James Smith

So I think that, for me, I found very compelling.

Yeah, I mean, Kate Ademala, I think, has been an amazing person here.

She was on the National Science Foundation grant in 2019, which was specifically about trying to make mirror cells.

There are a few other people on the paper from that grant too.

And I think...

I don't want to speak for them, but I think the arguments around the risks just basically convinced them.

Apparently, when this was initially being discussed, John Glass was part of the NSF workshop where the idea came up.

And he said, everyone talked about it.

They just thought, yeah, sounds like a cool idea.

Let's do it.

But there were no immunologists in the room.

There were no ecologists in the room.

And I think that interdisciplinary group was what was really needed in the end to fully understand the risks.

The risks have been alluded to in different bits of literature over the past 20 or 30 years.

But there was a bit of a disconnect in that no one had looked into them deeply and realized that this could actually be really bad.

People have kind of mentioned it in offhand comments.

So something that I've taken away from this is.

you do need to take really weird ideas seriously sometimes, but you also need to do proper due diligence on them because stuff like this, you know, the vast majority of the time will turn out to not be a problem.

But the one in a hundred times when it is, you know, that's really important to realize.

I think there's really good momentum around this being taken seriously in the scientific and policy community.