You're listening to Radio Lab, The Podcast, from W-N-Y-C, and NPR.

Hello, I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Krelwich.

This is Radio Lab, the podcast.

And today on our podcast, we have four little stops we're going to make, all centered around that thing, which none of us can avoid that's coming for us all. I'm talking, of course, about the Big D.

Well, we all know we're going to die, except some of our science friends. Remember when we were at Harvard and we were talking to George Church? George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

We were doing the show about bioengineering.

So here's an example where we might grow up a large batch of cells in a fermenter.

Yeah.

George Church was the guy who was trying to use a little bacteria to make gasoline.

He is manipulating life.

Right.

He also flirts around with the idea of eliminating the concept of death.

I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living.

I think there's a continuum between non-living and living, and you can create all sorts of things. Wait, wait, at some point, like, if I were to shoot you in the head and you would have fallen on the floor with a hole in your head and bleed, and I have no nurse or no doctor help you, at some point your state will have changed fundamentally. You'll stop breathing and you'll be over.

But I won't necessarily... Yes, you will be dead.

I'm saying that depending on the probability of a doctor coming into the room and fixing me

and the probability of more advanced technology being able to reverse all kinds of

pathological damage, there's a value to saying that there is a continuum

between life and death. I'll give you the continuum, but I'm also saying there will be a certain

point in which you are unmistakably over. With current technology, but not necessarily with future

technology. And there may be... You're saying that it is possible that you can never be totally dead, that that might be a

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