I was joined by Amy Webb, and Andrew Hessel to talk about their new book, The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology
As the world population grows every day, and methods of transportation get safer and safer every passing minute, will we run out of food supply? And will the organ transplant waitlist get longer?
I was joined by Amy Webb, an American futurist, author, founder, and CEO of the Future Today Institute, and Andrew Hessel, microbiologist, geneticist, and entrepreneur, to talk about their new book, The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.
In this episode, we talked about will the fusion of biology and computers can help us prevent a potential food hunger, the especially limited amount of organs that needed for an organ transplant, and also potentially editing the gene of your offspring, your descendants to make them either stronger or cure them of the genetic disease.
However, all this also comes with a bigger question. The ethics. Is editing the gene of your soon-to-be-born baby ethical? Or are we going against the law of nature? Or using genetically engineered livestock for more food or organ for humans ethical?
Listen to the episode, and tweet at me @jaltucher to let me know what do you think!
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James Altucher 0:01
This isn't your average business podcast. And he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on the James Altucher show, so we've done podcasts close to this topic before. And I've written about this before, but people can't ignore the fact that synthetic biology, the ability to not only edit genes, but literally create life, almost as if it was a piece of software, creating organs for humans, synthetic foods using gene technology in genomics, synthetic trees that could absorb co2 from the atmosphere even more efficiently than the average tree. There are so many real world use cases and dangerous you know, we've seen this with potential biological warfare, creating diseases, creating viruses and so on. But Amy Webb and Andrew Hassel have written the book on completely understanding this from beginning to end the history, the use cases, the risks, the dangers, what do we do about it, even a chapter on DNA surveillance and what that means and some stuff on DNA computing. Were talking about their new book, The Genesis machine, and hopefully we all live to see the positive benefits of this.
So you guys, you wrote the Genesis machine, it sounds like the name of a great science fiction movie or something. And the idea is that synthetic biology is going to change everything at pieces, I buy into everything from climate change to the foods we eat, to editing, our preborn babies to even editing ourselves or creating new life forms. It's all really exciting. And you talk about the risks, the possibility for regulation, everything. But I kind of want to start in the middle of the book, where it's not the history and not the risks. But of course, I want to know what I can do now to be Captain America. For in the near future, I want to be smarter and better.
Amy Webb 2:14
Well, you're probably best bet on that. One is virtual reality. And if you want to be Captain America, because we're a little far away from that type of genetic enhancement, but I think the best place today to start is with imagination. If we can remove our constraints from what is and allow ourselves to think about what might be, then that does two things. One, it gives us a Northstar for us to start marching toward and whether that's individuals or policymakers or business leaders, we're going to have to start confronting our mental models. So that's the first thing and the second thing is it gives us something to aspire to, what could we start building that it gives us optionality? And then what do you know? What are the risks we ought to be considering? So that we're not having to make decisions under duress?
James Altucher 2:59
Well, maybe. And I'm interested in the word mental models and what you mean by that, but but where maybe describe what's the state of synthetic biology right now? Andrew,
Andrew Hessel 3:12
it's early in the sense that you know, these things, all these technologies start off, and then from from zero, it's exponential, but it's still within the first it's just entering its third decade as a technology. So it's really starting to get some teeth, but it's still early days. So if you kind of map it on to the early days of computing, we're starting to build the integrated circuits. But we have not yet built the home computer in the end.
James Altucher 3:42
So what does that mean in terms of synthetic biology? Like what can we build right now or in the near future,
Andrew Hessel 3:49
we are pre programming large organisms, because we have the technology now to edit their programs. And we are ours organisms like a human, human plants, other animals, these have large, large genomes that are beyond our ability to synthesize but not to edit and modify. And then on the bottom end of the scale with the smoke with organisms with small genomes, bacteria, viruses, yeast, essentially the micro organisms, those are becoming, we've got the technology now to synthesize and build their genomes from scratch, which is giving us bit level control over their designs, then, and that's crazy.
Amy Webb 4:35
I just might, you know, messenger RNA is maybe a good way for us to think about what this is. So a messenger RNA is a set of instructions. It doesn't. It's not it doesn't create heritable changes. It's a way of tinkering with us in order to mitigate challenges brought by a pathogen, right?
James Altucher 4:56
You're talking about, like the vaccines for COVID For instance, so If you're able to kind of inject something into the system that can, you know, convince ourselves to behave a certain way. And and by not heritable. This isn't passed on to our children this ability, unlike though they in, in the book, you mentioned the case in China, where twins were born, supposedly with HIV immunity, and it would be heritable, like their children would be able to have the same immune kind of immunity that they have now, it didn't turn out to be full immunity. But this sort of thing is, and that was several years ago. So I'm just curious, even what are the advances since then? What's the top of our technology right now? Where are we at?
Andrew Hessel 5:42
Well, it all depends what organisms you're looking at humans, we can we can make any protein today. So we can make any protein we can make any sub cellular component that we're interested in. And we can start to program single celled organisms, that's pretty amazing. on humans, which are really the most complex, you know, biological organism, with 50 trillion cells give or take, we can only do edits. And of course, we can do edits on somatic tissues, which are our skin cells and other cells that don't get passed to the next generation. Or we can do edit on the embryos, which is what you're talking about with the Chinese babies, there, we, we made a change to their, to their DNA, it's in every single one of their cells, and it will be passed on to future generations. But those are, those are extreme cases, because there's only been, well, even the Chinese baby, the edits done on the Chinese babies has not been independently verified by the scientific community.
James Altucher 6:44
Meaning we don't know if they if those genes were edited, or
Andrew Hessel 6:47
we don't have the full data of what edits were done, and, and how, how it's affecting those children, if at all, like nothing's been verified, because it's basically it's been firewalled by China. So it's not open to the scientific community for review. And that's, that's so we, we still don't have the first completely verifiable cases of gene edits in humans. But absolutely, that's, you know, coming in the future more.
James Altucher 7:21
And and you mentioned, you guys mentioned in the book too, and I know I'm going straight into the middle, I'm sort of presenting the case that this is something that's life changing world changing everything using this as using, obviously humans as an example. But like, for instance, in the chapter on you, let's cancel aging, you mentioned how potentially, we can get and maybe this is through a type of messenger RNA, or maybe this is through more synthetic type biology. But you mentioned how in the near future, potentially, we can have cells that commit suicide, rather than just lingering in the body as zombie cells, which ultimately lead to aging and death. And, you know, where are we in kind of that spectrum of from beginning to end?
Amy Webb 8:05
Here's what I would say. We know that a lot of what is in this book is very radical, for the average person, and we know that it will even be somewhat radical for the scientists who and policymakers who are familiar with some of these things, who might be reading it. And the reason for this is because it explores these sort of areas of uncertainty in new ways. And when we tend to, I think, I think we get to these areas of uncertainty. Most people want to know when, but before synthetic biology, my and still is my research areas, actually AI. That was my last book. And I got asked that question all the time. When are the robots gonna come and take our jobs? And then when will they murder us in our sleep? And I'm going to give you James yesterday. I mean, yesterday, I mean, you're the set. Well, let's talk about zombies fan zombies house. Let me I will I will give you the same answer, because and I think Andrew will do the same. The answer is we don't know. We don't know how close we are to being able to drastically shift. Aging. We don't know exactly when it will happen that we can program organisms, you know, to do to do profound things. There's some work being done right now on rewilding, George churches is working on some different projects to to bring back certain species, not because of like, we want to create a Jurassic Park Zoo, but for really smart reasons. But the answer is we don't know when and I bring this up. Because if that is the focus, and it always is because I totally get why. But if we if we allow ourselves to lean into that question, I think that starts to set up these expectations that maybe can't be met. And that and you probably noticed that this is what happened with AI. Right that the AI winter happened to some degree because there was a lot of over promising and a lot of under delivering on time horizons that were probably not realistic. And the field funding in the field dried up, and there were problems that ensued for a little while. So I think when it comes to Synbio, there's so much happening, the better way to think about this is, we're kind of at the very, very beginning, the sort of Chickering Hall phase of this, when, for the first time ever, there was this new contraction that was being demoed on a stage in New York. And it was a phone call was like the first version of a phone call that have been made. And there was an audience that had assembled to watch this happen. And when they heard a voice on the other end singing they demanded demanded to go behind the curtain on the stage to reveal the person, you know, that the oz who was probably sitting back there with a mic or you know, some type of like bullhorn and making the song. And when it when it turned out that it was real technology. People did not, you know, they did not know what to do, their minds were blown, it doesn't mean that the whole ecosystem evolved. The next day, it took a little while to build transistors to build the center, you know, to to do all of these things. But the point is that pretty soon, and with rapid succession, we moved from old timey phones that you had to have a separate speaker and microphone, you know, two satellites today, where for the most part, connectivity is ubiquitous, and we cannot even calculate at this point, the value of the internet and telecommunications system economists have tried to do this. But it's so profound it's it's, it's a sort of a basic part of our life, the only way to calculate its real value is to calculate the negative, what happens if we take it away? So I think what Andrew and I are trying to say is, we are on that same trajectory, but we're at the beginning, this is the Chickering Hall face, where the technology exists, it has been proven. And now the other parts of an ecosystem and what can be done with that are starting to be built out,
James Altucher 11:56
I guess, I guess. So I'm just trying to kind of what is that moment where we're on the stage listening to the first phone call like friends. So you mentioned some real world use cases I brought up one of them was the aging. Another one is synthetic food. Like for instance, there are companies now that are synthetically creating meat. So you don't have to kill cows, potentially, you mentioned also actually, something I never thought of but but for instance, synthetically producing trees that could suck the co2 out of the atmosphere. So you mentioned a bunch of real world use cases, maybe better than to describe some of these other real world use cases. And you don't have to say when and where but, you know, we understand that the technology is is exponentially going in the direction to make these things happen.
Amy Webb 12:42
I can start with one and then I'm sure Andrew has 1000. I like bourbon, and whiskey. But mostly bourbon. And there's a there's a distillery that I like that pretty, you know, they produce these amazing, deeply flavored spirits. But there's a lot of variables outside of their control. So you have to have, you have to have barrels, they have to be burned in a particular way, you have to keep the pressure and the humidity and everything else. And even after doing all of this work, there's no guarantee that when you crack open that barrel 16 years later, that it's going to meet the criteria that it would take to bottle it and sell it. And in fact that happened. So last fall, there's a distillery, they, you know, they made they every 16 years, they crack open the barrels, everybody's been waiting, they crack open the barrel and the batches not good. And there's a company in San Francisco that's doing this in a different way. So they are creating whiskey that that meets the same molecular profile that has been aged in a matter of weeks, rather than years in controlled environments. And, and I've tasted it, is it the greatest bourbon I've ever had my life? No, but it exists. They got regulatory approval, they produced it, they bottled it, they sold it, and this is barrel aged whiskey that came out of a lab in San Francisco, rather than a distillery in, you know, somewhere in Kentucky,
James Altucher 14:07
and how did they get like, what was the process that how they made it?
Amy Webb 14:10
Well, I don't know that their IP is public. So I can give you my sort of very top level vantage point on how this happened. But it is what is the you know, what is the structure of the organic material that is going into this? The spirit? And then how can they mix those things together in a way that maps to the original code, the original profile, and then, you know, distill it and brew it in a way that again preserves the flavor flavor profile of what they were looking for. It's um, it's very different. There's another company that in Singapore, Singapore, the people in Singapore eat a enormous amount of chicken every year and an inconceivable amount of chickens. and Singapore doesn't have a lot of chicken farms because it's an incredibly high tech amazing, you know, place, which means they have to import it. So what if instead of importing all of this chicken and by the way, commercial chicken now is not that great, it's tough. It's, you know, it's not great to grow it's tends to be inhumane. What if instead, you had stem cells from a heritage chicken, and you were able to take those cells and put them into a, what's called a bio reactor, so imagine a giant pressure cooker that's very large silver, and you feed it with the same type of nutrients and love that a mother hen would have had for that, you know, thing that was she was incubating. And you didn't add any chemicals or hormones or any of the other stuff that you would normally need to add. And after a very short amount of time, a couple of weeks out pops the tissue. That is chicken that tastes like chicken looks like chicken, but was never attached to a living breathing chicken that clocked and so that meat went through a two year regulatory process in Singapore and actually went on sale at a restaurant club called 1880. Where for the first time in the world, cellular based meat that was created using synthetic biology went on sale and as far as I can tell was delicious. So there you go. But Andrews gone sure got many, many more examples.
James Altucher 16:27
Actually, food
Andrew Hessel 16:28
has been the absolute breakout of synthetic biology in terms of investment, because it's just Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we all need to eat, we all need fresh water, we all need fresh air. We all need medicines to stay healthy, etc. So that's that's really the area that's starting to get filled in. But food has been I just got the latest report from synbiobeta. Now doing businesses built with biology, it's it's really the entrepreneurial hub of synthetic biology. They just put out their q4 report for 2021, and it's just it's a it's a breakout 2021 over $18 billion was invested in sin bio product development, arkad technology development and more. So it's blowing up but it's food that's surpassing medicines, because food is our first medicine. So it's not just it's not just learning how to recreate some of these tissues, it's learning we're starting to go a little beyond and say how do we make these better? How do we build foods that actually fortify us, keep us healthy, give us the right nutrients, etc. Because we can start to engineer them from the ground up.
James Altucher 17:48
And so So what are some of the companies being invested in like what what excites you?
Andrew Hessel 17:52
Oh, well, so I tend to be put this way I'm all down for for for various drinks I've I'm more of a beer and wine drinker though I live in wine country, they're
Amy Webb 18:05
beer, but beer is a place where they're doing a lot of a lot of experimentation because of yeast. Well
Andrew Hessel 18:11
that's just it like the all take any of your alcohols, any of them and and boil it down into one active molecule ethanol and and yet what we've been doing with yeast, the the generator of that of that molecule is is literally insane. I have for years I've worked with a group that it was an international consortium that was building the first yeast genome which is crazy because now you have full control over designing the yeast but the things that people are doing with yeast is amazing because the yeast actually is the is the factory for the molecule so they're learning how to make cancer fighting beers, they're learning how to put various food ingredients into into yeast so that you can manufacture it at scale. And one of my favorites is is just a company called perfect day that has taken the proteins for for dairy products for milk and ice cream and put them into yeast. And now you don't need to have a cow to make the the milk proteins necessary for dairy products now you can literally fermented
James Altucher 19:19
so what happens so you put some proteins and genes or whatever in the yeast, and then it turns into ice cream or like what actually happened?
Amy Webb 19:29
That's exactly genes. You put a little proteins i You got Sure. Yeah, that's right.
Andrew Hessel 19:40
You know, yeast is an amazing factory because it reproduces like crazy, but you can actually program it with synthetic biology to make particular proteins and and to excrete that, you know, literally just produce it and ship it into into the growth medium. And so milk is mainly just a few percent proteins, casein, it's a few lipids, it's a few minerals, it's actually relatively easy to hack. So in the same way that yeast make beer, you're going to have yeast make milk. And that's pretty powerful.
James Altucher 20:13
So, so Okay, so then there was also the climate change scenarios, which I thought were fascinating as well.
Amy Webb 20:20
Okay, well, can I can I double click? Can I double click and reverse it? Is that a thing? Yes. I guess I'm showing my my Gen X age. Would you would you eat or drink any of the stuff? We just because? Because?
James Altucher 20:32
Because Because 100% Okay, I would have no problem with it.
Amy Webb 20:35
Yeah, cuz I think this is the part that people are gonna have a hard time with. And
James Altucher 20:39
I have a hard time eating regular chickens. I have no problem eating synthetic chicken that doesn't come from a chicken.
Amy Webb 20:45
Well, the reason I mentioned this is because I think that term GMO, and anti, you know, it's no GMOs, I think people have certain ideas about what modification means or implies. And I guess what Andrew and I are trying to say is if we can get beyond the labels, and open up our minds to alternatives here, there's, there's a world out there ahead of us that opens up so many options, you know, but but you're gonna have to change how you're thinking about things.
James Altucher 21:13
Maybe Maybe I'll make up the phrase like, I'm a synthetic biology psychopath. But I don't care at all about the ethics of it. And like, if I'm eating chicken me that maybe has consciousness, whatever, or did, I don't care. But why do people have a problem with GMOs? Like, I know, like, really smart people really seem to be very upset about GMOs, even though he's like, an extra billion people a year on the planet, like, what's this is a side thing, but like, why are people upset at all about GMOs? They're healthy, right?
Amy Webb 21:42
Well, listen, I think that they're, we live in a complicated world, there's a lot of complexity, and a lot of us don't have bandwidth to dive deep. And so I think that for some reasons that are very reasonable, and others that are probably less reasonable, and we're afraid of the idea that something has been tampered with in some way. And we don't potentially know the outcomes that I that's not actually the case. But I think that there's a long, you know, there's a lot of disdain for large, agricultural, and, you know, large agricultural companies. And I think that's some of where that's coming from. And it depends on where you are in the world, too. And other places people are, you know, they're, they're less, they don't care as much.
James Altucher 22:25
Well, because they they starve without it. Yeah, so now, so So but like, I could see though, where are the ethical considerations starts to come into play with, like these HIV twins, so they genetically modified something, these twins were born, and they supposedly immune to HIV, and their descendants forever will be immune to HIV, supposedly. And I could see how maybe they don't really know the effects of, of how modifying some genes could have on the rest of the system that seems extremely complicated to understand. So I can understand, not from an ethical point of view, but from a science point of view, why there might be concerns there. But why are there concerns even on that from an ethical point of view, if you could stop your kids from having all sorts of diseases by modifying their genes when they were in the fetus? Or before what what's the issue?
Andrew Hessel 23:17
Well, the issue in that particular case was that it was done without full consent without peer review. And and ultimately, it wasn't a necessary treatment for the health of those babies, in the sense that its Act was actually a genetic enhancement of those babies. And so the risk benefit that we typically do first do no harm for humans just wasn't just wasn't done.
James Altucher 23:46
That Well, let's say, though you knew was safe. What would be the problem that's
Andrew Hessel 23:51
that's the problem. We didn't know it was safe. This was the first time a genetic edit had ever been done on embryos that produced a baby so so the researcher really overstepped in this case and put this way, I think, in some ways, the researcher did the world of favor, because before those babies were born. It was really just a hypothetical people would get together and debate should we do this? Should we do this? How do we do this? But it was all it was all hypothetical. What he really did was push it into into reality and make us realize, one, we need processes in place to to review these types of experiments, this type of work. We need we need the proper oversight. We need regulatory controls. We can't just be a free for all because we don't know if it's safe. It's not like these edits were done on a primate first to determine, you know, what are the downstream effects. So so it was overstepping, but I've made the point, that if if he had been working With a couple that was truly infertile, that that couldn't, could simply not have babies. And, and he had used this CRISPR gene editing technology to do a genetic surgery on those embryos, to repair them so that they could develop and be born, he would probably be celebrated. Yeah, I
Amy Webb 25:21
just want to add a layer of of a dynamic here that also goes along with it. So I used to live in China, I also used to live in Japan, the HIV stigma that is exists in China in the year 2022, is pretty significant. And we don't see that anymore, at least as much here in the West. But in China, it's actually a really big deal. So without having been in the room, when the conversations were happening, my assumption was that there probably was some discussion about this. And if there was a way to shield yourself, future children from having to deal with the stigma of HIV, that was probably a pretty compelling. Ask, however, it, it's China, there's no, we have no way of knowing what the actual informed consent would have been like. Also, this wasn't the only couple, there were lots of people that were involved in the study. You know, and so everything that Andrew saying is correct. I want to say that there. There are some other pieces of this, that that play into it. And part of the reason why it rose to the conscious that international consciousness, the way that it did was obviously because there this is a worrying use of the technology. But we're also living through this moment in time when China is going through a significant transformation. And when stories like this pop out of China, it does attract a significant amount of attention.
James Altucher 26:47
I have two questions on this one, as you mentioned, you mentioned primates, have they tried doing anything significant with primates rather than going straight to humans? Oh,
Andrew Hessel 26:55
yeah, of course, there's there's most studies, there's there's, there's always studies being done. Primates are actually a very high bar, we don't use them that much anymore, because be considered cruel. We try and do as much work as we can, in lower animals and in cell culture today. And today, and using techniques like organoids, where we actually make essentially synthetic tissues.
Amy Webb 27:19
That's actually pretty cool. We should explain this because this is a key part of the book. But it's also it's a key, it's an interesting area of symbiosis. So you can create organoids. But you can also create what's a body on like a Body on a Chip. So imagine like a translucent piece of something like a rectangle, where you would have a miniaturised, let's say reproductive system got a couple of ovarian cells, you've got a circulatory system, they all connect to each other. And it's a really great way of testing and testing new pharmaceuticals, new new treatments, before you move it along the chain.
James Altucher 27:56
So what what have they been able to in, let's say, the closest animals to humans? Because ultimately humans, I assume, are the goal? What have they been able to test so far? Like I they've been growing tissues for organs, and what else? What are they discovered so far? And you write about some things in the book, but I'm just curious. I want to set the stage.
Amy Webb 28:18
Well, some of the research a lot of the research is, well, it's being done everywhere. But there's some research at Wake Forest University. Again, this is the kind of stuff that you don't, it's not off the shelf consumer products or anything like that. So it's more, there's just additional ways of testing for risk in advance. And I think, again, you know, imagining a chicken nugget that was made from a bioreactor, rather than a farm is like, immediately visceral, like we get that that's tangible. A lot of the stuff that Andrew and I are talking about is kind of in the weeds, infrastructure stuff, that is super exciting, but a little less easy to wrap your head around.
Andrew Hessel 28:58
Well, and you have to look at, you have to look at every experiment in context and how you're going to move it forward through the regulatory process through the r&d process, you know, to ultimately get it to market. I think one of the most exciting things that that's happening on this front of where we're using, you know, animals to pioneer the future, is just what we're doing to re engineer pace so that so that their organs can essentially be used in human organ transplants. That work is is game changing, because right 30 years ago, it was pretty clear that we weren't going to have enough organs for transplant because cars were getting safer. We are, you know, there's only so many motorcyclists that you know, available for organ transplants and cars have airbags now and it really takes a lot more to die in a car. So, so we had to start looking at something As new ways to procure organs, and there's basically two ways you can build them bottle up, bottom up, sorry, bottle up, bottom up through through 3d. Yeah. Yeah, so you can kind of build them bottom up with tissue engineering. But But that's really tricky. Or you can start to take in an organism like a pig that has organs very similar in size to our own, and start to engineer the pig so that the organs are where their cells essentially are more human, more humanized, they're expressing cell surface antigens are essentially the markers that that we use to recognize one cell from another that are human on those on those pixels, and do go into the pig genome and do things like remove the viruses because pigs have viruses in their in their cells that potentially could be expressed and harmful to us. And so they've taken out the viruses, and they start to modify those pigs so that their tissues are more human and less likely to be rejected. And now suddenly, you've got an animal that we grow a billion of every year, and their organs could potentially be used for transplant. That's amazing.
James Altucher 31:13
And they did it, they recently actually transplanted a pig heart into a human over the
Andrew Hessel 31:18
past couple of weeks. Yeah, you know, and this is a human cadaver that's being used as a test bed, essentially someone that's already brain dead. So no harm is being caused of them. In this case, they're really just using their body for scientific advancement. But the results have been really encouraging. And I wouldn't be surprised if in this decade, if we start to see these organs be used as replacements.
Amy Webb 31:41
It's a lot actually happening with pigs. So there's some other work being done in China to engineer, pigs be a little bit more resistant to cold. So the African swine flu, as you know, wiped out a huge part of the pig population. So in the aftermath of that, there's been some work being done to figure out how to make pigs a little bit more resilient. And part of that resiliency means can we engineer them so that they're less susceptible to extreme cold, that's maybe an upgrade that some of us may want to have some day, many years from now, the ability to maybe activate or deactivate or sensation or susceptibility to cold,
Andrew Hessel 32:17
I've got it already, I'm Canadian.
James Altucher 32:35
This is where we get into the ethics. You mentioned China several times, it's, you know, China had the first clone, I believe, of an animal or I don't know, China's always doing these experiments that are on the cutting edge. And the reason is, because they have absolutely no ethics about it. And they don't care about peer review, they're just gonna, they're just gonna throw as much stuff on the wall as they can and see what sticks in the long run. Even though that approach is not recommended, and nobody in the US would even think of an approach like that. In the long run, will that make them the winner in this game? And and Is that dangerous for other countries? If China's the winner in synthetic biology? Oh, go ahead.
Amy Webb 33:13
You and I are gonna say the same thing. We're both gonna push back on what you said.
James Altucher 33:17
Okay, keep pushing. And
Amy Webb 33:21
I'll start the pushing that Andrew Andrew could really push. I think we need to be we need to be very careful that we're not conflating science research scientists, with, with government policy with our outside perceptions of what's happening. There are definitely challenges within the country. But I don't think Andrew and I are saying or would be comfortable saying something like China has no ethics, Andrew, you can maybe
Andrew Hessel 33:46
yeah, double down on that. The ethics to me are a spectrum. They're they're very individual. And collectively, our communities have ethical standards. But and but you know, there's wide variations in a group. But in general, I've been absolutely impressed by the Chinese colleagues I've worked with in the synthetic biology community, their their work is excellent. They're very open and transparent. They don't they don't have some of the headwinds that we have here in the United States, where we have an established biotech industry, we have this legacy of resistance with with GMOs, like there's very we don't they don't have the same headwinds. They are looking at. We need medicines, we need foods. We, you know, we we have a billion people that we have to take care of. And so they're investing heavily in this technology, and in some cases, absolutely leading at the forefront when it comes to their path into the marketplace, whether that's a field or in the clinic. So
James Altucher 34:48
their motivations, though, like you said, I have less headwinds. We have headwinds from regulatory side, we have headwinds from an ethics side quite correctly. I think, whatever those headwinds are, though, it seems like China's gonna is going to be able to dominate this industry pretty quickly. Not
Andrew Hessel 35:05
necessarily. But I think I think we have to step up to the plate and think, where where do we want to win? You know, where do because a lot of the technologies that are being used globally today were developed here in the US. But but but we have a lot more resistance getting in for it. So it's almost like we're, we're we're generating the racecars, but then we're only running on three wheels. So it's a little, it's a little tricky, I'd love, I'd love to see that. The easiest way, the one way we can start to really compete is just invest more in it. It's It's surprising to me how little investment is flowing into synthetic biology, given the massive potential of this, like there's money going in billions, but but it's still compared to say the defense budget, a very small fraction. And so I've made the case now, particularly through COVID, that we have to take biology and really, and really start to think about it as as part of our our national infrastructure and national defense,
Amy Webb 36:14
we're drastically under invested and on the sciences in general, but specifically when it comes to biology, and that has to do with our r&d budgets at a national level are spending on basic research, which is a lot, you know, to many degrees, we sort of farmed out to the to the private sector. But it also has to do with making sure there are pathways into leadership for people in the hard sciences and biology, specifically, Eric Lander, so that the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the US Eric Lander geneticist, so as he was appointed, he resigned about a week ago, I think, and that leaves a power vacuum, the we don't have a current head of the FDA, we don't have a current head of a couple of other key agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, which haven't this is a similar, we just haven't prioritized this in the United States. And that makes us less competitive globally over time. It also potentially creates some security gaps. But as Andrew mentioned, like think of what we are leaving on the table, we have such a great opportunity to define our own transformation in the future and start marching toward it. But we keep getting in our own way. And the best way forward is to correct and start investing to create those pathways, so that we have the right people in the right places. And so that we can have public dialogues and look at what happened during COVID, with people simply trying to beginning to understand what was happening and it quickly became mired in politics. What Andrew and I are talking about here has to do with the future of life and evolution. And we're going to have to be mature about how we have these conversations. Because if we wait to have those conversations, we're going to be back to where we were in 1990 when Dolly the sheep was revealed. And you know, humanity lost its collective mind. We didn't wind up with demons spawn sheep, roaming around terrorizing us, like zombies in the middle of the night, we got therapeutics, but it was it was different, and therefore scary. And we didn't have the right ability to have a conversation. So I think what we're trying to get across here is we to rethink our investment structures, we need to pivot toward what's possible, while mitigating risk. And we have to have mature conversations where to be fair, everybody's you know, we have to hear skepticism. But the skeptics also have to be open to changing their minds a little bit, we have to figure out a way to do this.
James Altucher 38:55
But that's a that's almost more of a fantasy than
Amy Webb 39:00
then oh, enhancing my scattering. Yeah, I feel you, I feel you I agree. Um, but I also think that we are starting to run out of time. Um, part of what we're trying to drive home here is we have, we are living through some existential crises that are not going to go away. So if everybody is happy with extreme weather events, and an increasingly insecure global supply of food and water, then by all means, let's catastrophize the hell out of synthetic biology and see where that gets us. I for one would like to take advantage of these technologies so that we create solutions for ourselves, Andrew and I think space is awesome. But we also think it'd be really awesome to just like, exist where we are right now. In a way that is is like comfortable. So if if that's an opportunity that we could chase, and I think that's what we should be doing.
James Altucher 39:54
So okay, so then circling back like, let's, let's again, go over the real some real world use cases. What many of what you discuss in the book that do solve these existential crises. So we talked about how food, we could maybe, you know, use synthetic biology to grow food tissue, and then food that can be consumed by billions of humans, in terms of climate change, what can what can happen.
Amy Webb 40:18
So a couple of things, and there are ways so that I know there's some research in place to create artificial leaves and different types of plants that can suck up co2. And, and mitigate some, not all, I think most people look for, like single bullet solutions to things and that's not what we should be chasing. But that's one way to chip away at carbon emissions. Materials is another. So creating clothing is pretty damaging to the planet. And if you can use synthetic fibers instead, that reduces the amount of water that you have to use. It changes the type of materials that have to be grown, it also changes what the global supply chains look like, you know, and then there are different ways to use different types of bio chemicals that can degrade and potentially at some point break down plastics. You know, that's probably a little bit further off. Andrew, you have any?
Andrew Hessel 41:12
Oh, there's no, there's so many different entry points here. First of all, I want to point out that co2 is, which is changing our atmosphere, and, you know, really gets it has a big target on his back. And the climate change treaty is actually a biological feedstock. It's what trees are using to make trees. And you know, while they excrete oxygen, if we can just learn to harness co2 capture using a biological system that can grow and scale like trees, but perhaps grown faster than trees, because we don't have centuries, you know, to wait for, you know, our Redwood crops to grow. I think that alone is massive, because now we're fixing that co2 into materials that can be more economically useful and help drive us towards sustainability. I think if we actually really marshal our efforts here, we just we don't have to drill as many holes in the ground to get the carbon feedstocks, we need to go and build the world. And we start to equalize that. Another thing is just fresh water. We We live on a planet where fresh water literally dictates whether we can survive in an area or not, the Mayans had to abandon their cities, because because of climate change and water change. There's other examples in history, but turn off the taps in a city. And you've got three days before that city goes nuts. So and yet we're surrounded by water, it's just it's salt water. So if we can make a biological system that can filter salt water, and turn it into freshwater, and do it at scale, that's going to be an incredible driver for humanity.
Amy Webb 43:00
And there's Yeah, I mean, there's other things like biodiversity, I mean, everybody who's watched the BBCs, various series at this point knows that it's important, but it's kind of you can think about this in a different way. So I mentioned earlier, George Church, and one of the projects he's been working on to sort of resurrect the woolly mammoth, this is not, it's not like a circus project, is a reason why the permafrost layer is problematic. So part of what's happening is, you know, millennia ago, there were these enormous creatures that stomped down, during during different times of year stomp down the ground. And this created part of ecosystems that eventually allowed the grass to come up into flourish, and it compacted some of the ice. And now in the absence of having all of these animals, we this is created some of the problem. So what if part of our solution to climate change was to rewild parts of the planet where the biodiversity was helping, keeping help helping to keep things in check. So it's just a different approach to thinking about how to manage ourselves in this place. That is just different from how we thought about it before.
James Altucher 44:13
And what needs to be regulated or governed in the sense that let's say someone makes an organic tree that's better at or a synthetic tree that's better at, you know, extracting co2 from from the atmosphere? Does that need regulatory approval? Or, or can someone just do that?
Amy Webb 44:33
Right? So this is this is a little bit of the challenging thing right now, because depending on where you are in the world, the regulatory frameworks are different. So in the United States, there's no single regulatory framework specifically governing synthetic biology. It's something called a coordinated framework. That is the nexus point between several other things. And it tends to regulate the end product rather than the process. And there are good reasons for that. You want to be able To innovate and to do the research, so you don't necessarily want to regulate that process. But if you wait to regulate the end product, you're making a lot of assumptions about how that product continues to evolve, or what it might do. And it's sometimes unclear which part of the regulatory group has say over that. So again, this is not something that's going to get fixed overnight. And our situation in the US is very different from what exists in France, and Germany, and China and Japan, and so forth, and so on. So I think what we're looking for is some type of regulatory direction going forward. And that's just going to take a little bit of time, but we have to make room for the science to evolve. And because biology can be predictable and sustaining, and we have to think through ways to monitor that, and in the book, we actually have a whole thing where we go through and explain different ways, different approaches that can be taken.
James Altucher 45:54
Right? You have recommendations, you list, you list the wrist, it's very comprehensive. And and we're we're shortchanging the history to you have an excellent discussion of the whole history of this. I'm curious also about the kid you mentioned, who was selling the do it yourself gene editing kits, and like injected himself on stage to build more muscles? It didn't work, too. And you also mentioned he was he had something to make a translate or glow in the dark beer? Did that work? I don't know if that worked or not. Did that work?
Amy Webb 46:22
I did not taste that beer? I don't know. And it was a dark. No,
Andrew Hessel 46:26
it's not that hard to make glow in the dark fluids. And it really doesn't change the taste that much. I haven't tried that particular beer. But I am a big fan of people hacking beers. Have you seen the craft brewing in this country? Like there are so many different flavors, now that we can start to tinker with yeast and do it, you know, at a really an individual's scale? I think we'll see more creativity there.
James Altucher 46:49
But the person you're talking to the audience, though, yeah, well,
Andrew Hessel 46:51
the person you're talking about is Joseph Zaner, who's who's become kind of a celebrity biohacker in some ways, and we certainly I think he's indicative of, of the type of people that 30 years ago, you know, we're 40 years ago, I guess, now even longer, we're starting to get into computers and starting to hack and make it easier for others to kind of join the community. And of course, those those folks change the world, I think just is very, very similar. He runs a company called the Odin, that is really sells supplies and kits so that people can start to try this at home. He's a prolific communicator. And he's a provocateur. He's done some things that have been, you know, kind of push people's buttons and got some attention. But I am a big fan of people learning about biology and learning how to hack it, and doing and playing with safe projects. In much the same way as I picked up a computer when I was 15. And started programming.
James Altucher 47:54
Given the exponential growth of the technology, somebody's making a do it yourself, gene editing kit is gonna start to enter dangerous territory. At some point, however you define dangerous. But
Amy Webb 48:04
James, listen, a fork is dangerous if you stab somebody in the neck with it. Right? So I, we could make this exact same argument about everything. And I'm not trying to be glib here. But dual use has been a problem in every field of science and technology. And basically, this is, you know, where somebody takes a technology or a science that's intended for one purpose and applies it to another purpose that's intended to be nefarious. So yes, absolutely. Somebody somewhere will apply this technology. And they will attempt to make some type of system or organism or they will, they will use it in a way that is intended for harm. But But I could say that about just just about anything. And so the goal here is not to prevent that from happening. So I don't you know, what would it take for us to know every possible case of misuse, we would have to have every single data point all of the time, in real time, we'd have to have some type of super compute resource, basically, we would have to be Dr. Manhattan, right, which I don't think we are, and I'm pretty sure we're not living in a simulation. So if that's the case, then this is about monitoring and staying a few steps ahead, just thinking through next order implications, and coming up with reasonable ways to mitigate those.
James Altucher 49:13
Right? But like a do it yourself kit, if you were to guess like 10 years from now, if somebody was putting on a do it yourself kit for gene editing? And again, I'm asking the impossible, but what would it be able to do then that I can't do now? And how do we mitigate it?
Andrew Hessel 49:26
I want to I want to be cleared? If that's what are you gene editing? Is it a plant? Is it your isn't your dog? Or is it yourself? And if it's yourself,
James Altucher 49:34
I mean, this guy was injecting something into himself. It didn't work, what happens when it starts working?
Amy Webb 49:40
So again, let's let's pause, okay, because we want to be very clear and careful. We want people to think about what if we also want to be very realistic here. What would it take for it to be true that 10 years from now, I would be able to inject myself with some type of edited something that profoundly you know that that you As my body in some way, it is implausible, not impossible, but at the moment implausible and therefore improbable that that would be the case. What is more plausible, is that, you know, we will have for anybody, listen, it's hard to get people excited about this stuff, I've got a art kit at home, or you can grow ecoli and color the ecoli and paint with it, watch it grow, and then put it in resin, like my daughter, and I think this is cool. I've got an 11 year old who could give two shits about my Eco light art experiment. So, you know, I understand what you're trying to ask. But I think, to the same for the same reason that I would criticize Josiah provocation is sometimes useful because it challenges mental models. But sometimes it's it's problematic, because it implants ideas in people's heads that immediately lead to like catastrophizing, what could be next.
James Altucher 50:51
But provocation is going to happen. It does.
Andrew Hessel 50:55
And I can also see, so here's, here's an alternative scenario to, to doing a, essentially a stunt with gene editing. Because that's what it was, say some very credible people come along and design a gene editing construct, meant to be applied to skin, it doesn't make an it doesn't even necessarily have to make a permanent change. Because we're learning so much about these technologies, you can, it doesn't have to be permanent, but you apply it to the skin. And now it can, it can help regulate, it can essentially cure diabetes, it can help regulate your blood sugar, produce insulin, just from little just where you've applied it to your skin, it's now making your skin cells behave and allow you to regulate your blood sugar. And every three months, you have to apply more, if someone did something like that it would totally revolutionize the treatment of diabetes. Now, is that going to happen? I don't know. Could it happen? Could could we start making steps in that direction? Absolutely. And there's already a group that is trying to produce insulin in an open source capacity, because the pricing around insulin in biotech is insane. This is one of the first things we made, it cost very little to make it and yet the price has been increasing over time, completely the opposite of the other technologies that surround us. And that's and this is where some of this engineering, and hacking completely changed the biotech dynamic of today.
Amy Webb 52:33
And I just want to add to that some of what Andrew just mentioned, the sort of using skin as as the body's own pharmacy for insulin, that research is underway, but it JCVI so this is Craig Venters. Group, but it's it's very early days, and we're going to have to learn how to have patients. This is fundamentally literally life altering technology that is at the very nascent stages that will continue to evolve over time.
James Altucher 53:01
And do you think the private sector like you mentioned that the public sector doesn't have the money or the or the will to fund this at the level of needs to be funded. But Andrew, you also mentioned that, you know, funding last year was was greater than ever for this sector from the private sector. Do you think the private sector could make up the lack of funding that the public sector is not providing? I think like venture capital firms,
Andrew Hessel 53:23
I think venture capital today invest far more than than public groups in in applications, the but you know, they chase after the biggest markets with that, that are the kind of the flashiest in some ways. And of course, they're all competing against each other, its proprietary, I would really like to see some sort of baseline and biology. That is that is an open standard. You know, when I look at the biggest change that I've seen, in my lifetime, it's the creation of the internet. And the beautiful thing about the internet, it was one of the first truly open standards that we could all pile on and build on, you know, whether we were commercial or public or didn't matter which country, no other system that we created our electrical system or finance system or telephone system, was that universal biology is as universal as the internet, we are all running the same operating system, whether we're a bacterium or a blue whale, or you and me, and, and we, I think we have to respect that, and, and not, you know, necessarily go for this. We've got to own this. And we've got to own and control this system. We have to recognize it's an open system. It's an open platform. There's no way to encrypt DNA code, because it has to be in a form that life can read. And we all use the same code. So I'd like to see us have this baseline of open standards. I'd like us to have open transparency why we politicized? COVID is bizarre to me. It was like an alien invader. We couldn't all get our act together. to go and fight it as a species, I think that's telling. And I certainly don't want to see us start to fracture too early in biology, because whether it's bio economic warfare or bio warfare, it's just, it's just, it's going, it's not going to lead to a good outcome, we have to recognize where we're all running the same operating system. And, and, you know, for the most part, organisms don't care about our human classifications and borders, etc.
James Altucher 55:29
You know, there's one thing in the book too, that I had no idea about, but it's really fascinating, this concept of DNA surveillance, or DNA spying, whatever, you know, the idea that a company went to the World Economic Forum, and I guess, got DNA off the forks and spoons and plates, yeah, of all these world leaders, and that that could potentially be used for all sorts of things like blackmail and extortion. And I don't know what else but it's pretty interesting.
Amy Webb 55:58
It is. And literally, as we were talking to you moments ago, Emmanuel Macron. And who's trying to try and integrate with refused a Russian COVID test, because he could not have any assurance that his DNA would not be part of, you know, a Russian database somewhere. So yeah, I mean, he's, you know, we're shutting bio data all the time, just by virtue of the fact that we're alive. And we're moving around, I think the thing that is different is that there are new ways to scrape these data. And those data can be used in ways that I think we're not entirely imagining, it doesn't mean that we should be sterile everywhere we go. But I will tell you that pre COVID, I used to basically, I live on the east coast, and I used to commute between DC and New York on the Sella, which is Amtrak. And I was often Joe Biden, before he was, you know, he was president, and was on that train a lot, as were other people. And they left behind a lot of stuff. And I was used to think like, I don't know if I would leave behind all these use tissues. And I mean, I'm not saying that you have to, like Clorox everything, but I don't I, you know, I'm like nobody and and I am sometimes very conscious of like, Should I try to leave all this stuff behind? There's a lot of interesting things you can do with DNA. And some, there are some scientists that are trying to predict and map out what somebody looks like, based on their DNA. And there's a company, there's a company in England that this is pre COVID. Before, we were totally fine with people shoving stuff up our noses and, and, you know, taking our data and doing whatever with it. There's a company in London, you could go into a grocery store, it was a trial, they would, they would take a cheek swab sample, run it, run a test on it, and then spit out what it said was your best possible profile for food, it would give you a bracelet, and we walk around the grocery store and scan the bracelet everywhere. And it would tell you like yes, you you should eat carrots and like no, you should not eat Kiwis to optimize your best health. Now, you talk to anybody who works in the field. And they're like, you know, this is this is basically like a bio biological version of a horoscope. Right? You can't actually tell any information, which is fine, because I don't think that's what it was actually intended to do. I think this was intended as a DNA based marketing system a new way to get people's attention in a market to them. So we're kind of in this literal, Brave New World. Yeah.
James Altucher 58:31
What about like, if you take, let's say, you take 20,000 happy couples, however you measure it, and 20,000 Miserable couples, and you take the DNA from the dataset of you make the dataset of all the happy couples, and then you make the dataset of all the unhappy couples. And then if two people start dating, you submit their their DNA to this dataset and using Ayad matches, which dataset are the closest to the happy couple or the unhappy couple dataset? Do you think that would work?
Amy Webb 59:01
Sure. Here's, I think that would work if you're like super, super interested in certain chromosomal situations, like if what really attracts me is like this telomere, I that's not how we tend to be attracted to each other. So I don't know that DNA matching aside from like, if you're doing screening for certain genetic conditions like an Ashkenazi panel, and you want to make sure that you are not trans, you are not accidentally passing along Tay Sachs, something like that, then yes, do all the matching that you want. But I think there's probably very little evidence supporting DNA based, you know, getting together for dating, if there was a company 46
Andrew Hessel 59:41
And us and and you know, that would take my DNA
Amy Webb 59:45
better register that URL, and then sell it later on. Because what we're talking about is plausible.
James Altucher 59:52
Hey, get the.com right now.
Andrew Hessel 59:55
I just love the idea that you know, you can you know, your data, you can you can see what your potential kids would look like, that would be hilarious. But but they're all there. There's there's been groups doing DNA dating, you know, for a while, I think even George Church has a company and you say, man, so So that's, yeah, so, but I can tell you having had a couple of kids now, you know, through the IVF process, I everything you can throw at me genetically, I want I'm a little sorry, I missed out on being able to do gene editing on my kids, because it's not safe and legal yet, but just about every other procedure, you know, was fine pre implantation sequencing. And was was amazing. The fact that that, you know, you basically can profile an embryo now both pre implant you know, before you implant, it is just, it's like science fiction.
Amy Webb 1:00:52
I think Andrew and I both will tell you that we think that IVF is a great way, you know, that we may be years back 30 years into the future, we may be looking back at this time, as you know, it was barbaric that we were having, that we were procreating, using sex and not just having sex for fun, that that we were doing this crazy thing in order to make babies when we should have been using technology instead. So we're both big proponents of IVF. And all of the really enormous benefits that go along with it. That being said, going back to one of the ethics questions you asked, one of the things that often comes up is equity. And that there is some concern, which I think is to some degree founded, that these technologies will only be available to people at the upper end of the socio economic spectrum and less available to everybody else, and that we may wind up with a sort of genetic divide simply because of who had access to what, and that's something we can mitigate in advance.
James Altucher 1:01:53
You know, I wonder about that. Because, you know, you've all Harare mentions that in his book 21 problems for the next century, I forget the exact title. And I always think with technology, you know, because of the exponential growth, like, because of the exponential growth of computers, for instance, everybody's got a laptop from every part of the income, you know, the income spectrum. And I sort of feel like with problems like that it gets, it gets solved by the exponential growth, things become cheaper, very quickly, just like sequencing the human genome is I can do it now. You can,
Amy Webb 1:02:28
it costs, it costs more to buy a pair of Nike Air Jordans than it does to sequence a genome now, which is sure something
James Altucher 1:02:35
because that's a that one's a marketing challenge, and the others have technological challenge. And so the marketing makes it expensive. I could buy shoes really cheap. I can't buy Nike Jordans really cheap. So, so But I agree that people are worried about this, Paul, I feel taken out exponential growth gets rid of that problem. But we'll see. Well, we
Andrew Hessel 1:02:55
should like, we could certainly start to see that in the coming years just with these mRNA vaccines, which by the way I look at is really the sin bio poster child in some ways, because it was the first, these are programmable vaccines made using this technology of synthetic biology that went from zero to 100, you know, in a year. But more than that, this is a technological foundation that's within reach by just about any, any group that wants to that wants to make it. Yeah, we made billions of doses very quickly. That takes us that's a scaling problem. But making a vaccine now is within reach of just about any small scientific establishment. Even even individuals given access to the right scientific tools, like a bio foundry, which are coming we write about in the book, could potentially start making vaccines. This is a game changer for three places in Africa. This is a game changer for any area that just don't can't afford the Western vaccines, they can start saying, Oh, well, let's make our own Oh, and we have these little local things that we really need to be immunized against that no one else cares about, like yellow fever. You know, now let's go and make vaccines for that. And if it's not vaccines, it can be other medicines that are protein based, it can be foodstuffs, etc. So I see the democratization of of these technologies going in a very similar way to what we saw in computing. And I think it'll happen faster than the 50 years that cooking computer. Because with computing, you're kind of one of the breaks is you have to go and build new chip fabs to make a better computing architecture, you have to go build the factories to make the chips that go in the products. You don't have that with biology, like it's really the the cellular systems that we're reprogramming can run just about any software that we can write. So it's kind of It's software unlimited. And as we know the evolution of software, just take a look at the app store goes much faster than the evolution of hardware.
Amy Webb 1:05:08
Andrew, why don't you blow everybody's mind and talk about what Roswell biotech is working on. It's so cool. It's so cool.
Andrew Hessel 1:05:15
So there's a there's a company called Roswell biotechnologies. I love these guys. Because they are, they are pioneering a space called molecular electronics. Now, everyone, you know, like, most people don't know how electronic chips are made. But there's chip factories all over Silicon Valley. And but basically, you make these silicon wafers that you actually using various techniques to build circuits. It's fantastic. And of course, it's incredibly robust. We've gotten so good at making these things now that the features we put onto the silicon surfaces are down down to two nanometers, which is essentially the width of a couple of DNA molecules. So it's, it's incredibly detailed work in chip making. So chips run the world, they're used the laptops, all the systems might might, my washer and dryer, my fridge all have chips in it today, everything has a chip. So So but what Roswell is doing is they're making essentially cyborg chips. They're attaching biomolecules, DNA strands, proteins, antibodies, enzymes, which actually do metabolic activity, and they're attaching it directly to the to the silicon systems. So now essentially, it's like giving a biomolecule a cell phone and say, Hey, how you doing? And And if something binds to it, you you listen to it electronically in real time. If you can, you can also start to potentially talk to these things and say, Hey, what, you know, you want to do this for me, and and and start to direct molecule. So it's literally the fusion of carbon and silicon. And it's the first time we've ever done this.
James Altucher 1:06:53
And what's the potential for it? Well,
Amy Webb 1:06:55
the reason for this is you can only squeeze so much and a physical hardware using the old processes. So this was a way of getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Its lab budget. Yeah. Right. So what's the practical use for it for one, it's, it can not now, but at some point, it scales in a very profoundly different way. Right, it also means that maybe we have teeny, tiny microscopic chips, running teeny, tiny, microscopic robots, that are doing all kinds of really interesting things working in robot constellations, or, you know, autonomous swarm swarms that are doing different things.
Andrew Hessel 1:07:30
But the first application is just sensing, you know, like, so we, you know, imagine having, you know, today we have smoke detectors, we have carbon monoxide detectors, even co2 detectors. But, you know, imagine having a detector that literally detects any virus coming into your home, like, you know, and of course, most of them you can ignore, but suddenly, you know, COVID comes into your front door, it goes. Like that is completely doable with this molecular electronic technology, and so much more.
Amy Webb 1:08:04
There's some interesting research on the military side of things that's already being produced in in sort of a full body suit intended for warfighting. So think of what we're talking about being woven into the fibers of a material, it's mostly, you know, flexible, and you can move around in this would give you the ability to record everything that's happening in real time, not video and audio, but on a molecular level. So if there's a new pathogen in the field that that nobody has seen before, or if there's a known pathogen, you know, the suit would be able to record and read back those data in real time. And then the further extension of that is, well, maybe there's a little phone sized kit printer that could be carried in the field and you can rehydrate, reanimated. You know, an agent that could fight against that pathogen. So there's all kinds of really interesting applications.
James Altucher 1:09:00
So, look, obviously, this is people, this is one of those things where nobody talked about the internet in 1980, because it was an inning negative five, you know, then 1991, the web, sorry, people. But it wasn't really until like 90 until 20 years after that, even that people were starting to really, you know, use the web. And this is sort of similar as you were pointing out that we're like an inning zero. And but but in a few faster than we realize this is gonna change the entire way we live and act and and your book, The Genesis machine, you're not only going to the history, and all the use cases and all the risks, but all the potential discussions that we should be having about how to drive this forward and how this will, will change the world and it's a really, it's a really great book. I should mention the subtitle the Genesis machine is our quest to rewrite life in the age of synthetic biology, and I'm looking forward to having synthetic biologie pancakes that's my favorite food on the planet. I don't know how to make it better than they currently are. But I think they should be better because they'll glow in the dark glow in the dark in the dark.
Amy Webb 1:10:11
Yeah, we're gonna need to hack maple syrup.
James Altucher 1:10:14
I want to have pancakes that I eat and then I can like suddenly do math a lot better or like I could think better. But Amy Webb Andrew Hessel, thank you so much for putting up with my really stupid and inane questions. And I really look forward to all of this happening as fast as possible as you could have gathered. And please, you know, come back on the podcast for anything else. You have another book out or movie out or whatever, come back on and we'll, we'll talk about it.
Andrew Hessel 1:10:42
Sounds good. Thank you. Sounds good. And can I have a sample of your DNA James? Just say no.
James Altucher 1:10:49
Believe me, believe me. i My DNA is scattered everywhere. I just I eat potato chips that it drops all over the floor. And everybody hates me in this house.
Andrew Hessel 1:11:00
We can accelerate your entry into synthetic biology if we if we start working with yours. Yeah,
James Altucher 1:11:07
it's too late. I wish my parents had been able to sequence my DNA in the embryo that would have been a game changer for me, but it's too late for that. So but thanks again. Thanks again so much for coming on the podcast.