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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“Billion different kinds of electronic materials in an afternoon, barcode them all and see who wins. But we did that all the time in biology now, at least since 2004 we have. So, I think that's an opportunity that we use those libraries to make much superior materials, and we might even finally get room temperature superconductor that way. I mean, from libraries, we call it chemical slash biochemical slash exotic material libraries. But the point is they're libraries. They're essentially based in some sense on polymers, even though pieces of them don't necessarily have to be polymers.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's getting there. I mean, rather than going the route of having everything has to be based on first principle nanostructures, you can meet in the middle where biology can build things. Now, of course, when you go down to liquid nitrogen and colder temperatures, biology, as we currently know it, stops functioning. Now it's not to say that you can't have things moving in liquid nitrogen. You can, but that hasn't been explored and doesn't really need to be, because if biology can build things that can operate at low temperature, or maybe biology now because you can make these big libraries of biology, maybe 10 to the 17th in vitro. And you can flip through them quickly and you can barcode them. And this is something that's never been done. In electronics. I'm not saying you can't do it electronics, but you haven't made”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of it is that the nanotechnology as original Eric Drexler, he wanted to reinvent biology in a certain sense, but it already existed. And so you don't need to design a diamond replicator because you already have a DNA replicator. And so the question was what was missing, what was motivating this reinvention of myology, it was materials, so the biology is not that great with Materials that are, say, superconductors or conductors periods, semiconductors and light speed.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until maybe eight years ago, something like that. And I think we're just now getting used to it. The use of chips for making DNA. I mean, you said that DNA synthesis come down a thousand fold. Well, it depends on who you talk to. So when we came out with the first chip-based genes in 2004 nature paper, basically people dismissed it for about a decade. The only people they used it were collaborators and alumni. And it wasn't even listed on the Moore's Law curve for DNA synthesis, even though it was like a thousand times cheaper. It was just ignored. And now we have claims of 10 to the 17th genes that you can make libraries 10 to the 17th that aren't randomized in any usual sense where you just do air prone PCR or spiked in nucleotides 10 to the 17th, that's a lot bigger than a thousand fold if it turns out to be practical.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's definitely polymers that biology can make that we'll conduct at the speed of light. And we could make a mixed neuronal system that has conventional neurons and processes that conduct the speed of light. That would be interesting. I think that our ability to design proteins was particularly difficult. Designing nuclic acids was great whether we were doing, you know, you want two things to bind to each other, you just dial it up using Watson Creek rules. If you want to make a three-dimensional structure, it's actually the one kind of the one thing where morphology is dictated by fairly simple rules. It's not how developmental biology works and we still need to figure out how that works. But DNA orgami, DNA nanostructures really work. But doing it for proteins was really, really hard.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few things. One is the arrival of synthetic biology, where you sort of, we were already kind of doing synthetic biology before. We were doing recombinant DNA. Genetic engineering was called, was kind of in that direction, but synthetic biology really liberated us to think a little bit bigger, even though it started kind of focused on E. coli and yeast enabled us to maybe think about new amino acids, for example. And I think new amino acids, if you start using the full periodic table with the amino acids or what the amino acids can catalyze, that breaks one of the major barriers. One of the major barriers Electrical, mechanical engineering, and biology was the use of special materials, things that conduct electricity at the speed of light, or conduct signals more generally.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is that? Well, that electronics is Moore's Law. I wouldn't say is stopping, but it's kind of... What we would call the one nanometer Process, which is supposed to come out in 2027, according to the roadmap, it's not really one nanometer. It's more like 40 nanometers center-center spacing. typically in two dimensions, maybe a little bit of three dimensions, but biology is already at 0.4 nanometer resolution, and it is in three dimensions. And so, you know, depending on how you count that third dimension, that could be a billion times Higher density that biology is already at. And we just need a little more practice with dealing with the full periodic table. Even lectural engineering doesn't use the whole periodic table typically. But especially not at the atomic level. So I think biology is just really good at doing atomic precision.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that would be a big thing. Having just more materials in general, all the materials that we use in mechanical and electrical engineering should be made better by biotechnologies.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the cost curves are affected by new tools. I mean, it's not just some automatic thing. There was a big discontinuity between Sanger sequencing and nanopores and fluorescent next gen sequencing. And so, you know, I think sometimes it's a merger, two things. So clearly AI merging with protein design caused a step function. These step functions get smoothed out into a kind of a smooth exponential, but there are lots of them. The next set will probably be a merger of AI with other aspects of biology like developmental biology, merger of developmental biology with manufacturing and conquering developmental biology, in other words, actually knowing how to make any arbitrary shape given DNA as the programming material.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not even sure it's going to make sense, but yeah, 100x would not be completely surprising combinations of drugs will be important when you're using them intelligently. Some drugs will affect everything. So, for example, I have an age-related drug that could. That could impact every disease. I'm not sure the number is going to matter so much as the quality and the impact and intersection and software that helps physicians and regular citizens make decisions.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think that we are shortening the time of getting medical products approved still in a safe way. So I think, but that's not going to completely change the exponential. It might reduce it from 10 years down to one year is our record so far for, say, COVID vaccines. So maybe that'll be 10 times shorter. Maybe that will multiply out a little bit. But I think the big thing is that all our designs will become better. So there'll be fewer failures. The cost per drug will drop. There'll be things that we didn't classically consider drugs or instruments, some sort of hybrid thing. But again, I don't think that'll be completely shocking. But it's just going to be so much of it. There's going to be lots of diversity of solutions.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope it's not post AGI. I think we're rushing a little bit to get to AGI, and there's lots of cool things we can do with just. Super AI, but we need to be very cautious. I think that AJI, we can get into that.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Electronics and biology more thoroughly and AI and biotech. And I think that's, it seems like we're on the same track as Moore's Law, if not better.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so we have something that's about the same speed, a little bit faster than Moore's Law in Biology. It's more recent is one aspect of it. So we had, but we could kind of stand on the shoulders of the electronics giants to go a little bit faster to catch up. I would say we do. I mean, we have the biotech industry, which has... Use that exponential curve to get better. It's also possible we're close to the big payoff, as the other aspect or the beginning of the big payoff. You know, right now we have miraculous things like cures for rare diseases, we have vaccines, we have trillion dollars probably of various biotech related things. If you go far enough apart. But we're kind of on the verge of really combining”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, half empty, half full. I'll give you that. But all it takes is one for some of these scenarios, right? And that's. So it would have been nice if the whistleblowers could have saved him the three years in prison. By, you know, getting an intervention. I mean, it's not like anybody died. There are probably three healthy genetically engineered. Children in the world now. Teenagers soon. But it still was a good test run, shows a failure of the system. We need to have better surveillance of all the things we don't want and consequences that are well known.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I advocated in 2004 is that we stop deluding ourselves into thinking that moratorium and voluntary sign-ups to be good citizens is going to be sufficient. We need to also have surveillance. And consequences and mechanisms for whistleblowers to make it easy for people to report things that they think are out of. And we had essentially moratoria and disapproval for germline editing. Nevertheless, somebody did it. And a lot of people knew about it. So that was clearly a failure of the whole moratorium. Voluntary and whistleblower components”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one interesting thing is that there's only two chiralities. The current chirality and the mirror chirality. But there's maybe 10 to the 80th difference codes Now, some of them you might be able to take out all at once. Anyway, coding space is a kind of more interesting space. And of course it could get even more complicated than that because the 10 to the 83rd is based on triplet codons and that sort of thing. But if they're quadruplet codons or novel alphabets and so on. But we're sort of getting into A cycle of competition. It would be better to nip it in the bud, which is why did we spend so much societal resources building up to tens of thousands of nuclear warheads? And now we've Dialed it back to mere thousand nuclear warheads. That's nice that we dial it back, but why did we waste all that time and money and energy?”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There will be technological solutions to the psychiatric problem. It could be even people who aren't sure whether they want to be helped or not try it out and it's reversible. And they say, yes, I like that better. Okay, let's try that. Then there's other things that cause you to have bad days. It's not just your psyche, it's also the environment. So if you're surrounded by your people being starved or infectious disease or being shot at or something like that, those are things that are subject to sociological and technological solutions. And if we could really solve a lot of that stuff, we could reduce the probability that one person.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe some progress in psychiatric medicine would help. Again, you don't want to force that on people. You want to make sure that. That if they don't want to get cured, you can't force them, but you can make it available to them. That might help. Hopefully there's more”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often, often softly does have an advantage, but so far we haven't, you know, we made it through the Cold War without blowing up. Any hydrogen bombs, as far as I know, accidentally or intentionally on enemies. We did two atomic bombs But a lot of that is based on the difficulty of building. or atomic bombs. The thing that's alarming to people like me is that biotechnology Enables smaller and smaller efforts harder and harder to detect, harder, and more and more subtle to the stochastic variation between people. You know, there's some people that are just so happy they would. They would never want to do anything close to that, or they're so responsible. Or ethical or whatever. And then there are other people who, like, whenever they have a bad day, they want to take a lot of people with them, right?”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, too much power because over history of humanity, the amount of things that a single person can do has grown. Very significantly. I mean, it used to be when you had your bare hands, there's kind of a limit to what one person could do. A large number of people could team up and get a, let's say, a mammoth or something like that. But today, one person with the right connections or the right access to technology could blow up a city. And that's a huge increase in capability. And I think we want to start. That back a little bit somehow”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they wouldn't want to destroy themselves and their family and their legacy and everything like that. But all it takes is one group probably or one person. But your question is, is it inevitable? I don't know, might be. It's quite possible it's already here. In other words, we already have mirror life in our solar system or maybe even on our planet. It just hasn't been weaponized, right? And so it's just like what we were saying in the science paper is this seems like the sort of thing they could wipe out. All competing life, if we're properly weaponized. But there are probably a few things like that. And what we really need to do is reduce the motivation to do that, maybe increase our preparedness. A variety of existential threats, some of which will be natural, some of which will be one disgruntled person who has”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aren't any examples of that? But mirror life, if it can be weaponized, we took it to a whole nother level of concern. And the concern was that if we got it to a certain point, it would be easy to weaponize it. And again, there's practical considerations. It may be that most people who consider weaponizing mirror life would probably be satisfied weaponizing viruses that already exist, that are already pathogens.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. You know, I was a co-author on a paper that warned about the dangers of mirror life, just like. I wrote a paper long ago about the dangers of having the synthetic capabilities we have for making synthetic viruses. And to some extent having new genetic codes, they have a few things in common. But the thing about the advance that we were recognizing in our science paper that was warning about mural life is that we not only had to calculate what the possibility of error-prone Escape or something like that. We don't want anything to escape. We made in the lab, unless there's a general societal consensus, it's a good thing. And so far, there aren't too many examples of that.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In vitro things you can do on probably on the order of 10 to the 14th, 10 to the 17th things that involve cells are typically in the billions. But we have this, this is how we're going to get inroads into the very complicated biological systems.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company and a bunch of the work that we do is you can get a recipe for almost every cell type in the body. Now that's not new cell types, but at least you can, you've learned to your point about reducing the number of genes we need to manipulate in order to get to a particular goal. Here's a whole series of goals, and we can get them with one, two, three, maybe seven transcription factors. So that's an example. There's room for lots of other examples of where you can do reduction and do not just reductionistic virosy, but then constructionistic where you take it back up and make a whole complex system and see what happens. And then you can do lots of those combinations and you debug them and so forth. Some of these things you can do.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to overemphasize how single genes can do these amazing things, but there's also the possibility that multiple genes can be hypothesized and tested quickly. So for example, I mentioned earlier, what's the minimum number of transcription factors it takes to turn a stem cell into a neuron? Well, there's a bunch of recipes where you can do it with one, right? Maybe you want a specific neuron you might need a few more. But then you can kind of quickly go to the answer by looking at each target cell type that exists, and you can see, well, what transcriptive factors did it use to get, does it express at the time that the target? And then you say, well, let's just try those on the stem cells and see if they work. And that recipe has worked quite well. It's the basis of GC theory.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Functions I would say mostly GWAS for humans Maybe for animals in general, followed for animals with synthetic biology. And the smaller and the Cheaper and faster replicating the more experiments you can do. So”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushing us to a new level of intelligence is going to be very challenging and maybe not even urgent. To some extent, actualizing the people that we currently have would be quite just getting them all up to whatever speed they want to be up to within the range that's been demonstrated. Some people are going to want to be like Einstein. Some people won't. Some people want to be healthy all the time. Unlikely, but some people might not. Some people might want to live. The 150. Some people might want to die at 80. But if you give them that range, that capability, you know, what if we had 8 billion super healthy? Don't need to worry about... Food and drugs, super healthy Einstein level of intelligence, education level, best we can come up with. That would be a completely different world, right?”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biology, we've got a real gift, which is that it's both very much more complicated than almost anything we've designed from scratch, but it also is a lot more forgiving in a certain sense, is that you can have an animal or even a human that has two heads, which is not something that they evolutionarily, there was not evolutionary selection specifically to have two heads, but just a little deviation from the normal developmental pattern, fetal development, and they both function fine. They control subsets of the body. And they have their own personality, their own life. So there's all kinds of things you can do in biology where you're working at a very high programming level is a way of thinking. About it.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medical treatments. So that's a perfect example of how much we can minimize something, sometimes called reductionism. Reductionism isn't all bad Sometimes it helps us bring a product into medicine. Sometimes it helps us understand or build a tool chest or a module that we can use in other cases and translate it to other species. So you hit on it just right is. Is that not everything will translate, but we start accumulating these widgets. It's kind of like all the electronic widgets that we accumulate over time that if you just want to. Slap it into the next circuit you might be able to.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're hitting on a very interesting question, and it's related to what's the minimum. So, for example, you almost said it, which was for take a very multigenic trait. In humans, like height is something that's probably the most well studied one simply because no matter what medical condition you're studying, you collect information on height and weight and things like that. Anyway, they tracked it down to on the order of 10,000 genes. Of which we have 20,000 protein coding genes and some of them are RNA coding genes. And they each have a tiny influence on height. But if you take growth hormone, ceramatropin, that you have extreme examples where you'll get extremely low, small stature and extremely high stature do that one alone. And in fact, it's... Use clinically as well for seven different”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Educated people around the world, what is the difference between a wolf, a gray wolf, and a dire wolf, right? Because dire wolfs, they're big. Maybe they haven't particular coloration head components tend to be bigger than the leg components. And so how many genes do you need to do that? Maybe this was Dyer Wolf 2.0. We've got to go for 3.0 and successive approximation. We might want to develop the technology for making exact copy of something because then we can, especially being able to make 100 variations on an exact copy, because then there won't be any argument about whether you could make a direwolf. It's a matter of what should you make and what would be most beneficial for the species that you're making for the environment it lives in and for humans.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the minimum number of base spheres it takes to make something that will replicate to something that, you know, Was done in mycoplasma originally And in a way, these are more interesting than can we make a perfect copy of something, right? It's can we make, what's the minimum things we have to do to make it completely functionally or even functionally in a particular category, right? How do we make it bigger? We learn the rules for how to make things bigger, how to make things replicate faster, how to use new materials, et cetera. So I think what the Direwolf, we clearly didn't make an exact copy of a dire wolf, but it helped illustrate kind of”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other thing, the other aspect of it is there's a whole discipline within synthetic biology of asking what's the minimum. And so people often phrase it into what's the maximum, you know, like what can we do? And I'm interested in both, but it's like, oh, yes, there's millions of difference between mammoths and elephants. There are millions of difference between elephant one and elephant two within Asian elephants and between Asians and African. But not all of those are definitive in terms of what we would normally call them how we would normally classify them. What their functionality would be in an ecosystem. So there's this exercise that people do, and we've done it, for example, with developmental biology. What's the minimum number of transcription factors it takes to make a neuron from a pluripotence themselves?”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I think. I think people get worked up about whether we are trying to bring back or have already or will ever bring back a new species. And I think of it, if you think of it rather than as a natural thing that we're trying to do, but as a synthetic biology with goals that have potential societal, and people also get worshipped up as to whether this could possibly benefit society in any way, you know, can we really fix an environment to suit humans or fix the global carbon to suit humans? And the answer is we don't know, but it's worth a try, isn't it? Because it could be very cost effective.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the question is how close to 100% do you need to get? And it's going to vary from tissue to tissue. For example, for some therapies, you just need to get 1% because that 1% can produce some missing enzyme. And the 1% doesn't have to necessarily be in its normal place, right? You can turn a muscle into part of the immune system temporarily for a vaccine. An enzyme that's normally made in, let's say, the brain, you could make a liver, right? If the point is just to get it in through the blood. So I think that's moving along quite well.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is nothing close to that today, but there's nothing, no law of physics that would prevent it. You know, there's going to be practical considerations, like how many injections do you need to do? To achieve that goal. But we're getting better at targeting tissues. So for one of my companies, dynotherapeutics showed they could get a hundredfold improvement in targeting neurons in the brain, which is a big deal. Now, and that was just one little campaign that they did, one experiment involved a lot of AI and a lot of testing of millions of different capses. If you did that with cells, CAPS are fairly limited in the diversity and the structure that it can change to, but cells that have even more possibilities, I think you could probably get delivery to everything.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Trying to maintain the connections and the memories. But there's some fairly straightforward experiments that need to be done before we can really even estimate how hard that problem is. Very often there's low hanging fruit that people just think is improbable, but it's there because biology has all these gifts where the just hands over to us levers that we can flip like vaccines is an amazing gift. It didn't have to exist, but they do.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would suddenly be young again, right? Without going all the way back to the embryo and forward again. And there's various other things that are just short of that. If you replace the cells, they'll fit into that niche. They might displace the old cells. within certainly within the realm of modern synthetic algae is to for cells to take over niches i think the hardest part is the brain but even there you know there's some evidence that if you bring even though the brain doesn't really use stem cells that much you could artificially bring in stem cells and they could artificially fit into a circuit and learn the Circuit and then displace the old ones in some way.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably there's a lot of forces pushing it towards somatic. For one, there's 8 billion. People that have missed the germline opportunity As to say, it doesn't apply to us, the two of us, and everybody listening to this. And you have to be very cautious when you say something's impossible. It's safe to say it's impossible to do it this second, but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and next decade or something. So I think there's a lot that could be done, in particular since aging is a fairly cellular phenomenon with proteins going through the blood and other factors going through the blood that signaling and so forth, you could imagine if you replaced, let's say, every cell in the nucleus in the body left, you know.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sick 25 years from now that it's like hit or miss, it's more likely that you're going to be healthier 25 years from now than you thought you were going to be. There may be some, probably not some law of physics, but some Economic or complexity issue that we don't know about that becomes a brick wall. I doubt it seriously, but we'll have to see.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subsets of the aging phenotype. You're getting close to all of aging. In other words, you're seeing, instead of just saying, oh, I'm going to fix the damage in this collagen, in this tendon, in this limb, you're saying, oh, I'm going to change a lot of things that are common to aged-related diseases, and I'm going to get more than one at a time. I think looking at those two phenomena, the exponentials in biotechnologies and the breakthrough in general aging, not just analysis, but synthesis and therapies. And a lot of these therapies are now making in the clinical trials, I wouldn't be surprised if 2050 would be a point if we can make it to that point, 25 years. Most people listening to this have a good chance of making. It 25 years. And the thing is, it's not going to be some sudden point where you're going to be”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Escape philosophy is sometimes what it's called for aging. Different people have estimates, and all those estimates are, including mine, are going to be taken with a big grain of salt. I think that looking at how, mainly looking at the exponentials. In biotechnology and the progress that's been made in understanding, not just understanding causes of aging, but seeing real examples where you can reverse.”
2025-06-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source