A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church

George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.

Professor Church thinks that these improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise gene editing tools like CRISPR, AlphaFold-type AIs, & the ability to conduct massively parallel multiplex experiments) have put us on the verge of some massive payoffs: de-aging, de-extinction, biobots that combine the best of human and natural engineering, and (unfortunately) weaponized mirror life.

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Timestamps

(0:00:00) – Aging solved by 2050

(0:07:37) – Finding the master switch for any trait

(0:19:50) – Weaponized mirror life

(0:30:40) – Why hasn’t sequencing/synthesis led to biotech revolution?

(0:50:26) – Impact of AGI on biology research progress

(1:00:35) – Biobots that use the best of biological and human engineering

(1:05:09) – Odds of life in universe

(1:09:57) – Is DNA the ultimate data storage?

(1:13:55) – Curing rare diseases with genetic counseling

(1:22:23) – NIH & NSF budget cuts

(1:25:26) – How one lab spawned 100 biotech companies

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