George Church: belief

Transcript context

…Just getting everybody to the healthy level, how much gene therapy would that take? It sounds like it wouldn't take that much, if you think that there are a couple of knobs which control very high level functions? So do you find them through the GWAS, genome wide association studies? Is it through simulations of these… I would say mostly GWAS for humans, maybe for animals in general. For animals with synthetic biology, the smaller and the cheaper and faster replicating, the more experiments you can do. 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. For example I mentioned earlier, what's the minimum number of transcription factors it takes to turn a stem cell into a neuron? There's a bunch of recipes where you can do it with one. 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. You can see what transcription factors does it express at the time that it's the target? Then you say, “Let's just try those on the stem cell and see if they work.” That recipe has worked quite well. It's the basis of GC Therapeutics and a bunch of the work that we do. You can get a recipe for almost every cell type in the body. Now, that's not new cell types, but at least 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 1, 2, 3, maybe 7 changed transcription factors. That's an example. There's room for lots of other examples of where you can do reduction and do not just reductionistic biology, but then constructionistic. You take it back up and make a whole complex system and see what happens. Then you can do lots of those combinations and you debug them and so forth. Some of these things you can do… In vitro things you can do probably on the order of 10^14, 10^17. Things that involve cells are typically in the billions. But this is how we're going to get inroads into the very complicated biological systems. Can I ask you some questions about biodefense? Because some of the stuff you guys work on, or quite responsibly choose not to work on, can keep one up at night. Mirror life. Given the fact that it's physically possible, why doesn't it just happen at some point? Some day it'll get cheap enough. Somebody will care about it enough, that somebody just does it. What's the equilibrium here?…

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