Generative Optogenetics

Interesting finds, did you pull those from memory or do you have a search method?

Oh it's much older than 8 years... here is one such proposal from 2011: https://groups.google.com/g/enzymaticsynthesis/c/6GZT8zFNOfo...

I myself was bitten by a radioactive grad student in 2008 that was obsessed with this idea at the time, and have since learned that almost every major household name lab PI has thought about this in one form or another.

> Sometimes DARPA is real slow on identifying good ideas. (more than 8 years later today...) better late than never.

Perhaps they noticed a development (breakthrough?) in an adjacent field that makes this now more interesting and/or practical/feasible.

"However, current methods for creating these molecules de novo face significant limitations in terms of scale, complexity, and environmental impact. "

Do you have a source for this? Interested in reading more.

Unless it’s your personal summary, in which case curious what sources you used, or if it’s from an LLM in which case I’ll just ask it myself.

light can't get through the skull. current day optogenetics are capable of activation and readout of neurons optically.

this sounds more like some kind of crispr-light^2 where some subset of crispr like manipulations can be triggered with light control.

the cool thing about light is that it can be precisely targeted from a spatial perspective.

Best comment for this topic. Every point is true and should concern the whole world. And this lightcontrolled behaviour is not new and im pretty sure, already in use. Source? Could post a lot science papers on this topic in general now, that this tech exists, but thats not my point. Expirienced it,was not really a fun. And i know it sounds like a psychosis, but its not. Happend 2019, right before covid. Crap brought chaos to the world, people are not, or bareley aware of. Hate it to sound like a lunatic conspiracy theorist, but its on the topic it self. Who would believe you? Is there a rise in attacks, where the attacker heard voices? Or was somehow conected? Voices from Police, military, any alleged officials? Lazy way for induced voice, is pretending to be god... I bet the officials were more common recently. Sometimes people are aware of whats happening, when it happens.

Greetings from a ti with special interrests.

Hi Michael,

Really cool of you to be willing to engage with people on this stuff, thanks. I would ask if there would be pathways or initiatives for smaller biotech research teams or med startups to collaborate with DARPA GO for their various goals? Seems like the possibilities are endless. In your mind, could GO one day be used to change traits in an organism that aren’t fixed at birth, but can be influenced by genes? Where do you see the impact or practical use cases for GO in 10-15 years?

Thanks again and looking forward to learning about whatever other crazy things you guys are working on!

Is there a reason why this specifically has to happen in living cells? I get that you can skip the hassle of DNA delivery, but it makes the entire thing about 1,000x more difficult - which seems to offset the posited benefits.

Not to mention that the requirements in the solicitation for speed, accuracy, and length of product are each at least an order of magnitude above what is possible in current in vitro oligo synthesis. And that's just for the intermediate, 19-month goal, much less the later ones.

Certainly, DNA synthesis has been a limiting factor in bio R&D and both the cost and turnaround time have remained fairly stagnant, especially for gene-length products and given the near-term explosion in demand from AI-designed proteins.

I can appreciate that DARPA is a fan of moonshots but would it be advisable to break this into sub-projects such as generally improving DNA+gene synthesis, developing new methods for cell transfection, error correction, in vivo assembly, etc? Focusing on in vivo and light-directed only (and together) might not be the best path forward, though it certainly sounds sci-fi.