Craig Venter: Did He Make Life In The Lab?

Speaker:

The only junk DNA is in my colleagues’ brains.

Brian Keating:

Today, we’re featuring Craig Venter, a world renowned biotechnologist known for his groundbreaking contributions to genomics. He had a pivotal role in leading the 1st draft sequence of the human genome and assembling the pioneering team that achieved the transfection of a cell with a synthetic chromosome.

Speaker:

The cells are very dynamic, changing second to second. But one thing is fundamental to all life, And that’s the genetic code.

Brian Keating:

Later in life, he and his research team created the world’s 1st synthetic organism from scratch, demonstrating the potential of synthetic biology to engineer life at the molecular level.

Speaker:

Taking those gene pathways, putting them in The synthetic organisms will be able to create whole new chemical libraries.

Brian Keating:

Craig’s a leading figure. He’s hilarious, unfettered, unshackled, and unafraid. You’ll hear all of that in this episode and find out why he was among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, not once but twice, maybe on another planet where life already exists. So without further ado, we welcome a lively episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, my friend Craig Venter, live recorded at UCSD this past fall.

Brian Keating:

Welcome everybody to what promises to be an exciting and lively, emphasis on lively, Episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with none other than Craig Venter of many different theory, but we’re gonna talk about a couple of them in particular, including Mapping the human genome. Craig is local here in La Jolla. He has his institute named after him down the down the road from our campus, And he’s graciously agreed to spend some time with me. I’m gonna run out of time before I run out of questions, Craig. Thank you so much for visiting.

Speaker:

My pleasure to be here.

Brian Keating:

And you’re a proud alumni, Son of San Diego, UCSD. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about how the campus has changed a little bit. But sitting in that chair a couple months back bang, Kim Stanley Robinson, And who also goes by his middle name only as Stan. I don’t know what it is with you, famed super famous, brilliant, creative types. So today, we’re gonna talk about a variety of subjects, including your recent book, The Voyage of Sorcerer 2. We’re gonna talk about what happened to you on Sorcerer 1, Which is foreshadowing. But first, we’re gonna start with a very simple, easy question, Craig, and that is the one posed by Erwin Schrodinger in theory in a monograph, a very slim monograph. And that question was, what is life?

Speaker:

That’s a book I recommend that every scientist read at least Once. I’ve read it a few times. A few years back, I was asked to give, the only time someone was asked to give the Schrodinger lecture other than Schrodinger Sure. In the same, hall, under the same circumstance. It was it was really an amazing experience. And because we’ve designed the first Living cell, that didn’t happen in nature. People assume that I can answer that question. But, he tried I did define it in physical terms and, you know, thought about things about the genetic code bang before Watson and Crick.

Speaker:

And while everybody was sure that it was proteins, you know, he said it could be as simple as, Morse code.

Brian Keating:

Crystal And

Speaker:

I was talking to, Francis Crick about that. He goes, well, that was obvious to everybody. He was very dismissive of you know? That that was hardly a unique notion other than from protein chemists who, still refused to give Avery the Nobel Prize for proving that DNA was It’s the genetic material. The cells are very dynamic, changing second to second. But one thing is fundamental to all life, And that’s the genetic code. If you take the genetic code out of any cell, any species, the cell dies very rapidly. The Species dies. That’s why we’re so susceptible to radiation poisoning.

Speaker:

It basically blows apart Structure and you can’t continue to produce proteins and live. So some proteins have a half life of seconds, some minutes, some hours, But they’re not permanent structures. So every cell on our body is second to second constantly being rebuilt. Built. So the genetic code is being read, translated in proteins produced on a constant to bases. It’s even coded in the protein how long they’ll live and their degradation rate. So it’s a constant Synthesis degradation, taking out the garbage, and so without the fundamental information molecule, there is No life. That’s a good fundamental start.

Speaker:

Mhmm. Cells, you know, have to defy entropy. They have to keep existing by creating energy. They take things from the environment. We have, you know, hundreds of ways that different cells make energy and the forms of life vary from things that live at a 135 degrees centigrade down to subzero temperatures. History of biology is it got defined in a human centric point of view. So, you know, we were the Standard, so nothing could live out of 37 degrees, and we were the center of the universe. We’re not the center of biology.

Speaker:

We may Be the center of trying to understand and interpret biology, but we’re the minor species on the planet. So key proteins in the membrane pump nutrients and pump waste molecules out, but it’s a dynamic system that, In my view, kind of spontaneously happens. Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

And we’re trying to see right now if we can get it to happen spontaneously. Usually, when we made the synthetic cell, we made a we wrote the genetic code and we Developed a transplantation system where we could put that chromosome in a recipient cell that could read that code. And it read that code and then totally transformed that cell into what was defined by that code. So you change the genetic Could you convert 1 species into another? We’re trying to now see if we can do that in a cell free system, to get spontaneous formation by having all the components together. So, that’s a long winded way of saying we can’t define life. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. I’ve had on multiple The poll people, including, Carl Zimmer, who from The New York Times and other other venues I’m sure you’ve interacted with. I’ve had many, many, you know, people discussing the origin of life, Shadow biospheres and everything, but never anyone who’s claimed to create life. And it reminds me of this joke, which you probably heard before, You know, a group of scientists from JCVI, you know, go up to heaven, and they say, god, guess what? We’ve created life. We’ve created life in the in the lab, we can Clarke a man out of dirt. And God says, oh, yeah? Well, let let me see you let me see you do that. That’s pretty impressive. And so The science over there, they go outside, they scoop up some dirt, and God says, hold on a second.

Brian Keating:

Get your own dirt. Yeah. Meaning that, you know, you’re starting from from some bang material. And, obviously, in the origin of life studies, again, there’s almost no Real well defined kind of, pathway or or definition even of how the origin of life came to be. We’ll talk about my favorite way, which only explains how life on earth got started There’s called panspermia. We’ll talk about that in a minute Yep. Because I’m very interested in that and your thoughts on that and aliens and all sorts of cool fun stuff. But the synthetic life, It’s it’s, you know, it’s it’s rare in a career that you have one big hit.

Brian Keating:

I mean, you’ve had hit after hit after hit. Talk about what was the genesis of that? Were you looking was there a sophomore Slump fear that how do I top mapping that?

Brian Keating:

First of all,

Brian Keating:

you weren’t you didn’t only map the human genome. You had mapped you made the 1st complete genome map Of what’s bang interest Haemophilus. Haemophilus. Yeah. That was

Speaker:

in 1995. So 5 years ago.

Brian Keating:

30 years ago. It’s coming up on the 30th And

Speaker:

that developed the tools that made me know that we had a new way to do the human genome. That was new mathematical algorithms

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

For assembling the genetic code from the sequences that we get.

Brian Keating:

If we wanted to do the if you started from scratch and and, you know, we took you away, we put you on an island, You know, with with with some collaborators, brilliant people, computers, centrifuges, PCR, etcetera, how fast could you do it today? So How cheap could you do it?

Speaker:

Yeah. It took us 10 years. Writing the genetic code is very complex. The machines Things are slow. We had to develop error. They’re not accurate, so we had to develop error correction, methods. You can only make pieces so So large in size, and so we had to make multiple of those and find ways to link them together. As you make larger pieces of DNA, it It gets very brittle, so you can’t pipette it or do normal things.

Speaker:

So we had to take new develop new techniques of putting it Gels electronically and moving it around in the gels. So everything we did, we had to develop from scratch to be able to do, but the rate of synthesis was very slow. And the other problem was in the Final minimal cell, about a quarter of the genes are of unknown function. They’re essential for life. You take one of them out, the It’s all dyes.

Brian Keating:

This isn’t junk DNA, what they call junk. Tell it again.

Speaker:

The only junk DNA is in my colleagues’ brains. And that’s one of my pet peeves. People come up with These overly simplistic, basically stupid ideas, you know, that the Part doesn’t code for proteins must be junk.

Brian Keating:

Right.

Speaker:

And so I offered several of those people to surgically remove their junk DNA and see how long they live, but, There were there were no volunteers, but the the problem was we tried to design life On first principles based on what we thought we knew about biology, and it proved to be impossible. Mhmm. So the reason it took so long in part from The slow methods for synthesis, it was became trial and error. We had to add genes bang, then see how One of those we could remove until we could get a living cell. So we’d add back a bunch and then we get life. And then we worked out you know, we can remove some of those. We had methods for knocking out genes so we could tell which ones were essential And which ones weren’t. But so it’s basically a trial and error process.

Speaker:

And I think the biggest finding, and it’s similar To what we found with the ocean microbiome is science reaches plateaus of Knowledge and the geniuses in the field sort of trying to define things as though we know everything. Mhmm. I mean, I’m sure it’s happened in your field multiple times. So protein chemists thought we knew all the protein folds. We knew all the protein in families, it was gonna be hard to ever discover anything new in the ocean

Brian Keating:

Just stamp collecting.

Speaker:

In the ocean. You know, they thought there was only a handful and full of different microbes and, like, proving junk DNA is not junk. Instead of that being a major finding, you’re you’re just Proving some idiot’s stupid statement, calling it junk DNA in the 1st place. Mhmm. The Challenger expedition that we followed is from the 18 seventies. It was the 1st true scientific expedition in the oceans. Was sending a dredge down every 200 miles to see what was on the bottom of the ocean. And, again, the brilliant Sayers at the time said there couldn’t possibly be any life below 1800 feet.

Speaker:

You know, we’re Arbitrary. And so when they discovered life at every depth, including they discovered the Mariana Trench and Life at the bottom Smokers. Of Keating. So it was disproving, again, an idiot notion. You know? I mean, there’s There’s discovery science. We showed discovery science is not dead, but you can go out, ask questions, and make more discoveries. Science is limited more by this dogma that gets set up of inane ideas Mhmm. That if People really thought about it.

Speaker:

You know? They wouldn’t come up with them. You know? Before we C the human genome, people Clarke Arguing that there were hundreds of thousands of human genes because there had to be a gene for each trait and function. I mean, it just shows how little was Even fundamentally understood about what a gene does, what a protein does, and that theory wasn’t combinations of Thanks. So the biggest finding is we found 20,000 some odd genes instead of hundreds of thousands. It but it was only A surprise because of the silly notions that were out there. If they weren’t there, it would have been, oh, you know, that sounds makes science. You know? 20,000 commentorial is a huge number.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Genetic technologies, including gene therapy and synthetic biology Clarke surrounded by ethical, social, and safety concerns. However, despite being controversial, they offer promising opportunities to revolutionize medicine, improve personalized treatment, And tackle various challenges of human life. So it’s essential to stay up to date with the latest developments in this Exciting field. For instance, recently, the FDA approved the very first treatment to use the gene editing tool known as CRISPR, which my wonderful guest on today’s episode, Craig Venter, talks about, they just approved it. But the media landscape surrounding these developments is often fragmented, making it hard to find reliable information and find a balanced view, which is personally why I love Ground news so much. I even deleted the iPhone news app that’s default on my phone and replaced it with Brains News’ widget app, And I also bought it for a present for my older brother, Kevin. Ground News is an app and a website that gathers together all the world’s media into one place theory readers can compare coverage And see the full picture of what’s being reported worldwide.

Brian Keating:

For every story, you get a quick visual breakdown of the news outlets reporting it, including their political bias, how Factual the source is which entity owns the source and which countries are actually porting and covering the story. For example, let’s return to the FDA’s approval for the 1st CRISPR treatment. Right away, you can see that a 162 news outlets have reported on the story. Of these a 162 outlets, 23% lean left, 11% lean right, and an overwhelming 66 Percent come from the center. You can even see who owns the outlets reporting on the story.

Brian Keating:

63% are media conglomerates.

Brian Keating:

Brains News also makes it easy to compare the headlines To see how the bias might shape and influence the framing of the story and affect our understanding of it. One of my favorite features of Ground News is the blind spot feed, which allows you to see Stories that are underreported by either side of the political spectrum. Ground news lets you get a deeper understanding of the complexity and nuance of different issues by identifying media narratives and their biases. You can see every side of the story and thus develop a well rounded world view, which is pretty substantial in these turbulent times. You get access to newspapers and Things that are very hard to find. Go to ground.news/doctorbrian to stay fully informed on breaking news and compare media coverage. Sign up or subscribe through my link for 30% off unlimited access if you support the mission, and find it as essential as I do to scientific literacy.

Brian Keating:

When we think about unsolved problems in in physics, there’s the classic notions of of these grand kind of prizes and so forth that people will You stake their whole lives and careers on famous one theory of everything. Can we find a single equation that’s maybe 1 inch long that you Could write, that Einstein was unable to do. And, of course, going back to Schrodinger, Schrodinger came up with this famous paradox of the cat, Schrodinger’s cat, the The proposition of living in dead states. And that was meant to to to sort of reveal and and crystallize what he thought of as a paradox in the Interpretations of quantum mechanics. Mhmm. Are there similar problem in other words, like, you know, he would say things and Einstein would retort bang, You know, does the moon exist when I don’t look at it and all sorts of god doesn’t play dice, obviously, is a famous one. Are there interpretations of biology? In other words, in in it’s Not clear that there are that we know that there are only 4 fundamental forces of physics, the strong and weak force, electromagnetic force, and, of course, gravity. There could be other forces.

Brian Keating:

Sometimes they’re called 5th forces, but we can’t rule them out. And it’s sort of an interpretative or philosophical question. Are there philosophies of Biology in terms of interpretations. Like, could there be genes that we don’t know what they express or what they produce because we’re looking at them through How humans are currently. You know? Could there be something like some 6th sense that humans have, like, polarization of light? Yeah. Are there genes that would trace, you know, the the sensitivity of polarization in certain individuals, that we just don’t know about because maybe we only discovered polarized light relatively recently. It’s a long winded way of asking, are there issues in the interpretation of genetics and the human genome.

Speaker:

Well, totally. Even starting back, as you said, with the origin of Life, the assumption that exists everywhere in biology is that everything gets back to a common origin. That That means if there was panspermia, there was only 1 event, and everything in in the biosphere came from that 1 event. I’ve I’ve always just fundamentally thought that was bull Mhmm. It just doesn’t make sense. Mhmm. And as you know, the fundamental chemicals of Life are found universally. They’re they’re table over here.

Speaker:

They’re found on every asteroid that things Things are measured on, you know, in my view is every place you have the same fundamental components, We will fundamentally get life. You know? My bumper sticker says life happens. And so I think theory were Thousands, maybe millions of origins. There’s competition for these, but to assume there was a singularity event, I think he’s just extremely naive.

Brian Keating:

And What what is the most plausible in terms of the extent versions of of Not just origin of life on Earth, which I which is a huge problem to solve, and and we have Miller Urey as our computers, literally, a foundational experiment, which is, you know, not not Currently accepted, as I understand it, as representative of the oxidizing and reducing conditions of the early atmosphere.

Speaker:

That was a cool experiment.

Brian Keating:

It’s a very cool experiment, and that’s super fun to to talk about. But that would only and, again, forgive me. When I used to do biology experiments in high school, Craig, you know, we’d get a frog, and we’d have to dissect it. And my frog would, like, Not even die. Like, I I was horrible at cosmology, so so I don’t know almost nothing about it. But that would only solve life Brian on earth. But what is plausible in your idea, set of ideas for origin of life in the universe as a whole.

Speaker:

So in my 2nd book, it’s called Life at the Speed of Light and it’s based on the one invention I’m proud of. It’s it’s a biological teleporter. It’s called a digital biological converter. It was based on the notion of that we can send the genetic code through the Internet, through electromagnetic waves, In a combination of things, regenerate that code and regenerate life. And the notion was we can send a a DNA sequencer smaller than this coffee cup to Mars or other places. And Instead of sending up a $5,000,000,000 spaceship to fly back a sample taken from The subsurface of Mars, where you send a sequencer, sequence what’s there, send the digital information back, and we can recreate the Martians easily here in laboratory Mhmm. Using the tools of synthetic biology. So it’s not the Star Trek teleporter Keating, the digital information For life, but because that codes for everything, it can be recapitulated.

Speaker:

Mhmm. My understanding is we exchange about a 100 kilograms of material between Earth and Mars annually.

Brian Keating:

That’s right.

Speaker:

So various calculations. You can’t take a shovel of, Earth soil without having Martian soil in it. And so that means when the oceans existed on Mars and, You know, some evidence is they still do on the sharp surface that we will either still find living organisms And they’ll very much resemble, what we have here.

Brian Keating:

That’s a that’s a a meteorite found, in Argentina. But Behind you, somewhere else over there, I’ve got a sample of a lunar meteorite Okay. Which obviously hit the moon. That’s your gift, by the way. He came here. He came here. So the converse is also true. We’re exchanging medium with with Mars.

Speaker:

So when life is discovered on Mars, it will resemble life, that we discovered, in the ocean voyage and microbial life and viral life will, in my view, be ubiquitous in the Now there’s limits. Yeah. We can’t go right now above a 135 degrees centigrade, but we wouldn’t last too long at that temperature, Richard, personally. And, we have microbes that live in very high doses of radiation, Cocker’s were the Brains. The Space Station, was coded in part with that to see how long it would survive and survived a long time. In fact, one of the stories that I tell that, got the NASA director, very annoyed with me, I said The outside of the space station is covered with and it literally It was because early on, they just pumped out all the human waste Mhmm. Outside, and a lot of it stuck to the outside of the space station. Now they pack it into stainless steel containers and launch it back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Speaker:

I tell people to be very careful when they wish upon a shooting star

Brian Keating:

Shooting star.

Speaker:

That that that may be, maybe the wrong one. So life Will live in space. It’ll live on the surface of these things. It will live in nuclear reactors.

Brian Keating:

Geysers. I don’t know. Yeah. So Mhmm.

Speaker:

Trying to Extrapolate from human biology, which a well, of course, it can’t exist in other conditions. The only reason I’d like to Live a long time would be to see it proven that it is ubiquitous and is everywhere we look.

Brian Keating:

Hey theory, fellow voyagers into the impossible. It is I, your Fearless host, professor Brian Keating here with a microscopically tiny request before we go back to exploring the potential of biotechnology and its ethical implications, and that’s to make sure that you’re all subscribed to the podcast. I did some research and number crunching in my own and found out that only 18% of you are actually subscribed to the channel of all those that watch it. And to make matters even worse, only 8% have notifications turned on. You’re missing out on so much great, amazing, and free content. So make sure you like, subscribe, and turn on notifications. I know you hear it from every single YouTuber on Arthur, but to get the greatest possible guest on this show, I really rely on that, and it will help me help you. So do it.

Brian Keating:

Do it now before you forget. It just takes one little push. Now back to the episode.

Brian Keating:

So the thought comes to me, you know, when I read Life at the Speed of Light That, you know, that does involve a a a much slower process than the speed of light to transport the 3 d printer, the sequencer, etcetera.

Speaker:

Well, you have to get those there, but the data can come back at the speed of light.

Brian Keating:

So I guess the obvious implication that I’m kinda drawing from this is that, well, maybe there were other Civilizations and species and so forth that created some kind of sequencer, which we call DNA, and that produced us. What are your thoughts It’s about, it seems that DNA, which you’re, you know, at least as as as big an expert as exists in the planet today, That it could be the most, you know, kind of basic evidence for extraterrestrial, not only existence, but intelligence. Am I, like, off here? I mean, it’s durable. It’s like I I’ve heard of this Long Now. Have you heard of the Long Now Foundation? Yeah. So they’re trying to build a 10000 year Clarke Xtume Brains and Kevin Kelly. So 10000 years is child’s play compared to how long DNA is lost. So what are your thoughts about that as a signature of ETI?

Speaker:

When my I was the 1st human genome sequenced and when that sequence was finished to show People, they should not be afraid of their own sequence. It was put on the Internet. It’s been, you know, broadcast. So, my my genome has been broadcast into space now for 25 theory. So, you know Who knows what’s coming? It may come back and, you know, A a a troop of Brains Venters may come back and land here because it can be recreated from the C, you know, but it it’s like Human cloning, you don’t get the same answer every time other than in the, the basic structural and functional components. We’re we’re still plastic individuals and vigils bang be modified, but and we’re sending data into space constantly. People could be sending it to us, and And we’re we’re not yet knowing how to interpret those signals that are coming in.

Brian Keating:

And the fact that it lasts so long and, you know, has this Durability and resiliency is just is just so striking. And I don’t think there’s anything that’s create a ball in a lab that has any you know, that you can Create or that has been discovered that has the durability of something like that that’s capable Keating produced by a mind, by an intelligence sword. Now, obviously, that brings up notions of of all sorts of theory. Like, if you were to construct the most likely evidence of life traversing the universe, it would be something Something that traverses at the speed of light given the vast distances, which kinda brings me to my next question, which is about artificial life forms, not the kind that you synthesized, But necessarily artificial life, artificial intelligence. And the question I have is is really, would it make sense to teleport, you know, even these, You know, 3 d printers or or even the code, which still has to rely on matter, which cannot travel at the speed of light if it has mass, versus pure information. So But

Speaker:

that’s what DNA C. It’s pure information.

Brian Keating:

Right.

Speaker:

And so that could be sent anywhere. Certainly short distances

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

It would be the fastest way to get anything back from Mars or Europa, any place else It makes it feasible to do that instead of waiting for 2 a round trip of, physical material. Right. It’s The fundamental chemical components we we just talked about are basically ubiquitous every place somebody looks. So having DNA form, RNA form physics extremely likely. And, once it forms, it can accidentally code for something or it can very specifically code for something. So in the 1st synthetic genome, we created code. It was, based on Isaac Asimov’s, rules of robotics. We decided Being the 1st one to make a synthetic, organism, that it should be watermarked, to clearly distinguish it as A human made organism

Brian Keating:

Deep fake.

Speaker:

Versus otherwise, it could really confuse everybody doing evolutionary studies, for example. So we created a Code you know, people have used ASCII code, but that creates problems. So we created a unique code that puts Very frequent stop codons in. Yes. For example, we could write your name in the genetic code with this code, but Without the stop codons, that could lead to a new protein, a toxin, something of very unintended consequences.

Brian Keating:

What what is, I’m sorry Sorry to interrupt, but what would be the likelihood of that? It seems to me if I go into my friend’s Tesla and I, you know, I start to, you know, play around with the code, almost anything I Enter into it, it’s gonna destroy. It’s it’s less likely that it’s gonna produce, you know, something new and functional or or just an old fashioned Dodge, you know, Wrangler, Jeep Wrangler. Go in there with a hammer and start playing around. More than likely, unless, you know, do something cosmetically, you’re gonna make it irreparable and possibly nonfunctional. So is that I’m I appreciate the ethical concerns, but what is that really probabilistically, you know, likely?

Speaker:

I think there’s a high probability Wow. Of that, You know, the, all the microbes in the environment are basically chemical warfare with each other. That’s how we’re discovering so many new antibiotics. Mhmm. So they they create antibiotics to deal With these chemicals, they’re randomly evolved from just, you know the the biggest drivers of evolution in the ocean are UV light and oxygen, And that’s why there’s so such a high rate of mutagenesis. When you do C doing this experiment a 1000000000 times, anything’s It’s possible.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. So that brings me to, you know, some of the questions that that naturally spring to mind. I mean, the the the potential for For novel uses of it, incredible potential for you know, we just endured this, you know, 3 year pandemic. Right? So what are some of the concerns that you have beyond beyond the, you know, It could do something unintended. What about the intentional misuse of this technology?

Speaker:

So it’s one of the concerns That that we had. Any virus, any bacteria that’s been sequenced, any pathogen, we could readily reproduce. I think, My friends in China don’t like me to say this, but I think Occam’s razor says you have to prove that COVID wasn’t a lab made, pathogen. Yeah. You know, could have come out of the market, but Three people got sick theory, and they could’ve gone to the market. So, you know, they their alternate C aren’t impossible. Or they

Brian Keating:

could have brought it to the market.

Speaker:

It could have come from an animal, but, NIH, under Francis Collins’ direction, was funding gain of function research In this lab in China that we had no control over, I mean, it’s the most unethical, thoughtless idea that I can imagine.

Brian Keating:

I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to just get why was it done in China? Right? Because it couldn’t they couldn’t legally get it to be On here. Correct? They couldn’t do gain of function research. It was for They

Speaker:

could definitely do it at CDC and the spacesuit lab where we grow smallpox and everything else. And so Doing it in a lab where you have no control of the user, the outcome, or the processes. The the fact that 3 people got sick From the research theory, so something wasn’t being done right because, you know, in the in the p four facility at CDC, they grow The worst pathogens in the planet. And we sequenced the smallpox genome as part of an international treaty. It was grown up in the spacesuit lab and they would only Send us about a Arthur of the genome at a time to sequence so we would never have the whole theory, but it would be easy to recreate just from the genome sequence now. So we do have to be concerned with that. People created the notion of designing new pathogens. That’s much more difficult, in part because we know so little about biology.

Speaker:

Allergy. I mean, the the the fact that we couldn’t even design a living cell because of all the unknown, functions out there essential for life. I mean, nobody would have predicted that. Not a single person in biology would have predicted what we found. And it just shows we’re missing at least a third to half of all biological knowledge Mhmm. Yet to be discovered. Gain of Function is changing 1 or 2 genes to try and make things worse.

Brian Keating:

This Or not necessarily sorry to interrupt again. But but, you know, when I had COVID, But I only I I understand you had a terrible experience with COVID, but I had a big, relatively benign. In fact, I lost 10 I dropped I always joke. I dropped £5 from my double chin to my No. I I lost weight. You know? I didn’t have smell and taste. And, you know, it’s been more or less permanent. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

But imagine and, god forbid, I’m not suggesting, Keating, oh, it was really good because Brian Keating lost 5 pounds. There’s more to come. Right? But, but the question is, Craig

Speaker:

But you were vaccinated this year.

Brian Keating:

I was vaccinated. Yeah. It didn’t didn’t Prevent me. Somehow, my wife never got it, and she’s exposed to a bunch of kids. But the question I have for you is theory could be not just, You know, there could be positive uses for gain of function, right, not just negative or weaponizable.

Speaker:

It’s important for leading to understanding, But you gotta do it under the right conditions and the right safety environment and places where you have control. I think There’s reasons to potentially do it, but you wanna do it the right way. With smallpox, which I get very familiar with, not only sequencing genome, but once I sequence it, it was supposed to be, destroyed. And I I convinced the government that they should not destroy the stores of smallpox. They’re still in the, in the safe at the CDC. Mhmm. It’s this little tiny old fashioned safe from the 19 thirties, I think.

Brian Keating:

Great.

Speaker:

Because I said it creates a false sense of expectation that we’ve rid the planet of this pathogen when it could be reproduced very simply. I I went and gave a lecture to President Clinton has an entire cabinet on this. Mhmm. This was even early days before we really had all the synthesis This is technology that we have now. But because the smallpox sequence was so closely related to vaccinia, which we use as a vaccine against smallpox just doing site directed mutagenesis.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

A diligent team could convert Vaccinia into smallpox. Now we could just synthesize it from scratch. These are not, you You know, ubiquitous methods. There is a reason that in the last 14 years, no other lab in the world has been able, to make a new life form like we have. It’s it’s expensive. It’s time consuming. It’s not things government’s fund, except maybe in China. But, we also had bang expert team of 20 Scientists, including 3 National Academy members and a Nobel Laureate and just some extraordinary people working on all aspects of this.

Speaker:

So teams Teams like that don’t get put together very often in science, especially spontaneously and and self funded, but there are new tools coming. We’re working with a company called Avery that is doing DNA synthesis on computer chips where they can make a different DNA molecule on each pixel on a computer chip. Just by changing the voltage on that pixel, they can do deep detection, change the theorists, and so that could be a 10,000 fold increase in our rate of doing synthesis, which means even though it’s a Trial and error process because all the unknowns, instead of making 1 molecule at a time and testing it, which was hard and time consuming, We can maybe make a 1,000 different chromosomes and you your screen is for life. Which one gives you a living cell? And, so So it will change the experimental rate for doing things, hopefully, for the betterment of mankind. But every time there’s a breakthrough in technology, You have to worry about the dark side. So, my organization created a robot For assembling, DNA, you know, the notion would have been from the digital bottle biological converter. It Just take in sequence information and make a DNA or protein molecule, and it could do that. But we set it up so that The code could not be changed.

Speaker:

You had to order the prerequisite oligos, from us. C be in a tube. I I designed Ten different safety devices into it that if somebody tried to modify it, it would shut down the machine. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff in science or even thinking Got it. But we’re we’re trying to think ahead on it so the devices we’re creating for basic science didn’t turn into weapons manufacturers.

Brian Keating:

When I look at your Career and you already mentioned Isaac Asimov, who was, you know, one of my big inspirations. Obviously, this is part of the Arthur C. Clarke Center For Human Imagination that I’m the associate director of, and I should thank Derek Theory, the director for introducing me reintroducing me to you after decade of not seeing each other. And and that is, of course, you know, sir Arthur See, Clark’s visions and and, pronouncements and so forth that some of which came to be science fact from the realm of science fiction. And I wonder, you know, what seems like Science fiction today to you that could be a grand challenge akin to mapping a genome, to making synthetic cells. What what is the next frontier that Seems, again, like science fiction. I I we already agree that, you know, making pathogens and so forth, that could be you know, that that sort of could happen now, God forbid it does, and and and affects the planet. But, but tell me, like, what in your wildest dreams, where where do you go from here? What’s your what is Brian scientific Science fiction fantasy for for biology.

Speaker:

Briefly, before Keating there, the the same tools that are used for making potentially The pathogens are being used for creating the countermeasures. So biological warfare wouldn’t be a threat If we had a repertoire of antivirals, antibiotics, C, to deal with it. And so we created the 1st, using the digital biological inverter, theorists, FDA approved synthetic DNA C, And it was made against a flu strain that was discovered in China that looked very pandemic potential. The Chinese sequenced it and just posted it on the Internet. We downloaded and made the virus in in a week. We were the only source for the CDC and pharma companies of this virus because China wouldn’t export the biological But it just shows you don’t have to. Now you can just send the information and recapitulate it. And so we did a test.

Speaker:

We set up a device at Novartis. We sent the sequence to them. The device made the molecule and they scaled that up for vaccine production. But everything that happened with the COVID vaccines were really modeled after our early success. And, you can make large number of RNA molecules now, and and so our model with that, you know, who contributed to all of us getting vaccinated against COVID. Mhmm. But to answer your question on on the Bang distance horizons. The short distance is going to be the potential for totally new industrial revolution Big example, all the microbes we discovered in the ocean, they make chemicals more complex than the best theorists on the planet can make.

Speaker:

And so taking those gene pathways, putting them in synthetic organisms, we’ll be able to create whole new chemical libraries that will change every type of chemical theory, but also industrial chemicals for building things, making things. And the notion of this was developed for ideas on making things on Mars instead of sending everything up there Mhmm. Because it’s very expensive to build enough rockets to carry everything up there. So if you bang get microbes to produce the building materials holes in the food substances, that that would be the future. So I I think that’s the near term future.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

I proposed Because, you know, while I believe, panspermia has happened and is continually happening, We’ve already contaminated the moon. We’ve already contaminated Mars. You can’t Truly sterilize things here on this planet in a microbial world where there’s viruses and microbes in the air, just everywhere you are, you can’t eliminate them. And so we’ve sent microbes To Mars, we’ve sent, you know, people and poop to the moon, or pumping things out of the space station. So we’re we’re creating a version of panspermia. Every astronaut that goes up to the space station takes It’s a totally different repertoire of the microbiome of millions of different bacteria with C the HEPA filters from the space station. They’re loaded with so much diversity and so much stuff. It’s it’s just stunning.

Speaker:

But I’ve argued that any astronauts going to future planet colonization, we should sterilize them first and give them a The synthetic microbiome, so we’re not creating a set of new pathogens that would develop, in an environment. So those are sort of short Term ideas, human genome engineering is inevitable.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. We’re

Speaker:

not ready for Right now, we understand 1 to 2% of the genome at best.

Brian Keating:

When you say understand, what do you mean?

Speaker:

Know what these genes code Or why you have the traits that you have, why I have the traits that I have. You know, we just had this recent discussion here about Imagination. I have a Fantasia, so I don’t see any pictures at all in my mind. I only think in concepts.

Brian Keating:

The

Speaker:

person I was talking to only sees in pictures, and puts his world together through pictures. Wow. And we don’t even know the simple basis of that because, NIH doesn’t like to fund behavioral, The studies, that lead to social changes on the human brains, so we’re just not studying it. You can’t understand basis of, what’s called intelligence, not that, you know, but there’s multiple different types. It’s a spectrum of things. So we’re at a still a very early stage of understanding. Mhmm. One method of survival of our species is going to be to engineer humans to live in environments That will be inevitable because we’re destroying slowly the biosphere that we live in.

Speaker:

So maybe it’d be The humans that can tolerate higher levels of CO 2 or lower levels of oxygen Higher temperatures. Or higher temperatures. Science we We don’t even have a preliminary, understanding of the brain. We think we do because we understand more than we used to, you know, so that seems like huge breakthroughs, but we basically understand nothing. And we certainly don’t understand the genetic basis of how the The brain is hardwired. So in inbred mice and rats, the neurons are in the exact same patient of brains plus or minus a few microns. So all that’s completely under genetic control.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

So we start out Being higher hardwired, but we’re also hardwired to be plastic and adaptable. That may sound like a contraindication, but, But, you know, it’s it’s part of the design.

Brian Keating:

Antifragility. Yeah.

Speaker:

To to be adaptable, and and our Our brains are plastic to a certain extent and can change structure and function, but we’re not really studying that because because we don’t know what most of the genes even do yet. So, we have to increase our knowledge level before I would ever Be willing to start engineering, the human genome to change humans.

Brian Keating:

Interesting. Yeah. I kinda it’s reminiscent of, you know, The mapping, we have a periodic table on the wall over here. I don’t think I can cap well, I captured the lanthanides. Those those those are Arthur noble gases there. There it is In the corner over there. You know, most of these were discovered by number, you know, in the last, you know, 100 years or so. And, of course, many of them are important for life, but See, not as many as you think.

Brian Keating:

Right? I think the highest one that’s has some, viability is, like, there’s some amount of copper. Zinc, obviously, is important. But we yeah. I don’t think we need cadmium or technetium, etcetera. So there’s a lot of waste in theory.

Speaker:

Very important.

Brian Keating:

Iron’s very important, but it’s it comes, comes before copper, as I mentioned, And then zinc. There’s a little arsenic, and then people have claimed they found arsenic life, that that went away pretty quickly. Yeah. I wanna talk about an event. I think it happened 1997. You We’re, considering leaving this company, HTS, and, going off on your own. It it meant a great sacrifice for you financially, in terms of, stock options, things you had vested, important, investors and And relationships in the corporate Keating. And you talk about, you know, setting out to see, to clear your mind.

Speaker:

Yeah. It was not 97. It It was actually early 2000. So I C science the genome. Yep. I raised $1,000,000,000 cash for three percent of a company with no revenue. I didn’t get along

Brian Keating:

This is Solera?

Speaker:

Or Yeah. Yeah. Solera had a parent computers Pleura, that was sort of a holding company, a very volatile, Cuban CEO who only tolerated me because I was the only one who could C the human genome, but bang I I indicated to a board member that science I was done with that, I was considering going back To my institute because I wanted to keep doing basic research. He panicked. They decided it would you know, if I left, the Stock would crash, so they got the brilliant idea to fire me, and the stock crashed even faster. But, you know, went from The the intensity of those years, you got an idea from the paper almost daily somewhere in the world. The world was watching every move. One thing I point out, there’s Thousands of reasons, perhaps, why I should have failed.

Speaker:

K. But I had the best team of scientists in the world And they were all motivated to make it work and make history. You know? I was the orchestra conductor. You know? It’s the team that actually did it. Gene Myers Led the algorithm team that wrote the whole new algorithm for something 25,000,000 sequences that, nobody else thought was even possible. If it hadn’t worked, it would have been the biggest flame out in science history. Right? I I would have been noted for the fastest death in science, from Trying to do something too big and too bold, but it worked. But it was such intensity.

Speaker:

It was a 24 hour a day thing for two and a half years building this then actually sequencing the genome. We didn’t know with the White House event was scheduled before the computer stopped the calculation to know whether we had a genome or not.

Brian Keating:

Hey theory.

Brian Keating:

It’s me again. Are you enjoying this incredible conversation with one of the most brilliant thinkers alive, Craig Venter? Then I know you’ll love what I’m about to offer you. If you go to Brian bang And join my mailing list. You will get the hottest news in the cosmos from consciousness in the brain to life in the universe, and that will make you the star of any Cocktail Arthur, all this for free. My weekly Monday magic mailing lists always consider the highlights from all around science and especially from the Into the Impossible podcast with links to transcripts and giveaways, and you may also win a real piece of the early solar system, maybe the piece that brought life to Earth in a panspermic voyage across the cosmos. So do yourself a favor and go to Brian keating.com/list and join now. That’s briankeeting.com/list. Now back to the episode.

Brian Keating:

Take us back to that because we’re gonna get to the voyage of the sorcerer one, I believe. But talk about the race. Talk about you, Francis, NIH, public private, partnership, rivalry, and then winning it.

Speaker:

Well, I’ve got Lots of attention. I’ve I’ve got walls full of awards, including the National Medal of Science from Obama for For that work, that I had to share with Francis Collins, but, that’s alright. So, you Yeah. I approach things pretty much as a basic science scientist asking questions. So I was Trying to isolate the adrenaline receptor, work that started when I was a student here at UCSD. And the standard in science And then before genomics, was you’d spent 10 or 20 years trying to isolate a protein and characterize it. Lots Lots of Nobel Prizes have been given for single protein discoveries. And so when the first discussions in the mid eighties came of The idea to sequence the human genome, whichever we thought was outrageous.

Speaker:

I love the idea after spending a decade Trying to get 1 protein, the thought of just having all the neurotransmitter receptors and everything to do with cognition In one step, instead of waiting for centuries to do it, it it was just a sexy idea to me. I had the 1st automated DNA sequencer because I was in intramural NIH. I had more money than God to To do whatever I wanted to do, and, you know, so I actually sequenced the 1st genes in history with Automation. And so I had the only tools to actually do what was being proposed for the human genome. I just got very excited about the idea. And Randomness is a key theme in mathematics and cosmology.

Brian Keating:

Serendipity. Yeah.

Speaker:

It it it it’s also a key artificial we did in genomics. So shotgun sequencing is you have to have a perfect quote post on distribution of Clones, and then you randomly select those and sequence it. And by doing that, you can recapitulate the entire genome. If it’s not truly random, No. You can’t do that.

Brian Keating:

Can I just ask when when you say sequencing so I I’m envisioning, you know, this process, you know, running and and and sequencing different, you know, pairs and and, Even even individual, yeah, individual base pairs, etcetera, within the gene? Right? And then Well,

Speaker:

the the machine spit out roughly A 500 base pair sequence of

Brian Keating:

That’s what I was gonna ask. So what was the fundamental atom of that? So okay. Go on. So yeah. It

Speaker:

so we had 25,000,000 Fragments roughly 500 base pairs long.

Brian Keating:

I see. Okay. Continue.

Speaker:

And so that’s the math mathematical problem that had to be solved

Brian Keating:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Putting that back together. NIH Refused to fund, the grant that him and I submitted in 19 1995. This idea, we had to sequence the 1st genome. Yeah. And even after we had it 90% done, you know, we took money out of our own bank account at the institute to do it. It It was over 90% done. I wrote a letter to Francis saying, look, it’s clearly gonna work. You know, I’m not trying to embarrass NIH.

Speaker:

If you fund it now, you can still share the credit for doing this. Mhmm. And he wrote back I have the letter. It’s I think it reproduced in my book. He stood behind the study section who said this is impossible. Well, it won’t work. A few months later, we announced the 1st genome in history. And so that that sort of Created, you know, attention because I did it outside the realm of this entire enterprise called the Human Genome Project that was starting with a 5 year project to sequence E.

Speaker:

Coli and then yeast, And they were gonna progress up the Nematode. The nematode, then Drosophila. Yep. And I kinda threw a monkey wrench into that Because E. Coli had barely been started, and and we did the first one independently. And If you read the science paper in 1995, I had to really fight for this line to be in there, but I said that that I believe this is the method that will be Used to sequence the human genome.

Brian Keating:

Right.

Speaker:

I was probably the only one on the planet who who believed that idea. But, you know, it comes with Maybe the aphantasia bang able to think in concepts. Some things are just totally obvious to me. And and, fortunately, a combination of great intuition and that ability to put concepts together the only time I screw up in life is if I nor that intuition. It’s been right a 100% of the time. And NIH, you know, just refused to fund on these experiments to see if they had their you know, it was a public works project. They were distributing billions to

Brian Keating:

100 campuses. To

Speaker:

Labs around the world and, you know, led Cindy Brenner to joke, you know, why don’t we have prisoners do this, you know, if it’s a forced labor

Brian Keating:

So

Speaker:

thing to do. But it made sense to solve it mathematically. And So we sort of gave up and thought that, I I was gonna have to sit on the sidelines. I got a call. Oh, in fact, I got several calls. I treated them. I thought they were junk calls, and I ignored them, of offering me $300,000,000 to start a company to sequence the Human genome. And it was Applied Biosystems, the company that was they were making a new a C that they thought would fit with my method.

Brian Keating:

Did these rely on PCR? And maybe you bang explain. Okay. Did you know Carey when he was I

Speaker:

I knew Oh, wow.

Brian Keating:

What was he like? Just a side can we take a sidebar here? He came up well, first, could you explain what PCR is and why it wasn’t relevant, you know, to him? Nothing had like

Speaker:

C a method You know, it’s like a Xerox machine for making copies of DNA. It was really a profound technique that changed what people could do in the laboratory. He’s He’s a genius, but really a a crazy mofo.

Brian Keating:

Portrait. Portrait genie. Yeah. Well, he’s wild genius.

Speaker:

He’s a he’s He’s a fun guy. Yeah. I I enjoy him and, but, he he he went off, you know, with bizarre ideas of HIV and other things In the end, but, we use, you know, components of PCR to make copies of the The strands of DNA that were going to be sequenced. So, yeah, we had rooms full of PCR machines that were part of the process of getting enough Molecules of DNA that the automated sequencing machines could read.

Brian Keating:

And those were the capillary things that Applied was gonna give you?

Speaker:

So, You know, they sent somebody out to see me and said that they were sincere about the $300,000,000 and wanted me to start a company And invited me out to Foster City to look at their new machine, which was actually 6 breadboard devices spread over 6 different buildings. And I looked at all of them and I looked at the preliminary data, and it was totally clear to me that it was going to work. So we did some calculations of how many Machines it would take to do this. And it was funny. We, made an order of magnitude error, too big. And, and so it looked like it was gonna take 30,000 machines. And we were sort of saying, well, this Still might be doable.

Brian Keating:

Brute force.

Speaker:

And then we then we discovered there was a tenfold error, and I was, oh, in fact, there was A hundredfold theory because we only needed 300 machines. And even though that was absurd, all of a sudden, by By contrast, that C so doable. We thought, okay, yeah. 300 machines and $300,000,000, we we can do this. So I flew back to my institute. I went to see My friend, the Nobel Laureate, Ham Smith, who’d been working with me for 20 theory, and I said, look. I looked at the Sheen, I I’m certain it’s gonna work. If we get 300 of these machines and scale everything up, I think we have a shot and they’re giving us the resources to do it.

Speaker:

He goes, I don’t think it will work, but I’m going with you.

Brian Keating:

That’s a shock. Yeah.

Speaker:

And and that was that’s sort of how the whole Team built of I as soon as I announced it, we got a 1,000 applicants of the best scientists in the world, the best mathematician, physics. We had to build the 3rd largest civilian computer in the world, a whopping 1 and a half teraflops, which Cost roughly $100,000,000 to big, and now it’s a few $1,000 computers. It’s kind of TPUs. Cool how how how fast Things change, but it worked because of the dedicated, incredible team Better big it. I don’t think a team’s been built like it before or after. Ham’s complaint afterwards was, It was such a unique experience. We did it too quickly because we sequenced the genome in 9 months and then, you know, just Gave the illusion that

Brian Keating:

it was It’s a simpler

Speaker:

theory. Things exploded. But so the intensity of this was so much. When When I was fired from there, it was just like going into a sensory deprivation tank. And, so I decided I had to do some recouping before deciding what I was gonna do next. So I I got on my boat and, Tailed down and I lived in Tortola for several months working on my boat and thinking of ideas of what I was gonna do, came back and and started, 3 new not for profit institutes to one want to do the environmental work, want to do synthetic biology, and want to build off the ideas off the human genome. But, it took that, you know, rebuilding period just, you know, after anything that intense, you know, When you’re in the press every day, hounded every day, the whole it was, you know, it was a very unique experimentalist the negotiation, with the White House, when I agreed to do that, my colleagues He did before it.

Brian Keating:

Big they were jealous?

Speaker:

Or No. No. No. My colleagues at at at Solero Oh. Because we were so Far ahead.

Brian Keating:

Oh, right. Why give up the why share the glory?

Speaker:

And science like Richard Lerner, locally, I had a dinner Tim, I told him what I was gonna do. He he got viscerally angry with me. So people wanted me to embarrass NIH The new government for all the horrible things that they’ve done.

Brian Keating:

Right. Well, they’ve certainly done it. But but tell me, do you regret it? If you could go back, would you have done that?

Speaker:

No. Because it’s the the notion was, you know, trying to be publicly minded with this. I mean, emotionally, would that have felt great to embarrass the hell out of them that, you know, We we did it with, a 100,000,000 instead of 5,000,000,000, and we did it in 9 months. My ideas got proven right, bang the team got proven right. And, I knew that if I didn’t make the compromise To do the announcement at the White House that the following year or 2 when they eventually finished, They would do that, and we would be totally left out of it.

Brian Keating:

Right. It’s like they say the 3rd guy makes the money from the house. You know, The 1st guy lose all the money. The 2nd guy still loses money. The 3rd guy solves it.

Speaker:

So so it was a negotiated, you know, truce, but it was really based On what Celera was doing. And I would get calls every day, you know, has the computer Unstopped yet and, you know, because they were having to schedule all these dignitaries. It was on, You know, live international TV, and we didn’t have a genome yet.

Brian Keating:

SeaChange. Yeah. I remember that very well. I was at Stanford.

Speaker:

But But it got it got down to a game of chicken in the end because I had to share my speech with the White House, because it was gonna be live television from the White House. Okay. You’re not gonna And they Tony Blair was Was gonna be part of it because England was such a big part of the genome effort. And they sent me Tony Blair’s speech, and it was just totally insulting, totally Being totally one-sided, praising the public effort and attacking this company that, you know, intervened. Right.

Brian Keating:

And Being all businessmen.

Speaker:

And I Called the White House science adviser and said, unless Tony Blair changes his speech, I’m not coming. Wow. This was the night before the White House event. And he said, you’re asking us to change a foreign heads of state speech. We can’t do that. And I said, well, I know you can and you will, if you want me to show

Brian Keating:

They did.

Speaker:

He called me at 1 o’clock in the morning, and he goes, I can’t send it to you, but I tea that you will be very happy, with the changes that he’s made. In fact, I was. He changed it a 180 degrees So that all the scientists in England were totally pissed off with Tony Blair because he was being so nice to me. But,

Brian Keating:

you

Speaker:

know, But these games, you know, I’m just shows the intensity of all this stuff.

Brian Keating:

So so there’s there’s a line that really resonated shockingly so. You said something to the effect that he was more interested in the credit than the process or the money or or or anything. Bang that that really that’s kind of haunting, you know, to to think that there are people doing the science, and It is truly, you know, about them and about their egos and about their reputations. And and, you know, you don’t have to comment on it if you don’t want it, but Did write it in

Speaker:

the book. But as you know, it’s that’s the history of science. There there’s been some of the biggest battles even early on here Here at UCSD, with some of the big areas, you can’t work at these levels without having a strong ego. Yeah. And so it’s a question, what’s what’s the driving force? I mean, you want your ideas to be right, but we We were still trying to do it in a publicly minded fashion. You know, we’re taking private money. We gave the genome away for free, to science, I had a chance to embarrass the the government. My view is they were embarrassing themselves.

Speaker:

So we agreed to share the credit even even though it wasn’t. So different scientists are totally motivated by Different things. We’re given disproportionate attention, fame than you can probably get in most other areas other than being a rock singer or something.

Brian Keating:

But when it combines with power I mean, I had And I’m Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, who’s a good friend of mine, dear dear person. Of course, you know, in late, you know, 2020, There was artificial circulating around that there were, you know, fringe epidemiologists, including him and a Nobel Laureate at Stan, I theory, Levin, at Stanford who had joined in, and we have to, you know, basically censor them or mock them, humiliate them so that they don’t get attention. And one of the ways was to have, you know, op eds in the in the Washington Post, and I found that really despicable. And, it’s Not surprising when I reread your book, your, Life Dakota, that was, you know, kind of a character trait that I have to confess wasn’t that Not unfamiliar from the way he is 25 years later.

Speaker:

Yeah. You can do good science and make good contributions, but your ideas As an individual bang be really effed up. Yeah. And my quote friend, Watson, It is proven that

Brian Keating:

Is James Watson. By

Speaker:

and he’s now been censored by his own institution and fired, you know, because, I I think he did make important con contributions, not necessarily the role and the model of of DNA structure, but, you know, he helped Big called Spring Harbor and brains money and and do things for it. You know? He he has contributed positively to science, But he he’s one of the biggest racists and sexist on the planet. Yeah. And that does a disservice of Almost counteracting any good that he might have done, and he’s not the first one. There’s, you know, Other Nobel laureates that have really gone off on Oh, yeah. On Shockley. Shockley,

Brian Keating:

you know, was sort

Speaker:

of the predecessor there. And just because people For a bright in a certain area doesn’t mean they have the right ethics and morals. And, you know, when I announced I was gonna sequence the human genome, Watson Called me Hitler, and, you know, that I was taking over things. But

Brian Keating:

He seemed directly threatened. Yeah. It was very scary.

Speaker:

Yeah. Well, because, he was constantly afraid from the science they did and the discoveries that it would shut Put down congress funding their program if it was gonna be done faster and cheaper by industry. And, instead, it was And, you know, we had the US government and other governments competing against a start up biotech company in in the United States. I I guess the only one who would understand that at all is Elon, and he’s done pretty good with his competition against NASA, But in part from learning from some of the things we did, China funds its, biotech companies. It supports them. Yeah. Erica Wood, we have the government competing with a start up biotech company by outspending it fiftyfold.

Brian Keating:

Or suppressing contracts.

Speaker:

Yeah. And so it it it’s bizarre stuff, but I guess that’s that’s the diversity of our system. The The cool thing is I could have an idea like I had. It obviously stimulated others, to give me the resources. You know, they didn’t do it in a selfless fashion. They wanted to sell their machines, and they made billions selling the machines because I made Made them work. Mhmm. But that’s okay.

Speaker:

That that’s capitalism at work. The net effect was I got to do first class science for the public benefit, and moved it along 10 years faster.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Let’s get to some fun, science questions and, actually, Some voyages, as you said earlier, the voyage of the voyage of the Challenger back in the 1800. Obviously, we we haven’t mentioned the, Probably the most famous biological voyage until the sorcerer two, which is the beagle in biology.

Speaker:

What is it? The beagle was a survey voyage that had a naturalist on board that just went along to make observations along the way. So Right. It wasn’t actually a scientific expedition. Right. But it’s definitely the most Famous vessel. And the observations that that Darwin made are fundamental was That when you get life in isolated environment, it it there’s evolution of unique genetic characteristics that showed it associated Because it’s an isolated environment. Mhmm. We see that today in human populations where there’s been inbreeding.

Speaker:

For example, Saudi Arabia was based on, 12 Bedouin tribes, all first cousin marriages within the tribes, not even between them. Mhmm. They have some of the highest rates of genetic diseases in the world. Rolled 2nd type 2 diabetes only to the Pima Indians. Why? Because type 2 diabetes was a survival Advantage for the better one existence of feast and famine. Right. Once they switch to a steady Society diet, it becomes a disease. Right.

Speaker:

But it’s locked in. And with the inbreeding, even were. So, Darwin’s work totally predicted that in advance and what we’re using today. But I had the pleasure of following his exact steps, only I had a new lens. I call About the lens of genomics, we could see things by looking at the genetic code after it was sequenced that he couldn’t see even if he had good microscopes. Mhmm. So we discovered, 10,000 times the Life forms that he discovered, but they were the basis of all the life forms he discovered Keating. But that’s, you know, That’s what happens.

Speaker:

That happens in your field. You you get a a new telescope that can see further new instruments. All of a sudden, the lens of genomics changed the entire world. Microbiology was based on what you could To see through a microscope or what you could get to grow on an agar plate.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm. And

Speaker:

if it would grow on agar plate, it was deemed not to exist. And that’s why that’s what started this expedition. They were discovering microbes in the ocean and numbering None at a time. So SAR 11 was the 11th microbe discovered in the Sargasso C. And there was this paper by a physicist PNAS on, that I read when I was on Sorcerer one recuperating of how little Diversity there was of life in the ocean. And as a lifelong sailor, swimmer, surfer, Diver, this just didn’t make any sense to me at all because half the oxygen we breathe comes The ocean, the diversity of all the food does, and that’s where I got the idea just to use the same method we use for the human genome to try shotgun C the ocean. And discovered just from the very first experiment where they had 11 organisms, we discovered two Thousand in just the 1st sequencing experiment and 1,400,000 new genes. So we followed the challenger.

Speaker:

We took samples every 200 miles around the globe Mhmm. Over 65,000 miles covering most oceans and seas. And, Even early on discovered more new microbes than there are stars in the universe, which made it easier to recruit physicists The mathematicians because all of a sudden theory just said biology was a bigger problem.

Brian Keating:

That’s exactly right. Yeah. Makes cosmology seem Easy. Yeah. So that voyage began in what year did you start that 1st voyage?

Speaker:

Well, the early experiment started in 2003, and then really got going a few years later where we did a full circumnavigation. But like everything in science, you know, it wasn’t as ZZ is just going out like Darwin did and taking samples and making observations. Darwin didn’t have PETA, or he he would have been sued multiple times for the experiment. You know? Tortoise. When he discovered the iguanas, he He couldn’t believe that they could breathe underwater, so he’d tie stones to them and throw them in the water and see if they’d survive. And, you

Brian Keating:

You don’t do that with your graduate

Speaker:

students? Well, you can do it with graduate students. That’s okay. But so we had to get permits. We had to work through The state department with every country where we wanted a sample in theory 100 mile encountered numerous problems. We got arrested twice. We got threatened with sinking by the French Chen, the British. We got bordered by a SWAT team in Australia, just asking Basic science questions in a world that’s fearful of science is not always easy.

Brian Keating:

No. It is not. So is there going to be a a next voyage of A sorcerer 2 or maybe even a sorcerer 3. What what do we have to look forward to on the oceans?

Speaker:

Well, the good thing is, you know, one, that’s A simple idea. And most good ideas in science are pretty simple ideas. We showed that we could Just take a sample from the environment, isolate the microorganisms. For seawater, it’s simple. We just had of a series of millipore filters that collect things at a very tiny level. So we collect the viruses on 1 filter, The microbes on the other, the diatoms on another.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

We just put the filters in the freezer until we could get to a port, Send them back to the Venture Institute where we shotgun sequenced everything on the filter. It’s an idea now. There’s been hundreds of mini He and major voyages, copying this. Anybody listening any kid can take a Little vial go out to the nearest stream, lake, river, ocean, estuary, Take a sample, isolate the microbes, sequence them, and make more discoveries, than were made in the 1900 of new organisms because we have that much diversity out there remaining to be discovered.

Brian Keating:

Is there any way that they can actually submit them for analysis unless

Speaker:

Well, people have been putting more and more of these, the public databases. And, in fact, it’s one of the problems we’re trying to Oh, for the synthetic cell, most of the genes discovered by us and others are of unknown function.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

So We have now developed this catalog of biology on the planet without knowing the function of the majority of things that have been discovered. So we, we’re in the infancy of science, not in a mature Stage.

Brian Keating:

Well, Craig, this has been phenomenal, and there’s much more to come. But what I love to do now is, just In the beginning part of the conversation, I know you have a limited time here. I don’t wanna miss my audience questions. So what we’re gonna do As we’re gonna end the main episode of the channel, the conversation with with Craig. And then in order to see part 2 or the question and answer period As well as to hear Craig’s answers to my final 4 existential questions on the meaning of life, advice to his former self, the most magical technology ever were invented by Mann and what what what he expects to, give, as as a future sort of legacy for the planet. You’ll have to subscribe to my mailing Keating. And if you show me this little meteorite there, you will actually get a chunk of this rock. And we have some talks about panspermia questions about panspermia in the bonus episodes.

Brian Keating:

So to get the bonus episode, go to briancaming.com/list. I will send it out to you as soon as Freddie, and you may even win a chunk of space rock. In fact, you’re guaranteed to win a chunk of space rock. What I do, Craig, is anyone with a dotedu email address who, brains my mailing list, Gets a guaranteed fragment of this 4,500,000,000 year old piece of space schmutz sent to them along with its chemical C. And we’ll even put on some of Craig’s DNA. Hey. I’m gonna have him slobber over some of the meteorites. So tune in, to, to part 2.

Brian Keating:

You’ll get the link, when you join the mailing list. And And for now, Craig, thank you so much for being a guest on the Into the Impossible podcast.