Everything Alec Nielsen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Nielsen: Everything in the world will eventually be genetically engineered
“Everything in our world is going to be genetically engineered, and I mean everything. Our food, our therapeutics, our materials, our manufacturing infrastructure, our consumer goods.”
Nielsen: Humans will design complete genomes from scratch within decades
“And so, the trajectory of synthetic biology is, decades from now, we will be able to design entire genomes from the ground up. We will have complete control over the flow of information, matter, and energy inside living systems.”
Nielsen: Biology, not rocket science, is the true bottleneck for space exploration
“Everyone talks about rocket science being the hard problem about outer space, but biology is the really hard thing about outer space.”
Nielsen: Existing commercial biotech products rely on primitive genetic engineering
“Well, I hope it's not too controversial to say that while those products are amazing, they've all been made using relatively primitive genetic engineering.”
Nielsen: Genetic engineering will transition to designing proteins directly
“While right now we mainly do genetic engineering by repurposing things from nature, eventually we may be able to design these genetically encoded molecules like proteins directly.”
Nielsen: Photons offer higher spatial precision than electrodes for brain interfaces
“Photons have higher spatial precision than electric fields like you would get from an electrode, and so it may be the more precise way to read and write brain states.”
Nielsen: Treating DNA as software is an imperfect but useful analogy
“A favorite analogy of our field is that DNA is kind of like software. It's code that you can program, and then when you put that custom DNA into a cell, the cell boots it up kind of like software. It's an imperfect analogy, and it often gets taken too far, but…”
Nielsen: AquaAdvantage genetically engineered salmon will imminently reach supermarket shelves
“It's the aqua advantage salmon. It's engineered to grow year round instead of just the spring and summer months, and that should be hitting the supermarket shelves imminently.”
Nielsen: Every engineering discipline transitions to computer-aided design as it matures
“And in fact, this transition from manual design to computer aided design isn't unique to electronics. This happens for every engineering discipline as it matures.”
Nielsen: Human brains cannot holistically understand even single-cell biology
“Biology is too complex to be understood by a human brain at a holistic or intuitive level for even a single cell.”
Nielsen: Over 90% of global cheese relies on recombinant chymosin
“Over 90% of the cheese in the world is produced using recombinantly produced chymosin.”
Nielsen: UW's Rosetta software designs novel proteins lacking natural analogs
“They've developed a computational protein design software called Rosetta that recently has been making incredible strides in the design of proteins, many of which have no close analog in nature.”
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