Manolis Kellis

And part of what

If you look at our immune system, for example, it evolves at a much faster pace than humans evolve because there is actually an evolutionary process that happens within our immune cells.

As they're dividing, there's basically VDJ recombination that basically creates this extraordinary wealth of antibodies and antigens against the environment.

And basically all these antibodies are now recognizing all these antigens from the environment and they...

send signals back that cause these cells that recognize the non-self to multiply.

So that basically means that even though viruses evolve at millions of times faster than we are, we can still have a component of ourselves, which is environmentally facing, which is sort of evolving at not the same scale, but very rapid pace.

Sperm expresses perhaps the most proteins of any cell in the body.

And part of the thought is that this might just be a way to check that the sperm is intact.

In other words, if you waited until that human has a liver and starts eating salted food and sort of filtrates away

you know, or kidneys or stomach, et cetera.

Basically, if you waited until these mutations, you know, manifest late, late in life, then you would end up not failing fast and you would end up with a lot of failed pregnancies and a lot of later onset, you know, psychiatric illnesses, et cetera.

If instead you basically express all of these genes at the sperm level and if they misform, they basically cause the sperm to cripple,

then you have, at least on the male side, the ability to exclude some of those mutations.

And on the female side, as the egg develops, there's probably a similar process where you could sort of weed out eggs that are just not carrying beneficial mutations, or at least that are carrying highly detrimental mutations.

So you can basically think of the evolutionary process in a nested loop, basically, where there's an inner loop where you get many, many more iterations to run, and then there's an outer loop that moves at a much slower pace.

and going back to uh the next step of evolution of possibly designing systems that we can use to sort of complement our own biology or to sort of eradicate disease and you name it or at least mitigate uh some of the i don't know psychiatric illnesses neurodegenerative disorders etc you can basically and also you know metabolic immune cancer you name it

Simply engineering these mutations from rational design might be very inefficient.

If instead you have an evolutionary loop where you're kind of growing neurons on a dish and you're exploring evolutionary space and you're sort of shaping that one protein,

to be better adapt that sort of, I don't know, recognizing light or communicating with other neurons, et cetera.

You can basically have a smaller evolutionary loop that you can run like thousands of times faster than the speed it would take to evolve humans for another million years.