George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.Professor Church thinks that these improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise gene editing tools like CRISPR, AlphaFold-type AIs, & the ability to conduct massively parallel multiplex experiments) have put us on the verge of some massive payoffs: de-aging, de-extinction, biobots that combine the best of human and natural engineering, and (unfortunately) weaponized mirror life.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* WorkOS Radar ensures your product is ready for AI agents. Radar is an anti-fraud solution that categorizes different types of automated traffic, blocking harmful bots while allowing helpful agents. Future-proof your roadmap today at workos.com/radar.* Scale is building the infrastructure for smarter, safer AI. In addition to their Data Foundry, they recently released Scale Evaluation, a tool that diagnoses model limitations. Learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.* Gemini 2.5 Pro was invaluable during our prep for this episode: it perfectly explained complex biology and helped us understand the most important papers. Gemini’s recently improved structure and style also made using it surprisingly enjoyable. Start building with it today at https://aistudio.google.comTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.Timestamps(0:00:00) – Aging solved by 2050(0:07:37) – Finding the master switch for any trait(0:19:50) – Weaponized mirror life(0:30:40) – Why hasn’t sequencing/synthesis led to biotech revolution?(0:50:26) – Impact of AGI on biology research progress(1:00:35) – Biobots that use the best of biological and human engineering(1:05:09) – Odds of life in universe(1:09:57) – Is DNA the ultimate data storage?(1:13:55) – Curing rare diseases with genetic counseling(1:22:23) – NIH & NSF budget cuts(1:25:26) – How one lab spawned 100 biotech companies Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing George Church. I don't know how to introduce you. It would honestly, this is not even a exaggeration, it would honestly be easier to list out 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 in bio will keep progressing to such an extent that your lifespan will increase by a year every year or more. Right.
Escape velocity is sometimes what it's called for aging. Different people have estimates, and all those estimates, including mine, are going to be taken with a big grain of salt. I think that mainly looking at the exponentials in biotechnology and the progress that's been made in understanding, not just understanding 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 um in other words you're seeing instead of just saying oh i'm going to fix the damage in this collagen in this tendon in this limb you're saying oh i'm going to change a lot of things that that are they're common to aged related diseases and i'm going to get more than one at a time
I think looking at those two phenomena, the exponentials in biotechnologies and the breakthrough in general aging, not just analysis, but synthesis and therapies, and a lot of these therapies now making in the clinical trials, I wouldn't be surprised if 2050 would be a point. If we can make it to that point, 25 years, most people listening to this have a good chance of making it 25 years.
And the thing is, it's not going to be some sudden point where you're going to be, you know, so sick 25 years from now that it's like hit or miss. It's more likely that you're going to be healthier 25 years from now than you thought you were going to be. There may be some, probably not some law of physics, but some economic or complexity issue that we don't know about that becomes a brick wall.
I doubt it seriously, but we'll have to see.
Given the number of things you would have to solve to give us a lifespan of humpback whales.
Bowhead whales, yeah. 200 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 lot of forces pushing it towards somatic um for one there's eight billion right people that have missed the the germline opportunity yeah as to say doesn't apply to us uh the two of us and everybody listening to this and you know
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