| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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We are still at our core, a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
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Former Wisconsin Republican Representative Mike Gallagher talked about biotechnology and its potential uses during a discussion with leaders in the industry. | |
| Speakers also address how adversaries like China could create viruses or weaponize the industry. | ||
| This was hosted by the Hudson Institute. | ||
| It's about an hour. | ||
| I just think there's very little bounding to that premise of their relationship. | ||
| Good afternoon, everyone. | ||
| It's great to be with you all at the Hudson Institute to discuss an important, but I think still underappreciated topic, which is the biotechnology race we're in against the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| When we talk about the technological aspects of this new Cold War with China, I think our mind immediately jumps to artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or some element of the military competition. | ||
| But I would submit to you that biotechnology is becoming just as important as the other domains. | ||
| And if you're asking why, just look at how China is trying to use advanced biotechnology. | ||
| Forced DNA collection, genetic surveillance, the genetic enhancement of soldiers for the People's Liberation Army. | ||
| Genetically tailored weapons are already a trending topic in PLA military circles. | ||
| These threats that were once contained to science fiction novel are now becoming a reality. | ||
| They can be scary. | ||
| But the good news is that there's no one better to discuss these threats and how we win this competition than the man joining us today, Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. | ||
| Jason is truly a pioneer in this space. | ||
| We were honored to have him testify before my committee in Congress's select committee. | ||
| He did a fantastic job. | ||
| He got his undergrad and PhD from MIT, which is a small school that I think no one's ever heard of in bioengineering and started Ginkgo right out of school. | ||
| In 2014, Ginkgo was the first biotechnology company to do Y Combinator, right when Sam Altman took over as president. | ||
| Sam even said that Ginkgo was his favorite YC interview ever of all time. | ||
| As someone that's gotten to interview Jason and pepper him with questions twice now, although this time not under congressional oath, I can't disagree with that assessment. | ||
| It's partly why I think Jason was the perfect choice to chair the National Security Commission on Biotech, which is now chaired by Senator Todd Young, whose final report came out just a month ago. | ||
| And under Jason's leadership, Ginkgo has raised over $2 billion since its appearance at Y Combinator and went public in 2021. | ||
| Not an easy thing to do. | ||
| In fact, when he took the company public, he put a 50-foot T-Rex on the outside of the New York Stock Exchange. | ||
| Which leads me to my first question, Jason. | ||
| Where are we going to get the, when are we going to get Jurassic Park? | ||
| So to dig into that and many other important things. | ||
| This is available to watch online at our website, c-span.org. | ||
| We are going to leave this here for now for remarks from President Trump made just a short time ago. | ||
| How did they predict 100 years out and 50 years out or 200 years out? | ||
| They didn't do too well, the weather people last night, but it was beautiful. | ||
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unidentified
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The Prime Minister mechanic offers on the same page in terms of how to deal with Iran. | |
| Well, we get along very well, and I will tell you that I think we have great respect for each other. | ||
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unidentified
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Can you give us a new solution? | |
| Go ahead. | ||
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unidentified
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Mr. President, can you give us a sense of what your two is supplied as de-escalate the situation between Iran and Israel? | |
| Well, I hope there's going to be a deal. | ||
| I think it's time for a deal, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| But sometimes they have to fight it out, but we're going to see what happens. | ||
| I think there's a good chance there'll be a deal. | ||
| What? | ||
| So the protesters, if we didn't have the National Guard on call and ready, they would rip Los Angeles apart. | ||
| They come and they check and they say, is the National Guard going to be there? | ||
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unidentified
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And if the National Guard's being there, they don't even show up. | |
| Have you asked Israel to pause their airstrikes for a run? | ||
| Well, I don't want to say that. | ||
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unidentified
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You expect to have some great deals unannounced at the G7 summit coming up. | |
| Look, we have our trade deals. | ||
| All we have to do is send the letters. | ||
| This is what you're going to have to pay. | ||
| But I think we'll have a few new trade deals. | ||
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unidentified
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Will the U.S. continue to support the defenses of Israel? | |
| Will the U.S. continue to support Israel in its defenses? | ||
| We do, yeah. | ||
| Thank you very much, everybody. | ||
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unidentified
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We're the first person to take a gene from one species and move it into another. | |
| And this became the foundation for a company called Genentech. | ||
| And their first big product was human insulin. | ||
| Okay, so let me explain to you, because my dad was a type 1 diabetic. | ||
| All right, so when I was growing up, this is before all this started, my dad would take insulin that came from pigs' pancreases. | ||
| That was where we used to get insulin, right? | ||
| Because diabetics, type 1, childhood diabetes, you don't make any insulin at all. | ||
| So you got to take it with a needle. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So what did they do at Genentech? | ||
| So they got the gene from a human, okay, a human insulin gene, and they did a process called PCR. | ||
| Okay, and the first thing to understand is inside of all your cells is digital code in the form of DNA. | ||
| So there is a piece of code that equals the insulin protein. | ||
| And what Genentech did was they used this process to make many copies of that gene in the lab. | ||
| So they could identify where it was and they could make lots of copies. | ||
| And then they took those copies and they cut them with a thing called restriction enzymes, which could cut the ends and make them sticky. | ||
| And today, we'll talk about a thing you probably heard about called CRISPR. | ||
| That's the modern generation of being able to cut DNA where you want. | ||
| But back then, they cut the ends of this insulin gene. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And then here's the magic part. | ||
| They took bacteria that they could grow in a big tank, a little bit like a brewery. | ||
| You know, like how you make beer by putting yeast in a tank and feeding it sugar, except in this case it was bacteria. | ||
| They went in its genome, they cut it with that same enzyme. | ||
| The genome opened up. | ||
| They put in a copy of that human insulin gene. | ||
| They patched it back up. | ||
| They put those microbes in a tank in South San Francisco. | ||
| And boy oh boy, they started making human insulin. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| No human involved, okay? | ||
| And suddenly my dad could have the real thing. | ||
| You could have human insulin, not pig insulin, being made through the power of biotechnology. | ||
| And that was the beginning. | ||
| And so the way to understand what we're doing with biotech is you have digital code in the form of DNA, and we're building the tools to let you make changes to that in order to make new products on the economic side. | ||
| We can talk a little bit about the defense side. | ||
| But that's the core technology, and it's rooted in this fact that DNA is code, right? | ||
| Much like programming a computer or your phone, you add new code and the cell does something new. | ||
| In this case, you add the gene for insulin and it starts making insulin. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Well, it does make sense, although I think my takeaway when someone asks is that it's akin to making beer. | ||
| For a lot of your therapeutic drugs, it's a little bit like, it is a little bit like making beer. | ||
| If I were to apply the process or look at the process you have today at Ginkgo, which if you haven't visited the facility, it's phenomenal, it's eye-opening, and like compare it to what was happening in 1978 or early 80s. | ||
| What would be the biggest difference? | ||
| What tool do you have now that they didn't have back then? | ||
| So the major change is the scale that we're able to do. | ||
| This is enormously bigger now. | ||
| So for example, back then, you could only cut and paste. | ||
| So I had to have a human gene from a human. | ||
| I had to cut it out and then paste it into that bacteria. | ||
| Today, we have a technology called DNA synthesis. | ||
| So I go on a computer, I type ATC, GG, GGG, whatever gene I wanted. | ||
| It could be human insulin, but could be anything I want. | ||
| I hit print, and in our labs, or in their DNA synthesis companies, like a company called Twist out in California, a piece of DNA gets built letter by letter, exactly as I designed it. | ||
| So now you have the ability to access any gene from any genome that's ever been read out in the world. | ||
| Okay, and so that's one half of the technology called DNA synthesis or DNA printing or DNA writing. | ||
| And this is one of the things people are worried about on the biosecurity side, because what if I print smallpox? | ||
| Okay, so that's writing. | ||
| And then the other technology that's improved massively is DNA reading. | ||
| So you might remember the Human Genome Project, right? | ||
| It was like Clinton era thing, 2000. | ||
| We sequence the human genome. | ||
| Well, that's DNA reading. | ||
| You take a cell up, you grind it, you put it into a machine called a DNA sequencer. | ||
| It's like the size of a washing machine these days. | ||
| You put it in there, and if I ground up your cells, the book of Representative Gallagher would show up on the screen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we would see all 4 billion letters of your genome read out on the computer. | ||
| So we turn cells into that DNA code, and we can now access it. | ||
| And that's true not just for humans, we love ourselves, but for every plant, animal, microbe in the environment, we can also read their DNA and get that as a huge collection. | ||
| And then with DNA printing, I can pull any gene out of that library and get it in the lab and then put it into any other organism I want. | ||
| And that's modern biotech today. | ||
| We have all those tools. | ||
| Okay, but to go, sorry, go finish you. | ||
| Last thing I was going to say, if you want to understand, like the last bit, reading, writing, of the DNA, if you then want to put it somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, this is editing, and this is where CRISPR fits in. | ||
| So back in the 80s, you didn't get to decide where in the bacteria your gene went. | ||
| It was like pretty sloppy. | ||
| Now with CRISPR, you can say, okay, if you have this, I forget the exact whatever, X number of bases, cut at that site, and then it'll open there, and I'll put it in right where I want it. | ||
| So now I can paste exactly where I want in a human genome, and that's why you're seeing all these recent advances in gene editing for treating disease and so forth. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Which we can talk about, actually. | ||
| Okay, but to go back, I mean, you are a founder, which now that I'm in the private sector, I realize it's like the coolest thing to be. | ||
| It's not enough to be a CEO, you have to be a cooler founder. | ||
| Yeah, that's really awesome. | ||
| But what was the fundamental insight you had either as an undergrad at MIT or a grad student where you thought, okay, this is the direction I want to go. | ||
| I'm going to pour all of my energy and ambition into building this company. | ||
| Was there like a light bulb moment that you had? | ||
| I mean, so it's a little, as I got to learn a little bit about the Hudson today, that the we were two very different communities coming together when we formed Ginkgo. | ||
| So we were really engineers first, right? | ||
| So I was a chemical engineer. | ||
| My co-founders were all computer scientists. | ||
| And we had this idea that like cells could be made really engineerable because they run on code. | ||
| And we kind of went over and engaged with the biologists and they were like, you guys are idiots. | ||
| And that was sort of the beginning of the company. | ||
| Because it was like, okay, we really believe fundamentally that you can program this stuff because it's code-based. | ||
| And the counterpoint, and this I think can come up a little bit as we think about how to defend against this technology, we didn't design these things. | ||
| So like a computer we program, but humans build computers. | ||
| A bacteria, when we program it, we didn't design the thing. | ||
| So it's much more difficult to get it to do the things you want it to do. | ||
| It doesn't act exactly as you expect. | ||
| Have you discovered who designed it? | ||
| No comment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to leave that to the reader. | ||
| Is either God or yeah, I mean, yeah, somebody. | ||
| So yeah, but that's the, so that's, that was the, and that, like, we had a big chip on our shoulder that we thought these engineering approaches could make a difference. | ||
| And now you play out today and it's pretty widely accepted, but it wasn't 20 years ago. | ||
| So that divide is no longer as pronounced as not as, but it is still a little bit there. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Okay, let's see where the technology and your business meets geopolitics. | ||
| So one observation I had with any sort of anything we did in Congress talking about China, we kind of obscured a debate about like what is our long-term goal, right? | ||
| We sort of had consensus over short-term measures. | ||
| So why, if you look long-term, if you looked at 2050, why should we care where do we want to be, particularly relative to our geopolitical adversaries in this space? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do we get from it? | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I love it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So let's talk about this first because I think it's worth getting this down before we talk about how this stuff's all going to kill us. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the upshot on biotech, I don't know if you saw there was a sort of baby KJ was in the news recently. |