James Smith

And I haven't heard a specific benefit of completely artificial life be articulated.

The idea is more that you could generally manipulate life.

And if you understand it really well, you can do that better.

And so you could do a myriad of different things.

But I do think a bit more critical thinking is needed in terms of whether you could achieve those benefits the other way.

One example is you might be able to just transplant genomes that have

all of the characteristics that you need into cells, and then you basically have the cell be defined by the genome instead of booting it up from all of its individual components.

And that might get you basically the same benefits.

The things we've been talking about are the foreseeable benefits of making mirror life or making the technologies on the way to doing it.

A lot of science is done without a specific application in mind.

And usually I think that's a good thing.

Like we should have a prior on scientific progress being good given the results that it's produced historically.

In this case, we have to weigh that up against what I think is pretty overwhelming evidence of the risks, and I don't think it's sufficient.

One thing that I think is really important to say is that synthetic biology as a whole is a really big field that has a huge range of benefits that I do buy into.

synthetic cells are a relatively small part of that and within synthetic cells I think there are a lot of applications that will ultimately be important mirror life and mirror biochemistry and possibly some specific synthetic cell experiments that might not make sense to do are a tiny part of the technology tree so it's not like by not pursuing this we'll be giving up a huge area of science this is one very tiny area of the technology tree that we could choose not to go down

I think that's a really hard question to answer.

I think we'll get some better answers to some of the most important questions within the next year or so.

But then it's going to be a really hard road to go from there to implementation.

And a lot more people are needed to think through how exactly that will work.

Each different country might have a different regulatory framework to think through something like this.