George Church: belief

Transcript context

…Over the last couple of decades we've had a million-fold decrease in the cost of sequencing DNA, a thousandfold in synthesis. We have gene editing tools like CRISPR, massive parallel experiments through multiplex techniques that have come about. Of course much of this work has been led by your lab. Despite all of this, why is it the case that we don't have a huge Industrial Revolution, a huge burst of new drugs, or cures for Alzheimer's and cancer that have already come about? When you look at other trends in other fields, we have Moore's law and here's my iPhone. Why don't we have something like that in biology yet? We have something that's about the same speed, a little bit faster than Moore's Law in biology. It's more recent, that’s one aspect of it. We could stand on the shoulders of the electronics giants to go a little bit faster to catch up. I would say we do. We have the biotech industry, which has used that exponential curve to get better. It's also possible we're close to the big payoff is the other aspect, or the beginning of the big payoff. Right now we have miraculous things like cures for rare diseases. We have vaccines. We have a trillion dollars, probably, of various biotech related things if you go far enough apart. We're on the verge of really combining electronics and biology more thoroughly, and AI and biotech. It seems like we're on the same track as Moore's law, if not better. What exactly are we on the verge of? What does 2040 look like?…

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