George Church

We should make a biolat.

It should be a small...

challenge goal for the synthetic biology community, maybe iGEM or something, make, you know, bacteria make a radio.

Now, actually, Joe Davis is an artist that's been affiliated with my lab and before that, Alex Rich's lab.

And he did make a bacterial radio, but it was kind of more on the art end than on the science end.

But I think that would be a good goal.

So part of this has to do with just learning the rules of developmental biology, like I said.

We can determine morphology at sort of the molecular level now, proteins, nucleic acids.

Determining at the cellular, multicellular level, there's a lot more things you can do and a lot faster.

but we don't know the language yet.

I think we're on the cusp of getting the tools to do that, like the transcription factor I was talking about earlier, harnessing, migration, gradients of factor, diffusion factors, chemotaxis and so forth.

So that's one thing we need, but there's a bunch of things we need, really.

Oh, I see what you're getting at.

So astronomy might be we would detect radio signals or light signals.

But biology, the kind of evidence would be that you show in a laboratory using...

prebiotic conditions a really simple way to get life, right?

Or, I mean, it's a harder proof to prove that given, because we don't know what all the possible prebiotic conditions, and probably the number was vast.

I mean, you have 10 to the 20th liters of water and, you know,

at various different salinities and drying up on the ocean and the sun and the lightning and all this stuff.

But yes, I think if you showed kind of reconstructed in the lab a very simple pathway from inorganics, cyanide derivatives and reduced compounds all the way up to, you know, some cellular replicating structure, I think that might...