George Church

Much harder.

Again, the offense has the advantage.

We can make a lot of different codes.

Yeah, so one interesting thing is that there's only two chiralities.

There's the current chirality and the mirror chirality.

But there's maybe 10 to the 80th different codes.

Now, some of them you might be able to take out all at once.

Anyway, the coding space is a kind of more interesting space.

And of course, it could get even more complicated than that because the 10 to the 83rd is like...

based on triplet codons and and that sort of thing but if they're quadruple codons or new novel alphabets and so on um but we're sort of getting into uh

you know, a cycle of competition.

It would be better than nip it in the bud, which is, you know, why did we spend so much societal resources building up to tens of thousands of nuclear warheads?

And now we've...

Dialed it back to mere thousand nuclear warheads.

That's nice that we dial it back, but why did we waste all that time and money and energy?

It's hard to pound nuclear weapons into plowshares, as they say.

One of the things I advocated in 2004 is that we stop deluding ourselves into thinking that

moratorium and voluntary signups to be good citizens is going to be sufficient.

We need to also have surveillance and consequences and mechanisms for whistleblowers to make it easy for people to report things that they think are out of line.

And we had essentially moratoria and disapproval for germline editing, and nevertheless, somebody did it.