I'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey, actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis.
But one day, I went to the hospital -- my mother was sick -- and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people.
When the war broke out -- civil war -- I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children.
My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.
And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well -- to fold correctly and function correctly.
That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body.
Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards.
We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job.
And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on, and the consequence of that, of course, will be that we will be able to help many more patients.
Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving.
They told me, for example, that if I proved myself worthy of their help, then they could change my life back to how it had been, and a series of increasingly bizarre tasks was set, a kind of labor of Hercules.
Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium.
Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria.
And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy.
And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop -- and I'm actually redesigning the robot, so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me.
We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women.
And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way.
(Laughter) There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times.
This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it's purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries.
I'm going to save my son, and if it doesn't happen in time for him, I'm going to work so that no other mother has to go through what I'm going through.
So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally.
But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history.
CA: So people who want to help you on their way, they can go on, they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you're bringing over that are actually made, the embroidery is done back in Balochistan?
Flash forward: now I work at an amazing place in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, where we have a little ritual that helps with this shift in perspective.
Well, first of all, we have now the promise of big data and medium-sized data to help us understand drug interactions and really, fundamentally, drug actions.
Or a 16-year-old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant in the off chance that she can save her daddy's life because he has cancer.
It was a young consultant, a Saudi lady and friend, who helped me sell my first project in Saudi Arabia, a market I was finding hard to gain traction in as a woman.
Eventually, grandpa and I rescued the poor dog, but it was at that moment that I realized that that palette of roots and soil was really the foundation of the forest.
But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me, do selfless things, like helping other people at enormous risk and cost to themselves?
A common approach to understanding basic aspects of human nature, like the desire to help other people, is to study people in whom that desire is missing, and psychopaths are exactly such a group.
So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy?
In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others, " which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody.
I've learned that whatever moves you, whatever urges you to create, to build, whatever keeps you from failing, whatever helps you survive, is perhaps the oldest and the simplest emotion known to mankind, and that is love.
You may use your faith to make people afraid and terrify them into submission, or you can use it to give courage to people so they rise to the greatest heights of enlightenment.
Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man -- to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other.
Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "spiritual things, " like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that.
And for my students and I, it's been just a phenomenal experience because we have gotten to do interesting research, while at the same time helping the many children that we have worked with.
JA: Yeah. And you know, I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture, but some way -- there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crime.
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Which means all of the hard work and sacrifices that I have made to help this legal clinic survive, it may have been for nothing. 