Transcriber: wanqing jiang Reviewer: Denise RQ
In 1972, the musical group Funkadelic
released one of my favorite songs, "Biological Speculation".
If you don't know the song,
I want to share it at the beginning of the course with you.
We're just biological speculation, sitting here, vibrating.
And we don't know what were vibrating about.
Also in 1972 and 1973,
researchers at Stanford and at San Francisco invented
what became known as Genetic Engineering,
the ability to take natural pieces of DNA and recombine them
to make new chimeric molecules.
Oh, that's interesting.
How would we, members of the clan of opposable thumbs
who like to do things
apply this new tool if we don't know what we're vibrating about?
Forty years have gone by, roughly,
it's been a generation of genetic engineering
and we've already heard today that it's been used.
We've made foods. We've made medicines.
We've made stuff, recombinant insulin for treating diabetes,
engineered L-lysine
for better laundry detergents to wash your clothes,
and even, better ice-cream.
Those anti-freeze proteins from fish that go in the ice-cream,
so you don't get the big ice crystals in your low-fat ice-cream.
Isn't it funny that ice-cream isn't marketed as Nemo bits?
(Laughter)
"Mommy, mommy, mommy, I want some Nemo bit ice-cream!"
Oh, it's strange, you know, this technology, as we've explored it,
we haven't always been comfortable with it.
And there are good reasons for that:
maybe it's not safe, maybe it disrupts the purity,
maybe it messes up the normative aspects of nature.
Maybe it's just new.
How could we do better?
How could we start to talk in new ways about biotechnology?
I don't know.
And I thought about that a lot.
One of the things that I had to confront
is I'm not always sure how I make decisions,
and how I determine whether or not
a choice I'm facing results in a good decision.
And if I can't answer that question
is very hard for me to consider any technology,
especially living technology,
and decide what to do with it.
As best as I can figure it out,
I [together with] my wife, who is also a biotechnologist,
talked about this a lot,
we've come up with a framework
for thinking about whether or not we are making good decisions.
And the way we've come up with this framework
is to listen to nature, to return to nature,
and to try and understand biology, actually.
And what I mean by that
- this will sound a little hokey and should sound a little bit abstract,
but then I'll try to make it real for you -
biology, as I understand it, exists on an energy gradient:
we're powered from the stars, from the Sun, from the thermovents;
and living systems tap into this flux, this flow of energy,
and they are somehow able to do something incredible.
They are able to make patterns
that persist over time from one generation to the next.
Very improbable patterns.
If you were talking to a chemist about what a system should do,
thermodynamically speaking, it just all blur away.
But life is somehow capturing this energy gradient
and making these improbable patterns
that persist over time from one generation to the next.
That's what it means to me to be alive.
And if I believe that, then I can start to evaluate,
"Am I making a good decision or a bad decision?"
What I want to be doing is I want to be alive,
I want to be contributing to life.
If I do something,
and it's more likely to lead to more improbability,
more improbable patterns that continue to thrive and exist,
then that was a good decision.
I'm not expecting all of you to be satisfied by that,
that's just me being honest with you.
What does that have to do with making our civilization work,
thinking about how to make decisions about advancing biotechnology?
When I was biking in this morning to come over here,
I was looking at the pine tree, in the front yard of our house.
We live over in Menlo Park.
And it's that time of year where the pine tree is doing this.
It's growing these objects.
(whispers) They're called pine cones.
(Laughter)
For the longest time, until about two years ago,
I didn't think very much about my pine tree
- that's not really mine, it's sort of in front of my yard,
and whatever that means -
but over the last couple of years,
I haven't been able to escape what's going on: in a few short weeks,
the tree will grow hundreds if not thousands of these objects,
that will become quite big, almost as big as a can of tennis balls.
What do I do with this?
Nothing.
The winds come in the fall,
it falls off,
it gets swept up and composted.
As I've looked into this
across the town of Menlo Park, the gardens and lawns of Menlo Park,
we produce about 500 pounds per person per year of garden clippings
in a town of 32,000 people,
that's 16 million pounds of matter compiled from the atmosphere.
This is actually a state-of-the-art nanotechnology;
what could I do with it?
Maybe I could change how we make things.
Maybe I could--
could I reprogram my pine tree to grow computer chips?
Could this turn into something different?
That sounds really improbable.
Well, engineering is often times about solving problems,
but at a meta-level, what engineering is also about,
is getting better at solving problems.
And so, in 2002, we set out to ask the question:
could we make living matter fully engineerable?
Could we make life programmable?
Could I ever get to a future
where I can grow computer chips in my front yard?
Sounds implausible.
But if you look back in time,
engineers do get a lot better at doing things.
70 years ago,
we weren't very good at engineering electrical computing systems.
Several generations later, we were quite good at it.
What should we aspire to get good at this century?
We hear about the climate, we hear about the loss of [ozone];
what should we do?
Maybe we should get really good at engineering matter.
And of course it will take us 70 years, but we better get started now.
To work on that, I got support from DARPA,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in 2002.
And we didn't do any research, we just went and talked
about how we would make engineering and biology easier.
And by October of 2003, we had met a half dozen times
with 50 of the smartest people we could find.
I went and gave a briefing to the director of the Federal Agency,
"Mr. Director, here is the plan:
get a lot better at printing DNA from scratch,
so people can become designers of biology,
and other people can become builders.
Figure out how to abstract biological complexity
so that you don't have to program your DNA down at the machine level:
TAATACGACTCACTATAGGAGA.
Who can remember all that?
(Laughter)
And then develop standards to coordinate labor
when we measure something; how do I share that measurement?
Like the meter stick, but for inside the cell.
I gave that briefing in October of 2003
and it went over like a lead balloon.
Why?
It's a challenging time.
The anthrax attacks had happened TWO years earlier;
people were scared of biology, let alone getting better ar engineering,
but if you have DNA printers,
the garagistas working in their garages might print the genomes of viruses
that will be released and we'll have bio-terrorists everywhere.
Cut the funding, which was what happened.
And so we had this weird environment
of this idea of programming living matter
could be really helpful;
it could actually make things work,
but also sounds really dangerous: could make things not work at all.
And it just kept going back and forth in the conversation, politically.
I call this the "half pipe of doom".
(Laughter)
The problem with the "half pipe of doom" is it consumes all the attention
and the much more interesting thing is to figure out what to do in the middle.
It turns out the answer was to take it to the people;
the artists, the designers, and the teenagers.
We started something that's now called "IGEMC",
the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition.
The first class of students were 16 students in 2003.
This year, there are over 250 teams across 40 countries all over the planet
where students will spend their summer designing and building
living organisms to solve a problem wherever they are.
They work well together,
because they are sharing the bits and pieces of DNA, freely with each other.
As this has progressed, institutions have returned.
At Stanford for example, we have a new department in our campus,
- new in a sense of being 10 years old -
but a new department, in this case called Bioengineering;
it doesn't happen that often.
The last time we started a department of that scale,
it was called Computer Science.
(Laughter)
The building for the department will open next month.
Can we do it?
I think so.
I probably won't be able to reprogram a pine tree in my life time,
because it'll take too long,
but I can probably reprogram a wood fungus that eats sawdust
that converts the sawdust into chitin as a type of plastic;
I can bring into that organism a capacity from the oceans
to do bio-mineralization to make silica and metals.
And if you give me 10 or 20 years,
I'd bet I can change how we make things.
But what's most important is it's not me making things,
it's biology making things.
It's already taken over the planet.
We have a distributive manufacturing platform
that's capable of putting atoms in precise positions.
You can program it via DNA.
The instructions for your DNA can be sent over the Internet as information.
The natural ecosystem is running on 90 terawatts of power,
over four times what our civilization consumes.
We are biological speculation.
What would you like us to be vibrating about?
Thank you.
(Applause)