"the following is a conversation with manolis kellis he's a professor at mit and head of the mit computational biology group he's interested in understanding the human genome from a computational evolu..."

"what to use the most beautiful aspect of the human genome don't get me started so we got time um the first answer is that the beauty of genomes transcends humanity so it's not just about the human gen..."

"i'm not sure any of us know how to do that in this modern day we're actually learning one of the big surprising thing to me about the the coronavirus for example is that twitter has been one of the be..."

"the trend with and the speed with which human genetics has progressed we can now find thousands of genes involved in human cognition in human psychology in the emotions and the feelings that we used t..."

"so on that's on that topic let me ask the most absurd question uh that uh most mit faculty role their eyes on but uh do what do you think about the simulation hypothesis and the idea that we live in a..."

"difference to you between the way a computer stores information and uh the human genome stores information so you also have roots and your work would you say you're when you introduce yourself at a ba..."

"skip skip skip skip skip let me try to start somewhere in the middle so my first phd paper was uh the first comparative analysis of multiple species so multiple complete genomes so for the first time ..."

"so you now have this mapping between all of the set of functions that could all encode the same all of the set of sequences that can all encode the same function what evolutionary signatures does is t..."

"fascinating to you that viruses are doing this i mean it feels like they're this intelligent organism i mean is it like does that give you pause how incredible it is that they're the the evolutionary ..."

"beauty to it is there is it is it terrifying to you so this is something that has happened throughout history humans have been nearly wiped out over and over and over again and yet never fully wiped o..."

"current virus so you're saying natural pandemics may not be something that you're really afraid of because of the diversity in our genetic makeup what about engineered pandemics do you have fears of u..."

"so i made a very provocative claim earlier that we are a digital computer like that at the core lies a digital code and that's true in many ways but surrounding that digital core there's a huge amount..."

"seven in chromosome 12. you instead have content based indexing so at every location in the genome in front of the genes that need to be turned on i don't know when you drink coffee there's a little c..."

"they're first resilient and then anything else and when you look at this incredible beauty of life from the most i don't know beautiful i don't know human genome maybe of humanity and all of the ideal..."

"oh yeah you are yeah so basically from one day to the next you went from having eight chromosomes to having 16 chromosomes probably a non-disjunction event during a duplication during a division so yo..."

"you know the example that i was giving of messing with 20 of your bits in your computer totally bogus duplicating all your functions and just throwing them out there in the same you know function just..."

"functions so new functionalization comes from the very thing that breaks it so even in the current pandemic many people are asking me which mutations matter the most and what i tell them is well we ca..."

"exactly and that hasn't happened before yeah and and this somehow this mutation is really useful uh it's really useful in the current environment of the genome which is moving from human to human when..."

"as you're building a vaccine here's what you should be focusing on in terms of the most stable regions that are the least likely to mutate or here's the newly evolved functions that are most likely to..."

"the spacex approach versus nasa for the for example is there something we can learn about the incredible uh take lessons from the incredible biological systems in their resilience in their in the mush..."

"that same genome encodes every single freaking cell type of the entire body every single cell is encoded by the same code and yet specialization allows you to have this single viral-like genome that s..."

"work that might not be very different from how humans learn to use their natural limbs when they first grow up basically you have these you know neoteny period of you know this puddle of soup inside y..."

"malleability that happens you know naturally in our way of controlling our body our brain or thoughts or vocal cords or limbs etc and human machine interfaces are inevitable if we sort of figure out h..."

"magnets right but the the thing is the hope is if you increase that number more and more and more maybe you don't need to understand anything about the actual how human thought is represented in the b..."

"create all these neurons they migrate they form connections they sort of you know spread out they have particular branching patterns but then the connectivity itself unique in every single new person ..."

"something that you know is there so so yes there's ambiguity but there's all kinds of connotations and in the way that we select our words we have so much baggage that we're sending along the way that..."

"loss in translation between russian and english and getting a sense of that like for example there's like just taking a single sentence from dostoyevsky and like there's a lot of them you could you co..."

"word and then of course the word takes new meaning as you create it you know from its parts and that meaning then gets augmented and two synonyms that that sort of have different roots will actually h..."

"properties of these communication networks where every single you know if you look at the network of our cells and how they're communicating with each other every cell has its own code this code is mo..."

"evoke that same set of reactions to a french person than to a russian person because of the baggage of the culture that we grew up in yeah i mean there's so so basically you shouldn't find the best wo..."

"question of all meaning of life off mike you mentioned to me that you um you had your 42nd birthday 40 a second being a very special absurdly special number uh and you had to kind of um get together w..."

"or a new layer of a computer system so that's at the level of you know big questions there's another aspect of gratitude of basically what i you know what i like to say is during this pandemic i've ba..."

"so i've written this little sort of prayer for my kids to say at bedtime every night where they basically say thank you god for all you have given me and give me the strength to give unto others with ..."

"we learn through life to become truly human adults but there's something so beautiful about seeing that progression between them the complexity of the language growing as more neural connections are f..."

"research so conveying of knowledge conveying this lateral transfer that i was talking about at the very beginning of sort of human humanity and sort of the sharing of information all of that has gotte..."