Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Engineering Synthetic Life With Craig Venter (#385)

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Get 30% off unlimited access to Ground News, giving you full coverage of breaking news and allowing you to navigate media bias seamlessly 👉 https://www.ground.news/drbrian It may sound like science fiction, but it's true. Biologists are already creating synthetic life from scratch. Of course, this raises many questions: what is life? What are the possible applications? And are we on to something here, or are we just playing God? Here today, to answer all of these questions and more is one of the most influential biologists in the world, Craig Venter!  Craig Venter is a world-renowned biotechnologist known for his groundbreaking contributions to genomics. He had a pivotal role in leading the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembling the pioneering team that achieved the transfection of a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Later in his life, he and his research team created the world’s first synthetic organism from scratch, demonstrating the potential of synthetic biology to engineer life at the molecular level. In our lively interview, we dive deep into the world of synthetic biology, biological warfare, and engineering synthetic life. Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro  00:01:36 What is life?  00:08:03 Mapping the human genome  00:21:03 DNA durability and extraterrestrial life 00:26:49 The dangers of synthetic biology 00:34:27 The next frontier for synthetic biology  00:46:47 The race to sequence the human genome 01:06:15 The Voyage of Sorcerer II — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Check out Craig’s institute: https://www.jcvi.org/  ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're featuring Craig Venter, a world-renowned biotechnology known for his groundbreaking contributions to genomics. He had a pivotal role in leading the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembling the pioneering team that achieved the transfaction of a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Later in life, he and his research team created the world's first synthetic organism from scratch, demonstrating the potential of synthetic biology to engineer life at the molecular level.

Craig's a leading figure. He's hilarious. unfettered, unshackled, and unafraid. You'll hear all of that in this episode and find out why he was among Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Not once, but twice, maybe on another planet where life already exists.

So without further ado, we welcome a lively episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, my friend Craig Venter, live recorded at UCSD this past fall. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome everybody to what promises to be an exciting and lively emphasis on lively episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with none other than Craig Venter of many different fames, but we're going to talk about a couple of them in particular, including mapping the human genome. Craig is local here in La Jolla.

He has his institute named after him down the road from our campus, and he's graciously agreed to spend some time with me. I'm going to run out of time before I run out of questions. Craig, thank you so much for visiting. My pleasure to be here. And you're a proud alumni son of San Diego, UCSD. And we're going to talk a little bit about how the campus has changed a little bit. But sitting in that chair a couple months back was Kim Stanley Robinson, who also goes by his middle name only as Stan. I don't know what it is with you, super famous, brilliant creative types.

So today we're going to talk about a variety of subjects, including your recent book, The Voyage of Sorcerer 2. We're going to talk about what happened to you on Sorcerer 1, which is foreshadowing. But first we're going to start with a very simple, easy question, Craig, and that is the one posed by Erwin Schrodinger in the 50s in a monograph, a very slim monograph. And that question was, what is life? That's a book I recommend that every scientist read at least once. I've read it a few times. A few years back, I was asked to give the only time someone was asked to give the Schrodinger lecture, other than Schoringer in the same hall under the same circumstance.

It was really an amazing experience. And because we've designed the first living cell that didn't happen in nature, people assume that I can answer that question. But he tried to define it in physical terms and thought about things about the genetic code long before Watson and Crick. And while everybody was sure that it was proteins,

He said it could be as simple as Morris Code. Crystal. And I was talking to Francis Crick about that. He goes, well, that was obvious to everybody. He was very dismissive of, you know, that was hardly a unique notion. Other than from protein chemists who still refused to give Avery the Nobel Prize for proving that DNA was the genetic material. Cells are very dynamic changing second to second. But one thing is fundamental to all life.

and that's the genetic code. If you take the genetic code out of any cell, any species, the cell dies very rapidly, the species dies. That's why we're so susceptible to radiation poisoning. It basically blows apart the DNA structure and you can't continue to produce proteins and live. So some proteins have a half-life of seconds, some minutes, some hours, but they're not permanent structures.

So every cell on our body is second to second constantly being rebuilt. So the genetic code is being read, translated in proteins produced on a constant basis. It's even coded in the protein, how long they'll live, and their degradation rate. So it's a constant synthesis degradation, taking out the garbage. And so without the fundamental information, molecule, there is no life. That's a good fundamental start. Cells, you know, have to defy entropy. They have to keep existing by creating energy. They take things from the environment. We have, you know, hundreds of ways that different cells make energy and the forms of life vary from things that live

at 135 degrees centigrade down to sub-zero temperatures. History of biology is, you know, it got defined in a human-centric point of view. So, you know, we were the standards, so nothing could live out of 37 degrees, and we were the center of the universe. We're not the center of biology. We may be the center of trying to understand and interpret biology,

but we're the minor species on the planet. So key proteins and the membrane pump nutrients in, pump waste molecules out. but it's a dynamic system that, in my view, kind of spontaneously happens. And we're trying to see right now if we can get it to happen spontaneously. When we made the synthetic cell, we wrote the genetic code, and we developed a transplantation system where we could put that chromosome in a recipient cell that could read that code.

And it read that code and then totally transformed that cell into what was defined by that code. So you change the genetic code, you convert one species into another. We're trying to now see if we can do that in a cell-free system to get spontaneous formation by having all the components together. So that's a long-winded way of saying we can't define life. Yeah, I've had on multiple people,

including Carl Zimmer, who from the New York Times and other venues, I'm sure you've interacted with. I've had on many, many people discussing the Orchie. of life, shadow biospheres and everything, but never anyone who's claimed to create life. And it reminds me of this joke, which you probably heard before, but a group of scientists from JCPI, you know, go up to heaven and they say, God, guess what? We've created life. We've created life in the lab.

We can make a man out of dirt. And God says, oh, yeah, well, let me see you do that. That's pretty impressive. And so the scientists over there, they go outside, they scoop up some dirt. And God says, hold on a second. get your own dirt, you know, meaning that, you know, you're starting from some base material. Now, obviously, in the origin of life studies, again, there's almost no real well-defined kind of pathway or definition even of how the origin of life came to be.

We'll talk about my favorite way, which only explains how life on Earth got started. It's called panspermia. We'll talk about that in a minute because I'm very interested in that and your thoughts on that and aliens and all sorts of cool, fun stuff. but the synthetic life. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's rare in a career that you have one big hit. I mean, you've had hit after hit after hit. Talk about what was the genesis of that.

Were you looking, was there a sophomore slump fear that how do I top, you know, mapping that. First of all, you weren't, you didn't only map the human genome. You had mapped, you made the first complete genome map of, what's an interest? Homophilus. Homophilus. Yeah. That was in 1995. So five years before.

Almost 30 years ago. It's coming up on the 30th anniversary. And that developed the tools. that made me know that we had a new way to do the human genome. It was new mathematical algorithms for assembling the genetic code from the sequences that we'd get. If we wanted to do that, if you started from scratch, and we took you away, we put you on an island, you know, with some collaborators, brilliant people, computers, centrifuges, PCR, etc. How fast could you do it today?

How cheap could you do it? Yeah. It took us 10 years. Writing the genetic code is very complex. The machines are slow. They're not accurate, so we had to develop error. They're not accurate, so we had to develop error correction methods. You can only make pieces so large in size, and so we had to make multiple of those

and find ways to link them together. As you make larger pieces of DNA, it gets very brittle, so you can't pipette it or do normal things. So we had to develop new techniques of putting it in gels electronically and move. moving it around in the gels. So everything we did we had to develop from scratch to be able to do. But the rate of synthesis was very slow. And the other problem was in the final minimal cell, about a quarter of the genes are of unknown

function. They're essential for life. You take one of them out, the cell dies. This isn't junk DNA, what they call junk. Tell it. The only junk DNA is in my colleague's brains. And that's one of my pet pieces. People come up with these overly simplistic, basically stupid ideas, you know, that the part

doesn't code for proteins must be junk. And so I offered several of those people to surgically remove their junk DNA and see how long they live. But there were no volunteers. But the problem was we tried to design life on first principles based on what we thought we knew about biology and it proved to be impossible. So the reason it took so long in part from the slow methods for synthesis, it became trial and error. We had to add genes back, then see what of those we could remove until we could get a living cell. So we'd add back a bunch and then we'd get

life. And then we worked out, you know, we can remove some of those. We had methods for knocking out genes so we could tell which ones were essential and which ones weren't. So it's basically a trial and error process. And I think the biggest finding, and it's similar to what we found with the ocean microbiome, is science reaches plateaus of knowledge and the geniuses in the field sort of trying to define things as though we know everything. I mean, I'm sure it's happened in your field multiple times. So protein chemists thought we knew all the protein folds.

We knew all the protein families. It was going to be hard to ever discover anything new. In the ocean. Just stamp collecting. In the ocean, you know, they thought there was only a handful of different microbes. And like proving junk DNA is not junk. Instead of that being a major finding, you're just proving some idiot's stupid statement. calling it junk DNA in the first place.

The Challenger expedition that we followed, it was from the 1870s. It was the first true scientific expedition in the oceans. Was sending a dredge down every 200 miles to see what was on the bottom of the ocean. And again, the brilliant sayers at the time said there couldn't possibly be any life below 1,800 feet. Arbitur. And so when they discovered life at every depth, including they discovered that, the Mariana Trench and life at the bottom. Smokers. Of everything. So it was disproving, again, an idiot notion. I mean, there's discovery science.

We showed discovery science is not dead by you can go out, ask questions, and make more discoveries. Science is limited more by this dogma that gets set up of inane ideas that if people really thought about it, you know, they wouldn't come up with them. You know, before we sequence the human genome, people were arguing that there were hundreds of thousands of human genes because there had to be a gene for each trait and function. I mean, it just shows how little was even fundamentally understood about what a gene does, what a protein does, and that it wasn't combinations of effects. So the biggest finding is we found 20,000 some of genes instead of hundreds of thousands. But it was only a surprise because of the silly notions that were out there.

If they weren't there, it would have been, oh, yeah, that makes sense. 20,000 commentorial is a huge number. Yeah. When we think about unsolved problems in physics, there's the classic notions of these grand kind of prizes and so forth that people will stake their whole lives and careers on, famous one, theory of everything. Can we find a single equation? that's maybe one inch long that you could write that Einstein was unable to do.

And of course, going back to Schrodinger, Schrodinger came up with this famous paradox of the cat, Schrodinger's cat, the superposition of living in dead states. And that was meant to sort of reveal and crystallize what he thought of as a paradox in the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Are there similar probably? In other words, like he would say things and Einstein would retort back, you know, does the moon exist when I don't look at it? And all sorts of God doesn't play dice.

obviously is a famous one. Are there interpretations of biology? In other words, in, it's not clear that there are, that we know that there are only four fundamental forces of physics, the strong and weak force, electromagnetic force, and of course gravity. There could be other forces. Sometimes they're called fifth forces, but we can't rule them out. And it's sort of an interpretative or philosophical question. Are there philosophies of biology in terms of interpretations? Like, could there be genes that we don't know what they express or what they produce because we're looking at them through how humans are currently, you know, could there be something like some sixth sense that humans have like polarization of light? Are there genes that would trace,

you know, the sensitivity of polarization in certain individuals that we just don't know about because maybe we only discovered polarized light relatively recently? It's a long way of asking. Are there issues in the interpretation of genetics in the human genome? Well, totally. Even starting back, as you said, with the origin of life, the assumption that exists everywhere, biology is that everything gets back to a common origin. That means if there was panspermia, there was only one event and everything in the biosphere came from that one event. I've always just fundamentally thought that was bullshit. It just doesn't make sense. And as you know, the fundamental chemicals of life are found universally. They're found on this table over here. They're found on every

asteroid that things are measured on. You know, in my view is every place you have the same fundamental components, we will fundamentally get life. You know, my bumper stickers as life happens. And so I think there were thousands, maybe millions of origins. There's competition for these, but to assume there was a singularity event, I think is just extremely naive. What is the most plausible in terms of the extant versions of not just origin of life on Earth, which

is a huge problem to solve? And we have Miller-Urie is on our campus, a literally foundational experiment, which is, you know, not currently accepted as I understand it, as representative of the oxidizing and reducing conditions of the early atmosphere. It's a cool experiment. It's a very cool experiment. And that's super fun to talk about. But that would only, and again, forgive me.

When I used to do biology experiments in high school, Craig, you know, we'd get a frog and we'd have to dissect it. And my frog would like not even die. Like I was horrible in biology. So I don't know almost nothing about it. But that would only solve life origins on Earth. But what is a plausible in your idea, a set of ideas for origin of life in the universe as a whole? So in my second book, it's called Life at the Speed of Light. And it's based on the one invention I'm proud of it.

It's a biological teleporter. It's called a digital biological converter. It was based on the notion of that we can send the genetic code through the internet, through electromagnetic waves, any combination of things, regenerate that code, and regenerate life. And the notion was we can send a DNA sequencer smaller than this coffee cup to Mars or other places. and instead of sending up a $5 billion spaceship to fly back a sample taken from the subsurface of Mars, where you send a sequencer, sequence what's there, send the digital information back, and we can recreate the Martians easily here in a laboratory using the tools of synthetic biology.

So it's not the Star Trek teleporter. It's sending the digital information for life, but because that codes for everything, it can be recapitulated. My understanding is we exchange about 100 kilograms of material between Earth and Mars annually. That's right. So various calculations, you can't take a shovel of Earth soil without having Martian soil in it. And so that means when the oceans existed on Mars and some evidences they still do on the sharp surface, that we will either still find living organisms,

and they'll very much resemble what we have here. That's a meteorite found in Argentina, but behind you somewhere else over there, I've got a sample of a lunar meteorite, which obviously hit the moon. That's your gift, by the way. It came here. It came here.

So the converse is also true. We're exchanging medium with Mars. So when life is discovered on Mars, it will resemble life that we discover. in the ocean voyage. And microbial life and viral life will, in my view, be ubiquitous in the universe. Now, there's limits. We can't go right now above 135 degrees centigrade.

But we wouldn't last too long at that temperature, personally. And we have microbes that live in very high doses of radiation, and Dinococcus were due Dorans. The space station was coated in part with that to see how long it would survive and survived a long time. In fact, one of the stories that I tell that got the NASA director very annoyed with me, I said the outside of the space station is covered with shit.

And it literally was because early on, they just pumped out all the human waste outside, and a lot of it stuck to the outside of the space station. Now they pack it into stainless steel containers and launch it back into the Earth's atmosphere. I tell people to be very careful when they wish upon a shooting star. Shooting shit. That may be the wrong one.

So life will live in space. It will live on the surface of these things. It will live in nuclear reactors. And geysers. So trying to extrapolate from human biology, we'd say, well, of course it can't exist in other conditions. The only reason I'd like to live a long time would be to see it proven that it is ubiquitous and is everywhere we look. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible. It is I, your fearless host, Professor Brian Keating here with a microscopically tiny request before we go back to exploring the potential of biotechnology and its ethical implications.

that's to make sure that you're all subscribed to the podcast. I did some research and number crunching in my own and found out that only 18% of you are actually subscribed to the channel of all those that watch it. And to make matters even worse, only 8% have notifications turned on. You're missing out on so much great, amazing, and free content. So make sure you like, subscribe, and turn on notifications. I know you hear it from every single YouTuber on Earth, but to get the greatest possible guest on this show, I really rely on that. And it will help me help you. So do it. Do it now before you forget. It just takes one little push. Now, back to the episode. So the thought comes to me, you know, when I read Life at the Speed of Light,

that, you know, that does involve a much slower process than the speed of light to transport the 3D printer, the sequencer, et cetera. Well, you have to get those there, but the data can come back at the speed of light. So I guess the obvious implication that I'm kind of drawing from this is that, well, maybe there were other civilizations and species and so forth that, created some kind of sequencer, which we call DNA, and that produced us. What are your thoughts about, it seems that DNA, which you're, at least as big an expert as exists in the planet today, that it could be the most kind of basic evidence for extraterrestrial, not only existence, but intelligence. Am I like off here? I mean, it's durable. It's like,

I've heard of this long now. Have you heard of the Long Now Foundation? So they're trying to build a 10,000-year clock, I like Stuart Brand and Kevin Kelly. So 10,000 years is child's play compared to how long DNA is less. So what are your thoughts about that as a signature of ETI? When my, I was the first human genome sequenced. And when that sequence was finished to show people they should not be afraid of their own sequence. It was put on the internet. It's been, you know, broadcast.

So my genome's been broadcast into space now for 25 years. So, you know, it may come back and, you know, a troop of Craig Venters may come back and land here because it can be recreated from the sequence. You know, but it's like human cloning. You don't get the same answer every time other than in the basic structure on functional components. We're still plastic individuals and can be modified. And we're sending data into space constantly. People could be sending it to us, and we're not yet knowing how to interpret those signals that are coming in.

And the fact that it lasts so long and, you know, has this durability and resiliency is just so striking. And I don't think there's anything that's creatable in a lab that has any, you know, that you can create or that has been discovered that has, that has the durability of something like that. That's capable of being produced by a mind, by an intelligence sort. And obviously that brings up notions of all sorts of things. Like, if you were to construct the most likely evidence of life traversing the universe, it would be something that traverses at the speed of light, given the vast distances, which kind of brings me to my next question, which is about artificial life forms,

not the kind that you synthesized, but necessarily artificial life artificial intelligence. And the question I have is really, would it make sense to teleport, you know, even these 3D printers or even the code, which still has to rely on matter, which cannot travel at the speed of light if it has mass, versus pure information. So. But that's what DNA sequence is. It's pure information. Right. And so that could be sent anywhere. And certainly short distances, it would be the fastest way to get anything back from Mars or Europa, anyplace else. It makes it feasible to do that.

instead of waiting for a round trip of physical material. Right. It's the fundamental chemical components we just talked about are basically ubiquitous every place somebody looks. So having DNA form, RNA form is extremely likely. And once it forms, it can accidentally code for something or it can very specifically code for something. So in the first synthetic genome, we created a second code. It was based on Isaac's Asimov's rules of robotics.

We decided being the first one to make a synthetic organism that it should be watermarked to clearly distinguish it as a human-made organism. Deep fake. Otherwise, it could really confuse everybody doing evolutionary studies, for example. So we created a code, you know, people have used ASCII code, but that creates problems. So we created a unique code that puts very frequent stop codons in. For example, we could write your name in the genetic code with this code, but without the stop codons, that could lead to a new protein, a toxin, something of very unintended consequences.

What is, I'm sorry to interrupt, but what would be the likelihood of that? It seems to me if I go into my friends Tesla and I, you know, I start to, you know, play around with the code. Almost anything I enter into it is going to destroy. It's less likely that it's going to produce, you know, something new and functional or just an old-fashioned dodge, you know, a Wrangler or Jeep, go in there with a hammer and start playing around. More than likely, unless, you know, do something cosmetically, you're going to make it irreparable and possibly non-functional. So is that real, I appreciate the ethical concerns. But is that really probabilistically, you know, likely?

I think there's a high probability of that. You know, all the microbes in the environment are basically chemical warfare with each other. That's how we're discovering so many new antibiotics. So they create antibiotics to deal with these chemicals. They're randomly evolved from just, you know, the biggest drivers of evolution in the ocean are UV light and oxygen. And that's why there's so, such a high rate of mutagenesis. When you're doing this experiment 100 billion times, anything's possible. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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Yeah. So that brings me to some of the questions that naturally spring to mind. I mean, the potential for novel uses of it, incredible, potential for, you know, we just endured this three-year pandemic, right? So what are some of the concerns that you have beyond the, you know, it could do something unintended? What about the intentional misuse of this technology? So it's one of the concerns that we had. Any virus, any bacteria that's been sequenced, any pathogen, we could readily reproduce. I think my friends in China don't like me to say this, but I think Occam's razor says you have to prove that COVID wasn't a lab-made pathogen. Yeah.

You know, could have come out of the market, but three people got sick there. They could have gone to the market. So, you know, their alternate hypotheses aren't impossible. Or they could have brought it to the market. It could have come from an animal. But NIH, under Francis Collins' direction, was funding gain of function research in this lab in China that we had no control over. I mean, it's the most unethical, thoughtless idea that I can imagine. Sorry to interrupt, but I have to just get.

Why was it done in China, right? Because they couldn't legally get it to be done here, correct? They couldn't do gain of function research. It was forbidden. They could definitely do it at CDC and the spacesuit lab where we grow some op-pox and everything else. And so doing it in a lab where you have no control of the use or the outcome or the processes, the fact that three people got sick from the research there says something wasn't

being done right because in the P4 facility at CDC, they grow the worst pathogens than the planet. We sequenced the smallpox genome as part of an international treaty. It was growing up in the spacesuit lab and they would only send us about a third of the genome at a time to sequence so we would never have the whole thing. But it would be easy to recreate just from the genome sequence now. So we do have to be concerned with that. People created the notion of designing new pathogens.

That's much more difficult, in part because we know so little about biology. I mean, the fact that we couldn't even design a living cell because of all the unknown functions out there essential for life, I mean, nobody would have predicted that. Not a single person in biology would have predicted what we found. And it just shows we're missing at least a third to half of all biological knowledge yet to be discovered. Gain a function is changing one or two genes to try and make things worse. Well, not necessarily. Sorry, you know, when I had COVID, I understand you had a terrible experience with COVID, but I had a benign, relatively benign.

In fact, I lost 10, I was joke, I dropped five pounds from my double chin to my stomach. No, I lost weight, you know, I didn't have smell and taste. And, you know, it's been more or less permanent. Yeah. But imagine, and God forbid, I'm not suggesting, oh, it was really good because Brian Keating lost five pounds. There's more to come, right? But the question is, Craig. But you were vaccinated.

I was vaccinated. Yeah, it didn't prevent me. Somehow my wife never got it and she's exposed to a bunch of kids. But the question I have for you is there could be not just, you know, there could be positive uses for gain of function, right? Not just negative or weaponizable. It's important for leading to understanding, but you got to do it under the right conditions and the right safety environment and places where you have control. I think there's reasons to potentially do it, but you want to do it the right way. With smallpox, which I get very familiar with,

not only sequenced the genome, but once I sequenced it, it was supposed to be destroyed. and I convinced the government that they should not destroy the stores of smallpox. They're still in the safe at the CDC. It's this little tiny, old-fashioned safe from the 1930s, I think. Great. Because I said it creates a false sense of expectation that we've rid the planet of this pathogen when it could be reproduced very simply. I went and gave a lecture to President Clinton as an entire cabinet.

on this. This was even early days before we really had all the synthesis technology that we have now, but because the smallpox sequence was so closely related to vaccinia, which we use as a vaccine against smallpox, just doing site-directed mutagenesis, a diligent team could convert vaccinia into smallpox. Now we could just synthesize it from scratch. These are not, you know, you know, ubiquitous methods. There is a reason that in the last 14 years, no other lab in the world has been able to make a new life form like we have. It's expensive, it's time consuming, it's not things governments fund,

except maybe in China. But we also had an expert team of 20 scientists, including three National Academy members and a Nobel laureate and just some extraordinary people working on all aspects of this. So teams like that don't get put together very often in science, especially spontaneously and self-funded. But there are new tools coming. We're working with a company called Avery

that is doing DNA synthesis on computer chips where they can make a different DNA molecule on each pixel on a computer chip. Just by changing the voltage, on that pixel, they can do deep production, change the chemistry. And so that could be a 10,000-fold increase in our rate of doing synthesis, which means even though it's a trial and error process because all the unknowns, instead of making one molecule at a time and testing it, which was hard and time-consuming,

we can maybe make a thousand different chromosomes and your screen is for life, which one gives you a living cell. And so it will change the experimental rate for doing things, hopefully for the betterment of mankind. But every time there's a breakthrough in technology, you have to worry about the dark side. So my organization created a robot for assembling DNA. You know, the notion would have been from the digital biological converter, it just taken sequence information and make a DNA or protein molecule. And it could do that.

But we set it up so that the code could not be changed. You had to order the prerequisite oligos from us. They'd be in a tube. I designed 10 different safety devices into it that if somebody tried to modify it, it would shut down the machine. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff in science or even thinking about it. But we're trying to think ahead on it. So the devices we're creating for basic science didn't turn into weapons manufacturers.

When I look at your career and you already mentioned Isaac Asimov, who was one of my big inspirations. Obviously, this is part of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination that I'm the associate director of. And I should thank Gary Vary, the director, for introducing me, reintroducing me to you after decade of not seeing each other. And that is, of course, Sir Arthur C. Clark's visions and pronouncements and so forth that, some of which came to be science fact from the realm of science fiction. And I wonder, you know, what seems like science fiction today to you? That could be a grand challenge akin to mapping the genome, to making synthetic cells. What is the next frontier that seems, again, like science fiction?

I mean, we already agree that, you know, making pathogens and so forth that could be, you know, that sort of could happen now. God forbid it does and affects the planet. But tell me, like what in your wildest dreams? Where do you go from here? What is a scientific science fiction fantasy for biology? Brief, in a loop, before getting there, the same tools that are used for making potentially pathogens

are being used for creating the countermeasures. So biological warfare wouldn't be a threat if we had a repertoire of antivirals, antibiotics, vaccines to deal with it. And so we created the first, using the digital biological converter, the first FDA-approved synthetic DNA vaccine. And it was made against a flu strain that was discovered in China that looked very pandemic potential.

Chinese sequenced it and just posted it on the internet. We downloaded and made the virus in a week. We were the only source for the CDC and pharma companies of this virus. because China wouldn't export the biological molecule. But it just shows you don't have to. Now you can just send the information and recapitulate it. And so we did a test. We set up a device at Novartis.

We sent the sequence to them. The device made the molecule, and they scaled that up for vaccine production. But everything that happened with the COVID vaccines were really modeled after our early success. and you can make large number of RNA molecules now. And so our model with that contributed to all of us getting vaccinated against COVID. But to answer your question on the long distance horizons, the short distance is going to be the potential for totally new industrial revolution. of, for example, all the microbes we discovered in the ocean, they make chemicals more complex

than the best chemists on the planet can make. And so taking those gene pathways, putting them in synthetic organisms, will be able to create a whole new chemical libraries that will change every type of chemical therapy, but also industrial chemicals for building things, making things. And the notion of this was developed for ideas on making things on Mars instead of sending everything up there. Because it's very expensive to build enough rockets to carry everything up there. So if you can get microbes to produce the building materials and the chemicals and the food substances, that that would be the future.

So I think that's the near-term future. I proposed because, you know, while I believe panspermia has happened and is continually happening, we've already contaminated the moon. We've already contaminated Mars. You can't truly sterilize things here on this planet in a microbial world where there's viruses and microbes in the air just everywhere. you are, you can't eliminate them. And so we've sent microbes to Mars. We've sent people in poop to the moon.

We're pumping things out of the space station. So we're creating a version of panspermia. Every astronaut that goes up to the space station takes a totally different repertoire of the microbiome of millions of different bacteria with it. We've sequenced the hepa filters from the space station. They're loaded with so much diversity and so much stuff. It's just stunning.

But I've argued that any astronauts going to future planet colonization, we should sterilize them first and give them a synthetic microbiome, so we're not creating a set of new pathogens that would develop in an environment. So those are sort of short-term ideas. Human genome engineering isn't inevitable. We're not ready for it now. We understand 1 to 2% of the genome at best. When you say understand, what do you mean?

Know what these genes code for, why you have the traits that you have, why I have the traits that I have. We just had this recent discussion here about imagination. I have a fantasia, so I don't see any picture. at all in my mind. I only think in concepts. The person I was talking to only sees in pictures and puts his world together through pictures.

And we don't even know the simple basis of that because NIH doesn't like to fund behavioral studies that lead to social changes on the human brain. So we're just not studying it. You can't understand basis of what's called intelligence, not that, you know, but there's multiple different types. It's a spectrum of things. So we're at a still a very early stage of understanding. One method of survival of our species is going to be to engineer humans to live in environments that will be inevitable because we're

destroying slowly the biosphere that we live in. So maybe it be humans that can tolerate higher levels of CO2, or lower levels of oxygen. Higher temperatures. Or higher temperatures. Once we don't even have a preliminary understanding of the brain. We think we do because we understand more than we used to, so that seems like huge breakthroughs,

but we basically understand nothing. And we certainly don't understand the genetic basis of how the brain is hardwired. So in inbred mice and ranch, the neurons are in the exact same location, the brain plus or minus a few microns. So all that's completely under genetic control. So we start out being hardwired, but we're also hardwired to be plastic in a duct. That may sound like a contraindication, but you know, it's part of the design. Anti-Fragility, yeah. To be adaptable and in our brains are plastic to a certain extent and can change structure and function.

But we're not really studying that because we don't know what most of the genes even do yet. So we have to increase our knowledge level before I would ever be willing to start engineering the human the human genome to change humans. Interesting. Yeah, it's reminiscent of, you know, the mapping.

We have a periodic table on the wall over here. I don't think I can capture the lanthan of those, those are the noble gases. There it is in the corner over there. You know, most of these were discovered by number,

you know, in the last, you know, hundred years or so. And of course, many of them are important for life, but actually not as many as you think,

right? I think the highest one that's, has some viability is like, um, there's some amount of copper, zinc obviously is important, but I don't think we need cadmium or technetium, et cetera. So there's a lot of wasted. Iron is very important.

Iron is very important, but it comes before copper, as I mentioned in zinc. There's a little arsenic, and people have claimed they found arsenic life that went away pretty quickly. I want to talk about an event, I think it happened in 1997. You were considering leaving this company, HGS and going off on your own. It meant a great sacrifice for you financially in terms of stock options, things you had vested, important investors and relationships in the corporate setting. And you talk about, you know, setting out to see, to clear your mind.

Yeah, it was not 97. It was actually early 2000s. I'd sequenced the genome. I raised a billion dollars cash for 3% of a company with no revenue. I didn't get along. This is Salera? Yeah. Salera had a parent company, a Plera that was sort of a holding company, a very volatile Cuban

CEO who only tolerated me because I was the only one who could sequence the human genome. And I indicated to a board member that once I was done with that, I was considering going back to my institute because I wanted to keep doing basic research. church. He panicked. They decided if I left the stock would crash, so they got the brilliant idea to fire me, and the stock crashed even faster. But, you know, went from the intensity of those years. You got an idea from the book. I was on the front page of a newspaper almost daily somewhere in the world. The world was watching every move. One thing I point out, you There's thousands of reasons perhaps why I should have failed.

But I had the best team of scientists in the world, and they were all motivated to make it work and make history. I was the orchestra conductor. It's the team that actually did it. Gene Myers led the algorithm team that wrote the whole new algorithm for sampling 25 million sequences that nobody else thought was even possible. If it hadn't worked, it would have been the biggest flame out in science history, right? I would have been noted for the fastest death in science from trying to do something too big and too bold.

But it worked, but it was such intensity. It was a 24-hour day thing for two and a half years building this and actually sequencing the genome. We didn't know. The White House event was scheduled before the computer stopped the computer. calculation to know whether we had a genome or not. Hey there, it's me again. Are you enjoying this incredible conversation with one of the most brilliant thinkers alive, Craig Venter?

Then, I know you'll love what I'm about to offer you. If you go to Brian Keating.com slash list and join my mailing list, you will get the hottest news in the cosmos from consciousness in the brain to life in the universe. And that will make you the star of any cocktail party. All is for free. My weekly Monday magic mailing lists always consider the highlights from all. all-around science and especially from the end to the Impossible podcast, with links to transcripts

and giveaways, and you may also win a real piece of the early solar system, maybe the piece that brought life to Earth in a panspermic voyage across the cosmos. So do yourself a favor and go to Brian Keating.com slash list and join now. That's Brian Keating.com slash list. Now back to the episode. Take us back to the... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Because we're going to get to the voyage of the Sorcerer One, I believe. But talk about the race. Talk about you, Francis, N.H. public-private partnership, rivalry, and then winning it. Well, I've gotten lots of attention.

I've got walls full of awards, including the National Medal of Science from Obama for that work. I thought I had to share with Francis Collins, but that's all right. So, you know, I approach things pretty much as a basic scientist asking questions. So I was trying to isolate the adrenaline receptor work that started when I was a student here at UCSD. And the standard in science then, before genomics, was you'd spent 10 or 20 years trying to isolate a protein and characterize it. Lots of Nobel prizes have been given for single protein discoveries. And so when the first discussions in the mid-80s came of the idea to sequence the human genome, whichever we thought was outrageous.

I love the idea after spending a decade trying to get one protein. I thought of just having all the neurotransmitter receptors and everything to do with cognition in one step instead of waiting four centuries to do it. It was just a sexy idea to me. I had the first automated DNA sequencer because I was an intramural NIH. I had more money than God to do whatever I wanted to do. And, you know, so I actually sequenced the first genes in history with automation. And so I had the only tools to actually do what was being proposed for the human genome.

I just got very excited about the idea. And randomness is a key theme in mathematics. mathematics and cosmology. Serendipity, yeah. It's also a key part of what we did in genomics. So shotgun sequencing is you have to have a perfect proton distribution of clones, and then you randomly select those and sequence it. And by doing that, you can recapitulate the entire genome.

Can I just- If it's not truly random, you can't do that. Can I just ask, when you say sequencing, so I'm envisioning this process, you know, running and as, sequencing different, you know, pairs and even individual, yeah, individual base pairs, et cetera, within the gene, right? And then the machine spit out roughly a 500 base pair sequence of. That's what I was going to ask.

So what was the fundamental atom of that? So, okay, go on. So, yeah. So we had 25 million fragments, roughly 500 base pairs long. I see. Okay. Continue. So that's the mathematical problem that had to be solved, putting that back together.

NIH refused to fund the grant that Hamm and I submitted in 1995, this idea we had to sequence the first genome. Yeah. And even after we had it 90% done, you know, we took money out of our own bank account at the Institute to do it, it was over 90% done. I wrote a letter to Francis saying, look, it's clearly going to work. I'm not trying to embarrass NIH. If you fund it now, you can still share the credit for doing this.

And he wrote back, I have the letter. It's I think it reproduced in my book. He stood behind the study section who said, this is impossible. It won't work. A few months later, we announced the first genome in history. And so that sort of created attention. Because I did it outside the realm of this entire enterprise called the Human Genome Project that was starting with a five-year project to sequence E. coli and then yeast,

and they were going to progress up. Nematode. Nematode, then Drosophila. And I kind of threw a monkey wrench into that because E. coli had barely been started, and we did the first one independently. And if you read the science paper in 1995, I had to really fight for this line to be in there. But I said that I believe this is the method that will be used to sequence the human genome. I was probably the only one on the planet who believe that idea.

But it comes with maybe the A Fantasia of being able to think in concepts. Some things are just totally obvious to me. And fortunately, a combination of great intuition and that ability to put concepts together. together. The only time I screw up in life is if I ignore that intuition. It's been right a hundred percent of the time. And I just refused to fund these experiments to see it. They had their, it was a public works project. They were distributing billions to hundred campuses. To labs around the world and you know led Cindy Brenner to joke, you know, why don't we have prisoners do this? You

know, if it's a forced labor thing to do. But it made sense to solve it mathematically. And so we sort of gave up and thought that I was going to have to sit on the sidelines. I got a call. In fact, I got several calls. I treated them. I thought they were junk calls and I ignored them. Of offering me $300 million to start a company to sequence the human genome.

Wow. And it was applied biosystems, the company that was, they were making a new. capillary sequencer that they thought would fit with my method. Did these rely on PCR and maybe you can explain? Okay. Did you know Kerry when he was? I knew him well. Okay. What was he like just a side, could we take a sidebar here? He came up, well first could you explain what PCR is and why it wasn't relevant, you know, to knucklehead like me? Well, PCR was a method for, you know, it's like a Xerox machine for making copies of DNA. It was really a profound technique that changed what people could do in the laboratory.

He's a genius, but really a crazy mofo. Tortured genius. Well, he's a wild genius. He's a fun guy. I enjoy him and, but he went off, you know, with bizarre ideas of HIV and other things in the end. But we've met, you know, components of PCR to make copies of the strands of DNA that were going to be sequenced. So, yeah, we had rooms full of PCR machines that were part of the process of getting enough molecules of DNA that the automated sequencing machines could read. And those were the capillary things that applied was going to give you.

So, you know, they sent somebody out to see me and said that they were sincere about the $300 million and wanted me to start a company and invited me out to Foster City to look at their new machine, which was actually six breadboard devices. spread over six different buildings. And I looked at all of them and I looked at the preliminary data and it was totally clear to me that it was going to work. So we did some calculations of how many machines it would take to do this. And it was funny, we made an order of magnitude error too big. And so it looked like it was going to take the 30,000 machines and we were sort of saying, well, this still might be doable. And then we discovered there was a tenfold error. And I was, oh, in fact, it was a hundredfold error because we only needed 300 machines. And even though that was absurd,

all of a sudden by contrast, that seemed so doable. We thought, okay, yeah, 300 machines and 300 million dollars, we can do this. So I flew back to my institute. I went to see my friend the Nobel laureate, Ham Smith, who had been working with. with me for 20 years and I said, look, I looked at the machine. I'm certain it's going to work. If we get 300 of these machines and scale everything up, I think we have a shot and they're giving us the resources to do it. He goes, I don't think it will work, but I'm going with you. And that was that's sort of how the whole team built of I, as soon as I announced it, We've got a thousand applicants of the best scientists in the world, the best mathematician,

physicist. We had to build the third largest civilian computer in the world, a whopping one and a half taraflops, which cost roughly $100 million to build. And now it's a few thousand dollar computer. It's kind of cool how fast things change. But it worked because of the dedicated, incredible team. that it built it. I don't think a team's been built like it before or after. Ham's complaint afterwards was it was such a unique experience. We did it too quickly because we sequenced the

genome in nine months and then just gave the illusion that it was a simpler than it was. Things exploded. So the intensity of this was so much when I was fired from there, you were just like going in to a sensory deprivation tank. And so I decided I had to do some recouping before deciding what I was gonna do next. So I got on my boat and sailed down and lived in Tortola for several months working on my boat and thinking of ideas

of what I was gonna do. Came back and started three new not-for-profit institutes. One to do the environmental work, wanted to do synthetic biology and one to build off the ideas off the human genome. But it took that, you know, rebuilding period just, you know, after anything that intense, you know, when you're in the press every day, hounded every day, it was, you know, it was a very unique experience doing the negotiation with the White House. When I agreed to do that, my colleagues hated me for it.

They were jealous or? No, no, no. My colleagues at Salero because we were so far ahead. Oh, right. Why give up the, why share the glory. And scientists like Richard Lerner locally, I had a dinner with him. I told them what I was going to do. He got viscerally angry with me.

So people wanted me to embarrass NIH and the government for all the horrible things that they've done. Right. Well, they've certainly done. But tell me, do you regret it? If you could go back, would you have done that? No, because the notion was, you know, trying to be publicly minded with this. I mean, emotionally, would that have felt great to embarrass the hell out of them that, you know, we did it with 100 million instead of five billion.

and we did it in nine months. My ideas got proven right, and the team got proven right. And I knew that if I didn't make the compromise to do the announcement at the White House, that the following year or two, when they eventually finished, they would do that,

and we would be totally left out of it. Right. It's like they say the third guy makes the money from the house. You know, the first guy loses all the money. The second guy still loses money. The third guy sells it. So it was a negotiated, you know, truce, but it was really based on what Salara was doing. And I would get calls every day, you know, as the computer run stopped yet.

And, you know, because they were having to schedule all these dignitaries. It was on, you know, live international TV. And we didn't have a genome yet. C change. Yeah, I remember that very well. I was at Stanford. But it got down to a game of chicken in the end because I had to share my speech with the White House because it was going to be live television from the White House. And Tony Blair was going to be part of it because England was such a big part of the genome effort.

And they sent me Tony Blair's speech. And it was just totally insulting, totally one-sided, praising the person. praising the public effort and attacking this company that, you know, intervened. And I called the White House Science Advisor and said, unless Tony Blair changes his speech, I'm not coming. Wow. This was the night before the White House event. He said, you're asking us to change a foreign head of state speech.

We can't do that. And I said, well, I know you can and you will if you want me to show up. And they did. He called me at one o'clock in the morning. And he goes, I can't send it to you, but I guarantee that you will be very happy with the changes that he's made. In fact, I was. He changed at 180 degrees so that all the scientists in England were totally pissed off with Tony Blair because he was being so nice to me.

you know, but these games, you know, I just shows the intensity of all this stuff. And in the book you talk about Francis and there's a line that really resonated shockingly so. You said something to the effect that he was more interested in the credit than the process or the money or anything. And that really is kind of haunting, you know, to think that there are people doing the science and it is truly, you know, about them and about their egos and about their egos and about their reputations and you know you don't have to comment on if you don't want it but you did write it in the book but as you know it's that's the history of science there's been some of the biggest battles even early on here at UCSD uh with some of the big areas you can't work at these levels without having a strong ego yeah and so it's a question what's what's the driving force

i mean you want your ideas to be right um but We were still trying to do it in a publicly minded fashion. We're taking private money. We gave the genome away for free to scientists. I had a chance to embarrass the government. My view is they were embarrassing themselves. So we agreed to share the credit even though it wasn't. So different scientists are totally motivated by different things.

We're given disproportionate attention, fame, then you can probably get in most other areas other than being a rock singer or something. Yeah, but when it combines with power, I mean, I had on Jay Batacharya from Stanford, who's a good friend of mine, dear person. Of course, you know, in late 2020, there was articles circulating around

that there were, you know, fringe epidemiologists, including him at a Nobel laureate at Stan, I think Levin, at Stanford who had joined in and we have to, you know, basically censor them or mock them, humiliate them so that they don't get attention. And one of the ways was to have, you know, op-eds in the Washington Post. And I found that really despicable. And it's not surprising when I reread your book, your Life Dakota. That was, you know, kind of a character trait that I have to confess wasn't that unfamiliar from the way he is 25 years later. Yeah. You can do good science and make good contributions, but your ideas as an individual can be really effed up.

And my quote friend Watson has proven that. It's James Watson. And he's now been censored by his own institution and fired, you know, because I think he did make important contributions, not necessarily the role and the model of DNA structure. You know, he helped build called Spring Harbor and raise money and do things for it. You know, he has contributed positively to science, but he's one of the biggest racist and sexists on the planet. And that does a disservice of almost counteracting any good that he might have done. And he's not the first one.

There's, you know, other Nobel laureates that have really. gone off on Shockley, you know, was sort of the predecessor there. And just because people are bright in a certain area doesn't mean they have the right ethics and morals. And, you know, when I announced I was going to sequence the human genome, Watson called me Hitler and, you know, that I was taking over things. But he seemed directly threatened. Yeah. It was very scary. Yeah. Well, because he was constantly afraid from the science they did and the discoveries that it would shut down Congress funding their program if it was going to be done faster and cheaper by industry. And instead,

it was a very bizarre situation. And, you know, we had the U.S. government and other governments competing against a startup biotech company in the United States. I guess the only one who would understand that at all is Elon, and he's done pretty good with his company. competition against NASA, but in part from learning from some of the things we did. China funds its biotech companies. It supports them. Only in America would we have the government competing with a startup biotech company by outspending at 50-fold. Or suppressing contracts. Yeah. And so it's bizarre stuff, but I guess that's the diversity of our system. The cool thing is I could have an idea like I

had. It obviously stimulated others to give me the resources. They didn't do it in a selfless fashion. They wanted to sell their machines and they made billion selling the machines because I made them work. But that's okay. That's capitalism at work. The net effect was I got to do first class science for the public benefit and moved it along 10 years faster. Yeah. Let's get to some fun science questions and actually some voyages. As you said earlier, the voyage of the Voyage of the Challenger back in the 1800s. Obviously, we haven't mentioned probably the most famous biological voyage until the Sorcerer 2, which is the Beagle and biology.

Well, the Beagle was a survey voyage that had a naturalist on board that just went along to make observations along the way. So it wasn't actually a scientific expedition. Right. But it's definitely the most famous vessel. And the observations that Darwin made are fundamental was that when you get life in isolated environment, there's evolution of unique genetic characteristics associated because it's an isolated environment. We see that today in human populations where there's been inbreeding, for example,

Saudi Arabia was based on 12 Bedouin tribes, all first cousin marriages within the tribes, not even between them. They have some of the highest rates of genetic diseases in the world. Second type 2 diabetes only to the Pima Indians. Why? Because type 2 diabetes was a survival advantage for the Bedouin existence of feast and famine. Once they switch to a steady society diet, it becomes a disease. But it's locked in and with the inbreeding even worse. So Darwin's work totally predicted that in advance and what we're using today. But I had the pleasure of following his exact steps.

Only I had a new lens. I call it the lens of genomics. we could see things by looking at the genetic code after it was sequenced that he couldn't see even if he had good microscopes. So we discovered 10,000 times the life forms that he discovered, but they were the basis of all the life forms he discovered existing. But that's what happens. It happens in your field. You get a new telescope that can see further, new instruments. all of a sudden the lens of genomics changed the entire world.

Microbiology was based on what you could see through a microscope or what you could get to grow on an auger plate. And if it would grow on agorplate, it was deemed not to exist. And that's why that's what started this expedition. They were discovering microbes in the ocean and numbering them one at a time. So SAR-11 was the 11th microbe discovered in the Sargasso Sea. And there was this paper by a physicist in PNAS that I read when I was on Sorcer One recuperating of how little diversity there was of life in the ocean.

And as a lifelong sailor, swimmer, surfer, diver, this just didn't make any sense to me at all because half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, the diversity of all the food does. And that's where I got the idea just to use the same method we use for the human genome to try shotgun sequencing the ocean. And discovered just from the very first experiment where they had 11 organisms, we discovered 2000 in just the first sequencing experiment and 1.4 million new genes. So we followed the challenger.

took samples every 200 miles around the globe, over 65,000 miles covering most oceans and seas. And even early on discovered more new microbes than there are stars in the universe, which made it easier to recruit physicists and mathematicians because all of a sudden they said biology was a bigger problem. It's exactly right. Makes cosmology seem easy. So that voyage began in what year did you start the first voyage? Well, the early experiments started in 2003 and then really got going a few years later

where we did a full circumnavigation. But like everything in science, you know, it wasn't as easy as just going out like Darwin did and taking samples and making observations. Darwin didn't have PETA or he would have been sued multiple times. for the experiments that you know tortoise when you discover the iguanas he couldn't believe that they could breathe underwater so he'd tie stones to them and throw them in the water and see if they'd survive and you don't do that with your graduate students well you can do it with graduate students that's okay but um so we had to get permits we had to

work through the state department with every country where we wanted to sample in their 100-mile border. It encountered numerous problems. We got arrested twice. We got threatened with sinking by the French and the British. We got bordered by a SWAT team in Australia. Just asking basic science questions in a world that's fearful of science is not always easy. No, it is not. So is there going to be the next voyage of the Sorcerer 2 or maybe even a Sorcerer 3? What do we have to look forward to on the oceans? Well, the good thing is, you know, one, it's a simple idea. In most good ideas in science are pretty simple ideas.

We showed that we could just take a sample from the environment, isolate the microorganisms. For seawater, it's simple. We just had a series of Millipore filters that collect things. at a very tiny level, so we collect the viruses on one filter, the microbes on the other, the diatoms on another. We just put the filters in the freezer until we could get to a port, send them back to the Ventra Institute where we shotgun sequenced everything on the filter. It's an idea now there's been hundreds of mini and major voyages copying this. Anybody listening, any kid can take a little vial, go out to the nearest stream, lake, river, ocean, estuary, take a sample, isolate the microbes, sequence them, and make more discoveries than were made in the 1900s of new organisms.

Because we have that much diversity out there remaining to be discovered. Is there any way that they can actually submit them for analysis? Well, people have been putting more, more of these, the public databases, and in fact, it's one of the problems we're trying to solve with the synthetic cell. Most of the genes discovered by us and others are of unknown function. So we have now developed this catalog of biology on the planet without knowing the function of the majority. of things that have been discovered.

So we were in the infancy of science, not in a mature stage. Well, Craig, this has been phenomenal and there's much more to come. But what I love to do now is end the beginning part of the conversation. I know you have a limited time here. I don't want to miss my audience questions. So what we're going to do is we're going to end the main episode of the channel, the conversation with Craig. And then in order to see part two or the question and answer period as well as to hear Craig's answers to my final four existential questions on the meaning of life, advice to his former self, the most magical technology ever invented by man and what he expects to give as a future sort of legacy for the planet.

You'll have to subscribe to my mailing list at Brian Keating.com slash list. And if you show me this little meteorite there, you will actually get a chunk of a chunk of. this rock and we have some talks about panspermia questions about pan spurnia in the bonus episode so you get the bonus episode go to brian keating.com slash list i will send it out to you as soon as it's ready and you may even win a chunk of space rock in fact you're guaranteed to win a chunk of space rock what i do crag is anyone with a dot edu email address who uh joins my mailing list gets a guaranteed fragment of this 4.5 billion year old piece of space schmuts sent to them along with its chemical assay and we'll even put on some of craig's DNA i'm going to

have him slobber over some of the meteorites. So tune in to part two. You'll get the link when you join the mailing list. And for now, Craig, thank you so much for being a guest on the End of the Impossible podcast. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.