Godfather of Synthetic Bio on De-Aging, De-Extinction, & Weaponized Mirror Life — George Church

Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing George Church. I don't know how to introduce you. It would honestly this is not even an exaggeration. It would honestly be easier to list out the, the major breakthroughs in biology over the last few decades that you haven't been involved in, from the Human Genome Project to CRISPR, age reversal to de extinction. So, you weren't exactly an easy prep. Sorry. Okay. So let's start here. By what year would it be the case that if you make it to that year, technology will keep in bio will keep progressing to such an extent that your lifespan will increase b

Escape philosophy is sometimes what it's called for aging. Different people have estimates and all those estimates are including mine are going to be, take with a big grain of salt. I think that looking at how Mainly looking at the exponentials in biotechnology and the progress that's been made in understanding, not just understanding the causes of aging, but seeing real examples where you can reverse subsets of the aging phenotype. You know, so you're getting close to all of aging. In other words, you're seeing instead of just saying, Oh, I'm gonna fix the damage in this collagen, in this ten

the number of things you would have to solve to, get give us a lifespan of humpback whales. Bowhead bowhead whales. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Two

hundred years. Yeah. Is

there any hope for doing that from somatic gene therapy alone, or would that have to be germline gene therapy?

Probably, there's a a lot of forces pushing it towards somatic. For one, there are 8,000,000,000 Right. People that have missed the germline opportunity. Yeah. That's to say, doesn't apply to us, the two of us and everybody listening to this. And, you know, you have to be very cautious when you say something's impossible. It's safe to say it's impossible to do it this second, but you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow or in the next decade or something. So I think there's a lot that could be done, in particular, since aging is a fairly cellular phenomenon with proteins going through the b

Ship of Theseus kind of thing in the British?

Yeah, exactly. Ship of Theseus. Having, you know, trying to maintain the connections and the memories. But, you know, there's some fairly straightforward experiments that need to be done before we can really even estimate how hard that problem is. Or, you know, very often there's low hanging fruit that people just think is improbable, but it's there because biology has all these gifts that, you know, where the, you know, just hands over to us, levers that we can flip. Like vaccines is an amazing gift that didn't have to exist, but they they do. Yeah.

Yeah. Is there an existing gene delivery mechanism which could deliver gene therapy to every single cell in the body?