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

And again, they're doing this with a dead genome they make from the bottles of A's, C's, G's and T's.

Mm-hmm.

and removing as many genes as possible from that genome and then transplanting it in.

And Mycoplasma is the simplest bacterium that we know of.

It has a genome that's about a million base pairs.

They managed to half the size of the genome

And so this is like an example of the most engineered bacterium that we have.

We understand what a lot of the genes do, whereas in most bacteria we really don't.

One of the interesting things about the minimal bacterium is that it's quite feeble because a lot of the genes that they removed are needed for being able to deal with being in different environments and things like that.

Yeah, it's definitely alive.

It can do stuff in the lab, but...

But people, when they think of really highly engineered life, often think of something like this minimal cell.

And so when they're thinking about mirror life, they imagine that it would be something like that.

But actually, it wouldn't necessarily.

It could be a mirror of an already robust bacterium like E. coli.

Yeah, so mirror biochemistry is the other field.

I guess the central dogma is kind of the hardest part of the cell to recreate and is also the one that you know you would need to be able to make a mirror cell.

So the central dogma is all of the machinery needed to transcribe and then translate DNA into RNA and then to proteins.

And people have been working on basically trying to create that in their image form.

The part they haven't been able to do yet is the ribosome, which is the most difficult part of that, but they have been able to do other parts of it.

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