The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - George Church

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Known as “the Father of Synthetic Biology”, George Church is a geneticist, chemist and molecular engineer.  In this episode, Lawrence joins him in his office at Harvard Medical School to discuss his work with CRISPR, the differences between cultural and genetic evolution, the use of “smart materials” to battle climate change, and much more. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. I'm recording this introduction at home here during the pandemic, but the episode you're about to see or hear was recorded before the pandemic. Nevertheless, it's just as timely now as it was then. I'm also happy to say that we recorded several other episodes before the pandemic, so we'll be able to continue to release Origins Podcasts into the future. and I hope if you're continuing to stay home during this time that these podcasts will help make your time at home a little more interesting. In the meantime, stay safe and wash your hands. Hello and welcome to the Origins Podcast.

I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I'll talk to George Church, who's one of the most creative and out-of-the-box thinkers I've ever met. As a scientist, he's been a leader in the emerging field of synthetic biology, Indeed, some call him the father of the field. He's pioneered new methods of gene sequencing and most recently led in the development of techniques to use CRISPR technology for genetic modification.

And his organization holds one of the fundamental patents for this technique. Along with the biologist Craig Venter, he's helping redefine what we mean by life itself. I talked to him in his busy office at the Harvard Medical School about this question, as well as his proposal to use microbes, not to make fuel, but rather to create plastics for buildings to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, the uses and concerns about CRISPR, using DNA for computer storage,

growing brains in the laboratory, and resurrecting the woolly mammoth. Not for fun, but to help restore the flora and fauna of the far north. We just had time to scratch the surface of what this amazing scientist is thinking about and doing and its implications for our world. I hope to have him back on again sometime. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of all of our programs as soon as they appear at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I know you're going to enjoy this show.

George, it is great to be here with you talking. I have to tell you that I don't think I've ever had a conversation with you when I haven't come away thinking about the world differently than it before. So we'll see if it's... Welcome to my lair. Yeah. It's great to be in your lair here. And thanks for welcoming us. to it. Before, you know, there's so many things I want to talk about and, and I'm happy to answer

questions of yours too, but I thought I might ask you what led you to genetics to the path you did? Why that kind of science rather than any other kind of science? Well, I think pretty much every age I never wanted to specialize. And so I was always looking for something that really where it was intrinsically multidisciplinary and the first thing I think I found that really fit that was extra crystallography of macromolecules which I found when I was just 19 and I and I Sunho Kim was the head of the lab and I was basically I was just looking at like the the sheet of possible jobs that could do to make make a little money in my spare time and And I saw one that I said, I don't care whether they pay me, I'll do this one.

And after a few minutes talking to Songho Kim, it was quite clear because it involved, you needed to have the physics of diffraction, the math and computers to do the 40 transforms. You needed the chemistry of the bonds. And then you needed the biology of what the function of the macromoleco was. And so it's just like the whole picture. And then ever since I've been just trying to look to adjust. those lessons learned into lots of other fields of science, starting from that. But in your 19, you didn't know 40A.

Did you already know 4A analysis and all that stuff? I knew pieces of all those things. Wow. So what was your first degree in? I mean, did you study? Well, I didn't have my degree yet. Yeah, I was a sophomore when I joined his lab. I did finish my degree that year in chemistry and biology.

chemistry. Although I must say I was a bit more, the reason I picked that university Duke was because I had really great AP scores in math and physics and had a lousy scores in biology and chemistry. And I just didn't take that many courses in math and physics and computer science because I felt that I just couldn't manage to take the courses that I were if I felt that I felt that I already knew what was going on. Oh, interesting. And in biology and chemistry, I had a similar attitude. I skipped the first couple of years, mainly because I didn't want to hang out with

the premed. So I got nothing against premat. I was sort of premed myself, but it's just they were cutthroat. They were like, they were faking their exam results and stuff like that. That's awful. And so I just skipped to the upper level courses. In fact, I kind of wish most kids could skip top of level courses because often the introdough courses turn people off from whatever discipline they're going to be in.

It's really kind of sad. I end up skipping the first year in most things, except they wouldn't let me skip first year in physics, which was so bad that I told the chairman of the department eventually that I was just going to quit after December. By that point, they decided I could jump out to second. But when I was a graduate student in physics, I became depressed about what I was doing, as I think a lot of graduate students do. And I thought, I was at MIT and I was doing PhD in particle physics. and I thought of doing it, eventually doing a PhD MD and doing a PhD in biophysics. And this was in 1979 or 80, and I went to, at that time, the head of cell biology at Harvard, who was an uncle of a friend of mine.

And I said, what do you think? Should I do this? And he said, no, don't do it. Because biophysics isn't of interest to biologists and isn't of interest to physicists. And probably in 1980 it was, but the world has changed. I mean, the techniques of physics, the problems in biology are, physics problems and vice versa. Those fields have disappeared. And in some sense, you know, X-ray crystallography is an example, the thing that enticed you into biology. Yeah. That was 1973. Yeah, but yeah, but it's true. But I, you know, at this point, I don't know whether it had

it had diffused into the community. But now, of course, it's amazing to see how those fields have sort of merged together. And speaking of merged together, I couldn't help noticing in your book Regenesis that, you know, I have a bone to pick. Okay, sure. Not a bone to pick, but, you know, this chapter two is the greatest story ever. Yeah. And of course, I read a book about the greatest story ever told. So, why do you explain why I think that that's the story of the genome in some sense

is the greatest story ever. Oh, that was my story. Your story is the whole universe, which is a much bigger thing. I wrote mine in 2012. Yours was... Probably that book came out in 2000. Actually, 2014, so I probably... But anyway, there were different stories.

Yeah, in a way. And I forget exactly how I introduced it in the book, but the idea was that there was this story that involved dramatic life and death and sex and all this. And because we're the winners, the people that were reading the story were all winners, because all our ancestors all the time had won these incredible unlikely odds. Almost every generation, it would be a 1% odd that you had survived to have children.

And so you just multiply all those things out, and it's infinitesimal. So that was part of the reason it was a great story. But it also was like the story of all of us. It was a story that we could share and it was kind of connectivity. It's personal to us. And you're right. I mean, as you said, it has drama, it has sex, it has everything. And in some ways, what I found interesting is you related to the fact that when one thinks

about part of, you have so many hats, it's hard to classify you, which is great. But the pat, the synthetic biology hat at least, is in some sense, sense retracing those steps. And as you talked about it, maybe, and I think we're good to talk about that because, you know, you point out that I think that famous quote that basically in the process of, of, in utero, you basically go through the evolutionary phases of, that led to humans. And in some sense, that's what one is doing when one's dissecting our genome or potentially changing it, is sometimes going back in time.

So why don't you elaborate on that in a way it's more coherent than what I just said? So that was one of the themes of the book was this narrative stream that covered ontogenet recapitulates phylogeny or that developmental biology recapitulates the evolution of species. And so this was a question of whether we're recapitulating technologically and industrially all the stages of evolution. So it was kind of a hypothesis or a theme to make people think. simultaneously about these two timelines, the technological timeline and the natural evolution. And a lot of, you know, your first temptation is to say, oh, evolution is completely different from engineering. In fact, the whole anthropomorphism of evolution where you say, this was created or this was designed rather than, well, but they actually have a lot more

in common, which is that the engineers do a whole lot by trial and error. that most amazing engineered things have been through the most cycles of trial and error. Yeah, you don't see all those things. It looks like a path to success. And so in a certain sense, the commonality is the mutation and selection, which occurred in both the original long pathway that took billions of years and then the short pathway that's been more like millennia. Well, first, you know, it's interesting to me that that illusion of engineering being sort of a series of intelligent

to steps, which is really not often... Highly theoretical. But it's true. First time. But we perpetuate that myth also, unfortunately, when we teach science, right? Often it's... We teach it after the fact as if it's a logical progression. Exactly. When, of course, in the actual act of it, it's nothing like that.

It's a series of trial and error, usually. Right. Most often error. Yeah. And very rarely success. But I think that's probably for many young people, one of the hardest parts of... I guess especially the change from undergraduate to graduate is the realization that a lot of what you're going to do isn't going to succeed. Oh, yeah.

Right. And we do a disservice, right? We give kids problems. That's where they're, in physics at least, where they're always guaranteed to get the answer. And then we throw them in a lot. And it's a hard transition. But also, I guess people, I'm thinking of Francis Arnold now and people who in some ways are trying to take a lesson from, a real explicit lesson from evolution in doing it. engineering. Instead of actually trying to understand the pathway that goes from A to B, just trying a lot

of possibilities and letting nature sort of find the pathway, and maybe not even worrying about why or what the underlying mechanism is. I mean, how do you feel? Would you be happy with a black box that basically did what you wanted to do in terms of synthetic biology without knowing the underlying mechanism? Not entirely happy, but I think I do align with Francis when she says that, you you know, she uses evolution. In the world of synthetic biology, which was mostly, in its early days, dominated by computer science thought,

is that you would make circuits. You would design logical, bullion algebra inside the cell. I was an outlier, and I guess Francis was as well, on the side of, well, no, it's much more complicated than that. What we really want to do is design clever selection mechanisms and then where we really get what we want, no matter how complicated it is. So I do a lot of black box. So there was another theme meme at the beginning of synthetic biology was making everything

simple so that you could engineer because it's simple. And you rip out all the parts you don't understand. You're left with a minimal cell. And, you know, I was tempted for a few microseconds to that way of thinking. in it and I said, well, actually, you know, I'd prefer to have a maximal cell than a minimal cell. You know, it's like, you know, when I started building computers, I built minimal computers. I don't want to go back to that. I want something that's all tricked out with every kind of peripheral you want, as much memory as you want. I want to be able to write, you know, really complex software. I don't need to strip it out in order to make

good software. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you know, I've known you and Craig Venture independently for a while, and you've crossed bath and worked in. But, you know, so how, I mean, Craig was always talked, well, at least for a long time in synthetic biology, was trying to talk about creating literally the minimal life form, right? Yeah, I mean, I like Craig, you know, I've known since 89, and we tend to do things more alike than other people in our field. So, you know, We both did bioenergy at the same time. We both did genome synthesis when everybody else was doing other forms of synthetic biology. And we both sequenced our own genomes.

Yeah, there's a lot of similarity. But I think in terms of minimal genome, I sort of felt like there was no point. I just didn't see the point and the purpose of it. And I didn't see how you could achieve it. So, for example, in addition to Craig, I also knew Jack Shostack. And I knew that his minimal genome was going to be an RNA that could make a copy of itself. So it would be a ribozyme making a copy of itself. And that's basically one really small gene and maybe a few lipids.

And that's your minimal cell. And I say it's going to take a long time, like slowly reducing from a bacterium down to that one, you know, 200 base pair thing. And I said, why don't just build it up from, you know, why don't, you know. And I just sort of felt like, no, I'm going to go to the opposite direction. I'm going to go for really complicated things. And so I started saying, well, can we synthesize mammalian genomes, you know, that are thousands of times bigger than the bacterial genomes. And so, and that's, and we can do everything in between.

I mean, there's no particular. Yeah, well, we'll get to some of the interesting mammalian genomes you want to synthesize there. We'll get there, I guess. Because, of course, that's an area of people are fascinated by and terrified by. at the same time. And so I think it's worth a discussion. But let's actually, you know, let's go even to more, we talk about your origins. And I know in your book you began to talk about this, but this, of course, is something that I first thought was an easy, easily answered question and then I decided I wasn't sure if I could answer it. And which is what's the

difference between life and non-life? Right. Yeah, I think part of the, so this, Hank, this is a lot of people get hung up on this. And I think part of the problem is, they're trying to make a dichotomy and it would be like what's the difference between long and short and what's the difference between hot and cold and what's the difference between heavy and light and in physics we have we've we've settled this problem because we've got the meter is it's a continuous thing that goes from from pico meters or shorter all the way up to to to to to 10 to the 40th or something. And the same thing, almost all the very useful measures in physics are continuous and breath. There are some things that are quantized.

But they're relatively few. And anyway, I think in the case of life, if you take it from that perspective, you're going to say, well, what would be the continuum, what would be the value of the continuum? And I felt the defining feature, you know, there are various definitions, you know, like metabolism and evolution and, you know, the distinguishing feature that you know it when you see it is replicated complexity. It's not

complexity because, you know, like if you take a frog and dissociate its atoms, it actually is more complex than the original frog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not replicated things because the salt crystal is a nice, beautiful, organized replication of sodium and chloride. It's the mixture if you take something as complicated, that's not interesting. But you have two of them, and you say, how is it possible? You know, the odds of having two complicated structures is infesthal, so they must have replicated it. Yeah, I mean, and that's the mystery.

I was going to say miracle. There aren't any miracle. The mystery of life, which, of course, is fascinating. People like Shostak and everyone, I guess, in some ways, fascinating to understand how you can, how something as complex as even RNA could be, could be, replicated. You know, what made me realize that this issue of replication and complexity is more subtle is when someone said to me when I talked about what life was, that in many ways, fire has many of the characteristics of life. It's got metabolism. It replicates. It can even mutate. I even played out a scenario. Yeah, right. It mutates. And in some sense, some people say faithful replication, but in fact, fires, you know, certain kind of forest fires are faithfully replicated as they jump across. So it's kind of interesting. But, no, but no. No one would say it's life, so it's a bit... Well, it's on my spectrum.

Yeah. So if you tolerate that life as a spectrum, then it's on that spectrum. Well, let me jump ahead now to the future, and then we'll go in between. But what will life be like 100 years from now? Will life be the same thing? Will life have the same meaning? So 100 years can seem very short and very long in your perspective. If you go 100 years back, life hasn't changed that much.

I mean, certainly a culture has changed quite a bit, but the biology hasn't changed so much. I think one thing that people neglect is how much we inherit this not DNA. And so things could be quite different, even though our DNA is the same. 100 years seems like it's short and that it's like only 10 cycles of FDA approval, you know, about 10 years each. But it's a long time when you think of it in terms of the revolutions that I've personally experienced. So I was involved in some level of exponential curves that involved reading and writing data and DNA. You know, basically almost within one year,

we went from no web to web. We went from, I mean, we had the internet before that, but we didn't have like really, nobody was using it for web. Yeah, no, physicists were trying to little bits, but then it suddenly boomed over the world. And then we had, you know, reading and writing DNA improved by 10 million fold in less than a decade each. Editing has been about 10,000 fold in a few years. So if that can happen in five to 10 years, each of those revolutions,

and they're multiplicative, you know, where they build on, each other and accelerate. It's not just a 10 million-fold plus 10 million-fold. It's 10 million-fold times 10 million-fold. It's really hard to predict what could happen. My guess is it's one of these things that's very unpredictable tipping point kind of thing. If we culturally decide that we're going to change ourselves, we will be unrecognizable in 100 years.

and that's what scares us. If we decide we're going to not do that, then we'll be totally recognizable biologically, but completely unrecognizable culturally. Because we have this double standard where you can do radical surgery to the human inheritance as long as it doesn't involve DNA. So, in other words, you know, like my cell phone is heritable.

I've watched my daughter and her daughter use cell phones that look just like mine. And on the other hand, they don't really look that much like me biologically. And so I think that in a certain sense, our cultural evolution is going faster. Oh, sure. It goes horizontal better. In the words, if I say something in this microphone that's alluring, everybody will do it, you know? Right.

And so I think 100 years now we're going to be unrecognizable in some major way, even if we still have exactly the same human genome distribution that we have today, it won't play out the same. And to what extent cultural evolution can keep up or anticipate or deal with an exponentially growing technology is a, well, it's what the big problem. Well, technology is part of culture. Yeah, I know. So, of course it keeps up.

Well, it keeps up, but it's confronted by it. Some people would like to control it and some people realize it's what's going to happen is going to happen. some point. But I mean, the reason I'm asking is it's quite possible, given the technologies that have changed dramatically, even in the time I've known you, that we will be able to not only manipulate life, change life, and, well, not only create new life forms, but maybe change what the meaning of, the very meaning of life in a biological sense. And I, you know, I don't know where it's heading, but, but I... We're changing the most fundamental parts of it. Whether or not we change a human part of it. We're changing. So we have a new set of DNA bases, RNA basis, protein

amino acids. They're no longer limited to the original four and the original 20. So those are the genetic code, which is one of the things that's conserved across all species. Now we can change that arbitrarily. We can make any genetic code we want. And so these are the foundations. We're getting control of developmental biology so that it may be the 3D printer of the future. Yeah. Because instead of having one printhead that doesn't scale well, you've got a trillion print heads. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, life, well, we'll talk about it.

I mean, in fact, life utilizing life both for computation and reproduction in many ways will be, well, again, I have to admit, I hadn't thought of those things, I think, till some conversations we've had or overturned. the limitless possibilities of using what is a remarkable chemistry set and set of physical tools to do things that we might not have had the intelligence to actually design ourselves and use. And I think, well, of course, as I say, some people are terrified by that. But I guess, well, a related question, we're jumping all around, but that's fine.

A related question is a lot of people, for example, are concerned about cloning humans. and concern about various aspects of synthetic biology and now with the new tools. My attitude has always been that unless it violates some universal human moray to the extent that there are any, that what is possible will happen, whether you like it or not. I don't know, do you think so, or do you think the people will be so self-regulating that they'll not do things that could be done? Well, I neither buy the inevitability argument nor the regulation argument. You know, I think it is, nothing's truly inevitable. There are some things that we have banned and they stay banned.

Or they are just unpopular, you know, like jet packs, for example. Yeah, it's just, you don't have to ban them. Yeah, yeah. Right? They don't work very well. But if you buy one on Amazon, I think maybe, you know. they'd get zero stars and they disappear, you know. So what happens is that the regulations are kind of a facade that mass the capitalism that's actually calling the shots.

When we vote in the ballots, you know, that's a stand-in for where we're really voting, switch with our wallet. So it's ballot versus wallet. And I think that when we are concerned about the future, we should be, you know, it's good to have those conversations as far in advance as we want to have them and keep having them. And then when it comes, we're not reacting to it. We've done a little bit of proactive thought. I think it was a biologist who said, in fact, maybe the street were on is named after. I think he was the one who said fortune favors the prepared mind.

Wasn't it pasture? Yeah, I think it was. So anyway, so I think that the thing about genetically modifying babies, let's say, or germline, where it will be passed on for generation to generation, is one of these things where we get hung up on drawing lines, and we draw lines in the wrong place, right? In other words, we say, oh, here's a convenient place to draw a line because germline and soma, the body is totally different. But, and sometimes we'll draw a line in the wrong place where it's really a continuum and you can draw it really anywhere. And people are scared about regulating continue because there's this, you know, the line could slip.

It's like the continuum for speed limit, right? Yeah. It did slip, you know, for a while we were driving at 80 miles an hour or higher on the Audubon. Yeah. And then the gas crisis hit and we started saving, we started cutting the miles per hour and we started saving lives. You know, so regular things on continuum is hard, but we do it all the time. Most of the things we do on that. But when we say here's a dividing line that everything that's dangerous is on the germline side,

everything that's safe is on the soma side, because that's where we've been doing pharmaceuticals all along. That's false assurance. That's the thing that's dangerous, is that if to engineer, assuming that we're going to have this normal safety and efficacy, and we're worried about something above and beyond safety and efficacy. We're talking maybe long-term safety or equitable distribution or something like that. The germline takes 20 to 80 years to debug. In other words, if we want to make a baby that's safe from Alzheimer's, that's an 80-year design test-billed cycle. That ain't going to happen.

That's not going to happen just as likely as a jetpack. But if we want to prevent Alzheimer's in people that are... you know, 70 years old, then that's something, you get a good idea, you implement it, it's going to spread like wildfire through our aging population, and then it's going to spread horizontally in adjacent people who don't have Alzheimer's. Yeah.

Who, you know, their kids said, hey, that works so well for my dad, I'm going to take some, and then they become enhanced. And so this whole idea that, oh, we're not going to do enhanced, and, oh, germline is where we draw the line. It's artificial. we should be paying attention to the revolutions that can occur in somatic change and not just DNA. Well, you know, again, seeing it as a physicist from the outside, this artificial line is really remarkable. The first time it really hit me in biology was I was lecturing at a medical school in Chicago, I guess.

And it was a reproductive biology that, you know, they helped reproductive health. and I was taking an in vitro fertilization program and seeing it. And then when I discovered, and it always amazed me when people talk about the moment of conception, when you look at the continuum that happens there, it's not clear what moment you're talking about. I mean, there's so many steps. It's not as if it's boom.

It's just a life form. Sure, there's a sperm and egg, but I mean, all these, every step along the way. Well, there's even a 14-day rule, right? which is something happens at 14 days that causes us to not want to take in vitro fertilization beyond that. So the magic isn't at the one cell or the two cell stage. It's somehow at 14 days.

And it has something to do with how identical twins, it's like the last time that they can form, and therefore the soul or the identity is formed at that point. But then there are other things where we're clearly taking embryonic parts to much longer times. It's like we're building, if long as we build the parts, that's okay. So it's interesting how you figure out

how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. But it's more than just an academic question. And this is, I mean, you've now written this book and are asked to speak a lot in different contexts than just in academia. We make laws and regulations. and if they're not informed by reality, then they're pernicious,

at least in my opinion. And the issue of abortion, which is, of course, a hot-pushed issue in this country is based on so many... There's moral and ethical questions which may transcend them at some level, but to be based often on incorrect biology is a problem.

So how can we... Any suggestions for trying to improve that? Well, I mean, I tend to be pretty less so fair, is if people want to, you know, have reproduction one way or another, if they want to have, if they want to ban abortion in their family or their community, then that's their prerogative. It doesn't have to be based on facts. Or it doesn't have to be based on my facts, certainly. You know, so. But, of course, it's fine. I mean, people can always say, but no person is an island.

yeah, sure, they can decide not to have an abortion or their family. But what if they want to affect the way you make a decision? Is that, that's not a fair. If they're in the legislature, if they're in the majority, then they can make me do whatever they want, really, to some extent. And my only options are to leave the country or the planet or something. Well, as a scientist, so you can... Generally speaking, they don't interfere.

because they realize that if the 51% forces the 49% do something they don't like, it's only a few days before the 49% is the 51% and they're going to reciprocate. I think you're generous in terms of people's understanding what's going to happen next when they're working hard. And, you know, I do. But I think, well, let me put it this way. Do you think I often have this issue because I'm a scientist who spent a lot of time talking and speaking and writing for the public and for a variety of reasons.

and young people, often young scientists, come up to me and say, how can I do what you've done? And I usually tell them that if they're good young scientists, they should be doing science. The best thing they can do if they're talented is to do the science. And if they do good science, that the opportunities, if they're interested in social issues or political issues or communication of science or education,

those opportunities will come up in increasing frequency and larger scale, the better the science they do. Right, that's true. But, well, I mean, but you're an example. I mean, you've been doing fascinating science, and of course there's a huge public interest because of the implications. Have you been sort of, has this been thrust upon you?

Has this kind of greatness been thrust upon you? Or is it something you did willingly or just begrudgingly? No, I don't, I didn't feel a stress. In fact, if anything, there's a lot of selective forces against it. So, you know, I see my colleagues, older colleagues, who will reject communication with journalists because they might misinterpret it in a way that they can't correct it, that they can't micromanage it. It might make them look stupid or might make them look like they're desperate for attention or, you know, just a whole bunch of ways that can backfire. And so there's, so that was facing me.

So I was not, I didn't feel forced into it. I did it, Voluntaria, I sort of felt like, well, somebody's got to do it. Yeah. You can't complain that nobody understands you if you don't talk. Yeah, yeah. That nobody funds you if you don't explain. Yeah. If you don't listen, that's the other thing is part of the, part of the reason to going out there and communicating with the public is so you can listen.

Yeah, so you can learn what. If you don't say what's on your mind, you can't get the feedback that they don't like what's on your mind. You know, you don't find that out unless you've, you've, you know, you don't find that out unless you've. unless you've put it out there. And overall, I've been quite either lucky or, you know, in the right place, the right time, because I've, you know, I've had hundreds of interviews. Sure. And I look over them after the end, and I'm pretty much, they're accurate enough for my taste.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we agree in that sense. On the whole, I mean, I've been distorted every now and then, but the effort is, has been gratifying in many ways. And as you're pointing out, you learn as much as you give. You learn, you have an exposure to a different set of people than you would otherwise, which is really eye-opening. And they also learn what people are interested in.

You may think, I mean, we all think, the problem is most, especially, scientists, think what they're doing is incredibly interesting. But, you know, people may not find it that way. And it's really interesting to find out that what you think is interesting may not be what other people think is, you know, is interesting. And so it's, I'm glad to see that, well, I think it's important that some people, as I say, that some people, it's important. I think some people don't communicate. There's a lot of self-selection. Yeah, I think that.

I want to ask, by the way, you know, because your book begins with E. coli. I mean, as a non-biologist, I always hear about E. coli. Is E. coli your favorite thing? Not particularly. Probably my favorite organism is human. We do most of our studies in it. Again, not because somebody twisted my arm, but it's self-obsessed chauvinism.

But it also, you know, studying the human allows you to buy time. So if you're endlessly curious and you want to see what the future looks like, you're going to do something about aging. And there's a limit to how much aging you can study in ecoli. Echolai was the fastest-growing organism when I started working on it. Since then, we've found a faster one, and we've championed it, and we've changed it, and we've made it into something, which is almost as cool as you call it.

Cooler, because it's faster. So it's what you normally would take two days you can do in an afternoon, but it's called vibrio-netrogens. But it's, you know, they're basically, it's just another E. I mean, they're basically, you can lump them together and call them the same thing. It has, it has its place. If it's faster, why isn't it caught it? Why do I hear E. coli and I'd hear that a lot?

I mean, I know, you mentioned your book, started in the 40s and Vibrio started in 2015 was when our first really good paper on it came out. So, okay, so it's just sort of inertia. If it's valuable, it gets up, yeah. Yeah, well, again, natural selection in a sense in terms of the community, what works. It's got a lot of legacy stuff too. I mean, it's just, there's this backlog of knowledge and tools and so forth. Yeah, people want to work with what works if it ain't broken.

Yeah, yeah. But there is a new tool. And I want to spend, you know, CRISPR's changed everything. And you've been at the center of it. And I wonder, I mean, can you take us through this? I mean, how it's changed, your role in it, how it's changed the way you operate. And then we'll talk about what it, I mean, there's what it can do and what it can't do or what it might do. Well, first of all, I just want to say that CRISPR is kind of a placeholder.

an icon for a bigger set of things. And in a certain sense, there's a whole revolution that occurred in molecular biology that many people missed, either the new generation missed it or some journalists missed it. And so then they caught the CRISPR bug, because it has a cool name and it has some cool people involved. But really, it represents a number of other editing methods and then non-editing ways of doing genetic genomic modification. So CRISPR and its editing buddies nucleases mainly subtract.

They remove stuff. They're good at it. But there's addition. There's precise editing, which CRISPR isn't particularly good at yet. It's not very precise? Typically, it's low efficiency when you're trying to use it precisely. So if you look at most of the gene therapies that use CRISPR, they're aimed at removing a gene, knocking it out. you can do it, especially if you're doing it in animals.

But we already had ways of doing precise editing. It goes back, I don't know, to the 80s at least. Oh, really? Just a little less efficient. And that's the interesting thing, is people sometimes forget what a little efficiency will do. So CRISPR is maybe four times more efficient than the previous method. Maybe, you know, five, six times less expensive,

which is a different axis than efficiency. So those two, that's enough to get people excited. But CRISPR also represents the revolution in reading DNA. So it's hard to edit DNA. It's hard to edit a manuscript if you can't read it. And we just take for granted that we can now read things, not four times more efficiently, but 10 million times more efficiently.

And so it's like somehow that message is so overwhelming. We have to say, well, well, it's actually Christopher. We're interested. Christopher's a real hitter. Okay. So that's my disclaimer caveat about Christopher. But now I'll say how great Christopher is. So it represents to me a set of tools that are out there in the biosphere.

And one of the reasons of biological engineering, molecular biological engineering is so advanced so quickly, is because not only do we inherit all the legacy stuff from the electronics and physics revolutions, computerated design, micro fabrication, and so forth. We also inherited billions of years of trial and error, which resulted in these exquisite nanomachines, and that's what Christopher is. It's a nanomachine. Essentially, you could program the computer

a series of 20 ACs G's G's and T's that will take it to a corresponding set of G's A's and T's in the genome and do something there, typically cut it. That blows me away. And that's what this nanomachine does. And it's very complicated, and it's very sophisticated, and very efficient. And if you tried to make that from first principles, it would be quite challenging. And you might not even think to make it from first principles.

But they're lying around. There's like an alien spacecraft that's in your backyard without too much in the way of instruction manuals, but fairly intuitive once you start playing with them. And you just harvest these things. So our role in it was we had made a series of ways of reading DNA, you know, like maybe 30 different ways of reading DNA. We were involved in commercializing it. And that's the stuff that's increased by a factor 10 million.

That's the reading. Yeah, so nanopores and fluorescent. And that's been hugely important. Those are the kind of background without that. And then that was used to discover a lot of this. alien technology witchcraft, whatever, that's out there. And then some of the things that were discovered was, Christopher was junk DNA.

It was basically the repetitive DNA. That nobody knew what it did. And then eventually once we learned what it did, it turned out to be the least junky part of the genome. And I think back to the beginning genome project where everybody was trying to shut it down, like 90% of the people were opposed, the scientists were opposed to it because there's this junk DNA. Well, Christopher came out of that chunk. And we didn't tune into it right away.

But what we did was we were building up a set of tools that allowed us to characterize editors. So we were among the first to make libraries for zinc fingers. Libraries are a kind of collection of molecules where you can make them systematically and by designs. You can do trial and error and design at a large scale. It's giving millions of things in a library. So we made Zingfinger libraries back in the 90s, then Talons, Zin CRISPR,

and then various ways that were more precise. So those were all kind of things where you'll swap DNA integrases and recombinases. And we were doing all that. And we were just ready for anything like Christopher to come along. It's not like it came as a total surprise of us. We were totally right. So within weeks of us, you know, reading the literature, we could pop it into our pipeline for developing new technologies,

and it worked right away. And the fact that it worked that easily said, oh, well, this is going to be easy to get other people to use it as well. And then we started thinking about off-target. And so in our very, very first paper, we did a bunch of things that nobody else was doing, which was we did it in normal cells. So everybody was just doing it abnormal, abnormal cells.

We did look for off-target versus using, computer program. You say off target just for everyone. So, yeah. So the little 20 ACGs and T's that tells it where to go, well, it's not like a guided missile where it's just like goes right to the right place. It actually knocks on six billion doors. Yeah.

And sometimes knocking on the same door over and over, even when it's the wrong door, until it finally finds the right door and then it cuts. Every now and then, it'll say, I'm so tired. You know, I've knocked us on many doors. This door's close enough. And it'll make it cut there and that'll be off target, right? Okay. And so anyway, we wrote software in their very first paper on Christopher.

Well, it's software you wrote, do you say? Well, in addition to other things, there were software that said, don't just look on target. Don't just write the 20 bases that will take you to where you want to hit. Think about the whole genome. And that's partly because we came from reading the whole genome. We figured, let's look at the whole genome, see if there's something nearby that it could get into trouble with.

And if there is, then adjust the on-target. to some other place that doesn't have an off target. So the computer can kind of figure it out. Well, so you look for, you find in some sense what you look for. If you ask better questions, then you can use this tool more efficiently. Yeah. Now, I don't know if you want to talk about this or not, but because I don't know, I've, I was a little confused.

I mean, so there's this big patent thing, right, which you're involved in, and which, as far as I can tell, you guys came out on top. And is that because of determining, the utility of the technology and developing the techniques to be able to use it effectively, these software techniques? I was not that involved because I felt as a 10% teapot is most useful things, you know, like this microphone or a cell phone or something. Fulfs thousands of pounds.

Yeah. And nobody really, you know, they cross-license, you know. Yeah. You know, we'll get the microphone license together with the like the, the keyboardless screen and so forth. And I felt the same thing was going to happen in CRISPR. And sure enough, there are three CRISPR companies within a few blocks of each other here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And, you know, they're pretty much all healthy. And they have different founders. You know, I'm involved in two of them. And, you know, they don't need to worry that much about intellectual property. In fact, I tell all the people in my lab, I say, you know, don't worry about infringing. You know, that's your show. showing respect to the past. It's like citation, you cite previous work and you build on top of it, stand on the shoulders of giants. And the same thing's true of Christopher. By the time the dust

settles on, you know, we have patents and there are various other ones, but by the time the dust settles on Christopher patents, it'll be replaced by something else. You know, this too will change, right? Just like Christopher replaced talons, which, which, you know, will probably come back. Okay, well look, okay, but we're in the rapidly changing situation. And again, look, I asked you a hard question about what life would be like in 100 years, which is a question I wouldn't want to answer. Making predictions about the future is notoriously difficult, which is why. But it's important.

Yeah, I tell people I only do it for two, you know, two billion years in the future minimum, because then it's easier. But what, but CRISPR is changing. And people are afraid, as people always are of new things. Yeah. And I guess I was going to ask you if, what, well, do you see any limits? Do you see any, where do you see going or potentially, does it worry you? Or are there inherent limits in what you think you can do?

Or is it limitless? And you do what you will be able to do and create virtually whatever we want. Yeah, well, first of all, I try not to reassure people. I worry as well. I worry about every new technology, not just biotechnology. And I try to see as far as possible in terms of the future is plural. I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm trying to predict many of them.

And then we can pick the one we like the best. We can try to pick the one like the best. But I doubt that it's limitless. I mean, there's certainly laws of physics will limit it. Heisenberg and second law and so forth. But it's also limited in a certain sense by competing methods. So not just competing methods doing editing, but competing methods doing everything. So people talk about the enhanced human.

But we're incredibly enhanced. We're transhuman in the sense that we do things that our ancestors and even people that live today that haven't experienced technology, you know, isolated communities, wouldn't understand. They wouldn't understand why LIGO was an interesting physics experiment. I mean, it would just blow their mind, right? And why we care about social networks on this little piece of, you know, glass and metal. Yeah. And, you know, why we're so worked up about going to Mars, you know, it's just a little dot of light that doesn't do anything, except maybe helps me do selectional navigation when I get lost.

And so we have enormously changes. So the limitations on synthetic biology is that so many things we've already done. So people say, well, we could expand so we can see more than just red to blue. We already can see everything from gamma rays to radio. We can see the whole lot. And we can image it if we want. We can see it in 3D. Yeah, we do.

All the observations from satellites, like all color images. And we can see very tiny things and very distant things. Our senses are only limited. by physics. And so therefore, why should biology intervene to do something better than that, right? And you can say, well, it could make us super strong. We're always super strong. It's like, you know, if I want to be strong, I use a forklift. If I want to run fast, I get on a jet. You know, I'll outrun even your most advanced genetically engineered cheetah. So what we're limited, What we're restricted to that we can't already do some other way is probably health.

We want to be robust for as many years as possible. We want to be youthful, basically. And then maybe intelligence. We want to be able to design the next set of physics, right? Because it's mostly physics and chemistry that are amazing. And the biology is just, we're a particularly good computer. Yeah, we're fat amazingly good at compressing, throwing out a lot of garbage data we don't need. Yeah.

And then thinking big thoughts. We're good at that. And that's it. That's it. Pretty much living, youthful, productive lives with better brains. That's all that's left to us. Everything else is physical chemistry. Wow.

It's interesting to hear you say that. I used to say that when I taught physics that we do quantum mechanics would say, well, okay, today we're going to do all of chemistry and then, you know, the rest is just details. But I've thought about a lot of things you've been talked about and that are interesting possibilities. So I thought maybe we just go through some of the interesting, specific possibilities that you've talked about. And one that I was always fascinated that you first brought up to me, and I again was reading in your book, but is plastics. I feel like the Dustin Hoff movie at the beginning of it. Yeah. But the graduate. But the notion that life can make plastics, and that'll be very useful, you can engineer life.

But why don't you talk about that first? Well, so plastics, I think we can do so much better than plastics, first of all. I mean, even when we were writing the book, that particular chapter was initiated by my co-author, Ed Regis. And I sort of felt like he was emphasizing biodegradable plastic. And I actually think there's something we said for non-degradable plastics. Yeah, you were the first person that made me realize that that was probably very useful. Yeah, so I mean, the thing is where, you know, a lot of the things that we talk about, like, that are solutions to climate change are really just pushing things around a little bit or maybe delaying the inevitable a little bit. Yeah.

But if you could sequester carbon into something useful, like asphalt or non-degradable plastics, you could build bridges between the continents. You could build new islands. I remember you first told me a bridge across the Pacific. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's more interesting. Furthermore, we can make polymers that are smarter than what we normally think is plastics.

Almost all of life are polymers that are very smart. You know, the skin repairs itself. Imagine if everything in the world was as good at skin will keep out little pathogens. You know, things we can't even see, it will keep them out effectively. What if all of our buildings and all of our tables and chairs and everything were as smart as our skin is? We're smarter, right? And almost everything in life is atomically precise. We aspire to that with our non-biological engineering.

But biology is already there. It makes things atomically precise. And so I think the future of plastics, you know, from the graduate, is smart, infinitely complex, atomically precise objects. So basically everything should have the power. Just like your cell phone now has a power of a room-sized computer. Your materials will have the power of a cell phone. Every little voxel, every little pixel, a little square centimeter. will be like a computer was.

Well, that'll be fascinating. You know, it's interesting. When you talk about atomic precision because one of the forefront of physics right now is it's amazing to be able to manipulate single atoms and try and utilize and maybe create new materials, non-life material, but new materials and manipulate atoms. But you're absolutely right.

Life's been doing that so effectively for billions of years. We need to take it. We can move atoms around with about 10 to minus, ninth precision. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. Well, well, let's, and by the way, and with close to theoretical thermodynamics, too. So we can, we can store a bit of information, you know, within a factor of eight of the thermodynamic limit of bit storage, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, in fact, I remember reading about that when you were talking. So we'll talk about computers, but in a second,

I was interested in how you were talking about storage and processing and using DNA for that, which is actually, I mean, DNA is actually just a fancy kind of, you know, electric storage. Electro storage and software and manipulated by that kind of hardware. And I should say, just so the people who hadn't thought us quickly through this, is the point of non-biodegradable plastics that might be useful is that, I mean, obviously the basis of plastics like the base of all organic life is carbon. You can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by, in some ways, through organisms,

and turn it into something which is ultimately totally sequestered, which won't go back into the atmosphere. That means you, in principle, could work against the buildup of greenhouse gases, just so. Oh, yeah. You unpack it very nicely. In fact, I'll unpack it even further, which is that the amount of photosynthesis we do every year on the planet,

most of it occurring in the ocean, with invisible organisms, is enough to take us back to pre-industrial carbon levels in the atmosphere in a few years. That's how potent our current ecosystems are. And we just need to figure out where to store it. You don't want to store it. One proposal was to add iron and then have all the carbon drop to the bottom of the ocean. A, that's inaccessible. B, it's going to take a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus with them, especially the phosphorus, which is not really a renewable resource the way we're using it. Instead, the tundra, so 19 million square kilometers, is storing more carbon than the rest of the world put together. And it's at risk. But the form is a semi-bodegradable polymer, which is

cellulose, which is in the roots that go down. Most of the carbon out here, in the regular part of the world here, the non-permafrost is about a meter thick, and then there's almost nothing. But there, it's 500 meters thick, right? And it's, this is a lot of carbon. And it's, unfortunately, it's non-biodegradable, while it's frozen, it's very biodegradable.

And it turns into methane, which is 28 times worse than carbon dioxide. Yeah, which is a huge, huge problem. And the exponential, the fact that all, a lot of these problems are exponential, or at least non-linear that you, once it starts to melt, you produce more, but of course the effect of more methane is to make more melt.

And so when people think in the far future, things can happen very, very quickly. And there can be a phase transition that it just, and it's not clear where the tipping point is and how close we are to it right now. It could, you know, if you, so a lot of the methane is in a metastable form where it can literally bubble out of the ocean or the lake.

You could get really big bursts. And so when we say that something thousands or 100 years or 50 years away, we don't have confidence there. And as Clint Eastwood would say, do you feel lucky, punk? You know, it's like, I don't feel that lucky about nothing. And the other thing that I think that gets people that denial, denial has to do with inconvenience. And I think Gore had it slightly wrong, which is the inconvenience. which is the inconvenient truth is not a slogan. Yeah.

It is the problem. And what we need to do is make it more convenient. And I think there are various natural processes that we could harness that wouldn't necessarily require us giving up our SUVs or getting, you know, big government handouts that we need to think about those alternatives. As you say, this inconvenient aspect is a key question. Most people, the problem, I mean, as a scientist, uncertainty, of course, is a central, what people don't realize that uncertainty is a central part of science.

It's not what science overcomes. It's the basis of science because we can quantify our uncertainty. But when people talk about, well, these predictions are this or that, and I don't believe in the question, it seems to me that we need to ask is, well, this is a possibility. How much money are you willing to spend to avoid that possibility? Because if that possibility happens, it's devastating. So the question, I mean, and, you know, compare it to grounding all the 737 max 8s that is happening because a few people died. I mean, it's not as it's tragic that they died, but tens of millions of people fly in them every day.

And yet that risk was enough to cause people to, the risk of one in 10 million. We're not really good at public health risk assessment. Exactly. We worried about 3,000 people. Yeah. When that day, more people died for other people. costs and 50 million of us die every year. Okay, so that should put the, if you really want to get worked up about 3,000 people, think

about the million people dying every year from malaria or vitamin A deficiency or that sort of thing. And I think that part of the inconvenience is the finger-pointing aspect. Is this like, you're the villain because you've got the biggest smokestacks. And really, the villain is probably somebody 15,000 years ago. who slaughtered all the herbivores in the Arctic, or some other thing like that. Interesting.

And so stop pointing the finger. It's like if an asteroid were aiming towards Earth right now, you might say an asteroid never bothered me. Why should we worry about asteroids, you know? I'm not even sure that the asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. You know, maybe it did, maybe it didn't. You know, the scientists are still debating this. So we don't need to worry about that asteroid out there

because while they're still debating the dinosaur asteroid. And I say, hey, get a grip. It's just, let's just take out that asteroid. You know, it's like, you don't have to point a finger as to who's responsible that asteroid. It's like, it's like the biggest snokes that didn't cause that asteroid. It's just, let's have some heroes take it out, right? Yeah, yeah, no, okay, good.

And existential risk, I mean, is something that we've talked about. I was very proud to bring you into the board of sponsors of the Bulletin, the Atomic Scientists, when I shared that. But let's talk about something more positive than, then destroying life. Well, this is positive you can do something about it by engineering photosynthetic organisms. Exactly. You can do it by engineering herbivores that will craft the Arctic like they used to 15,000 years ago.

Those are things that could be very low cost. So, for example, we've reinstalled almost extinct bison to 500 million, sorry, 500,000 worldwide. and they're doing their thing. They're doing their gardening without a lot of micromanagement, a lot of government without government handouts. Well, I think that, you know, I've said repeatedly, and I think it's the case.

The problem of global warming is two parts, or climate change, and more generally, there's a societal part and a technological part, and I think it's just a lot easier to technology than it is to change society. And so I'm, all my votes are... It's the only thing that does change society, really. Yeah, exactly.

In between technological revolutions, you have a bunch of people like moving around the shell game acting like they're controlling things. But really, it's technological revolution. So the technology is going to be a key. And whether it's mediation or avoidance, we'll see. But there are other technologies that you've talked about that, at least want to touch on in some of the time remaining, and then maybe end up with some more general questions. Reversal of aging. You talk about aging.

I know that's one of the things you're thinking about. I want to talk about that a little bit. Right. So there's a lot of wishful thinking that I try to avoid. You know, like, oh, all of this is I have to change my lifestyle a little bit, run a few more steps, eat or don't eat something. I think it's more complicated than that, but it's not, it's not daunting. It's just complicated. It's like, you know, a jet is complicated. You're not going to reduce it down to a sliver of, you know, of plastic. You know, it's, and so when, you know, aging, we have a big body of knowledge. It's not like it's a mystery, mostly derived from tiny model organisms, worms and flies, and we just harvest that information. We're turning it into gene therapies to tackle all the known, you know, like nine major pathways of biochemical pathways of aging, and we just tackle them all at once with a very small number of gene therapies, and we tested all mice and dogs and humans. And so that's one approach that I think is,

relatively easy, and we're making some progress on it. Well, it'd be interesting to see people have argued about an upper limit on lifetimes. I mean, because it's fascinating to me to think of the social implications of if you could double the human lifetime. Then society has to restructure itself completely, right? Because it's based on a working lifetime. Right. And then you've got to worry about it. I mean, professors, you don't want them to be. Why wouldn't you work for 200 years?

Exactly. I agree. And we can't have that because you don't want to have a 10-year professor for 200 years because the young assistant professor is not going to wait 100 years to get a physician. I don't see why they can't both have a physician. It will be interesting. I mean, this question of how. It's not a zero-thumb game. No, it's not, but society, you know, has to somehow restructure the way it works.

There's definitely, we're going to be restructuring anyway. We restructure every, whether we like change or not, you can, it's pretty much guaranteed. We're radically different culturally. than we were just when I was growing up. Well, let's hit another topic that I was hoping to get to, which you've written about, and I think about, which is AI, the artificial intelligence, because that, of course, what people don't realize is those changes are going to happen,

and we have a choice. There's zero doubt, it seems, to me. I mean, AI isn't very artificial in the first place. But it is going to change our, it already has changed our society. It will change our society, and it will mean there's no doubt that what we would now call machines are going to be able to do most jobs better than people, I think. So we have a, and that's going to produce a social issue. Is it going to be that the few companies that have control AI basically control all the resources,

or are we going to say, yeah, it's great that those, the old Keynesian argument, it's going to be great that these machines are doing that. We have a chance for you and I to hang around coffee shops and listen to music and have interesting discussions, which is, I think what Cain said would first happen when machines were, you know, the basis of the economy. But that's going to be a social question. And I'm not optimistic that we'll be able to guide things in the right direction. I don't know whether you...

And so if we talk about aging, I'm not optimistic that it won't first cause a lot of... At least first cause a lot of displacement and problems. But maybe you're more optimistic about how we might... I try not to be optimistic. You know, I try to think about all those... things that can go wrong. And part of the reason that the disasters don't happen first is because a lot of people have visualized those disasters and avoid them. You know, like, Y2K, what a fizzle. That was there was nothing. But maybe it was nothing because we spent so much time messing around

with it. Maybe. Or, you know, there's safety mechanism. There's a whole safety engineering in almost every discipline of engineering. Civil engineering, electrical engineering, a little UL codes on your wires. You know, it's why we want to anticipate things. Well, I agree. It's why we want to have these discussions, why we want people to think about it. And it seems to me, ultimately, why we want the public to think about these things, because some of them are going to require at least legislative reaction, and governments are relieved they follow. And so if your public is sort of completely ignorant of what the questions are, the politicians can afford to ignore them, too, it seems to me, at least from my experience. Yeah, but again, ultimate,

the public is voting with their wallet. And they aren't necessarily informed beyond the consumer reports or the Amazon star rating. But the point is they are informed in a way that's very practical. Just like in engineering, we don't need to understand everything in order to make a revolution, like smallpox. We didn't understand virology or immunology, but it was still a revolution. Same thing goes when we purchase things in the marketplace. We don't necessarily have to know all the ramifications. of it. Somebody hopefully is paying attention to the ramifications, the long-term ramifications.

But in the end, as things, long before things become disastrous, they have small disasters where one person will be hurt. And then you'll say, oh, we completely forgot, or we weren't listening to this person over here that's been telling us for years that somebody's going to get hurt. And before a million people get hurt, one person got hurt. And I think that there's a feedback loop. I don't think that aging reversal is necessarily going to have, you know, bad consequences right away. I agree. I can imagine things where you don't have that interim time very much time for that goal from one to a million. And AI may be, maybe one such. So I think with AI, well, first of all, it's a gigantic assumption that we're going to continue to use, you know,

gold and silicon and those sort of things. I think it's just as likely. I think it's just as likely. we switched over to atomically precise computing, which is this. I mean, we already have brains that will reconfrey. They will not only reprogram themselves overnight, they will change their hardware. They will synthesize new hardware in C2 all the time, okay? Now, they're not the fastest thing in the world,

but in the other hand, it's not clear that this is a speed issue. But if we need to do speed, we'll make various hybrid systems where the speed is handled. You know, storage, you know, we're notoriously poor at storage, but in a way that's our superpower, too, is that we're really good at compressing, and the compression is part of the thinking part,

the out-of-the-box thinking is how we compress. But if we do decide we want to store a lot of stuff, DNA is a great storage device. We could fit the entire Internet into our cranium if we really want it to. So I'm not convinced that artificial intelligence is going to be superior. It's not superior yet, and we're going, the biological revolution is going faster. More as well as kind of plateauing, at least in terms of miniaturization, and biology is almost going vertical in its exponential.

Yeah, as I've often said, I don't think artificial intelligence is so artificial. And it's not going to, if we incorporate the brain, it's certainly not going to be that. And the fact that the brain, from a physics perspective, what always amazed me is there's something the brain does very well, which is if you took a conventional electronic computer and tried to do the storage and memory and the processing power of the human brain, the power would use becoming like 10 terabytes, which is the power used by a whole of humanity. We use 10 watts or 20 watts in our brain. There's a factor of 10 to the 12 different. We're doing something much more efficient. Yes. It's efficiency is something we're good at. Well, there's so many things I want

to talk about. But you mentioned thinking, ultimately thinking outside the box, and I hope people realize from our discussion, it seems to me when we think of people who think outside the box that you're just one of the best examples. I always love thinking outside the box with you. So thank you very much. Sure.

The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krause, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps. Directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwerta. Audio by Thomas Amison. Web design by Redmond Media Lab. Animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects. and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content,

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