George Church

So, for example, you almost said it, which was, you know, take a very multigenic trait in humans, like height is something that's probably the most well-studied one, simply because no matter what gene you're, no matter what,

medical condition you're studying, you collect information on height and weight and things like that.

Anyway, they tracked it down to on the order of 10,000 genes of which we have 20,000 protein coding genes.

Some of them are RNA coding genes.

And they each have a tiny influence on height.

But if you take growth hormone, somatotropin, that you have extreme examples where you'll get extremely low, small stature and extremely high stature due to that one alone.

And in fact, it's used clinically as well for seven different studies.

medical treatments.

So that's a perfect example of how much we can minimize something, sometimes called reductionism.

Reductionism isn't all bad.

Sometimes it helps us bring a product into medicine.

Sometimes it helps us understand or build a tool chest or a

module that we can use in other cases and translate it to other species.

So you hit on it just right, is that not everything will translate, but we start accumulating these widgets.

It's kind of like all the electronic widgets that we accumulate over time, that if we just want to slap it into the next circuit, you might be able to.

Biology, we've got a real gift, which is it's both very much more complicated than almost anything we've designed from scratch.

But it also is a lot more forgiving in a certain sense, is that you can have an animal or even a human that has two heads, which is not something that they evolutionarily have.

There was not evolutionary selection specifically to have two heads, but just a little deviation from the normal developmental pattern during fetal development.

And they both function fine, they control subsets of the body.

And they have their own personality, their own life.