Jon F.: Welcome to Episode 169 of The Digital Life, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett.

This week on the podcast is the third in our special series of episodes put together in conjunction with our friends at the GET Conference, on the cutting edge of research science and technology.

In this week’s episode we’re exploring the topic of genomics and life extension, with some really fascinating interviews by Dirk Knemeyer with James Crowe of the Human Immunome Project and George Church of the Personal Genome Project.

Genomics and the science of life extension are inexorably tied together, whether we’re talking about slowing down or reversing the processes of aging to extend the human lifespan or future breakthroughs in gene therapy and organ replacement, which might eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans.

Let’s start with our interview with James Crowe of the Human Immunome Project.

James: I'm James Crowe. I'm the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dirk: Wonderful. Now, tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing in Vanderbilt.

James: Well, we're interested in the human immune system, in all of its complexity and contradictions. The immune system is built with the capacity to respond to any threat that comes in, and it's fascinating to think how does a single system respond immediately to such a wide diversity of threats that we encounter.

Dirk: How is the immune system similar or different to the greater ecosystem? Is the immune system like a microcosm of how the greater ecosystem in our world works, or are they different? Some of the language you used when talking about the immune system took me to the ecosystem, is why I asked that.

James: Well, there are, I think you're referring to the idea of self-organizing systems, so the threats that we face, often, the microbial threats, they themselves are communities of organisms. One of the fears, I think, that we all have is we face organisms that are constantly changing. They're hyper-variable, so HIV changes in your body every day if you're infected, or flu drifts in birds. So there's these collections of organisms that are morphing continually. What we need is our own immune system to be able to do the same thing, to move and change and adapt very rapidly. The question is, what is the genetics and what is the structure underlying that rapid adaptability in our own system?

Dirk: So our own system is in fact rapidly adaptable and you're trying to understand why and how?

James: Absolutely. The genome of people is relatively small in terms of numbers of genes. It's about 10,000, well, it's about 20,000 genes, but four orders of magnitude, and yet the microbial threats that we face are millions or billions. So we've got to figure out how to do that. The way the immune system has done it is to use modules that are combined in combinatorial fashion. So using sets of pieces and stringing them together has allowed us to make an incredible diversity of recognition elements.

Dirk: What is the nature of your research? Like, what are some of the research tools or techniques that you're using to try and figure all this out?

James: Our concept is very simple and it spins out the human genome project. Technology was developed to synthesize DNA very rapidly and cheaply, and this continues to be evolving, because now we want the genome of everybody. This is going to evolve into clinical care. So these sequencers are getting faster and cheaper. In the immune system, the challenge is there's not 20 or 25 thousand genes. Each person may have 10 to the ninth antibody genes in them or a similar number of T-cells. So the amount of sequencing that we'll need to do to get the genes sequenced in a single person is enormous, and we want to get every sequence on the planet. We're just upscaling the sequencing efforts,