(via Michael C.)

We’ve slowly been unraveling bits and pieces here and there.

Creating biologicals is a lot like using a bunch of crufty libraries with lots of dead code, redundant functions, and unoptimizable/unremovable interfaces left in for backwards compatibility that no one really understands at all except for maybe one or two functions per library.

But even with such little understanding, there’s been a lot of progress.

But if smart developers struggle to grok decades-old code, it’s probably gonna take a while to clean-room reverse-engineer the billions-of-years-old code base of life, especially since we have absolutely no idea how it got bootstrapped.

(crossposted on Facebook)