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

So even if we rewound the tape of life on Earth, we probably wouldn't get something that looks exactly like what we have today.

And so doing that on a different planet, it's just incredibly unlikely that there wouldn't be some contingencies that pushed life to evolve in a way that's a bit different.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, for sure.

When I first got involved in this, which was about the middle of 2024, this working group was just starting to form that Jack Szostak and John Glass were co-chairing.

So I worked really closely with them and a few others to basically write up the paper, recruit more people into the working group and think about how we wanted to communicate this to the world.

So we had these meetings with all of these top scientists from China, from Japan, from the US, from Europe, where we'd all be on Zoom calls, kind of going through the arguments, going through the exact recommendations that we wanted to make in the paper.

It was a pretty crazy time.

Yeah, I mean, it was really international.

So some of the top synthetic biologists in China were involved in the group.

Someone called Chen Liliu, who is on MBDF's advisory board.

He runs like a 6,000 person synthetic biology institute.

Hiroaki Suga, who is one of the top synthetic biologists in Japan, who's founded...

like big successful companies so this was also a group that is not naive to the potential benefits of new technologies like these people a lot of them have been successful in biotech and are really pushing the frontier of synthetic biology right right were there okay so that was kind of the beginning um were there i don't know particularly big hurdles or particularly big wins from there

One thing I'll say is it was quite hard to get 38 people to agree on the exact text that we used in the science paper.

We literally had these Nobel Prize winners, all these top scientists from all these different countries in a single Google Doc commenting back and forth, arguing about different bits, trying to agree on the text.

So that was pretty fun.

It was definitely a bit intimidating getting introduced to all of them.

When I first joined, I flew around the US to meet some of the key people like John Glass and David Relman, met them in person, talked about synthetic biology, which honestly I didn't know that much about at all at the time.

At this stage, I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this, but I was new to mirror life and I couldn't believe that

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