George Church
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
That was just one little campaign that they did.
One experiment involved a lot of AI and a lot of testing of millions of different capsids.
If you did that with cells, capsids are fairly limited in the diversity and the structure that it can change to, but cells have even more
possibilities, I think you could probably get delivery to everything.
And the question is, how close to 100% do you need to get?
And it's going to vary from tissue to tissue.
For example, for some therapies, you just need to get
1% because that 1% can produce some missing enzyme and the 1% doesn't have to necessarily be in its normal place, right?
You know, you can you can turn a muscle into part of the immune system temporarily for a vaccine.
You can, you know,
An enzyme that's normally made in, let's say, the brain, you could make in the liver, right, if the point is just to get it into the blood.
So I think that's moving along quite well.
I think people get worked up about whether we are trying to bring back or have already or will ever bring back a new species.
And I think of it, if you think of it rather than as a natural thing that we're trying to do but as a
synthetic biology with goals that have potential societal and people also get worked up as to whether this could possibly benefit society in any way you know can we really um you know fix an environment uh to suit humans or fix the global carbon to suit humans and the answers we don't know but it's worth a try isn't it because it's could be very cost effective um
And the other thing, the other aspect of it is there's a whole discipline within synthetic biology of asking what's the minimum, right?
And so people often phrase it into what's the maximum, you know, like what can we do?
And I'm interested in both, but, you know, it's like, oh yes, there's millions of difference between mammoths and elephants.
There are millions of difference between elephant one and elephant two within Asian elephants and between Asians and African.
But not all of those are definitive in terms of,