Against Regulations. My TED Talk

Hey! A few months ago, I was asked to speak at TED.

At first, I hesitated. Yendou is priority number one, and I feared the TED talk would be a distraction. That’s why I say no to almost every public appearance. But the team insisted I should do it. They only wanted to join Yendou after listening to my interviews, so TED, they argued, should be our hiring funnel. And I agreed.

Disclaimer: I believe the role of policy is to ensure safety, not to dictate the path of innovation. Under the banner of safety, much has been taken away from Europeans. The most tragic loss was—and still is—the ability to act. The European mind has been brainwashed to worship the vice of prudence—to seek contentment, to resign to its destiny, to detach from the will to be meaningful.

Poisoned by slave morality, and much like every religion that rewards passivity (“to do no harm is the road to heaven”), there is a genuine belief that doing nothing is admirable and that being ambitious is evil.

Now, how would you put a European mind at ease with the concept of “speed is the ultimate goal”? I needed to create a narrative that destroys the WWII guilt propaganda that served the advocates of stagnation well for decades—by using German history, their own instrument, against them—to show that speed, that urgency, is not recklessness but a commitment to the future.

The following is the transcript of the TED talk I gave yesterday (18th October 2025) under the title “The Pulse of Progress.”

You prefer listening? Access the audio here

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Good afternoon, Berlin.

It is 1945.

West Germany lies in ruins.

Cities are broken shells.

The industry — silent.

The average German stands among rubble and ration cards,

staring at a future that seems impossible to rebuild.

(Pause)

And yet — by 1960,

just fifteen years later —

this same country ranked among the world’s five largest economies.

In less than twenty years,

a nation rose from ashes to affluence.

Germany went from total collapse —

to an economic world power.

It built its own future.

A future of quality. That’s progress.

(Pause)

We are gathered here today under the theme “The Future Is Now.”

And there is no better place on earth to talk about building the future — than here.

Not long ago, Germany achieved the impossible.

And it wasn’t luck.

It was will.

The will of the people — to move.

Again and again.

Faster than despair.

(Pause)

They called it the Wirtschaftswunder — the economic miracle.

But the miracle wasn’t the progress itself.

The miracle was the speed at which a generation brought progress to life.

The speed at which a nation rose from collapse to power.

(Pause)

And this — this is what I want to talk about today.

The single most undervalued force shaping progress: speed.

How we slowed it down —

and how we can bring it back.

Starting with medicine.

(Pause)

If speed built a nation from ruins — what else can it build?

What if the same law that rebuilt Germany governs everything that grows?

Progress has a pulse.

A natural rhythm.

A simple beat.

A beat that governs every act of creation.

And it goes like this:

Try. Learn. Build.

Try. Learn. Build.

It is the oldest beat — and the most powerful engine in the universe.

It’s how atoms formed molecules,

how molecules became life,

how life became thought.

Everything we are began with something trying, learning, building.

There are two rules to this rhythm.

First — every beat counts.

You do not leap from a single cell to a human in one jump;

you walk, one iteration at a time.

Second — the pace of that beat decides life or death.

A heart that waits too long between beats dies —

and so does a civilization that forgets to build.

We are here today because evolution was impatient.

Nature refused to slow down.

(Pause)

Yet, since the 1980s and for reasons I can’t accept, we have been slowing the pulse of progress further and furhter.

I would like to take the next minutes to show you how we are slowing the beat of medical progress.

And perhaps, it’s the right moment to introduce myself.

I’m Zina Sarif. I got into cancer research as a chemist in 2009.

For a decade, my life was ruled by that pulse: try, learn, build.

My job was to design new anticancer molecules — test them, learn, and build again.

Every day was iteration. Every failure, a heartbeat toward progress.

For that entire time, I believed the only reason we hadn’t cured cancer

was that we just hadn’t found the right molecule yet.

I was focused on the science — not on how fast that science reached humanity.

Until one day, I asked a question I shouldn’t have waited so long to ask:

What happens after the science is done?

Once we’ve found the molecule?

Here’s what I found.

Even when a drug works, it takes twelve years — and more than a billion dollars — to reach one patient.

Twelve years.

A silence between the beat of discovery and the beat of delivery.

We all know this from our own work — whether it’s this talk I’m giving now, or a report to your boss —

the first draft is never our best work.

Progress is iteration.

Greatness is a process of improving what exists.

Now, if it takes twelve years to ship version one of a life-saving molecule —

and let’s assume we need just seven iterations to perfect it —

we will get there in the year 2109.

There will be no cure for cancer within our lifetime.

The diagnosis is clear:

the pulse of medical progress suffers from severe bradycardia — a dangerously slow heart rate.

But why?

(Pause)

To find out, I left the lab and stepped into the system that controls how science becomes medicine.

And this is how it works.

To turn science into medicine, we must prove it’s safe and effective — and that’s right. That’s fair.

That’s regulation doing its job.

But somewhere along the way, regulations moved from ensuring safety by telling us what it expects, to controlling it by dictating the how too.

Instead of speeding safety, and ensuring that therapeutics makes their way to patients faster. It began to script every move of the journey, adding more and more steps.

Each new rule demanded new paperwork.

Each safeguard required another committee.

Each layer added delay.

What began as regulation became bureaucracy.

Layer after layer — ethics boards, contracts, permits, audits — built to protect, now conspiring to delay.

We created a system so heavy that progress itself can’t breathe.

In fact, nearly 40 percent of those twelve years aren’t even scientific or clinical timelines —

just operational drag: meetings, paper shuffling, signatures, reviews, and waiting for permits.

A lot of waiting.

(Pause)

In 2022, I met Jack.

He was thirty-seven, diagnosed with head and neck cancer.

Existing therapies had failed him.

Yet there was a molecule that could have saved his life.

In 1936, under his doctor’s care, he could have tried it.

But in 2025, that’s not how it works.

You can only test a drug if the regulations allow it.

So he waited.

At forty-two, Jack died waiting.

And he is not the only one.

Every year, millions die not of diseases — but of delay.

Regulation protects us.

But when protection becomes paralysis, it kills us too.

(Pause)

Now, how does one fight this?

We cannot tear down the institutions that protect us,

even when they slow us down.

But we can remove the drag they’ve imposed on progress —

We can lift the weight that stands between discovery and delivery,

between the cure and the human being waiting for it.

We can lift that weight from the scientists,

so their focus returns to what matters most:

moving knowledge into lives.

That is what I chose to do.

To built technology that ends the paralysis of process —

a digital pacemaker for medical progress.

Its purpose is simple:

to shorten the journey from twelve years to five.

What does that mean?

It means that the seven iterations that would reach us in 2109

can arrive in 2060 — within our lifetime.

Thirty-five years sooner.

And when time collapses, possibilities multiply.

Cutting years also cuts cost.

It means we can test more therapeutics for the same investment —

more shots on goal, more chances to win against diseases, including cancer.

And with every extra shot, we don’t just do more —

we get there faster.

Why does it matter?

(Pause)

Because we should not die of diseases we could defeat —

but only of age itself.

And perhaps, one day, not even that.

That is what progress means:

a future that is exponentially better than the past.

And to restore its pulse

is to ensure that the walls built by the careful

are destroyed by the bold.

(Pause)

You might think — good for you, Zina, you found your fight.

But How about me? This talk isn’t about me.

It’s about us. Policies shape every aspects of our lives.

Giving each of us an opportunity to shape progress —

and the quality of the future we will share.

It takes two years to approve a building in Berlin.

Nine to approve a renewable project in Europe.

We feel that drag in the housing we can’t find,

and the climate crisis we can no longer ignore.

The future is not built by ideas waiting for permission —

but by people impatient enough to begin.

And maybe progress doesn’t need more ideas.

Maybe what it needs most

is to be freed —

to remove the delays standing in its way.

(Pause)

People will tell you that speed is recklessness.

But how can the very speed that built our prosperity - The Wirtschaftswunder - be reckless?

Speed is responsibility in motion.

Speed is a commitment to ourselves, to our nation, to the future.

Speed is the believe: We deserve better. Thus, we must protect it.

Because progress delayed

is progress denied.

And the second rule of Progress is: We either move fast or die.

(Pause)

Now, how can you become an agent of progress?

How can you spot the next thing to work on?

It is far easier to see where speed is violated

than to invent something new.

We are impatient creatures by design.

We hate waiting. We despise bureaucracy.

We feel it in traffic,

in lines,

in life.

We are taught that impatience is bad.

No. It’s not. Impatience is our human instinct.

Nature’s way of reminding us

that movement is survival.

We must follow its lead.

(Pause)

The future is not now —

but what we do now

decides what the future becomes.

Its quality depends not only on our imagination

but on our velocity.

The world is full of advocates for ideas,

but few for urgency.

I am here today as ambassador of urgency.

And I have two asks for you:

First, live a life that refuses to be slowed down.

Because what slows us today,

slows the future too.

Second; When the cry rises for more policies to protect you.

Ask yourself what do they want to protect? what are the consequences?

Behind every policy, every process,

lies a lifeline to the future —

waiting to be freed.

And when we free it,

we do more than build the future.

We become the future.

A nation of builders.

(End)