(2013-11-15) Brand Gentry Biohacking

Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, joined Eri Gentry, cofounder of the BioCurious Hacker Space in Sunnyvale and a research manager at think-tank Institute for the Future, for a wide ranging conversation about “Life 2.0” at Techonomy 2013, moderated by Andrew Hessel, a distinguished researcher at AutoDesk. (BioTech)

When synthetic biology pioneer Andrew Hessel wonders aloud what the next killer biotechnology app might be, 74-year-old Stewart Brand quips, “Resurrection.” Considering that Brand, the tech industry and ’60s counterculture legend, is exploring the use of recovered DNA for repopulating the earth with hundreds of thousands of woolly mammoths, millions of passenger pigeons, and other extinguished species, bringing humans back from the dead might not be so far-fetched. Our capabilities in biology and technology are “moving from the impossible to the expensive to the routine,” he says.