A drunken walk through science and a back-up on a hard drive with Andrew Hessel

Titus Talks

If you want to talk about crafting a career that emulates a drunken walk through science and explore the potential of backing up your biology like we back up computers for a reboot in the future, it’s time to meet Andrew. On this episode of Titus Talks, we are super excited to sit down again with Andrew Hessel. Andrew is the co-founder and past-president of Humane Genomics - which engineers synthetic viruses to target cancer cells- and co-executive director of the Genome Project-write (GPW), an international research and development effort that lays the technical and societal foundations for responsible applications of synthetic biology. He was also an Autodesk Distinguished Researcher, where he was part of a multidisciplinary team exploring computer-aided design and manufacturing for biotechnology and nanotechnology R&D.

Today Andrew shares about his newly-released book: The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. We also discuss our shared passion for the operating system for life, the impending Cambrian explosion of biology, and the importance of looking at life as a non-zero-sum game.

His advice for our listeners?

If you are looking for mission-driven work, pay attention to the programming of life that makes synthetic biology really ignite at the intersection of biology, computation, and automation robotics. And it’s time for humanity to be victorious over viruses.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!