The first session of Changing The World was about living longer, and creating the world. But I think the talks diverged from that message. What I got out of it was that you should think out of the box.

The first speaker was Aubrey de Grey who was IMO the most famous speaker at the event. Aubrey is famous for suggesting that we can live until we’re 1000 years old (provided you don’t get run over by a truck etc). He looks a bit like a kook, speaks in a rambling manner, and delivered a lengthy technical talk. I think he lost a lot of people, but the point was that even if a fundamental problem such as aging can be challenged, we should be able to make progress on smaller issues.

The second speaker, Eva Vertes is a cancer scientist who made an Alzheimer breakthough at age 15. She spoke without slides and discussed her approach to solving cancer by making the counterintuitive observation that perhaps cancer is “damage” and attacking damage with more damage is not the way to repair the damage.

Following Eva was Toronto-based Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (winner of the 2006 Giller Prize). He spoke about how his expertise in disassociated fields (medicine and writing) actually complement each other. Although he has not presented at TED like the previous two speakers, he surprisingly delivered a great talk that was funny and engaging. Here is Vincent showing some of the possible covers for his book.

Following Vincent was Karim Rashid, an industrial designer. I don’t really remember what Karim spoke about, because his slides were a slideshow of things he had designed. These included the Method bottles that you can find in Shoppers Drug Mart, and the Dirt Devil KONE which I first saw in Japan. He also designed the Garbo trash can sold by Umbra, which he was selling and signing during the session 1 break.

The last speaker was Karim’s brother, Hani Rashid. I didn’t really understand the point of his talk as he just showed some images of projects he had been working on including a hotel that overlooks the Formula 1 in Abu Dhabi.

Although the majority of the talks were interesting, I wasn’t inspired to change the world.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: conference, toronto