The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people’s lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.
I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.
I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That’s why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
Most people don’t realize it, because they’re invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth’s biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone’s information is out there, it’s part of the collective.
Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth’s environment.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we’re witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.
I think I’m a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I’ve come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.