I was listening to it yesterday in the final chapter where you were talking about making artificial dyes. What they're doing is so dying blue jeans is very destructive to the environment. We don't have ginkgo by works. And now a couple other companies are just trying to grow synthetic, brew it really synthetic dye that would be benign. They're also trying to do this with fertilizer. I think those things are compelling the way that the mRNA vaccines are compelling. If you know, it doesn't just have to be a vaccine. It can be food. The way we make our food is crazy. Now we're starting to grow food that tastes like meat. There are a bunch of
Last month, longtime New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter released a brand new audiobook with our friends at Pushkin. It’s called “Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life,” and it’s an inspiring account of the emerging field of synthetic biology — a field where scientists combine chemistry, engineering, and computer science to develop new drugs and therapies for treating diseases of all sorts.
This month, Steven Johnson, a frequent guest on this show and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is publishing a brand new audiobook of his own. It’s called “Immortality: A User’s Guide,” and it was produced by ... us! (You can get a copy here.) The premise is this: we might well be on the cusp of a revolution in the science of aging and we are not prepared for the consequences.
You can see the overlaps, right?
So we decided to get Steven and Michael on the horn to talk about breakthrough technologies, radical life extension, and the future of our species.