George Church

I mean, certainly there are plenty of modified ones.

There's a bunch of alternative base pairs, some of which don't even involve hydrogen bonds.

So we could have more.

But I think the main thing is this information storage and whether it's bits, digital binary is just zeros and ones, that works pretty well for 99% of what we do electronically.

So having four is better than two maybe, but do we really need six?

You know, I don't know.

So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we had... Another possibility is that we change the backbone of DNA.

So maybe keep the ACGT, but make it out of peptides now.

A little bit smaller, a little bit more compatible.

I don't know.

Or maybe that'll just be...

just a slight, you know, it could be part of the new amino acid collection.

And there'll be more.

I mean, these are just things that my primitive 21st century brain is coming up with a thousand years from now.

It'll be a whole new millennium.

I think that evolution has a tendency to go with what works, and the investment in making a whole new base pair would have been high.

And we haven't even articulated what

what the return on investment would be.

What do you get from that?

We have made systems like Floyd, Williamsburg and others that where you have replication and transcription and translation with a new base pair, but it hasn't been clearly articulated what that gets you.