This is the last podcast of this series on my book, Darwin's Solution: The Impact of Evolutionary Thinking on Medicine and Biotechnology.

CRISPR evolved in bacteria to fight their viruses. Now we engage these evolved molecular devices to cure previously incurable genetic disorders.

Engage evolution to design novel biochemical reagents and drugs.

This is episode 17 of the companion podcast to my book, Darwin's Solution: The Impact of Evolutionary Thinking on Medicine and Biotechnology.

AI learned how to fold proteins, only because proteins had evolved.

Linus Pauling, Christian Anfinsen, and Cyrus Levinthal meet in a pub to debate the folding and function of proteins, and how Darwin's thinking provided a solution to an almost impossible problem. However, how do you make a protein with a completely novel function that nature has not yet invented?

[There is an unfortunate historical error here: Anfinsen was an American biochemist, not Swedish. Mea culpa...I was unable to correct the error of his name and nationality in time for the production of the book.]

This episode examines how Darwinian evolutionary theories contributed to understanding the COVID-19 pandemic and, eventually to defeating it with mRNA vaccines.

This episode explains how we had anticipated, using Darwinian logic, a pandemic, not in its exact form but in some form, at least 7 years before it actually came, but had failed to respond appropriately..

Albert Camus, the Nobel-winning author of The Plague and a foremost proponent of existentialism, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, both inventors of polio vaccines, and Francis Crick, often called the smartest biologist of the century, are having a dinner party, discussing the pandemic and viral evolution.