George Church

But there's definitely polymers that biology can make that will conduct at the speed of light.

And we could make a mixed neuronal system that has conventional neurons and processes that conduct at the speed of light.

That would be interesting.

I think that our ability to design

uh proteins was particularly difficult designing nucleic acids was great whether we were doing you know you you want two things to bind to each other you just dial it up using watson creek rules if you want to make a three-dimensional structure you know it's actually the one kind of the one thing where morphology is dictated by fairly simple rules it's not how developmental biology works and we still need to figure out how that works but dna origami dna nanostructures really work

but doing it for proteins was really really hard until i don't know maybe eight years ago something like that and and i think we're just now getting used to it the use of chips for making dna um i mean you said that dna synthesis come down a thousand fold what depends on who you talk to so that when we came out with uh the first chip based genes in 2004 nature paper uh basically people dismissed it for about a decade the only people that used it were

you know, collaborators and alumni.

And it wasn't even listed on the Moore's law curve for DNA synthesis, even though it was like a thousand times cheaper.

It was just like ignored.

And now we have claims of 10 to the 17th

genes okay that you can make you can make libraries 10 to 17th that aren't randomized and in any real in the usual sense where you just like do air prone pcr or spiked in nucleotides uh now 10 to 17th that's a lot bigger than a thousand fold you know if if you know if it turns out to be practical yeah

I think part of it is that the nanotechnology as original, the source of the inspiration, Eric Drexler, he wanted to reinvent biology

In a certain sense, but it already existed.

And so you don't need to design a diamond replicator because you already have a DNA replicator.

And so the question of what was missing, what was motivating this reinvention of biology, it was materials.

So the biology is not that great with...

you know, materials that are, say, superconductors or conductors, period, semiconductors and light speed.

But it's getting there.

I mean, you know, rather than going the route of having everything has to be based on first principle nanostructures, you meet in the middle where biology can build things.

Now, of course, when you go down to