"Humanity's struggle against death has been our most enduring fight." "History has given us one weapon in this existential battle." "We fight back with medicine." "Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors scavenged the natural world for remedies." "Imagine the incredible leaps of faith we had to take in an effort to ease the pain, mend the broken, and revive the sick." "Medicine was a dark art, full of false starts and false gods." "But when we struck upon some form of relief, it swept like wildfire through humankind." "We built on every success until medicine became a form of science, that's when we discovered the real killers within us." "Microscopic armies hidden within our bodies waging war on our species for thousands of years." "Medicine is our great weapon to fight back against invisible, unthinkable death." "From superstition to science, medicine has become one of humanity's most powerful tools." "And though with each new challenge we may stumble, we find a way to get stronger and smarter, to beat back fatal diseases and extend our lifespans." "Even crack open our genetic code." "This is the story of how our fight against death has determined our fate, how it became the driving force of our evolution." "How our tireless pursuit of medicine has made us modern and even made us superhuman." "This is Origins." "It's the greatest adventure story ever told, the story of humankind and how we created the modern world." "We're going back in time to explore key moments, origin moments, that changed the course of our shared history." "In the beginning, survival was key, not just from the violent threat of instant death posed by predators... no..." "Survival from all the little things that we take for granted today." "Infection, bacteria, disease." "Let's be honest, anytime before the last century, the common cold or a bug bite could kill you." "Medicine is the name that we gave to the magic that allowed us to cheat death again and again and again." "And how we learned to fight, how we have managed to survive." "In fact, all the little miracles that medicine brings us today, all of it adds up to a story about who we are as a species." "These are moments in time, origin moments that offer irrefutable proof, medicine has made us modern." "And it's been a key weapon in our fight for survival for thousands of years." "We didn't know how old medicine was until 1991." "Imagine, you're hiking through the Eastern Alps and you spot something in the snow." "It's an ancient mummy, the oldest and best-preserved corpse in history." "We call him Otzi Man, and he's more than 5,300 years old." "Otzi Man has given us an understanding of the origins of medicine." "When we evaluated him, we're able to document ancient humans' best efforts at treating the human body." "So, Otzi Man has given us a glimpse on how he lived, but we also got an understanding of how he died." "Otzi Man lived in a time of brutality between humans." "Ancient tribes often fought to the death over life's most precious resource, food." "We know Otzi was a fighter from the scars on his body, but we also know that he and his tribe were true believers in the mysterious healing powers of nature." "Medicine was largely a matter of whatever was at hand." "Herbs, tree bark, those kind of things that may have a healing effect, but it was really kind of catch-as-catch-can." "Today, we're inventing medicines in the laboratory." "To do that, we needed thousands of years of trial and error." "Plants and nature are the foundation of modern medicine." "Otzi lived in a world of unforgiving violence, but Otzi Man and his people had learned the Earth had remedies for their pain." "Natural therapies passed down from generation to generation, each one improving on the last." "Otzi Man put his trust, his faith, in the healing powers of the Earth." "But natural medicine could not protect him from human brutality." "Otzi Man was found face-down with a flint arrowhead in his shoulder." "We think he died of blunt force trauma to the head." "Otzi Man comes from a farming community that was only 5,000 years into modern man." "As a 45-year-old shepherd," "Otzi Man is a living document, so to speak, of the good and the bad of those societies." "In some sense, the agricultural economy that they were living in was great in terms of letting them flourish and have stable lives and growing families, but then they had to come to grips with what are called mismatched diseases," "such as tooth disease, dental disease, heart disease." "All of those things that we now think of as human life and kind of what a lot of people die from is attributable to the civilization we've created." "All of a sudden," "Otzi and his people were faced with new diseases because of the invention of agriculture." "They needed new remedies." "And their only resource is the natural world around them." "Otzi Man is sort of a champion survivalist." "It's a testament to how well he did that he made it into the 40s, given how harsh the environment must have been." "In his stomach, there were eggs of parasites." "His toes had remnants of frostbite." "He didn't have the medical firepower we do now, but he carried with him essentially a first-aid kit." "Inside it was a mushroom, birch polypore, which could have been a treatment for his intestinal parasite." "Everyone thought that these ancient folk remedies from thousands of years ago had nothing left to teach us." "But now that these synthetic drugs have reached a plateau, scientists are beginning to realize that maybe in order to go forwards, we need to go backwards and discover what nature has to offer us." "Today, we're inventing medicines in the laboratory." "But the best medicines, the most effective medicines were discovered from nature." "We learn from plants and nature, and then we go to the laboratory and try to copy them." "Our ancestors' surprisingly modern and inventive medical treatments have left scientists scouring the Earth and reaching back in time for forgotten cures." "About 80% of the world's population relies on plants as a major form of medicine." "Looking around in this habitat, you might see just some trees and weeds, and not really think that there's anything special about this area." "But what I see is different." "I see medicines." "I see cures from the past and hopefully, for our future." "The Brazilian pepper tree berry has a unique mechanism of action that we've just started to uncover." "It could be the source of the next big medicine in treating really nasty infections like MRSA in the future." "Plants make these compounds to protect themselves." "It works not by killing the bacteria, but by disarming it." "So, we're harnessing tools that are already in use to manage human infections." "We're not looking for a needle in a haystack." "We know that people have used these plants as medicines for hundreds and hundreds of years." "Every traditional society had encyclopedic knowledge of the medicinal properties of the plants in their environment, because that was the only medicine they had." "During the American Civil War, soldiers would make teas out of the oak bark and use it to rinse their wounds and infections." "Spanish moss has also been used as a tea to treat fever and chills." "So, all around us, we actually are surrounded by many interesting plants that could serve as future medicines." "A lot of this information, which may seem bizarre folk medicine to us, in fact, is pharmaceutically potentially extremely valuable." "I think there are many, many more areas of medicine that can benefit from improving our understanding of how these ancient remedies actually work." "These days, we can treat wounds and cure diseases that not too long ago would have meant certain death." "But the medical skills that made us who we are today were built by the doctor who got his start the hard way, patching up gladiators in a second century fight club." "Humanity is cursed by the knowledge of our own mortality." "The terrifying realization that life is a fickle flame that we, and all our loved ones, are destined for the grave drives us to find solace." "Religion told us death is not the end." "The flesh is weak, but the soul survives." "We could be reborn in infinite loops of reincarnation or live forever in the kingdom of heaven." "To our ancestors, religion offered more than solace." "It offered to cure our suffering." "For thousands of years, we invoked the supernatural in search of remedies." "Medicine and superstition were woven tightly together." "We turned to divination, shamans, and white witches to guide us to long life." "For the ancients, no remedy was too strange." "The Egyptians mixed spells and natural cures into magical remedies." "They pioneered bloodletting, a cure-all around the world for 2,000 years." "Even in our deepest desperation, we pushed on, slowly uncovering the truth behind our suffering." "The pain of losing loved ones drove us forward." "Over time, the answers began to reveal themselves." "Superstition was giving way to science." "Medical science has come a long way in the last century." "To our ancestors, things like CT scans and laser surgery might look like magic." "The medical skills that made us who we are today were built on a slow and steady accumulation of knowledge over centuries." "Medical knowledge the world over came to a head here in Ancient Greece." "An empire of organized learning where the ruins of medical treatment centers still stand today." "If you were going to be sick in the ancient world," "I think you really wanted to be treated by the ancient Greeks." "For one thing, they had temples of healing." "These were called asclepeion, which were basically the world's first teaching hospitals." "So, we are here in the most famous sanatorium of the ancient world..." "But not just a priest who might say an incantation or wave a piece of smoky feather around you and hope that the spirits would leave you." "This was based on trial and error." "Medicine was more than just magic." "Patients would visit this ancient teaching hospital, they would actually spend the night and the next day, report their dreams, which guided the doctors to finding the next treatment." "They actually invented and developed scalpels." "We can see evidence of minor surgeries when we look at the patients that were treated during that time." "Greek medicine actually created a structure for human disease and human experience that we still use today." "The Greeks created the ritual and the process of diagnosis." "Everything that we have today is built on the giant shoulders of those that came before us." "Every step, every innovation, is held on to." "That is the scientific method." "But we're continuing to build on the legacy of thousands and thousands of years for the fundamental advances for tomorrow." "This trial and error approach became the scientific method, the basis of all modern medicine." "Observe, experiment, formulate a hypothesis, and then test it again and again until it's proven false or true." "It's a method passed down to us by the most famous graduate of the Asklepion," "Galen of Pergamon." "Roughly 200 years after the birth of Christ," "Galen helped lay the origins of modern medicine." "Galen was a fight doctor who actually managed to write down his best practices and writing down what he knew to be true." "He created a corpus that was not just useful, but was in fact revered for centuries." "With each procedure," "Galen was diving into undiscovered territory." "Lucky for us, he kept detailed notes and recorded all his successes and his failures." "The tradition before Galen was so bad that you were actually genuinely likely to die if you went to see a doctor, which is why Galen himself is such an important doctor, because he wasn't in there simply to magic something up and hope for the best." "He had a reason for treating a patient, and that patient he expected to get better." "Starting with Galen, the history of medicine is really an effort to see inside the human body, to perceive what we can't see." "His discoveries and his books were incredibly powerful, because it allowed that knowledge to be transferred and disseminated to Arabia, to Europe eventually, and became really the code of medicine for the next thousand years." "Unfortunately, all of his autopsies were done on animals, not on humans." "For about a thousand years," "Galen colored modern medicine and the treatments and people's approaches to it, but there was an awful lot that was wrong, for the principal reason that Galen couldn't do dissections." "Religion didn't permit people to do dissections." "Andreas Vesalius, who was a Belgian doctor, he came along at a time when it became possible to do dissections, and to actually look at the human body and how it was put together." "Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, with his anatomical drawings, really began to create an environment in which medicine and human anatomy was looked at scientifically." "When people actually studying with, essentially with an open mind, how the body works." "It's an immensely complicated thing that we, even now, we don't really understand in a lot of detail." "I mean, nobody really understands exactly how the brain is working, for instance." "But it was the beginning." "It was when we started to get a handle on all this." "The invention of the x-ray machine, the invention of CT scans, it is all a process of trying to see what we could not see, of trying to look inside our bodies." "Thousands of years ago, they only looked at the surface, and then Galen got us a little bit deeper inside the skin, into anatomy." "When I think about my surgical practice now, it wouldn't exist if it were not for Galen." "And now with the tools we have, we're relying on genetics and DNA and even atomic interactions within our body." "So the progress in modern medicine is in parallel with the progress in modern technology." "They go hand in hand." "Better tools means a better understanding of us." "Galen had a seismic effect on how your doctor treats you." "Challenging established ideas, figuring out those missteps, using science to prove them wrong." "Our knowledge base is built on thousands of years of trial and error, and it all adds up to who we are now." "We have mastered the repair of our bodies." "We can come back from what was once deemed almost certain death and be remade, almost good as new." "And yet, one enemy is always lurking, always evolving, always surprising us with sickness and deadly disease." "We could have been wiped out as a species, if not for a few origin moments that gave us a fighting chance against unseen, almost undetectable killers." "The healers of the past fought blindly against disease for ages." "But in the 17th century, their hidden enemy was revealed." "Beneath the microscope, a strange new world came into focus." "We had our first tantalizing glimpse of the hidden realm inside us." "Under the lens, flesh became a latticework of nerves, capillaries, and blood, each playing a unique role in the concert of life." "Everything we thought we knew about medicine, about life itself was cast into doubt." "As we plunged deeper, we came face to face with an alien universe filled with miniscule creatures." "We had revealed the realm of bacteria." "Trillions of them live and die within every one of us." "They are central to our survival, yet among them are the killers that have plagued us with cholera, tuberculosis, and the Black Death." "Looking deeper still, we discovered something even more sinister, the virus." "Secret agents in our system that hijack the mechanics of biology." "These microbes are our oldest enemies." "A force we have fought for centuries." "Over the ages, these tiny armies have killed billions." "With medicine, we bring the fight to them." "We live in the Information Age." "An epoch where information can spread to billions of people around the globe instantaneously." "Information that can illuminate, entertain, and save lives." "In the recent outbreaks of SARS, measles, and Ebola, transmission of information was crucial to stop disease in its tracks." "But imagine finding yourself stripped of all access to information and in the midst of one of the deadliest plagues known to humankind where over the course of a few centuries, half of the entire population of Europe was lost." "This was Europe in the 16th century." "Black Death stole up to 200 million lives." "It was an invisible, relentless tidal wave washing over the world for hundreds of years." "Medicine in the early Middle Ages in Europe was pretty rudimentary." "A lot of it was to do with superstition rather than any sort of rational treatments." "You might as well have expected if you had a bad wound to have someone press a dead rat to it in the hopes that that would cure it." "In 1528, one young doctor was determined to fight the plague with science." "His name was Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus." "When we think of Nostradamus, we think about all his prophecies, but actually he was a plague doctor taking care of the sick, as a young clinician." "We know now the Black Death is an infection, but back then they didn't know, so they blamed everything from God to foreigners and even earthquakes." "Nostradamus' contribution to the Black Death was getting people to boil water, was getting people to bury their dead." "This led to a whole new awareness for sanitation and its link with health." "The invention of sanitation, the recognition that we needed to have sewers, that we needed to take human waste and move it as far as possible from human settlements." "That was in many ways the greatest invention one would say of medicine." "What separates town dwellers from nomads, people who live in nomadic societies can just get up and walk away." "Town dwellers can't." "And why this is important is because town dwellers have to deal with their own refuse." "That required organization." "It required politics." "It required a system of sanitation." "You're seeing the beginnings of what we now call civic society." "If you want to just count the number of lives saved, sanitation is perhaps one of the greatest discoveries we've ever made." "The plague pandemics are a prime example of how lack of knowledge and the inability to spread accurate information can lead to false assumptions." "At every turn in our existence, the quest for truth by examination has provided the key to our survival in the face of disaster." "When we started to get a clearer picture of our body and how our system works, we discovered we are not alone." "We now know we carry life-forms within us, trillions upon trillions, many of them good, some of them bad." "The first discovery of these microbes opened a whole new battlefront in the war against disease." "It's a fight that continues today, attacking the origins of illness itself, beating back the specter of death!" "We know today that our macroscopic world is controlled by microscopic beings." "Most of them help us, but some microbes are killers." "Medical technology is now so powerful we can see them in fine detail." "But in the 19th century, doctors had no idea what caused epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, influenza, measles, diseases that ravaged the most sophisticated modern societies on Earth." "A lot of the very finest minds put themselves to the challenge of understanding the human body and illness and how they work." "But the problem is that the human body is a very complex thing, and they didn't understand one of the basic mechanisms, which is that a lot of what determines how healthy we are or not is invisible, it's microbial." "Imagine what it must have been like to look into a microscope and see for the first time organisms invisible to the eye, operating in our blood, within our bodies." "But how would you know if you were looking at the product of a disease or its cause?" "This was the central question facing a young doctor working in the outskirts of the German empire in 1875." "His name was Robert Koch." "Robert Koch was a country doctor in a small town that was filled with sheep farmers and had an outbreak of anthrax." "They asked him to find out what was killing the local sheep." "So Koch started a series of experiments." "Robert Koch believed the germ theory of disease, that disease could spread by means of microbes, these things we observed under microscopes." "People had observed bacteria for many hundreds of years." "There was no way to prove that that had anything to do with causing the disease." "In fact, it was thought that they resulted as a consequence of the disease." "So Koch took the blood of the local sheep, and he moved it to another animal." "And that animal died." "He saw bacteria in the blood that had an outbreak of anthrax." "After he had reproduced the disease in 20 or 30 animals, and in each case seen the blood go from pure and clean to infested with these pathogens," "Koch had actually created a chain of evidence that had identified that there was in fact one bacteria, one pathogen that caused this disease." "The germ theory of disease became a true breakthrough of medicine." "Right up until the time of Koch, a common notion was that maladies were caused by bad air." "Miasmas, as they were known." "I mean, malaria means 'bad air.'" "It just seems so counterintuitive, the idea that something small and invisible could make you ill and even kill you." "Eventually, Robert Koch started to make this amazing pattern of discoveries." "Typhus, anthrax, tuberculosis." "All these diseases that caused millions of deaths a year were suddenly catalogued and identified as being caused by bacteria." "And so Robert Koch signs up to give a lecture in a library in Berlin." "The doctors in the room were there to challenge Koch." "They had staked their careers on arguing against germs." "And he finished his lecture, and the room was completely silent." "Paul Ehrlich, another famous scientist who was in the room, said he knew that he had witnessed a pivotal moment in medical history." "And the world had suddenly changed." "The ability to identify and prevent infectious diseases is the key to almost all of modern medical science." "Without it, humanity can die in a matter of months." "The germ theory of disease led us to the creation of vaccines, and that was a pivotal moment." "We haven't yet conquered death, obviously, but one of the things that we have conquered thanks to vaccinations is the insane infant mortality rate that used to exist." "A hundred years ago, families had to be of, you know, three, four, five, seven children, because at least half of them weren't going to make it to adulthood." "And of course it prevented women from having careers, having lives outside of the family." "But thanks to vaccinations, we can be pretty sure that the children we give birth to are going to make it." "Suddenly, you now only need to have one or two children." "Women are no longer just baby machines, they are human beings." "And so you have the rise of feminism." "You get the rise of the middle classes." "So in fact, there's this huge social revolution that comes out of this medical revolution." "The collective wisdom of all of humankind led to the medical advancements that made us modern." "We're attacking the things that harm us on a microscopic level." "We're finding new ways of preventing disease every day." "The question is, how far can we go?" "What seems to be fantasy and sci-fi in the world of health and the human body is actually just right around the corner." "Imagine having your own personal catalog of replacement tissue sitting on a shelf." "We can tweak a skin cell and turn it into a brain cell and rebuild your body parts." "That's the horizon, and it's not far away." "It's not 50 years away." "It's going on right now." "This lab is to genetics what the printing press was to written word." "Here in this lab, we synthesize DNA, so a lot of people have heard about the Human Genome Project where DNA was decoded, but here what we're doing is actually building pieces of DNA." "The DNA code in every cell is not only a source of information, for example, your eye color, your hair color, your height, but it's also a source of control of different processes in your body," "things like regenerating cells at different speeds in different parts of your body." "It's an incredible, incredible technology." "Our overarching goal is making DNA ubiquitous, to make it available to everyone." "The things that we're working on right now we know can be game changing, better, more specific drugs, personalized drugs." "We're enabling a lot of different types of projects." "But I always like to think about the people that are studying cancer." "There's been a lot of cancer in my family." "Cancer is a very dynamic disease." "But if you can accelerate research, then you can actually create a designer therapy for a specific tumor." "And the faster you can do that, the earlier you can intervene, and that's everything in cancer." "In the world of synthetic biology, it's either going to be the thing that saves humanity or the thing that kills humanity." "So we're part of an organization that self-polices in the industry." "We have different protocols to ensure that none of us will design and build something harmful to humanity." "I think as we think about medicine, this is the next revolution in medicine." "This is the ability to really create personalized medicine." "It's an opportunity to help humankind." "With the discovery of DNA and the mechanisms of genetics, we have discovered the language of life." "We have realized that we are linguistic all the way down." "DNA is code, and we are diving deeper into what makes us uniquely human." "We are repairing flaws that have built up over millennia of evolution, so we can chase off death and thrive in this modern world today and beyond tomorrow." "As Alan Harrington once wrote," "'Any philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.'" "Across time, the advancement of medicine has done more than save lives." "It has given us a new understanding of ourselves and our world." "We have grasped the inner workings of our bodies and our minds." "We have gazed upon the very building blocks of life, the clockwork of biology that makes us tick." "We have even discovered an entirely new way of thinking." "Through medicine, powerful ideas about logic and reason have taken root and blossomed into science." "Even when the unknown outweighed the known, even as we fought an invisible enemy, we refused to accept the inevitable." "With medicine, we have seized our own fate." "We owe it all to the visionaries of medicine, the healers and thinkers who paved the way." "We have come far." "Our species is on the verge of medical revolutions that will change what it means to be human." "As we turn to face the future, we fight death with more power than ever before, standing on the shoulders of giants." "We are ready to face the unknown." "We will fight until we see the end of disease... and just maybe, the end of death."