The video embarks on a journey through Switzerland, unraveling the dynamic and innovative aspects beneath its pristine exterior. It introduces Switzerland beyond its picturesque landscapes and idyllic image, highlighting its significant investment in universities and research, especially within robotics, artificial intelligence, and medicine. Through multiple ventures, Switzerland embraces intelligent immigrants, encouraging startup growth from academic research.

An emphasis is placed on personalities like Raffaello Dandrea, a professor and entrepreneur whose contributions to robotics have revolutionized warehouse automation and entertainment using drones. He represents the intersection of art and engineering, demonstrating how technical innovation can blur industry lines. The narrative then shifts to another pioneering figure, Daniela Marino, who enhances medical technology through lab-grown human skin, aiming for worldwide impact.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. autografting [ˈɔːtəʊˌɡrɑːftɪŋ] - (noun) - A surgical procedure in which skin from one part of the patient's body is transplanted to another part. - Synonyms: (skin grafting, transplantation, imbedding)

autografting means that the surgeon takes skin from somewhere else, not burned, on your body, and puts it on the wound.

2. entrepreneur [ˌɒntrəprəˈnɜːr] - (noun) - A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks. - Synonyms: (businessman, founder, capitalist)

Founder Daniela Marino is another immigrant turning Swiss R and D into a startup.

3. synchronizes [ˈsɪŋkrəˌnaɪzɪz] - (verb) - To cause to occur or operate at the same time or rate. - Synonyms: (coordinate, harmonize, integrate)

The drones fly when there's no one there, and then the system synchronizes with the warehouse management system.

4. paradigm [ˈpærəˌdaɪm] - (noun) - A typical example or pattern of something; a model. - Synonyms: (model, example, standard)

So what we do is trying to shift the paradigm towards saying, okay, give me a little piece from somewhere, and I take it to the lab and I make it bigger and ship it to you back.

5. melanocytes [mɪˈlænəˌsaits] - (noun) - Cells that produce melanin, responsible for skin pigmentation. - Synonyms: (pigment cells, melanophores, chromatophores)

So, at the moment, we don't have melanocytes in the culture, which means we are missing the cells that produce the melanin.

6. epidermis [ˌɛpɪˈdɜːmɪs] - (noun) - The outer layer of cells covering an organism, in particular. - Synonyms: (skin layer, cuticle, integument)

I have prepared for you something more Sci-Fi more medical, more epidermis.

7. clinical trials [ˈklɪnɪkəl traɪəlz] - (noun) - Research studies performed in people that are aimed at evaluating a medical, surgical, or behavioral intervention. - Synonyms: (research study, medical trial, drug trial)

So far, Daniella and her team have treated 50 patients in clinical trials, including, in one case, a newborn.

8. motivate [ˈmoʊtɪˌveɪt] - (verb) - To provide with a motive; prompt or incite someone to do something. - Synonyms: (inspire, encourage, stimulate)

It was a way to motivate the researchers.

9. incorporated [ɪnˈkɔːrpəreɪtɪd] - (verb) - To take in or contain as part of a whole; include. - Synonyms: (include, integrate, absorb)

Fabi built his first VR simulator in his living room, earning himself the title of greatest dad of all time.

10. hyperspeed [ˈhaɪpərspiːd] - (noun) - A rate of speed that greatly exceeds the speed of conventional travel. - Synonyms: (ultrafast, high-speed, rapid)

It seemed that Mario was a kind of spirit animal of the swiss tech scene, moving at hyperspeed.

Switzerlands Mad Scientists Soar to New Heights | Hello World with Ashlee Vance

We're on a car train. Let's go to the Swiss Alps. There's no one at the wheel. There he is. It's a little scary in here. Now eat. Come on, Guy. Got a helicopter to catch. We are travel to Switzerland and an obvious thought will hit you. The country can feel too perfect. The cities, the watches. The cities with watches. The lakes, the mountains. Roger Federer, the ideal man. It's also well made, either by humans or by nature. It's almost boring. And it's true that there is a museum like quality to Switzerland. It feels like they figured everything out, then stopped. But let me offer an alternative view, because in Switzerland you can also find the shock of the new and unexpected. The country aims a large portion of its considerable wealth at universities and research institutions. These places are doing fantastic work in fields like robotics, AI and medicine. And Switzerland is also a country that welcomes immigrants, at least crazy smart immigrants, and helps them create startups from their research.

Let's go meet one. They are everywhere. Like, if I did hit one, would it just try to be like this? Yeah. And it just finds its location again. Yeah, exactly. The worst thing that could happen is that somehow the propeller hits your eyeball. Yeah. Why did you say that? On this show, we tend to feature people who are exceptional. But the man behind these drones is unusual, even among the exceptional. My name is Raffaello Dandrea. Everybody calls me Raph. I'm a professor at ETH Zurich and I'm also the CEO and founder of Verity. Raf is part math genius, part robotics pioneer and part artist. Oh, yeah. You can actually give it a good shove. Yep. It balances amazing. And not only can it balance, it can actually rotate and balance at the same time. No way. It's very delicate, what it does. So I'm scared to move. The cube was cool, then he super sized it. So this is the balancing cube. And the goal here is for this to stay upright and balanced. Exactly. It changes its position, so it changes the center of mass to compensate for movement. So inside I'm seeing, like motors and circuit boards. There's motors, there's sensors, and actually what you don't see is that these are all communicating to each other.

Raf's talent for engineering has made him a very wealthy man. In 2003, he co founded Kiva Systems, a robotics company specializing in warehouse automation. In 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva for almost $800 million. For someone who's into so many things as you, it must have changed your life to have this Amazon buy the company and then you get to chase whatever you want, really. Right, yeah. I think I've been fortunate that I've been able to do what I want to do. This is how we tested the first versions. That's me right there. Raf discovered his passion early in life. He was born in Italy, then moved to Canada at ten and quickly developed into a budding mad scientist. I did some stupid things. I learned about pressure by jumping into a swimming pool with a hose in my mouth. I jumped off the roof of my house with an umbrella, a lawn umbrella, because I wanted it to be like a parachute. Did you break anything on there? No, I didn't. It was, you know, Canada bungalow to only 10ft. But it's what a great way to learn something by actually putting yourself in the experiment.

He miraculously survived to adulthood, worked and taught in the United States, and then, for good reason, settled in Zurich. I've heard Zurich is known as Drone Valley or something like that, or is that right? Yeah. There is a lot of activity in autonomous systems in general. Switzerland is known for doing a lot of cool stuff with drones. When we started doing drone research in 2008, that was still kind of early days for drones, and there we were really aimed at pushing the boundary of autonomous flight. So we did a lot of crazy stuff with pole balancing and playing ping pong and a whole bunch of other fun things. It was a way to motivate the researchers. If we can make something that makes people go, wow, that's amazing, then we know we've pushed the boundary. To commercialize his acrobatic drones, RaF started a new company called Verity in 2014. They made their artsy machines and then, oddly, began chasing that sweet, sweet warehouse management money as well, hoping to replace fallible humans with a fully automated system. People hate doing inventory control. It is a detested task. As a result, people don't do inventory nearly as often as they should, and they live with these errors. In a warehouse that has, you know, $100 million of throughput and there's a three or 4% error in that warehouse. That's a significant amount. Sure.

To help fix some of the costly mistakes, Farady can send over some of its drones to work the night shift. The drones fly when there's no one there, and then the system synchronizes with the warehouse management system and then creates a list of all the things that need to be fixed. RaF showed me the aerial auditors in action. It's doing these very fine adjustments to make sure that it's in the right spot of where it needs to be to take the image verity's warehouse drones have been pretty successful, successful landing customers like Ikea and Samsung. They raised a $32 million funding round in early 2023. And these drones can do a lot more than scan QR codes. Our entertainment business, it's less than 10% of what we do, but it's an important part of what we do. It's in our DNA, you know, doing things when failure is not an option. To Rafae, whether he's flying his flock past 10,000 boxes of liquid soap or over the heads of 10,000 spellbound spectators, very little changes. You know, for me, the act of creation is what I really enjoy. And the nice thing about technology and specifically robotics and AI, is that whether it's art, whether it's industrial practice, whether it's research, it's all about taking something and making it do motion that hasn't been done before through mathematics. This is only 16. Can you imagine when you have 200 of them? Yeah, I feel like I'm in a midsummer night's dream. It is magical. You know, we take it for granted because we do it all the time, but it is amazing that intelligent monkeys can do this. Right.

It could be the case that crazy flying robots don't do it for you. I understand ish. And so I have prepared for you something more Sci-Fi more medical, more epidermis. Welcome to QTIs, purveyors of the finest lab grown human skin. Founder Daniela Marino is another immigrant turning Swiss R and D into a startup. She formed QDIs in 2017, hoping to transform the way we treat severe skin damage. If I had a burn, an accident, what would be the standard thing that happens today? So if you today get burned severely, so you lost quite a substantial amount of your skin, you are in danger of life first thing. So you are admitted in very specialized burn units.

When your body is ready and out of danger of risking your life, autografting starts. autografting means that the surgeon takes skin from somewhere else, not burned, on your body, and puts it on the wound. If the wounds are very large, it is a clinical challenge to actually find enough skin. So what we do is trying to shift the paradigm towards saying, okay, give me a little piece from somewhere, and I take it to the lab and I make it bigger and ship it to you back. We receive a piece of skin of the patient as small as a stem, and then we can extract the stem cells, expand them, and then recreate skin using a bioengineering technique. When the skin is done growing, it looks something like this. Delicious. This is both cool and slightly creepy, isn't it? No. You haven't seen anything creepy for real in your life.

Then, like, how does this look different to the final product when it's the final one is a bit thicker and it will be much more resistant because you have all the cells that keep it together. I mean, the one major limiting factor it seems right now is the pigmentation in the skin. What's the plan for addressing that? So, at the moment, we don't have melanocytes in the culture, which means we are missing the cells that produce the melanin, and we are now having an add on therapy to then simply transfer the melanocytes from somewhere colored to the white area and produce a melanin which will match the color of the patient. So far, Daniella and her team have treated 50 patients in clinical trials, including, in one case, a newborn. So this is youngest child ever treated with bioengineered skin. And you can imagine the growth of a kid five days old, and now two and a half years later. I mean, the stretch is just humongous, and it's impressive to see the results.

If all goes well, Daniela wants to have her skin growing machines set up around the world, not just limited to hospitals, but in oil rigs, commercial kitchens, and war zones. As ever with biotech, these things take time and lots of money. Luckily, Switzerland adores its science startups and lavishes them with resources. You have a mixture of brain force here, which is incredible. And next to this innovative hub, you have a very strong startup ecosystem. So I don't know if I would have been that successful creating Kutis in my homeland, Italy, or somewhere else, because here you really are nurtured as a startup.

Yeah, because there's nothing that many countries, I think, where you could raise the amount of money it would take to a company that has to have a few years to get going because of all the clinical trials and long term investment. For sure, they're not willing to sit through that. This is a very, very expensive journey, and there is no plan b. I mean, it has to be like that. So, let's see. I hope I continue raising the money I need. If she's able to bring the technology to market, it could impact millions upon millions of lives.

I just hope that after my next adventure, I don't require her services. We're flying straight into the mountain. It's scary. Zurich is a lovely town, but this is Switzerland, and there are natural wonders to see. I'm told there's nothing like soaring around the Alps in a helicopter. However, dodging crags in a metal cage is somewhat, well, extremely terrifying. Mostly because I'm not a pilot and I don't want to start learning at 13,000 ft. As it happens, however, I am that lucky tourist who knows a guy who can make all of my sightseeing dreams come true. My name is Fabi Riesen. I have the pleasure to be the CEO of Loft Dynamics company. Basically, Loft is producing the world's first flight simulator training device using virtual reality technology.

It's kind of like, truthfully, I'm a bit of a flight simulator veteran, but even at the high end training centers, pretend flying still has its limitations. You go to NASA or something and you expect it to be space agey and cutting edge, but the simulators always look like they were built in, like, the 1980s. I mean, it seems like technology that hasn't changed in a long time. Yeah, those gigantic domes give you a very nice view, but the main challenge is everything outside is projected. So if you have two objects behind each other and you move the head, you kind of, like, see that they are moving against each other on the dome projection. Nothing happens with virtual reality. This is basically not the case anymore. And it's, like, real from a visual point of view of you.

Fabi built his first VR simulator in his living room, earning himself the title of greatest dad of all time. He finally upgraded to a real workshop, Suisse quality. This all gets made in Switzerland here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. The simulators sell for under a million bucks, way lessen than a traditional dome type sim, which is good, because the world needs a lot more of these things. Let's talk about the pilot shortage a bit. I mean, it seems like there's not enough pilots, and then there's just a ton of training, both for new pilots and older pilots. Right. To keep their skills up. Is that the general idea?

Yes. On one hand, it's quite expensive to use the real aircraft to do it, and on the other hand, the simulators are also expensive, and there are simply not enough simulators, so we are continuously below the actual need from the pilots. The true test was giving one of these whirlybirds a whirl. Get to the chopper, and we're gonna give you a bit of forward speed. This is cool. All right, I'll give you the control in three, two, one. Your control. Do I need to get higher to get. Yeah, you need to get higher because you want to get over that hill. So keep pulling, keep pulling. That's good.

Oh, boy. Whoa. Okay, what did I do? I'm going to take the controls. We haven't even started with the pedals. Wait, what do the pedals actually do? You know what? Let's make him land the aircraft. Okay. Okay. You're gonna crash into the building, but you're going down really fast. Okay. Okay. Now you manage to crash. As far as I was concerned, I had officially graduated swiss flight school. I blame you. Now it was time to try the real thing. So Fabi sent me on a four hour drive into the Alps, destination Zermatt, a charming mountain town where we could take off and cruise the skies together.

We're at Air Zermatt. The Matterhorn is just over there. I'm gonna meet up with Bobby, and I think he's getting here right now. With a little help from ace pilot Julie, it was time to put my skills to the test. You want to try a little bit on what is really, really slowly? Okay. Your control. Ashley, have you realized he's not holding any more control. Fully your control. Don't tell me that, please. You're not breathing. You have to breathe. Have you seen? You're turning yourself. Did I actually just do that or did you help? No, no, you did it. No way. All right. I don't like it when we get so close to the route, but then I get no idea. I come with you now, okay. Yes, please. Both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

I actually flew. It was really cool. Before heading home, Fabi insisted I meet his buddy Mario, a mysterious mountain man who's invested in some of the best tech startups in Switzerland, including Fabi's knock, knock, knock, knock. On joke. Hey. Hey. Come in. Mario, how are you doing? Ruth? Good to see you guys. Hello. Pleasure to see you. Nice to meet you. Warm welcome. Sit down. Beer, chin tonic? What do you like? Mario had all the trappings of an eccentric free spirit, right down to his underground secret passageway and spa. Watch your head here. Okay. First, this is the wellness area, and this is where I have the wine and spirits. So that's the Matterhorn right out the window? That's the Matterhorn right there.

Of course, I know a lot of rich people and whatever, and they are impressed by the house, so they offer me tons of money for this house. And what do you tell them? I tell them not on sale and never on sale. This here is my house, and that's where my spirit is living and giving me opportunities to be creative. Mario was born in Zermatt and has lived many lives. Restaurateur, hotelier, mountain climber, ski instructor, and eventually, tech investor stirring the fondue. I feel like now I get swiss citizenship. If you manage to reach his fortress of solitude. He is a gracious host. Cheers to our thanks for inviting us into your home.

Cheers. Appreciate it. Mario told me about some of the ventures he has in the works. First, we make a carbon fiber out of algae. Okay. We reinforce this with stone. And then he told me about them some more. This is not rustic. It cannot. You can imagine what impact this is having on construction. Also for this key industry, my goal is now to build the house completely CO2, neutral, even negative. This would be sexy. Yeah, it has to be sexy. So you've been to the North Pole, the south Pole. You've climbed the eight highest peaks, right? Yeah. Traversing Everest. When I'm doing expeditions, I can calm down because I think one day I will be crazy. I'm enough crazy already. But I feel like you calm down by doing more stuff. Yes, but it is running on high speed. It seemed that Mario was a kind of spirit animal of the swiss tech scene, moving at hyperspeed, embracing new ideas, flush with cash, and perched atop a majestic alp.

Bless this country. But this wasn't the end of my swiss journey. It was time to trade in my helicopter for a bicycle and take a mind expanding trip.

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