Will this NEW Scientific Breakthrough Make Us Immune to Everything? George Church - #524

Get started with 1 month free of Superhuman today, using my link: https://try.sprh.mn/briankeating Today's guest made bacteria immune to every virus that exists. This breakthrough could revolutionize medicine by creating virus proof cell therapies and potentially extending this protection to human cells. Also demonstrating that we can fundamentally rewrite the language of life itself, something that was previously thought impossible. George Church is a Harvard Medical School genetics professor and pioneer of synthetic biology. He's an entrepreneur who's found in multiple biotech companies and is known for pushing the boundaries between science fiction and reality. His team just did something that sounds like pure science fiction. They made living cells completely immune to every virus on Earth. That resistant immune, every single virus that tries to infect your cells just fails. The viruses can't evolve around it. Here's the wild part. They didn't add anything new. They just removed a few letter from the genetic alphabet. But George isn't stopping there. He wants to do this to human cells. He's talking about engineering astronauts for Mars missions, bringing back wooly mammoths, and maybe even, just maybe, making humans virus proof to the implications are staggering. The ethics are murky. And the timeline. Well, if church's track record tells us anything is happening far faster than we think. KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00:00 – Church’s team made cells virus-proof, a major medical breakthrough 00:02:34 – Radiation resistance may come from DNA repair linked to desiccation 00:04:43 – A few genes can boost bacteria’s radiation resistance 00:07:16 – Panspermia is unlikely due to harsh space conditions 00:10:50 – Space travel may need biological, not just physical, changes 00:14:19 – Regenesis explores synthetic biology's potential 00:18:19 – Height involves many genes, but single ones can have big effects 00:20:57 – Once sci-fi, genome sequencing and pig organs are now real 00:23:20 – Church and Venter are more collaborators than rivals 00:27:17 – Rewriting genes can create virus-proof organisms 00:35:36 – DNA can store data, but reading/writing is slow 00:41:06 – Gattaca and Jurassic Park portray genetics well with small flaws 00:44:03 – Gene therapies can be affordable for all 00:46:44 – Stem cells can create any body cell for therapy 00:49:15 – “Mirror humans” are possible but avoided ethically 00:53:59 – Genomic privacy isn’t an issue since we shed DNA constantly 00:56:09 – Gene editing helps endangered species adapt, not revive extinct ones 01:00:30 – Virus-proof humans are possible, but tough to deliver to all cells 01:02:59 – Gene therapies could reverse aging at the cellular level 01:04:18 – Church avoids saying “impossible,” but admits to timeline optimism - Get My NEW Book: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN8DH6SX?ref_=pe_93986420_775043100 Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  Today's guest made bacteria immune to every virus that exists. This breakthrough could revolutionize medicine by creating virus-proof cell therapies and potentially extending this protection to human cells, while also demonstrating that we can fundamentally rewrite the language of life itself, something that was previously thought impossible.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  We've been dreaming about this since 2002, but just in the last couple of years, we've delivered engineered and secured an organism that was resistant to all viruses. Every gene in every virus is broken in multiple ways, and so they can't even evolve around that.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  George Church is a Harvard Medical School genetics professor and pioneer of synthetic biology. He's an entrepreneur who has founded multiple biotech companies and is known for pushing the boundaries between science fiction and reality. His team just did something that sounds like pure science fiction. They made living cells completely immune to every virus on Earth. Not resistant, immune. Every single virus that tries to infect your cells just fails. The viruses can't evolve around it. They didn't add anything new, they just removed a few letters from the genetic alphabet. But George isn't stopping there. He wants to do this to human cells. He's talking about engineering astronauts for Mars missions, bringing back Woolly mammoths and maybe, and just maybe, making humans virus prove to. The implications are staggering. The ethics are murky.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  And the timeline, well, if church's track record tells us anything, it's happening far faster than we think.

• 2:23Brian Keating?

  All right. Welcome today to this episode of Into the Impossible. So I want to start off with some of the curiosity that you engender in me and your wonderful book, which we'll get to. We'll talk about different challenges. We'll talk about the relevance of biology, genetics, gene information and so forth to an audience that has a lot of astronomers and a lot of cosmologists and a lot of people that think about life on other planets. And that's sort of where I want to begin and asking a question. Eventually we'll get to whether or not Elon Musk is sending the wrong species to Mars. But first I want to ask you, how do we grow or engineer life? Like tardigrades or rotifers, or how do they indeed have natural resistance to radiation?

• 3:06Brian Keating?

  That would liquefy my cells, I know for one. How do these creatures come about? Why was this so necessary at one point? And why is it still in the, you know, in their genetic record to this very day?

• 3:17Speaker 03

  It's hard to definitively answer questions about the past or about intentionality. But I think there's fairly convincing speculation that much of the radiation resistance in naturally occurring species are, is due to desiccation. Desiccation causes DNA damage. And the repair processes that deal with that also work for, say, double stranded DNA breaks that would be caused by ionizing radiation, gamma rays and desiccation. So, and this applies to single cell organisms like Dianococcus and to, you know, multicellular organisms like the tardigrade.

• 4:01Brian Keating?

  Could we learn from them? Could we use tools that you've invented like mage, multiplex genome engineering to add kind of a repair kit, a rotifer style, you know, a bolt on to our DNA, essentially upgrading ourselves for out of this world, out of this earth biology?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so there is some work in the literature and, and in our.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  In our lab on seeing what sort of the minimal number of genes required to get an increase in radiation resistance or better repair. And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the repair proteins are known. There's, there's as few as four or five genes can result in 10,000 fold, 100,000 fold improvement in radiation resistance in a starting organism like E. coli, which is has very low tolerance for radiation. And turn them into something that is comparable to, you know, things that we've thought required

• 5:10Speaker 03

  billions of years of evolution to become that radiation resistant. You can do it in a small number of mutations, which gives us hope. We haven't yet, we've started to, but haven't finished extending that to mammalian cells. But, you know, assuming that goes as well as it did in bacteria, then that's something that could at least apply to cell therapies and organ therapies. Whether that would be enough to protect the entire body is an open question.

• 5:48Brian Keating?

  I know you mentioned that, you know, it's hard to make predictions about the past, kind of inverting Yogi Bear. But if we look at the inherent ability for our species or for even, you know, lineages that were not directly related to, but share, you know, some massive amount of chromosomes with, I forget, a fruit fly has something, what 50% of similar variety of chromosomes to a human being or something like that, or banana, I forget which one, if it's the fruit or the fly.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Well, it's kind of a, it's kind of a slope, you know, it's different levels of relatedness, but we have, you know, a fruit fly is basically has one copy of each gene where we have four copies of those genes and they do four different things. So, but, you know, we have roughly the same composition of, at least for core essential genes.

• 6:43Brian Keating?

  So, does that hint at something in the deep past that perhaps, as you mentioned, one of my favorite words? I think, you know, originally coined by Fred Hoyle or one of his colleagues, you know, panspermia, the notion that life arrived on, you know, meteorites or comets, not unlike the kind you get at my website, briankeating.com, and George, I'll bring you one because you have a .edu email address and that automatically gets you one. But does that point to perhaps, you know, evidence for a life originating not on Earth? In other words, the fact that we have this radiation resistance, we know the Sun is an active star, but to survive interstellar, you know, distances, it would have to be very hard. And I think a trip

• 7:24Brian Keating?

  to Mars, you said in an interview, is about 180 days' worth of Earth exposure. So, does the existence of latent, even latent, unexpressed information or abilities within our DNA to resist radiation and vacuum and so forth, does that point to an origin perhaps from another world?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Well, in a certain sense, it points away from it, in the sense that, yes, you have all this radiation that's galactic, and, but, you know, the main things that protect, the three main things that protect us on Earth is our magnetic field, and then the atmosphere and any additional layers that could come if you're subterranean, and then, and finally, then, active metabolism. So if you're in a tiny frozen rock without a magnetic field and without much mass to protect you, and you're frozen, so there's

• 8:25Speaker 03

  no metabolism, that's the worst-case scenario. But there are many larger rocks that have, in principle, a planet could come, could break loose, and it would have all the magnetism and the...

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Atmosphere and so forth that it had when it was part of a solar system. And those can go at, you know, at very high velocities.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  You know, slowing them down and transferring them to another solar system is a non trivial thing. The other possibility is if you can, if you're going at relativistic speeds, let's say 5% speed of light or something like that, there's some calculations that indicate that you can decelerate. And so then if you just accept a certain number of mutations, if you accept the frozen state, you can have a very small package, you know, in the order of, you know, single cells or small cluster of cells, nanogram amounts.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And you can cover distances like say from here to, you know, proxima B in, you know, dozens of years and you just accept the number of lesions. And then as soon as you get into a warm place, then you start repairing those lesions. And so I, I think that, that, that, that kind of, those, those kinds of solutions to the, the triple problem of magnetic, you know, atomic shielding and, and repair processes could allow at least short trips.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  And we don't know what the upper limit is, you know, most of the, of the failure of, of repair processes are because there's a compromise where the evolution has been cheap or has, you know, has hit a, has hit a trade off between saving energy for other things like reproduction, rather than spending huge amounts of energy, keeping a perfect copy of your, of your genome in every cell in your body. It's basically, but in a, in a, in a scenario where you have great abundance, as we do in the modern world and might have in a, in a panspermia world, then you would, you would spend that. Energy wisely on on repair.

• 11:02Brian Keating?

  What about the prevention is worth a nanogram of cure? Is Elon being reckless by sending unmodified humans to Mars? Or should we be editing astronauts before engineering rockets?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I think, uh, I I wouldn't lay this at Elon's feet.

• 11:21Brian Keating?

  Just generally ethically.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  He's he's putting effort into the physics mainly. But yes, I I think it's almost inevitable that since, you know, we consider medicine as being appropriate to a certain environment. So if you, you know, live in a, you know, very cold environment, then doctors are going to be treating frostbite. And if you live in a very humid environment, you might be dealing with fungus and so forth. And I think as we go into space, there's going to be a whole new set of problems, mostly having to do with weightlessness and radiation that are that will merit new medicines.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  And an increasing number of medicines are now gene therapies, which are kind of a once and done, which can apply to an increasing fraction of your body. So I I suspect that that is that will happen. And, um, in a way that will be kind of independent of of the it doesn't have to be independent, but but so far it has been independent of the physics problems. I mean, for example, there are known solutions for the, let's say, the the gravitational issues, you know, these are very serious things that even after people return to Earth after a year or more, um, they have kind of.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Irreversible damage to the bone structure and even the distribution of fluids in the body. That could be solved by having, you know, simple rotation centrifugal forces that end up being one unit gravity. For some reason, that's been deemed not cost effective so far, even in the International Space Station. But that's, that's a, now that becomes a more difficult problem on moons and planets. Because then you have to set up the equivalent of a rotating space station, which is already

• 13:34Speaker 03

  unaffordable in a gravitational force field. Anyway, I mean, all these things have physics solutions, but they also have biological ones. So we'll see which, which ones are respected.

• 13:51Brian Keating?

  Now, speaking of billionaires, soon I'll ask George whether or not billionaires will live 50% longer than us public university employees.

• 14:02Speaker 00

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• 14:33Brian Keating?

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• 15:17Brian Keating?

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• 16:01Brian Keating?

  Auto reminders and auto drafts mean you never drop the ball, even if your collaborators take their sweet time collapsing their email reply wave functions. This is the emotional shift that I've experienced, from stressed and overwhelmed to in control and mentally clear. No inbox singularities, just focus clarity and time back to finally read that paper you've been citing without actually opening. Escape the gravitational pull of email inbox overwhelm and experience Superhuman transformation. Get started with one month free of Superhuman today using my link below. But first, I want to do what we're not supposed to do in life, George, which is to judge books by their covers.

• 16:51Brian Keating?

  You know, in a probabilistic sense, what else do we have to go on? So for those that have not encountered your really delightfully written, highly nerdy, but highly informative for laypeople as well, your book, Regenesis, which hearkens to many different aspects. So I want you to go through the title, the cover art, and the subtitle, and what went into all those with you and your co-author.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And so the title is Regenesis, subtitle is How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  This was co-authored with Ed Regis, who's a popular science writer. It was a great pleasure to collaborate. You wanted me to unpack some of those words.

• 17:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, the title and the subtitle, yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  So, the regenesis, you know, refers to, you know, the regenerative processes that occur within our bodies all the time. I think we're, most non-biologists are blissfully unaware of what's going on. We're constantly getting cancer and having our blood vessels break and they're all constantly getting repaired. So that's one meaning of regenesis. The other meaning is that genesis, that the creation of life from non-life is something that we're quite interested in from, you know, from an astrobiology standpoint, is how many times did that happen? How different were the outcomes and so forth?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  And we can, we can get a feeling for that on Earth by creating lots of alternative synthetic biology. So that's what the subtitle is, "How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature in Ourselves." Reinvent, I think, is intended to be a modest term. That is to say that even if we come up with biology that's not at all like our current biology, it probably is a reinvention because of the vast amount of real estate present in the, in our galaxy and beyond. So, but nevertheless, with that modesty in mind, it is a, it's breathtaking how fast the synthetic biology is going.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  It's going at an exponential curve that's typically faster than Moore's Law and where costs are dropping by factors of two to 10 per year and, and quality is going up at a similar pace. So. And we think that some of these will affect manufacturing of essentially anything. I teach a course at MIT and Harvard and actually globally, students globally called "How to Grow Almost Anything." And that's, and that's the idea is that biology can manufacture even inorganic materials and computers and so forth, computer electronic components.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  So that's what we mean by nature and ourselves.

• 19:53Brian Keating?

  And the artwork on the cover, I listened to the audiobook, so I have a microscopically sized cover. Can you go through what, what the description of the cover looks like to those?

• 20:03Speaker 03

  I actually didn't choose this cover. It is a, it's a refactoring of, of a, a famous painting that, that I actually figured out what it was. I, I reverse engineered what the painting was when it was presented to me by the publishers.

• 20:24Brian Keating?

  Of course you did.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I didn't veto it, but I, you know, it, it's, I think it represents, I think the connection with the topic is that, is it represents Genesis in some sense, the biblical version of it. But it's abstract enough that it, it could be something else.

• 20:45Brian Keating?

  Well.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Again, the, the point was to be modest, not to be arrogant about, about what we're reinventing.

• 20:53Brian Keating?

  Okay, we're gonna do a couple of quick, quick questions from my audience first. What's the biggest myth that people believe about genes and traits like intelligence or aging? Can you get into the, what's the difference between, you know, polygenic and environmental factors that lead to different complexity factors that we see, not just in ourselves, but in all species?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think one of the, I'm not sure myth, it's certainly a potential source of confusion even among scientists, is that you can, you can establish with well, well-known tools like genome-wide association studies, you can establish that there, let's say 9,000 genes involved in a polygenic trait like height. Height's one of the favorite ones because people collect height information and weight, even when they're studying some disease unrelated to height and weight because it's just easy to do. And so anyway, 9,000 genes are involved. And so you sort of say, well, that's so complicated, it's going to be hard to predict, much less

• 21:59Speaker 03

  influenced, right? But in fact, there's one gene that doesn't turn up as being particularly special in those 9,000 that does influence it tremendously in all sorts of animals and in humans at the extreme values of tall and small. And that's the somatotropin gene, or sometimes called a human growth hormone. And it's so powerful that it's actually used in seven different clinical settings, diseases. And it works. It's like part of standard medical care in these seven cases.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  So that shows that something can be multigenic, polygenic, and also monogenic in a very practical way. And it can be a germline, or it can be something that happens somatically. So for example, some of the giants, the historical giants over 10 feet, sorry, 8 feet tall, had pituitary tumors. This is not something that kills them. You know, it just makes them very tall. And if it continues late enough in life, it causes acromagaly, which where you have coarse facial and hand features. So anyway, that's one of the complex, you know, things that is misunderstood.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  But we could look into others if you want.

• 23:31Brian Keating?

  I want to ask another question. You have this unique ability to combine physics, engineering, obviously biology, bioinformatics, even AI, which we'll get to. But I want to ask first, what's something that you would have thought was science fiction 20 years ago, but now in your lab and your collaborators' labs is routine effectively?

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, almost every project that we're proud of had that nature to it, you know, it was. It was called science fiction in a pejorative way, not in an admiring way. That it was it was either useless or impossible or both. And some examples were, you know, when I was starting as a graduate student, I I had the pleasure of typing in most of the DNA sequence and RNA sequence that was known at the time. And that was easy back then because it wasn't much known. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great to do this? You know, I learned some things and I said, wouldn't it be great to do this for everybody on the planet and do their whole genome? And that was completely out of the question because the biggest things that had been

• 24:37Speaker 03

  sequenced at that point were 80 base pairs long, Cs, As, Gs and Ts. And and the human genome was, you know, three billion times two for each, you know, each person had mother and father inheritance. So so 80 to three, three billion. But we did it. So we're now sequencing lots of millions of human genomes and hopefully we'll get all, you know, eight billion, at least a subset of people who want their genome, which is, I think, going to be most people, but we'll see. That's that was science fiction. Particular ways of doing it, like what's called nanopore sequencing, where we do look at single molecules that just seem like, you know, doing single molecule anything,

• 25:21Speaker 03

  much less, you know, reading the detailed structure from a single molecule. But that's now also the routine. It's a it's the best way of getting really long reads.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  You know, making organs in pigs that could transplant humans. We now have someone who's getting close to six months with a pig kidney that seems quite healthy, happy. So that's that's that's science fiction. And the list goes on and on, you know, of things that.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  You know, even surprised at people doing it.

• 25:57Brian Keating?

  Tell me about your relationship with past guest Craig Venter. What's that like? Because you guys are in a very similar space, you think very much alike in some ways. But I sense a friendly degree of maybe competition or admiration without directly having collaborated, if you feel comfortable.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel comfortable. I don't think we're exactly competitive. We're kind of synergistic. Craig, when we were in a meeting together, he answered somebody's question and he said, George helps invent these technologies and we deploy them and use them on a scale that's useful. And I'm certainly not unique as inventor and he's not unique as a consumer. But we do have similar tastes, which I think are good tastes. That is to say, you know, we both worked on ocean ecology at one point with a genomic flavor.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  We both worked on human longevity and wellness. We, you know, both were involved in synthesizing genomes. He did Mycoplasma and we did E. coli. I don't think it's simple enough to just say that one is doing industrial and the other one's doing academic, because we've both done a little of each. In fact, I think very often his industrial projects end up being very academic, like, you know, sequencing the human genome wasn't immediately commercializable, even though

• 27:43Speaker 03

  they tried to patent all the cDNAs. In the end, it's just the... It was mostly very basic research that came out of the genome project. While some of the things that I did that were kind of academic, like multiplex editing, end up producing CRISPR and these organs from pigs and things that were genuinely useful. Anyway, I think...

• 28:21Speaker 03

  You know, I think we help populate, we represent extreme values in the genomics field with similar goals, which is to, you know, help the environment and help people.

• 28:35Brian Keating?

  Quick story about Craig. We went to, I used to be involved with a project that Jim Simons, my late mentor and friend, sponsored called Math for America, and we had a branch here in San Diego. And Jim came out for one of the first fundraisers that we had, trying to raise money. And Craig was there as well. This is before he started the Benner Institute down the road from UCSD. And he spent the whole time talking to Jim Simons. And at the end, Jim said, you know, Craig's very interesting, but, but, you know, he, you should be very careful inviting people to talk to me, especially the smarter they are. And I said, that's weird. I thought you liked smart people, Jim. And he said, well, no, because the problem is, every time I meet somebody, they tell me that they're a genius,

• 29:20Brian Keating?

  they ask me for money. And even if I, at my wealth, gave a dollar to each person who said they were a genius, I'd be broke. But, you know, Craig was not, not too shy about fundraising for his own ventures at someone else's fundraiser. So I want to ask about genome rewriting and the resistances of viruses. And basically, the question between editing and rewriting, it just seems strange. I heard Jennifer Doudna speak two weeks ago at the Simons Foundation for a retrospective, you know, tribute to Jim Simons' life. And I really can't understand how you guys do what you do. Because it seems like if I went to Mars and, you know, sprayed Mars with a bunch of koala bears, you know, it wouldn't just like take over the planet. But somehow you guys are able to, you know, change a

• 30:05Brian Keating?

  single gene or a part of a gene, and then it rewrites the entire genome grammar, like what you did with codons. Can you explain that to a simple experimental cosmologist? How does the body know that you inject in, you know, a couple of trillion particles, maybe, and that it takes over, you know, 10 to the, you know, 24th particles?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So actually, how biology does what it does is...

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Rightfully mysterious to non-biologists. And it causes some of the, you know, some misunderstandings, you know, like physicists might say, "Oh, you're defying the second law of thermodynamics if you live forever," or something like that. And the fact is, no, we're obeying them by burning energy and entropy into the outside world in order to keep the thing in the middle youthful. Or, for that matter, to some extent, there's a continuum of life from billions, three billion years ago to today, where there's no dead thing anywhere along that pathway.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Anyway, that reproduction, and the process of evolution is also a little counterintuitive, where you can, a bunch of small increments, even in the lab, you can see accumulate and make new phenomena. So, anyway, it's a real gift to we synthetic biologists, is that so many things self-assemble. They've been selected by evolution to bind and to catalyze and so forth. So, you literally can throw something in there, and it says, "Well, I've never seen this before, but I've seen things like it, I'm just gonna run with it."

• 31:56Speaker 03

  You can put a, you know, a little piece of optic, you know, nervous tissue, and put it where it doesn't belong in the tail rather than the head, and it wires up, and it senses things, and it reacts as an organ, as an eye would. And the same thing at the genomic level, you can change the genetic code quite radically, and it will do its best. And you have all kinds of great debugging tools, that you just unimaginable for most people in a mechanical world, you know, having a self-repairing, anything mechanical. But in biology, you take it for granted and you use it.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And so synthetic biology is, really, it's...

• 32:44Speaker 03

  It's not like all other engineering protocols. You know, it's like if you're gonna build a bridge, you might build some scale models, but maybe one or two. And then you build the big thing and hope it doesn't fall down. But with biology, you can make billions of model prototypes. And then you could literally let them compete with each other. And then pick the winner. Imagine if we could build a billion bridges and then pick the winner. That would be great. Or, you know, take, yeah, anyway. So what we did with, what your, your, your other part of your question was, you know, how did we make virus resistant cells by changing the code?

• 33:26Speaker 03

  And put that in the simplest possible way, but not too simple. Is that you, you, the, the genetic code contains 64 triplet codons. So every possible combination, A, C, G, and T, like A, A, A is, you know, codes. Each of these 64 codons and codes is different amino acids. Sometimes they're redundant, the same amino acid at different triplets. Anyway, you can change those triplets because of redundancy. So some amino acids have six different triplet codons. And we can take two of them and move them up with the other four. And then clean out every use of that. So every protein in your body is made up of these triplet,

• 34:10Speaker 03

  or the gene is made up of these triplets. And you can clean up, so it's not using two out of the 64. Once you're done, so that, that's radical surgery. You've done that throughout the genome. The organism is now just basically as healthy as it was before. But it's, it's only using 62 of the 60, 64. Or you could use 63 out of 64, which was our first genome that we engineered.

• 34:38Speaker 00

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• 35:10Speaker 03

  And then, now that it's freed up, it might have resistance to viruses because the viruses needed that code, that particular one out of 64. And we've been dreaming about this since 2002, but just, you know, in the last couple of years, we delivered, we eventually engineered and debugged and made it bio-secured, an organism that was resistant to all viruses because of the changes to the code. The virus still has the old code, the cell has made a new code without consulting the virus, and so the virus has broken every gene in every virus is broken in multiple

• 35:54Speaker 03

  ways, and so they can't even evolve around that as far as we can tell, both theoretically and experimentally.

• 36:01Brian Keating?

  And what is it about these codons? I mean, can you explain again to a lay audience, what is a codon? What are the different functions of them? You know, I kind of analogize them to almost like a colony of bees where you've got drones and workers and honey and a queen, and they do different things, and you have to implant certain things in the hive to make them stop, and there are stop codons and start codons. But there's also redundant codons and so forth. Can you talk about how these, you know, kind of magical combinations of just tiny amounts of, you know, chemical content do so many different varieties, well beyond the number of permutations, say that, at least as a, you know, physicist, I might think are possible to express?

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like the specialized casts of the social insects as a metaphor. We do have start signals and stop signals and so forth. Another way of thinking about it is like a computer program. But here's a single molecule which has a, you know, it's linear, like a, you know, a computer tape, or actually, most programs are written linearly, historically. But anyway, you'll go along the tape until you find the start signal, which will be a start codon of three letters, A, T, G, and then you'll take the next one, and it'll

• 37:31Speaker 03

  what you've now started, and then the next one. You know, might be AAA, which is lysine, and the next one after that might be GGG, which is glycine, and you just add them on. And there's a machine that does this, and if you had to pick something that is the secret of life, I would say it's ribosome. It's this machine that does this decoding of this single molecule linear tape metaphorically, and it goes along and it keeps adding amino acids. And so you're converting from a simple, kind of a simple information molecule, which is DNA and RNA, into a folded molecule that has catalysis and, you know, sort of architectural

• 38:15Speaker 03

  features to it, regulatory features, that the typical linear DNA doesn't have. You want to keep those functions separate, just like you want to keep the computer codes separate from the bulldozer or the manufacturing process that it regulates. So anyway, the ribosome was amazing. It takes single molecules of RNA, it turns them into single molecules of protein, and it does that trillions of times per square millimeter per, you know, minute.

• 38:49Brian Keating?

  Towards the end of the book, you talk about storing it, encrypting it, and all the attendant concerns that you might have with making a book out of DNA. I think DNA is unique. Certainly, a lot of people talk about, I heard David Reich speak again a couple of weeks ago at the Simons Foundation, you know, it's always analogized that, you know, DNA is the software, but, and then, you know, the cells, the hardware, et cetera. But DNA and RNA, especially as past guest Thomas Chek has pointed out, you know, they are software, but they're also hardware. So I always find the analogy kind of breaks down, but what do you think about, you know, the replacement of the physical world, which has not yet happened?

• 39:32Brian Keating?

  We do have proposals by my friend David Spiegel and others to make dark matter detectors out of DNA sequencing kits for various reasons, but can we replace hard drives? Could we eventually have this podcast hosted not on Riverside, but on, you know, dna.fm? What are the prospects for using, you know, this magical substance that has hardware and software-like properties? Is it truly unique? And what possibilities beyond writing your book in DNA as possible beyond that?

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Right, so, yeah, we Uh, the book that I held up earlier, uh, we did encode a early draft of it in into DNA and made 70 billion copies of it, uh, which is some kind of record and, uh,

• 40:18Brian Keating?

  You beat God, you know, in terms of book sales. If you can sell each one of them, you'll beat the Bible.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Right. And, uh, yeah. Um, it, the, um,

• 40:32Speaker 03

  the industry kind of got inspired by this and there's now a worldwide consortium that's, that's trying to push this. Um, as, because it has certain key properties that are good and some that are not so good. So the, the good things is that it lasts a long time. So our record for DNA storage is uh, over a million years and our record for disk drives is decades.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  It also, um, is easy to make copies. Uh, it's very compact. It's like millions of times more compact than most uh, storage media and it's easy to make copies. You can make 70 billion copies. We made for a few pennies.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  That, you know, even if you, yeah, even if you had a market for 70 billion books, uh, you, you would have trouble, uh, manufacturing it for pennies. Uh, so the downsides are it's not, it's not fast.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it, to the extent that it's cheap and you can do it in parallel, you can make lots of copies of a book. Um, that, that seems fast. Um, but in fact, if you want to make one, if you want to read one copy of a book, we have limitations on the reading and writing phases of it. The copying phase is really fast, but the reading and writing, since we're kind of interfacing with a digital physics-based world, uh, of data storage, that's the slow part. So one of the things that I think is an interesting application of it is in, is leaving the physics and digital world out and just recording in, uh, in a biological world.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  So you can record, um, all sorts of physiological data in an, in a animal or a human and, and then, um,

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Human cells. And then you can take, then you can store that in wherever it was recorded. So every cell in, let's say, a mouse has its own recording device and records lots of, you know, you know, gigabytes of data. The whole mouse then can encode an exabyte of data, let's say, ten to the eighteenth bytes of data. And, and it's very intuitive. That is to say, the recording of events that's relevant to the heart is in the heart and recording events that are important to the tail are in the tail. And so the three dimensional aspect is, is, is there. And so I, so I think that, and you don't need to read it all at once.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  You can just, only when something goes wrong, do you read it. And so it's analogous to a flight recorder in a plane or a, you know, a camera that you, a surveillance camera in a bank or something like that. You, you, most of those things, they just store them for a while and then they recycle them. But if something bad happens, then they'll go through it in great detail. So I think that's, that kind of the, you know, it's kind of like a, a living camcorder that's just taking lots of data in and then, and then the, the slowness of writing is replaced by, because it's biological, it's, it's just as fast as you need.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And then the reading is, is compensated for the fact that you only read it rarely.

• 43:47Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  So I think that's an interesting combination, but most of the industry right now is just trying to compete with this drives as far as I know. And I think that's, that's challenging.

• 43:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, the, even the dark matter detector, you know, is sort of curious, but may not ever have any real scalability and, and despite the trillions of dollars that have gone into, you know, sequencing and so forth. And, you know, soon I want to get to our, you know, favorite topic around the water cooler these days and maybe the watering hole, the woolly mammoth, the dire wolf and, and creatures like that, perhaps from people's nightmares. But I have a couple more lightning round questions for my audience, if you don't mind. Which film, in your opinion, gets genetics hilariously wrong?

• 44:29Speaker 03

  You know, maybe I, maybe I've been.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Too selective, you know, I think movies like Gattaca and Jurassic Park are actually pretty, pretty good. You can pick little nitpick things, but I wouldn't say they're hilariously. For example, I mean, one example that shows how it's somewhat amusing, but it's not. They had a thing called a lysine contingency in Jurassic Park, where if the animal, if the dinosaurs escaped, I don't think I have to prep this audience for.

• 45:05Brian Keating?

  Forty years old, I was thirty five.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  If the dinosaurs escape, then they, they have a dependency on lysine, which is one amino acids they were talking about in the genetic code. And they, and they'll starve, effectively nutritionally deficient. The problem with that is that every food on the planet has lysine in it, plenty of it, too. It has twenty amino acids and lysine is one of them and, and it's fine. So, so what we did, we did eventually implement a real world version of, this is again, science fiction turns into science fact. We made a version of that, which instead of lysine, uses a different amino acid. We call it BIP-A. Doesn't really matter. It's, it's one that's only chemically made. It's only, you can only

• 45:50Speaker 03

  make it in chemistry labs. It's not made in nature. So in that case, if they did escape, then they would run out of BIP-A and they would, they would do, they would, they would die. So, and this is important for biocontainment, not just for biocontaining dinosaurs, but for biocontaining. Let's say you want to clean up an oil spill with a, with a new bacterium, and you're not really sure, you're not sure you want to release that bacterium on the world forever, but you want to release it on the oil spill, then you want to biocontain it. So, so that's, that's, maybe you, maybe you have a favorite one. Do you think is hilariously wrong?

• 46:27Brian Keating?

  I've got plenty in physics and astronomy, you know, anytime there's a multiverse or a wormhole, you know, and that, that'll always trigger my, my annoyance. But, but, you know, they do a decent job. Yeah. I mean, Jurassic Park, you quote from, you know, quite with, with high praise in, in the book. And I think it was like a, a great movie. I mean, I can't vouch for the, you know, the ninth sequel that, that's coming out this, this next, next month.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  I hear it's really great.

• 46:54Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Anything with Scarlett Johansson, you know, can't be bad. Tell me, George.

• 47:01Brian Keating?

  Is it possible, you know, as an extrapolation of what you wrote in Regenesis, very presciently, almost, you know, 12, 13 years ago now when it was written,

• 47:11Brian Keating?

  what is it going to be the case that we're going to set out to produce unintentionally or not, a hierarchy, a caste system where, you know, billionaires will live 50% longer than ordinary thousandaires like me? How will that pan out, in your opinion?

• 47:29Speaker 03

  I think I have consistently felt that this is negotiable. This is something where we, where as scientists, if we choose to make it inexpensive, we can, and we have. Almost everything that I've worked on, we've brought down the price by 20 million fold, for example, for reading and writing DNA.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  And I think that will also be true for gene therapies, and gene therapies are a very viable, look like a very viable way of dealing with age-related diseases. So, for example, vaccines are now being formulated in a formulation of gene therapy. We have a wrapper that allows you to target particular tissues, and then you have a single gene in the middle. And that's been tested now on 6.5 billion people successfully for the COVID vaccine, for example. So, I think, and that's on the order of $20 a dose.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  So, there are examples of gene therapies that are not just for the rich. They were affordable for essentially the whole population. And so, I think that, I think that the main thing that made that inexpensive was the large marketplace. In other words, you have a fixed amount of money you're going to spend on research and clinical trials, and then you divide that by the denominator, which is the number of people that will benefit. And if 6 billion people are going to benefit, then you can get it down to $30 a dose. And I think the same thing's true of aging. Essentially, all of us are going to die of aging, 90% of us. And so, that...

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Can be brought down to a similar price range. So I I'm working hard to make sure it's not just the the the super rich or even the moderately rich that benefit. I want everybody to benefit. And I think it's within, you know, the capability of synthetic biologists to do exactly that.

• 49:37Brian Keating?

  So I want to go from shallow layperson level to, you know, beyond Nobel Prize winner level here with a discussion about these induced pluripotent stem cells. And I want to first start off, for people that aren't so familiar with them, what are they and how do they allow, you know, the turning of, you know, skin cells or umbilical cord blood as they guilted me into with my with my youngest kids, you know, and freezing this stuff, you know, for who knows how much money I'm still paying off along with my college loans. What are these things and what can they be used for at a layperson level?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Right, so stem cells have things in common with the earliest embryonic cells. I I worked on this in in the 80s with Gail Martin, who was one of the pioneers in this field. And and they can differentiate into every cell in your body. They they do in every baby, every embryo, every fetus grows and develops and has a and they also replenish some parts of your body, have stem cells built into them. So if something gets damaged, they will use the stem cells to repair it. It's not the only repair process, but it's a very powerful one. We've harnessed them since the mid 2000s.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  We've harnessed them into making cell therapies and even

• 51:02Speaker 03

  you know, for a variety of different diseases. And these are making their way into clinical trials. The very first

• 51:12Speaker 03

  two came from spinoffs from my lab. One of them is that's already in phase three. So there's phase one, two, and three are the stages that you have to get through to to have a therapeutic approved by the FDA for general use. So phase three is the last phase and and the first

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Stem cell derived therapy to do that is granulosa cells that are used in IVF clinics now. So another one that's coming along that's in phase one is has to do with autoimmune disease using natural parts of your immune system. But these can be engineered the same way we're talking about making bacterial cells resistant to all viruses. You can do almost anything to these stem cells and and then from that you can make any cell in the body, in principle, all cells of the body.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  We use the stem cells sometimes to make, you know, whole organisms like like mouse or pig and so forth.

• 52:20Brian Keating?

  Could you in principle use them in some vast, you know, 3D printer to make mirror humans? And maybe you could describe what a mirror human is first of all, and then whether or not a stem cell from a non-mirror human, I don't know what that means, an ordinary human could be used to make a mirror image of that of that organism's DNA.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, it's it would be very challenging to make even a mirror

• 52:46Speaker 03

  ribosome, the hero that I talked about earlier, much less a bacterial cell, much less a human. But but they all have the same principle, which is that, you know, your right and your left hand look a lot alike, but they're not directly superimposable. They're, you know, when they when you line them up, they're actually backwards there from each other. You put it up against a mirror, then you can you can see what what's meant by mirror. And this happens not just at the level of your hands, but the level of molecules. You have molecules which are mirror images of one another, and they can't just interconvert by rotation.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  They have all to make one into the other, you'd have to break a bond and reform it. So so those mirror, so all of life has a particular mirror form. So the helixes, the helices of of proteins and DNA are all right handed. As I say, they screw like this.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  They

• 53:47Speaker 03

  If you could make, and we can make mirror images of the DNA and some of the proteins, the proteins that you can even get mirror image proteins to make copies of mirror image DNA.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  But no one has yet made a cell that has all of its molecules mirror image. And part of that is, you know, we wrote a co-author on a paper that warned about this is probably not a good thing to do and that it could be misused. It's probably quite safe if there were no evil people in the world. But it's just like jets are generally safe if you don't run them into buildings.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  So, anyway, they have the advantages of mirror molecules, not necessarily replicating cells, is that you can make things that are more stable in the environment, things that don't rot in the environment, things that don't get degraded inside your body. So you can make medicines that last longer, things like that. And so I think there's considerable enthusiasm for making mirror molecules. And there's low enthusiasm for making mirror image, you know, bacteria or fungus or, and for humans, that's off the table ethically for now. I mean, ethics does change as we get comfortable with technology.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  But right now, we don't want to, we're not, don't want to make genetically engineered humans in the germline, meaning via babies. But we routinely make genetically engineered humans in the soma in the body that's not inherited, and that's what gene therapy is all about.

• 55:39Brian Keating?

  Last question before we move on to talking about the mammoth in the room. And I guess this question will really revolve around the risks. As you talk a lot in the book about risks and how we've overcome them and how luditism has never really worked. But recently, we learned about the bankruptcy of 23andMe and that I was now in receivership and supposedly the Wijiki Foundation is going to take it over. But there was a lot of concern for people like me. And luckily, I didn't go too deep into cataloging everything in my life. But I did subscribe to that. And you also have had even more.

• 56:24Brian Keating?

  You put your whole genome is online, I believe. Are you worried about targeted supervillains and the ethics of having these data from billions? I mean, literally, Facebook's had billions of people's personal information passwords leaked. What happens when they buy up your genome or something like that? I mean, could they make targeted super weapons to just the anti-church missile? And that would be the ultimate terrifying bioweapon evolution of this massive revolution that genetics has brought on. So you obviously weren't worried 12 years ago. Would you do it today?

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, my genome is still available, along with medical records to make it useful. We have a project that's intended to make packages that represents individuals so you can develop software that a physician would use. A physician has to see the whole individual. I worry about everything. I worry about technology and usually accompany each new technology we develop with a prior paper on safety considerations, not just in the book, but academic papers. And when we found companies would try to have safety be one of the founding principles.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  In this case, if you are concerned about the privacy of your genome, your problem isn't so much.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Whether it's posted on Facebook or not, their problem is that you're dropping your DNA all over the place every day. So the only way you could keep your DNA truly private, now that it's getting dirt cheap to sequence it, you could just pick up somebody's coffee cup or their dandruff or something and sequence it. You would have to stay in your house or completely seal yourself in a moon suit or something, which is not practical. That said, if you want to assassinate somebody, there's a lot easier than building a personalized weapon because most people have so much, they have a lot more in common than they have different. And to make something that would only work on one person would be challenging.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  I'm not saying it's impossible.

• 58:37Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, it depends on who the person is.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  It's just easier to shoot them or poison them or, you know, there's a variety of ways. So I'm not recommending that anybody kill anybody ever, but certainly I think it's unlikely that you would do it through this exotic method. And if you did, it would be hard to, if that developed as a technology, it would be hard to protect yourself just by keeping your data private. You would also have to keep your pieces of your body also private.

• 59:11Speaker 00

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• 59:43Brian Keating?

  All right, so here we go. When you set out to bring the dire wolf and the woolly mammoth back to life, or in some sense resurrect them, regenerate them, de-extinct them, as you call it, what was the single most unexpected roadblock that you hit? And how did cutting-edge gene editing actually help you push past that obstacle?

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Right, well, some of this was derisked by the work that we did in pigs. So we had to make 69 edits to the pig in order to make it safe and effective for transplant in the humans with kidney failure, heart, or liver. And so that gave us some experience. You need to make a lot of edits to get key to de-extinct multiple genes. So we're not talking about de-extincting species so much as genes to help increase the diversity of, you know, of modern species that are endangered. So a lot of endangered species have gone through population bottlenecks where,

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  because their environment has been crisscrossed by pipelines and highways and things like that. So their population has become inbred and hence less adapted. Also, their environment has changed. So anyway, we're trying to make, give endangered species, you know, some superpowers like resistance to killer herpes viruses that are, you know, part of the reason they're an endangered species, to make them cold tolerant so they can huddle, you know, now have suddenly millions of square kilometers of space that's far away from poachers and

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  from humans in general, but full of plenty of, you know, delightful plants that herbivores like. So.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  So the surprise surprising roadblocks that you asked about would be, you know, I think one of them is that when you're working with endangered species, you there are the rules that you have to follow and and we and we do and we respect them. Uh, but that's that slows things down a little bit. I wouldn't say it was unexpected.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  They, you know, doing, we want, we want to eventually make, you know, possibly thousands of changes in the genome. And, uh, and we're still for most purposes stuck in the low numbers for bacterial genome engineering. You know, we've synthesized the whole genome. And so in principle, we could have changed the whole genome, but the more you change, the more debugging you have to do. So we're, you know, in the, in the tens of thousands, uh, is a reasonable number of edits, whether they're made by editing or whether they're made by genome synthesis. But that's changing. I think it's changing. These are all exponential. They're going faster and faster. So I think it won't be long before we're not only synthesizing microbes,

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  uh, we're also synthesizing mammalian genomes accurately. And, uh, and then, um, but, but, but we, we've overcome it by, you know, we're, we're really trying to make the, the species healthier and to improve the environment, which means, which we're actually not trying to make an identical copy to something that's long ago. We're using the old genes to help the new ones. We're trying to make, uh, things that fit a particular environment. And, uh,

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  and that's, you know, we're getting better and better at it. You know, I don't think we're, we're perfect, but, um, we can test, to contest things out with easy organisms like mice. So we made a woolly mouse that, that had a lot of the features that we wanted to have in terms of cold tolerance, like many cold tolerant elephants. So they, you know, have their new home and, and possible, uh, they can help the environment in the.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  And then, and then dogs and wolves are also easy to, not quite as easy as mice to engineer, but, but relatively easy. And, and many ecologists will claim that, that you need a, a major, you know, you need to, major predator is a keystone species in any environment, you know, as, as occurred in, in Yellowstone. We did an experiment where we removed the wolves, returned them back. It's not a simple story, but it is, it is an instructive one. Anyway, so those, those are some of the, the roadblocks and surprises that we've overcome.

• 1:04:26Brian Keating?

  The main question I have now is, is the, you know, possibility of virus proofing humans. It's, is it, is it possible to virus proof a human and then concomitantly, you know, on the other side, living well, living longer, can we reverse aging using gene therapy?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Right. So I, I think gene therapy is only recently become, you know, come into something that, that looks like a very reasonable medicine. It's been used for, you know, saving millions of people via vaccines. It's, it's, it's saving individual people. You can make an N of one of highly designed gene therapy that just happened, uh, uh, thanks to Kieran Musa Nero and his, his team at Penn, where you, within just a few months, you could go from kid being born, sequenced and

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  cured. So, so for, for gene therapy, for viruses, we've, we've shown that we can make virus resistant cells. We've got to upgrade that to human cells. And then got to deliver those human cells to enough parts of human body to make it virus resistant. It depends on the kind of virus. So if it's something like HIV that just infects T cells, that's relatively easy to replace our T cells, either by gene therapy or by cell therapy.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  If there's a virus that can affect every cell in your body, that would be quite challenging to do it by cell replacement. But not out of the question, I'm not going to say impossible. For age-related diseases, I think we're entering a golden era where a lot of information is turning into practical therapies and preventives. We have a couple of things going into clinical trials now at Rejuvenate Bio that look incredibly promising. The gene therapy is once and done, so you don't have to be paying for it for the rest of your life. And we've seen that gene therapies can get into the $30 range, probably more, at least initially, until the full population can use it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  And that's because we have learned a lot about the components of aging, the things that are deep underneath almost all diseases, almost all forms of death. We can now get at the core of those and even reverse them at cellular level. So-called, you can make stem cells from fairly old cells that are not stem cells. And we can do that in the body as well. And we can extend life in pre-clinical animal trials. So I think we're going to have a very interesting near future

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  for genome engineering with respect to infectious diseases and age-related diseases.

• 1:07:32Brian Keating?

  Very rapid question. Arthur C. Clarke, who's the namesake not only of this podcast, but of all podcasts, I don't know if you knew that, but the word podcast comes from the iPod, which comes from the Podbay Doors, which is in the background over here on my wall. So Arthur said many things, including the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible, which is the namesake of this podcast, but I want to ask you a different take, very quickly. You might not be familiar with another quote that Arthur said, which is that when a distinguished scientist says something is possible, he's very much likely to be right. When he says something is impossible, he is likely to be wrong. I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? Is there anything, you're so prolific, so generative, just incredible mind?

• 1:08:20Brian Keating?

  Have you been wrong about anything? Or what would your, you know, critics say if, if, if pressed to do so?

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  I, I'd like to believe I'm one of my best critics. And, you know, I try not to say something's impossible. I'm just very disciplined about that. You know, when you tell, or even say that it's a bad idea, you know? You do have to prioritize a little bit. But with my students, I try to say, well, this is a, maybe a more promising direction. But I have been, I think, what I've been wrong, even though I've become a fairly good communicator of science, I think, early on, and even, maybe even to this day, there's a, if somebody asks a question in just the right way, I will give an optimistic answer. Like, you know, how long will it take is the worst question?

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  And, and most of my colleagues like to dodge that question. I try not to dodge any question. But, you know, occasionally I'll say something, you know, where, where I've, I've got all the caveats in my mind, but I'm not articulating them right. Like, how long will it take to do this? Well, it takes two years to birth an elephant. Okay? That's true. It's 22 months, and that's true. But then, taken out of context, it's like, well, that's how long it takes to complete this project, you know? And, or, or I'll actually believe that it might take two to 10 years, and it actually takes a little bit more. I, I remember somebody was, was a critic, was saying, you know, he's been saying that,

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  that you can have pig organs in people any day now, you know? And there, I don't see any pig organs in people. Now I can say, okay, there's, there's one survivor of six months now, and he's, he's happy and enjoying his life. So, you know what? Okay, so, maybe I was off by a year in a, in a, when a proj- project that's been going on since the 1960s. I don't think that's a gigantic sin, but I, I do plead guilty.

• 1:10:23Brian Keating?

  Well, George, thank you so much. This has been a real treat for me.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  The genetic revolution George Church has accelerated has made things faster than Moore's law. And the line between biology and technology is disappearing entirely. If you want to understand where this convergence is heading, check out my episode with Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Chek. We explore how AI and other revolutionary tools are making machines that can design medicines better than even humans can. Click here and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

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