Drew Endy

I think of it as whittling or sculpting a block of marble.

You're removing everything that's not needed.

When Kate's talking about building a cell from scratch, we are not subject to that constraint because she gets to choose every block of DNA that goes into that system.

That's the bottom-up, exactly.

The way I think about it metaphorically is I imagine we're all part of this giant world called lineage land, right?

And if we leave that continent or world, go to a new world, you know, we just get to build new things.

Wow.

And it's a very subtle mental shift.

This is not something that's decades into the future.

This is something that's a very active field making progress in real time.

Thanks for having us.