Suggestion for George Church’s next company

This NYT article about Colossal amazes me for 3 reasons:

• The audacity of George Church’s initiatives
• His ability to convince other people to invest high amounts of money in his bold initiatives
• The risk tolerance of the venture capital ecosystem in the US

Initiatives like Colossal, Nebula Genomics and Warp BioDrive (just to mention two of his other companies that I follow/ed closely), stands out not only because of the relevance of the problem, the ambitious of the goals and the technical challenges of the daring solutions, but also because of the controversy of the topic:

How to deal with the power and ability to decode organisms genetic information? How to deal with the power and ability to create new species or bring them to life?

We live in a world in which science and technology moves faster than societies’ understand of this very same science and technology. While I am a firm believer that science and technology cannot wait for society to catch up, I understand that this comes at a risk, for both scientists, entrepreneurs and society itself. Societal-imposed moratorium on nuclear energy has had a significant impact in the way the global energy matrix is constituted today, with consequences to the environment. The growing evidence that COVID19 escaped from a laboratory in China may reflect in scientists ability to pursue risk dangerous endeavours such as virus enhancement.

While I believe it is important for scientists to take the time to properly communicate society of what they are doing, without a mechanism for society to influence in the destiny of research, this communication looses relevance.

Blockchains offers today, through different consensus mechanisms, ways to make the complex governance around this complicated topics feasible. I particularly like the concept of ‘Liquid democracy‘.

Maybe next George Church company should be on this kind of ‘social technology’.