George Church

Having just more materials in general.

All the materials we use in mechanical and electrical engineering should be made better by biotechnologies.

Why is that?

Why is that?

Well, it's that electronics is more so, I wouldn't say is stopping, but it's

that what we would call the one nanometer process, which is supposed to come out in 2027, according to the roadmap, it's not really one nanometer, it's more like 40 nanometers center to center spacing, typically in two dimensions, maybe a little bit of three dimensions, but biology is already at 0.4 nanometer resolution and it is in three dimensions.

And so,

you know, depending on how you count that third dimension, that could be a billion times higher density that biology is already at.

And, you know, we just need a little more practice with dealing with the whole periodic table.

Even lecture, lecture on engineering doesn't use the whole periodic table typically, but we, but especially not at the atomic level.

So I think biology is just really good at doing atomic precision.

A few things.

One is the arrival of synthetic biology.

We were already kind of doing synthetic biology before.

We were doing recombinant DNA.

It was kind of...

you know, genetic engineering was called, it was kind of in that direction, but synthetic biology really liberated us to think a little bit bigger, even though it started kind of focused on E. coli and yeast, it enabled us to maybe think about new amino acids, for example.

And I think new amino, if you start using the full periodic table with the amino acids or what amino acids can catalyze,

that breaks one of the major barriers.

One of the major barriers between electrical and mechanical engineering and biology was the use of special materials, things that conduct electricity at the speed of light or conduct signals more generally.