#1: hell yeah. #2: love the less fully formed posts, keep them coming (maybe I'll do one). #3: what are the near term steps along the way to this vision?
Re: 1 & 2, thanks! Re: 3, the honest answer is I'm not sure... I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this as well.
Accelerating cost decreases of foundational tools so people can try more stuff can't hurt. Besides that, I have a bunch of ideas that are probably unrealistic. On the applied side, these include 1) find places where the current paradigm seems stuck, 2) find areas where you can't help but deal with the messiness.
In the first direction, maybe the meat substitutes are a good area to explore? We know that metal bioreactors are really hard to get right, and we know that animals are way more efficient even though they waste all that energy moving around.
A more out there idea I've thought about is that there's something about giving people the ability to do cell "programming" or directed evolution easily that would be really powerful here, as those are basically the two ways we know about for controlling complex biological behavior. E.g. can we find some minimal setup that allows people to "program" biobots (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.04.502707v1)?
And then scientifically, I (like everyone these days) unsurprisingly am a big fan of the Levin Lab's stuff (https://drmichaellevin.org/).
Again though, I'd be curious what you think. It does seem genuinely like pushing against a pretty strong current...
#1: hell yeah. #2: love the less fully formed posts, keep them coming (maybe I'll do one). #3: what are the near term steps along the way to this vision?
Re: 1 & 2, thanks! Re: 3, the honest answer is I'm not sure... I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this as well.
Accelerating cost decreases of foundational tools so people can try more stuff can't hurt. Besides that, I have a bunch of ideas that are probably unrealistic. On the applied side, these include 1) find places where the current paradigm seems stuck, 2) find areas where you can't help but deal with the messiness.
In the first direction, maybe the meat substitutes are a good area to explore? We know that metal bioreactors are really hard to get right, and we know that animals are way more efficient even though they waste all that energy moving around.
In the second direction, things like engineering the microbiome (https://www.kingdomsupercultures.com/) and regrowing limbs (https://www.morphoceuticals.com/) seem like the sort of thing where you need to solve dealing with complexity.
A more out there idea I've thought about is that there's something about giving people the ability to do cell "programming" or directed evolution easily that would be really powerful here, as those are basically the two ways we know about for controlling complex biological behavior. E.g. can we find some minimal setup that allows people to "program" biobots (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.04.502707v1)?
And then scientifically, I (like everyone these days) unsurprisingly am a big fan of the Levin Lab's stuff (https://drmichaellevin.org/).
Again though, I'd be curious what you think. It does seem genuinely like pushing against a pretty strong current...
Yes!! I would very much like to grow my house. What a world we can have.