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Rewriting the rules of the genetic code – Dr Wes Robertson – #1
08/11/2026
Rewriting the rules of the genetic code – Dr Wes Robertson – #1
Dr Wes Robertson is a synthetic biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was recently part of a team that fundamentally rewrote the E. coli genome. While natural life is written in an 'alphabet' with 64 letters (known as codons), his team was able to compress this down to just 57. It's the most radically refactored genome ever built. He has since set up his own group, applying the same approach to engineer therapeutic bacteria for the human gut. In this episode: why compressing the genetic code from 64 codons to 57 is a different kind of achievement to ordinary gene editing, and what new possibilities those freed-up codons give to synthetic biologists. We also get into what's fundamental to life and what turns out to be historical accident, applications in industrial chemistry and drug discovery, the idea of a genetic firewall, and whether this changes what aliens might look like. I hope you find this conversation with Wes, and the world of synthetic biology, as fascinating as I did.
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