AI medical breakthroughs, and a Disney Imagineer receives a major honor | Eye on America

[Music] welcome to I on America I'm Michelle Miller today we look at a series of Innovations in Tech and science that are inspiring people and saving lives in Massachusetts we see how doctors are using AI to improve the speed and accuracy of medical care and in California we take you inside the magical world of a Disney imagineer who brings movie Magic to life including the lightsaber but we begin in North Carolina where First Responders are turning to drones for a surprising purpose Manuel borquez shows us how the latest trend for water rescues comes from the

Sky last month two young paddle boarders found themselves stranded in the ocean strong winds and currents pushed them 2,000 ft from the shore of Oak Island North Carolina but Rescuers had eyes on them the whole time thanks to the deployment of a drone within a few minutes they were safely aboard a rescue boat the fire department here in Oak Island is one of a few in the country using this kind of technology for ocean rescue sha Barry is a firefighter turned drone pilot so this drone is capable of flying in all types of weather and

environments it's equipped with a camera that can switch between modes including infrared to spot people in distress responders can communicate instructions through a speaker and just as important is its ability to carry life preserving equipment this is triggered by a CO2 cartridge and has a triggering device that's activated by the intrusion of water and as soon as it's uh activate it it inflates here's a real life example after a 911 call from Shore the Drone went up and spotted the swimmer in distress you can see the moment one cartridge was released and then another giving

him two floating tubes while help arrived like many Coastal communities the population here in Oak Island can balloon from around 10,000 to 50,000 during the summer tourist season and Rib Tides Columns of water rushing out to sea and hard to detect on the surface can happen at any time every year there are about 100 deaths due to rib currents along us beaches it's estimated more than 80% of beach rescues involve rip currents Lee price is Oak Island's fire chief you think people underestimate the force of a rip current they do people I'm a good swimmer

I'm going to go out there and then they get in trouble for chief price the benefit isn't just a much faster response time but also not putting Rescuers In Harm's Way when through the camera and speaker they can determine when someone isn't in distress why aren't more jurisdictions you think adopting something like this right away cost I don't know is necessarily a factor because because the cost isn't tremendous but having somebody trained and able to operate and and perform that capability it's like anything as technology advances it takes a little bit for everybody to catch

up and get used to it the drone's hovering directly over our victim Shan Barry is improving both his piloting skills and the drone's capabilities drop in this demonstration he showed us how it can bring a safety rope to a swimmer while Rescuers prepare to pull the person to shore the speed and ACC accy that this gives you rapid deployment speed accuracy and safety overall it's an eye in the sky and a potential Lifesaver in the water we stay above ground to look at an Innovative way one California startup is aiming to reverse the Earth's Rising

temperatures CBS News Bay areas and Movic gets a look at how weather balloons could Aid in the fight against climate change high up in the hills near Silicon Valley a controversial Mission involving a weather balloon will soon take flight go ahead and start it slowly what's getting pumped inside the expanding Globe turn it up a bit more please two gases sulfur dioxide and helium 3 2 1 the helium will carry this balloon more than 12 miles above the surface of the Earth into the stratosphere once there the balloon bursts releasing the sulfur dioxide the belief

is that the gas turns into an aerosol which will bounce the sunlight back into space cooling the planet that gas reacts with other things to form clouds that reflect a little bit of sunlight back into space before it can warm Earth the strategy seeks to temporarily cool the planet as human activities continue to warm it even if we magically can stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and somehow have some other magical energy to replace it um there will still be warming since 22 Luke Eisman and Andrew song from the startup make sunsets have launched more than

80 balloons the concept behind the method is based on the planet cooling effects of volcanic eruptions a good example is the massive eruption of Mount pinba in 1991 it injected 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere dropping temperatures around the world pinba actually cooled the Earth by about a 310 of degrees celsi or half a degree Fahrenheit for several years Dr William Collins is with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a top expert on aerosols and climate change science so we know these aerosols can cool the climate and the question that people are

now asking is could we do that artificially larger entities around the world are also looking into using this technology we're opposed to deployment at this stage Lisa dilling is an associate Chief scientist with the environmental defense fund the nonprofit is financing scientific research into artificial cooling Technologies the goal is to identify and better understand any unknown risks or side effects we feel we need to understand a whole a lot more about this uh before we can uh even know if it's even a viable uh technology the team is willing to share its data with Scientists

but not willing to stop the launches we can't let concern about impacts be an excuse for an action or you know we end up with more intense versions of all of the problems that we already have coming up we take a look at how AI is being used in medicine to save lives this is I on America welcome back scientists say artificial intelligence is streamlining medicine AI is already being used to diagnose rare illnesses develop new prescription drugs and find alternate treatment options Brook Silva bragga learns how AI advancements could make medicine more accurate and

improve patients lives in some ways this is how new drugs have been discovered for decades creating compounds then seeing if they fight disease but that painstaking almost artisanal process is starting to look very different next when I was in school I used to have to do that now we've got a robot that doesn't so these youngsters don't know how good they have it with their thumb and for finger stre automating the lab though important is the least of it Don Bergstrom the president of research and development at relay Therapeutics says a revolution in drug Discovery

could cure cancer in the next 50 years by bringing new approaches to one's impossible problems the number of potential chemicals that could be a drug is larger than the number of stars in the universe traditionally in the lab you'd have a collection in a freezer of 100,000 different chemicals and over the course of weeks you would take each one of those chemicals and put it with a protein okay computationally overnight we can look at not at 100,000 compounds but in a trillion compounds then after the computer has virtually screened those trillion just a few hundred

of the most promising get physically tested these are essentially very very sensitive scales a key part of that selection process is using new Computing methods to better understand the proteins they're targeting we just want to turn off this one not turn off that one over there on the left okay but they look basically same right yeah by learning the difference in the movement of extremely similar proteins relay says they can now Target the ones causing disease without hurting healthy tissue and causing side effects that this protein moves more slowly than this protein does right so

you're able to put something in that'll fit there but won't there exactly because they just moving too fast here they discovered that I had a a gene this medicine was able to turn off Marsha meron is part of a small clinical trial testing one of relay's first drugs it targets a common gene mutation in tumors like her metastatic breast cancer current treatments don't work for long because they quickly cause severe side effects but under the care of Dr Andrea varus at Mass General Hospital you look good now meron has stayed on relay's experimental drug for

a year and a half so the little side effects that I am having I balance out with the big effects that I'm still living my life and I'm working and I'm traveling and I'm spending time with my beautiful family within 5 years you will see a great part of the drug development pipeline massively accelerated Harvard's Isaac kohane is both a medical doctor and PhD in computer science he says Technical Innovations like drug Discovery are just half of ai's potential in medicine it could also totally change how patients interact with doctors how might that work he

offered the early example of a family from Michigan here is a mother whose child was fine but now is having trouble walking is then having trouble chewing and then having intractable headaches for three years she goes from Doctor to doctor to doctor they get all the tests you can imagine she takes all the text from those studies cuts and pastes it into GT4 and says what's wrong with my child the chatbot spit back a suggestion tethered cord syndrome and so she goes to a neurosurgeon is this tether cord syndrome surgeon looks at the MRI says

yep they do the and they do the surgery and the kids's fine had doctors not thought of that before no and this diagnosis is actually not that sophisticated a diagnosis so it's both an endorsement of the AI and an indictment of the medical community as it is and in fact right now that's my primary thesis about where we are right now we are at a point where medicine is stumbling killing patients by the thousands every year through misdiagnoses and medical errors the answer according to kohani are Healthcare Outsiders like computer scientist Prav Raj bukar yeah

I mean we're at an inflection point who joined kohani at Harvard his earlier work helped prove computers could read x-rays as well as humans in limited ways AI is now helping doctors read some scans but Raj bukar gave us a first look at something grander let's jump into that an experimental system called metav Vera Circle the enlarged heart instead of a series of one-trick pony algorithms wouldn't it be cool if the same model could segment out the pancreas mid Versa can understand and diagnose and we're going to generate a prediction here a wide range of

issues so it says the main diagnosis is melanoma he says the model will be good enough to seek regulatory approval in about 2 years we're at a point at which these Technologies are going to work and it's a matter of when not a matter of if the if he says is whether doctors will embrace them many so far have not the impact on Patients health and doctor's employment remain uncertain but kohani envisions a new kind of doctor a new kind of medicine we just don't have enough of the right people with enough of the right

time combining the expertise of every specialist into an AI any doctor or even patient can freely access at least that's his hope for the medical community if we don't take leadership in how AI is used in medicine others will do it for us and these others may not have the best interest of society or our patients what if this gets optimized for the insurance companies what if it gets optimized for a particular set of drugs we have as a society to start asking for super transparency if AI companies aren't transparent kohani says governments should step

in but he's convinced massive change is coming to Medicine the use of AI is going to be problematic but far better than what we currently have ahead we meet a lifelong inventor and Disney imagineer with a boundless sense of wonder and over 100 patents to his name that story is next we close our show spotlighting The Mastermind who creates some of Disney's most magical moments in real life Lanny smoo is the first Disney inventor since Walt himself to be inducted into the national inventor Hall of Fame Skyler Henry talks with the groundbreaking imagineer about receiving

this incredible honor and gets a Peak at his latest creation [Music] there's no mistaking that signature sound then glow an icon of Science Fiction this is my lab that Jedi lightsaber brought into the real world by Disney's research and development team in Glendale California how long did it take to come up with this it was a few tries yeah few early models and the key is to have a uniform blade very bright and full retraction into the hilt and those were the challenges with something like this lead inventor Lanny Smoot loves a challenge dreaming up

ideas at Disney imagineering for the last 25 years bridge the gap for me if you will between storytelling and invention sometimes you'll have an invention that inspires a story right sometimes I'll hear a good story and realize that a specific technology can make it real so the two things support each other my peers on the movie side of things can fake things with computer generated effects and movies I have to make them for real from liveaction props to interactive Theme Park attractions he uses science to create Joy but Smoot says his own story was improbable

growing up in Brownsville Brooklyn with a wealth of ideas and encouragement but very little means when I was quite young probably 12 years old I I saw a unicycle Rider I said I want one of those P my parents were poor I made a unicycle by taking the front wheel off of a tricycle because it had the pedals banging a pipe onto the top of it putting a bicycle seat on top of that and rode that around I me guess you weren't wearing a helmet either I wasn't wearing a helmet and by the way those

tires are not pneumatic they're not air filled so it was a bumpy ride and I never wanted to ask my parents for a real unicycle but one day I came home and it was a unicycle laying up against my bed cuz my dad said I saw you clunking along on the street he credits his father for that initial spark as early as I can remember he brought home a battery a bell a little light bulb I was probably 5 years old he gets the light bulb to light and the bell to ring and that light

lit my entire career a career that began at Bell Labs where for 22 years he made strides in fiber optics and Broadband systems but his greatest pride is his most recent invention so what do we have here this is the hollow tile floor M it is the world's first omnidirectional multi-person treadmill floor it can have any number of people on it so it's like having an infinite walking surface but in a finite size I'm entering the ship's Hollow deck where images of reality can be created by inspired by another sci-fi technology I reasoned that it

won't work unless you have a floor surface that can have everybody on that floor moving in any direction they want they might be in VR but how do you solve the floor problem this is the solution so we're going to let you control our chair here okay and I got quite the demo I'm just going to teach you the controls to our game here okay I think he's been practicing he's really good I can do this all day not to mention a little Jedi training it's all part of why Smoot now joins the national inventor

Hall of Fame this gallery of icons is actually a patented wall reie Piva is their vice president of selection and recognition I think one of the really interesting things about this wall is you also see the pace of innovation he here at the nihf Museum in Alexandria Virginia the evolution of invention is on display a lot of times these names aren't people who are going to be recognizable but the applications of their inventions are we want to show the world how important they are so that's what we do we're looking for a patent holder and

then what our selection committee will look at is whether that patent has had some sort of significant impact so economic cultural societal and for smoot's colleagues change and collaboration are linked so two is embracing the challenge where does competition play a part we compete he's very creative I'm very creative he is Alfredo aala a Disney R&D executive and smoots friend Lenny smooth is a renaissance man he's a genius and our favorite thing to say to each other is what's not to like now what does that mean I might build something that's pretty cool design something

and he'd come over and say hm that's really cool but there something missing and when we say that and he would say it to me and I would say it to him it's kind of like you win it's just what's not to like about it their camaraderie seems to hold more weight than their successes and to a yala that's everything he represents many people people like me and that means the world to me I work in a company where creative artists are all over the place and I could say oh look at this horrible looking

thing that I made that can do magic what do you think about it buddy part of smoot's magic advice for the Next Generation get it out of your head into the world many people waste time in their lives by saying oh I could have done that or I should have done that do it being able to do things that other people might have thought is either impossible or difficult and if it can Inspire young kids to do it is an honor for more stories like these and live coverage of breaking news stream us right here

on CBS News 247 I'm Michelle Miller thank you for watching I on America