The possibility of transcending the limits of human intelligence in scientific discovery has led this young British scientist to leave academia and found a startup. Founder & CEO James Field and LabGenius are engineering the evolutionary process to create novel proteins that have remarkable qualities. I caught up with James at TEDMED and had a most revealing interview.
Topics covered include:
- Sal Pitches the Syndicate
- Sal Introduces James Field, CEO & Founder of LabGenius
- James Field Was Inspired to Become a Scientist by Science Fiction
- Discovered Synthetic Biology by Participating in iGEM
- James Field Is the Second PhD from Imperial College on the Podcast, Beth Marcus Was the First
- "…the big flaw in my approach was that I was trying to apply rational engineering principles to nano-scale highly complex biological systems. And in my opinion, that's the wrong way to go about it."
- "…if you start testing many designs in parallel and then selecting for the ones that work, you don't have to be smart."
- "…LabGenius is a vehicle through which we can explore and harness evolution to develop new products."
- Founding a Company Was the Best Way to Accelerate the Work that Excited Him
- Harnessing Evolution, but Doing it Better than the Natural Process
- "…in the case of natural evolution, the process doesn't get any smarter. But the beauty of our process is every single time we conduct one of these evolutionary cycles, we gain information that then enables us to be more intelligent about how we design these biological systems."
- Concrete Applications
- "…because we're so mission-driven, we're gonna continue this mission until either we succeed or conclusively fail."
- "…I was really banging my head against a brick wall until I found a group of investors who understand this to be an important part of the development of humanity…"
- Transcending Human Intelligence by Designing Evolutionary Processes for Scientific Discovery Is Astonishingly Promising
- James Field's Parting Words