Berkeley Talks

Jennifer Doudna spoke at UC Berkeley's International House on Feb. 21, 2019, about the revolutionary gene-editing tool she co-invented, CRISPR-Cas9.Our technological capacity to make changes to genomic data has expanded exponentially since the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 as an RNA-programmable genome editing tool. Over the past seven years, this genome editing platform has been used to revolutionize research, develop new agricultural crops and even promises to cure genetic diseases. However, ethical and societal concerns abound, requiring a thoughtful and ongoing discussion among scientists and stakeholder groups.Doudna is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and is Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Professor in Biomedical and Health. She is a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, Doudna received a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society.This talk was hosted by the Institute of International Studies, as part of its Endowed Elberg Series. It was recorded by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Watch the video here.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1.5 degrees Celsius. That's the maximum global temperature increase allowable before we see catastrophic impacts on food security, ecosystems, water access, frequency and extremity of weather events, according to a special 2018 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report warns global leaders and policymakers that failing to limit the earth’s temperature increase will result in a world that is unrecognizable – and extremely difficult to live in.  Given the urgency and magnitude of climate change, what are individuals’ role in helping to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius? How do our lives and habits need to change? How does our responsibility, as residents of the wealthiest country in the world, compare to those living in poverty? And how does individual responsibility for carbon reduction interact with corporate and industrial responsibility? Does it matter that we recycle and buy local produce and use public transit when the U.S. continues to buy oil from Saudi Arabia and 85% of Americans drive to work?  To answer these questions, Talk Policy to Me reporter and Goldman MPP student Reem Rayef spoke with Chris Jones, one of the makers of the CoolClimate Calculator. It's an online interactive tool that calculates users’ carbon footprints (the amount of CO2 they emit per year) using information about their homes, consumption habits and lifestyles. The calculator then provides custom recommendations to users on how they might “green” their lifestyles — from buying an electric vehicle to eating a vegetarian diet.Through April, the campus is participating in the Cool Campus Challenge, designed to educate and motivate all nine UC campuses to take simple, energy-saving and waste-reducing actions to help the UC system reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2025. Students, staff and faculty are all invited to participate.Read a transcript of this episode on Berkeley News.Listen to more Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy’s website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Heineike is the vice president of product engineering at Primer AI. One area the company is active in is around news data and news cycles — they model the contrasting narratives that people are telling around global stories using millions of statistical observations about entities and their relationships. Another area that they’re active in is around Wikipedia — human-written summaries and maintaining these summaries is extremely time intensive and Primer AI has formulated approaches to creating and maintaining pages.For her talk, Heineike focuses on an idea that Primer AI had from the very beginning: How we think about humans and machines interacting with AI, how we understand the data and then, how we overcome the bias we discover.Heineike gave her lecture on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer, essayist on technology and culture and an author of four books — two nonfiction and two novels — on the human side of technology. Her most recent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, in 2007 was named by the San Francisco Chronicle among the best books of the year.Life in Code bookends her earlier work, in 1997, where that was named Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, recounting life as a woman technologist amongst and almost exclusively male workforce at the start of the global digital revolution. Twenty years later, Ullman reflects on digital technology's loss of innocence and reckons with all that has changed and so much that hasn't.Dean of engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu spoke with Ullman on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants — relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these plants as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these plant-human interactions, often in ways that are highly interdependent.David Presti, who teaches neurobiology, psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, gave an opening talk March 21 for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.Presti has been on the faculty of Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for 28 years. He teaches classes on topics related to brain, mind, consciousness, neurochemistry and psychopharmacology. For more than a decade, he worked in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. And for the past 15 years, he has been teaching neuroscience and conversing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan and Nepal. He is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016) and Mind Beyond Brain (2018).For upcoming events, visit the Heart Museum of Anthropology's website.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018) and Seam (2014). Faizullah has won a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award and other honors. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, including Poetry Magazine, Guernica, Tin House and The Nation. They are translated into Persian, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil and Spanish, and have been featured at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art and elsewhere. In 2016, she was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. In Fall 2018, she joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Visiting Writer in Residence.Faizullah read her poetry on March 7, 2019, at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.This talk was recorded by UC Berkeley’s Educational Technology Services. Watch the video.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ashton Applewhite, named one of PBS Next Avenue’s Influencers in Aging and author of the breakaway new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, share her own personal experiences with ageism — defined as “treating a person differently on the basis of age" and discusses her work, which explores ageism’s destructive impact on individuals, our communities and our policies.Chronological age is often a key factor in decision-making about treatment for physical and mental health; or selection for housing, employment, or access to other opportunities, says Applewhite. Yet, she argues, age alone is a poor predictor and she pushes back on ageist assumptions that people within any given age group are all the same. They vary substantially in their capacities−and census data show growing diversity in every age group.Nevertheless, unfounded ageist stereotypes result in marginalization and discrimination against older people.This Chair Rocks does not simply identify the problem. It offers a wealth of ideas about how to counteract ageism. As Applewhite explored the subject, she discovered a clear upside: “The possibility that life could be more fun in your eighties had never crossed my mind…nor that such joyful clarity would be rooted in awareness — not denial — that time was short and therefore to be savored.”This talk, given on March 15, 2019, was hosted by Ashby Village and the UC Berkeley Retirement Center, who are committed to transforming aging in community. They hope this talk sparks interest in continuing an intergenerational conversation about collaborative efforts to build a community that works well for all ages.Read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Composer Jimmy López, who earned his Ph.D. in music from UC Berkeley in 2012, speaks about Dreamers, an oratorio he was commissioned by Cal Performances to write that is informed by interviews held with undocumented students at UC Berkeley. The piece was written in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, who created the libretto. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director designate of the San Francisco Symphony, conducted the world premiere performance of Dreamers in Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, March 17 at 3 p.m. with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, soprano Ana María Martínez, and a chorus of nearly 80 voices, including those from the UC Berkeley Chamber Choir.López's talk was held in an open session of the academic course Thinking Through Art and Design @ Berkeley: Creativity, Migration, Transformation taught by Peter Glazer and Stan Lai held in Osher Auditorium, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on Thursday, March 14 at 12 p.m. It was free and open to the public.Read a Q&A with Jimmy López, "Alumnus's 'Dreamers' oratorio inspired by Berkeley undocumented students" on Berkeley News.See events related to upcoming shows by Cal Performances on calperformances.org.Watch the world premiere of Dreamers and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan turns his focus to psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and the like — exploring their history, use, and potential to help people not only transcend, but also treat conditions from addiction to anxiety. On March 5, 2019, Pollan joined Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and founder of the Greater Good Science Center, for a conversation about the book.This talk was recorded by Educational Technology Services. Watch the video and read "A trip of his own: Michael Pollan on writing and the power of psychedelics" on Berkeley Library News. Photo by Alia Malley.Read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

NIMBYism, geographical limitation and weaponized policies have led California to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem?  California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here? Why has the development of solutions shifted from a city level to a state level?UC Berkeley MPP student Spencer Bowen speaks with Ophelia Basgal and Elizabeth Kneebone from the Terner Center and California Assembly member, David Chiu. Here are five intersecting causes of California’s housing crisis that they help identify:  Limited land and diverse geography  Production not keeping pace with booming job market Housing is expensive to build and new methods are limited Cities wield their power to slow down or vote down projects that they don’t like  Proposition 13 and the California Environmental Quality Act have been weaponized to limit housing production Talk Policy To Me is a podcast built by students at the Goldman School of Public Policy in partnership with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans.Read more and listen to other Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy's website.Read the transcript and listen on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.