I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - The Microbiologist: The Science That Could End Disease (And Create Life) | Andrew Hessel

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

In this episode of I’ve Got Questions, I sit down with Andrew Hessel, microbiologist, geneticist, author and pioneering voice in synthetic biology, a field that is redefining how we understand and engineer life itself. We explore what happens when biology becomes programmable and every cell, virus, and even our own DNA can be edited, rewritten, and redesigned. Andrew explains how breakthroughs in digital biology could make infertility a thing of the past, why diseases like cancer and diabetes could soon be treated at the cellular level, and how a new era of genetic surgery could let us reprogram our bodies before illness ever begins. We also unpack the ethical, emotional, and philosophical questions of what it means to live in a world where we can literally reprogram life. Follow my work here: Website: https://www.sineadbovell.com Substack: https://sineadbovell.substack.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sineadbovell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadbovell Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/SineadBovell YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Sineadbovell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/sineadbovell

By 2030, every single-celled organism, every virus, every protein, every cellular component now becomes engineerable. We could be on the cusp of a new technology that could change the idea of infertility entirely. In vitro gametogenesis, which is a really fancy way of saying making eggs and sperm from stem cells. So the future of conception could be just getting your blood drawn. You had said it's now open season on all rare genetic diseases. We are seeing more and more now the ability to design and build personalized therapies in cancer, and that's huge. World changing. So does this mean something that was previously untreatable, a rare untreatable genetic disease?

That is going to be a thing of the past. Have you been sequenced? No, and I'm concerned about the data. They'll make some people millionaires because their genomes will be so valuable. They'll have some resistance to some disease that companies will come and say, I'd like to buy an exclusive license to that person. DNA. What would you say to people who think we shouldn't be touching this at all? Gene editing, gene therapies, we're playing God.

There is just no stopping it. There's just too many powerful benefits for individuals and groups. Welcome back to I've Got Questions. I'm your host, Shenei Vowell. I'm sitting down with Andrew Hessel, who is a microbiologist, a geneticist, and works in a field that I am deeply passionate about called synthetic biology. What happens when we treat biology like a technology, right? When biology becomes programmable, he's going to tell us what that means and what that future looks like. Andrew, how would you describe the work that you do and the field you practice in?

The area that I'm obsessively focused on is our growing ability to program life. So DNA in some ways is like the chapters in a book. It's something that can be read. And so by programming it, you're essentially saying now we can edit out or move around that DNA and maybe write a little bit of a different story. Or what do you mean when you say you can program a cell and how are you reading it and what is it described as? I look at the DNA as the operating system, the molecular operating system of the cellular machine. It really is like the code, like the software that run. that machine. And although it's not like the human readable software that we write for programming

computers, which is then compiled into an executable that the computer systems can run, with DNA, it is the executable. We've had to reverse engineer it to kind of produce a human understanding of that code. You wrote in your book, a Genesis machine. We could be on the cusp of a new technology that could change the idea of infertility entirely, including the biological clock, that could become a thing of the past. And the idea that somebody is infertile could become a thing of the past. So in vitro gametogenesis, what is this technology and where is the science today? Yeah, no, absolutely. So fertility is one of my favorite areas to track. My challenge for me personally was that we weren't able to conceive naturally. So we had to go into the IVF.

process, which as a as a biologist, I loved. The huge challenge around IVF is taking control of these processes that normally inside of your body and externalizing them into the lab. And the one precious thing that needs to be acquired to do that is, is human eggs. Normally you only produce one a month. They give drugs, very powerful drugs, so that you over-stimulate the ovaries and produce multiple eggs. And then those have to be. be collected through a surgery and then moved into the lab. Fertilizing them is easy. Tracking their growth is easy.

Implantation back into the womb is relatively easy. But the limiting factor is the eggs. So there's a technique that's being developed now. It's working in mice. They're doing, it's advancing towards humans. Some people I've heard is possibly within three years now of something called IVG, in vitro gametogenesis, which is a really fantastic. way of saying making eggs and sperm from stem cells. And when you can do that, when you can move into

the lab, the manufacture of eggs in particular, but in some cases sperm, you now can produce an unlimited number of eggs. And where does the stem cell come from? So if somebody is... It's recovered from a blood sample. So they basically take some of your cells, turn them back into a stem cell, then, so we call them IPSC's induced pluripotent stem cells. It just means we've engineered it and it can become any other cell. And then you learn how to forward, flip the switches to turn it into an egg. That's huge. And when we do that, the entire process of IVF changes, because now you, you know, you get a

blood draw and you come back in a few weeks and it's like, how many eggs would you like, ma'am? And then fertilizing them, obviously, is not a big challenge. Now you can use all sorts of high throughput selection procedures for choosing the embryo that you'll take into, you know, to produce your baby. So essentially you could go get blood work. Your blood is drawn. That blood is turned into stem cells. And that stem cells could be converted, those stem cells could be converted into eggs. Eggs or sperm.

Or sperm. Yep. So the future of conception could be just getting your blood drawn. And that would mean it doesn't matter if you're a woman in her late 40s and the idea of metapause and racing against this biological clock. It doesn't matter if you were a same-sex couple and you want now to have children that are biologically related to both of you or if you're a male that's been diagnosed with infertility. All of that essentially could go out the window if this technology works. Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

And the costs of IVF could fall really significantly instead of being, you know, it's often anywhere from $8 to $20,000 a cycle that could drop to, you know, under a thousand. Yeah, it's a huge technology. So IVG is something a lot of people are working on and trying to get right. And, of course, even if you succeed, you still have to do that big step where you actually produce a baby from these, you know, from these engineered eggs. Which is still even a challenge in IVF, right? There's still a lot of uncertainty there. Not all of the eggs convert and so forth.

But it's a huge upgrade because, you know, some people get are lucky, they're young, or they banked their eggs early. They might have 20, 30 eggs, each one representing a potential person. But in this with cell technology, again, you could have hundreds of thousands of eggs. Right. It's a complete game changer. And then you can also screen those eggs for health and all the things that we apply to IVF, but even more so. And this is potentially three years away. Yeah, I just recently was listening to another interview,

and the researcher felt that, yeah, within three years, we might be over that particular home. That doesn't mean that we'll have our first baby produced from those engineered eggs, but they think they're cracking the programming of the IPSC intuiting. I think IVG is the technology I am most excited about this decade. I think it is the most transformative reproductive technology we've ever seen. I think there will probably be a lot of pushback initially when people hear the idea that you

could conceive from a few drops of blood. But I think we're familiar with this story, right, IVF? We almost didn't have because there was so much objection to the ethics of it all. Yeah, you know, that's almost ancient history now. And certainly it was global news when the first baby was produced, but today we take it for granted. Most groups. Having a child is such a personal thing. And if you choose to use technology or not, it's a really personal choice. If you choose to get genetic testing on your developing baby, it's a personal choice.

If a person wants to have a child today, they have more and more tools at their disposal to do that. And that I find really exciting. I also love the idea that as we get better at doing this, we might be able to correct a number of serious, you know, do genetic surgery on some of these embryos if necessary to ensure that any combinations that the parents brought to the table that could lead to illnesses or major challenges can be corrected right there. There's, you know, we're familiar with the Chinese doctor that did the, the first CRISPR edits on children in China. And that wasn't, that wasn't seen as a good thing. That wasn't seen as a good thing because, because he had actually done an enhancement. Right.

And giving HIV resistant to these children. But that was not medically necessary. It wasn't properly reviewed and vetted. And he, he paid a serious price for the choices that were made. in the sense that he went to prison for three years. But that being said, there are a number of instances moving forward where I think that genetic surgery on an embryo is going to be warranted. For whatever reason, the parental combination of genetic material is going to produce a sick child.

If we can do a genetic surgery to fix that before they grow and develop into a child, I think that's warranted. A lot of pediatric care has really pushed the forefront of medicine in cancer and in diagnostics, et cetera. And it's fascinating that you word it that way, right? So right now that disease manifested, it would be potentially a physical surgery. There's a future world where there's a genetic surgery done to the child isn't even born with that disease, and they don't even experience it. So for people that might be having children in the next five to 10 years, some of the choices, parents will have, will expand. And they could see these are the genetic diseases or diseases

your child is more at risk of. It could be from a cancer to maybe an autoimmune disease to maybe even a psychiatric disorder. Would you like to perhaps perform a genetic surgery if it's safe and if the science community does its thing correctly? And a parent would be able to make that choice to move forward or not. Absolutely. It's going to start with some really severe diseases. but down the road we could start making cosmetic edits. That to me, I'd like to not to go there. But when the technologies have been proven through research and development, people are going to use them.

Like I co-founded a project called the Genome Project Right. And it was really just recognizing that, yeah, we put a lot of effort into reading the human genome. eventually we're going to start putting the same amount of effort in, you know, to answer the question, can we write a human genome from scratch like we've done with viruses and bacteria? And I think that is, it will be possible. And to write a human genome means can we write the instruction manual for a human? Can we write the complete instruction manual from a human from scratch?

and we're going to get there with the technologies that we develop. Today we've demonstrated we can write any protein, we can build metabolic circuits, we can build viruses, we've made a few bacteria. The tools for synthesizing and assembling and, hey, using the computer term, booting up a genome in a cell, are getting better. We're working bottom up, and there's still not many examples,

but it's the tools that are improving exponentially. Now, once you can synthesize a genome, and this is something I love about the work that I get to do, when you can synthesize a genome, you have full programming control. It's not just an edit. It's not just a search and replace. It's a very new. Now you have full control at the bit level over the entire genome.

It just makes genetic engineering easy. So how is biology a technology, which is essentially what you're describing? We can think of the cell, which is the kind of the fundamental unit of all living things as being a machine. It's a processor. It's not processing digital information. It's processing physical molecular information, whether it's a chemical sugar, whether it's a protein, whether it's nucleic acid. And it is a machine. We've been reverse engineering the processes of that machine for a century now.

and understanding how it works and how it fits together. There's only a small number of very low-level processes in that machine that are universal, which is why cells are the basis of all living things. And they can be programmed with DNA code. When you change the DNA code, you change the cell. How are you then telling a cell to do something where? Well, let's just start with a gene. A gene typically encodes a protein.

protein, and a protein is kind of a machine in the component of the cell. Like a little manufacturing. Yeah, it's like, it's, think of it as an electronic component that has a defined job. And then we have switches that we've defined in DNA code that will turn that proteins production on and off, for example. We've got a fairly large library now of these switches and of these proteins and other control systems. systems in the cell that we've learned how to put them together in a logical way, literally writing a program. And for the human genome, which has about three... And what is a genome? Just in case a genome is the full genetic program, the full DNA-based program for building and operating a

particular organism, which may be a single cell, like a bacterium, or you and me. So it's like your instruction manual for your body. That is what your genome is. It is essentially the operating system for your body. And so when you hear the term getting your genome sequenced, that would be scientists opening that operating system and seeing what it looks like? That would be scientists extracting the genetic material, rinsing away all the proteins, and then using various technologies now for reading the linear chain of instructions, A, T, G, C, T, T, C, A. And computationally taking that data, it's not read from beginning to end. It's read in chunks.

Computationally, reassembling the entire genetic sequence, and then running that through other software to analyze the function of encoded in that sequence. So to read the book of your life in Y, you, this organism, look, walk, talk this way. And so if I was to get my genome sequence, and just drop a piece of saliva on a sequencer that I think now is about the size of a stapler, what could it tell me about my body and how much would something like that cost? To kind of reassemble the full genome you need to sequence multiple times. But what that code will tell you is essentially mapped back onto everything we've charted with humans

relating to that code and function, whether it, whether that this particular sequence produced a disease, this particular sequence produced this blood type, this particular sequence produced eye colors. The understanding isn't 100% complete, but we build associations to known traits from that sequence. And how long did it take to sequence the first human genome? The first human genome took approximately, this was the human genome project, started in 1990 and essentially completed in 2003. So 13 years. And how much of that costs? Approximately the numbers are all hand-wavy here, but it's about $3 billion.

It was roughly a dollar-a-base pair, given the technology of the day. So it took around $13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Now it could take around five hours and cost. About $1,000, give or take, not for the five-hour one, but today routinely you can get a high-quality, 30 to 100 X whole human genome for about $1,000. And the prices are always fluctuating, but definitely falling. And so you can see that cost curve. So essentially you can have the instruction manual of your body in some ways

sequenced in red and understood. And if something maybe went wrong, scientists can see potentially where and that cost. That takes half of an afternoon and $1,000. And maybe in the next couple of years, you can see it maybe being a part of routine health checks. And so we were emailing a few months ago. And you had said in the email,

it's now open season on all rare genetic diseases. So does this mean something that was previously untreatable, a rare untreatable genetic disease? That is going to be a thing of the past. We have the tools to make that a chapter of history that's closed. The tools are coming online where it's not like we're going to solve every rare disease, but what being able to sequence does is allow us first often to diagnose a rare genetic disease. This can be a huge challenge.

We have somewhere between 40 and 50 trillion cells in our bodies. And if the fix requires changing the code in those cells to repair it, we're kind of stuck. If we can target a particular tissue to a particular, group of cells to affect a repair, whether it's a blood stem cell, or whether it's cells in the inner ear, retinal cells in our eyes. We've created systems to deliver a fix, a repaired bit of genetic code, and to do essentially a search and replace an edit of the code in those cells. There was a story about a baby that had a rare genetic disease that I think you were referring to a couple months ago. And so how were scientists able to do that? What would

have that have entailed? So the baby was born with, and I think it was something that destroyed muscle or protein. Is this a big surgery procedure or is it something very simple, a laptop and tinkering in a lab? Nothing simple, but it was, they were able to get a molecular diagnostic of this, of this baby's disease very quickly. Which means what? Which means they could identify the gene and the aberrant part of the gene that was the issues. So you get a molecular medical diagnostic, which is cool. But what was really remarkable, and I think it was baby KJ, what was really remarkable there, as I recall, was just the speed at which the physicians and scientists were able to engineer a gene therapy to correct that particular deficiency and to get

the authorization to use. it and ultimately do that gene therapy very in a period of I believe all start to finish somewhere on the order of nine months. So you're looking at the mutation on a computer and you can see where the genome, something went wrong in the mutation. And then how does a gene therapy actually get programmed and then how does that gene therapy get delivered to the baby itself? Is it a vaccine?

What does it look like? So the actual fix would be identified from the molecular diagnostics, and then they would design and use software, computer software, to engineer a replacement, essentially a search and replace of that damaged area. And that typically gets packaged into a carrier that allows you to get that new construct into the cell and the editing system to do the search and replace. Typically, that's either a little fat globule, a lipid polysaccharide LPS that basically encapsulates the new construct and allows it to get inside the cell, or it can be delivered with more precision if a viral construct is used, because viruses have very close associations with the cells they infect.

And so I guess if this is totally new to somebody, you can picture opening up a Microsoft Word document and seeing a spelling error. And that's technically the mutation, maybe that the baby had or the gene mutation. And so it's a control, alt, and then we want to delete that error, and we want to write the correct spelling. And that correct letter or spelling gets delivered maybe on a little piece of fat with the instructions inside. And that gets delivered to the gene and then corrects that mutation. And they're doing most of it. They're looking at a computer to do most of it. Well, it's a fusion of computer work and clinical work.

Yeah, and work on the lab bench. What excites me is that as we get the tools for being able to do these molecular diagnostics and to make gene therapies faster and get more experience with it, it really is kind of open season. I don't expect that gene therapies are going to be out of reach. Sometimes they cost millions of dollars. And, of course, in the case of baby cage, you're getting an entire team of people coming together to help this child. I don't, I think we'll get, I think we'll get better at doing this. And I think like anything that digitizes, biology is going to get faster, better, cheaper.

And I think when you look at the early days of getting blood tests and how cumbersome that was and how many people were involved, this is decades and decades ago. And now you just go to the local clinic and it takes an hour sometimes to get, you know, your vitamin D results back. But that used to be a huge production. So something like a gene therapy could be on that type of cost and accessibility curve potentially. Absolutely. And I think a lot of what will ultimately drive this in the rare disease space. And rare diseases are interesting because you don't have a huge population. You can usually get approvals. Sometimes they're quite debilitating. You can usually get approvals for treating a rare disease faster with the regulatory agencies than if you're going to make a treatment that will go into many millions of people.

But I think the rare disease that will really advance a lot of this type of diagnostics and of treatments is a rare disease that we often don't think about, which is cancer. Cancer is a rare disease in the sense that it's your cells that are broken that are now infecting other tissues and destabilizing your body. But no one else has your cancer. So it is a rare disease that is pretty common. Right, and you're seeing it's rare because we have this generalized approach to treating cancer right now, because that's the best we could do, whether that's chemo or radiation. But how can cancer manifest in one person's body is very unique to the other person because it's your cells. It's your cells acting like an infectious agent. And so then what is the approach that the field would take going forward to treat or reverse certain cancers, even if they're not genetic?

Is it these personalized gene therapies? We are seeing more and more now the ability to design and build personalized therapies and cancer. Right now you're seeing it with personalized vaccines, where they're analyzing the cancer cell antigens, essentially some of the cellular signals that make that cell unique in your body. They're doing the molecular diagnostics on those cells, and then using that information to go and now stimulate your immune system to go and attack. those cells. But there's other approaches. You can use that same information about the cancer cell to make a very specific targeted treatment as well. So not just priming your immune system, but making what's called an oncolic therapy if it's a virus or a precision therapy targeting

just that cancer cell. Which is absolutely fascinating because, as you said, cancer is personalized into this idea that we throw the entire kitchen sink at it with chemo, it is the best we can do, but going forward, why not tell your body what that cancer is in your body and to go get it itself if it has the tools, or if not, here's a virus that's going to kill your specific cancer? And we're developing larger and larger. I don't like to use military terms, but in arsenal,

options for making those therapies today. We're getting faster at making them. We're getting faster at the diagnostic. So I think cancer really leads the way to a lot of these very specific genetic treatments moving forward. And how far away are we from most cancers potentially being treatable in some ways, at least, with personalized vaccines or these viral therapies? How much would that cost, say, in a few years? And how accessible would that be? It's happening.

It's a spectrum. But we've been moving towards that, you know, faster and faster. I don't think the costs are falling significantly yet. There's not a lot of competition. This is still very elite work at the forefront of oncology, but it's getting easier. The tool stack for doing this type of work is becoming more accessible. The tools are becoming cheaper.

We're finding new ways to bring them to people that are suffering with the disease faster and easier. And I think particularly if we focus on that, that individualized aspect. I think it'll just continue to accelerate. But I can see the day, and again, this is what I love to do. I can see the day when pretty much from diagnostics to bedside and treatment is done algorithmically and that it requires very little human intervention across that pipeline. When you say algorithmically, you mean AI and it's mostly done in the computer.

And then your personalized treatment is ready for you. And there wasn't anything you had to do to show up for the treatment. Yeah, the doctors get a biopsy of the cancer or blood sample, whatever type of cancer it is. And pretty much there's a machine set up to do the molecular understanding of the cell and the damage that's making the cell cancerous through the design of a personalized medicine, through any approval processes that can be done digitally, to the manufacturing, which increasingly is done robotically, to produce a dose made just for you all as essentially a full drug development pipeline,

but possibly something that can be done with a single box in a number of hours. That would be, I can see us trending towards that. But not all diseases may be genetic. A lot could be environmental, so you have autoimmune diseases, for instance. does do the tools of synthetic biology and kind of molecular surgery also point to a future where if somebody has something like a rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes, we could be reversing or putting in remission some of these illnesses as well using these same types of programming tools? I absolutely believe so. We are understanding of these disease conditions, whether they're

systemic, whether it's sometimes just cells that have lost some function like the ability to be properly regulated or produce insulin. It's all accelerating. We're getting such an incredible understanding of these processes and tools and new ways for manipulating them. So there's never been a better time to get a disease. But let's face it, there's a lot of diseases are complex, our bodies are complex, particularly if you're talking about things that are not just caused by a single genetic defect, but now is how your body is actually operating. We can't deny the complexity, but we can keep building better tools and processes to help people. And I think we're doing that faster than ever before. And how could that theoretically look? Something like

a rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes, would we just be also reprogramming their cells to not attack them or to recognize something in them? Like, how simple would that process be? I don't think it's simple when you're dealing with anything with the immune system, which is one of our most complex systems. And you really have to look at it a case-by-case basis. Today, as you pointed out, like, we tend to just do kind of broad strokes. You know, we take steroids to tamp down all inflammation. We use chemotherapy to destroy all fast-growing cells. These are very crude broad-stroke approaches.

But as we get more precision capabilities in measuring us and our cells and our subcellular systems right down to our DNA, And now we end up being much more precise and personal in how we treat any illness. And there was a line that you wrote in your book, and it really stuck with me. And you write, if you could reprogram your body, what would you want to change? And when I read that, and it wasn't so much to me, but it applied to family members who have been struck with certain illnesses and to think if we had the tools to reprogram it, so they never were sick with those in the first place, could put those in remission, I think we would absolutely utilize them. Yeah, I have to believe that. Again, this is, biology is becoming a technology. We have optionality now. We have more insights. Life is a special case in technology because it's the only technology we didn't understand.

And our bodies are created for us. It's not like we have a choice. And it's a pretty random process if you understand reproduction. So I think this idea that we can start to look at things and think, how do I want to change things? And this is not just a cosmetic fix. This is, we could start to imagine functional changes to our bodies. I think that's pretty exciting. And by a functional change. Well, functional change. Again, if you have diabetes, you are going to correct the diabetes.

If you are losing your vision, you want to be able to correct your vision. It gets easier than that. A lot of people lose their hair. They want to regrow hair. Some people have too much hair. They don't want that hair to grow. There's so many possibilities here. But this is a tool set that we just didn't have

until recently. It's evolving slower than our other digital tools because it's harder and it's more complex and we didn't create the systems that we're changing. We built computers. We know how to do it. a program. We didn't build the cell. It's a black box until we completely reverse engineer it. Yes, I guess it's biology. It's the only technology we didn't invent. Yes. But we're learning how to speak its language. Yes. Everything else in the world that humans have made has been engineered.

We've had to reverse engineer the cell. We've had to take it. It's, it's, it's, think of it as molecular dissection, dissection down, you know, to the smallest components. And you had mentioned we're going to talk about hair loss, if these are some of the kind of superficial things that I think a lot of us would, or maybe even hair color, we would engineer a little bit if we can. But even something like stem cells. So we hear a lot about them as being this miracle cell or the powerhouse of the body. What are they and why are scientists so excited about the role they could play in some of this? Stem cells are kind of like, imagine them like children.

You know, when you have a baby, that baby, you know, when you take it home, you have no idea if that boy or girl is going to become a doctor, an astronaut, a plumber. or, you know, environmental, you have no idea. A stem cell is kind of the baby of cells. It's young, it grows quickly, and it can, with a little bit of molecular education, we'll call it, it can turn into any other cell. So a stem cell can turn into a liver cell. It can turn into a brain cell. It can turn into a skin cell, et cetera, just by adding the right, just by pulling on the right levers.

So stem cells are really magical. All cells are magical. But stem cells are particularly magical because they can be pretty much anything. And so when we look at regenerative medicine in a future where we could maybe regrow an organ that's failed or regrow a tissue that is failing us or malfunctioning, is it stem cells that form the basis of that process? Absolutely. You teach the stem cells and throw certain levers so that they become certain tissues or organs or organ-like. we don't have the technology outside of the body to make a super complex organ like a liver yet or a pancreas. But that's the direction.

But that's the direction. We're trying to understand the environments, the switches, the cellular machinery so that we can start to do stuff like that, rather than do organ procurement in exchange. We've taken different approaches for doing this. Some people are looking at 3D printing type technologies to grow, to grow, organs. Those have had limited success. One of the ways that I think is actually probably going to be more interesting and scalable is we've learned to take pigs, which have organs that are very similar to us do genetic engineering on the pigs to remove viruses, for example, in the pig genome,

but also change some of the code in the pig genome so that the cells are more human-like. And we're getting pretty good now. We've had a few examples where these engineered pig organs have been put into people as replacement for some of their organs and tissues. As we get better at doing this type of engineering, as we get more precise, maybe one day we'll learn how to reactivate different parts of our body to regrow. We grew. Why do we lose the ability to regrow. Right. And, you know, again, it's a constant learning, reverse engineering, forward engineering

process where we just get more and more control over our systems. Right. So an ideal holy grail is if I grew my liver at one point, going from childhood to today and something's failing, can we jig some switches to have the body start to repair itself so that the idea of needing an organ donor is a lot of? It was away. That's definitely a possibility. Can we convince it to regrow, the organ to regrow?

On the, on kind of the forward, you know, I've mentioned, you know, growing humanized pig organs, that's an option. We grow a billion pigs a year, so we should not have a sourcing problem if we can start to do that. And some people have said, well, even that, maybe we just grow a headless clone of you. and then to give you a new set of organs or tissues. And that's really extreme, but some people are starting to propose it now because anytime you move to an animal model, you're making that animal your factory.

And maybe that's not ethically okay. That's the end of where I go. Is there an option that doesn't involve another thing suffering? When you say a digital, a physical double of your organs and you grow them somewhere, else, kind of. So when you say a headless double of somebody, it doesn't have brain cells, it doesn't, it's not a thinking thing, but it's just your organs as a backup. People have developed things called organoids, which are little chunks of tissue that are similar in function to be it, to a particular organ, our brain, our liver, etc. These organoids have been important to understand,

not just how cells work, but how communities of cells work, but the term that we're talking about for this, you know, being able to grow a whole new set of organs or has been called a bodyoid. It's a really new term. I only saw it first used about a year ago, but it's pretty edgy. And here's the thing about biology. It tends to trigger an automatic response of kind of fear or revulsion sometimes or, you know, a lot of people say, oh, we're not meant to be playing with these systems. I recognize this fundamentally. Again, it's the only technology we didn't create. It created us.

But if you look at it from a mechanistic point of view, we're getting more and more control over these systems. And at some point, I think we just have to take, you know, recognize that, yeah, we have a responsibility to do it, right? And we have a, it would be best if we use our own organs, tissues, and systems, rather than using other life as factories. And so sometimes, I know in Canada this is true when a child is born, the parents are given the option

to store some stem cells. Would you recommend parents it's an option they should definitely, or they should at least consider? I absolutely support that. They're so easy to collect at birth. They literally just drain the umbilical cord into a tube and then you can and store that. Trying to collect and generate stem cells from adult

is just so much more word. So I highly recommend it. And it's something I think the government should be paying for rather than just asking any individuals to pay for the storage costs of those. I think it should just be automatic. I think we should also throw in sequencing at the same time because you get your, you get the most value out of sequence really early. Again, like I'm thinking conception, because now you have a pretty much the same, all the molecular diagnostics available. even before development. Right.

That can save you a lot of headaches. But if not at conception in an IVF clinic, then certainly at birth. So I've been an advocate of replacing the metabolic tests that we do on most babies in the West with genetic testing that can give you the same results, but a lot more results than any metabolic test can do. And can also give you a lot more predictive power. and you can make better lifestyle decisions for that child from birth. You get basically a radar screen for any health effects without making any changes. Even just having those molecular diagnostics at birth,

if you know that your child is going to have a propensity for certain types of liver diseases later in life. Doctors are going to now be able to integrate that knowledge in their care. Parents are going to be able to integrate that knowledge in their diet, et cetera, et cetera. So I think having that radar screen is really useful. And we had touched a little bit on some cosmetic tools. When it looks like something like Botox or fillers, these are very popular anti-aging or age preservation tools. But with synthetic biology and the tools of kind of genetic reprogramming, is there a future where somebody doesn't have to even engage with something like Botox because we could just reprogram or tell

ourselves to boost a bit more collagen or a bit more elastin naturally? There's a whole class of new cosmetics coming on now that are kind of called functional cosmetics, where they may actually have a bioactive component in the formulations that stimulate the production of new collagen. I've never tried any of these. But they're of interest to people. We want to stay looking young and feeling healthy as long as we can. There's been a huge amount of interest directed now towards health span and certainly looking and feeling vibrant. For me, I'm looking at this on the outside. But I think the idea of having well-tested functional components in the creams and other things that we apply to our bodies is really useful.

Even before stimulating ourselves to grow and reduce a wrinkle, for example, or prevent a wrinkle. There's options today in functional cosmetics where we can eliminate acne, for example, which can be really challenging for some people and quite scarring. And what could that look like? For instance, in your book you describe a potential future with a crisper cream. And I don't think we're close to that maybe yet. But where, so is the message getting delivered to the cells to say up the collagen, up the elastin, to what you used to produce maybe when you were 25?

That's certainly a possibility. Remember, any time you stimulate growth and production of anything in your body, you have the potential of disrupting a system too. So that we have to be careful how we apply these things and how we test these different components. But I think we'll definitely start getting it. But remember, it's a cosmetic fix. In general, I'm a fan of longevity research. I'm certainly a fan of people staying healthy longer. And you see that reflected in, you know, decreasing smoking rates, better attention to diet, Zempic and other tools being used today by people to stay healthier longer. But I think the arc of our biology is built into our genetic program, and that's set it at conception. There are some treatments like stem cell treatments for your knees that are making it to clinics, but there's no magic solution here. And in general, I'm personally skeptical that we'll be able to push our life.

span, longer using any type of one-off fix or drug. I think it's when we really get an understanding of biology at a low level, and we start to be able to recode ourselves that we'll be able to change our biology significantly. We're the product of billions of years of evolution. And evolution doesn't have a designer. It's just it does what works. and selects for that. And in our present forms, we're pretty new. And we're best fit for a very complex world with a lot of other creatures.

And yet we are remarkably long lived with we can stave off infection. But I don't think we can dramatically change the arc of that biology until we really have control over programming our biology. So when people say we've on the cusp of conquering immortality, that's probably not true. But even something like extending the human lifespan by 20, 30 years.

Which is a huge percentage. Which is a huge percentage. That could be possible, but you're seeing, we have to understand the tool, going back to the book, going back to reprogramming us a little bit. And then we could see maybe a 20, 30 year extension. So if a child is under the age of five today, is it possible that in their lifetime, by the time they're 30, 40, we could see these bigger advancements? Well, this is the idea of kind of longevity, escape velocity.

The science will outpace our biological aging. I'm still on the fence there personally, and that's because we haven't accelerated the pace of drug development or of research and development yet. So I think there's the promise of that. It's a great goal, but I'm still on the fence. I haven't seen it yet. So I'm a little skeptical. So again, I'm working down most of the same. down most of the time with a simple, single-celled organism.

You know, that's my, that's my focus. That's been, that is for all intents and purposes, already immortal. Yeah. Like, you can take an E. coli bacterium and freeze dry it and add water and boot it up later. They've been around for billions of years. We haven't been around for that long. So, you know, mapping the, the precision and control that I'm seeing in the microbial space to, you know, really the, end case use human beings, that's a huge gap.

Like in terms of evolutionary code, that's four billion years. So we have a lot of math and code to get through. We've got a lot of programming experience to get through. No one sits down to write their first program, which is typically Hello World. No one sits down and writes, you know, the latest operating system for, you know, for your Mac. But that's how we tend to think. Right. Because we're very human-centered.

Yeah. Yeah. The brains don't think in quantum. We don't think about single cells. Like they're invisible, right? You need a microscope to see a single cell. So we don't naturally think that we really process most of this technology through the lens of humans, which are the hardest. Humans are the hardest to work with.

If a human suffers or dies, there are legal and economic ramifications. And you just don't get that with bacteria. Yeah, right, exactly. You don't have lawyers either. It shocks me that we started the human genome project to read our genomes before we had sequenced the first bacteria. The first bacterial genome, you know, was published, sequenced and published shared in 1995. That was five years into the human genome project. I was in the room for that announcement.

It was amazing. But it just shows the way humans think about the... Human centering themselves, that seems very odd and unique. I know. It's been a one off. There's one thing to write a genome from scratch that we think could lead to a healthier child, a healthier person. Again, you're jumping straight to human.

Straight to human. You're jumping straight to human. And yes, I see that. But right now, we're sitting there writing genomes from scratch for bacteria, which has a huge implication for humanity because there's so much bacteria around us. There's so many viruses around us. We're already at the point where we can write the genome of any virus. That's a separate issue that we haven't talked about. We'll definitely get into. We've demonstrated we can build the genome of a bacterial cell. When our tools allow us to write about five to 10 million base pairs of genetic code.

And how many of these tears are in a body just so people get an idea? Well, most mammals are around three billion base pairs. So that's gigabases, right? We're working right now in the megabases, a few million base pairs. But as that technology becomes affordable, all single-celled life becomes programmable. This is not a top-down thing that I'm interested. I can't edit and tweak you easily. There are elite communities that are trying to do that for certain devastating.

diseases or in situations where a child cannot be born and power to them. But those are tweaks, those are edits, those are screens. The thing that really excites me is being able to program with precision using these digital tools and whole genome synthesis tech. That's where it gets powerful. And it's there now. And it gets powerful because what would be a use case? So you can program something small from scratch of bacterium and then what to use where? Well, again, let's just keep it even at the virus level. The viruses are essentially gene delivery systems. That's all the virus does.

It simply loads a genetic program into a host cell that it is co-evolved with. So there's viruses for every cell, as far as we know. But a virus will deliver a genetic program. That genetic program usually says just make more viruses. We've learned to engineer them with gene therapies to say, Oh, yeah, go and deliver my genetic program to the cell. In this case, say, causing a fix for blindness, just as an example. So viruses are little delivery trucks.

But if you're, now that we can synthesize the entire genome of the virus, including any payloads that we want it to deliver, now they essentially become 3D printable gene therapies, 3D printable medicines, if we're going to use that virus to fight a cancer cell. for example. There are viruses that infect bacteria. So if you design that virus to be even more effective at killing that bacteria and targeting it specifically, you've just made an incredible antibiotic for a superbug, for example. And all of that can be done today cheaply with molecular, even atomic precision. And that's the thing that's really exciting. It's not doing the human stuff. We're not ready for that yet. Ethically, technologically, that's the hardest. and it's worth getting there.

But we are absolutely now programming biology bottom up. The Nobel Prizes were given out for being able to understand and design any protein. And then this is technically the escape velocity, not in lifespan and all of that. In any type of disease or bacteria or infection, we go to the computer, we program a little viral load from scratch to deliver that solution. And now you can, it's like loading an app into a software. cell. That technology is already here. If you're starting to program a cell to have new functions, we've barely started with that because that cell is essentially a computer. It's a living

molecular processor that can make more processors. So say you've programmed that cell to, I don't know, detect arsenic in water, which is a huge problem. You can't see it. It takes a chemical test. A lot of wells have arsenic. You drill a well over here, and it doesn't have arsenic. You can't tell which is which, but you can engineer a bacterium to change color if there's arsenic in the water because you can, arsenic will change gene expression in certain switches. So now, you know, now you could literally take a sample of water, mix in a little freeze-dried packet of bacteria, stir it up and look for a color change. And if it changes color, that well has arsenic. Don't drink from it. It'll poison you. Could we do that with anything? Does this water have lead? Does this

what, I have a bunch of microplastics. We just code a little viral load and it goes red or green. Or you code the bacterium as a sensor and you can do that. Again, if we can synthesize a bacterial level amount of genetic material, suddenly all bacteria become programmable. We have the genomes for tens of thousands of these organisms already sequenced and published in databases. That's your starting point. This is why I write about you'll be able to download from a digital.

file, you know, from a database, an organism, and with the right tools, print it on demand, with any edits and changes you may want to create in it. Like this is, this gives us full control over programming a living cell. And it's still a bacterial cell, but that's a huge play space. We've now gotten there with proteins. Again, cellular components. The Nobel Prize that have been awarded, that's going gangbusters. We can explore proteins. That's huge. And now we're moving into viruses and single-celled organisms. And all of this gives us experience and tools and technologies that one day, yeah, will apply to every plant, animal, and us.

Absolutely incredible. And I guess with that, because we touched on programming in a virus, you could program the virus to go attack a cancer, to go kill an infection so you don't have to take a bunch of antibiotics if it's resistant. But you could also program a virus to, in a malicious way. to attack a population, a specific person, technically, if you knew their DNA or their microbiome. So what does this mean in terms of biosecurity? Would you say that the next war could be biological? Yeah, I think it's the biggest existential risk today. And here's why. We live in a sea of viral particles already, but we're blind to it because we haven't built the tools and technologies for sensing the viral particles around us.

Just look at the huge efforts we had to make with COVID just to start testing. Not easy, not common. You still, you had to do it person by person. It's not like we could just put up a COVID detector and find out if COVID was in the room. We are still largely blind to the microbes and viruses that circulate around us in our world. I think that has to change. We have the technology today to make any virus malicious or beneficial. But we don't have really any rules of the road or monitoring or technology over who's making what and why are they doing it and could this be dangerous.

In the databases, we have pretty much every virus that we know about that causes serious human disease. Ebola, smallpox, COVID flus, and they're just available for download. And yet we already have the technology for making these things in the lab. And the accessibility is getting cheaper fast. You know, most people realize that an atomic bomb, for example, is a runaway nuclear reaction. It causes a chain reaction. The splitting of one atom or the fusing creates this chain reaction that just sudden happens very quickly and boom, you get an explosion.

Everyone saw Oppenheimer. With a virus that goes through a species with the right dynamics, it creates a biological chain reaction. I have an infection or I seed an infection in a person. That person seeds an infection in, say, two or three or four or five more people. And if that happens, then all of them, and they go on and infect two or three or four or five people. Now you have a biological chain reaction that we've learned can spread around the world very quickly, like through, you know, and just be devastating to a particular species. How prepared do you think the United States is for the age of biorefare or just biosecurity in general?

I think the world isn't prepared. This is nothing against the U.S. We are blind to most of these agents, and I think we have to take them more seriously because it's never been easier to make a virus. And COVID demonstrated that we don't have the appropriate coordination tool systems to defend against it. And that weighs on me, because we have to figure this out. As we get better tools, it's only going to get easier and easier to make these very small constructs

that can have huge effects for a species or humanity. And we're just not putting in enough effort and research and thought into this problem. But my general approach, having sat with this problem for so long, is that really the only thing I think that works is full transparency. If anyone is designing any virus for any reason, it should be public information. They'll be pushback on that because there's commercial utility in making some viral-based gene therapies. But I think it's just one of those things where we all have to look out for each other and we have to learn how to cooperate on this in ways that we've never cooperated before. And I'm not saying you have to do it for everything.

If you're making a protein, protein's not going to take over the world. If you're making a bacterium, bacterium can't take over the world. just don't grow fast enough. If you're doing any other biological engineering, again, I don't think the full transparency is required. But I've pretty much locked down that we need full transparency here. And we can't have a dark bio web, so to speak. Right. And so we see all this focus on AI, the AI race, perhaps needing coordination, what is the kind of nuclear plan but for the AI age? And we don't have those same conversations with biology yet or at that scale. No, well, they haven't sometimes because they talk about, oh, well, with these tools, could, with these new AI tools, will it help someone make a deadly virus? And they're going, ooh, kind of, yeah.

But there's no part two to the combo. Now what? Next slide. Okay, like, what do we do? It's one of the big edge of essential risks of runaway AI. Runaway AI might hack a nuclear silo and start Armageddon. Runaway AI might design a virus and just say, let's knock out humans. Or again, if it's not the AI doing it, it's being prompted by someone with that intention. I gave a talk just recently mapping our inexperience in building our digital computers at the beginning. When we first started building PCs, so now it's not working with just a handful of academia. It's going into the hands of millions of people.

And we started to connect those PCs in different ways. We saw the emergence of viruses. And the very first PC virus was called Brain. And it wasn't malicious. It didn't destroy data. And it was written by a couple of brothers in Pakistan who had some software. And people were stealing the software. So they just put a little virus on their floppy disk.

And they started realizing, oh, my God, we kind of created a digital pandemic, which was wild. But again, not malicious. A few years later, we started to get malicious viruses and computer networks that did destroy data. And today, if you follow along, cybersecurity is a huge industry. There's still breaches and data loss, etc. But it's a huge industry,

and it's basically AI's fighting AIs. You can think of your immune system as an AI, molecular AI. It's looking for anything abnormal. But we've learned how to get around it. We can make really, really nasty things, things today at relatively low cost using malicious intent and design. And we're just not prepared for that right now. And yet we don't need to learn all the same lessons from digital computing

and the types of infections we saw there. It's all going to come to biology. It's completely predictable. So let's get ahead of the curve. And you had mentioned transparency and you had also pointed to smoke detectors. Is there a potential world where we also have viral detectors in our homes, like some of these biopreparedness also means physically engineering our environment a little bit to be able to detect these things. Sure. Yeah, I would love that. I would love for my future smoke detector to also be, you know, screening for any airborne virus particle. We have a technology that's universal enough to actually make that happen. It's the DNA sequencer. And the DNA sequencer has been around for, you know, over 40 years. And again, we talked about how quickly you can sequence a human genome,

Well, you can sequence bacterial and viral GMs a lot faster, right? But it's still a technology that has never made it to consumers. The military thinks about it in potentially having some out in the field. Sure. And then we have it. There's a company called Oxford and Annaport that, as you said, their smallest, most portable sequencer is the size of a stapler, and it'll work in the field with your phone.

Right. That's great. But we need it in the mall. But you need kind of continuous, you know, screening. And we don't have that. that technology yet, and it's not in our homes. No one, I asked the question to a lot of audiences, do you have a DNA sequencer at home? And, you know, occasionally you get some, you get a finger at, but this is a technology that could be as easy to use as a microwave or a TV. And we just

haven't made that switch to consumer biosensing it. And do you think that's because the health sciences, they're underfunded, they're not as understood? I think it's the understanding more than anything. You know, a lot of people buy their kids microscopes so they can see things that are smaller and it comes usually with prepared slides. But, and I look at the DNA sequencer as a digital microscope into the things we can't see, the biological things we can't see. So I've, as part of the biosecurity work that I've been doing, I've been saying, maybe we should just make a box. Think of it at the size of a toaster right now. It'll get smaller. But you swab anything, just a swab and then put it in a box

and it will do all the sample prep sequencing and analysis of whatever you swabbed, you know, or maybe clipped a little bit of tissue out of, you know, that fish I bought it safe way. Was it actually a tilapia or was it something else? You know, if I swabbed my skin, is my skin microbiome changing?

Is it, if I swabbed my mouth, is my oral microbiome changing? You know, what is that ebug in the backyard? You know, like, go squash it, put it in the device. You know, like that technology could be here very quickly, and it would be fun and playful and creative and open up some really interesting data sets, and people would use it diagnostically. My kid came back from a birthday party and got a runny nose, swab that. And if the data layer for the viruses was transparent, you'd immediately get a signal, oh, you know, there's RSV spreading through, you know, this zip code, whatever. It's funny to think that I have more viral software on my phone than I do in my home for my body.

Yes. Or on my computer. We download that every month. Make sure your software is up to date. And we don't think about the most important software, arguably. Well, and we can't, you know, quickly change our biology, our biology, but we can quickly change these microbes. And we have a ton of programmable tools for managing them. And for the final kind of few questions, I wanted to circle back a little bit on ethics. I know

it's tricky because ethics isn't up to any, shouldn't be up to any one person. But the reality is we do have to start thinking about these decisions. And we have time in some ways, especially when it comes to things like editing. You talk a lot in the book about where do we draw the line with enhancement versus improvement? These are things, conversations that we're going to have to have. and some people tend to just want to unsubscribe from the idea altogether, but that doesn't necessarily help us get through it. With IVG, I think the fear would be what's stopping anyone from running and just grabbing a strand of Brad Pitt's hair,

and maybe he has to triple his security as a result of IVG. But is there a world in which then we could just do genetic matching and making sure that in terms of genetic privacy and that sort of thing? Yeah, it's not hard to collect biological material. First of all, if you went and grabbed Brad Pitt's hair, that's a salt. Great. So that's covered. But say you're cleaning up in the hotel room you just stayed at and you empty out the garbage can and you keep everything, all the Kleenexes and other stuff.

And you shake off the pillowcase and you get all the dandruff. I'm sure there's some. Then that's not a salt. That's considered discarded material. And, yeah, you could do a complete genetic analysis. of Brad with that material and perhaps understand and publish information about him that he didn't know himself. It gets even weirder because given more advancement in that technology, say, IVG, you could use Brad's, if you could recover enough material and the right material,

you could potentially make Brad Pitt sperm. You could potentially make Brad Pitt clone. So, you know, you'd still have to raise Brad Pitt baby. But, yeah, like, it gets a little weird. So the idea of genetic privacy and just biosecurity is all got to change. And we don't, science fiction plays with these ideas a lot. But it's always dramatic and negative because that's what fiction does to keep us interested. But there's some real, there are some real truths to the, the capabilities of these technologies.

And if something can be done, someone might try it. It's going to be tried, yeah. Genome sequencing, I think, is such an empowering technology and everyone should be able to do it. If they want. If they want, I have the choice. Have you been sequenced?

No, and I'm concerned about the data. I mean, I would if I could guarantee that that data wasn't going to get used or that company wasn't going to get acquired and somehow my data is now benefiting some bank on the stock exchange. So that's where I could draw the line. I want to. I believe in the technology. And if someone has made the choice to do it, I can't wait to see the results and to see what choices they're going to make. But I'm a bit

concerned. So I hear you. And I've thought about this deeply as well. I wrote an essay quite a while back now asking who will be the Google of genomics? Because when you think about a Google kind of grew by offering services to people at no cost because they were advertising to you. Right. And it's, it is an incredible business model. But it extends all the way to genetics. They could sequence you for free and say it's completely your information, just like the information in your Google account is yours. But we can process it in ways and connect people with products and services to you in ways that are beneficial to you. It costs you nothing. We'll pay for all the sequencing.

We'll do all the processing. We'll do all the matching. It'll make your life better. No one's built that company yet. But when they do, they could potentially sequence everybody multiple times all for free. And I've pointed out they'll make some people millionaires because their genomes will be so valuable. They'll have some resistance to some disease that is so valuable that companies will come and say, I'd like to buy an exclusive license to that person's DNA.

And you'll get a huge chunk of money. And whatever company is doing this on your behalf will act more like a sports agent or a booking agent and take their cut. But the money will flow primarily to you. That is stunning. What you just said is I could have my genome sequence. You could see that I am cancer resistant for some reason or I'm Alzheimer resistant. And then you could technically have an agent that says you could buy these access to her genes or license her genome and rebuild a drug based on her drug. And you might even have in the smart contract that you get royalties off the drug if it comes to market.

Everything that didn't happen to Henriette Alex. Yeah, exactly. But that was, you know, the first. It's an edge case. Your body is content, you know, the way I look. at code. And yeah, you should control it. An agent for your genome. Yeah, but it's like there's a business model there when the cost of sequencing is low enough. And I've suggested that we're pretty much there. At a $100 genome, you, that's a customer acquisition cost, right? And

amortized over five years, particularly if the company is, you know, trying to connect you with product, services, you know, medical or cosmetic or whatever, you know, can be recovered over a five-year period. And then, you know, it just scales. It scales to everyone. And what would you say to people who think we shouldn't be touching this at all? Gene editing, gene therapies, tampering with the human body. We're playing God. These aren't our tools. Even though we're seeing that it's just an option, not everybody has to do it, but what would you say to people who think we need to draw a line in the sand and this is just... If that's the line you want to draw and stay behind with you in your community, I have no problem with it, but you have to understand that if you tried to do that with

computers, you would have just been run over by Moore's law. I think that the same thing is happening in biology as we get more control over it, and it's an even bigger freight drain. There is just no stopping it. There's just too many powerful benefits for individuals and groups, governments, insurers and others, like everyone's got a different angle on it. So I can't judge it. If that's really, if you think it's playing God, it violates your religions or your belief system, great. I have bred bacteria and I've built viruses from scratch now. And I just look at it as another technology and one that I want to get better at and do useful things with. But I can project a little bit in the future that as these tools get more powerful, and the AI systems are certainly

helping there. And the synthesis and assembly systems for making and compiling and booting these organisms are getting better. And the test and measurement systems for getting really detailed diagnostics and sensing of activity is all, they're all going to get better. This is just not going to stop. So I, it's like, thank you for your opinion. I will respect it, but I'm going to go over here to where it's permissive. And I guess as the technology gets better and more accurate, any kind of safety risk goes down so eventually becomes we have this seamless way, more or less to edit out or to treat a cancer. And this is a new tool in the arsenal. And that's kind of the direction. Look, if you've got six months to live, you know, and there's a lot of people they had diagnosed with

something like that, I think you should just get an automatic pass for experimental medicines, and there will be companies that will come in and, you know, and try and help you. And the thing is, when you go N of one, you become a clinical trial of one. It's generally unethical to sell a drug into a clinical trial. You provide them for free because you're getting information back. I think when our drugs become programmable for cancer, they're almost free to make. Like, they cost like a bar of soap. So there's other business models that will work for being able to provide you treatment.

And I've poked a few of the pharma companies that I've had access to to really think about this. Keep your one-size-fits-all business over there, but maybe you want to come over here to do N of 1, where you can make a drug only for a single individual, but as fast as the technology will allow. Oh, and you're pre-approved for working with them because, because, they're an edge case, like they will die unless you help them, you know, whether that's a baby or whether that's a person with cancer. And as soon as one company flips over and puts their incredible

power and technologies and science on that end of one problem and realize, oh, we can do it. Oh, and like with baby KJ, we did it in a number of months. Oh, but if we get more practice, maybe we can do it in weeks. Maybe we can do it in days. Maybe we can do it in hours. That's where it gets really exciting and we're so close to that. And that idea that we do this mass solution for everybody could slowly, that's crazy, because we all are sick in different ways. We're all unique. We're all end of one lives. It's not like we have a hive mind or anything. And I guess for pharma right now, the business model is we only go after things that enough people have because we need to be able to make a return. To make it worthwhile. Because it takes so long and it's so

onerous and it's so crazy to, you know, crazy expensive to do a drug. I gave a talk to a company on the use of AI and drug development, which is not my normal thing. Through clinical trials, not discovery. And the reality is it's so expensive to be in that phase clinical trial portion that if your AI tools can save six months off of, shave six months off of that, you've saved literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And so that's probably been one of the best uses of AI in drug development, not at the forward edge, but just saving time. And I see, I mean, pharma getting completely disrupted if they don't get on board, if you look at AI and synthetic biology and being able to program, you know, solutions in a computer for a fraction of the cost, if pharma is still doing their old 15-year, only going after the most popular diseases or their most common ones, there are a group of scientists, some startups and some technologists that are headed straight for that industry. And that whole business model becomes a thing at the past.

it completely gets out-competed. Yeah. Well, you know, the word processor killed the typewriter, right? And that could be pharma if they don't. Yeah. But I think when people also hear the affordability right now to cure baby KJ, it was a stunning feat of science, but it was also a few million dollars. Which is nothing, which is absolutely nothing in the cost of drug development.

People do go-fund-meas for more, you know, so. You see that coming down there? Yeah, and it's only going to drop. With experience and digitization, the cost will only drop. So the idea of a biological divide, which could be, we could circumvent that if the cost continued to fall and fall so people aren't priced out of these tools. So the example that I use is, you know, people say only the rich will get access to it.

Now, generally it's the rich that have the early access to it. Think the cell phone. You know, Mike Douglas with the big giant cell phone brick. Yeah, that was pretty edgy back in the 1980s. But today, I've never been to a part of the world, no matter how poor where people don't have a phone because it's tied into their digital economies now. It might be a flip phone and not the latest, you know, Samsung. But still, biology is the actual cheapest thing to manufacture. It's self-assembles.

You don't need a factory, a factory that we think about because the factory is a cell or just components of a cell in a tube, which is often all you need, not a lot. living cell. So biology is super cheap when it's programmable. It's the making your original program might take some work, might be hard, getting the first thing to boot up might take some work and be hard and validating might be testing hard. But after that, it just scales. That's the difference, I guess, between the chemical pharma era and this new biological one. People are going to look at these tools and think inaccessible. But biology becoming a technology. And technology is a story of things getting cheaper. It doesn't matter how rich you are. You can't buy a better phone than the richest person down the road or a worse phone. And that is the path these tools are on.

Yeah, absolutely. And yes, there will be some companies that have tremendous influence over that space, just like we have companies like Verizon. But everyone's got access to the technology. I think if we do this right, no one's going to have complete control. No company is going to have complete control over life and death. But But this is going to be a massive wealth generator for individuals and for, you know, economies around the world. We should all get some say and some cut in the data that we give. Tech companies soon we'll get some say and some cut in the data that we give from our biology. Because there was that story where when the Braco I and Bracow 2 gene were discovered by that pharmaceutical company or that gene company,

they tried to patent it, which meant that no woman could screen for that gene without giving that company some money or that company would have. the license. And thank goodness, the science community went to bat and flagged it. And then the Supreme Court said anything that nature produces, you can't patent. But that's, I think, why it's so important that all of us understand what's happening so we can start to weigh in on the conversation, advocate, and make sure that these tools aren't just kind of co-opted by a few. Well, again, the tools are general purpose, and I think we're going to see a lot more people come to them. There's a whole new wave of bioengineer coming online. And the, like, Like, I've met examples of these folks, and they're stunning because they don't, they're not necessarily

waiting to get a PhD and do a couple of postdocs and get their first R.O.1 grant from the NIH. That's, that was the old way of doing things. And you were 40 by the time you started to be an independent researcher. Now they're like, you know, they're like in their early teens, getting trained by AI systems, we're deep diving on projects, getting hands-on experience in, in labs and internship. and using IGM and other organizations that are giving early access. And they're realizing, oh, if I just have the right target, tell the right story,

why Combinator will write a check, I can build a company, and I can go and hire biological PhDs for a heck of a lot less than I can pay, you know, someone to do machine learning or AI tools. So maybe the future biological divide, it's not rich versus poor, it's ideology, people who are maybe for this science and this type of progress and these types of technologies and people who are fearful or feel like you're tampering with God or with nature. And that's maybe where the default line draws. These two communities will probably bump heads, but not necessarily over just biology.

You know, when you think about it, what we're building with, you know, in computing right now is leading us to artificial general intelligence. A lot of people are saying Nats could be with us in the next few years. And then artificial superintelligence, which is far beyond our own capabilities to reason and process information. And ASI, for all intents and purposes, is what most people imagine as God, right? And eventually the folks, you know, on that side of the equation with their computer gods and the ones with, you know, with other face are going to butt heads. Personally, I'm more on the scientific side because I don't think prayer cures cancer. I think better medicines cure cancer.

It's a choice people will have. And that's the beautiful thing about technology is that it's a choice. And it's a beautiful thing about people. We all create our own model of existence, our own rules for the road for our own behaviors and sometimes our communities. But I think if it's too restrictive, if it's too regulated, if it doesn't give room to breathe, there's going to be conflict. And you could see that playing out geopolitically, a country that's a bit more open to the science, and maybe their population does become a bit healthier as a result, lives a bit longer, and a country that is more.

Or they have treatments and services available that aren't available in another country. Like there's been medical tourism forever. But yeah, like if suddenly you get the best molecular diagnosis and cancer treatments in Beijing, there's going to be a lot of flights booked to Beijing. So if you had to say, what is the thing you're most excited about in your field? And I know it's hard to narrow it down. What really excites me is that the AI, I can break it down. The AI systems are incredible.

The bio-AI systems have ingested every paper, every scientific document, every open database. And for all intents and purposes, they are becoming the best scientists. researchers and developers out there. I love that. It's been just this huge acceleration. And again, most recently validated with the Nobel Prizes for proteins. Huge. The thing that really excites me is that we're on the cusp of building better synthesizer and assemblers that will get us to the point of being able to build single-celled organisms. So we're talking bacteria and at the very outer edge yeast.

We've already demonstrated we can do it. Synthetic yeast has been made. Synthetic e coli has been made. Synthetic mycoplasma has been made. So we know we can do it. It's just a matter of priced performance on the tools. And I think we'll crack that nut in the next by 2030. And every single-celled organism, every virus, every protein,

every cellular component now becomes engineerable. And that's huge. Like, game world-changing. incredible. Andrew, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's really a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of I've Got Questions. If you've got questions, we would love to hear them. Send us a message or a voice note at IGQ with shenabovell.com or comment below. Subscribe if you found this episode interesting and share it with somebody you think might also enjoy it. I've Got Questions was created by me, Sheney Boval. The show is produced and edited by Tara Cuts and Sandra Etynan, an executive produced by Paola Piers Torres, artwork by Corey Vincent at

Piel Studio.