 Boom, what's up everyone welcome to simulation. I'm your host on Sakyan very very excited for this episode We are still on site in Boston, Massachusetts. We are at the new research building in Dr. George Church's office We are going to be talking about all things synthetic biology and his lab and what's going on for us in this new Evolution of our future George. Thank you so much for joining my pleasure. I really appreciate it This is our second episode of George. The first one was super short at Ark Fusion And I'm really glad that I've had more time to study up for this one And we're going to go into a little bit more depth on a lot of the really important fields that you're working in for those That don't know George Church is a geneticist a molecular engineer a chemist He is a professor at Harvard and MIT last 33 years This is that it's an incredible amount of students and teaching that's been going on He runs the church lab which has a hundred people has grown over 33 years to have a hundred people working within the church lab on a bunch of different disciplines of Advancing us into the future. So he's co-founded 22 companies co-authored 500 papers 143 patent publications author of Regenesis and so much more George you have an insanely incredible bio You have been at the edge of knowledge for so long pushing the boundaries. So this is an honor. Thank you. Thank you Thank you. So, all right Let's let's start with this big history understanding of where we've found ourselves kind of asked two words of earth and Figuring out now tweaking the biology. So this is a major transitionary moment How have you seen that evolution of civilization up until this point of synthetic biology? Well, that's a obviously big question but I think one of the things that that Critics often point out is we make mistakes and there's no doubt about it. We are a species of engineers. That is that is both our That's our past and our future is almost certainly has to do with our Unique ability to really think deeply about the past in the future and to engineer as a consequence We we do make mistakes, but we're probably only species that is capable of protecting any or all of the species from catastrophic events like Asteroids the Sun expansion Etc. So We have that responsibility to ourselves and many other species and maybe to the whole universe We there is still yet an open question as to whether we're the only intelligence In in the entire universe is eminence It's arrogant to think of it either way that we're the that we're the only one or that we're one of billion You know, it's just it's arrogant to think we know the answer to that. Yeah, lots of civilizational hubris and You you point out that we have a lot of sort of ways of figuring out how to best use these powers and you point out to Species and I and I actually wanted to make this point as you are Investigating how to do things like bring the woolly mammoth back into at least a point of awe within our own Awareness, there's so many species that we could bring back as a point of awe and as an awareness Expansion for ourselves to be able to see how we got to this point Is that kind of where that drive for the species comes from? Well, so I Think the woolly mammoth is the best example of something where we can get more than just off. I mean all is Amazing already, but we can we can get things that are potentially beneficial To the species they're and and to species preservation in general the species being Asian elephant By bringing in other bits of DNA that could help it survive in the modern world But also to help the Arctic environment where whether they can participate in carbon sequestration, which could benefit the entire planet Preventing carbon loss and sequestering new carbon So when we think about space, you know de extinction we're typically talking about the extinction of genes most all Animal plants and animals and bacteria are hybrids of related Organisms and we're creating a particular hybrid, which will be cold resistant Asian elephants will extend their range It'll help help them help us with carbon sequestration So see there's there's many ways to engineer to advance our world Like you said carbon sequestration is one of them there are there's so many of these different ways to help advance us now I want to ask, you know as we kind of dive into the deeper subject areas prior to getting there You know what you what you did with in 1975 with x-ray crystallography of transfer RNA and seeing how that how that affects the Carrying of instructions to other parts of the cell that was kind of a big moment for you and That was at the cutting edge of knowledge and you've spent the next 40 years at the cutting edge plus years at the cutting edge of knowledge always pushing always pushing the edge of what we know Tell us about that It's not just knowledge is also engineering But yet with the transfer RNA that was a teenager when I was first introduced to this research project my son co-chem and his team and I Was doing I started I was just a job, but it was one that I picked I mean, I didn't you know to be the fusion of math physics chemistry biology computer science all in one package because you really had to have all of those to It's not like looking through a microscope where you just see things you actually have to solve the structure but it also introduced me to the whole world of nucleic acids and you know the epiphany of Typing in all of the sequences that were known at the time the one-dimensional structures folding over the three dimensions and then seeing how it is how easy that was and And how valuable it would be to have the one-dimensional structure of everything in the world It also introduced me to Automation so we had all that data was automatically collected this in 1974 and Almost nothing was computerized or automated in the rest of the rest of biology and I thought well time to Introduce that and there were many other aspects of it, you know first-folded RNA first-folded to click acid it was Led me to a lot of almost everything We're still working on has to do with that and we still work on even transfer and itself in the genetic code Changing genetic codes of a number of organisms now and George was a Pioneer in genome sequencing and still is in genome sequencing and and you've seen that drop in In price and speed So we are now doing things much faster and much more cost-effectively when you've co-founded Several companies in the space Veritas genetics nebula genomics, so teach us about what's happening because you're specifically making a big push to the idea of Open access mechanisms because there's a lot of silos of data And we want to be able to leverage open access to data in safe ways that make it easier for medical research Yeah, exactly. So there were there were two components from the very beginning for me one was the technical part of bringing down the cost and we've You know pursued most recently fluorescent next-gen sequencing and nanopores to help do that We brought down 10 million fold in cost, but it is that technical part yet. There's a social component, which is Convincing people is safe and that it's effective, you know that it does something that they care about And the problem is it's kind of a seat belt situation where even after the seat belts were installed in your car is effectively free And even there were laws and so forth to really get people to pay attention You had to have a circuit that sense that your seat belt was sealed and then it was shut off the annoying sound And I think we have a similar thing here or about 1% of the people are at risk for genetic diseases And they sort of feel like well, I'm exempt because there's nobody in my family yet But the thing is that's almost always the scenario is there's nobody in your family until there is one So so what Veritas and and Nebula do is Veritas brought the price down to thousand dollars and started getting it out to closer to regular people Nebula brings it down to zero dollars and starts Making the connection to researchers like pharmaceutical companies much more friction-free Simultaneously making convincing arguments that that they're to lower There's two things that worry people one is the safe You know is there is their data secure and Nebula can't using combination of blockchain encryption We can guarantee that the data is only used the way you originally wanted to be used You can you can secure it so that your physician can't see it insurance companies can't see it can't be subpoenaed because you next You never had it nobody else has it It can only be used for a list of things that you approved in advance It could benefit you and nothing to be held against you and you don't need you can even protect it from yourself So you don't learn anything that you don't want to learn so That's a that's a breakthrough and then the breakthrough of getting the drug companies to pay for your genome And they may be paced possibly paying you for the education in time Completely blows away the thousand dollar genome would Making something where you could potentially profit from your genome without ever actually selling it to anyone the the importance as you said of of privacy for an individual's full genome sequence and then to Have these access controls where we ourselves can decide where we want the data to flow And who we want to tell plus then not only have that be a free of cost for us to understand our whole genome But then for medical research to be able to be done on how the we can best Help with diseases and all different types of understandings of different humans This is a crucial advancement And it's a new way of thinking about things of offering offering data which is this most precious and also One of the best ways to better understand ourselves Giving that in a safe way to researchers and then letting them on better understand Humans and also potentially get paid and this could potentially be a good way to get into something like a universal basic income Is giving our data and then being able to get paid for that. All right. Yeah It's exciting stuff and that is I love your push for that though these open-access mechanisms It's it's a very very cool that your silos are very problematic at both ends. They're neither that they're They they don't benefit the patient much they it's very hard to to get in When you get in what you can do with it is very limited And so at the very open end of the spectrum is the personal genome project and then at the at the level where almost anything could be Communicated without anyone ever having your individual genome in their possession in an uncrypted form the normally way that use you encrypt Use encryption is I'll send you a encrypted email. You'll uncrew you decrypted at the other end But at that moment it's it's out of my hands and it's in its full embodiment at your end But with things like homomorphic encryption you can ask questions of a group of us and get your Data back without ever without you or anyone outside of my control ever having my open genome so You can ask the same questions you would ask but they're all the questions and answers are all Via this encryption This this leads us into another Pressing area that that you're working on We've seen over the last Six or so years this this evolution of CRISPR into our lives of of better Leveraging evolutionary technologies for over billions of years like bacteria So with the Cas9's ability to go in and do things like genetic editing And engineering that is birthing this new there's a second wave that's coming now of genetic engineers Leveraging CRISPR's Cas9, but also other like SC Cas9. So there's new sorts of ways to to I want you to to tell us about this second wave because you guys have a good amount of second waivers in your lab and You're pushing the the edge again in genetic engineering Yeah, I would say it's probably you know eighth wave or something like that because there there were many Genome editing methods before CRISPR and there'll be probably many after and CRISPR is not even that good at doing precise editing where you where you want to say change a G to a T that's very hard to do with with CRISPR It's good at mutations that you're right it can make single-point mutations But sort of randomly and and sometimes it hits adjacent bases that you didn't want to touch and and that There there were ways there have been other ways to do that So for example, there's a lambda red system that allows you to do that. There's a AAV single-stranded DNA base method There are a bunch of Integrases switch where you can pop in a cassette precisely and then you've got the point mutations in that cassette. So These are only slightly less efficient than CRISPR right at the moment and they will inevitably get the Everything will get easier and cheaper and at that point you will pick the ones the best And that's been the history with sequencing too is that everything is there were all kinds of compromises and shortcuts and so forth And those have fallen away now that you'll just pick the best sequencing right now, which is whole genome sequencing yeah, so I listed some of the ones that are that are That are preceded CRISPR and those same ones are up and coming because they could blow past it because of their precision It was so interesting how you were like nah Alan. This is the eighth wave Okay, and because this is what was it tau right TAL so tau was the one just before CRISPR and it's still in use It's still in clinic. It's in clinical trials People use it for research Just like you can send off an order to get CRISPR in a worse Nobody actually almost nobody makes CRISPR in their own lab. What they'll do is they'll order the synthetic Modifications and then it'll come back in and then they'll do the experiment in their lab And say they would tell as you order it and you come back in and the prices are not that different And so in the end it's going to be which one handles the sequence that you want Regions that many reasons the genome where none of the known CRISPRs will cut there. Okay, but the towels are Basically, you can make one to cut anywhere. Yeah, and that's an advantage It's that in terms of precision. Yeah, and this is what we're looking at aiming to be able to do a hundred percent of the Genome rather than just limited. I think it's close to what seventy percent or so and the and the other advantage Or the other thing we're looking for for the next next generation is ability to do multiple sites at once So if right now if we're having problems doing one In other words for having on target and off target problems if you do two sites three sites We get down to 15,000 sites Then you need to have something that's very low toxicity and very Precise and so that's another that's another standard measurement for how well we're improving is is how high a multiplex level We can get to whoa multi targeting because yeah, just quickly off targeting is when you're looking at a Sequence of DNA that looks similar to where you and it accidentally goes there and then on target What are what? How can you have an on target error on target meaning you're trying to change? You're trying to make a precise edit like a G to a T and you and you make a little bit bigger So you could call that off target off by one, but it's basically it's on target. It's a red gene and Okay, it's just not it's not very precise on target So off target is completely different part of it as you know I'm not even in a related gene and in our very first paper where we turn CRISPR into technology We anticipated that we wrote computer programs that would help you avoid off target because I think it's easy to just naively say oh I'm gonna Use the computer to design it hit this gene and you ignore it But you need to think holistically you need to think about the whole genome. So that's what we did. Yes in our very first paper Now George give us your understanding of there's this was part of bacterial evolution We're now starting to see billions of years of the of what they've understood as best Ways to boost up their own immune systems We're trying to understand what they're doing and apply that to ourselves And we're trying to use computational biology to really best Understand a lot of this. So can you tell us what your thoughts are about leveraging computational biology to better? You do genetic engineering right, so there's We use but computational biology almost every aspect of everything every research we do This is just one of them. So it can be used for computer a design Certainly you need to Edit the genome you need to be able to read it up front You need to know what it is you're editing and at the end you need to read it again to make sure what you edited This was what you wanted, right? So there's a lot of computational Components there you need to go through You need to get inspiration from somewhere. So you need to look through human populations for people that are exceptionally resistant to diseases You need to look for people that that you know the contribution to common diseases look at animals for And in bacteria for additional tools that you can use So all of us computational interesting. Yeah, yeah In the cut so exactly computational biology being leveraged into all different aspects of the lab and also the sort of Without getting too much into the Ethics and the in the geopolitics of things You are you is your most is your we've now through through revolution. We've been we've been doing our own Genetic engineering through through breeding over time. It's taken much longer now We can go immediately and start tweaking. We can eradicate disease. We can do augmentations to humans Which are do you have a specific kind of favorite that you're most interested in in the space? Well, so the the most powerful preventative medicine Which is also augmentation that that We should all be familiar with this. We should be constantly celebrating is vaccines We have about a couple dozen vaccines that make us superhuman relative to our ancestors. They they lived in fear of You know a smallpox a polio of many diseases that we now have We're not fearful of Because they're either completely extinct nearly extinct or Completely controlled by the vaccination process That in principle some of that Could be there could be similar things that happen that increase our health over our lifetime There could be gene therapies for example that could reverse aging as we get older There could be some that have cognitive advantages as we get older so that we prevent the cognitive decline in a population that's Rapidly becoming kind of lopsided on the on the older end of this of the demographic spectrum We could have you know cognitive enhancement to reduce that cognitive decline and And who knows where we go from there, but those are examples of things where Genetics is not fundamentally different from drugs except the connections between Mechanism and therapy is so much more direct and faster. And so we We need to they'll go through the normal Vetting processes of safety and efficacy through the FDA the EMA CFDA and so forth And then you started touching on on Neuroplasticity and neuro degeneration and so I want to you have the brain initiative going on you have the Connectome going on and so this is mapping all of the neural pathways and neural networks within our entire nervous system This is very exciting Teach us about why this is so important So the brain is is very special in many ways It's one of the things that separates us from other animals their ability to to think about the past the future to you know It's not just memory. It's our ability to to think out of the box to Intuit to moat to show sympathy and All of us We could another thing makes it unique is you can replace almost any part of your body I mean as we go into the future organ transplants will become They're easy But it's hard to place certain parts of your brain that are responsible for the memories that make you you So we want to learn more about how that's encoded and we want to do it Inexpensively something that could be used clinically where we know the connection of every you know every neuron might be connected to a thousand other Neurons, you know 36 billion neurons each for a thousand connections or big range and and Whether those connections are inhibitory or excitatory We can map out this at like single molecule level so we could really go down to a resolution of of the synapse and we and we have a big government project From my ARPA called the microns project that it aims for synapse revolution resolution connect home Plus we can find out what the lineage of the cells were you know what cells begat You know what precursors be gave me came those cells where they migrated and What and what their expression state is which again is relevant to understanding and if you had to That kind of deep understanding you could reconstruct it if it got broken. Yeah, potentially I mean we're gonna start with very simple things like dopamine and Parkinson's But eventually we'll get to more be able to reconstruct more and more complicated connect homes So we have to you have to read and write the The brain cells and not just neurons but clear Yeah, you know A ligand in your sights and so on yeah wow all the way down to the to the It's to the small even to the synaptic level. Yeah, wow Yes, so we have super resolution with multiple high-quality antibodies that can tell us pre and post synaptic Excitatory inhibitory at the synapse level connect home. Whoa And this is getting a lot deeper than just knowing prefrontal cortex amygdala. This is way way cool and deep And then now this is this is actually ties us into the importance of Preservation we've gotten this far as a civilization in many regards due to collective learning that we've been able to build on top every single millennia up until this point and So now as we go with minds like you we want to retain as much as we can of What's built up in your mind over time and then be able to tap into that in the future and access it? Understand how you got to where you got and whatnot. Yeah, and How how specifically Are are you working on your own? Neuroplasticity as well as offsetting of moving yourself away from their generation Yeah, I don't I don't think of it so much as about me I mean I was taught as a youth to serve everybody else first But we need you to George. We need you. I think there is a Bit of a tragedy that occurs among many Highly skilled people is that it really takes a lifetime a current lifetime to get to a Point of competence, you know, I think that I didn't feel particularly competent until I hit my 64th birthday And now I actually feel like I can do my job because I've been properly educated It would be a pity to like build this and program the supercomputer and then unplug it the set the day that it's that it's finally working and that's You know, I've already twice the age average age my ancestors You know that our longevity is doubled roughly And it's and it's more and more occurring at the later years of life So if we could extend the youth Ness of the body is regenerative properties that you see most diseases that kill us in industrialized nations Do not kill 20 year olds and so that sort of planned obsolescence if we can reverse it Then we can have all the advantages of this Education this 60 years of education plus the flexibility of mind that you and the and the Vigor of a youthful body And I think that's at least an option that we want to strongly explore So beautifully said that there's so much hubris in 20 year olds and And then the proper education only, you know, what's your 60 you're like I know a little bit about the world now Yeah, and then now it's and now it's just so important like you indicated stay healthy longer keep that that youthful homeostatic Capacity up until your later years Therefore we can be more creative. We can contribute more in our later years with that Mountain of knowledge that we have later on very well said now Ooh, yeah, what's in your on the advisory board with sense? That's right Also a recent startup called rejuvenate bio, which is aimed at using gene therapy to do aging reversal in dogs and then and then move into human clinical trials with this with the same genes So hitting this from multiple angles for longevity now Okay, this is This this this is kind of like how we perceive the world and the mechanisms of which Things work not only this camera system are everything from our phones to all different types of Biomaterials that we see buildings even our ecology architecture and ecology. There's so many interesting ways to have bio inspired Materials and robotics and all different types of things. This is what's going on with you at the whist Institute They said and I'm pronouncing that right. Yes. Yes. Yeah, V's Institute. There we go V's Institute, which I'm your co-founding member of now Teach us about what you're excited about with the biomaterials Right so Biology is just another engine engineering discipline But it's also has some Interesting advantages one advantage is we have extremely complex beautifully Debugged systems because they've been the duck debugged over billions of years over, you know Many orders of magnitude of land and and air and and liquid We inherit that so that's one thing advantage. The other advantage is we can reduce some of that We can do evolution in the lab, but we could do evolution kind of on steroids Where we we can accelerate evolution. So we have that Plus we have all the advantages from all the engines other engineering disciplines like Computer-aided design so all these things combined to make something that's highly accelerated, but we have a fourth thing Which is extremely Important and maybe not obvious is that we is that we want to atomic We what we would like to be able to do atomically precise engineering if it's free and and basically biology basically does that it it Almost everything it does is capable of being atomically precise almost every molecule. It's made is the same as every other molecule of that type and That and it does it at scale so you can make things the size of a giant redwood or the size of an entire ecosystem and basically for free that forest Didn't really cost us anything to to build so Atomically precise at scale billions of years evolution and ability to evolve on our own So instead of making a prototype in any other field of engineering like a prototype for a bridge or a cell phone Where you really put a lot of energy into one prototype here. You can make a trillion prototypes and let Evolutionary processes pick best one you just have to be clever about setting up the accelerated evolution. So this is interesting the amazing capability of biology Including materials and it's not just biologically inspired materials where you can make atomic the precise versions of things that are normally imprecise You know like instead of making mortar We can make a shell, you know with all its intricate patterns on it mortars It's kind of like blob of stuff that you smooth out But we can also make Biology make things that you normally don't think are biological right not like not shells But but like shells made out of inorganic materials So we should be able literally everything we can make metals semiconductors all of that We know how to make those with biology. We know how biology can make metals It can make it can make refractive index gradient Optical fibers it can it it can make thinking machines Like some of the best supercomputers in oral there are biologically Manufactured so I think nothing is currently manufactured without biology is safe From from disruption and revolution and this is a this is a really good point for for Young people as well watching is that there are so many ways for them to to dive into bio-inspired materials Yeah, that's really no matter what field you've come from there is a Biological version of that especially if you're an engineer or scientist But I would say almost everything the societal influence is also biologically in society is a bunch of Biological atoms. Have you come right down to it? Okay, George, this is this is crazy. You have over 33 years How you've built up a lab the church lab and your lab has a hundred people now That how is this? How do you possibly figure out how to manage this? This is this is important because we have now we're moving into these Labs at Boyden has a really popular now lab We have more of these labs sort of popping up with these really roaring groups of Scientists and engineers intellectuals pushing the boundaries of knowledge and we want to know how to best design The the the frameworks and the flows of information in these labs So, you know, maybe we start off by asking you, you know, here you are Running this lab. How do you pick what to research? And how do you delegate research to other people? Yeah, well a lot of this has to do with co-mentoring. So I Co-mentor with Ed Boyden and Bob Langer and Sangeeta, but the we help each other out Because we're running kind of similar kinds of labs and there's co-mentoring within the lab You don't necessarily need a big hierarchy If you've got Kind of good will I select for people that are nice and that's one of my yeah first interview questions Is is or discussions is is how you achieve that kind of environment? You you want to have a An environment where failure is an option but fail fast to get on to the next thing to a bunch of things in parallel It's like the lesson of biology is not to make one prototype But a trillion prototypes was hard to do a trillion projects, but you can at least do more than one You know have a Kind of a real group size of about three So so the hundred is just a group bunch of groups of three. Okay Have an interdisciplinary team. So it's hard to make an interdisciplinary team out of disciplinarians So it's easier to make it out of people that are themselves interdisciplinary So you have like two people that know two different languages, even if there's no overlap of any of those They they know how to gain a third one So each gain a third one that's a shared language and then they can and they can build up this network of people That are just then you can decorate it with a few disciplinarians at the end But the major network of know-how I think has to be people who feel comfortable with two or more fields in their own head And this is like molecular biology and computer science. Maybe something like that or you know philosophy or ethics and and and medicine or you know optics and Genetics for to see you can know the three visual structure of the genome and et cetera There's there's and once you get used to it then it becomes it becomes You know you're good at whatever you do and if you have a lab that does interdisciplinary stuff and does entrepreneurship and does And really generally has its sights on transformative technology Then something that seems like science fiction becomes more routine because that's what you do every day as you transform Things that look hard, you know things that are actually easy, you know want to be actual heroes You just want to find the low-hanging fruit and help everybody get to it There was a couple of really important points there this co mentorship We've seen over and over again that mentorship is such Acceleration of one's fullest potential into the world. So that was a big one and then also this this interdisciplinary approach across We've we talked about this so much of having different fields that were really Really knowledgeable in that we can mesh together and work with other teams as these groups of three like you said within the hundred And then I really appreciated how you talked about entrepreneurship. You're actually trying to Translationally take what you're building at the edge and put that out into the world and make that available to people. It's so crucial So How do you keep up? How does the lab keep up and all these labs around the world now? There's the the doubling of scientific papers is just so fast now There's not enough eyeballs to scan them and understand them. How do you keep up? Well in a way our task is worse speak harder because we're trying to be interdisciplinary, which we don't know where the next idiosyncratic oddity from physics or or Our ethics could or chemistry could impact our lab So we have to constantly we have a lot of antennae out there. So part of the reason for having a large ish Interdisciplinary group is that each individual is an antenna for their specialties plural for each person And they may not be the best in the world at any particular task some of them are they're good enough that they can talk to the World's experts. So that's one way. We don't need everything because we're mainly doing this for engineering. So we need things that are People turning into something that the rest of the world could benefit from so That that that's a luxury and just in in general when you have a lot of things working, you know a lot of balls in the air that nobody else has You're not we're not catching up with other groups. We're kind of staying ahead and in a way that's Kind of easier. Yeah in a certain way. It means we'll probably make a few more mistakes than the average group, but We'll have a lot more warning When new things are coming down the pipe because a lot of those new things came from our lab. Yeah or from the alumni of our lab I like the way that you explained as it as in tennis is that you did that you we got to have the we've got to constantly be receiving the the edges across the different disciplines and plugging it into what we know George how with these 500 co-authored publications and 143 patent publications, how are you ensuring that what you've done? people actually understand and also that the information in your lab is really Properly being trans generationally disseminated Well within the lab is pretty easy There's a lot of side-by-side Commentoring that you can't really can't get by books or lectures or that sort of thing you need to be sitting next to them Day in day out so so that's why these teams of three really You know are the best way of getting really complicated things communicated and and take it to the next step but there is still a need for educating the general public and and and reverse so it's a conversation is two way It's a broad societal conference because some of these topics You know have difficult policy components. They have economic components Both people benefiting from what we do and also us benefiting from from their funding So so we use various mechanisms one is there's a organization my wife started called pg ed.org Ting Wu started in around 2006 and that Has congressional briefings every six months or so for many years now They work with with Hollywood for on TVs and movies which reach millions of people. Yes, both of those mechanisms reach millions of people Online materials that that educators high school educators can just download And then You know working with authors and journalists in various ways so that that reaches more people than you can reach in a simple classroom It's even more than you can reach with these web classrooms are very popular MOOCs and yeah things like that And Harvard has a great one called at X at X But those don't reach nearly as many people as you can reach with Hollywood and Congress Yes, yes as we move forward with figuring out how to most effectively design The labs that we can have these hundreds of scientists ethicists engineers collaborating and and working on the edge of what's known by society How would you optimally design the workflows there? You were giving this idea of mentorship. You there's got to be a lab component There's got to be yeah entrepreneur component Yeah, so I think it was it was hard to get going and it's not clear that it would Transfer trivially it's something where you you need to have kind of a track record that attracts the best people because if you try to Build you know a soup out of stone soup and nothing but stones. This is problem So so part of it was a process where first we inherited the reputation of Harvard MIT to track the best students and postdocs But they still didn't believe in what the lab was doing I mean they would join they believed it enough to join the lab, but I was then took another You know many years to get it to the point where but now we have a track record where it both attracts people and they believe in the And the more they believe the more they accomplish and it's a positive feedback loop the more they accomplish And more the next generation believe they train each other and then and they also Create these entrepreneurship They'll spin off a company and then the then the comp the people from the company will come back and tell everybody what it's like on the Other side and and they'll it's like older siblings that are like very protective of the younger ones coming up through the ranks And it's just wonderful to watch it happen because it didn't quite self-assemble There was some nudging here and there but for the most part it's something that's self-sustaining now Yeah, and it's a and it's slightly amplifying each generation So you have more more alumna out there They kind of they have this little conspiracy that they they help each other out Worldwide, and that's it's really wonderful. Yeah, that's a principle of patience and Providing value and yep, and it's been a long time 33 years So for all the young people that are really trying to get to where you're going right away be patient provide value Take your time getting there Okay, a couple quick things on the way out George, what would you say is a core driving principle of your life? Oh Well, so it's changed over time. I think I had Kind of wacky idea what science was like when I was young But I would say that Fairly consistently I've tried to do two things three things at once Okay, so any one of these would be pretty cool But is as asked basic, you know science Philosophy philosophically interesting questions, you know, like that would be cool to know Have something that's technological by fat many factors of ten not just you know 1.5 and and broad so it's not just I'm gonna this is the way you fix a particular knee problem This is something that that everybody can use like reading and writing DNA And then the third thing is having a society been a beneficial not just you know changing society but In a way that There's some consensus on on the on the value of it So if you can do all three things, you know the basic science the the technological Disruption in the societal benefit that that's it's good. You know, it doesn't have to be medicine. It could be agriculture. It could be You know data storage you can be getting off the planet getting some of us off the planet to have a backup All these things are you don't have to prioritize perfectly You certainly don't want to put all your chips on one thing that you think is the world's most important problem You want to have a diverse portfolio for the world and even for each individual? You know those are that was so beautifully said. I love it This wouldn't be a simulation if we didn't ask you Do you think this is a simulation? You know I think simple answers. I don't know. I think that if it doesn't really matter in some extent because in the simulation We need to be doing something You know, I I doubt it personally But it you know if it is such a sophisticated one that we might as well live out that in that simulation We may be the only intelligence in the planet in the universe and we better take it seriously There's some reason why we're the only Intelligence in that universe George is like the video game character that maxed out all of his attributes, especially in the field of biology Thank you Okay, last question George What is the most beautiful thing in the world? You know, you know no one's ever asked me that question in an interview So I'll give us a very spontaneous answer. I would I would say the way that we know about the world is the way we gain knowledge and and Think about the past and the future is there is really quite beautiful And it's it's it's what makes us human if we took away if we change ourselves in many ways that were unrecognizable visually Sound different if we can still do that That's a beautiful thing and that's and that's the thing that will allow another beautiful thing It's related to is our ability to survive. That's the that's the Darwinian beauty of the world But our ability to know is is is one of the most potent ways of We we can survive and all the things we we bring along with us Thank you George. This has been an honor and a pleasure and thank you so much for your continued work in this field at the edge and Inspiring others. Oh, thank you. Thank you for coming out of the show and joining us. I really appreciate it Thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate you Go ahead and give us your thoughts in the comments below on all things related to biology like we've been discussing with George We'd love to hear from you Also, go and build go and build manifest your dreams into the world everyone go creatively Execute we love you so much. Thank you for tuning in also check out all of the great links below to George's work and to the lab's work at church lab and Also, join us as simulation so we can help scale this content to more people and come on site to great places and Talk to some of the world's most brilliant leaders. We greatly appreciate you much love and we'll see you soon