• Rothberg is developing a low-cost DNA sequencing machine, potentially accelerating open-source genomics and personalized medicine.  
• Nature paper reports the first library of base editors capable of precisely knocking out every protein-coding gene in the mouse mitochondrial genome, expanding mitochondrial genetics tools.  
• PNAS study shows that “decorating” chromatin with engineered factors can enhance CRISPR-Cas9 editing efficiency, offering a practical lever for improving gene-editing yields.  
• CellPack, a Blender-based pipeline for visualizing crowded cellular environments with real protein structures, was highlighted; the underlying method is published at PubMed ID 34774566.  
• GPT-3, GitHub Copilot, and DALL-E each surpassed one million users in 24, 6, and 2.5 months respectively, illustrating the rapidly widening adoption of generative AI tools.  
• Channel members debated whether AI-risk-focused funders should aggressively finance non-AI science to strengthen humanity before AGI arrives, noting current reluctance to do so.  
• Concern was raised that future web-scraped text corpora will be increasingly contaminated by machine-generated language, complicating training data provenance and model evaluation.  
• Participants discussed cultural pushback from 2-D artists and impending resistance from journalists as generative AI encroaches on creative labor, framing it as an emerging “culture war.”  
• References to classic sci-fi tropes (Asimov’s “The Caves of Steel,” the Butlerian Jihad from Dune) were used to explore historical narratives of banning human-like machines and their relevance to present-day AI safety discourse.