George Church: prediction

Transcript context

…What would it take to do whole genome engineering to such a level that for even a phenotype which doesn't exist in the existing pool of human variation, you could manifest it because your understanding is so high. For example, if I wanted wings. Is the bottleneck our understanding? Is the bottleneck our ability to make that many changes to my genome? Part of this has to do with just learning the rules of developmental biology, like I said. We can determine morphology at 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. I think we're on the cusp of getting the tools to do that, like the transcription factor I was talking about earlier, harnessing migration, gradients of diffusion factors, chemotaxis and so forth. That's one thing we need, but there's a bunch of things we need, really. What discovery in biology—so not in astronomy or some other field—would make you convinced that life on Earth is the only life in the galaxy? Conversely, what might convince you that no, it must have arisen independently thousands of times in this galaxy?…

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