George Church: prediction

Transcript context

…If in a thousand years we're still using DNA and RNA and proteins for top-end manufacturing, the frontiers of engineering, how surprised would you be? Would you think, “Oh, that makes sense. Evolution designed these systems for billions of years.” Or would you think, “Oh, it's surprising that these ended up being the systems. Whatever evolution found just happened to be the best way to manufacture or to store information”? I don't think I'd be surprised either way. 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. One thing that's probably already happening, we don't have to go a thousand years out, is that 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 34 new non standard amino acids being used simultaneously with the standard ones in a 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. Certainly there are plenty of modified ones. There's 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—whether it's bits, digital binary—it’s just zeros and ones. That works pretty well for 99% of what we do electronically. Having four is better than two maybe, but do we really need six? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised. Another possibility is if we changed the backbone of DNA. Maybe we keep the ACGT, but make it out of peptides now, a little bit smaller, a little bit more compatible. I don't know. It could be part of the new amino acid collection. There'll be more. 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. It makes sense why evolution wouldn't have discovered radio technology. But things like more than 20 amino acids or these different bases so that you can store more than 2 bits per base pair or for example, the codon remapping scheme, this redundancy, which it seems like based on your work there was this extra information you could have used for other things. Is there some explanation for why 4 billion years of evolution didn't already give living organisms these capabilities?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.