This is a Headgun Podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Connover. Thank you so much for joining me once again

as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing stuff that they know that I don't know

and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we're going to

have a ton of fun doing it. Now, this week we're talking about one of the most incredible scientific

breakthroughs of human history. See, scientific progress doesn't happen in a linear manner.

For every breakthrough, there are a million dead ends and a hundred thousand mediocre papers

that nobody ever reads. It's all fits and starts and many more fits then starts for that matter.

Decades can go by with very little progress and then all of a sudden, boom, we go from studying

electricity to using it to power our houses. We go from looking at the moon to landing there.

There are these turning points in science that transform human society so profoundly,

we suddenly can't even imagine what life was like before them.

The moments that science goes from explaining something to being able to manipulate it.

Well, as our guest today argues in a new audiobook, we are in the middle of one of those transitions

right now. Remember those mRNA vaccines that came out of nowhere to save our ass during the pandemic?

That wax that's likely coursing through your veins right now? Well, those are just the tip of

the science bird because suddenly it seems that we have new tools to fudge around and hack life

itself and these tools work. Foundational biological properties can now be manipulated in ways that

would have been unimaginable just decades ago. Nearly four centuries after Robert Hook became

the first person to observe a cell under the microscope, we have arrived at an incredible moment.

Humans now have the power to dominate and control the cell itself. This new world of synthetic

biology brings tremendous opportunities for medicine, climate change, agriculture and so many

...