I believe pretty strongly that the COVID pandemic will be forgotten at some point, but it will have been the thing that gave us mRNA vaccines. And that will end up doing for synthetic biology with the cold worded for the microchip. We need to we need to figure out ways to make those stories more compelling because it's such an important part of what drives us forward.
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.