A Billion Years of Evolution in a Single Afternoon — George Church

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. Read the transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/george-church Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381?i=1000714690480 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7i0apPkNdLsZPfUulrAzHu?si=d3e1c0312c0c4a9b ---------------------------------------- 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 https://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 https://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.com To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise ---------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 – Aging solved by 2050 00:07:37 – Finding the master switch for any trait 00:19:50 – Weaponized mirror life 00:30:40 – Why hasn’t sequencing/synthesis led to biotech revolution? 00:50:26 – Impact of AGI on biology research progress 01:00:35 – Biobots that use the best of biological and human engineering 01:05:09 – Odds of life in universe 01:09:57 – Is DNA the ultimate data storage? 01:13:55 – Curing rare diseases with genetic counseling 01:22:23 – NIH & NSF budget cuts 01:25:26 – How one lab spawned 100 biotech companies