Steve Jurvetson predicts big year for artificial life

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Speaker: What is going to happen is that for the first time, humans will create an artificial life form. Boot it up. It will reproduce in the lab and produce children and do useful work. And this is a symbolic achievement for this year. Commercial applications will follow, though. The reason that this has been a project for the last 15 years is that when you can write the code of life with the same authorship flexibility as you would a poem or a computer program, you can do many more experiments, accelerate the pace of progress, and build my groups to make fuels, chemicals, many of the artifacts in the world around us that formerly relied on petrochemicals and instead digest waste fuels -- waste materials to produce them. We can also purify water and do a lot of other interesting things. So actually, I should have some slides here. Is that -- can I push a button? So if -- don't look at the axis. There's no way to digest this other than the slopes of the lines. Red is Moore's Law, the pace of progress of Moore's Law as we know it. Blue is the pace at which we can do gene sequencing, which is reading the code of life. And green is the pace at which we've been able to write the code of life. Accelerating much more dramatically than Moore's line, and allowing for predictions to be accurately made that in 2002, we create the first synthetic virus, and in 2010, we'll create the first synthetic bacterial class organism, what most people consider a living thing. How do you do this? Well, on the map you see all the labs around the world that you can email a file. You can say give me an A. Give me a T, a G, a C, and they will FedEx you back all the good nucleotides that just ordered without any animals being involved. It's a machine very much like the one you see in the top right corner, quite remarkable to witness. What's astounding is that you then get to stitch those together in a yeast or in other mechanism into longer and longer nucleotides more cost effectively. What you do is take all of the DNA out of a cell, put the synthetic chromosome in, and it becomes a new species. It's like genetic alchemy. That's already been demonstrated, the fact that you can change the species 100 percent. Well, why is this so important? I think it will engender a new era of what we call biotech 2.0, or a new era in biotech where we can run millions of experiments at the same pace at which an information technologist would expect to operate. Instead of physically cutting and pasting genes from existing organisms, which was the entire history of biotech looking into the past. So the pace of progress will be daunting. George Church at Harvard has already shown that you can create 4 billion novel genetic variants per day. Now, these are 4 billion different genetic organisms that prior, were not on the planet before, and they can be tested and screened for. And so I think the profound question will be how do we design these organisms and even more profoundly, how do we evolve these organisms in artificial environments?

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Speaker: All right. Steve does this every year. Okay, for those of you on our inaudible understood him, raise your panel. No, just kidding. Green or red?

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Speaker: I have no idea what inaudible.

Laughter

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Speaker: What he said. We should have a third.

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Speaker: Okay, now let me look. I know, actually --

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Speaker: I'm not a PhD.

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Speaker: -- Given Esther's dinner table upbringing, I'm sure you can comment because you've been surrounded by smart people.

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Speaker: This stuff is going on. I've actually -- I've had my genome sequenced by George Church, who you mentioned who is an advisor to that 30 startups in one form or other, something to do with gene sequencing whatever. It's -- this is the thing that's going to have really unpredictable consequences, and I hope most of them are going to be good. We -- you know, we might create something that we can't control, and that's one of the challenges here. At the same time, I think it's tremendously exciting because the way to solve a lot of our large problems is not through machines or even electronics, it's through biology, growing plants that produce more oxygen and less carbon, or things that eat oil that spills, or things that create oil, but only where we want the oil. And, you know, what this is going to mean less for electronics, but for energy and pollution and environment, and disease is amazing. But it's not clear. Whatever. It's exciting and it's real. Thank you.

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Speaker: And this is the big year. Dave.

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Speaker: Yeah, I agree, it's exciting. I don't know if it's real, but it sounds exciting, so --

Laughter

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