James Smith

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922 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 13 Jan

James Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe · 13 Jan 2026 podcast

Once you can do that, then you have a proof of principle and a method that you could apply on the mirror.

But there have been like really quite amazing breakthroughs on both sides that we could go into.

Yeah, on the synthetic.

So synthetic biology is like a huge field.

Synthetic cells is a subset of that.

And then mirror life is like a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of that.

So synthetic cells, some of the most impressive breakthroughs have been from John Glass and Craig Venter, who are two...

really, really impressive synthetic biologists that people will probably be familiar with, who were both on the science paper.

And in 2010, they, for the first time ever, basically took a completely dead genome that they made from bottles of nucleotides, from bottles of A's, C's, G's and T's, and they transplanted that dead genome into a living cell.

and then took the genome that was originally in there out of that cell.

And the genome was of a slightly different species.

So they kind of converted a bacterium from one species to another.

Yeah, it's crazy.

The thing that I think the relevance to mirror life is it kind of shows you in principle that you can take a completely dead genome and use that to make life.

So you're going from a chemically synthesized, completely dead genome.

putting it in a cell, and then that genome is then the only thing in the cell after a certain amount of time that's being transcribed and translated.

So it's pretty amazing.

And then in 2016, they basically did a really similar experiment

but where they created what they call a minimal cell.

The idea here is they're trying to remove all of the non-essential genes from the genome.

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