George Church

isn't obviously compatible, but the possibility that once we, that a biological system can make other things, for example, it can,

You know, it can make a nest, a bird can make a nest, okay?

And you consider the whole nest as part of the replication cycle of the bird.

So you can say biological thing that replicates at 30 minutes doubling time could make a nuclear reactor as that would be its nest.

But you need to expand this range of materials.

In a certain sense, we do this already.

Humans are a biological thing that replicates, not in 30 minutes, but in 20 years or less.

And is that fundamentally limiting us?

Probably is.

But yes, it's amazing to think about what if you could take a cornfield or a nuclear reactor and suddenly 30 minutes later, you've got two of them, right?

And then four of them.

I mean, that's quite an interesting concept.

But I think we should start with, I teach a course called How to Grow Almost Anything.

And I work with Neil Gershenfeld at MIT who has a course called How to Make Almost Anything.

And we're trying to meet in the middle where we can

And, you know, his, you know, mechanical electrical engineering will meet with our biological.

And, in fact, neither of us can make or grow almost everything because there are all kinds of little gaps and things that are very hard to make in a small lab because there are things all over the world that depend on, you know, multibillion-dollar fabs to make things.

But, you know, we're eating away at it.

I think that we might eventually be, you know, maybe a smaller baby step than making a nuclear reactor is making a phone.

You know, you said radio communication.