George Church

But then you can get, you can kind of quickly go to the answer by looking at each target cell type that exists, and you can see what transcription factors

Did it express at the time that it's the target?

And then you say, well, let's just try those on the stem cells and see if they work.

And that recipe has worked quite well.

It's the basis of GC Therapeutics, the company, and a bunch of the work that we do is you can get a recipe for almost every cell type in the body.

Now, that's not new cell types, but at least you've learned a...

To your point about reducing the number of genes we need to manipulate in order to get to a particular goal, here's a whole series of goals, and we can get them with one, two, three, maybe seven change transcription factors.

So that's an example.

there's room for lots of other examples of where you can do a reduction and do not just reductionistic virality, but then constructionistic, where you take it back up and make a whole complex system and see what happens.

And then you can do lots of those combinations and you debug them and so forth.

Some of these things you can do in vitro things you can do on probably on the order of 10 to the,

14th, 10 to the 17th.

Things that involve cells are typically in the billions, but this is how we're going to get inroads into the very complicated biological systems.

Right.

You know, I was a co-author on a paper that warned about the dangers of mirror life, just like, you know, I wrote a paper long ago about the dangers of having the synthetic capabilities we have for making synthetic viruses.

And to some extent of having new genetic codes.

They have a few things in common.

But the thing about the advance that we were recognizing in our science paper that was warning about mirror life is that we not only had to calculate what the possibility of error-prone escape or something like that.

We don't want anything to escape.

that we made in the lab, unless there's a general societal consensus, it's a good thing.