George Church: belief

Transcript context

…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? I think that evolution has a tendency to go with what works. The investment in making a whole new base pair would have been high. We haven't even articulated what the return on investment would be. What do you get from that? We have made systems, like Floyd Romesberg and others, where you have replication and transcription and translation with a new base pair. But it hasn't been clearly articulated what that gets you, even in technological society. In technology you can jump to things where all the intermediates aren't incrementally useful. But evolution, as far as we know, is generally limited to… You have to justify every change, like some bureaucracy, “If you're going to put this sidewalk in, you have to justify that before you build a city.” We've talked about many different technologies you worked on or are working on right now, from gene editing to de-extinction to age reversal. What is an underhyped technology in your research portfolio which you think more people should be talking about but gets glossed over?…

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