George Church

what we would normally call them, you know, how we would normally classify them, what their functionality would be in an ecosystem, right?

And so there's this exercise that people do, and we've done it, for example, with developmental biology.

What's the minimum number of transcription factors it takes to make a neuron from a pluripotent stem cell, right?

What's the minimum number of base spheres it takes to make something that will replicate to something that was done in mycoplasma originally?

And in a way, these are more interesting than can we make a perfect copy of something, right?

It's can we make – what's the minimum things we have to do to make it completely functionally –

or even functionally in a particular category, right?

How do we make it bigger?

We learn the rules for how to make things bigger, how to make things replicate faster, how to use new materials, et cetera.

So I think what the dire wolf, we clearly didn't make an exact copy of the dire wolf, but it helped illustrate kind of,

educated people around the world that what is the difference between a wolf, a gray wolf and a dire wolf, right?

Because, you know, dire wolves, they're big.

Maybe they have a particular coloration.

You know, the head components tend to be bigger than the leg components.

And so how many genes do you need to do that?

Maybe this was dire wolf, you know, 2.0, and we're going to go for

go for 3.0 in successive approximation.

And we might want to develop the technology for making exact copy of something, because then we can, especially being able to make a hundred variations on an exact copy, because then there won't be any argument about whether you could make a dire wolf.

It's a matter of what should you make and what would be most beneficial for the species that you're making, for the environment it lives in, and for humans.

Yeah, I think you're hitting on a very interesting question, and it's related to, you know, what's the minimum?