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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the members of PCAST, to our panelists who will shortly be introduced, to the members of the wider science and technology community who have joined us in person, and to those who are watching on the web. Welcome to this second to last meeting of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The last

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meeting will be January 5th and 6th. We, at this particular meeting, will need to pay our respects to one of our members, Eric Schmidt, who will not be able to be with us the next time. We thank Eric for his extraordinary service as a member of PCAST throughout the two terms of the Obama administration. Eric, it has been a huge pleasure working with you and you

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have made outstanding contributions, as you have also in your private life, but it's been great to have you on PCAST. Thank you very much. Sorry, I didn't have my mic on. We were saying goodbye as well to Diana Pankovic, a mainstay of the PCAST Executive Secretariat in OSTP. Diana, let us thank you for your extraordinary service. It has been a busy time in OSTP and for science,

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technology, and innovation policy in the administration since we last met. I will mention just a few highlights. In mid-October, OSTP, in cooperation with many of the other components of the White House and the administration, hosted the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, in which President Obama participated vigorously. That Frontiers Conference was

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both looking at the extraordinary pace of advance across a variety of domains of science, technology, and innovation, but also looking 50 years ahead. Some 700 people attended in person, many more over the web, and it really was an extraordinary look ahead that also highlighted this President's vision and commitment to science, technology, and innovation. We released, in

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conjunction with that meeting, a National Science and Technology Council report on artificial intelligence, which rightly received a lot of attention and a lot of discussion as a major theme at the meeting. We released a new executive order on space weather, better preparing the nation to build up its preparedness and resilience against geomagnetic storms

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resulting from solar eruptions. We launched a new initiative to fuel a revolution in small satellite technologies since the last meeting. We had a meeting for the first time in the White House of the President's Kids Science Advisors at the Sixth White House Science Fair. One of the nine-year-old science fair participants in the White House said to the President, Mr. President,

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do you have a kid science advisor? You know, kids have ideas that would be helpful in thinking about national science and technology policy. And the President bought it and asked us to look into it. And as a result, not long ago, we assembled 10 outstanding kid science and math students from across the nation, and they met with the President and other senior science

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officials of the administration. And they were, in fact, full of interesting and good ideas about how to improve STEM education, in particular, at the K-12 level, which, of course, has been a theme of this administration from the outset. We launched the resilience dialogues, which are a new mechanism to connect local decision makers, business people, officials, members of the

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public, fishermen, farmers, with expert advice on where climate change is going and what can be done to reduce the vulnerability of our communities to climate change. We held, in combination with the White House Council on Women and Girls and the My Brother's Keeper Initiative, a White House conference on inclusive STEM education. This has been another big theme of the Obama administration,

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increasing the representation of women and historically underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, in STEM. And we released, very significantly, the PCAST report on action needed to protect against biological threats, a very important contribution where our members, Chris Chiba and Wanda Austin, chaired that study. And I think it's going to have a significant effect.

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The one more comment I will make is I was in China two weeks ago for a meeting of the G20 ministers of science, technology and innovation. And what struck me at that meeting, listening to these ministers of science, technology and innovation from around the world was the extent to which President Obama's agenda and initiatives for science, technology and innovation have captured

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the imagination and the commitment of the world. At that meeting and an adjacent meeting of the chief science advisors to the heads of state of the G7 plus five, the themes were persistently the same themes that President Obama has been advancing in this domain. STEM education, inclusion of women and underrepresented groups in STEM fields, public-private partnerships to accelerate the

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progress of discovery in the laboratories into widespread application in society, action on clean energy and climate change. Earth observations, attention to the importance and the understudied characteristics of the oceans and the Arctic. And tech in government, how to bring more technically qualified people into all branches of government to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness

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and the responsiveness of government itself. Virtually every country in the world either wants to take part in the international dimensions of these and I should have mentioned as well, biomedicine and public health, the brain initiative, the precision medicine initiative, the combating antibiotic resistance initiative, the cancer moonshot. Virtually every country in the world

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either wants to participate in the international dimensions of these activities or to replicate domestically what the United States is doing domestically in these domains. I think that is a major part of President Obama's legacy in science, technology and innovation that these themes to which he has given such high priority have really permeated the global community of

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science, technology and innovation. With that let me turn the microphone over to my co-chair Eric Lander for any welcoming comments he wants to make and if he doesn't want to make any welcoming comments to launch into the first panel. Well I certainly want to be welcoming but John has made most of the comments so I just want to again underscore my thanks to the PCAST for their

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tremendous service. We are coming up in January on our last meeting and I am really grateful that no one has led up on the energy that they're bringing to studies. We have another study that is coming before PCAST today with recommendations to vote on. We have another study in progress so there's a tremendous amount of work still going on and we'll continue on through the

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closing days of the administration. But today we're going to turn first to the subject of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. That is a very important national initiative and PCAST has over the course of the term reviewed the NNI every two years and we are back again today that is a responsibility of the PCAST. We're back again today to undertake a review of the NNI.

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I'm going to return to Maxine Savitz to lead this session our co-vice chair and we're going to find out in particular about a review undertaken by the NRC recently and we are lucky enough to have reviewers here from that study. Thank you Eric and as you mentioned this has been a national initiative created in 2001 and then the Congress passed a law in 2003 creating the 21st Century

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Nanotechnology Research and Development Act. The over a dozen agencies have been active in the nanotechnology area since this initiative has begun across several administrations and as Eric mentioned PCAST has a role to review it every two years and in the law also the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine was to do a triennial review of the act and they finished

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their review in September and so we're going to have a report from them. So the panel has Celia Merzbacker who's Vice President of Innovative Partnerships Semiconductor Research Corporation. She was chair of the panel along with her is James Murdy, Director of Physical Sciences for University of Southern California. He was the vice chair. Then we have from the federal government

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Sankurb Vasu Director at National Science Foundation and Robinson Pinot, the program manager Office of Science from Department of Energy and they're the ones who are implementing one of the grand challenges that was recommended by the PCAST report two years ago to give us an update on that and our last panel member is Lloyd Whitman who is Assistant Director for Nanotechnology

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Advanced Materials at OSTP who coordinates the cross agency activities which will give us an update of what things have happened since the last review. So I think each of the panel members can speak about 10 minutes so we have plenty of time for questions and you'll just go right down Good morning. Thank you Maxine. I'll be speaking on behalf of Jim who's here with me as Vice

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Chair of the committee and Jim just for some of you who maybe don't know was one of the founders of the NNI along with Mike Rocco from the National Science Foundation and I came from a background with federal government as well so we're both sort of nanotechnologists at heart and when I was given the opportunity to chair this study I was pleased to do so. I was also on the

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committee that did the 2013 Triennial Review and I also want to acknowledge Eric Fedberg from the National Academies National Research Council who's here with us in the audience. So the statement of task for our study is shown here and you don't have to read it. I tried to highlight some of the keywords. It had two parts and our report follows these two parts. The first

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one is to look at the mechanisms that are used by the NNI to advance focused areas of nanotechnology towards development and commercialization. So it's really asking how should this big body of activity be focused in some areas to reach commercial application and public benefit. At the time that this was written the signature initiatives was one such activity to focus.

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The grand challenges hadn't yet been developed so we looked at both of those in considering this part of the statement of task. The second part was to assess the physical and human infrastructure needs and we have a chapter on each of those and a few recommendations. I forget the total number of recommendations Lloyd keeps track for me something like 17

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all together. I am going to highlight just a few and I leave it to you to go and look at the entire report which is on the NRC website to see all of the recommendations. So before I show this picture in order to address part A the committee thought quite a lot about how innovation happens. How do technologies move from discovery to

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application and I think you all have had some of these similar conversations in some of your work so we recognize that it's messy and complicated and sometimes there's the push somebody comes up with a really great new material or new discovery that they recognize has tremendous potential and they sort of push it forward and sometimes

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there's a need and necessity is the mother of invention and there's a call for solutions and there's a pull from the commercial sector or for someone who needs a technology solution. So as you all know in your work on the manufacturing area in particular there's this so-called valley of death and typically as shown here and I think we took this maybe in part from

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the advanced manufacturing report that you did there's investment in discovery and of course the government plays a very large role in that very basic fundamental early stage R&D or research and then there's investment in the commercialization and that's a private sector activity and that valley in between is sometimes underfunded and things need that deserve to move across it

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need some help and so across the bottom we have these sort of categories of technology readiness level TRL one to three four to six seven to nine course sort of divisions I think you're all familiar with the TRL scale and Jim Merday really was responsible for starting the development of this figure where we collected together all the programs in the government

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that we could identify that are trying to address this problem and help move things from earlier stage to a point where the private sector is willing to invest and we kind of color coded it with different agencies and I think this figure out of the report may find a lot of utility in the conversation about what is the role of government in helping to bridge the valley of

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death but the main point I want to leave you with is that there is actually quite a lot that the government is trying to do to help bridge this gap and move things forward but none of these programs say nano in their name and so one of the themes that came out of our study was that there are a lot of government programs that are not nano specific that can help achieve the goals

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of the NNI for instance to advance nanotechnology into practical use and so one of our recommendations is that the NNI the interagency group with the coordination office should identify these programs we've taken a start at it but they should continue to identify them and they should take advantage of them and that means both telling the people who are doing the basic research hey there are

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programs out there that you can take advantage of and also to reach out to the managers of those programs and say hey nanotechnology is something that your program can help to advance it's a priority and your program should be aware of that the 2003 act actually calls out the SBIR and STTR programs and requires that the coordination office and its annual report collect from the

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agencies and report how much SBIR monies are being spent on nanotechnology related innovation research we aren't recommending that all of these programs should be required to report how much nanotechnology investment they're making but it's it's along the same vein as what was being thought of at the time that that act was passed so that's sort of a first recommendation now I have three

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slides one on sort of the advancing focused areas one on physical and one on human infrastructure so when it comes to advancing focused areas under the NNI we did look at the different areas the different mechanisms that are in use and when we looked at the grand challenge mechanism which of course was based on a p-cast recommendation we recognized as I think you all do that this is

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a nano inspired grand challenge and it requires advances that are outside the purview of the NNI and therefore the NNI managers and agencies are going to have to coordinate with others in order to achieve that grand challenge on the other side of the same coin in a way NNI is investing in areas that are going to help realize the goals of other initiatives the brain initiative initiatives for

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clean water etc manufacturing initiatives and so the things that they do control the nanotechnology research that the NNI is responsible for can be organized and focused toward those other initiatives that's something that they do control and so we made a recommendation that the inset the interagency group should strengthen and its outreach and engagement with the other initiatives

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work to figure out how nanotechnology can help to achieve them and then go back and focus some of their NNI activities around those goals and needs advanced manufacturing is a particular case essentially that's a big priority thanks in part to the work of p-cast and so a more sort of targeted recommendation is that the NNI agencies should go and look at those institutes of which there are to

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be 15 by the end of this administration and look at their roadmaps and figure out what it is their technology needs and invest in the trl one to three part because those are focusing on four to seven primarily and help to do the one to three manufacturing research or other nanotechnology research that's going to help those institutes be successful in the area of physical infrastructure

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so now I'm sort of turning the page to the next chapter and part b of our statement of task we recognized and commended the NNI for investing and building up a real enterprise in the facilities and equipment and instrument instrumentation that's needed to do nanoscale science and engineering research but there hasn't been as much attention paid to recapitalization

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and sustainment and so our recommendation here was to look for funding mechanisms and again there may be non-nanospecific pata money for instrumentation and facilities at NSF at DOE at DOD there are in fact that could be used to help sustain the investment and maintain the quality that's important for nanoscale research another area and sort of theme that was somewhat cross cutting

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in our study was that there's a lot and I think you all have acknowledged this as well in your last report the intersection between nano and biology is one that continues to gain momentum in a sense and have potential for impact and that includes nano medicine but more broadly as well and so we recommend it we we acknowledge and commended the nanotechnology characterization lab that has

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been funded by a partnership with the national cancer institute NIST and FDA primarily funding coming from NCI and expand that model to because it's coming out of NCI they're looking at nano materials and assessing materials that are being developed for application to the treatment and a diagnosis of cancer this model we thought should be expanded to look at materials for

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treatment of other diseases as well and even beyond that for looking at interactions between biological systems and nano materials in a more general sense for purposes of use and and looking at environmental impacts and involving agencies like everything from the computer consumer product safety commission to the NIEHS the Institute for Environmental and Health Sciences and others

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so those are the sort of the physical infrastructure highlights again there's more in the report and the third section on human infrastructure we benefited we were very fortunate there was a significant nanoscale science and engineering education report that came out right around the time that we started our work as a committee and Jim Merday was very much involved with that

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workshop and the report that came out of it it had a lot of excellent recommendations and so rather than repeat them we endorsed them and I commend that report to you the recommendations that we made included the following and again following going along with our theme we encouraged the NNI to identify STEM education programs that are already out there and investing in good work

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on STEM education and seek to nano eyes them if you will inject nanotechnology where appropriate or to leverage those funds toward nanotechnology education needs the second recommendation that I highlight here is more at the and there's the word undergraduate and at first it probably should be more general STEM education programs in general the second recommendation here highlights

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K through 12 and of course K through 12 education is predominantly the domain of state and local jurisdictions and the federal government doesn't control all the two decisions and and policies that are made we heard from someone from Virginia who's that state has taken some steps to incorporate nanotechnology into the curriculum and the standards and so we encouraged the nano the NNI

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through the NNCO to identify with the state of Virginia what's been working or what they did to make these progresses and to package that in a way that they can share with other states so that others can benefit from the lessons learned in that state and keep track of what's going on at the states in general and share they also should stay in touch with what's going on and identify

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the impact it's having and see if it's actually effective and finally we recognize that there's been actually quite a lot of investment in nano education by the NNI and a lot of materials developed and sometimes these projects and programs and centers come and go and there's a lot of good work that's done and the materials that are prepared and produced aren't always captured and made

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widely available and so we felt that when when NNI invests in education related work and in particular programs that develop materials they should insist that that material get put in a repository where others can access it and there is a nano hub which many of you may be familiar with that's hosted by Purdue but very widely used around the world frankly and I think there already have been

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steps taken and we may hear from the government folks to increase the availability of education materials on that site so the main messages of our study and I think I'm probably already out of time are the following first of all nanotechnology is a multidisciplinary area of research that's going to impact a lot of different areas I'm preaching to the converted I'm sure the NNI should

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focus that broad portfolio on areas that enable progress in other initiatives and to achieve priorities of the federal government so that was a number one sort of theme there's a lot of investment by the federal government that could be taken advantage of and we encourage the NNI to look for those programs and help to connect them with nanotechnology advancement for education

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for innovation instrumentation and so on and finally and I haven't really spent a lot of time focusing on the nano medicine piece we saw this as an area of high potential but in addition to the needs for the ability to do characterization lab like assessment there are some special issues when it comes to manufacturing in the medical space and we made some recommendations to NIH to

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work with the private sector to identify the barriers there and help to address them so I think that the overarching theme here is that it's really important that the NNI communicate and coordinate with others in order to achieve its goals and to help those other initiatives and priorities be successful as well so I just have a sort of ps here post script this is a figure

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from the report and it may actually have been modified slightly for the report based on some of the reviewers concerns but actually they're worth noting so this shows the revenue from nano-enabled products we got the data I think through Lloyd from these are luxe data luxe has been collecting data for a long time hopefully in the same manner so there's some trend relevance

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here at least you can quibble about whether something's nano-enabled or not but I think there's a uniformity of the methods that they've been using over time and so this is sort of a good news bad news situation and I want to point out that the data go through 2014 and I know you probably can't read the axis on the bottom but there's dotted lines projecting linearly from 2014 out to 2018

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on the right hand side of this chart so you can take or leave those projections but in the sort of 2011 to 2014 time frame the US has fallen to slightly below Europe and Asia according to this set of data so you could say that's not good news worry some perhaps I haven't dug into the data to understand exactly why that difference has emerged but it's it's not a huge difference and

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there's probably a fairly large error bar on these so anyhow there's there's a lot going on and it's trending upward the red dots at the bottom which appear to be at zero are the NNI investment and the point here is that it's not zero of course there's about one and a half billion dollars a year or more being spent by the federal government and sometimes policymakers look at that and say

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gosh we're spending one and a half billion dollars a year and what is coming out of this well the good news is a lot and I don't think and this was sort of a recommendation of ours that the the inset and the NCO in their communication should get the word out that there's actually a lot of value in this nanotechnology space and of course cause and effect is hard to prove but there's a

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definite increase in the impact of nanotechnology in the private sector and the NNI is is making some of that possible by sort of priming the pump at the early stages so I added a cell a chart on nanotechnology inspired grand challenges because and and I'm getting the wrap it up I'm just going to sort of very quickly run through this because I want I think we want to talk about the grand

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challenges I this sounds maybe obvious but the grand challenge that was put out is a grand challenge so I commend the government on identifying a grand challenge that is really grand and challenging and there's a lot going on in this area and I think we'll hear about that and we also and I'm putting on my personal hat to some extent on this part of the comments but I think that the

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committee would agree but from where we sit outside the government it doesn't appear very coordinated and I think their steps being taken to improve that and finally we did look at grand challenges past and present and our observation was that a grand challenge takes leadership and resources and so we encourage the government to put both behind this grand challenge to make it

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work so with that I will turn it over to the next speaker and this is the committee which I want to recognize and and answer any questions that you have once we I guess finish our presentation thank you sir uh good morning uh good morning my name is robinson pinot from the department of energy and I'm going to be speaking with dr. sankir basu from the national science foundation

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and and I and also Lloyd is going to be speaking at the end and and before I start we I think we need to thank Lloyd for putting this uh grand challenge together and and helping us to to get together towards um addressing the challenge and today we're going to talk about the the federal vision for future computing and nano technology inspired grand challenge and when we talk about

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computing in particular we need to we need to if we look at the top 500 supercomputers in the world according to that list the us is number third and yesterday the the Gordon bell prize for supercomputing was awarded to unfortunately the you know the department of energy liberal more Lawrence liberal more national laboratory was one of the sixth finalists and and we didn't win

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though though we seem to be losing the edge in computing and here we're talking about the the the vision for future computing and to me the the the future looks very bright and and and when we look at the at the grand challenge that that Lloyd is is leading it is really grand it involves three initiatives the the NNI the NSCI and the brain initiative with with a very grand challenge

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to create a new type of computer that can proactively interpret and learn from data solve unfamiliar problems using what he has learned and operate with the energy of the human brain which is very exciting and and it can lead to a lot of interpretations as we can see based on the white paper that our committee has put together so we have a committee of of

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of multiple now talk to people from many federal agencies and and even and we reached out within our organizations to to ensure that we have as much broad feedback to the white paper as possible and the objectives that we highlighted was to highlight potential areas of investment where we can pursue emergent and innovative solutions and to describe technical challenges that

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from the federal agencies we feel are important and we highlighted four areas where we believe if we can make a difference it could result in game changing capabilities and some of those are emerging computing platforms from neuromorphic to quantum how could we accelerate in particular artificial intelligence algorithms intelligent big data sensors that can be autonomous and

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reprogrammable machine intelligence for scientific discovery and the the challenge here is we live in an age of of information in which there is so much information that that no single person can analyze everything so how can we enable rapid and stream scale data analysis and be able to deal with data that is unlabeled it's very easy to look for things that you know what to look for

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but how could we accelerate innovation and and also cybersecurity as an important application where we could prevent or minimize or authorize access identify anomalous behavior and ensure that our codes and applications are integrity and also how can we able to understand from a contestable point of view what malicious activity is and help us detect protect and adapt we have highlighted

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seven areas of research and development activity potentially and and key points from from a timeline what could we expect that we could be doing in a five to 15 years and and and I will highlight some of those and that are in particular important to and related to the NNI which is how can we bridge that value of death where the NNI has been extremely successful for many years how can we

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take what we have learned from from nanoscience and make useful devices and hardware out of it how can we model the the nonlinear properties and how can we model and and simulate and emulate new and future computing architectures at scale and from a modeling and simulation point of view in in computing architectures it is very challenging to simulate nonlinear processes at scale

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but as we move on the ability to be able to to to predict to be able to simulate when we look at the linear processes the state becomes very unmanageable and we do need intelligent systems to be able to help us explore those spaces even from a material systems point of view what materials would give us the properties that we would like for specific applications

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in the grand challenge we have had many many activities that have that have resulted because of the announcement of of these grand challenge both within government within within academic within academia and industry and here we have a list of of many activities that have happened since the announcement of the grand challenge and that are scheduled to happen in the next in the

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next year in particular to the to the DOE and the office of science because of this grand challenge we we have been motivated to work between with with with other offices in particular our our basic energy sciences office and the advanced scientific computing research office and we have we have conducted two two workshops that have resulted in in reports and we have participated

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also in the national official research and development strategic plan where we do see an opportunity to accelerate artificial intelligence algorithms through through new and innovative hardware that leverages nanotechnology and some of the goals that that we have looked at is how to evaluate advanced materials and scientific computing opportunities to develop and enable

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a new paradigm in computing that will take us beyond what we understand today as more slow and from the office of science we we're looking at it from a neuromorphic point of view and and why neuromorphic computing in we in in the office of science we we run the the supercomputers in the U.S. in our national laboratories and and we we we see all these volumes of information

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and and one of the challenges we see is how can we ensure that we have the ability to understand both the data that comes out of our experimental sources and the ones that we simulate and how can we take cues from biology and and be able to to create these new architectures that definitely biology show us that it is possible to do it how could we

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begin to be doing it for real so and now I'll give it the the floor to Shankar so he can continue okay thank you for the opportunity oops okay I'm just going to follow up with what Robinson just said in terms of a concrete activity that resulted out of this grand challenge actually NSF being myself from NSF so NSF being a basic science research agency as you all know

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we were already in the process of formulating a program like this but we were in the right time in the right place when the grand challenge was announced and one of the things that was done at NSF is this program on energy efficient computing devices to architectures quality to cdf for short was jointly between SRC Celia is here and two directorates at NSF the computer

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science and engineering directorate which is where I belong and the engineering directorate so we equally the three sides three parties equally shared the funding the focus was as Robinson said two essentially two things one is how to exploit non-silicon emerging devices and this is where nanotechnology comes into the picture and another bottleneck for low power

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or low energy computing is the traditional von Neumann architecture one based on which all pretty much all computers today are built so to break away from that paradigm which is more of like a computer science challenge so the the the goal of the program was to how to bridge this gap with nanotechnology on one side and computer science on another side so we had

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a first round of this funding already in place proposals were invited I think sometimes in March proposals the overwhelmingly many proposals came in from the academic community SRC helped us to to evaluate proposals to gather with the university folks I think together we spent something like 21.6 million dollars in the first round there are nine projects that were funded out of a

00:41:04.640 - 00:41:30.800

submission of more than 100 so a success rate for this program was dismal way below less than even half the regular success rate of NSF programs which is already low in itself so out of these nine projects we have all kinds of things see this picture actually shows you a complete set of all those who were funded nine projects out of 16 universities there are

00:41:31.360 - 00:41:59.200

uh uh non-silicon technologies like spinronics carbon nanotubes uh uh photonic devices and things like that in the architectural side we have projects on neuromorphic computing brain inspired paradigms how to use uh neuroscience knowledge from neuroscience in computing that sort of things we can talk about this in a breakout session if you need to know more details about

00:41:59.200 - 00:42:30.080

that in fact there is a website in which this is all listed together there is an NSF website I might might just say that this is not the only activity at NSF which addresses the low-power computing grand challenge and there are several others going on I have a short list of those how does that work this one right okay so more recently after this

00:42:30.080 - 00:42:54.640

announcement was made this workshop that took place together with microco and others on intelligent cognitive assistance that that has resulted in another and now program announcement at NSF I don't know if SRC is part of that probably not not very directly it has to do with smart and autonomous systems it may sound a little different but it's

00:42:54.640 - 00:43:20.000

kind of relevant to low-power computing it also has to do with the artificial intelligence initiative that we just heard a little while ago there are other mechanisms through which NSF keep on collaborating with industry as well and that is the last item here on the slide other than SRC which has been a major partner in public-private partnership with NSF we also have some direct

00:43:20.000 - 00:43:45.840

interaction with Intel and this program on computer-resisted programming on heterogeneous architectures is essentially one of those other programs where NSF directly interacts with the industry and it's actually also falls right at the heart of low-power computing initiative not so much forward-looking as the E2CDA program that I mentioned but it's somewhat of a near-term need

00:43:46.480 - 00:44:11.040

to meet industries goals within the next five years. I have no slides and I will be brief so first I want to just say it's been a real pleasure and a privilege to be engaged with with PCAST and the academies over the last few years at looking at at the NNI and PCAST in particular has taken its responsibilities as the national nanotechnology assessment panel very seriously

00:44:11.040 - 00:44:36.640

and has I think done a great job looking at the challenges and opportunities facing the NNI and making salient recommendations on how to overcome the challenges and and take advantage of the opportunities and OSDP and the nanotechnology coordination office and the federal agencies have really taken those recommendations to heart and we've done quite a bit. We've continued to engage

00:44:36.640 - 00:44:58.640

with the business community in different ways and different parts for example we've recently had a webinar related to insurance which is a big issue for commercialization. We've continued to explore new technical priorities and beyond the grand challenge for example our we launched a signature initiative related to nanotechnology for water issues all these things we can find everything

00:44:58.640 - 00:45:21.360

on nano.gov but we've engaged taking to heart the recommendations of the academies and engaged more with the other initiatives from advanced manufacturing to the materials genome initiative just this week we had Robby Barbera who's sort of the brain initiative lead at OSDP come and talk to the NSET so we're working on that. Environmental health and safety we're again

00:45:21.920 - 00:45:43.040

continuing to try to find new ways to advance that for example NIOSH has a public private partnership now with SUNY Polytech looking at nano manufacturing and advanced materials there's an emerging partnership between the Consumer Product Safety Commission and NIH in that area as well. We've done a lot of work on community building and education just just to

00:45:43.040 - 00:46:05.680

highlight one of the the more interesting ones working with a large number of stakeholders professional societies universities you may remember we had the first nano day you may know that a nanometer is 10 to the minus ninth meters so to recognize that we had nano day on 10 October 9 and all kinds of fun things took place and largely led by outside people outside the government

00:46:05.680 - 00:46:29.600

including the hundred billion nanometer dash which you can see videos of and even a picture of me running and and also a series of videos called nano nuggets short videos by experts in the field including including a couple here around the including a couple here around the table including Chad and myself so and there's a whole series of those being rolled out

00:46:29.600 - 00:46:48.720

actually on the nano youtube channel the net so there's a lot of and actually that's a really interesting example because it shows a lot of continued excitement at the bottom upright of of what we can do with that technology so I'll just conclude with a couple of things I'd like to say about the initiative that I think actually are very well illustrated by the grand challenge

00:46:48.720 - 00:47:07.040

itself which is that the foundational basis of having a national initiative for nanotechnology still still apply I think so it's a very transdisciplinary field so you really need to bring people together you see that in the grand challenge and the recommendations of the academies you know where we need to bring together material scientists physicists computer

00:47:07.600 - 00:47:27.680

computer scientists potentially people working on the brain initiative it's still an expensive field in terms of infrastructure so you want to continue to share infrastructure and you see that in the renewed national nanotechnology coordinated infrastructure at NSF and the ongoing and the comment by the academies to keep supporting the user facilities and then finally it's just important

00:47:27.680 - 00:47:50.000

to I think national economic competitiveness which is Robinson alluded to the bell prize awarded to actually he didn't say the Chinese Academy of Sciences from there using their most use and supercomputer and as I think people will hear a little bit later on in the public session about the semiconductor working group sort of looking at the future nanotechnology is really

00:47:50.000 - 00:48:14.240

poised to continue to make important contributions so with that I'll I'll finish up well thank you all very much we're over time but we want to take some questions Wanda well good morning thank you very much for your comments and for your work in this really critical area and I would concur it is a grand challenge I guess the thought that I wanted to share with the group and maybe get some

00:48:14.240 - 00:48:37.760

comments but maybe just have you reflect on it later is that one of the challenges in getting through the valley of debt is moving from a concept to something that's actually manufacturable something producible something that the commercial marketplace could actually adopt and in the work that you talked about I didn't really hear anything about testing validation and evaluation you know

00:48:37.760 - 00:48:59.840

how it is that we get to the point where we say that no kidding we can use this technology for the grain initiative or some of the other things that that we're talking about so it may be that you know there's ongoing efforts that's focused on the test and evaluation but I would be interested to hear if there's a recognition of the challenge there and getting from something that you know

00:48:59.840 - 00:49:27.120

is conceivable to something that is actually marketable well I'll I'll say a sentence or two and then maybe Lloyd wants to add to it but I think that goes back to that first figure where it showed where the government does see it having a role in advancing discovery to practical application and and those programs are often mission driven from mission agencies and they're

00:49:27.120 - 00:49:55.040

looking for a solution to a mission problem that may not say nano in the title but that nanotechnology can help and so I think DoD and NASA and DOE and others are actually helping to support and and do that test and evaluation work if there are special facilities that are needed to deal with nano materials and nano scale processes then maybe it is a a gap that needs to be

00:49:55.040 - 00:50:18.000

addressed but I think that the glass is somewhat half full so I'll make two comments so one is if you look at the white paper actually it it does expand all the way it does span has seven focus areas including sort of the application development and and which if you look at it includes being able to model simulate and understand architecture so for something like the grand challenge you

00:50:18.000 - 00:50:36.880

really need not the whole doises but you need the whole architecture the whole programming environment and everything so that's captured there the other is the interest of outside parties in this group so for example IEEE they have a rebooting computing initiative which they've made this sort of grand challenge if not the focus one of the focuses of that so you see that at the

00:50:36.880 - 00:51:01.920

industry level and what they're certainly thinking about that Mike Metter our former NNCO director told me a story that he had visited I guess I won't say one of the big semiconductor companies he was visiting and and and in the person's office was a copy of the white paper all all highlighted so there is definitely interest in thinking about on the industrial side as well on on how do we

00:51:01.920 - 00:51:26.480

make you know essentially brain like computing at brain like power so quay thank you very much yet another really good look at the program so Dr. Merzberger I know it wasn't specific in the questions you were tasked but in the background and any comments on on any major changes or change in direction that the countries outside the U.S. are taking on their investment in nano

00:51:28.480 - 00:51:53.520

we that wasn't really we didn't have the resources to go into that it was something that was of interest in the figure that I showed at the end I think tease up perhaps the core of what might be a follow-on set of studies or a topic for the next study I don't know if Jim wants to that's essentially where it's to Chad yeah thank you for the very nice presentation

00:51:54.800 - 00:52:16.160

both groups kind of called out nano medicine is a great opportunity but the grand challenge it's tangentially related to that you called out the ccne program which I think also is is one of the model programs in terms of how it's making an impact in an area where the bar is relatively lower and we could see translation much faster and there are many

00:52:16.160 - 00:52:42.000

shots on goal that have come out of that particular effort with respect to both diagnostics and therapeutics is there anything being done to kind of franchise that into other areas for example throughout the NIH moving that model into other areas of medical research so that they can benefit from those types of materials advances I don't think that we're in a position to answer that we

00:52:42.000 - 00:53:05.840

may have someone in the audience from NIH you could speak to it but I think and and in our conversation with the interagency group when we met with them after the report was released I got we got a lot of feedback from the agencies indicating that there was thinking along these lines and I think there's interest of course there has to be sort of resources allocated

00:53:06.640 - 00:53:32.960

to back that up but I get the feeling and I'm looking towards Laurie you might talk to her afterwards I think the answer is yes and I just have one last question and it's related to certain through Michaels with the commercialization activity both in our 2014 report and reports before that and you show that sort of with what the international still depending upon looks need

00:53:32.960 - 00:53:57.520

to really develop a formal system of metrics for your outcomes and commercialization so Lloyd is anything being it's a very difficult thing to do but if anything being done particularly as a program mature so we're able to really so we've done a couple of things it's a slow process we actually succeeded in working with the Commerce Department to get some new NAICS codes related to nanotechnology

00:53:59.360 - 00:54:25.760

which enables to start tracking some of the commerce related to that recently the you know so these are these are sector-based metrics okay the FDA excuse me CMS recently approved some of the first nanotechnology related device codes and then at the international we've actually been engaging at the international level with the OECD working party nanotechnology where actually Mike

00:54:25.760 - 00:54:47.440

Metter the NSEO director was the US lead of a working group specifically on metrics so there's an international effort actually in OECD to define metrics related to the commercialization of nanotechnology so we've been working engaging in that in that venue but there's honestly there's a limited amount that the federal agencies in the nano community in the NNI community which are

00:54:47.440 - 00:55:26.160

mostly S&T based can do in that space you know in terms of defining and collecting metrics well I mean thank you all well next time we'll have a nano race so we actually we just had one um by many nanoseconds yes well thank you Maxine thank you to the panel that's great all right we're going to turn now to a PCAST report and I understand we are going to have a set of

00:55:26.240 - 00:55:53.920

recommendations to vote on drinking water is the subject and it's been a subject of great importance to Americans particularly brought to attention by the situation in Flint Michigan which called attention of many people to the problems of lead in the drinking water but the purity and the safety of American drinking water is a topic that is much broader

00:55:53.920 - 00:56:16.160

than that involves many possible contaminants a tremendous amount of infrastructure hidden in the ground and in the walls of American homes and it's a serious science and technology problem to understand the scope of the problem where the problems exist what can be done to remediate those problems and so at the request of the president who is very serious about this matter PCAST took

00:56:16.160 - 00:56:38.800

on the question of the safety of drinking water in the United States and we have a working group Chris Castle and Rosina Bierbaum are the co-chairs of that working group which also includes Ed Penhote Maxine Savitz and and my co-chair John Holgen and we're going to hear from the working group today about what they've learned and what their recommendations are and I will start by

00:56:38.800 - 00:57:08.960

calling on Chris Castle who's going to introduce this and then turn to her co-chair Rosina. Thank you Eric yeah I'm pleased to present this report and really hope that it brings needed attention to this important area my focus on this is as a physician and the concerns for human health that contamination in the nation's water system poses and the need to strengthen

00:57:08.960 - 00:57:51.600

our ability to know what's in the water and to be able to head off another Flint and other such threats so there's in in terms of the threats to health the tension in Flint was focused understandably primarily on lead because lead has no safe levels and particularly for pregnant women infants and small children its effect on brain development and mental capacity is really dangerous

00:57:51.600 - 00:58:24.160

and important to head off pediatricians often test for lead they can treat it if it's above a certain level but it's a very subtle and insidious kind of toxicity unlike some of the other sort of toxins that occur in water that you hear about which are both chemical toxins and microbial toxins that cause acute GI upsets or sometimes liver dysfunction or other kinds of

00:58:24.160 - 00:58:55.040

things that really make you feel sick so it brings attention and we we discover it more quickly so when the event happened in Flint it really led to a discussion well let me just say that you know the attention to lead has been for decades the cause of much progress with the work of EPA and CDC and others to reduce the risk of lead from auto emissions from lead paint in

00:58:55.040 - 00:59:28.160

houses from other sources of lead so these remaining threats come primarily from various water water sources and in particular drinking water that comes through many different sources and in the case of Flint happened with this change to a different water source for the city of Flint and the addition of chlorine disinfectant which did not add anti corrosives and therefore corroded

00:59:28.800 - 01:00:00.080

old lead old pipes that had lead in them so there are many just to say there are many many factors that that lead to this so you see up here some pictures from that Flint experience there were also at the same time outbreaks of Legionella found in some of the homes and then a year earlier I think it's important to recognize also that things like blue-green algae toxic algae produces

01:00:00.080 - 01:00:38.560

cyanotoxins which are another form of toxins that can happen in water this comes from fresh water 27% of lakes in the United States are vulnerable to this and this is made worse by I reduce the both the warmth and warm temperatures and increased sunlight that come with climate change and are also able to let us know that we can probably expect more of this kind of problem and

01:00:38.560 - 01:01:04.560

indeed we have been seeing more of these so these are just some of the areas that we need to look at as we look at multiple chemicals multiple microbials different kinds of treatments and different kinds of approaches and of course the president taking this very seriously made what I think is this very important statement there is no more basic elements sustaining human life than

01:01:04.560 - 01:01:36.400

water this is definitely true it's not too much to expect for all Americans that their water is going to be safe he said this in this picture is drinking glass of water during his visit to Flint to reinforce for people that drinking water once it's treated once you test it coming from the tap really is safe and he asked us to consider the following questions for the nation and I want

01:01:36.400 - 01:02:00.240

to particularly point out here that he's drinking the water from a glass not bottled water he did not ask us to look at the situation with bottled water I think many for environmental and other reasons we'd like to really believe that the water coming from the tap is safe and we know that it is in the vast majority of American communities we just want to be more assured that it is for

01:02:00.240 - 01:02:24.240

everyone so these are the questions he asked us to consider what is the current state of scientific understanding of the risks associated with contaminants and drinking water some are more serious than others what can be said about the comparative risks from different contaminants is improvement needed in monitoring data collection and data analysis on the contamination

01:02:24.240 - 01:02:46.080

and drinking water and the factors that might contribute to it because as you'll see in a moment there are multiple factors what can currently available technology contribute to risk assessment risk mitigation and risk communication in this domain and what additional research and development could contribute to the understanding and minimizing the risks from

01:02:46.080 - 01:03:19.120

contaminants of the nation's drinking water these are the members of our working group Eric also already introduced the PCAST members and you see there the several working group members who are all people with extraordinary expertise in this area some of whom have worked in federal agencies and local and state agencies and academic settings as well and then we had

01:03:20.000 - 01:03:50.480

fabulous support from Diana Pankovich who's been recognized this morning already and Bruce Rodin who's here today as well we conducted very extensive deep dive conversations with stakeholders sometimes in person sometimes in my telephone reviewed a number of relevant reports and peer reviewed papers and hosted one workshop with 36 experts that included water

01:03:50.480 - 01:04:25.520

energy environment and public health experts federal agencies including EPA CDC and NEHIS non-governmental organizations representing both public and private sectors and water utilities and this is too small to read because it's a lot of people so we really reached out very extensively to get a lot of input for this report we also were aware that EPA at the same time

01:04:25.520 - 01:04:58.560

was developing a drinking water action plan in response to the same set of realities and concerns from the administration and while that action plan has not yet been released we're aware that it's complementary to the work that we did and that it will apply its legislative mandates to advance next generation safe drinking water act implementation address environmental justice and

01:04:58.640 - 01:05:25.680

equity and infrastructure funding strengthen protections against lead in particular in drinking water and address emerging and unregulated contaminants just to give you sort of the context of the fact that there is a substantial and important regulatory framework for the nation's drinking water in this country that is based primarily on the safe drinking water act from the

01:05:25.680 - 01:05:51.360

1970s the EPA's primary authorizing legislation to to protect the public drinking water systems and there's additional authorities under the clean water act and other legislation that protect against other kinds of releases related to other sources of contaminants and water EPA doesn't act alone in this it's supported by a number of other federal agencies in particular

01:05:51.360 - 01:06:23.120

NOAA HHS and the Department of Energy so let me just before I turn this over to Rosina to talk about the recommendations not everyone is familiar with the water system and as we think about a regulatory framework and information for consumers we sometimes think of water systems as one system and here's a place where it is not one system and that adds to the complexity of both the

01:06:23.120 - 01:06:53.840

problem and the solutions so just on a very schematic and high level basis the drinking water system starts with the source of the water and for most of Americans it comes either from surface water that's about two-thirds of the nation and groundwater which is about one-third the both of these can also be affected and are affected by changes in water supply the increases

01:06:53.840 - 01:07:27.840

of with drought that we're seeing with climate change and so we need to be mindful of how these different sources both are at risk and themselves will be changing in addition 15 percent of Americans get their water from private wells so that's not really represented in that system but that is a groundwater source but they but is not subject to this whole array of treatment storage and

01:07:27.840 - 01:07:59.280

distribution so for the majority that come from organized water systems the water comes from surface or ground goes into a water treatment facility which includes both filtration and disinfection filtration primarily for chemical and mineral contaminants and disinfection for microbial contaminants and then is stored in one way or another you see the familiar water towers

01:08:00.400 - 01:08:32.720

and then is distributed through those pipes that you see there and that's generally underground it's in many cases particularly in some of the nation's older cities is can be very old pipes very expensive and difficult to replace and there's lots of ways that new technologies and new science can provide safety within those pipes without actually replacing them it's one of the

01:08:32.720 - 01:08:59.040

things we recommend in our report that we need more work on but also as cities like Flint develop lower populations and they find people leaving and less use of water the water can stagnate more in the pipes which then puts it at greater risk so there's lots of different dynamics having to with population water sources water distribution that have that affect the safety of the water

01:09:00.240 - 01:09:29.840

and then once it goes into the houses that you see there it becomes a completely different entity that's called premise plumbing it's not regulated by and large by cities for many citizens they can't other than buying commercially available testing at the tap they can't really know what happens to their water the city can certify that they it's tested it but but we need a quicker

01:09:29.840 - 01:09:58.720

more affordable ways for people to test their water so it's a very complex system very diverse and therefore really needs a collaborative attention just to give you an idea a hundred and fifty thousand systems are exist for drink for public drinking water in the United States so this is some of them are very large and big metropolitan areas some of them are very small but when you

01:09:58.720 - 01:10:25.040

think about trying to create a regulatory framework it just really adds to the complexity of the situation so we have these areas of focus of our recommendations I'm going to go over them quickly and Rosina is going to go into more detail the first is that we need better ways of monitoring drinking water contaminants especially for vulnerable populations we know particularly infants

01:10:25.040 - 01:10:53.280

children pregnant women are especially at risk we know that people in underserved and under privileged communities often are at risk for the kinds of aging infrastructure that I described so we want to be able to have better and more efficient ways of getting a picture for the citizens and also for the policymakers about drinking water safety and to that end we also think

01:10:53.520 - 01:11:26.240

there's an underused and underappreciated approach that big data analytics can offer and you'll hear more about that from Rosina and then the workforce in fact a number of it takes expertise to really work on water safety many and these are local entities primarily in cities and townships and states and there is a lack of really trained expertise particularly a number of the people who

01:11:26.240 - 01:11:52.080

have been the experts are reaching retirement age and there hasn't been a focus on bringing younger people into the field this is an ideal area for STEM education to really apply opportunities for young people who are interested in science that is applied to public health we need federal coordination of research and development focused on drinking water

01:11:52.640 - 01:12:18.240

and developing the next generation of technologies to improve the safety of drinking water and then because there are so many different contaminants and because some are much more serious than others we need a better way of understanding the comparative risk of different contaminants and different aspects of the water distribution system we think much of what we've described here could

01:12:18.240 - 01:12:48.960

really be advanced by citizen science president obama has really extended the notion of citizen science in a wonderful way we saw a good example of that in our in our workshop with a individual who brought a big data analysis that he himself had put together just from publicly available data sources so we want to really encourage citizen science as a way to help us

01:12:48.960 - 01:13:12.000

with all of all of these goals that we describe and then lastly there are a number of cities out there that are really doing innovative things and we think that it would be very good for the government to support demonstration projects at the local level in cities that have different circumstances for their water that are either in water shortage and drought areas or aging

01:13:12.000 - 01:13:34.160

infrastructure or specific groundwater kinds of risks so we make some recommendations to that effect so with that I'm going to turn this over to my co-chair Rosina to thank you very much Chris so I'm going to try to take you through in a little more depth each of the findings and recommendations and I want to remind you that our real focus is on advancing science and technology

01:13:34.160 - 01:13:59.760

not to micromanage the how it gets done there's lots of actors as you've heard in this water system space but we at least try to identify lead actors and our reasons for that because a lot is happening that can be built on so let me start with the first finding and that's on monitoring the complex system that Chris described would certainly benefit from more monitoring to detect

01:13:59.760 - 01:14:24.880

contaminants and many technologies are coming along that'll soon make actually real-time monitoring more possible but it's also important to monitor people particularly as you heard the most vulnerable in society and that can be improved too so our first recommendation which definitely on monitoring interleafs with the r&d and the technology and the risk assessment recommendations coming later

01:14:24.880 - 01:14:48.560

but we do have some targeted recommendations in monitoring of both people and water so our first recommendation returns to the issue that president obama initially raised with us and that's led so to test led you can test the people or you can test the water and we have one recommendation for each so on the first there is a program that's called the special supplemental nutrition program

01:14:48.560 - 01:15:18.960

for women infants and children wic and wic was established to counteract the negative effects of poverty on prenatal and pediatric health but actually in 2014 mothers of 53 percent of the babies born in the united states actually participated in this wic program and this is the group that is most vulnerable to lead so if water testing could be added to the participants of the wic

01:15:18.960 - 01:15:46.640

program we'd get a lot more data and just for example in flint michigan alone 4800 mothers were wic participants so the wic program is really a usda department of agriculture program where the money flows to the states but if these participants could be tested we'd also start getting into testing tap water in rural areas on well water which is an under tested area

01:15:46.640 - 01:16:14.560

and if we actually got to that point nitrate and arsenic might be important too to test in those populations so we would like to encourage that wic participants be able to be tested for blood lab the second monitoring targeted recommendation is that we should monitor high lead locations and really be looking for lead hot spots so chris talked to you about the EPA rules and under the

01:16:14.560 - 01:16:38.880

safe drinking water act there's a lead and copper rule and EPA considers a system to be in compliance if fewer than 10 percent of the households are at an action level of 15 parts per billion and EPA is in the process of revising this rule so if you think about that you can have high levels of lead but as long as what 10 percent of what you've tested doesn't exceed

01:16:39.680 - 01:17:03.760

15 parts per billion you are quote in compliance so we think it would be good to consider testing the highest lead level homes repeatedly even if the average community level meets that 10 percent rule and so for example EPA could consider establishing a household action level based on the amount of lead in drinking water that it would take to raise

01:17:03.760 - 01:17:25.280

a healthy infant's blood level to something that would be greater than five micrograms per deciliter which is considered unsafe for young children our second finding is data I'm sure it's shocking to hear that we have a data recommendation from PCAST but it's on as usual data aggregation sharing and interoperability quite honestly the federal government already

01:17:25.360 - 01:17:48.080

spends somewhere between 10 to hundreds of millions of dollars a year monitoring both water quality and water quantity so if you think about quantity we measure lake levels precipitation patterns no fall depth and on quality we certainly measure salinity trace organic pesticides and then state and local agencies have data on water treatment plants

01:17:48.080 - 01:18:12.480

on distribution systems and in some cases on individual households but most of this data is inaccessible to the water community and there's no real data analytics platform to access or integrate or link this data across agency states and local governments meanwhile private industry is beginning to market data analytics control systems and interfaces for utility

01:18:12.480 - 01:18:38.800

operators but the industry lacks standardization security and interoperability capabilities in this emerging area so it's an ideal time to get better control of the data and our recommendation is that the federal government as a first step should support the development of a drinking water data platform for collection analysis and storage of geospatially linked drinking water

01:18:38.800 - 01:19:01.680

system contamination data now fortunately there are a number of things that could be built on and so we suggest that one might want to start with epa safe drinking water information system or the water quality portal which is something managed by epa the geological survey and the national water quality council and also there's some very interesting experiments with geospatial

01:19:01.680 - 01:19:27.280

data in states that should be looked at so for example minnesota is one that we found that has a very interesting mapping program our third finding was on the workforce water system operators are aging as are we and the system is becoming more sophisticated you know with higher tech sensors and we hope improved it so additional skill sets are going to be needed and as you know

01:19:27.280 - 01:19:52.800

pcast has been a very strong advocate of STEM education and in particular using community colleges to train for tomorrow's higher tech jobs and that seems appropriate here so for on the near term opportunity the national science foundation has a program called advanced technological education or a te and that is actually focused on preparing students in community colleges for

01:19:52.800 - 01:20:16.320

tomorrow's higher tech jobs in collaboration with industry and we've already found that three such grants with a water training focus exist there may be more but for example the the kia mukul community college bristol community college and san bernadino community college so we're encouraging more of these to train the next generation over the longer term though i think we

01:20:16.320 - 01:20:40.400

really need to evaluate both the size and the expertise of the workforce that we need over the coming decades and so there we recommend that epa in coordination with the national science foundation with education and interior should initiate a stakeholder process so that we can actually develop a blueprint for the overall professional training of water treatment managers

01:20:40.400 - 01:21:09.680

of the future but also the continued education of those that we have today our fourth finding also probably not a shock to you is to coordinate r&d better uh to our amazement there are already three interagency groups across the federal government that have mandates in part to work on the challenge of providing safe drinking water so two of those agent multi-agency groups are under

01:21:09.680 - 01:21:35.760

the national science and technology council the subcommittee for water availability and quality called SWAC and one that looks at the water energy food nexus called nexus but then we found a third one a water treatment interagency working group that the bureau of reclamation and the army had set up so interestingly each of these has more than a dozen agencies but actually none has the

01:21:35.760 - 01:22:02.880

explicit responsibility to coordinate the broad array of r&d needs that are germane to drinking water safety across that system that you saw from chris from source to tap so our recommendation is that we need a real federal strategy on drinking water and we recommend that since so many agencies are involved the white house offices should oversee and develop and coordinate the

01:22:02.880 - 01:22:30.080

execution of a real federal strategy for the research development and deployment of adequate and affordable water monitoring treatment and distribution technologies across the nation's drinking water system to tackle the source to tap our next finding is on technology and the national innovation system for development and deployment of new technologies we find is inadequate so

01:22:30.080 - 01:22:57.760

in some cases we found that there are technologies developed but are not widely being deployed some of those are for example activated carbon enhanced pipe cleaning noa has a new autonomous sampler for algal toxins but these are all kind of very new and not widely dispersed but there are some technologies that also exist in other domains outside of water such as the tools of genomics to

01:22:57.760 - 01:23:24.960

identify microbial contaminants but they're not common in the water system and then third in some cases we need leaps to different kinds of technologies new membranes ways to dispose salty brines after desalination or sensors so there is a lot to build on such as research hubs and we could think about grand challenges and prizes but the innovation system right now for water

01:23:24.960 - 01:23:49.200

really needs a boost by the federal government and so our recommendation is of course to build on research hubs but to actually launch a focused research activity to jumpstart a number of these research development and deployment issues so that we can really rapidly get to the next generation of technology and get that into our water systems so in addition to some of the areas that I already

01:23:49.200 - 01:24:15.040

mentioned here are some other that others that PCAST identified we could we need some inexpensive multi-contaminant sensing testing and treatment technologies new ways to map find or replace lead service lines we need to get a handle on microbial contaminants from the source to tap to develop disinfection mechanisms that go beyond chlorine and those are just a few and so the

01:24:15.040 - 01:24:42.160

government has a number of entities like this for example we just heard about the NNI and we have things like the RPE so it's it's not a new concept but we definitely need something to bring water technologies into the 21st century our next finding is on risk assessment quantitative risk comparisons across different drinking water contaminants and different sources of exposure

01:24:42.160 - 01:25:09.520

is an underdeveloped field of study so health endpoints of concern differ and and it's really hard to inner compare for example coliform with lead with trihalomethanes with carcinogens with microbial pathogens with cyanotoxins and many federal agencies are involved in thinking through some risk and risk reduction to health across exposures in different parts of the drinking water system

01:25:09.520 - 01:25:34.400

and we think that this needs to be developed in a much more coherent way so our recommendation is that the federal government must lead but it must clearly involve state cities and drinking water experts to improve methodologies that can do comparative risk assessments of contaminant mixtures and across the complete water system and so we recommend some agencies that we think

01:25:34.400 - 01:25:56.400

should be lead but this activity should certainly supplement the ongoing activities under the safe drinking water act and we encourage collaborations to enable the collection and coordination and assessment of data especially for those drinking water systems that are currently not under regulatory oversight such as the private wells and premise plumbing that chris mentioned

01:25:57.360 - 01:26:23.200

our seventh finding is on citizen science and as you heard this is a new initiative across the entire federal government every agency has a city citizen science coordinator and we think engaging citizen scientist is really important for two reasons one to educate the public about their water systems and indeed most water systems of the country are safe and second to collect

01:26:23.200 - 01:26:43.760

information from taps and well water that we might not otherwise procure obviously citizen science is tricky because you have to be sure that you're going to get measurements that are both replicable replicable and verifiable but there are lots of great examples that are working and just a few that we found was one that's a collaborative a community collaborative

01:26:43.760 - 01:27:08.320

rain hill and snow network an urban water program amigos bravos and student watershed research plan that's just a few so if we could think about expanding this to increase our database across regions and across the country in a coordinated way we think that would be very helpful and I think I do want to mention that it was the citizen scientist initiative was something

01:27:08.320 - 01:27:38.880

that John Holdren and OMB actually kicked off in 2015 and so let's use those federal agency city science coordinators to identify some near-term actions that can help both educate and contribute to educating K through gray as well as fill in those data gaps and our last recommendation is on cities and we are certainly finding that cities are experimenting and they are innovating

01:27:38.880 - 01:28:04.320

and we must learn from them and so our last recommendation is that we should have some of the new and emerging technologies that I was talking about earlier be piloted in a few kinds of cities and so as Chris mentioned we were thinking perhaps an inland arid city would be a good one and El Paso is one that we studied quite a bit perhaps a groundwater dependent city and that

01:28:04.320 - 01:28:28.240

was one that we looked at Fresno in particular and of course an industrial midwestern or northeastern city and we looked at Cincinnati and each of those have interesting complex problems and are beginning to experiment with interesting complex solutions and all of the problems that we're seeing as you heard will be exacerbated by climate change so with that I think I'd like to end and

01:28:28.240 - 01:28:55.120

open it up to the rest of our PCAST working group members to make comments if they'd like or corrections and that would be Ed Penhote, Maxine Savits and John Holdren and of course Dan Shrag is not here today but he was an integral part so thank you very much. Great thank you Chris and Rosina and did you want to weigh in here? No I just want to say what a pleasure it's been to work on this

01:28:55.120 - 01:29:21.120

project and that the recommendations I think although many are thoughtful and and hopefully will be recognized if you read the first slide carefully there was another recommendation to rename Lake Erie, Lake Erick after our team co-chair but that's actually not serious. Yeah I'm going to vote against that so yeah. But you know I think that all of these recommendations are

01:29:21.840 - 01:29:46.240

supported by a wide community of people that we were able to engage in the entire process and I think these are thoughtful recommendations. They're generally quite broad and we leave it up to the agencies involved to figure out among themselves how to sort through and who should take the lead. We deliberately decided not to be too proscriptive about exactly how this should be done given the

01:29:46.880 - 01:30:17.600

broad nature of the challenge and the number of players involved in this space. John did you want? Yeah just a couple of quick points. One I want to stress the extraordinary team aspect of this effort. We had tremendous inputs as as Chris and Rosina have already indicated from the seven non-PCAS members of the working group. We had great cooperation and interaction with the EPA

01:30:18.480 - 01:30:46.000

which is noted has had a parallel effort underway and I would just stress that the great majority of Americans the great majority of the time can rely on clean drinking water at their taps. This is not by any means a national disaster we're talking about. We're talking about a system that does very well again in most places most of the time but can be improved and we believe that

01:30:46.000 - 01:31:12.240

the recommendations of this study will lead to filling some of the gaps that do exist in what is overall a very good system. That's great and Maxine didn't have anything particular so I'm going to move to the flags. This is our custom. The PCAS members put up their flags and I'd like to get questions about this report. I saw Jim Gates's flag up first and then Barbara Shaw.

01:31:15.040 - 01:31:41.840

Thank you Eric and thank you to the excellent briefing by Christine and Rosina. You mentioned the fact that you're looking at technology and it occurred to me that there's a dimension here that I don't since I was not part of the working group I don't know how broadly this was discussed it's the I was brought back to by your comment about technology in the future to think about

01:31:41.840 - 01:32:10.080

something that seems like it's totally unconnected namely the Elmo zoom wall which is a new destroyer. It's a stealth destroyer but the thing that's really interesting to me and if there may be an overlap is the fact that the crew size has been reduced because of taking advantage of IT and robotics and so as you start thinking about this technology transformation that will I think also

01:32:10.080 - 01:32:35.760

be possible around the issue of water I don't know if the working group thought of some really out of the box sort of ideas like this namely whether you're thinking about bringing in perhaps some expertise from the Department of Defense as they're thinking about using robotics to create a more efficient workforce whether also there was consideration of looking outside of the

01:32:35.760 - 01:33:06.560

traditional water management community and here I'm thinking about chemical engineers petroleum engineers because these are also people who move liquids around and therefore might have a very out-of-the-box perspective on what's possible. Yeah Ed why don't you? Well you know a couple of various that come to mind that we did think about one are autonomous sensing vehicles or apparatus

01:33:06.560 - 01:33:32.320

that could actually move around the city and figure out a better way to assess whether pipes are leaking or not etc so robotics could play a very important role and then you did see in one of our recommendations that we recommend a real effort to get less expensive and more versatile sensors and so that's something that as we get more data throughout the system by deploying many more

01:33:32.320 - 01:33:57.440

sensors which today are too expensive to deploy broadly across communities it's another area where getting more information would allow a much more targeted approach to and therefore less expensive approach less intensive from a human intervention point of view to only go to the places that really need attention and so those are two examples that we ran across in our work I think that that read on

01:33:57.440 - 01:34:24.400

exactly what you were saying. Thanks Ed and let me add to that your your suggestion about chemical engineers is really an important one and and other I mean I'm even thinking about the nanotechnology world could be very helpful here both in sensing but also in creating films that can be protective you know we've seen actually how that works sometimes even interestingly with biofilms which

01:34:24.400 - 01:34:55.120

can be dangerous but can also be stabilizing to some of those distribution systems and I think it's you know this I I put particular attention on the sensors because of what John said about how we know if you go and test that the vast majority of water at the tap is safe and people who have concerns don't have an easy way of asking that question about my tap I mean you can buy some

01:34:55.120 - 01:35:21.840

commercial tests for one for lead in particular but there ought to be a way of testing for the things that are the most dangerous there are you know might be multiple contaminant sensing that would be much easier much less costly and much more easy to reassure people we do have you know activated carbon and filters that people can use which are relatively inexpensive but I think

01:35:22.080 - 01:35:49.520

that's a form of both citizen science and sort of empowering consumers to ask those questions if you can give them the tools to do it. With regard to DoD I mean in some ways in the demonstration cities if there is military base nearby it certainly becomes a vehicle to demonstrate some of these things with a wide audience and we talk in the demonstrations about public-private partnerships

01:35:50.080 - 01:36:17.120

not just the government agencies who are involved in water the EPAs and but also the implementers potentially DoD. Great, Barbara. So thank you first very much for this great presentation for all the hard work on something that has really been in the public concern and has some deep deep effects on our society and on the well-being of our citizens. The last thing

01:36:17.200 - 01:36:40.560

Rosina that you said was that climate change is going to affect all of this. Clearly climate change is going to affect both the quantity and the quality of water and some of the effects are going to be obvious such as increasing water temperatures you increase cyanobacteria blooms. So my question is how will climate change do you think affect water issues quality and quantity

01:36:40.560 - 01:37:04.960

on the short term and then also long term what what are the differences in the implications and what are we looking at in the future? Well I don't have a crystal ball but I think you know we've often said that water is the the linchpin of climate change as you've said too much too little wrong time and as we looked at the water systems in the country it's clear that pretty much systems

01:37:04.960 - 01:37:26.720

are built assuming that the past is prologue and you assume the last hundred years are a good surrogate for the next hundred years which is clearly not true and so all of a sudden you're seeing different places have like Des Moines have the hundred year flood four times in the last decade and so you're you're planning for an uncertain future which is definitely going to have more

01:37:26.720 - 01:37:51.600

total water but not necessarily at the right time and you're seeing water quality issues already so you you mentioned the algal blooms from warmer temperatures but in the midwest where we have a lot of combined sewer overflows you're seeing real flows of toxic and human sewerage out into the streets creating different kinds of health issues so I think that this planning for uncertainty

01:37:51.600 - 01:38:13.520

in some play actually today in the paper there's a story about king tides and how Miami is going to spend four hundred million dollars just to keep the water pumped out well that sea level rise infiltrates water systems along the coast with salt water which creates a problem and so any part of the country the planning that has taken place and the infrastructure that has been built

01:38:13.520 - 01:38:39.600

has not been built for the climate of today a or the climate of tomorrow b and so I think that protecting the nation's drinking water it is becoming harder as climate changes and so as we build for the future we've got to do what I think the government is requiring any federal infrastructure monies have to be used considering sea level rise in the future or built at two feet

01:38:39.600 - 01:38:59.920

if you don't know what that is and that we have to to build the best thinking of these changing patterns and timing and quality into our engineering designs but also there's going to have to be a lot of adaptation with the systems that are not going to turn over these are hundred-year systems so you're seeing innovative things like the city of king new hampshire the absolute first

01:38:59.920 - 01:39:22.720

city to build an adaptation plan in this country build deeper culverts because they were overflowing all the time so coping with the water systems we have today in the changing climate big deal right now and then what we build going forward has to be different and what we're testing for the changing microbial and chemical mixtures will have to change as well so I think climate change

01:39:22.720 - 01:39:47.680

has to be built into every aspect of managing today's systems and planning tomorrow's John Rosina just hit a great many of the important points about climate change I just want to mention two two more that are happening already and that are expected to continue to escalate going forward one is that decreased mountain snow packs and earlier faster spring

01:39:47.680 - 01:40:11.040

melt are leading to decreased summer and fall flows and so those very low flows combined with high temperatures contribute to the problems that Rosina was describing that you also mentioned about bacteria but another one in a way a real sleeper because it's a little bit complicated is that we've been seeing lengthening wildfire seasons increasing areas burned

01:40:11.680 - 01:40:40.160

uh aggravated by drought and massive tree die offs caused by bark beetle infestations and what that leads to is increased areas susceptible to accelerated erosion runoff of sediment into streams and reservoirs and that runoff of sediments and contaminants can impact water supplies uh the quality of water supplies over a very long period and this

01:40:40.480 - 01:41:05.840

wildfire issue is one of the issues I think of as kind of a sleeper because most people don't immediately connect the wildfire issue to climate change but there's a very direct connection and it's big uh the increase is already very very striking and the impacts on water quality are already happening great are there other questions from members of the pcast

01:41:06.080 - 01:41:35.680

well if not we have a set of very interesting recommendations put together by the committee and I would like to ask whether the pcast is ready to consider those recommendations all right well do I have a motion to approve the recommend I'm not done yet done yet boy he's so eager to yes so our our practice here is to approve the recommendations

01:41:36.080 - 01:42:00.800

themselves and then there is a report accompanying it and we approve subject to the editorial revisions and things that will go on in in a couple of weeks to be able to get that whole thing properly edited and out and we hope to get this out in in a couple of weeks from now but the recommendations in their current form we're going to vote and we're going to vote on

01:42:00.800 - 01:42:26.720

the substance of the report subject to those editorial changes and now I turn to my co-chair John Holdren to ask if you would like to move the recommendations so move is there a second all in favor and he opposed there stand none the report and the recommendations unanimously approved with tremendous thanks to this working group which took this project on on very tight

01:42:26.800 - 01:42:56.160

timetable and learned an awful lot about a subject well there's probably nothing more important to life than water and so thank you for the work on that we're going to take a break for about 15 minutes and we're going to return in 15 minutes to talk about semiconductors right now let's say we'll be back here at about 10 minutes before 11 so our next topic is an update on some actually

01:42:56.160 - 01:43:24.640

if we could ask everybody to resume their places that's great yes yes implicit in that thank you so much we're going to now turn to a topic of great interest which is semiconductors and work PCAST is doing on this topic and for that I'm going to turn to my co-chair John Holdren thank you very much

01:43:29.520 - 01:43:56.320

relatively recently a couple of months ago President Obama asked PCAST to look at a set of challenges facing the US semiconductor industry and and ask the question what could be done in concert between the government and the private sector to strengthen that industry for the variety of reasons for which it's important that we have a strong domestic

01:43:56.320 - 01:44:19.440

semiconductor industry so the goals as indicated here of this study which is of course on a relatively short time fuse because we are determined to finish it before the end of the administration or to sharpen understanding of the challenges that that industry faces and the implications of those challenges both for our economy and our national security and to

01:44:19.440 - 01:44:46.720

identify actions and I should have included the academic sector as well as the private sector and the government the actions that could be taken to strengthen semiconductor innovation and the and the industry as a whole we were able to recruit on short notice an exceptionally qualified working group the co-chairs are Paul Otellini the former president and CEO of Intel

01:44:46.720 - 01:45:18.480

and myself the other members listed here represent a who's who of both the semiconductor industry academic understanding of the kinds of issues that the semiconductor faces and experience in trade issues international economic issues more broadly so it's a very strong group the group members have organized themselves into four different working groups

01:45:19.120 - 01:45:48.880

the working groups have been actively engaged not just in discussion but in producing text I am certainly optimistic that this that this study will come across the finish line for a vote by PCAST at its last meeting now why did I okay here we go so could we get into presentation mode so that that becomes a little more readable

01:45:51.280 - 01:46:15.600

all right so here we go the context this is a very important industry employees 250,000 people third largest source of us manufactured imports highest level of investment in r&d as a percentage of sales of any major us industry and creates foundational technologies that enable innovation in virtually every other sector

01:46:15.600 - 01:46:44.480

of the us economy some of the challenges are indicated under the heading of motivation here the industry is approaching both technological and economic inflection points the slowing of Moore's law the proposition enunciated decades ago by one of the founders of Intel that the performance and capacity of semiconductor chips would double roughly every 18 to 24 months

01:46:44.480 - 01:47:10.480

that proved to be true but it is now slowing there is no question that that rate is slowing this is not projection it's data it is also data that the cost of designing and fabricating high performance chips has been going up and a further challenge is that some countries that are important in this domain are rather energetically subsidizing their domestic semiconductor

01:47:10.480 - 01:47:45.600

industry or requiring a transfer of technology and intellectual property in exchange for market access that poses risks to the pace of semiconductor innovation so again you will be hearing more about this study as it as it moves toward drafts and and recommendations but I am optimistic as I mentioned that we will bring it to a successful conclusion that we will bring a good set of

01:47:45.600 - 01:48:19.120

recommendations to this group for its approval at the last meeting and I am optimistic that these findings will have a significant impact on US activities in this domain great thank you for that report John so our next topic this morning is agricultural biodefense we have a panel with four speakers and I'm going to turn to Chris Chiba and Wanda Austin who so ably led us through our

01:48:19.840 - 01:48:48.480

biodefense report which was released just a day or two ago to lead this panel so perhaps Chris will start off thank you thank you Eric in 2014 PCAST presented to the president its report on combating antibiotic resistance this that report was accompanied by an executive order and a national strategy for combating antibiotic resistance just a few days ago PCAST posted to

01:48:48.480 - 01:49:11.760

our website our letter report to the president on action needed to protect against biological attack which focused on potential threats to human health in both of those reports PCAST endorsed what has become known as a one health approach to these problems one that fuses attention to animal health with attention to human health and I hope the reasons for that are clear first according

01:49:11.760 - 01:49:35.520

to the Centers for Disease Control some 60 percent of human pathogens are zoonotic that is they come from animals and some 75 percent of recently emerging infectious diseases are that affect humans are zoonotic moreover it ought to go without saying I hope it goes without saying that entirely apart from implications for human health the well-being of agriculture is essential to the nation and the

01:49:35.520 - 01:50:01.200

world so PCAST as a whole and Wanda and I in particular are very pleased to welcome today's panel on agricultural agricultural biodefense our panel today consists of Undersecretary Michael Scuse who's Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dr. Jerry Dick who is Associate Administrator of the U.S. of USDA's Animal and

01:50:01.200 - 01:50:23.360

Plant Health Inspection Service service Dr. Steven Kappas who is Associate Administrator of the USDA Agricultural Research Service and Dr. Jim Roth who is the Clarence Hartley-Kovalt Distinguished Professor in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine at Iowa State University Undersecretary Scuse will give an overview but then we'll need to depart for another

01:50:23.360 - 01:50:46.960

commitment so we will hold questions until after the entire panel has had a chance to speak under Secretary Scuse well thank you very much I want to first thank the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for coordinating this panel session and allowing us to share our perspective on the state of agricultural biodefense today while our nation is in a state of

01:50:46.960 - 01:51:13.760

transition the work in the biodefense arena will continue to be important to the new and future administrations as it is a bipartisan issue global food security is essential to the success of our society and the U.S. food system has a direct impact on the entire world as I'm sure many of you are aware the United Nations now projects that the world population will surpass

01:51:13.760 - 01:51:45.760

nine billion people by mid-century producing food for these additional two billion people will be a challenge in and of itself and keeping it safe from intentional or accidental threats will truly be important human health and the economic fortune are uniquely entwined with agricultural biosecurity we know that about 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases for humans

01:51:45.760 - 01:52:17.600

are zoonotic meaning they can be transmitted between humans and animals recent emerging zoonotic diseases include the path and path pandemic h1n1 influenza hodipathogenic avian influenza h5n1 severe acute respiratory syndrome known as SARS hindra and the middle east respiratory syndrome known as MERS those are just to name a few additionally we have witnessed how

01:52:17.600 - 01:52:49.360

the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy led to enhanced food protection measures to protect human health according to the department of homeland security the food and agricultural sector makes up one-fifth of our nation's economic activity so it's not only important to our health but it's important to our overall economy as well in 2015 highly pathogenic avian influenza

01:52:49.360 - 01:53:25.360

led to the loss of nearly 50 million chickens and turkeys this affected the american economy in a number of ways consumer egg prices increased 36 percent from september 14 to september 2015 which led to an estimated economic loss of 3.3 billion dollars 1,500 jobs were lost in the state of iowa alone when i was the secretary of agriculture for the

01:53:25.360 - 01:53:56.080

state of delaware in 2004 i personally saw the toll that this type of disease can have on the impact of our local economy after the first detection there wasn't a great deal of panic by our producers that was on a friday most of you know whole bad things happened on a friday that following monday we had our second detection and with that second detection all of the producers

01:53:56.080 - 01:54:22.240

on the entire delmarva peninsula took it very seriously they started practicing the strictest of biosecurity measures which meant they stopped traveling they stopped going to the local coffee shops they stopped going to the stores they stopped meeting with their friends and neighbors as secretary i had to stop all the auctions that were being held in the state of delaware

01:54:22.240 - 01:54:50.640

and those included not just animal auctions but machinery auctions as well and when you look at the overall economic impact that just two two situations of avian influenza low path caused and the economic harm that it did to our state as well as the region and the industry as a whole because most of our large trading partners at that time stopped buying us poultry

01:54:51.600 - 01:55:18.160

now because of the work that we did then and the work that aphis and usda and the state department's agriculture has done since we don't have the immediate closures of markets like we did in 2004 but it was still a tremendous loss to our industry on the delmarva peninsula as you can see the crux of the american economy it does in fact lie on food security

01:55:18.960 - 01:55:46.000

and today you'll hear from dr james roth from iowa state university who will talk to you about other zoonotic diseases that are at the human animal interface which in fact must be controlled in animals to ensure our safety in humans one key component on understanding these disease is actually research and usda plays a dual role in the protection of agriculture and public health

01:55:46.000 - 01:56:12.720

relying on science and evidence-based approaches in its decision-making the agricultural research service is represented on the panel today by dr steven kappas who will lay out gaps in agricultural biodefense research another major component is surveillance and response and dr jerry dick from the animal and plant health inspection service will discuss current animal disease surveillance

01:56:12.720 - 01:56:38.800

and response activities that play an important role in human health and areas in these programs that need to be addressed the important role agricultural biodefense plays is not only american but it's also global health it's food security it's economic stability shared with you today and we reinforce the need to focus on bolstering our animal and plant food security in order to

01:56:38.800 - 01:57:04.480

improve our national security so ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and i'm going to lead you leave you in the very capable hands of three outstanding individuals who will continue to discussion so thank you thank you very much for the opportunity to provide a brief background on the vulnerability of u.s. animal agriculture and food production

01:57:04.480 - 01:57:29.520

to the accidental or intentional introduction of diseases as i know you're already aware from your bioterrorism report that we're living in an era of emerging new diseases and that's true in both people and in animals we're seeing a rapid emergence of new diseases and the transboundary spread of those diseases to new countries and there is the threat of bioterrorism

01:57:29.520 - 01:57:57.600

as outlined in your paper and this affects not only human health but also animal health this slide shows the is the list of bioterrorism agents for people on the left hand side on the right hand side is the list of the same diseases all except smallpox also affect animals and i've passed that had a chart passed out that has this information for each of the bioterrorism agents

01:57:57.600 - 01:58:24.320

you can see which animals are affected incubation period some of the clinical signs so if we were to have a bioterrorism attack with these with these known potential agents it will affect both animals and people and it will be essential to control it in both animals and people because the agents can be spread and expanded in animals and continuously reinfecting people so the animal

01:58:24.320 - 01:58:51.040

part is is extremely important and is easier to control for a variety of reasons and can be controlled more quickly potentially depending on the agent and if there are novel bioterrorism agents that are generated through by nefarious actors it's likely that they would also affect animals because nearly all essentially all of these do so any novel when there's a good chance it they would

01:58:51.040 - 01:59:19.200

affect animals also and we would have to figure out which animals and begin to control it in those animals as well whether it's food animals or companion animals and some of these it's absolutely essential to control in animals that it the animals are them the main and only way we would bring some of these diseases under control the the example that occurred in malaysia in 1999 was the

01:59:19.200 - 01:59:46.640

nipa virus at the bottom of the list it was a virus that jumped from fruit bats into pigs spread very rapidly among pigs because it adapted to the pigs and then began infecting people it was a brand new paramexial virus never before seen the cdc was able to identify it they sent a team of veterinarians and microbiologists to malaysia and australia did the same

01:59:46.640 - 02:00:08.480

they worked with the malaysian government developed a diagnostic and an eradication plan and in about a two month period of time by working with the army they destroyed half the pigs in malaysia and that wiped out the virus and took care of it the only way to control that virus was to control it in pigs now malaysia is predominantly muslim countries so they don't

02:00:08.480 - 02:00:31.280

eat a lot of pork there were only 2.4 million pigs in malaysia and they they killed half of them and the virus hasn't returned even though it's still in the fruit bats it hasn't made the jump into pigs it's fortunate that that emerged in malaysia and didn't get into the rest of south east asia where there's very high pig populations living in close proximity to people that would

02:00:31.280 - 02:01:00.720

have been a huge huge disaster and at the bottom of the chart that i handed out is the list of usda high consequence foreign animal diseases and pests and these are diseases that we don't have in this country and if they came in there would there would be a great a very high consequence primarily economic consequence some of them are zoonotic the ones in yellow on the list are zoonotic

02:01:00.720 - 02:01:26.000

so there would be human health concerns as well the tier one would have the greatest impact and i'll talk a little bit more about the avian influenza and foot and mouth disease as an example of a potential zoonotic and non zoonotic currently we're having an outbreak of new world screwworm in key deer in florida that the usda is having to put a lot of resources in to attempt to control

02:01:26.000 - 02:01:58.720

that's a screwworm parasite that affects people and animals and it's absolutely essential to control that in the animals by controlling the the flies that lay those eggs and this shows the civilian biodefense budget for fy 2014 and it's i don't have a pointer it's difficult to see but the little purple piece of the pie up towards the top is department of agriculture and they get

02:01:58.720 - 02:02:25.120

approximately one percent of the civilian biodefense budget and as i've emphasized any outbreak of bioterrorism agent is going to have to be controlled in animals and that'll be the usda and states officials responsibility to do that it's already been mentioned that food and egg sector is designated by dhs is a critical infrastructure accounts for about a fifth in the nation's economic activity

02:02:25.120 - 02:02:51.200

and it provides a major portion of the positive contribution to the trade balance so agriculture is one of the major contributors to the positive contribution to the trade balance and animal agriculture has changed dramatically in the last two or three decades in the us and it's unique no other country in the world has an animal agriculture structure like the us does

02:02:52.080 - 02:03:20.960

we have very large herd and flock sizes laying hens over six million laying hens in one complex series of buildings in one complex dairies with over 10 000 dairy cows calf ranches like in the upper right corner with more than 70 000 dairy calves on a ranch feedlots as in the lower left corner with greater than 90 000 head per feedlot and swine operations with over 20 000 head on one

02:03:21.760 - 02:03:48.320

premises and often these are located near each other because of the efficiencies that that gains that allows animal agriculture to produce a very high quality product at a low cost very efficiently but it increases vulnerability when we get a major infectious disease spreading through those very large complexes and usda and the states will have to deal with those diseases when they come in

02:03:49.120 - 02:04:21.200

and we also have a very diverse animal agriculture so 62 percent of the the swine are on 3 300 operations with more than 5000 head per operation but there are about 48 000 farms that have less than 100 head of pigs so there's great diversity and usda has to deal with all of those facilities the great big ones and the small ones and that takes a tremendous amount of resources similarly

02:04:21.200 - 02:04:50.000

with dairies about 35 percent of the dairy cows are on operations with more than 2000 cows but there are 19 000 dairy farms with less than 30 cows mom and pop operations and the diseases have to be controlled on all of those it's already been mentioned the avian influenza outbreak that we had in 2015 centered in the upper midwest iowa was the hardest hit and the iowa economy alone was

02:04:50.000 - 02:05:19.200

estimated to have been hit with 1.2 billion dollars in losses and it cost the usda nearly a billion dollars in in response effort to stamp out and clean up from that disease and it was only a two month period in iowa so in two months from april to june we lost 31 and a half million poultry 24 million laying hens we were number one in egg production with about 60 million laying hens 40

02:05:19.200 - 02:05:44.720

percent of them died and we were still number one in egg production because we have such a very large industry the usda successfully and the states and the industry worked together to bring it under control in two months and there were major problems with carcass disposal as you can imagine disposing of 31 and a half million poultry in iowa alone in a two month period and this was h5 and

02:05:44.720 - 02:06:14.000

two which had its origins in china and it was not zoonotic that was very fortunate if it had been h5 and one or h7 and eight which are also present in china those are zoonotic low transmission rate to people with high mortality rate up to 50 percent if this had been one of those zoonotic avian influences it would have been a much different story much more difficult to control and probably

02:06:14.000 - 02:06:40.480

some very serious human cases and perhaps deaths from from that virus i served on the national science advisory board for biosecurity for nine years and we dealt with issues of dual use of research of concern and for the last few years we spent a lot of time on gain of function research because some researchers had shown in the laboratory that they could modify the h5 and one virus so that

02:06:40.480 - 02:07:09.600

in all likelihood it would transmit easily from person to person of course that was very controversial research and there have been controls put in place for that but if someone were to using the new easy genetic engineering techniques modify the h5 and one or h7 and eight to be easily transmitted from person to person and to be multiplied in poultry we would have a disastrous

02:07:09.600 - 02:07:38.800

unmanageable situation if one of those viruses got loose in the u.s. another disease that would have the greatest economic impact is foot and mouth disease it's the most contagious disease of livestock and it's a major animal disease preventing world trade of animals and animal products countries that have fmd can't export their fresh meat or milk or live animals because of the

02:07:38.800 - 02:08:03.440

danger of spreading the virus and the u.s. had nine outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in a 60-year period between 1870 and 1929 every one of those was controlled by stop movement and stamping out we kill all of the animals very quickly and all of the associated animals to make sure that you've really stopped the virus and we now realize we can't do that in these very very large operations

02:08:03.440 - 02:08:28.160

we can't kill them quickly enough to stop the virus and this virus is endemic in 96 countries in the world we've been very good and very fortunate that it hasn't come in into the u.s. since 1929 but it's a great threat that it could other countries that were free have had recent outbreaks fortunately this is not a public health or food safety concern but it's a bad animal disease

02:08:28.960 - 02:08:56.000

and an outbreak of fmd would be economically devastating in the u.s. we in academia are working closely with usda and state officials in the industry to design plans on how to respond to fmd and how to contain it a crucial need is to have vaccine available and there isn't sufficient funding and usda has recognized this there is not sufficient funding for an fmd vaccine stockpile

02:08:56.640 - 02:09:22.240

without sufficient vaccine if it gets here we'll probably watch it burn through our livestock populations most adult animals will recover recover often young pigs and young calves it can be fatal but adult animals often recover so we're really pretty defenseless without the vaccine that we need and that needs a major investment one of the major reasons for economic impact of fmd

02:09:22.240 - 02:09:43.920

is we lose our exports as has already been mentioned and you can see that the industry has been successful in increasing exports which is a major economic driver in the in the livestock industry we now export about 20 percent of the pork about 11 percent of the beef in 1983 we had one case of mad cow disease both in spongiform encephalopathy and our

02:09:43.920 - 02:10:08.800

exports of beef dropped to zero and it took several years for those to come back the expectation is that if we get foot and mouth disease these exports and the export of milk will drop to near zero that's about 19 billion dollars a year and if we can't control it quickly that'll probably go on for several years so there's a major major need for better preparedness for for this disease

02:10:08.800 - 02:10:34.320

even though it's not zoonotic and new generation genetically engineered biotech vaccines are being developed but there there are holdups in that development and we need to make sure that some of those can get past some of the the hurdles that are out there regulatory hurdles so that those can be developed and put in the stockpile so that's a quick summary of a very big topic

02:10:35.920 - 02:10:57.440

turned over to dr. kappas thank you dr. roth my name is steven kappas i'm an associate administrator for usda agriculture research service agriculture research service is the internal research arm of usda and along with our sister agency the national institute in food and agriculture which funds the extramural part we represent the majority of publicly funded

02:10:57.440 - 02:11:22.080

agriculture research i also thank you for the opportunity to visit with you about animal health and its impact on bio defense as we've heard twice once from deputy secretary excuse on 75 percent of the recently emerging diseases in humans come from animals so it's very logical that animal health has to be a critical component of any bio defense program and it is widely recognized

02:11:22.080 - 02:11:44.240

in the one health arena that one health and human health are very intertwined this panel is correctly recognized that there are many advances in biotechnology that can lead to improvements in human health and enhanced productivity in agriculture you've also recognized the importance of having an international bio surveillance in agriculture during our collaborations with

02:11:44.240 - 02:12:08.320

a number of different countries we begin to recognize the value of having a very strong veterinary infrastructure and that we have a very good infrastructure here in the united states but that infrastructure which for animal health is the national animal health laboratory network has been eroding resources in the last five to ten years and no longer has the capacity that it

02:12:08.320 - 02:12:35.280

used to have this network is the state diagnostic labs that are responsible for the first line of defense and identifying high consequence animal diseases and this is led with my other sister agency aphis the national veterinary services laboratory part of aphis aphis my under secretary dr catholic techie is very concerned that we're losing our resources to effectively diagnose

02:12:35.280 - 02:12:59.280

plant and animal diseases through these different types of networks and along with that is may come shocking that a very basic need for doing diagnostics and research is having the proper immune reagents that we need there's need for more of this and it's not very expensive for the animal health for farm animals but if you go to the wildlife services side

02:13:00.000 - 02:13:25.520

they have almost no immune reagents and if you look at potential zoonotic diseases that can come through wildlife it's it's a bit scary that we don't have those very basic tools that we need to have this p-cast panel has highlighted the 2010 p-cast report on influenza and also the 2014 p-cast report on combating antimicrobial resistance bacteria

02:13:26.560 - 02:13:51.680

usda plays a critical role in both of these first on the influenza side we have an active surveillance and research program both on avian influenza and porcine influenza and this we work very closely with cdc and our information is being used by cdc and hhs to develop the human health vaccines and this is the way it needs to be but we're also need

02:13:52.480 - 02:14:15.200

we're very critical component for that and we with this effort we develop countermeasures for farm animals usda also has seven agencies that are involved in combatic antimicrobial resistance and it is recognized that the one health approach is needed to address this very serious issue we're looking at understanding the microbial ecology and animals the environment on food

02:14:15.200 - 02:14:37.840

and understanding the fate of antibiotic resistant genes in all these different environments we're developing alternatives to antibiotics we're doing surveillance working with fda and we're engaging with the egg industries on stewardship within the the animal health research we know we need to develop more countermeasures medical countermeasures for the diseases that

02:14:37.840 - 02:15:00.960

dr roth identified and we know that from these the work that can be done there's benefit to animal health and human health however i want to highlight the need of more basic research to develop new tools and biotherapeutics we need to better understand host pathogen interaction and host range specificity and through this we'll develop additional

02:15:00.960 - 02:15:24.640

opportunities to control these dr roth already pointed out in nipah how it jumped into into pigs we need to be better prepared that when we have some of these devastating diseases jump into a new host that we understand the immune systems of these different different hosts and that we can better address these these issues within ars we have a foreign animal disease research program

02:15:24.640 - 02:15:45.040

at plum island it only addresses three foreign animal diseases foot and mouth disease apricot swine fever and classical swine fever if you look to the list that dr roth provided we aren't even close to touching the many very important issues our research and foot and mouth disease we're through host pathogen interaction research we're able to show that foot and mouth disease

02:15:45.040 - 02:16:08.080

virus down regulates interferon pathways and we've shown that if you administer a single particular type of interferon with the vaccine you decrease the time of protection from seven to ten days down to 24 hours with foot and mouth disease as dr roth indicated it is a highly transmissible to disease and if you go from 24 hours to seven ten ten days for the time of

02:16:08.080 - 02:16:30.640

protection you you infect a lot more animals the controlling gets much more difficult so this is the type of research that we need to do a lot more of we've also looked at better understanding the the components of the viral genome of foot and mouth disease and and how it interacts with the host and through reverse genetic engineering we've developed a leaderless foot and mouth disease

02:16:30.640 - 02:16:52.560

vaccine that is very promising and something that could be produced in the united states and would be easily adapted to the different serotypes so this is the type of work that we need to do a lot more of this type of basic research can play great dividends in the area I'd like to focus on is comparative immunology if we look at the host pathogen immune response

02:16:52.560 - 02:17:17.920

of the different pathogens across farm animals and especially including wildlife we can learn a great amount about those different immune systems and then utilize that diversity in immune response to better do a better job of controlling these diseases why are some birds susceptible to one isolate of avian influenza and a closely related avian influenza will not affect that same species

02:17:17.920 - 02:17:38.960

of birds we need to understand what's different about that interaction of of the host and the pathogen what's the difference in bacterial infection how you can have a closely related species that shows very devastating symptoms and another one that it won't even colonize the bacteria to me there's a very rich source of of information that we need to exploit

02:17:41.600 - 02:18:03.280

within animal health we also can evaluate a lot new a lot different novel vaccine platforms we don't have the same limitations that you have in in developing human vaccine and there needs to be much work needs to be done in developing more efficacious vaccines and looking at the different stages of life in farm animals and seeing how we can better develop develop vaccines that work better

02:18:03.280 - 02:18:27.040

at each of those stages once again this can translate into human health we also need to look at better vector control we know a climate change that there's more and more of these type of diseases that are showing up at our doorstep ars has a very rich history with working with the department of defense on developing vector control to protect our soldiers and a lot of these products

02:18:27.040 - 02:18:51.840

end up in the marketplace and they're helping our the public and and being used by the public today we need to do a better job of identifying the different locations and environmental conditions where we need to do surveillance while we need to do control and we need to do a better job of modeling when these diseases are going to be a problem USDA is engaged in international partners

02:18:51.840 - 02:19:11.680

we work on global health security and especially global food security we have global alliances to work on different diseases one of them the foot and mouth disease alliance and what we found with that alliance is that developed countries we're looking at countermeasures that are going to be effective in our country but the best thing we can do is address those pathogens in the countries

02:19:11.680 - 02:19:30.960

where they're endemic and their countermeasure needs are different than ours so we have to engage with those countries we have to be working in those countries so we prevent those diseases from ever coming to the United States so in conclusion animal health is a critical component of any biodefense program and we provide many opportunities to address this important

02:19:32.480 - 02:19:58.960

issue however we need the resources to do that with that i'll turn it over to my colleague dr jerry dick thank you dr capis good morning i'm jerry dick i am the associate administrator for the u.s department of agriculture's animal plant health inspection service uh we're commonly referred to by our acronym as aphis and as our agency's name suggests our top priority is protecting

02:19:58.960 - 02:20:29.200

the health of animals and plants to ensure an abundant food supply our 8000 approximately approximately 8000 employees and aphis work every day domestically and around the world to prevent foreign pests and diseases that can harm u.s agriculture and we intend to keep them from entering this country at aphis we focus on both intentional and unintentional threats to the

02:20:29.200 - 02:21:01.280

u.s agriculture because on any given day we don't know which one may come our way so we give equal attention and our um mitigation measures are focused on both these threats can come from just about anywhere for example from hitchhiking pests on imported cargos infested or in infected plants or food brought in by travelers into this country sick animals or pets shipped from overseas or

02:21:01.280 - 02:21:31.840

even deliberate attempts at agro agro terrorism so regardless of the intent or mode of entry aphis focuses on putting in place preventative measures to keep pests and diseases out of this country as well as preparing for these threats finding them when they do enter and taking emergency action if necessary when they when they are entered when they enter this country to do this we maintain a

02:21:31.840 - 02:22:00.160

comprehensive system of overlapping safeguards overseas at our u.s ports of entry and with the united's within the united states and so i'll discuss just a few of those so that you get a flavor for our current activities we use information from overseas threats to inform our decision making and import policies and inspections those come from our employees and some from the intelligence

02:22:00.160 - 02:22:30.560

community overseas this includes coordinating closely with our u.s customs and border protection colleagues and since 2003 they have enforced our regulations at us ports of entry lastly and perhaps most critically we conduct surveillance in the united states to identify and address those pests and diseases that despite these multi-layered exclusion activities may slip through the cracks

02:22:31.520 - 02:22:59.440

we're facing a situation right now as was mentioned previously with new world screwworm which has reappeared after 30 years of being eradicated in the united states that that particular fly can infest livestock and other warm-blooded animals including human beings as of midweek this pest has been found in more than a hundred endangered key deer

02:23:00.160 - 02:23:31.600

in four of the florida keys and on monsoon island and screwworm flies have been found on more than 13 other keys in our effort to delineate this outbreak we've had five pets also infected but to this date we have found no cases in livestock or in humans or on the florida mainland we're working closely with the u.s fish and wildlife service the state of florida and others to

02:23:31.600 - 02:23:57.040

prevent the spread of this serious pest our response includes surveillance release of sterile screwworm flies that are grown in Panama at our bilateral facility and flown every week to the florida keys for release we're assisting the state with its outreach and usda currently has an incident management team with 33 employees deployed to the keys

02:23:58.160 - 02:24:27.040

and two from agricultural research service to do the field work that's necessary to eradicate this outbreak as in the case with screwworm and on the ground field force and a strong network of partners is critical part of our ability to detect and quickly respond to any animal health threat however we've seen challenges in the field force and emergency preparedness arena and these challenges

02:24:27.040 - 02:24:58.800

can present a threat to both domestic agriculture and to public health if it's no longer has a large animal disease program such as tuberculosis scraping brucellosis and other diseases that were more prevalent decades ago so we aren't on farms every day to be able to quickly identify potential problems and react immediately to address that gap we count on our partnership

02:24:58.880 - 02:25:25.520

network to identify potential problems and to quickly reach out to us for further investigation these and these partners include farmers and producers local veterinarians are accredited veterinarians across the country and laboratories that are a part of the national animal health laboratory network that was previously mentioned our current funding for animal health activities

02:25:25.520 - 02:25:56.320

is below levels that were available 10 years ago and AFIS has seen a reduction of more than 200 animal health professionals since that time the need to rebuild our capacity is really at a critical level the fiscal year 2017 president's budget asks for an additional 27 million dollars to address this need most of which would be used to hire new veterinarians and animal health technicians

02:25:56.320 - 02:26:24.320

for the field and for laboratory support we're certainly hopeful of course that congress will act on that soon we've seen firsthand how shortages of skilled personnel can affect our disease detection and response for example our recent response to highly pathogenic influenza in minnesota and Iowa we had to rely on contractors who in a number of cases did not have the

02:26:24.320 - 02:26:56.160

experience and training of our workforce and when we found a different strain of hpa i earlier in indiana this year we had to bring in temporary staff and that assisted us in that effort the response to the 2015 outbreak was the largest and worst that we've ever had and certainly our cooperation with our partners state and federal helped us in that event i'll try and scoot through

02:26:56.160 - 02:27:26.480

the rest of this mr chair we worked with the center for disease control and prevention and state and public health and as was mentioned we were very very lucky that this was not zoonotic in nature because we would then have had real problems with our response and response personnel so i will i'll skip through some of the other comments in the interest of time here so that you

02:27:26.480 - 02:27:57.200

can ask questions and get to my closing comments basically that is is that we in aphis are committed to doing all we can to protect us plant animal and human health from threats posed by destructive pests while we have a great deal of confidence in the soundness of our agricultural framework and our robust cooperative partnerships like our public health partnership we believe there are

02:27:57.200 - 02:28:26.560

shortcomings that can be adressed and should be addressed we can make improvements in our infrastructure to better detect and respond to threats we can enhance our support for laboratories we can strengthen the federal select agent program we can increase our role in the intelligence community and we can improve research and available tools for detection and response

02:28:27.440 - 02:28:53.520

so whether the threats we face now and in the future are intentional or unintentional we must be prepared to respond thank you so much for allowing all of us to make comments here today in front of the committee thank you i'd like to thank the entire panel and especially dr dick for staying within time and leaving us some time for questions i see our tradition here is to raise

02:28:53.520 - 02:29:25.600

our flags i believe one the austin's flag was first up and then john holdren my thanks also to the panel for your thorough treatment of the subject and as a result of our work in the last year we were very much aware of the impact of the agriculture concern you know in addition to the focus of our report um i wanted to ask you to expound a little bit if you would on um the you

02:29:25.600 - 02:29:44.880

know the difference between the focus on what's going on in the u.s and what's going on in the rest of the world you know we often say that someone in china sneezes means someone in the u.s is going to catch a cold uh and i think that's true in agriculture as well um you talked about the surveillance within the u.s um we didn't really talk about capacity building in other

02:29:44.880 - 02:30:13.440

countries to help them be prepared to respond to this but how well are we doing in really combating the challenge that we face and the fact that um you know we don't issue passports to infectious disease they they move wherever they're going to move thank you very much i i can respond to that first of all the vast majority of our appropriation is for activity here under line items in this

02:30:13.520 - 02:30:45.920

country we do realize however that we have a responsibility in the united states to um and in fact um are eager to participate in activities to build infrastructure around the world and um we do participate we have two succundes to the crisis management center for animal health in rome where we work uh hand in hand with human uh who and others for uh work around the world uh

02:30:45.920 - 02:31:12.560

with the global early warning system for avian influenza and other diseases we also get some funding from do d ditra mainly um they ask us for our expertise and we visit countries around the world to help them build their infrastructure we believe that's really critically important because we would like to be able to prevent diseases coming to this country by helping

02:31:12.560 - 02:31:41.200

folks overseas eliminate them themselves that's a very critical need that that we still have funding wise we also participate in the global health security initiative and supply folks for the if you're familiar with the pbs and jee work that that evaluates countries a third party evaluation and tells them where they need to improve but our we we receive very little

02:31:41.200 - 02:32:07.680

independent funding for work outside of the united states thank you john holgen yes thank you again my thanks to the whole panel this is a question for uh dr dick and a relatively narrow one but the effect of eradication of the screw worm is a serious uh pest against livestock in the united states this is really one of the great stories in the history of biological control

02:32:08.320 - 02:32:34.720

of pests and so i'm wondering if we have any understanding at this point as to uh how and why the screw worm is coming back to the extent it has and i understand it's not yet in our livestock and i also understood from your comments that we are using the sterile male approach against the outbreak to the extent it already occurs in wild populations but do we do we have some

02:32:34.720 - 02:32:59.760

understanding of why after all these years it is rematerializing yeah of course our weather patterns when it comes to insects and vectors they can come in in a variety of ways we are working very closely with our agricultural research colleagues in uh doing a gene sequencing on the fly that we have found down there that work is not yet complete we hope that it is complete

02:32:59.760 - 02:33:28.080

within the next few weeks we have obviously banks of flies that we can then test against and we hope to be able to identify where this fly originated of course we're not very far from Cuba that they still have a screw worm flies but we're not ready to ascribe blame to Cuba at this point it is important for us to know where it came from so that we can begin to delineate the possible

02:33:28.080 - 02:33:58.720

pathways that it came through and those pathways change all the time and as you know the Florida Keys is a popular stop-off place for people from around the world if as they come in with their boats to dock and there are many possible ways that it could have gotten there Barbara Shaw thank you very much for your comments certainly as part of this group we

02:33:58.720 - 02:34:20.800

did look at foot and mouth disease and I think we all agree that an outbreak in the U.S. would be absolutely devastating I was very interested in your comments about vaccine development and the comment that there were regulatory hurdles and I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about what are the barriers to developing vaccines for something like foot and mouth disease

02:34:23.600 - 02:34:47.920

so foot and mouth disease virus is a select agent and in addition to that actually there's a law against having the live virus in the mainland so it's it's not possible to make the traditional killed vaccines on the U.S. mainland because that requires live virulent virus to make the vaccine but there's been some very good research all of the research for the U.S. has to be done at Plum

02:34:47.920 - 02:35:20.640

Island where they've developed an adenovirus vectored vaccine candidate and the leaderless vaccine that Dr. Kappas mentioned but the the select agent designation is still being used for the modified vaccine strain which in my opinion is not appropriate because it's been modified to not be able to spread in animals and it was would be used as a killed vaccine but it would

02:35:20.640 - 02:35:48.800

be safe for manufacturing the U.S. so they're they're in process of trying to overcome that that current hurdle could you just elaborate on what the killed vaccine is or what this modified vaccine looks modified virus looks like so the current vaccines used around the world and FMD vaccines the number one vaccine used around the world they're all virulent virus grown and killed

02:35:48.800 - 02:36:19.440

and adjuvanted and and those work but we don't have enough in the stockpile this new leaderless vaccine has been modified so it grows in vitro and it will you can infect animals with it but it won't replicate in the animal now the intention is that it will be used in manufacturing and then killed and adjuvanted and used in animals so it wouldn't be used as a modified live vaccine

02:36:20.080 - 02:36:45.680

it would be used in a manufacturing facility and because of the law against having FMD virus on the mainland and the select agent designation that is still under that designation but it's not the virulent original virus and if it escapes it it should not be able to replicate and that's being discussed I know a lot and just to add to that of course we would very much like to go to

02:36:45.680 - 02:37:09.760

a platform technology in the future whereby the several dozen uh serotypes of FMD could be substituted onto a platform and more quickly produce vaccine and so that's something that ARS and others are are working on with us and and you mentioned doing this in ad no and is there a problem in just doing it in a more recombinant fashion

02:37:10.960 - 02:37:38.800

so there is also a human ad no virus five uh vectored FMD vaccine platform also developed at plum island and that one has been picked up by both of these have been picked up by a pharmaceutical company for development uh that one is has been conditionally licensed there are some still development issues getting into production uh at a cost and in large scale all right so

02:37:38.800 - 02:37:56.000

sorry to jump the queue I just wanted to follow up on that question we are thank you we are approaching the end of our time so I would like to ask Susan Graham and Jim Gates to eat to give their questions together and then the panel can decide how to briefly respond so brief questions and brief responses thank you

02:38:00.960 - 02:38:29.440

so I have a science question which will reflect my ignorance I think um Dr Roth talked about the eight the effect of h5 n2 on Iowa and you said that it had originated in China and then we had a discussion of the screw worm and and Jerry Dick said it probably came from Cuba and my question is when there is an outbreak

02:38:29.440 - 02:38:58.560

of that kind um how able are we to trace it back so that we can say with some certainty how it originated and how it got to the U.S. let me be clear I'm not ascribing blame to Cuba at this point we uh we are doing the genome sequencing to find out where it came from the issue that we have for instance with avian influenza is there are fly

02:38:59.120 - 02:39:28.080

flyways around the world for birds there are four specific flyways in the United States one of which significantly mingles with a flyway between China Russia and northern Alaska and so as you know avian influenza viruses are very promiscuous they're always exchanging a DNA RNA type material and so we were able to determine that the major outbreak virus that we had

02:39:28.720 - 02:39:56.080

had Eurasian genomics in it and in fact had probably come down through the flyway our first outbreaks were actually in the pacific flyway and then it's spread spread to the central and to the mississippi we did not have outbreaks in the atlantic flyway thank goodness which would have included many of our major poultry producing states and so through genomics basically we uh

02:39:56.080 - 02:40:22.800

are are very strong in making sure that we make those connections and then that we do everything that we can to try and prevent that so right now for instance we collect 40 000 wild bird samples across the united states in a statistically significant way to monitor the wild bird viruses all the time so that we can be sure that if we detect it there that we're we're beginning

02:40:22.800 - 02:40:49.680

preparations for the domestic poultry and the final question final brief question goes to jim gates and it will be very brief uh both dr dick and dr roth spoke about the screw screwworm outbreak i wanted to know something about the impact on human health with regard to the current situation there there have been no cases in human beings of course in countries where screwworm is

02:40:49.680 - 02:41:21.360

endemic um any skin eddy lesion uh you know can be um deadly because those larvae feed on live tissue and if they're not treated immediately can ultimately kill the host and as we've seen in over a hundred deer uh those those pictures are very crotesque uh deer a fight it's the time of year where they uh rut and mainly the bucks fight with each other and they put lesions on the head and

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shoulders and those lesions then become um they they get myosis and uh and then they if they're not treated and of course wildlife is very hard to treat we have to be very creative in the way we do that but to this point in time we have not had any human cases and of course we want to wipe out this outbreak and have zero human cases well i'd like to thank the panel for this simultaneously

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reassuring and disturbing set of presentations and also and also undersecretary scoos for uh for spending this hour with us and i return the control to john holgen and eric lander great well thank you very much chris for the session thanks to the panel very much uh and i echo chris's assessment of that delicate balance between the reassurance that that people like you are

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thinking hard about it and the inherent difficulty of the problem so thank you uh we have no registered public commenters at this session that's still correct and so that brings our formal agenda to an end i'm going to pass back over to my co-chair john holgen for any parting words well thank you eric i thought we had a terrific set of sessions this morning certainly including

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this last one on the biodefense issues in the agricultural sector and how they intersect with the with those issues in the human sector this was really very informative and i thank this panel again and uh any remnants of the previous panels who are still in the room we thank you as well it was uh it was a great morning uh it it uh it does bring to a close the second to last

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meeting in the obama administration of president obama's council of advisors on science and technology we are grateful as always to the p-cast members to our remarkable p-cast secretariat and the other supporting members of ostp who work with the p-cast members uh so closely and we do appreciate the attention of uh and the interest of the members of the wider science and technology

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community both who join us in person and who watch on the web so we are now uh with thanks to all officially adjourned