This TED Talk features genome writer Dan Gibson recorded live at TED 2018.

All right, let me tell you about building synthetic cells and printing life.

But first, let me tell you a quick story.

On March 31st, 2013, my team and I received an email from an international health organization,

alerting us that two men died in China shortly after contracting H7 and 9 bird flu.

There are fears of a global pandemic as the virus started rapidly moving across China.

Although methods existed to produce a flu vaccine and stop the disease from spreading,

at best it would not be available for at least six months. This is because a slow,

antiquated flu vaccine manufacturing process developed over 70 years ago was the only option.

The virus would need to be isolated from infected patients, packaged up,

and then sent to a facility where scientists would inject the virus into chicken eggs

and incubate those chicken eggs for several weeks

in order to prepare the virus for the start of a multi-step,

multi-month flu vaccine manufacturing process.

My team and I received this email because we had just invented a biological printer,

which would allow for the flu vaccine instructions to be instantly downloaded from the Internet and printed,

drastically speeding up the way in which

flu vaccines are made and potentially saving thousands of lives. The biological printer

leverages our ability to read and write DNA and starts to bring into focus what we like to call

biological teleportation.

I am a biologist and an engineer who builds stuff out of DNA.

Believe it or not, one of my favorite things to do is to take DNA apart and put it back together

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