George Church

And we know how to

We know the genes involved and we know how to do genetic counseling in some cases, gene therapy and other therapies to deal with it.

At the other end, you know, we have

reduction of cognitive decline by cognitive enhancement, which is showing some promise.

But again, that's kind of like this early stage severe impediment to cognition has a late stage component.

But what about...

How much information does it take to encode a brain?

I'm not sure that that much less genome is required than if you just wanted to make a brain, because the brain is totally entangled with the body.

You know, you have a 10 to the 11th neurons, 10 to the 14th synapses.

If you wanted to reproduce a particular brain, let's say, it might be...

It's speculative as to whether it would be easier to do that by making a copy of it in silico, in some kind of inorganic matrix, or making a copy of it.

Both of those are going to be hard.

I would say that if you wanted to make a copy of a

you know, complicated book, it would be easier to take photographs of each of the pages than to completely translate it into another language, trying to get all the nuances and the poetry and so forth if your goal is just to replicate it.

And I think the same thing might be true of a brain.

But replicating a brain probably involves a lot more information than synthesizing it.

So, I mean, just to define the 10 to the 14 synapses is going to take a lot more bytes than the genome, which is

billions rather than 10 to the 14th.

But there might be reasons that you want to replicate a particular brain configuration rather than just make another animal that starts from scratch as an infant.

Well, I mean, certain things seem incompatible, like the temperatures of a fission reactor.