WHAT IF WE TOLD YOU THAT IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT FUTURE,
YOU COULD LOG ONTO YOUR COMPUTER AND
PROGRAM LIVING CELLS LIKE SOFTWARE?
EVER SINCE SCIENTISTS UNLOCKED THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF BIOLOGY – DNA–
WE’VE MADE MASSIVE STRIDES IN UNDERSTANDING THE ‘BASE CODE’
THAT UNDERLIES ALL LIVING THINGS.
AND OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, WE’VE BECOME SO OBSESSED WITH THIS CODE
THAT SCIENTISTS ARE EXPLORING HOW TO EDIT GENOMES
AND EVEN CREATE BRAND NEW ONES
THAT NEVER EXISTED BEFORE.
SO, HOW CLOSE ARE WE
TO HARNESSING SYNTHETIC LIFE?
- Life is a technology.
It's a technology we didn't create.
BUT WHAT IF WE COULD LEARN TO HARNESS IT?
THAT’S THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND “SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY,” THE EMERGING STUDY
OF BUILDING LIVING SYSTEMS.
YOU MIGHT BE IMAGINING ARMIES OF FRANKENSTEIN CREATURES...
AND WE’LL GET TO THAT…
BUT WHAT WE MEAN FOR THE TIME BEING IS CREATING ANIMAL PRODUCTS,
INDIVIDUALIZED MEDICAL THERAPIES,
AND EVEN TRANSPLANTABLE ORGANS….
ALL STARTING WITH SYNTHETIC DNA AND CELLS IN A LAB.
- I look at them as 3D printers, but the most powerful and successful 3D printers that exist
today, because they can print thousands and thousands of different materials all at once,
and they can make more of themselves.
And it comes with a programming language: DNA.
- Pulling the principles of engineering design, and then the real fundamentals of molecular
biology together is really powerful, because it makes you think of biology as a design
medium, if you like, using genetic material as the building blocks.
AND WHEN IT COMES TO SYNTHESIZING LIFE, THERE ARE TWO MAIN SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT.
One is actually trying to build artificial cells.
Actually starting from the bottom-up, and saying how do I build a living cell
in a synthetic way?
Either using synthetic, chemical components, or using natural, biological components, how do I build
a cell, basically, from first principles, from scratch, bottom-up?
IN 2010, CRAIG VENTER’S RESEARCH TEAM MADE HISTORY WITH THIS APPROACH WHEN THEY CREATED
THE WORLD’S FIRST ‘SYNTHETIC ORGANISM,’ A BACTERIUM MADE ENTIRELY OF SYNTHETIC DNA.
- And most recently, out of the UK, Jason Chen and his team synthesized the E. coli genome.
That's pretty remarkable.
That's a four million base pair genome.
- We now can specify, we want a genetic sequence, A, T, G, C, T, T, T, T, T, A, whatever.
We can send that information across the web to a company, and then they will put it into
their production pipeline, and then we will get sent back a chemical synthesized piece
of DNA.
- It's only going to get faster, and cheaper, and easier from here.
BUT IT’S STILL NOT AS FAST AND CHEAP AS EDITING AN EXISTING GENOME TO SYNTHESIZE NEW LIFE.
AND TO BE HONEST, STARTING FROM SCRATCH MIGHT NOT BE WORTH IT.
- A purist would say you have to make all the cellular components from atoms, okay.
No cheating, no using bits of life.
You can make fully synthetic DNA chemically, but for most purposes it's not any more useful
than something that's semi-synthetic.
- Now, the other way is actually taking existing cells, but re-engineering them,
to have particular functionality
to the extent of completely re-synthesizing the whole genome,
and redesigning it
Putting it back into the cell, which means it's still a species, but it's got a human-designed
genome in it.
Building that code to perform a function, or to do a design, or to make something.
AND THAT’S JUST WHAT WE’RE BEGINNING TO EXPLORE.
WITH GENETIC ENGINEERING TOOLS BECOMING MORE ACCESSIBLE THAN EVER BEFORE,
RESEARCHERS WANT TO USE SYNTHESIZED GENOMES
TO ENHANCE HUMAN HEALTH.
For simple things like detecting infections, or detecting environmental pollutants, we
can now engineer bacterial cells that will detect arsenic or fluorine or any of these
toxic chemicals, and will change color like a pH strip.
THESE BACTERIA COULD PROTECT US FROM CONSUMING TOXINS IN
CONTAMINATED DRINKING WATER, FOR EXAMPLE.
AND ANDREW AND HIS TEAM AT HUMANE GENOMICS ARE WORKING TO DEVELOP A LIBRARY OF SYNTHETIC
VIRUSES THAT COULD LEAD TO CUSTOMIZED CANCER THERAPIES.
The virus is like a USB stick.
You know it's going to dock with the particular cancer cell, and it's going to load a program
into that cell.
Now we get to write that program to make it even more specific for the cancer cell.
We're working with dogs, and dog cancers, to gain experience.
The cancer that we're working with first, it's a bone cancer.
So we put in little switches into the viral genome, so it's only active in a bone cancer
and you can measure its killing activity relative to normal cells.
Like the first attempt at anything, it's not going to cure cancer, but we demonstrated
that we could go from a file on a computer to a virus particle that could infect a cancer
cell, and we did it in a relatively short period of time for a relatively low cost.
OTHER RESEARCHERS HOPE TO TAKE ON THE FASHION INDUSTRY WITH LAB-MADE VERSIONS OF TRADITIONAL
BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS LIKE LEATHER, OR SILK.
BUT PERHAPS THE MOST AMBITIOUS PLAN INVOLVES “BIOREMEDIATION”––PREVENTING OR COUNTERBALANCING
ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE USING MICROORGANISMS.
The concept is you have organisms that are engineered that would go out and either start
degrading plastics, start using plastic as an energy source, possibly start using toxic
components, cleaning up environments, using natural microbial systems.
OKAY, OKAY, WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING––WHAT ABOUT SYNTHETIC HUMANS?!
ENTER HUMAN-GENOME PROJECT-WRITE, OR JUST, GENOME-PROJECT WRITE.
A SEQUEL TO ‘THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT,’ GP-WRITE IS BRINGING TOGETHER OVER ONE HUNDRED
INSTITUTIONS WORLDWIDE IN ONE COMMUNAL QUEST: TO SYNTHESIZE THE HUMAN GENOME.
You want a human cell which has new properties.
You want to make something that has properties like virus resistance or senescence, aging
resistance.
You could do it with organic chemistry, or you could do it with biochemistry, or you
could do it by editing of living cells.
You could build human parts, meaning transplantable human parts, and from that you could build
large portions of a human being.
But right now I think we're in a time where that's on hold, in part for lack of strong
arguments for why you would want to do it.
INSTEAD, THESE RESEARCHERS ARE LOOKING TO UNDERSTAND THE GENETIC SYMPHONY THAT MAKES
HUMANS TICK, BY DEMYSTIFYING OUR CELLS’ INSTRUCTION SETS.
The simplest microbe in the world, which has got the smallest number of instruction sets,
we don't even know what 40% of those instructions do.
So our knowledge base is still quite limited.
It's like redesigning an airplane with components and half of the components you don't know
how they function.
That's where we're at.
AND IF YOU THINK TINKERING WITH GENOMES IS A BAD IDEA WHEN WE KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT THEM,
YOU’RE NOT ALONE.
I MEAN, WHAT IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG?
SHOULD I LIVE IN FEAR OF EVIL SYNTHETIC HUMANOIDS TAKING OVER THE WORLD?
I think fear and concern and dystopic narratives is a good thing.
I think it's far better to have too much discussion of how things can go wrong than having too
little.
We've been using living organisms to produce and manufacture things for thousands of years.
We've been using yeast to make bread, alcohol.
What we're doing now is much more systematic.
It just opens up all the possibilities.
We have to frame it as the exploration of inner space.
Instead of going up into the stars, we're going down into the cells, and learning how
to get there, and how to explore, and how to manipulate.
It's as important as going out to the stars, because if we get to Mars and we don't have
a way to grow food and to keep ourselves healthy, we're not going to survive there for very
long.
We just have to start opening the doors and saying, "Come on in.
Take a look.
Don't be afraid.
Let's all learn and grow, and use this incredible technology for good."
SO IF DNA IS THE NEXT HTML, HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO HARNESSING SYNTHETIC LIFE?
This is a very fast-moving field.
I think in 10 years time, 15 years time, we will know enough about microbial genetic engineering
to be building microbes that could be potentially quite novel.
We went from 2015 being able to edit two genes to 2017 doing 25 genes in the germline to
now we can do 26,000 which is actually relatively easy in the era of exponentially improving
technology.
I think we could have mammalian systems, including human, that are multi virus-resistant within
I'm guessing two to six years.
All you have to do is be able to write a new genome, that nature hasn't created, and by
that definition, I'd say we’re already there.
We're quite far away from even thinking about a human.
As the technology increases, there will be more interventions into multicellular organisms,
and we need to be mindful of what they are, and have good reasons for why we're doing
it.