Andrew Hessel

In the following 2 fascinating videos, Andrew Hessel — a geneticist, research pioneer and founder of the Pink Army Cooperative, speaks about synthetic biology. Andrew discusses the similarities between biology and computer science and claims we can look at biological systems the same way that we look at computer networks. Thus, if the cells are information processors and DNA is their programming language, then synthetic biology is the next IT industry. Consequently, for him the best way of thinking about synthetic biology is thinking of it as programming computer code. Though indirectly, Hessel provides evidence in support of Ray Kurzweil‘s claim that biology has recently turned into an information technology and therefore we can expect that it too will abide by the Law of Accelerating Returns and exhibit an exponential growth in the amount of our knowledge and discoveries. Andrew [...]