A Thousand Microbes in Your Mouth and Other Scenes From the 2010 TEDMED Conference

The TEDMED conference, with its two-hour sessions of engrossing 15-minute presentations on medical technology, education, and design, returned this week to the San Diego area’s famed Hotel del Coronado. Like its progenitor, the annual TED conference in Long Beach, the four-day TEDMED event cultivates an aura of exclusivity by mixing talks from celebrities, prominent CEOs, and famous scientists and technologists—and by charging attendees $4,000 apiece to enjoy the show.

Each series of talks is grouped around a general theme, but the overall effect tends to be impressionistic. So keeping in the spirit, here are some rapid-fire impressions of the TEDMED presentations yesterday afternoon.

—Motivational speaker Tony Robbins is huge!—especially when he’s standing next to the diminutive TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman. At 6-feet, 7-inches, Robbins is not just tall—he is clearly some kind of power weight lifter. He could probably bench press 750 pounds. Robbins, whose seminars urge audiences to “Take Charge of Your Life” and “Overcome Any Challenge,” informs the sellout crowd that it is Wurman’s 75th birthday. Robbins asks the audience to acknowledge the inspiration Wurman has provided the world, and they respond with a standing ovation.

—J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer and founding CEO of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics, tells the audience that most humans are born without any microrganisms in their body, but we acquire them very quickly. Scientists estimate that the average human has 1,000 unique j-craig-ventermicrobial species in their mouth, 1,000 in the intestinal tract, 500 in the vagina, and 200 on the skin (mostly on the hands and forearms). “You can’t understand human biology without understanding what all these organisms do,” Venter says. For example, Venter says each human has the ability to make about 500 different chemicals in our blood that circulate throughout the body, including the brain. About 10 percent of these are bacterial metabolites. Another 30 percent are from the food we eat, and 60 percent are from our own metabolic processes.

—Juan Enriquez, managing director of Boston’s Excel Venture Management, makes the argument, drawn from a soon-to-be-published

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.