Speaker 1: Welcome to the Sentient Code, where intelligence is engineered, autonomy
Speaker 1: is emerging, and a line between human and machine grows thinner.
Speaker 1: Each episode, we decode the algorithms, explore the robotics, and
Speaker 1: examine the ideas shaping the future of artificial minds.
Speaker 2: For all of human history, humanity has treated matter like
Speaker 2: a sculptor treats clay. You know, you find a material
Speaker 2: in the earth, you extract it, and you just force
Speaker 2: it into the shapes you want entirely from the outside.
Speaker 3: It's a very top down approach exactly.
Speaker 2: I mean, you chisel stone, you heat and hammer iron,
Speaker 2: you melt and mold plastic. The physical material itself is
Speaker 2: essentially dumb.
Speaker 3: It's passive.
Speaker 2: It just sits there, an inert substance, waiting for you
Speaker 2: to impose your will onto it. But right now there
Speaker 2: is this profound mechanical shift happening in material science. We're
Speaker 2: no longer just obs deserving or brute forcing matter.
Speaker 3: No, we're really not.
Speaker 2: We're actually designing it from the ground up to behave
Speaker 2: with absolute intentional precision at the bare molecular level. So
Speaker 2: our mission for this deep dive today is to figure
Speaker 2: out exactly how scientists are turning passive physical matter into
Speaker 2: programmable software, moving from a.
Speaker 3: World where we build things to a world where things
Speaker 3: build themselves exactly.
Speaker 2: And I think to really grasp the physics of this,
Speaker 2: we need to contrast it with how traditional chemistry is
Speaker 2: operated for centuries. Because traditional chemistry, I mean, even at
Speaker 2: its most advanced, like synthesizing complex pharmaceuticals, it's still essentially
Speaker 2: a game of macroscopic manipulation.
Speaker 3: It is. It relies heavily on manipulating external conditions to
Speaker 3: force a statistical outcome. Right, if you want a reaction
Speaker 3: to happen, you raise the temperature to increase the kinetic energy,
Speaker 3: or you increase the.
Speaker 2: Pressure, or you drop in a catalyst.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you add a heavy metal catalyst to lower the
Speaker 3: activation energy. You are violently shoving molecules together in a
Speaker 3: giant vat and just relying on the brute force of
Speaker 3: probability to get the chemical bonds you want.
Speaker 2: It's chaotic, highly chaotic.
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly indirect way of guiding outcomes.
Speaker 2: So traditional chemistry is sort of like trying to herd
Speaker 2: a massive flock of sheep by building rigid fences, waving
Speaker 2: your arms and shouting.
Speaker 3: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 2: You're just creating external boundaries and hoping this sheer chaotic
Speaker 2: energy pushes the flock generally where you want it to go.
Speaker 2: But programmable chemistry, on the other hand, is like breeding
Speaker 2: a new type of sheep that possesses an instinctual genetic
Speaker 2: drive to always stand exactly three feet apart from its
Speaker 2: neighbor and form a perfect geometric circle. Yes, you don't
Speaker 2: need the fences anymore because the behavior is baked right
Speaker 2: into the unit itself.
Speaker 3: That perfectly captures the shift in thermodynamics we're seeing. You're
Speaker 3: moving the burden of organization from the outside environment, the
Speaker 3: macroscopic fences, like you said, to the inside of the
Speaker 3: entity itself, into the chemistry. Right into the chemistry ammable chemistry.
Speaker 3: The molecules possess the architectural instructions embedded directly into their
Speaker 3: physical geometry. We are no longer forcing systems into desired
Speaker 3: outcomes through sheer heat and pressure, or coding behaviors, exactly
Speaker 3: encoding behaviors through localized chemical affinities. Simple instructions at the
Speaker 3: nanoscale when they combine, produce highly complex, deterministic behaviors at
Speaker 3: the macroscale.
Speaker 2: Well, I think when you use the word instructions or code,
Speaker 2: most people immediately visualize a computer screen. They think of
Speaker 2: Python or C plus plus rs or binary ones and
Speaker 2: zeros sitting on a silicon hard drive. So we really
Speaker 2: have to clarify what code means when we're talking about
Speaker 2: physical matter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because the software of this matter is not written
Speaker 3: in lines of texts. It's written using physical chemical bonds,
Speaker 3: electrostatic forces, and spatial configurations. The specific angles at which
Speaker 3: atoms connect, the geometric shapes they form, the placement of
Speaker 3: a positive charge here and a negative charge there. That
Speaker 3: geometry is the that stereochemistry is the code. It's all
Speaker 3: about steric hindrance and Vanderwohl's forces. The physical shape of
Speaker 3: the molecule and its chemical affinity act as the instruction set.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's anchor that to something physical for the listener.
Speaker 2: Look at the coffee cup on your desk right now.
Speaker 2: To you, it's a solid, dumb object, just a mug,
Speaker 2: just a mug. But at the molecular level, it's this chaotic,
Speaker 2: vibrating lattice of atoms. Imagine if you could write a
Speaker 2: line of structural code that told those specific atoms to
Speaker 2: shift their bonds slightly, altering the thermal conductivity of.
Speaker 3: The ceramic, so the cup insulates the coffee better as
Speaker 3: it cools down.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the geometry dictates the function.
Speaker 3: And while the idea of writing code into molecular bonds
Speaker 3: to tell matter how to behave sounds like, you know,
Speaker 3: speculative science fiction engineering, we actually have a highly successful,
Speaker 3: fully functioning prototype of this technology, he do. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: it's been running efficiently for about four billion years biology biology. Yeah,
Speaker 3: long before material scientists conceived of programmable matter, biology had
Speaker 3: already solved the thermodynamic problems of self assembly and molecular coding,
Speaker 3: which is wild.
Speaker 2: To think about. Yeah, because biological DNA is almost universally
Speaker 2: taught as genetic.
Speaker 3: Storage, right, like an archive.
Speaker 2: Like an archive. Yeah, we think of it as a
Speaker 2: passive biological hard drive sitting in the nucleus holding the
Speaker 2: blueprints for eye color or height. But DNA is actually
Speaker 2: a fully programmable, dynamic physical system.
Speaker 3: It doesn't just sit there storing data like a dusty book.
Speaker 2: No, it's a physical mechanism that actively directs the assembly
Speaker 2: and behavior of living organisms through its structural geometry.
Speaker 3: And that's why scientists have stopped looking at biological DNA
Speaker 3: merely as a way to understand genetics and heredity. They
Speaker 3: are actively hijacking DNA's physical properties to use it as
Speaker 3: an engineering building material.
Speaker 2: Because it's so predictable, right.
Speaker 3: Incredibly predictable. What makes DNA so powerful as a structural
Speaker 3: building blog is the Watson Crick pairing rules. The ATC
Speaker 3: and G exactly the way the base adenine always binds
Speaker 3: with thymine and cytosine always binds with guanine. It creates
Speaker 3: an incredibly reliable interlocking foundation. It is a literal physical
Speaker 3: language of attraction.
Speaker 2: And because of those strict pairing rules, if you synthesize
Speaker 2: a specific sequence of ATCNG, you know exactly what complementary
Speaker 2: sequence it will aggressively seek out and bind.
Speaker 3: Two, you're creating incredibly specific puzzle pieces.
Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, let me just I'm struggling to visualize
Speaker 2: the actual physical process here. Okay, if you just throw
Speaker 2: a billion custom design strands of DNA into a beaker
Speaker 2: of water, wouldn't they just constantly crash into each other
Speaker 2: and form a massive, useless, tangled knot of genetic spaghetti.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you just dump them in probably.
Speaker 2: So how does it actually form a clean, intentional shape.
Speaker 3: Well, that gets into the mechanics of what we call
Speaker 3: DNA or agami.
Speaker 2: Or agami like the paper folding.
Speaker 3: Exactly like that, but at the nanoscale. It was pioneered
Speaker 3: by researchers like Paul Rothaman. You don't just throw throw
Speaker 3: them in at room temperature. You use thermal cycling.
Speaker 2: Okay, so temperature control.
Speaker 3: Right, You take a very long, single scaffold strand of DNA,
Speaker 3: which is often borrowed from a harmless virus actually wow,
Speaker 3: and you mix it with hundreds of shorter, custom synthesized
Speaker 3: staple strands. Then you heat the mixture up to near boiling.
Speaker 2: So you're adding kinetic energy to break everything apart.
Speaker 3: Right at that high temperature, the thermal energy is so
Speaker 3: high that no bonds can form. The strands are just
Speaker 3: wildly vibrating and whipping around.
Speaker 2: Just total chaos, total chaos.
Speaker 3: But then you slowly meticulously cool the liquid down. This
Speaker 3: process is called a kneeling.
Speaker 2: Kneeling Okay.
Speaker 3: As the temperature drops, the molecules lose kinetic energy and
Speaker 3: they start looking for their most thermodynamically stable state.
Speaker 2: The lowest energy state.
Speaker 3: Exactly. And the short staple strands are programmed with sequences
Speaker 3: that perfectly match two distant parts of the long scaffold strand.
Speaker 3: As they bind, they physically pinch the long strand, folding it.
Speaker 2: Oh. I see. They act like molecular.
Speaker 3: Clamps, exactly like clamps. Because point A on the staple
Speaker 3: is programmed to bind with point B on the scaffold,
Speaker 3: and point C binds with point D, the scaffold strand
Speaker 3: naturally bends and folds to make those connections.
Speaker 2: And it just forces the shape.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thermal cooling allows the strands to detach
Speaker 3: and reattach if they make a mistake. Constantly seeking the
Speaker 3: perfect intended fit. You've essentially programmed the geometry of the
Speaker 3: final structure into the chemistry of the initial strands.
Speaker 2: And Rothaman literally used this to fold DNA into nanoscale
Speaker 2: smiley faces.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, smiley faces stars maps of the Americas, just.
Speaker 2: To prove that he had absolute geometric control exactly. And
Speaker 2: this is happening entirely without microscopic tweezers. You just synthesize
Speaker 2: the liquid heat, it cool it, and the molecules follow
Speaker 2: their internal thermodynamic code to fold themselves.
Speaker 3: The process is meticulously guided by the encoded information within
Speaker 3: the molecules themselves. I mean, you are building structures at
Speaker 3: a scale nanometers across that would be absolutely impossible to
Speaker 3: construct using any conventional top down manufacturing method like photolithography
Speaker 3: or milling.
Speaker 2: But DNA has limitations. Right, Oh, definitely, biology prove the
Speaker 2: mechanism works. But DNA evolved to function inside a very
Speaker 2: specific watery, temperature controlled environment, the living cell.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If we want to build bridges or car parts or
Speaker 2: industrial sensors out of programmable matter, we can't build them
Speaker 2: out of fragile genetic material that degrades in sunlight.
Speaker 3: No, you definitely can't, which is why the field is
Speaker 3: rapidly moving beyond biological molecules into purely synthetic materials. We
Speaker 3: are taking the theoretical lessons learned from DNA, the idea
Speaker 3: of embedding structural code into a polymer chain and applying
Speaker 3: them to custom built synthetic plastics and polymers.
Speaker 2: So taking the concept but upgrading the hardware.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yes, we can now design synthetic block cop polymers
Speaker 3: with highly specific sequences, completely independent of biological constraints.
Speaker 2: And these synthetic materials are engineered from the ground up
Speaker 2: to fold, interact, and respond to environmental stimuli in strictly
Speaker 2: controlled ways. Right, we're talking about polymers that react to
Speaker 2: specific wavelengths of light, to precise temperature shifts, or to
Speaker 2: the presence of particular chemical gradients, and.
Speaker 3: The mechanisms behind this are just fascinating. Take photo responsive polymers,
Speaker 3: for instance, you can synthesize a material containing molecules called
Speaker 3: azobenzenes azobenzines. Right, when you hit an azobenzene molecule with
Speaker 3: ultraviolet light, it absorbs a photon and instantly undergoes a
Speaker 3: conformational change. It physically bends. Wow, it isomerizes from a
Speaker 3: straight shape to a bent shape. And when you remove
Speaker 3: the light or apply a different wavelength, it snaps back.
Speaker 2: So the light isn't just heating it up. The light
Speaker 2: is triggering an actual mechanical gear shift at the nanoscale.
Speaker 3: Yes, and if you string millions of these molecules together
Speaker 3: into a polymer chain, that microscopic bending cascades into a
Speaker 3: macroscopic change. You have a synthetic material designed to instantly
Speaker 3: become more rigid or to contract like an artificial muscle.
Speaker 3: The moment it is exposed to u V.
Speaker 2: Light that is insane.
Speaker 3: Or consider thermore responsive polymers that undergo a phase transition
Speaker 3: at a specific temperature. They shift instantly from being hydrophilic
Speaker 3: which means water loving, to hydrophobic, repelling water.
Speaker 2: And the behavior isn't because someone is outside flipping a
Speaker 2: mechanical switch or adding a dye. The physical reaction is
Speaker 2: built directly into the material's structural code. Exactly, the material
Speaker 2: itself is making a binary choice based on its environment.
Speaker 3: And this naturally leads us deeper into the physics of
Speaker 3: self assembly, because when you are dealing with building complex
Speaker 3: machines at the nanoscale, the physical tools we rely on
Speaker 3: in the macro world completely break down.
Speaker 2: The physics just don't work the same way, not at all.
Speaker 2: You can't use microscopic tweezers to build a complex system
Speaker 2: atom by atom. At that scale, everything is subjected to
Speaker 2: Brownie in motion.
Speaker 3: Yes, the constant shaking right.
Speaker 2: Water molecules are constantly bombarding your materials, shaking them violently.
Speaker 2: The scale is overwhelmingly small and the environment is just
Speaker 2: pure chaos. If you want a complex functional structure at
Speaker 2: the nanoscale, you can't build it You have to design
Speaker 2: the pieces so that they want to build themselves exactly.
Speaker 3: Self assembly actively leverages that chaotic Brownian motion rather than
Speaker 3: fighting it. You aren't building a structure piece by piece
Speaker 3: like a bricklayer. The pieces themselves possess the chemical knowledge
Speaker 3: of how to aggregate.
Speaker 2: They know where they belong.
Speaker 3: Right, you provide the environment and the programmed interactions, the
Speaker 3: carefully balanced hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions, the electrostatic charges, they
Speaker 3: just take over. The constant shaking of the environment actually
Speaker 3: helps the pieces jostle around until they lock into their
Speaker 3: lowest energy state.
Speaker 2: Which you have cleverly designed to be the exact structure
Speaker 2: you want exactly, Like putting a bunch of magnetic legos
Speaker 2: in a washing machine, right and knowing that because of
Speaker 2: the specific placement of the positive and negative magnets on
Speaker 2: each brick, after ten minutes of tumbling, you will always
Speaker 2: pull out a perfectly formed miniature castle.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect way to visualize it. The engineering
Speaker 3: challenge is designing those initial energetic interactions perfectly so that
Speaker 3: the local castle structure emerges reliably every single time without
Speaker 3: getting trapped in a flawed intermediate shape.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's pull this out of a lab and into
Speaker 2: the real world. Sure, if materials can truly self assemble
Speaker 2: and actively respond to stimuli through conformational changes, how does
Speaker 2: this actually disrupt industries? I feel like we should look
Speaker 2: at medicine first, because the current paradigm of treating disease
Speaker 2: is incredibly blunt.
Speaker 3: It is very blunt. Traditional medical treatments, specifically oncology and chemotherapy,
Speaker 3: rely on flooding the entire biological system with a highly
Speaker 3: toxic molecule. You saturate the bloodstream, and rely on the
Speaker 3: fact that cancer cells metabolize and divide faster than healthy cells,
Speaker 3: meaning they will hopefully absorb more of the poison before
Speaker 3: the healthy cells die. It is systemic toxicity.
Speaker 2: So traditional chemo is sort of like trying to weed
Speaker 2: a fragile arden with the flamethrower. Basically, yes, scorching the
Speaker 2: earth and hoping the weeds die slightly faster than the tomatoes.
Speaker 3: That's a grim but accurate way to put it.
Speaker 2: But programmable medicine that's entirely different. That is like releasing
Speaker 2: a swarm of robotic beetles that are chemically programmed to
Speaker 2: only eat the leaves of a specific toxic plant completely
Speaker 2: ignoring everything else.
Speaker 3: And the mechanism that enables that swarm behavior is molecular recognition.
Speaker 3: With programmable molecules, you can synthesize a nanoscale carrier like
Speaker 3: a little shell exactly, perhaps a hollow shell made of
Speaker 3: self assembling polymers, and you trap the toxic chemotherapy drug
Speaker 3: inside it. Now, the outside of this shell is covered
Speaker 3: in specific chemical ligands or optamers. These are targeting sequences, so.
Speaker 2: They are essentially physical keys looking for a very specific lock.
Speaker 3: Exactly. As this nanocarrier circulates through the bloodstream, it constantly
Speaker 3: bumps into healthy liver cells, heart cells, and lung cells.
Speaker 3: But because those cells don't have the core spawning lock,
Speaker 3: the carrier just bounces off harmlessly.
Speaker 2: It just ignores them.
Speaker 3: Right. However, a cancer cell often over expresses unique protein
Speaker 3: signatures on its surface, tumor specific antigens. When the nanocarrier
Speaker 3: bumps into the cancer cell, the ligands on its surface
Speaker 3: perfectly bind to those unique proteins.
Speaker 2: It's checking molecular id badges.
Speaker 3: But binding isn't enough, Oh really no, Because we can
Speaker 3: program the material to require multiple inputs before it releases
Speaker 3: the payload. We can engineer the polymer shell so that
Speaker 3: it remains tightly sealed at the normal pH of blood,
Speaker 3: which is around seven point four. Okay, but the micro
Speaker 3: environment immediately surrounding a fast growing tumor is highly acidic because.
Speaker 2: Of how tumors metabolize glucose. So you program a polymer
Speaker 2: to undergo a structural collapse only when it experiences a
Speaker 2: pH of SA six point five.
Speaker 3: Yes, the molecule requires the presence of the cancer protein
Speaker 3: to bind, and then it requires the acidic pH to
Speaker 3: break open. Only when both of those logical conditions of
Speaker 3: its programming are satisfied does the shell degrade and deploy
Speaker 3: the highly toxic drug directly into the tumor cell. That's incredible,
Speaker 3: And once the drug is delivered, the polymer shell is
Speaker 3: designed to safely hydrolyze. It just breaks down into harmless
Speaker 3: byproducts that the kidneys filter out.
Speaker 2: You are turning the drug from a passive chemical that
Speaker 2: just poisons whatever it touches into an active decision making
Speaker 2: agent that evaluates its environment before deploying.
Speaker 3: The precision is staggering.
Speaker 2: It really is. And if we apply that same logic
Speaker 2: to manufacturing and energy, the implications are just as disruptive.
Speaker 2: We're looking at the possibility of fundamentally changing how physical
Speaker 2: objects wear down and break.
Speaker 3: Absolutely because in current macroscopic manufacturing processes are mostly subtractive
Speaker 3: or additive in very energy intensive ways. You cut away material,
Speaker 3: which generates a massive waste, or you melt and cast
Speaker 3: material under extreme heat. If we move toward self assembling material,
Speaker 3: you eliminate those crude fabrication steps. You synthesize the raw
Speaker 3: programmed precursors, and the material forms exactly the required internal
Speaker 3: architecture with minimal to no waste.
Speaker 2: I mean, think about the static objects you interact with constantly.
Speaker 2: A concrete bridge, the casing of your phone, the paint
Speaker 2: on your car. They are all caught in a one
Speaker 2: way street.
Speaker 3: Of entropy, always breaking down exactly.
Speaker 2: From the moment they are manufactured. They slowly degrade, accumulate microfractures,
Speaker 2: and eventually fail. Imagine if those materials were designed with
Speaker 2: dynamic reversible chemical.
Speaker 3: Bonds you're referring to intrinsic self healing materials. Instead of
Speaker 3: using traditional permanent covalent bonds that snap under stress and
Speaker 3: stay broken, you build the material using dynamic covalent chemistry
Speaker 3: or supermolecular networks. These are networks that can continuously break
Speaker 3: and reform their crosslingks.
Speaker 2: So if you get a scratch on your car door,
Speaker 2: the kinetic energy of the impact breaks the local bonds, right,
Speaker 2: But because the material is programmed to seek its low
Speaker 2: energy state and those broken bonds are highly reactive, the
Speaker 2: molecular coat of the paint essentially initiates a sequence to
Speaker 2: rebind across the gap.
Speaker 3: Yes, the polymer chain slowly diffuse across the scratch and
Speaker 3: tangle back together.
Speaker 2: So the scratch literally heals itself just sitting in the
Speaker 2: driveway to.
Speaker 3: Sit in there. Yeah. And we also see this massive
Speaker 3: potential in the energy sector, specifically regarding efficiency and adaptation.
Speaker 3: Well like solar panels exactly, our current energy capture technologies
Speaker 3: are highly rigid. A silicon solar panel sits on a roof.
Speaker 3: It operates optimally at a very specific temperature and a
Speaker 3: specific angle of light, but.
Speaker 2: The environment is constantly changing. The sun moves, clouds, roll
Speaker 2: in the temperature spikes.
Speaker 3: If we integrate adaptive programmable polymers into the photovoltaic matrix,
Speaker 3: the material could autonomously optimize itself. We can have coatings
Speaker 3: that dynamically reconfigure their surface nanostructure to alter their refractive
Speaker 3: index throughout.
Speaker 2: The day to maximize light absorption depending on the angle
Speaker 2: of the income photons exactly.
Speaker 3: Or think about battery technology. The biggest issue with lithium
Speaker 3: ion cells is that repeated charging cycles cause physical microfractures
Speaker 3: in the electrodes.
Speaker 2: Right, which eventually kills the battery's capacity. The battery essentially
Speaker 2: crushes itself from the inside out every time you charge.
Speaker 3: It, exactly. But if we build the internal separators and
Speaker 3: electrodes out of programmable self healing polymers, the battery could
Speaker 3: continuously repair those microfractures in real time. Wow, the material
Speaker 3: senses the mechanical stress and autonomously patches the structural defect,
Speaker 3: extending the life span of the energy storage system exponentially.
Speaker 2: But you know, to pull back and look at the
Speaker 2: underlying logic of all these examples. For a polymer shell
Speaker 2: to quote unquote know it has found a cancer cell,
Speaker 2: or for a solar panel coding to know it needs
Speaker 2: to alter its refractive index, or.
Speaker 3: For a battery to trigger a.
Speaker 2: Repair exactly, the material has to process information. It's quite
Speaker 2: little and making a choice based on environmental inputs, and
Speaker 2: that brings us I think the most conceptually difficult part
Speaker 2: of this.
Speaker 3: Shift molecular computation. Molecular computation, Yeah, it requires a complete
Speaker 3: reimagining of what computation actually is. We are heavily biased
Speaker 3: toward electronic computation. We think of logic as electricity flowing
Speaker 3: through silicon pathways, governed by physical transistors acting as gits.
Speaker 2: Right, a motherboard copper traces electrons, That is a computer. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so how does a beaker full of liquid chemicals perform
Speaker 2: logic operations?
Speaker 3: Well, a logic gait fundamentally is just a system that
Speaker 3: takes one or more inputs, processes them according to a rule,
Speaker 3: and produces a definitive output. An electronic transistor does this
Speaker 3: by blocking or allowing the flow of electrons, But molecules
Speaker 3: can do this by blocking or allowing chemical reactions. Interesting
Speaker 3: in programmable chemistry, the molecules themselves perform the computations through
Speaker 3: their physical interactions. We can design chemical reaction networks to
Speaker 3: flawlessly mimic the exact same boollion logic operations.
Speaker 2: Your laptop uses like eighty gas or gates.
Speaker 3: Sandy gates or gates, not gates all of them.
Speaker 2: Let's actually map the physics of an A and D
Speaker 2: gate for the listener, because I think this is crucial.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: In a silicon computer, an A and D gate means
Speaker 2: if electrical signal A is present A and D electrical
Speaker 2: signal B is present, then send electrical signal C. Right.
Speaker 2: How do molecules physically perform that exact same map.
Speaker 3: We use a mechanism called a loft street or allosteric
Speaker 3: regulation lost. Right, Imagine three different custom designed molecules in
Speaker 3: a solution. Let's call them input A, input B, and
Speaker 3: the processing unit molecule C. Molecule C is designed with
Speaker 3: a very specific tightly folded geometry. In its default state,
Speaker 3: its active site, the part that can create the output reaction,
Speaker 3: is hidden hysterically injured. Exactly, it physically cannot react with
Speaker 3: anything in the environment because the active site is buried
Speaker 3: inside the folded structure.
Speaker 2: It's locked from the inside.
Speaker 3: It's locked now. Molecule C has two specific binding pockets
Speaker 3: on its exterior. If on the input A is present
Speaker 3: in the liquid, it binds to the first pocket. The
Speaker 3: molecule shifts slightly, but the active site remains hidden. No output.
Speaker 3: If only input B is present, it binds to the
Speaker 3: second pocket. Another slight shift, but still.
Speaker 2: No output, so the logic gate remains closed.
Speaker 3: But if input A and input B are present simultaneously,
Speaker 3: they both bind to the exterior pockets. The combined mechanical
Speaker 3: stress of both inputs binding causes a massive conformational change
Speaker 3: in molecule See.
Speaker 2: It shifts shape.
Speaker 3: It drastically changes its physical shape, unzipping and exposing the
Speaker 3: hidden active site. Now and only now, molecule C can
Speaker 3: catalyze the final reaction.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: That chemical reaction is the computation. The system has processed
Speaker 3: two distinct pieces of information applied to logical rule and
Speaker 3: arrived at an output.
Speaker 2: Is literally doing math with physical shapes. The stereochemistry is
Speaker 2: the logic gait. You've basically replaced a silicon transistor with
Speaker 2: a shape shifting protein or polymer.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: And once you realize, you can build an A and
Speaker 2: D gate, you can build an our gate. You can
Speaker 2: string them together into complex cascades where the output of
Speaker 2: one chemical gait becomes the input for the next.
Speaker 3: Leonard Adelman actually proved this back in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 3: He used custom strands of DNA to computationally solve the
Speaker 3: traveling salesman.
Speaker 2: Problem, which is a notoriously complex mathematical routing problem.
Speaker 3: Very complex. He encoded the cities and the flight paths
Speaker 3: into DNA sequences, mix them in a test tube, and
Speaker 3: let the sheer parallel processing power of trillions of molecules
Speaker 3: naturally binding together compute the most efficient route.
Speaker 2: But I mean, why go through the trouble. My laptop
Speaker 2: can solve the traveling salesman problem in a fraction of
Speaker 2: a millisecond. Why painstakingly build a computer out of liquid
Speaker 2: polymers or DNA when silicon is so unimaginably fast.
Speaker 3: Because of the environment. Silicon computers are incredibly fast, but
Speaker 3: they are incredibly fragile and entirely macroscopic.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 3: Cannot insert a microchip inside a living human cell to
Speaker 3: monitor its metabolism. You can drop a silicon motherboard into
Speaker 3: a highly corrosive, toxic chemical spill to analyze the specific
Speaker 3: isotopes present.
Speaker 2: No silicon shorts out in water.
Speaker 3: It melts under extreme heat, and it triggers immune responses
Speaker 3: in biological systems.
Speaker 2: So molecular computers are built out of the very fabric
Speaker 2: of those extreme environments.
Speaker 3: They operate natively in the wet, messy, chemical world. They
Speaker 3: open the door to processing complex information precisely in the
Speaker 3: places where electronics are entirely useless. You could inject a
Speaker 3: molecular computer into an aquifer to map heavy metal contamination
Speaker 3: molecule by molecule, processing the data locally and neutralizing the
Speaker 3: toxins on site. You are decentralizing processing power, moving it
Speaker 3: directly to the microscopic site of the.
Speaker 2: Problem, which honestly forces us to step back and look
Speaker 2: at the philosophical crater this leaves behind.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 2: If we have purely synthetic systems that can compute logic,
Speaker 2: that can make independent decisions based on their environment, that
Speaker 2: can self organize from chaos into order and self repair
Speaker 2: when damage. Yeah, we're backing ourselves into a corner. Regarding
Speaker 2: the definition of.
Speaker 3: Life, the boundary completely dissolves. This actually goes back to
Speaker 3: Erwin Schrodinger's famous nineteen forty four book What Is Life Right,
Speaker 3: where he proposed that life at its core is driven
Speaker 3: by an a periodic.
Speaker 2: Crystal, the physical structure that contains information.
Speaker 3: Exactly when you look at biology through the lens of
Speaker 3: programmable matter, life itself loses some of its mystique. It
Speaker 3: can be viewed as just a highly sophisticated, highly evolved
Speaker 3: form of programmable chemistry.
Speaker 2: Like we look at a white blood cell hunting down
Speaker 2: a bacterial pathogen, chasing it through the bloodstream, and it
Speaker 2: looks like a conscious living action. It looks like agency.
Speaker 2: It does look like that, but fundamentally we know it
Speaker 2: is a complex cascade of chemical logic gaits opening and closing.
Speaker 2: It's following a gradient of chemical inputs executing in internal code.
Speaker 3: Exactly. A biological cell is just a localized pocket of
Speaker 3: billions of molecules interacting according to complex evolutionary rules to
Speaker 3: reduce emergent behavior that we intuitively label as living. By
Speaker 3: creating purely synthetic, engineered systems that exhibit these exact same properties,
Speaker 3: self organization, adaptation to stimuli, rudimentary computational decision making, scientists
Speaker 3: are proving that the mechanics of life are not exclusive
Speaker 3: to biology.
Speaker 2: It feels like we are scripping away the magic of
Speaker 2: biology and replacing it with pure thermodynamics and engineering. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in a way, which is awe inspiring because it means
Speaker 2: we can build with it. Yeah, But it also means
Speaker 2: that the line between a biological, living organism and a
Speaker 2: highly programmed piece of synthetic plastic is getting dangerously thin.
Speaker 3: It's very thin.
Speaker 2: Are we just redefining life to make our engineering sound cooler,
Speaker 2: or are these synthetic systems actually approaching something fundamentally alive.
Speaker 3: It is a profound philosophical shift in how we categorize
Speaker 3: the universe. We have historically separated matter into the animate
Speaker 3: and the inanimate, the living and the dead. But programmable
Speaker 3: material exist in a gray zone. They challenge our understanding
Speaker 3: of matter itself. Matter is no longer a passive substance.
Speaker 3: It is an active participant in processes that closely resemble
Speaker 3: thought and decision making. We are proving that agency, the
Speaker 3: ability to react and adapt, is just a function of
Speaker 3: structural complexity.
Speaker 2: But as incredible and world changing as all of this sounds,
Speaker 2: we do need to ground this in the immediate reality. Definitely,
Speaker 2: we aren't quite living in this fully programmable, self assembling
Speaker 2: utopia yet. I mean, I still have to charge my
Speaker 2: phone and my car still get scratched. Designing matter from
Speaker 2: the ground up comes with massive fundamental engineering hurdles. Huge
Speaker 2: hurdles and the biggest one being the challenge of nonlinear complexity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is the core difficulty of this entire endeavor,
Speaker 3: and it really comes down to the battle between kinetics
Speaker 3: and thermodynamics. Okay, designing these molecular systems to behave predictably
Speaker 3: in complex, messy, real world environments is agonizingly difficult. In
Speaker 3: a tightly controlled sterile lab experiment with cure distilled water
Speaker 3: and exact temperature controls, you can make a targeted nanocarrier
Speaker 3: work flawlessly, sure, But the real world, the human bloodstream,
Speaker 3: the ocean, an industrial vat is full of fluctuating temperatures,
Speaker 3: chaotic fluid dynamics, impurities, and unexpected chemical interactions, and.
Speaker 2: Molecular interactions are highly nonlinear. If a single line of
Speaker 2: code in the smartphone app is written wrong, the app crashes,
Speaker 2: It throws an error code. It's annoying, but the errors
Speaker 2: contained the phone doesn't turn into a toaster. But if
Speaker 2: a chemical bond goes rogue in a self assembling material,
Speaker 2: the entire architecture can mutate.
Speaker 3: Because of the nonlinearity, A tiny change doesn't just create
Speaker 3: a proportional error, it can cascade into a completely different
Speaker 3: physical outcome. A slight shift in the ambient pH or
Speaker 3: the presence of a stray enzyme might alter the binding
Speaker 3: affinity of your polymer just enough that instead of assembling
Speaker 3: into a neat, hollow shell, the molecules fold inside out,
Speaker 3: or they actgate into a massive, useless clump.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to choreograph an intricate ballet for a
Speaker 2: trillion microscopic dancers who are all blindfolded, and if one
Speaker 2: dancer trips, the kinetic energy knocks over the entire continent.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. And this nonlinearity
Speaker 3: makes the physical scaling of these systems a massive bottleneck.
Speaker 3: The unpredictability scales exponentially as you increase the volume. Synthesizing
Speaker 3: a microgram of a programmable polymer in a microphlitic chip
Speaker 3: is one thing. Producing a ton of it in a
Speaker 3: giant industrial vat where the temperature at the center of
Speaker 3: the vat is slightly different than the temperature near the
Speaker 3: cooling jacket, introduces thermodynamic gradients that completely ruin the self
Speaker 3: assembly process.
Speaker 2: You can't just scale up the beaker to a swimming
Speaker 2: pool now, you really can't. The physics of mass transfer
Speaker 2: and heat dissipation completely change and fixing that scaling issue
Speaker 2: requires a completely new paradigm of interdisciplinary science.
Speaker 3: It does. Progress in programmable matter cannot happen in a
Speaker 3: tradition academic silo. It requires a seamless, almost unnatural convergence
Speaker 3: of fields because it touches everything exactly. You need organic
Speaker 3: chemists who inherently think like software engineers. You need computer
Speaker 3: scientists who deeply understand quantum thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. We
Speaker 3: are having to invent new physical tools just to observe
Speaker 3: these systems operating in real time, let alone manipulate them.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Our theoretical vision of what these molecules can do is
Speaker 3: currently running slightly ahead of our practical tool set to
Speaker 3: reliably manufacture them.
Speaker 2: And beyond the sheer technical hurdles of scaling, there is
Speaker 2: the undeniable engineering challenge of control and safety. Oh absolutely,
Speaker 2: When you begin manufacturing synthetic materials that have the physical
Speaker 2: capacity to adapt to environments, process local information, and potentially
Speaker 2: self catalyze or self replicate, you're introducing a completely new
Speaker 2: mechanical risk vector into the physical world.
Speaker 3: The control problem is paramount I mean, how do you
Speaker 3: engineer reliable constraints into materials that have their own internal
Speaker 3: programmatic agency. A self assembling polymer system designed to process
Speaker 3: toxins and an oil spill is operating in a highly
Speaker 3: chaotic environment. If it encounters a novel chemical stressor in
Speaker 3: the ocean that we didn't model in the lab, its
Speaker 3: dynamic bonds might reconfigure in ways that alter its primary function.
Speaker 2: It's the mechanical reality of unintended consequences. If a synthetic
Speaker 2: polymer begins catalyzing reactions out of control, you can't just
Speaker 2: hit a macroscopic power button to turn it off. No,
Speaker 2: it doesn't plug into the wall. The process is entirely
Speaker 2: localized in chemical.
Speaker 3: Which is why a massive portion of the current engineering
Speaker 3: effort is focused purely on designing robust containment mechanisms and
Speaker 3: physical kill switches.
Speaker 2: How do you put a kill switch on a molecule?
Speaker 3: By engineering synthetic oxotrophy osodrophy? You design the self assembling
Speaker 3: material so that its structural integrity is entirely dependent on
Speaker 3: a highly specific, rare synthetic molecule that does not exist
Speaker 3: in nature. You must constantly feed the system this artificial
Speaker 3: stabilizer oh ICEE.
Speaker 2: So if the material escapes the controlled environment or starts
Speaker 2: replicating unpredictably. It rapidly exhausts its local supply of the
Speaker 2: stabilizer exactly and without it, the thermodynamic bonds become unstable
Speaker 2: and the entire structure rapidly diplemerizes back into inner dust.
Speaker 3: Yes, you engine your fragility into the code. Ensuring the
Speaker 3: safe deployment of programmable chemistry requires that these containment strategies,
Speaker 3: these physical failsafs, are integrated into the molecular architecture from
Speaker 3: step one. They have to be heavily scrutinized by cross
Speaker 3: disciplinary regulatory frameworks before they ever leave a contained lap.
Speaker 2: So to bring all these threads together, the trajectory of
Speaker 2: the materials science is undeniably clear. The hard historical lines
Speaker 2: we've drawn for centuries between chemistry, biology, and computer science
Speaker 2: are blurring entirely.
Speaker 3: They're merging.
Speaker 2: They're merging into a single unified discipline of programmatic molecular design.
Speaker 2: Information and physical matter are becoming so deeply intertwined that
Speaker 2: you can barely separate the two concepts anymore. We are
Speaker 2: completing the shift from a world of macroscopic external control,
Speaker 2: beating the dumb clay into shape, to a world of
Speaker 2: microscopic internal instruction where the clay structurally knows what it
Speaker 2: wants to be.
Speaker 3: It is a complete paradigm shift in our relationship with
Speaker 3: the physical universe. It moves our focus from static, dead
Speaker 3: objects to dynamic responsive systems. We are no longer limited
Speaker 3: by what materials inherently are based on their extraction from
Speaker 3: the Earth. We're only limited by what we can mathematically
Speaker 3: program them to do. We are opening up a space
Speaker 3: of engineering possibilities limited only by our ability to imagine
Speaker 3: and compute new molecular architectures.
Speaker 2: And as we move into that space, I'm going to
Speaker 2: leave you with a completely new implication to Mollover. We've
Speaker 2: talked a lot today about how this technology is erasing
Speaker 2: the distinction between hardware and software. Think about your smartphone.
Speaker 2: When you want your phone to do something new, you
Speaker 2: don't throw away the physical glass in silicon and buy
Speaker 2: a new device. You connect to a network, download to
Speaker 2: software update, and the internal behavior of the phone changes.
Speaker 2: If we apply that same logic to the physical world,
Speaker 2: if the walls of your house, the frame of your car,
Speaker 2: or the fibers of your clothing are built from a
Speaker 2: highly responsive programmable polymers. We are looking at a future
Speaker 2: where tangible objects are just as adaptable as an operating system.
Speaker 2: You might not physically replace materials when they wear out
Speaker 2: or when you need them to be more rigid or
Speaker 2: more porous. You might simply expose them to a specific
Speaker 2: chemical trigger or frequency of light that uploads a new
Speaker 2: sequence of structural instructions. But if physical matter is essentially
Speaker 2: running on code, and that code can be updated remotely
Speaker 2: through environmental triggers, it introduces a terrifying new vulnerability in
Speaker 2: the digital world. Where there is code, there are exploits.
Speaker 2: If the structural integrity of your car's breaks, where the
Speaker 2: thermal insulation of your home relies on a highly specific
Speaker 2: cascade of molecular logic gates, could a malicious actor introduce
Speaker 2: a synthetic chemical virus. Could someone intentionally release a custom
Speaker 2: design molecular sequence that acts as a false input, perfectly
Speaker 2: fitting the binding sites of your programmable materials and instructing
Speaker 2: them to subtly depolymerize or change their physical state. We've
Speaker 2: spent thirty years learning how to defend our digital software
Speaker 2: from hackers. As the fabric of physical reality itself waits
Speaker 2: for its next software update. We may soon have to
Speaker 2: figure out how to put a firewall around the very
Speaker 2: atoms we live inside.