George Church

Very different attitude.

It's much more engineering, but it's even different from most engineering.

Engineering doesn't usually use libraries that way.

Millions and billions of components that are non-random, but...

But many of them will fail.

Yeah.

So the question is selection criteria.

So of that, there's a self-selection.

And the next thing is in the interview, I typically tell them I'm looking for people that are nice.

I'm not necessarily looking for geniuses.

We end up with a lot of geniuses.

It's wonderful.

But NICE, I think, is highly predictive of how well you will do in the lab and afterwards.

And as a consequence, I think we have a kind of international set of alumni that are quite nice to each other.

even though they're supposedly in cutthroat fields.

And I think they're nice to other people as well.

So that's nice is one criteria.

Multidisciplinarity, it's hard to build a multidisciplinary team from disciplinarians.

So if you have two people that each know

two languages or two skills, even if they don't have anything in common, they have shown that they can learn a new skill and then they'll each add the skill that connects them as a third thing.