Today's guest made bacteria immune to every virus that exists. This breakthrough could revolutionize medicine by creating virus proof cell therapies and potentially extending this protection to human cells, while also demonstrating that we can fundamentally rewrite the language of life itself. Something that was previously thought impossible.

We had been dreaming about this since 2002, but just in the last couple of years, we delivered, engineered, and secured an organism that was resistant to all viruses. Every gene in every virus is broken in multiple ways, and so they can't even evolve around that.

George Church is a Harvard Medical School genetics professor and pioneer of synthetic biology. He's an entrepreneur who has founded multiple biotech companies and is known for pushing the boundaries between science fiction and reality. His team just did something that sounds like pure science fiction. They made living cells completely immune to.

Every virus on Earth.

Not resistant, immune. Every single virus that tries to infect your cells just fails. The viruses can't evolve around it. They didn't add anything new. They just removed a few letters from the genetic Alphabet. But George isn't stopping there. He wants to do this to human cells. He's talking about engineering astronauts for Mars missions, bringing back woolly mammoths, and maybe in just maybe making humans virus proof too.

The implications are staggering. The ethics are murky, and the timeline. Well, if Church's track record tells us anything, it's happening far faster than we think.

All right, welcome today to this episode of into the Impossible. So I want to start off with some of the curiosity that you engender in me and your wonderful book, which we'll get to. We'll talk about different challenges. We'll talk about the relevance of biology, genetics, gene information, and so forth to an audience that has a lot of astronomers and a lot of cosmologists and a lot of people that think about life on other planets. And that's sort of where I want to begin and asking a question. Eventually we'll get to whether or not Elon Musk is sending the wrong species to Mars. But first I want to ask you, how do we grow or engineer life like tardigrades or rotophores, or how do they indeed have natural resistance to radiation that would liquefy my cells? I know, for one, how do these creatures come about? Why was this so necessary at one point, and why is it still in the, you know, in their genetic record to this very day?

It's hard to definitively answer questions about the past or about intentionality. But I think there's fairly convincing speculation that much of the radiation resistance in naturally occurring species is due to desiccation. Desiccation causes DNA damage and the repair processes that deal with that also work for say double stranded DNA breaks that would cause be caused by ionizing radiation, gamma rays and desiccation. And this applies to single cell organisms like Dianococcus and to multicellular organisms like the tardigrade.

Could we learn from them? Could we use tools that you've invented like mage multiplex genome engineering to add kind of a repair kit, rotifer style, you know, a bolt on to our DNA essentially upgrad or out of this world, out of this earth biology.

Yeah. So there is some work in the literature and in our lab on seeing what sort of the minimum number of genes required to get an increase in radiation resistance or better repair. And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the repair proteins are known. There's, there's as few as four or five genes can result in 10,000 fold, 100,000 fold improvement in radiation resistance in a starting organism like E. Coli, which is, has very low tolerance for radiation and turn them into something that is comparable to, you know, things that we thought required billions of years of evolution to become that radiation resistant. You can do it in a small number of mutations, which gives us hope. We haven't yet, we've started to, but haven't finished extending that to mammalian cells. But you know, assuming that goes as well as it did in bacteria, then that's something that could at least apply to cell therapies and organ therapies.

Whether that would be enough to protect the entire body is an open question.