the actual release was super gentle it's just like disconnected from the crane and like slowly headed upwards

and I remember like looking up at it and being like oh my god it's happening yeah did you celebrate? Yeah we were like all right like yes way to go and now the world starts. That was sort of our feeling. Like I remember standing around outside, right around sunset, and we were looking up at it. It had this, like, beautiful red glow in the sunset light,

and it was kind of the, like, deep breath before then we go inside, and we have to start doing the science operations and, like, actually taking data and pointing the telescope and all of this stuff that we had been training for, you know, for weeks and years. And that was a really nice moment to be like, oh, look, there it is. We did it. We finally got the telescope launched. I have put so much of myself my whole life into this project, and I still can't believe that that happened. And I have this picture that's taken right around sunset on that day of our balloon, fireball hanging from it, and the nearly full moon. And I love this picture.

I love it. But I look at it and it makes me want to cry. Because when fully inflated, these balloons are spherical. And this one isn't. It's shaped like a tear drop. And that's because there is a hole in it. Sometimes balloons fail too. I had to go back downstairs and tell everybody on the team. Like, there's a hole in the balloon. And that was, like, probably the worst part of the whole experience. Oh, you were like all this work that I've put in, and we thought we did it. We even saw it up there.

Did you manage to at least get some data? It ended up being not enough to do what we wanted. We, like, valiantly tried to collect as much data as possible. like the whole way it's going down. And I was like, like that next day, I was like having like a, almost like a crisis of faith about it, actually, of like, why am I doing this? The whole project were like making this incredibly complicated system

to look at this like super faint object. Why am I doing the hardest possible thing at every point? And then you like build this whole thing and like put it on a balloon. And then the balloon has a hole in it. Like, why am I doing this? And I've thought a lot about why since that day. And I've realized that all of my work has been full of things that break and fail, that we don't understand and they fail,

that we just get wrong the first time, and so they fail. I think about the thousands of people who built Hubble and how many failures they endured, there were countless failures, heartbreaking failures, even when it was in space. and none of those failures were a reason for them to give up. I think about why I love my job. I want to know what is happening in the universe.

You all want to know what's happening in the universe, too. I want to know what's going on with that hydrogen. And so I've realized that discovery is mostly a process of finding things that don't work, and failure is inevitable when you're pushing the limits of knowledge, and that's what I want to do. All of science builds on the previous, group of people not giving up.

I don't know what the future holds or what is going to matter 50 years from now, but I know that it's going to matter to some group of scientists in the future that I didn't just say like, well, I'm not going to try again. I mean, it's kind of amazing that the only reason why it failed was because of a tiny hole. That actually feels

surmountable in some ways. Yeah. At the time, it felt very out of control. It was like the one part of it that I couldn't be responsible for. But at the same time, it's like very fixable. Versus if everything else worked and we still just didn't see anything, like that would mean that there was a problem with the universe.

Which is a lot harder to solve. What's so interesting to me about your story, Erica, is as much as what you describe being fantastic, this humongous balloon holding this precious telescope, But the process of it is fascinating. I mean, it starts with an idea and then it takes teams all over the globe to build it and then transport it and then get it to where it needs to go. That in and of itself is quite a feat. Yeah.

It's like the combined effort of all of these people who are all driven to a certain extent by the same thing as me, where they just like want to know more about. the universe than we know today. That's Erica Hamden. She's an astrophysicist and telescope builder. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And Fireball, by the way, survived. It is scheduled to fly again in September of 2022. On the show today, special delivery.

Stories about transporting, surprising, and precious cargo through sometimes treacherous journeys. And in the past year, almost half of the world's population, more than 3 billion people, have received at least one dose of a vaccine against COVID-19. It is a remarkable feat. But I got to say, when I got my shot at my local drugstore, I remember sitting there and thinking, like, how does the vaccine know where to go in my body? How does it get delivered to the right cells? It's amazing. I am constantly amazed at how it works, how synchronized it all is, and how smart it is. Catherine Whitehead is a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and she is what's called a drug delivery scientist. So a drug delivery scientist wants to make sure that when we take any kind of medication,

It goes to the right place inside of our bodies, and it does that without causing any kind of toxicity or negative effects in places that it shouldn't. So one of the things we work on in my lab is to enable the use of brand new drug technologies. The new technology, of course, that we've all been talking about is the COVID-19 messenger RNA or mRNA vaccine. It's different because it doesn't put a live virus. into the body. MRNA is a very critical middleman. With this vaccine, MRNA delivers instructions

to teach ourselves how to make the spike protein that's part of the coronavirus. And so the moment that messenger RNA is fully inside the cell, our cells know exactly what to do with it. They know that they have to look at that code and they have to make the protein

that's associated with it. But once that protein, is made, the cells start to suspect that it doesn't belong there. And they hold it out on the outside of the cell to basically alert our immune systems and ask them, hey, will you come over here? Will you check out this protein that I just made? Is it a problem? And when our immune cells come over and they see this part of the spike protein belonging to the coronavirus, they know it doesn't belong. It doesn't along there. And so they begin to make antibodies. And in this case, they're making antibodies that will bind very specifically and accurately to the coronavirus if it were to enter our system.

And when those antibodies bind to an invading coronavirus, basically it gets walled off from its surroundings. It cannot interact with our lung cells or other cells that it wants to infect, and our body knows when something's covered in antibodies, we have to get rid of it. And so it gets flushed from our system. I mean, that is just incredible. It is, it is just amazing. Here's Catherine Whitehead on the TED stage. How is that even possible?

It was possible because scientists have been working for many years to get us to the point where we could use mRNA quickly in an emergency situation. Specifically, we've been working on how to help MRNA with its biggest problem, which is that it doesn't normally go to the right places inside of our bodies. When MRNA is administered, it's injected into our muscles or our bloodstream, but we actually need it to go inside of our cells. Unfortunately, MRNA is fragile, and our bodies will destroy it before it goes very far. You can think of MRNA like a glass face that you'd like to send in the mail.

Without a box and bubble wrap, it'll break long before it's been delivered. And without an address on the box, your postal delivery service will have no idea where to take it. And so if we're going to use MRNA as a therapeutic, it needs our help. It needs protection, and it needs to be told where to go. And that's where I come in. In a minute, the very special wrapping material that Catherine Whitehead and other scientists have developed to get that MRNA delivered safely. It's kind of like packing peanuts, but on a cellular level. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.

We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. And for this episode on special deliveries, we were just talking to Carnegie Mellon Professor Catherine Whitehead. Her job is figuring out how to safely transport the very fragile mRNA vaccine when it's introduced to our bodies when we get a shot. It doesn't belong in the bloodstream. And so the different components there, including some of our immune cells, would destroy it right away because they know that messenger RNA does not belong there. Okay. So, and that goes back to

your analogy of MRNA being like a very, very precious vase that you want to send in the mail, but you're worried that it will be destroyed or crushed before it gets to its destination. Exactly. But if we put it in a box and add packing material, then it is safe. It can move through the mail system because it's in a box. And then on top of that, we need an address so that the post service knows where to take it. For over five decades, scientists and engineers like myself have been creating the shipping materials for nucleic acid drugs like DNA and RNA. Through trial and error, we've created packages

that deliver intact faces to the wrong address, that deliver to the right address, but with a broken face, and packages that throw out the mail carriers back. It's taken many years to get the science right. Let me show you the result, these tiny balls of fat that we call lipid nanoparticles. Let me tell you what they are and how they work. These nanoparticles are made up of several fatty molecules called lipids. Fat is an awesome packing material, nice and bouncy.

Interestingly, our cells are also served, surrounded by fat, to keep them flexible and protect it. Years ago, scientists had the idea to create lipid nanoparticles that would act like a Trojan horse. Because the lipids in the nanoparticle look similar to the membranes that surround our cells, the cells are willing to bring the nanoparticle inside, and that's when the MRNA is released into the cell. So, Catherine, the vaccine gets delivered.

to the cells via these tiny balls of fat. They're kind of like the packaging material or like the packing material. But how do you actually make these fatty globules so that they can do this so that they can protect the MRNA and then safely transport it? So there are two ingredients that are naturally occurring in our own cell membranes. One is a phospholipid. Phospholipids when you put them together, they self-assemble into what's called a lipid bilayer. And so that helps with the organization of the particle. However, those phospholipids, they are a bit too loosey-goosey, and they will fall apart. Second, there's a lipid called cholesterol.

It provides structural support so the nanoparticles don't fall apart in between the injection and when they get into our cells. We have a tremendous amount of beneficial cholesterol in our bodies. We would be a pile of goo if we did not have. Seriously, all of our cell membranes would collapse, and we would be a pile of goo. So those are two of the ingredients in the particle. Then there is what's called the ionizable lipid. This is the one that can take on a positive charge inside of our.

our cells. This is one that needs to be made in the lab. And because they're made in the lab, they tend to be proprietary to the company that invented them. So, for example, Moderna and Bioentech, the company that partnered with Pfizer, they discovered different ionizable lipids, and that is the only important ingredient in their COVID-19 vaccines that differ. Finally, one more ingredient. This one is a polymer called polyethylene glycol. So let's call it peg. That's much easier. You can think of the other three lipids as the box and the bubble wrap for the MRNA,

and the peg as the packing tape. So let's take a step back and look at our whole nanoparticle. When these ingredients all fit together nicely, the result is a delivery woman's dream. As we speak, the mRNA vaccines are out. saving lives from the coronavirus. They were our first and best tool to combat this nightmare, and they are our best hope of responding swiftly to viral variants

because we can keep our lipid nanoparticle packaging the same, and all we have to do is swap out the MRNA that's inside. But here's the best part. For MRNA therapeutics, these vaccines are only the beginning. MRNA can be used to treat or cure many diseases. So in the future, we will likely have treatments for many terrible diseases, including cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and sickle cell anemia. We'll have treatments for cancer, breast, blood, lungs, you name it.

Here, we'll use mRNA to teach our immune cells how to find and kill. cancer cells. And then, if we're lucky, we'll have vaccines against some of the most deadly and feared pathogens across the globe, including malaria, Ebola, and HIV. Some of these products are already in clinical trials, and the success of the COVID-19 vaccines will pave the way for future generations of these therapies. I mean, it's, so it's kind of bittersweet without, COVID, we would not have made such rapid progress to deploy this MRNA technology that can be used, will be used in the near future you're saying, to treat all kinds of diseases well beyond coronaviruses. Exactly. This pandemic is the only thing that caused us to use this MRNA technology because we felt like we didn't have many options. But meanwhile, this MRNA technology, it can do so many things.

And so this is kind of like the gates have opened for MRNA therapeutics. They have finally gotten their chance to show that they work. So, yes, we have lost entirely too many people to this virus, and it's been awful. But when we think ahead of all the people who are doing, dying of all sorts of rare diseases, other infectious diseases. When we consider all of them, you can think about how this technology can be deployed then to help them, to save those people, the future sick people. We have lost too many people now to this exact virus, but the technology and through its development will down the line save,

even more lives. That's Catherine Whitehead. She's a drug delivery scientist and professor at Carnegie Mellon. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, special delivery. Instant delivery, instant logistics, the ability to teleport something. In this case, we're talking about shipping life-saving treatments

within hours, even minutes. Using autonomous aircraft to deliver medicine to thousands of hospitals and health facilities all over the world. And when you say autonomous aircraft, you're basically talking about using drones, right? Technically, they are drones. They're autonomous. This is Keller Renado. He's the CEO and founder of the drone delivery company, Zipline. Usually when someone says drones, someone thinks of kind of like an annoying quadcopter hovering in their backyard. These are definitely very different kinds of machines and tools.

These drones look more like miniature airplanes. with a wingspan of about 10 feet. They can travel up to 60 miles per hour. And when they arrive... A plane will descend to about 30 feet off the ground. And then we drop the package using a really simple paper parachute. Floating down from the sky are packages containing supplies like vaccines, insulin, PPE, and even blood.

One of the first places these drones were used was Rwanda. You know, the first time it happens at a hospital, like patients are climbing out of their bodies. beds to see it. People are, you know, totally shocked and thinking it's so cool and total science fiction. And I remember one doctor told me it's as though Jesus Christ himself is delivering blood out of the sky. And so it's definitely a really cool event that first day that we do a delivery. And I think it stays kind of magical and sci-fi for about seven days. And then it is completely boring and nobody cares at all. In fact, I had one doctor and she looked at her watch

and looked at me and said, it's 30 seconds late, which, you know, is amazing and is totally deserved and fair. It shouldn't have to be a sexy technology that people are focused on because it isn't. It's just logistics. It's something that people can depend on with their lives. Doctors and nurses rely on it to do their jobs. And, you know, we love the fact that a system like this can just fade into the background and be something that people come to expect. So can you just tell me, though, about Rwanda? like why did you start testing out your drones there?

We were pretty sure we wanted to focus on a country with a public health care system. We knew we needed a government that wanted to move quickly and be innovative. And Rwanda by far was the country that actually moved the fastest. That would not have happened in the United States in 2015 or 2016. Bigger countries tend to move slower. Also, the United States has a private health care system rather than a public health care system, which just makes it a lot harder. And was part of the reasoning for changing that system?

like did it have to do with roads or infrastructure in Rwanda? That's a great question. That's actually one of the biggest misconceptions, I would say, about what we do. The vast majority of the 2,500 hospitals and health facilities we serve have pretty good roads to them. The benefit is instant logistics. I remember, you know, visiting the Minister of Health of Rwanda. And at that time, I was saying, hey, you know, Zipline will deliver all different medical products to all 500 hospitals and health facilities.

in the country, it'll enable teleportation from a central medical store. And I remember the Minister of Health, she looked at me and said, Keller, shut up, just do blood. Here's Keller Renato on the TED stage. So why is blood important? Rwanda collects between 60 and 80,000 units of blood a year. So this is a product that when you need it, you really, really need it. But blood is also challenging because it has a very short shelf life.

There are lots of different storage requirements, and it's really hard to predict the demand for all of these different blood groups before a patient actually needs something. But the cool thing is that using this technology, Rwanda has been able to keep more blood centralized and then provide it when a patient needs something to any hospital or health center

in an average of just 20 or 30 minutes. So when a patient's having an emergency, a doctor at that hospital can send us a WhatsApp, telling us what they need. And then our team will immediately spring into action. We pull the blood from our stock. We scan the blood into our systems. And then we'll basically pack it into a zip, which is what we call, these little autonomous airplanes that run on batteries.

And then once that zip is ready to go, we accelerate it from zero to 100 kilometers an hour in about half of a second. How were they getting blood delivered prior to your arrival, these hospitals? Like, what was the problem? So the way these systems work today, and this is true even in the United States, which will blow your mind, is that, you know, we do big blood drives. Blood is collected from donors taken to a central place where it's tested and typed. Once that's done in Rwanda, it was distributed to four different regional blood transfusion centers. And then when hospitals needed to transfuse patients, a nurse or treatment. doctor would get into a car, drive several hours to the regional center for blood transfusion,

wait in line, sign forms, get the blood, put it into the back of the car, drive back. And obviously, if you're someone having a medical emergency in one of those hospitals and you need a blood transfusion, every minute can be the difference between life and death. A couple months ago, a 24-year-old mother came into one of the hospitals that we serve, and she gave birth via C-section. but that led to complications, and she started to bleed. Luckily, the doctors had some blood of her blood type on hand, and so they transfused her with a couple units of blood,

but she bled out of those units in about 10 minutes. In this case, that mother's life is in grave danger, in any hospital in the world. But luckily, her doctors who were taking care of her immediately called her Distribution Center. They placed an emergency order. And our team actually did emergency delivery after emergency delivery after emergency delivery. They ended up sending seven units of red blood cells, four units of plasma, and two units of platelets.

That's more blood than you have in your entire body. All of it was transfused into her. The doctors were able to stabilize her, and she is healthy today. That is an incredible story. But I guess, you know, on the flip side, There are less altruistic ways that drones are being deployed by governments, private companies, for control, for surveillance. How do you reconcile that side of this technology with what you're doing? Well, I actually think you didn't even bring up the biggest example.

I mean, the biggest example would be drones have been used very effectively as weapons of war for decades. And so, you know, that is happening. Like, you know, governments are already using, you know, these kinds of autonomous aircraft as weapons. And so certainly to a certain degree, you know, we benefited from the fact that a lot of research had gone into autonomous aircraft over the last 20 years in order to build things like the predator drone, which kills people. But, you know, technology has the moral values of the person who is wielding it. And our goal as a company has always been to, like, take this overall technology platform and turn it into something that, that can make the world a fundamentally more equal place. The idea that you can pull out your phone, talk to a doctor,

and the doctor can be like, great, I've diagnosed you, I know exactly what you need, I'm writing the prescription, it's going to be on your doorstep in five minutes. That really is the vision that we are pursuing. That's Keller Renaudo, founder and CEO of Zipline. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. Special delivery. To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to ted.npr.org.

And to see hundreds more TED Talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Rachel Faulkner, Matthew Cloutier, and Sylvie Douglas. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkenpour. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, James Delahousie, Diba Motisham, Fiona, and Harrison V.J. Choi. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, Michelle Quint, and Micaheems. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.