Stewart Brand: “You can’t reverse engineer that which wasn’t engineered in the first place.”

“It’s patches and kludges all the way down to a frozen accident.” — Stewart Brand

Jim Flatt (SGI / Genovia): “We developed the H7N9 vaccine with just the sequence of the virus sent to us over the internet.” How fast? “6 weeks.”

Floyd Romesberg (Scripps): “Life is more plastic than we thought. We have shown that G,C,A,T are not the only possibilities. We now have X and Y as a synthetic graft in living E.Coli. My lab spent the past 15 years working on this under one continuous NIH grant. If our small team could do it, then there are probably many solutions out there. We used hydrophobic interactions instead of hydrogen bonds to avoid mis-pairing with the GCAT. But it might be hard to do the entire code with multiple hydrophobic interactions instead of hydrogen bonds.”

The final panel at Techonomy Bio.