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The Jordan Harbinger Show
It was discussed in the context of synthetic biology and how it might reshape the future, specifically in areas like medicine, food, and the environment. The host and guest also debated the potential risks and ethical dilemmas surrounding the field.
That was sort of the intro sound bite that I got for the book and I was like, I'm sold because I want to know how to make myself more caveman, to make myself more resilient.
— Episode: 687: Amy Webb | Changing Lives with Synt...
Episode: 687: Amy Webb | Changing Lives with Synthetic Biol...
It was discussed in the context of synthetic biology and how it might reshape the future, specifically in areas like medicine, food, and the environment. The host and guest also debated the potential risks and ethical dilemmas surrounding the field.
That was sort of the intro sound bite that I got for the book and I was like, I'm sold because I want to know how to make myself more caveman, to make myself more resilient.
if you're a regular listener of this show believe it or not you've already been hearing about it you just haven't had the vocabulary to describe it so synthetic biology is a relatively new interdisciplinary field of science it combines design computer science biology engineering and the goal is to redesign or design organisms on a molecular level to have new purposes
of all the things we wrote about in this book there's a lot of I think controversial concepts and ideas the future of agriculture was not the part of the book that I thought was going to set off a firestorm of public debate and have a lot of like calls to cancel me online and yet that's kind of what happens
I read in your book about the leather that's made from spider silk it's obviously not really leather but it's just like yeah some sort of analogous compound that's maybe really hard to tell what it is and it's like hey this didn't require torturing an animal and yeah all the other things that go with raising an animal in the first place just for the skin
the futures here it's not just not evenly distributed you know what I would say is the future is here it just didn't show up the way that we all expected and therefore we miss it we miss the developments in real time they don't meet the expectations that we had they don't have the shape or the form factor that we were expecting so we miss things until they reach a level of maturity
Episode: 687: Amy Webb | Changing Lives with Synthetic Biol...
It was discussed in the context of synthetic biology and its potential to reshape the future, specifically in the areas of medicine, food, and the environment. The book explores ideas like growing organs and meat in labs, resurrecting extinct species, and genetically enhancing humans.
So first of all, that's not entirely my idea. So George Church who's a premonent geneticist, scientist at Harvard really pushes his thinking to the very edge of plausibility in a way that I think is incredibly profound and beneficial.
And one of those edge cases is we've got human DNA but is this the best we can do? There are derivatives at some point we forked. Is there something about those who were living near us around us?
Is there some other part of our evolution that we might be able to tap into? And if so, would that make us more resilient?
The bottom line is we are facing existential crises on this planet right and it has to do with climate change and food security and all kinds of things.
And of all the things we wrote about in this book, there's a lot of I think controversial concepts and ideas, the future of agriculture was not the part of the book that I thought was going to set off a firestorm of public debate and have a lot of like calls to cancel me online and yet that's kind of what happens.