Meeting created at: 21st Jul, 2026 - 10:23 AM1
Adrian Woolfson: I actually see it as a time machine which travels outside time across this mathematical space of all possible biology and then can just kind of materialize like the tardis.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome to Talk Bio To Me, the show where we sit down with the people building the future of biology.
Flo Lumsden: I'm your host, Flo Lumsden, founder of Korus Studios, a podcast production company where we transform complex technologies and breakthrough ideas into human stories that educate, entertain and inspire.
Flo Lumsden: This year we headed to Synbio Beta, the world's largest conference for synthetic biology.
Flo Lumsden: This mini pod features some of the most fascinating founders.
Adrian Woolfson: We make spores that actually eat the insects.
Flo Lumsden: Scientists.
Kaihang Wang: We have carbon fixing microbes that can essentially eat emissions.
Flo Lumsden: Researchers.
Adrian Woolfson: This is going to make DNA into a programmable material that we can use to turn biology into infrastructure investors.
Kaihang Wang: Because it's garbage in, garbage out on AI.
Speaker 3: And Mother Nature still works in mysterious ways.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Flo Lumsden: And AI innovators.
Kaihang Wang: I'm increasingly excited about AI actually making.
Flo Lumsden: An impact in the lab, shaping the future of biotech.
Flo Lumsden: From breakthrough therapies to AI that's beginning to design biology.
Flo Lumsden: I discovered one of the most exciting technological revolutions of our time.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, Talk Bio To Me.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome to Talk Bio to Me with Flo.
Flo Lumsden: That's me, of course.
Flo Lumsden: Studios.
Flo Lumsden: So excited to have you both here today.
Flo Lumsden: Could you help me out and give a brief introduction to each of you individually, your name and what you do.
Adrian Woolfson: So my name is Adrian Woolfson.
Adrian Woolfson: I'm the CEO of Genyro and also the co founder along with Kai Hang.
Kaihang Wang: I'm Kai Wang.
Kaihang Wang: I'm a professor at Caltech.
Kaihang Wang: Also I'm a co founder of the company at Genyro, together with Adrian and also two other of our co founders who cannot be here today.
Flo Lumsden: How many co founders are there?
Adrian Woolfson: There are four altogether.
Kaihang Wang: Okay, cool.
Kaihang Wang: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: The other two are Brian, he at the Arc Institute at Stanford, and Noah Robinson who's in Kaihangsab at Carltown.
Flo Lumsden: Very cool.
Flo Lumsden: Gener, how many years has it been here in the world or when was it?
Adrian Woolfson: I can answer that one.
Adrian Woolfson: A year and a half.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, so it's very new.
Adrian Woolfson: Yes, yes.
Flo Lumsden: What was the impetus?
Flo Lumsden: What was the spark of innovation that led to its creation?
Kaihang Wang: In a way, this is the pain and suffering I endured for like over probably 20 years.
Kaihang Wang: Right.
Kaihang Wang: Of.
Kaihang Wang: Because I'm in the field of synthetic biology.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Kaihang Wang: And I need to make DNA from scratch sometimes to encode for functions, to cure diseases and so on and so forth.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Kaihang Wang: So in my earlier work, I have to make a design and make the entirety of the E. Coli bacterial genome to carry out new functions.
Kaihang Wang: And I can design, I made an invention to basically, Once you have 100,000 nucleotide, you can use that as building blocks.
Kaihang Wang: But has been tremendously painful, expensive and slow to build into that 100kb building construct.
Kaihang Wang: So in a way, the pain and suffering I endured through that was the inspiration of the invention of the technology called Siloender, which is a foundational piece of the company.
Flo Lumsden: General Sidewinder.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: And just to be clear, you know, Kaihang, were both from Cambridge University at the same laboratory of molecular biology, but at different times.
Adrian Woolfson: And Kaihang built the first ever entirely synthetic genome of a bacterium and then recoded it to give it a totally new genetic code.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: And as he said, you know, don't build the genome all in one go.
Adrian Woolfson: You build it from kind of building blocks like those prefabricated units.
Adrian Woolfson: When you see those buildings go up over a weekend from the car park.
Adrian Woolfson: And it was those units that were very to make that Kaihang's new technology solved.
Adrian Woolfson: So when Kai Hang and I were collaborating on another project, I'd started another company before this.
Adrian Woolfson: But when Kai Hang told me about this technology, I thought, wow, this is going to.
Adrian Woolfson: It's going to change the world.
Adrian Woolfson: This is going to make DNA into a programmable material that we can use to turn biology into infrastructure and literally build everything out of, you know, biology.
Adrian Woolfson: Grow things.
Flo Lumsden: That is so freaking cool.
Flo Lumsden: I come from a sustainability, climate centric background.
Flo Lumsden: So when you talk about growing things like infrastructure, buildings and rugs, that's like, oh, I love that.
Kaihang Wang: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: I have a funny question for you guys.
Flo Lumsden: So you were the first to create synthetic biology or DNA, right?
Kaihang Wang: So we cannot, I mean, we are on the shoulders of the giants.
Flo Lumsden: Okay?
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Kaihang Wang: So synthetic DNA, I mean, that is a brilliant invention.
Kaihang Wang: And that's not us.
Kaihang Wang: That is made in the 1970s by Professor Cronus.
Kaihang Wang: He got Nobel Prize for the work.
Kaihang Wang: But there's a catch.
Kaihang Wang: These are synthetic DNA invented back then and also made today.
Kaihang Wang: They are fairly short of only a few hundred nucleotides, short strands, short stranded pieces.
Kaihang Wang: They are kind of like equivalent when you can use in the printing press to print a page, one page each oligo, synthetic oligo is equivalent to one page.
Kaihang Wang: But you need multiple pages to form a book.
Kaihang Wang: The same way you need multiple synthetic oligos to be pieced together in the right order to form a gene for the sustainability, for the function, to cure diseases, so on and so forth.
Adrian Woolfson: So what Kaihang did so prior to us you know, you could make very small bits of DNA and you could actually make a, you know, a long bit like you did.
Adrian Woolfson: But it was really painful.
Adrian Woolfson: And there was some.
Adrian Woolfson: Like, when Kaihang made the synthetic E. Coli, he had to leave out a bit of it because it was.
Adrian Woolfson: You just couldn't make it.
Adrian Woolfson: And so what Kaihang did is he invented the concept.
Adrian Woolfson: He brought the concept of page numbers from the publishing industry, from books into DNA.
Kaihang Wang: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: Because it actually took the publishing industry 90 years to discover the concept of page numbers.
Adrian Woolfson: The first books, the Gutenberg Bible, didn't have page numbers.
Adrian Woolfson: So obviously.
Adrian Woolfson: But once you have the page number concept, you can actually assemble DNA programmatically without having to, you know, if you had a book and it fell apart, you'd have to reassemble it by reading the beginning and the end of each page and kind of matching them up.
Adrian Woolfson: And that's how all existing DNA is made.
Adrian Woolfson: The problem with that is if the DNA is very repetitive, you can't match it up because it all looks the same.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: And half of the human genome is like that, and 85% of the plant genome is like that.
Adrian Woolfson: But with Kaihang's method, like with page numbers, you don't look at text, you just can programmatically assemble the pages and as many as you like.
Adrian Woolfson: And the error rate, if the method.
Kaihang Wang: Is one, maybe you could actually.
Flo Lumsden: I remember this from the press release.
Kaihang Wang: Yeah.
Kaihang Wang: So with conventional method, without the equivalent of the page number, the misconnection rate, if you put a two page in the wrong order, that is one mistake out of every 10 to 30 connections.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: So every 10 to 30 pages you've got the wrong page in the book.
Kaihang Wang: So our misconnection rate is way lower.
Kaihang Wang: If I'm going to ask you to give a number that will impress you because you have very high standard.
Kaihang Wang: One out of a.
Kaihang Wang: You really know.
Adrian Woolfson: One in 10 million.
Adrian Woolfson: Yes.
Adrian Woolfson: So it's basically you can make a book 10 million with 10 million pages and only one page will be in the wrong order instead of one in 30.
Adrian Woolfson: And that's not an incremental change, that's an exponential change.
Kaihang Wang: Yeah.
Kaihang Wang: So in a way, this is from the before for the invention, from 1 in 10 to 1 in 10 million.
Kaihang Wang: So there are many different criteria, you measure the connection, but if you just reduce that just to the misconduction rate, then that is literally a million times better.
Flo Lumsden: And using this tool, you can build.
Kaihang Wang: Synthetic DNA for any functions.
Flo Lumsden: For any function, yeah.
Kaihang Wang: And there are some low Hanging fruits.
Kaihang Wang: And one of the low hanging fruits we identify in particular is using the messenger RNA vaccine to fight against cancer.
Flo Lumsden: Right?
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah, yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: So at the moment people are exploring these kind of what they call personalized vaccines.
Adrian Woolfson: So if you get cancer, you take a sample of the cancer, you sequence it and then you make a personalized vaccine and put it.
Adrian Woolfson: And these work very well.
Adrian Woolfson: The problem is it takes eight to 12 weeks.
Adrian Woolfson: It's expensive and it takes eight to 12 weeks.
Adrian Woolfson: With our method, we can literally make it within one to two days.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah, it's not, you know, again.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah, so it's a massive difference.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah, that's one in media.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, now I really got it.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah, yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: Now I'll give you one more example.
Adrian Woolfson: Like, so we're, the other thing we're doing.
Adrian Woolfson: So you're interested in the, you know, the world sustainability.
Adrian Woolfson: Sustainability, right.
Adrian Woolfson: So basically 10% of the world's energy is used to archive digital information.
Adrian Woolfson: So you have thousands of photographs on your phone, millions of emails on your computer, which you will never look at again.
Adrian Woolfson: We all know that.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: But you'll never get rid of them, just in case.
Adrian Woolfson: Now, so all of that information all over the world is being using energy, right?
Adrian Woolfson: Now we can store all that information in DNA with no energy expended.
Kaihang Wang: We can do that.
Kaihang Wang: We can write that into the genomes of living things.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: So let me give you another example.
Flo Lumsden: Extract.
Kaihang Wang: Oh, that's another.
Kaihang Wang: You can sequence it.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Kaihang Wang: And you are absolutely right.
Kaihang Wang: To have the full stack you need three steps.
Kaihang Wang: You need an encoding of information to convert 0 ones to the GATC in the DNA sequence in the day.
Kaihang Wang: So that we have a like collaborator, Shuki from, like, from Caltech.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: He built, helped the IBM build a.
Kaihang Wang: Parallel computer and that you have.
Kaihang Wang: You need someone like me and Adrian to write the GATC into the genomes of living things.
Kaihang Wang: Right?
Kaihang Wang: We do that, we have the writing and that as you said, how do you read it out?
Kaihang Wang: Right.
Kaihang Wang: You need like stack of reading.
Kaihang Wang: And for that we collaborated with Professor Hagen Bailey in Oxford.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: So another example, you know, again, the sustainability angle, because that's really important to our civilizational level problems and sustainability.
Adrian Woolfson: So another one is the increasing world population.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: So there was, as you know, a green revolution where our ability to produce crops more efficiently dramatically increased, but then just leveled off.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: So if there isn't a second green revolution to sustain the world's new population in 2060, we're going to have to mow down every remaining wilderness rainforest.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: We're working on a synthetic chromosome called a neochromosome with some guys in Cambridge.
Adrian Woolfson: And we can write many versions of these, which will help increase the yield of crops, make them drought resistant, heat resistant, pest resistant, so on and so forth.
Adrian Woolfson: So it's another example of a kind of civilization level project that we're working on with huge implications for sustainability.
Flo Lumsden: And guys doing all these different things.
Kaihang Wang: Oh,.
Adrian Woolfson: We figured out with cloud bridge, these are just two examples.
Adrian Woolfson: Another example is AI, Right?
Adrian Woolfson: So at the moment, AI can produce lots and lots of designs of proteins, for example, to make drugs, protein therapeutics, but they can't build them.
Adrian Woolfson: To test them.
Flo Lumsden: To test them.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: So there's a huge discrepancy between our ability to design DNA and our ability to test it, make physical examples in the real world.
Adrian Woolfson: And Kaihang's latest invention, which was published on Monday, shows that we can make DNA in a massively parallel manner incredibly quickly, at a very low cost, efficiently, accurately, which can test all of these designs.
Flo Lumsden: What do you think we might find in these?
Flo Lumsden: These are potential.
Kaihang Wang: Oh, yes.
Kaihang Wang: What we may find in these AI designs.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, these AI wonders.
Flo Lumsden: Wonders.
Kaihang Wang: Wonders, yeah.
Kaihang Wang: So conceptually, I mean, if you think about it, the mathematical possibility of the DNA coding space is literally infinite.
Kaihang Wang: The possible proteins to conclude it's more than the atoms in the observed universe.
Kaihang Wang: It's just like without that ability of the AI, we don't have a way to navigate in the infinity of that space.
Kaihang Wang: But this is our first attempt to build, like, a portal that can allow us to realize into any spot in that infinity space.
Adrian Woolfson: I actually see it as a time machine which travels outside time across this mathematical space of all possible biology and then can just kind of materialize, like the tardis.
Adrian Woolfson: I don't know if you ever saw Doctor who.
Flo Lumsden: We create new animals.
Adrian Woolfson: Oh, yeah.
Kaihang Wang: With icicle concerns.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Unicorn with wings.
Adrian Woolfson: The question is, hang on, is this an order?
Adrian Woolfson: Yes, we'll produce the invoice.
Adrian Woolfson: So the answer to that.
Adrian Woolfson: The answer to that is that in order to map out the space of possible organisms, we need to be able to simulate them and compute them.
Adrian Woolfson: And to do that, we need to understand the generative laws of biology, which we don't yet understand, but we will.
Flo Lumsden: Because we have tested them.
Kaihang Wang: Yeah.
Kaihang Wang: I want to say that is exactly what Adrian's book is about.
Kaihang Wang: Yes.
Kaihang Wang: The concept of the general biological intelligence.
Adrian Woolfson: That's right, yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: That is general biological intelligence.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: I call it artificial biological intelligence.
Adrian Woolfson: What I mean by artificial biological intelligence is exactly that.
Adrian Woolfson: So you say to me, hey, Adrian, build Me, a unicorn with, you know, whatever features you want.
Adrian Woolfson: And I say, yeah, okay, here's the genome that computes that creature that you've imagined and not just its morphology, but its behavior, its anatomy, its physiology.
Adrian Woolfson: Right?
Adrian Woolfson: It's biochemistry, right.
Adrian Woolfson: And.
Adrian Woolfson: Or I say, actually, sorry, but it's not computable.
Adrian Woolfson: In other words, it's not possible.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: There's no developmental pathway that can take you there.
Adrian Woolfson: Or maybe you say, hey, Adrian, make me a butterfly with wings the size of five tennis courts.
Adrian Woolfson: Or a human the size of a kind of flea, right?
Adrian Woolfson: And I'll say, well, actually human biology won't work at that scale because of surface tension.
Adrian Woolfson: Or a butterfly with wings the size of four tennisaurs couldn't fly unless you put it.
Adrian Woolfson: But more kind of practically speaking, what you've got to realize is that evolution has only explored and tested the most infinitesimal fraction of all possibility, right?
Adrian Woolfson: So imagine if you were able, if you were to rewind the tape of life a million times and press the button again.
Adrian Woolfson: You may never end up with a lettuce or a tomato or rice or maize.
Adrian Woolfson: So, so there are all these useful species out there which we've never, you know, discovered.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: By turning wild weed, tsonite into maize, it enabled, you know, mass agriculture, efficient agriculture, which enabled cities, which enabled culture, which eventually led to gene editing and then eventually led to our technologies, right?
Adrian Woolfson: Genome writing, when suddenly culture feeds back into genetics and suddenly you don't have to inherit the, you know, 4 billion years of evolutionary design.
Adrian Woolfson: You can just take a blank slate and redesign from first principles with this, right?
Kaihang Wang: We can really have the freedom to design and construct and beyond just the single path that earthly life has endured.
Adrian Woolfson: Right?
Kaihang Wang: And yeah, as I've been saying, right.
Kaihang Wang: It's like with this technology we can realize things from the past, we can bring things from the future, we can really even unwind the tape to ask the question, what if have a parallel.
Adrian Woolfson: Universe and then run again.
Adrian Woolfson: Now, one of our co founders who sadly isn't his day Brian, he has actually designed and built the first ever totally computer generated biological entity.
Adrian Woolfson: I say biological entity because it's a virus which isn't technically living, right?
Adrian Woolfson: Because it has to in fact, bacterium, right?
Adrian Woolfson: But the sequence that the computer generated using a Genome foundation model that he invented called Evo 2 basically met the criterion for a new species because it had only 93% identity to the parental sequence.
Adrian Woolfson: So technically he wrote, designed and built the first ever new species, right?
Adrian Woolfson: But that's not a zebra and it's not a hippopotamus.
Adrian Woolfson: And it's.
Adrian Woolfson: But it.
Adrian Woolfson: But it's the beginning.
Adrian Woolfson: And I've called this elsewhere, the.
Adrian Woolfson: The Wright brothers moment of biology, when the plane goes into the air and bumps down after 90 seconds.
Adrian Woolfson: But in that moment when the Wright brothers took off, you could anticipate the future of aviation.
Adrian Woolfson: The Boeing 747.
Adrian Woolfson: Space travel.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Kaihang Wang: It's the first baby step.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: It's the beginning.
Adrian Woolfson: It's like a baby babbling.
Adrian Woolfson: We haven't learned how to speak the language fluently of biology, but were beginning to speak it in a very primitive way.
Adrian Woolfson: Right.
Flo Lumsden: Analogy.
Adrian Woolfson: Thank you.
Flo Lumsden: I'm actually interviewing Samuel from Stanford.
Adrian Woolfson: Oh, he's great.
Adrian Woolfson: Well, Samuel works with Brian, who's our.
Adrian Woolfson: Okay.
Adrian Woolfson: Funny.
Adrian Woolfson: He's in his group.
Flo Lumsden: You were saying he had one of those big moments.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: He was involved in that work.
Flo Lumsden: Okay.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Adrian Woolfson: And actually they never got the credit they deserve because the public just didn't understand what they'd done.
Adrian Woolfson: The significance.
Adrian Woolfson: Like I said in my thing, that should have been front page New York Times.
Adrian Woolfson: Those guys are pioneers.
Kaihang Wang: So Samuel is the lead author on the front on the synthetic phage paper.
Kaihang Wang: Phage is the virus against the bacteria.
Adrian Woolfson: Hey, if you're watching in 2020.
Kaihang Wang: Because it's very safe to us.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, great.
Flo Lumsden: Well, thank you both so much.
Kaihang Wang: Oh, pleasure.
Flo Lumsden: I love how much enthusiasm and optimism you both have.
Flo Lumsden: And I'll be waiting for my custom unicorn with words.
Kaihang Wang: You have Adrian's ward.
Adrian Woolfson: Yes.
Adrian Woolfson: You have your word.
Adrian Woolfson: We're taking that as an order.
Adrian Woolfson: So we're going to invoice you for the gun.
Adrian Woolfson: But one last word, right.
Adrian Woolfson: Is that we.
Adrian Woolfson: It's really important, first of all, and it's the key message of my book as well, by the way, that we're doing all of this synthetic biology.
Adrian Woolfson: But we.
Adrian Woolfson: We must value nature as a precious gift, if you like, that we are custodians of.
Adrian Woolfson: We have no right to destroy nature.
Adrian Woolfson: And as I said, you can see how synthetic biology can help us to preserve wilderness, rainforest, species.
Adrian Woolfson: That's our primary aim.
Kaihang Wang: Right.
Adrian Woolfson: And we think we can help to do that by using.
Adrian Woolfson: Making everything biological.
Adrian Woolfson: And the other thing is that this technology must be used safely, wisely, responsibly, ethically, in a morally reasonable manner and in a manner that benefits society.
Adrian Woolfson: So it's really important that we put that on record.
Adrian Woolfson: And that's.
Adrian Woolfson: That's a key part of our company philosophy.
Flo Lumsden: That's very important.
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Well, thank you both for sharing your passion for what you do with me and my audience.
Flo Lumsden: Of bio enthusiasts.
Flo Lumsden: I thank you for answering all my questions.
Flo Lumsden: I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of what you're doing and I'm excited to see the future.
Adrian Woolfson: Thank you so much for having us on the show.
Flo Lumsden: Don't forget to subscribe or follow Talk Bio to me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube today for episodes dropping very soon.