Scientists May Soon Design Entirely New Life Forms (#296)
4/7/202620 min
We’re entering a world where life itself could become programmable.
What if creating new forms of life becomes as simple as writing code?
Geneticist Adrian Woolfson explains how close we are — and why the consequences could be extraordinary.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLynn Thoman· Host0:00
[chime] For billions of years, evolution wrote the story of life. Now, for the first time, we may be picking up the pen. Advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are moving us from observing nature to redesigning it, giving us the potential to eliminate disease and even create entirely new forms of life. But if we can start designing life, where do we draw the line, and how do we decide what life should become? [music] Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Tolman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Adrian Woolfson, a geneticist and science writer whose work sits right at the frontier of synthetic biology and the design of new forms of life. He spent years studying how biological organisms can be built from scratch, not just discovered in nature. He's the author of On the Future of Species, which explores how advances