YouSaid · the spoken record

George Church

lines on the record: 94
first: 2025-06-26
most recent: 2025-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think one scenario, and like if we handle the safety issues, and that has to be a top priority, if we handle that properly, then we're probably going to have almost perfect health. Why, wait, why wouldn't we? It's going to go so fast. And, I mean, it's going to go pretty fast with just regular AI without AGI. But if you add to it AGI, and it'll be a positive feedback loop because the more people they get, Fixed, you know, or get access to good healthcare, the more people will be helping prompt the AI, if that's necessary. And I think it probably will be. And the more hybrid systems will have of people and machines working together in harmony in this very positive scenario, yes.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though they're supposedly in cutthroat fields. And I think they're nice to other people as well. So that's nice is one criteria. Multidisciplinarity, it's hard to build into multidisciplinary team from disciplinarians. So if you have people that each know two languages or two skills, even if they don't have anything in common, they have shown that they can learn a new skill. And then they'll each add a new skill that connects them as a third thing. Those are the three main things, I would say.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Non random, but many of them will fail. Yeah. So the question is selection criteria. So of that, there's a self-selection. And the next thing is in the interview, I typically tell them, I'm looking for people that are nice. I'm not necessarily looking for geniuses. We end up with a lot of geniuses. It's wonderful. Nice, I think, is highly predictive of how well you will do in the lab and afterwards. And as a consequence, I think we have kind of international set of alumni that are quite nice to each other.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly. We're an acquired taste. Technology development is not at all the same skill set as regular biology, where you pick a gene, you pick a disease, you pick a phenomenon, and you hammer away at it for your whole life. This is more you make a library where you have a million members of the library are going to fail and maybe one or two will succeed. Very different attitude. It's much more engineering, but it's even different from most engineering, where engineering doesn't usually use libraries that way, millions and billions of components that are”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you framed it as spotting talent. I've heard at least one meme that all you have to do is show up and you'll get into my lap, which is definitely not true. First of all, there's a lot of self-selection.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then also the timing is good because the exponential is starting to show up. The exponential is pretty much the same. In the beginning of the hockey stick and the end of the hockey stick, but you don't notice it until he gets. And so that's what's happening is both the computing AI Biotech, they're all peaking at this point. And so whichever lab happened to already have that positive feedback loop going with the academic to industry technology transfer would asymmetrically benefit from that exponential And to some extent, exponential, you can really look like you're very productive when really you're just kind of sliding downhill.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lab that chooses from an early stage to keep this dynamic between basic science and societal needs going at all costs, causing great trauma when the lab starts, but then getting a couple of wins and it starts building up a It's a positive feedback loop where just like the building of Boston was a positive feedback loop, the more Harvard's and MITs and high-tech startups than pharma. And so you get a couple of wins in the literature and people start coming that are a whole nother level up on it. And maybe they're already aiming for entrepreneurship while before they weren't. Anyway, it evolves in a way that you can't just jumpstart, you couldn't just suddenly create Harvard MIT in the middle of the desert and suddenly create a lab that is taking these kind of risks early in a career.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, thank you for being so generous in your evaluation, which may take a grain of salt. But I think that what it is being in the right place at the right time. So Boston is a unique culture. It attracts some of the best and brightest students and postdocs automatically. It is a dense enough. Sometimes people want to spread the wealth out evenly all over the universe or the planet. And there's advantages to having it clustered. So like if you have spouses can find other jobs in the same field. So having a concentration of biotech and pharma and MIT and Harvard and VU and so forth all in one pretty walkable distance, you know, not spread out all along the East or west coast, but actually in a walkable city is one thing. That's the starting point. And then”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be for China. I mean, you didn't specify who it's a positive story for. The US displaced Britain, which would displace Spain and Portugal. It keeps moving. Fresh blood is sometimes a good thing. Again, I preface this by saying I'm not advocating this. What else could go well? You know, there's just certain things that we, the society is fairly good at doing collectively that we're not good at doing individually. You know, building roads, schools, and science are examples of that doesn't mean we couldn't learn how to do that. To some extent, when you build a gated community, a lot of that is done with private funding. It's possible we could figure out how to build roads and schools and just about everything. It means we're going to run into some kind of hyper capitalism.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than doing basic research, I'm a big proponent of basic research, but also maybe I'm more than average connecting the basic research to societal needs from the get-go. I don't think it actually interferes with basic research to think and act on societal needs at the same time. So that would be a positive. It could be that it creates another nation state that now is the dominant force, like China could now become the next empire after.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to preface this when scientists explore, answer a question, explore possibilities, it doesn't mean they're advocating it in the past. People have asked me off the wall questions about Neanderthals, for example. And then it was described as if I was enthusiastic about it, so not enthusiastic about NIH and NSF budgets being cut. You could say, well, it forces us to think more seriously about philanthropy and industrial sponsored research. That could be a positive thing. It could be that that makes us listen more carefully to what's”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, I counseled my genetic therapy companies that they should invest in common diseases like age-related diseases and infectious diseases. And in fact, the COVID vaccine was formulated as a gene therapy and was, you know, the cost was in the $20 per dose range and 6 billion people benefited from it. 6 billion people took it and it was proven over the whole population. So I think that's the more appropriate usage gene therapy. But I think for practical reasons, getting FEA approval and so forth, you might go for the rare diseases. And that's perfectly fine. But I think the cost effectiveness of the sweet spot for gene therapy is for age-related diseases and the sweet spot for Rare diseases is genetic counsel”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I've actually counseled my gene therapy companies that they should be investing in very common diseases. Because rare diseases have this genetic counseling solution. With the exception of spontaneous mutations and dominance, which probably our IVF clinic type solutions rather than, but the rare recessives can be handled in matchmaking and at every level”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's just like it's very inexpensive. In fact, it's less than zero because you spend $100 per genome and it'll probably be less soon. And you get the whole thing analyzed and compare that to millions of dollars that will be lost opportunity costs of not being part of the workforce, taking care of them and so forth. So the return on investment is tremendous. It's at least a tenfold return on investment. So it's a no-brainer from a public health standpoint. We should be able to pay for this through national health services in England, through insurance companies in the United States, and it turns the insurance companies from being the bad guys that they're snooping in on your personal life and then raising your rates to, oh, they're giving you this free information and you can do it as you wish. And if you...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the point is 3% is still acceptable. I mean, it's just a tragic loss not only of the human life Directly affected, but the whole family Is very often one or both parents have to quit their job and spend full time like caregiving and fundraising. These are very expensive diseases as well. It's We don't need to be careful not to stigmatize as well. So when if a bunch of families get fixed, we shouldn't point a finger at the ones that are unwilling to get fixed because that's their choice. But I think as word spreads and you see the positive outcomes, I think there will be. Will be seen as one of the simplest bits of medicine ever. I mean, in fact, it's something that”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's it. Yeah, I know what you're saying and what David is saying, but I think it's a dangerous dichotomy. They'll say that there are lots of, not just India, all over the world. And in fact, and in fact, we all went through a bottleneck. No, but that changes the rate from, say, 3% to 6%.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solution. And the other thing is, I think it has to do with the trolley problem. It's like if you don't influence it, it's not your fault. But actually everything is your fault. You know, not doing something is a decision, right? And so I think it's like. If I just don't do anything and they come out damaged, well, it's not my fault, but it is”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was great resistance to seatbelts because less than 1% of people died in automobile accidents or even got hurt. Great resistance to stopping smoking. Really, it's hard even for us to imagine how great the resistance was for seatbelts and smoking. But eventually we got over it. I think this is a similar thing, which is that only 3% of children are severely affected by genetic diseases and they feel like, well, I'm not that unlucky. You know, I'm in the 97%, right? You know, 97% of those were your odds of winning, you know, at the horse races or at the casino. You take them, 90% of winning. Good. But when a children's When a child's future is at risk, I think that's not the right.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cure these kids as soon as they are newborns, or whether you counsel the parents so the same disease is missing. The problem with eugenics was that it was forced it on people. It wasn't that it enabled people to make a choice. Is that it removed the choice from the people. That was what was wrong. And that's the confusion. But I don't think that's the explanation for why this is underhyped. I think it's people when they're dating, they're not thinking about reproduction necessarily. And when they're thinking about reproduction, they're not necessarily thinking about Serious genetic diseases because they're rare. I think it's our difficulty with dealing with rare things. It's like,”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, it was somehow underhyped. What I would say is genetic counseling is underhyped. It is clearly competitive with gene therapy in a certain sense. Clearly not for people that are already born, but for people in the future, not even distant future next couple of years. We've got a chance of diagnosing them or diagnosing the potential parents. and dodging and this has been in practice since 1985 in Doria Shar Perfectly reasonable community response to it eliminated or greatly reduced all sorts of very, very serious inherited diseases. It's sometimes just, you know, depending on how it's presented, it's dismissed as eugenics. I think it's rarely, and I heard Doria Sharim describe that way, and rightly so, what they're doing is standard medicine, whether you...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to say because as soon as you say it, it becomes hyped. So, if I've ever been asked this question before, it's too late. But, you know, I would say one thing I think is very ripe and is very well understood in a certain sense, but is nevertheless ignored. It's kind of like the previous example I would have chosen out of arrays. Arrays were typically used for analytic quantitating RNAs or something like that. The original affimetrics type arrays. But we turned them into gene arrays. And just people weren't using it. It was in nature. Hidden in plain sight.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that evolution has a tendency to go with what works and the investment in making a whole new base pair would have been high. And we haven't even articulated what What the return on investment would be, what do you get from that? We have made systems like Floyd Romsburg and others where you have replication and transcription and translation with a new base pair, but it hasn't been clearly articulated what that gets you. Even in technological society, so in technology you can jump to things where all the intermediates aren't incrementally useful with evolution as far as we know, generally limited to you have to justify. Every change is like some bureaucracy says. Put this sidewalk in, you know, you have to justify that before you build a city.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there'll be more. I mean, these are just things that my primitive 21st century brain is coming up with a thousand years from now. It'll be a whole new millennium.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of alternative base pairs, some of which don't even involve hydrogen bonds. So we could have more. But I think the main thing is this information storage and whether it's bits, digital binary is just zeros and ones. That works pretty well for. 99% of what we do electronically. So having four is better than two maybe. But do we really need six? I don't know. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we had another possibility is that we changed the backbone of DNA. So maybe keep the ACGT, but make it out of peptides now. A little bit smaller, a little bit more compatible. I don't know. Or maybe that'll just be. Just a slight, you know, it could be part of the new amino acid collection.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I'd be surprised either way. I mean, I can imagine it going either way. I can imagine making truly amazing materials using proteins as the catalysts, or maybe in some cases as a scaffold as well as catalysts. I think one thing that's probably already happening, so we don't have to go a thousand years out, is the number of amino acids is going up. It's going up radically from 20. I think pretty soon we'll have a system where we can have 33 new non-standard amino acids being used simultaneously while the standard ones in an E. coli cell. 34. Plus 20 is a lot bigger than 20. I don't think we necessarily need more than four nucleic acid components. I mean, certainly there are plenty of modified ones that are...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know some of that would have been a good breeding ground. But it could be that we need sunny shores, you know, where you have a lot of dry land right next to water. Maybe these are just giant oceans that are surrounded by ice, and maybe that's not yet. But in any case, we need to look at those fountains to see what's popping up. That's a high priority. And the same thing goes for there's a lot of... Water on Mars that's maybe even more accessible. But until we've exhausted those, those are probably the easiest, they're hard. They're still talking about multi-billion dollar experiments, but I think they're a little more convincing. And again, it'll be hard to prove the negative. If we find this negative on everything in the solar system. There's so much more diversity out there that could have done it.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think these are very challenging problems. I'm not even sure we would be able to say within five or is a magnitude much less 50%. I think it's more likely to come from exploration than it is going to be from simulation. The sad truth is that almost none of the missions that we sent outside of Earth have actually looked for life. They've had components that could have looked for life, but a sad number of those, not enough components that could look for life, and the ones that could live for life not really looking for it. And when we get positive results, we dismiss them, as happened with the pioneer. I think if we just start looking at the geysers that are coming out of various... So much water, there's 50 times more water. Liquid water, not frozen. More liquid water in our solar system than in Earth, doesn't that seem likely that...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might lead us to believe that least life exists. Now there are other parts of the Drake equation that might kick in, which is maybe it's hard to get intelligent life because intelligence isn't necessarily in your best interest. And if you get intelligence life, it's hard to maintain that without societal collapse or without robotics taking over and then killing themselves. That's hard to do experiments. But I think to your question, I think an experiment that showed maybe multiple different ways of getting to a living system from non-living systems spontaneously would be interesting. Again, I'm not sure it would be very hard to prove the negative.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radio signals or Light signals But biology, the kind of evidence would be that you show in a laboratory using prebiotic conditions. A really simple way to get life Or, I mean, that's a harder proof to prove that given because we don't know what the All the possible preconditions. And probably the number was vast. I mean, you have. 10 to the 20th liters of water. And at various different salinities and drying up on the ocean and the sun and the lightning and all this stuff. But yes, I think if you show kind of reconstructed in the lab a very simple pathway from inorganics. Cyanide derivatives and reduced compounds all the way up to some cellular replicating structure, I think that might”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So part of this has to do with just learning the rules of development of biology, like I said. We can determine morphology at sort of the molecular level now, proteins, nucleic acids. Determining at the cellular multicellular level, there's a lot more things you can do and a lot faster, but we don't know the language yet. So I think we're on the cusp of getting the tools to do that, like the transcription factor that I was talking about earlier, you know, harnessing migration gradients of factors, diffusion factors chemotaxis and so forth. So That's one thing we need, but there's a bunch of things we need really”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenge goal for the synthetic biology community, maybe IGM or something, bacteria make a radio. Now, I actually, Joe Davis is an artist who's been affiliated with my lab before that, Alex Richard's lab. And he did make a bacterial radio, but it was kind of more on the art end than on the science end. But I think that would be a good...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanical electrical engineering will meet with our biological. And in fact, neither of us can make or grow almost everything because there's all kinds of little gaps and things that are very hard to make in a small lab because there are things all over the world that depend on multi-billion dollar fabs to make things. But we're eating away at it. I think we might eventually be maybe a smaller baby step than making a nuclear reactor is making a phone. You said radio communication. We should make a lot. It should be a small...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you need to expand this range of materials. In a certain sense, we do this already. Humans are a biological thing that replicates, not in 30 minutes, but in 20 years or less. And is that fundamentally limiting us? It probably is. But yeah, it's amazing to think about what if you could take a cornfield or a nuclear aptor and suddenly 30 minutes later you've got two of them, right? And then four of them and eight of them. Yeah. I mean, that's quite an interesting. Concept. But I think what we should start with, I teach a course called How to Grow Almost Anything, and I work with Neil Gerschenfeld, who at MIT, who has a course called How to Make Almost Anything. And we're trying to meet in the middle where we can.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, certain things seem incompatible, like the temperatures of a fission reactor. Isn't obviously compatible. But the possibility that once we that a biological system can make other things, for example, it can make a nest, a bird can make a nest. And you consider the whole nest as part of the replication cycle of the bird. So you can say biological thing that replicates it 30 minutes doubling time could make a nuclear reactor. That would be its nest.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But replicating a brain probably involves a lot more information than synthesizing it. So, I mean, just to define the 10 to the 14 synapses is going to take a lot more bytes than the genome, which is billions rather than 10 to the 14th. But there might be reasons that you want to replicate a particular brain configuration rather than just make another. Animal that is starts from scratch as an infant.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 to the 11th neurons, 10 to the 14th synapses. If you wanted to reproduce a particular brain, let's say, it might be speculative as to whether it would be easier to do that by making a copy of it in silico, in some kind of inorganic matrix, or making a copy of it. Both of those are going to be hard. I would say that if you wanted to make a copy of a complicated book, it would be easier to take photographs of each of the pages and to completely translate it into another language trying to get all the nuances and the poetry and so forth if your goal is just to replicate it. And I think the same thing might be true of a brain.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Severe impediment to cognition has a late stage component. But what about how much information does it take to encode a brain? I'm not sure that's that much less genome is required that if you just wanted to make a brain because the brain is totally entangled with the body you have a”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I always felt it was very gnarly I also felt there was something that we could engineer. Certainly we have made a lot of progress in At the broken end of the spectrum where the brain is severely challenged relative to average, there's thousands, a huge fraction of genetic diseases that have one of their consequences being that the child is... Developmentally delayed to such an extent that it's lethal or Or a lifetime deficit. And we know how to, we know the genes involved and we know how to do genetic counseling. In some cases, gene therapy and other therapies to deal with it. At the other end, we have reduction of cognitive decline by cognitive enhancement, which is showing some promise. But again, that's kind of like this early stage.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the same thing is there may be certain things that doesn't take a lot of people. We just all know. We just don't have that much experience with having You know, thousands of Einstein type levels of creativity and intelligence simultaneously in a generation. And in fact, it's probable that we're all capable of being a bit more efficient if we don't have the distractions of mental illness, of Taking care of other people. Now, taking care of other people might be a very good thing. If we have no one to take care of, there'll be something bad that happens to us socially. So these things are very complicated, hard to predict. I think right now I think the baby step, or actually the pretty big baby step, is to eliminate diseases or at least make it possible for people to eliminate their own diseases as they see fit.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. These are great questions, and I'm not sure. I don't want to misrepresent that I know the answers, but it's like the question of, you know, if you have. Nine women, can you do pregnancy in one month? No, not present.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard to not only hard to calculate the bads, it's hard to calculate the goods. So I think it could completely be a complete game changer. But on the other hand, You know, it's like if we said, you know, we could get instantaneous transport all over the earth, right? Well, we could say, yes, that could be a game changer, but do we really need it, right? Is that really important? Maybe it would be more interesting to just have Zoom calls. So be careful what you ask for, right? Because you could tip our priorities towards something that we really don't care about, that where we shouldn't care about or might wish we didn't care about, right?”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we have anything close to the assurance that we need that would be safe. But let's put safety aside for a moment.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A completely foreign type of intelligence. I mean, we barely know how to pass it on to the next generation of humans. So I think we need time to sort that out. And there's no rush. This is a completely artificial emergency. This is not like COVID-19 where we actually millions of people are dying if we delayed the science. This is something where if there ever is a crisis, it's because we created it. It's not because we're trying to solve it. And so I think we need to go very slowly on AGI and ASI and double down on Slightly narrower scientific goals. And even that we need to be very cautious about. We need to have kind of an international consensus on what constitutes safe AI.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm much more excited about scientific AI than I am about language AI. I think languages were in pretty good shape already. And what worries me is that to get to the next level of language requires AGI or ASI, artificial superintelligence. And that's very dangerous. I don't think we have quite figured out how to There's a lot of safety organizations and a lot of safety rules and so forth. And I think what typically happens when there's an intense competition is those safety rules get undermined and pushed aside. But even if they weren't, I just don't think we don't think we understand our own ethics well enough to educate.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I didn't mean to stop there. I mean, I knew the conversation would continue. Right. I'm not pinning down a particular year either, but I think this is poised to go pretty quickly. There are very few practitioners is a thing that will stop it for a while. Sense materials should go faster though because they don't require quite as much regulatory approval. So it's one of these things where when you get the right idea, it's not hard to recruit people. I mean, for example, when Feng Zhang and My Labs brought out CRISPR, we just got 10,000 requests in the next two months for people that wanted to duplicate the system. And so that's what I hope will happen with the non-standard amino acids and the using AI for protein design and making new materials. Hopefully that will recruit tens of thousands of people overnight.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The determination of the functionality of your library is a kind of computer. So you use AI to design the library optimally so you avoid things that are really neutral and really seriously damaged. But then the stuff in the middle, you actually play it out, not in a simulation, but in real life. But it's so inexpensive and it's so fast and it's so exact. I mean, it's 100%. Precision because you're not simulating, right? You're not making assumptions. You're not going from quantum electrodynamics, which is an assumption, quantum mechanics, which is an assumption to molecular mechanics, which are full of assumptions. You're really doing the real thing. And so you're doing a kind of natural computing, and then you can take that data and harvest it in various ways very efficiently, pump it back into the...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which use 20 amino acids and large language models where you line up all the sequences of 20 amino acids. And we have very little experience with extra ones. But I think there's a revolution going on in generating non-standard amino acids where the amino acids can either have as part covalent part of them or as easily liganded all the entire periodic table, stable elements. And that will, you know, each of those will have to blend in and train our models on. But as soon as that comes in, then we're going to have a whole series of new materials very quickly. And ultimately, you can think of the...”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we can do it at incredibly high speeds. In principle, what might evolution might incorporate a few base pair changes in a million years, now we can make billions of changes in an afternoon. And so, and it's all guided in such a way that you get rid of the wastefulness of having a bunch of neutral mutations and a bunch of lethal mutations. You can have things that are quasi-neutral but likely to be game-changing, have more of a focus on those. Another thing that's been missing, and none of the AI protein design tools that I know of are particularly good at it yet, but we're trying to, we're, as we speak, trying to improve this, is non-standard amino acids. Because a lot of these tools depend on having libraries of 3D structure.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I mean, I think the way that it's working now, which will get us a long way, won't get us the whole way, is we have something that kind of works and we make libraries inspired by that, make variations on it. And then whichever of those variations work, we make variations on that. We can just keep going. It's kind of like the way evolution worked.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alpha Falls very nice, but it's only part of it. So there are large language models that are different from Alpha. So give an example. Alpha Fold last time I checked anyway, these all changed, if you substitute an alanine for a serine in a serine protease, it will have exactly the right fold. It will be precise to a fraction of angstrom overall average, but it won't function. It just won't function. And that's where you need either extraordinary precision or just knowledge of what happens evolutionarily or happens in experiments to say that no analyty won't work. And so I think there's all kinds of combinations of AI tools that can give you deeper insight into that.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source