Neil Gershenfeld

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1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · 28 May 2023 podcast

Yeah, the answer is different at different length scales.

So to explain that, in biology, primary structure is the code in the messenger RNA that says what the ribosome should build.

Secondary structure are geometrical motifs or things like helices or sheets.

Tertiary structures are functional elements like electron donors or acceptors.

Quaternary structure is things like molecular motors that are moving my mouth or making the synapses work in my brain.

So there's that hierarchy of primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary.

Now what's interesting is

If you wanna buy electronics today from a vendor, there are hundreds of thousands of types of resistors or capacitors or transistors, huge inventory.

All of biology is just made from this inventory of 20 parts, the amino acids, and by composing them, you can create all of life.

And so as part of this digitization of materials,

We're in effect trying to create something like amino acids for engineering, creating all of technology from 20 parts.

As another discretion, I helped start an office for science in Hollywood.

And there was a fun thing for the movie, The Martian, where...

I did a program with Bill Nye and a few others on how to actually build a civilization on Mars that they described in a way that I like as I was talking about how to go to Mars without luggage.

And at heart, it's sort of how to create life in non-living materials.

So if you think about this primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary structure, in my lab, we're doing that, but on different length scales for different purposes.

So we're making micro robots out of like nanobricks

And to make the robots to build large scale structures in space, the elements of the robots now are centimeters rather than micrometers.

And so the assembly robots for the bigger structures are

there are the cells that make up the structure, but then we have functional cells.

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