3 Takeaways Podcast Transcript
Lynn Thoman
Lynn Thoman: For billions of years, evolution wrote the story of life. Now, for the first time, we may be picking up the pen. Advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are moving us from observing nature to redesigning it, giving us the potential to eliminate disease and even create entirely new forms of life.
But if we can start designing life, where do we draw the line and how do we decide what life should become?
Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world, and maybe even ourselves, a little better.
Lynn Thoman: Today, I'm excited to be with Adrian Wolfson, a geneticist and science writer whose work sits right at the frontier of synthetic biology and the design of new forms of life.
He’s spent years studying how biological organisms can be built from scratch, not just discovered in nature. He's the author of On the Future of Species, which explores how advances in AI and genetics could move us from observing evolution to actually shaping it. Adrian, welcome to 3 Takeaways.
It's great to have you here today.
Adrian Woolfson: Thank you, Lynn. It's such a pleasure to be on your show.
Lynn Thoman: It is my pleasure.
Adrian, you say we may soon become the authors of species. That sounds almost like science fiction.
What would that actually look like in the real world?
Adrian Woolfson: What that means is that we can actually literally take a blank piece of paper, imagine what we want to build in terms of the type of living creature or the types of properties that we might wish to introduce into existing life or to reach back into past life, and then literally write the code for that organism much in the same way as we author a story or a piece of computer code, turn that into a genome sequence, and then build the organism.
Lynn Thoman: That is so shocking. For billions of years, evolution had essentially no plan or direction. Are we now moving into a time where evolution itself becomes something we intentionally shape?
Adrian Woolfson: I think we're moving into a time where life is going to have two co-authors.
There'll be evolution by natural selection, what I call natural intelligence, or natural engineering.
Then there's artificial engineering, which is the collaboration between natural and artificial intelligence by humans, largely guided by AI, but humans still having the final say over what happens.
Lynn Thoman: Is biology starting to look less like studying nature and more like writing code?
Adrian Woolfson: Absolutely.
The history of biology has been observation, documenting species, trying to work out how they connect with one another, how they originated, how they work. That's really characterized all biology to date.
Then at a certain point, Francis Bacon had this clever idea. What if we start to break these systems and crack them open, and then see the way in which they break down, and see whether that can tell us something about how they work? That's the scientific method.
Now we're in a new phase of biology, a transition point, if you like, where suddenly we can begin to think about understanding biology through generating it. Build to generate, to test, to understand. That's where we are today.
That relies on the ability of AI to extract generative rules from existing biology, and then our ability to synthesize genomes at scale, get that DNA into cells and boot them up.
Lynn Thoman: You introduced the idea of artificial biological intelligence, the ability to construct entirely new species. How close are we to that reality?
Adrian Woolfson: We're on the ski slopes. We're not on the double diamond black runs, we're on the ski bump, but we're on the mountain and we can see the T-bars and the chairlifts and the cable cars that take us to those more difficult slopes. But we're skiing, right?
By that, I mean Brian He, at the Ark Institute in Stanford, has used AI to generate the first ever totally artificial species, which happens to be, I'd call it a biological entity rather than a living species, because it's a virus and viruses aren't technically alive, but they do have genomes like living things. When they infect cells, they become alive. As of right now, as of today, we can design the genomes of viruses using AI.
Therefore, we're writing the code of simple biological entities, and then it looks as if we can write the code of bacteria, and then beyond that, we'll be writing the code of more complex organisms. We're not there today. We're not writing Dostoevsky.
We're writing kids' stories as of right now, but we're writing. When kids learn to speak, they don't start speaking in fluent sentences. They babble, babies babble, and we're babbling right now.
We were babbling the genome sequences of viruses, and we're copying the genome sequences of bacteria and of yeast, but we're getting to the point where we're starting to get a real firm grasp of how things operate, and that knowledge will just increase exponentially over the coming years.
Lynn Thoman: Adrian, if species are designed rather than based on inherited characteristics, does the very concept of a species begin to dissolve?
Adrian Woolfson: Oh, Lynn, I'm so happy you asked me that question, because you're absolutely right, because the concept of a species is a purely historical one. It means that information is coming down in a linear, vertical manner by descent, as Darwin described and Wallace, using the mechanism of heredity, and the genes and information of different species is partitioned by the fact that they belong to a species, and the species can only reproduce with other members of the species. That's the kind of historical way that things have happened, but obviously, when you can just write genomes from scratch, the concept of species becomes irrelevant, actually, not for natural organisms.
It will always be relevant for them, but for organisms made artificially, the concept of species is totally irrelevant. These organisms that we will design have no historical reference point. They're ahistorical.
They don't need to reference anything that's ever lived before, or even anything that currently exists. You can just start from a blank slate and build something that's possible, and then test it in the real world after having simulated it on a computer.
Lynn Thoman: It's so amazing.
If we can engineer organisms on demand, does life itself become a kind of manufacturing platform for drugs, materials, even technology?
Adrian Woolfson: Yes. Let's not lose the wonder of life and the wonder of human existence, because I think that's special. I don't think anything I'm talking about excludes that, or I have no wish to try and destroy belief and all of those things.
I'm simply saying that, yes, when we turn biology into a predictive engineering material, we can use it for the benefit of humanity, and we can use biological systems to do things that help humans, like help us grow more food, to store information, to create energy, to create biomaterials. For example, right here, right now, the population of the earth is just growing every year, and we're having to destroy rainforests to create the land to farm, to produce enough crops. There was a green revolution, but it's stalling a bit.
The rate at which our food productivity is increasing isn't quite enough, and so we have to create more land for farming and agriculture. But if we were able to farm, for example, in deserts or in high salinity environments, extreme environments, then that would change everything, or increase the yields of crops. In principle, we can do that.
If we understand how the genomes of these cash crops operate, we can actually reprogram them, or even totally rewrite them, or find new cash crops which have never existed, which could actually be as beneficial as corn, rice, wheat.
There are many ways in which this technology could help us, but obviously, we need to be super cautious and really think carefully about guardrails and safety and ethics and responsibility.
Lynn Thoman: You imagine a future, which you just talked about, where we could grow new crops, but we could also potentially grow houses, wear living clothing, and use biological devices in daily life. Which of those feels closer than most people might expect?
Adrian Woolfson: I think that we're going to start to see biology integrated in every aspect of our life, and that's just going to increase incrementally over time. It's always hard to predict specifically if it's 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, but you just got to remember that even if it's 100 years, that's just the tiniest drop in the ocean of the history of life on Earth and even of humans.
It's going to happen increasingly rapidly, and I think within the decade, we're going to start to see biology being present in a lot of our infrastructure, the materials we use, the energy we consume, the information that we store.
That might be 30, 40 years, maybe less, who knows, but it's going to happen. I promise you that.
Lynn Thoman: What are you most excited about?
Adrian Woolfson: I'm just excited about getting rid of illness, number one. I want all of us to live healthier, longer lives. I don't want to see kids dying of cancer at the age of one or three or five, or frankly, at any age.
I don't want to see people suffering with debilitating diseases or suffering from Alzheimer's. I don't want to see families destroyed.
For me, the medical side of this is really, really important because if you understand how genomes work, and in particular, the human genome, you then can reverse engineer human disease.
Also, I'd really like to see us stop destroying the planet and using these horrible chemical processes that create pollution. I want to see microplastics, even in the Arctic, snow or Amazon rivers, species being destroyed, wilderness being destroyed. I believe that we can use biology itself to preserve biology.
That's a huge part of my vision. Preserve nature, value nature, treasure nature. It's our heritage.
Let's keep it for the future. It's a precious resource.
Lynn Thoman: What worries you most?
Adrian Woolfson: There are lots of things that worry me.
Unethical use of the technology, use for enhancements, use to basically undermine human nature, or what I would call the non-negotiables of human nature, like free will, sense of empathy, and so on and so forth.
Obviously, the use of technology for biowarfare or bioterrorism, but also there's a real risk that inadvertently, we might cause great damage without actually meaning to by releasing new species whose behaviors are poorly understood and whose effects on ecosystems can only very poorly be modeled.
The key point is we just need to be really, really incremental and cautious about what we do and how we do it, and just say, hey, take a step back. Let's just do this cautiously and carefully and responsibly.
Lynn Thoman: To recap, what you're saying is that essentially programming life will be like programming code, and we will be able to potentially eliminate disease, create new species, create new attributes or characteristics for existing species, including humans.
Adrian Woolfson: I personally have absolutely no doubt that that's the case. AI has already demonstrated that it can predict the structures of proteins, any protein that's ever existed or could exist. Honestly, we don't know how it works.
What we do know is it doesn't make its predictions by understanding the detailed laws of physics and chemistry. It does it through looking at huge databases and extracting patterns, and that's the way that AI works. It's not like mathematics.
In fact, mathematics didn't turn out to be particularly useful for understanding how biology works. AI does. There are those who are pessimistic and say, oh, we're way too complicated to be predictable, and there's an environment, and this and that.
Of course there is, but those are kind of details, sometimes important details. More or less, I think biology is predictable. It is engineerable.
We will master those rules. We will master the grammar of life, and we will gain control over the construction and design of life. I have absolutely no doubt that that will happen, and actually quite swiftly because we're already doing it.
We're just in the earliest days. AI is in its earliest days, and look how incredible ChatGPT is. You can have an incredible conversation with ChatGPT, which transcends the kind of conversation you can have with almost any human being.
Just imagine what AI is going to be like in another decade. Imagine what our ability to design genomes is going to be like in a decade, and to build them. This is happening, and it's happening fast.
Lynn Thoman: This is because of the ability of AI to understand the structure of essentially biology and the genome. Already, we're seeing this with genetic diseases, some of them being cured.
Adrian Woolfson: Monogenic diseases, those are diseases caused by a single gene, like sickle cell anemia or haemophilia. They're pretty easy to fix, actually. They do behave like broken parts in a machine, component-like, and you can put in a new gene or edit them, and that using gene editing, that works.
Unfortunately, most human diseases aren't that simple, and they don't behave like broken parts in a human-made machine. That's where you need a different approach. I think that it's quite likely that we're going to have to start to think about doing a bit of rewriting.
Now, we would only do that, of course, if we were pretty confident that we knew the consequences of doing rewrites. I don't think we're anywhere near ready to rewrite human genomes in any way that's inherited. I think in the short term, we're going to get insights into human diseases, which can be treated in different ways, which don't involve genome rewriting.
The rewriting of the genomes of other species will be extremely useful for us. Spider silk, for example, is the same tensile strength of steel. If we can devise using an AI version, it's 10 times the tensile strength of steel.
That could be a really useful material, for example.
Lynn Thoman: Do you have a couple more examples like that? That's fascinating.
Adrian Woolfson: Pretty much anything you can think of, like clams and mollusks, for example, make a kind of natural glue when they stick to rocks. We can take some of these naturally occurring materials and use AI to reimagine them and simulate different versions of them that have never existed. Then hallucinate, to use an AI term, something which has no direct relationship to that, but could be really useful for another purpose.
Lynn Thoman: Do you see biology as a treasure chest?
Adrian Woolfson: Yeah. I think once we're able to navigate this infinite space of all biological possibility, because remember, the species that have existed, or still exist, represent the most infinitesimal fraction of all biological possibilities. Imagine if evolution had never discovered rice, or corn, or chickens to make eggs, or cows, or sheep.
If the tape had been rewound, and the tape of life ran again, maybe we wouldn't get any of those things. The potential for them is always there. There are other things out there in the space of biological possibility that have equal utility or greater utility that could be really, really useful for us.
What we've done is we've unlocked that treasure chest. We've pulled it open, and now we're exploring it. There's a lot of interesting and really useful stuff in there for us.
It is a Pandora's box, and we need to explore that box with great caution, but there's a lot of treasure in there.
Lynn Thoman: So exciting.
Adrian, what are the three takeaways you would like to leave the audience with today?
Adrian Woolfson: The first one, I guess, is we're at this critical transition phase in the history of life on Earth where all of a sudden, naturally occurring life, which has got to be the way it is as a result of evolution by natural selection, will be joined by living species that are created artificially as a result of a collaboration between artificial and natural intelligence.
My second takeaway is that everybody needs to participate in this debate to ensure that the science of generative biology is actually performed in a manner that's safe, ethical, responsible, equitable, transparent, and ultimately benefits society.
The third takeaway of this is that although initially you might say, oh gosh, we're going to be making artificial life, and how scary and terrible.
Actually, my view is that it can help us to preserve natural life. Actually, if we don't engage with synthetic biology and artificial life, we're just going to destroy the planet, all known species. We're going to destroy all the ecosystems, get rid of all the rainforests, and we'll be left with nothing.
We'll destroy life's heritage, and that belongs to not just us, but to our children, our children's children, and to the future. We have to be honest and safe and responsible custodians of nature.
Lynn Thoman: Adrian, thank you so much. I really enjoyed your book On The Future of Species. The future that you describe is both so exciting and breathtaking, as well as incredibly worrying.
So, thank you.
Adrian Woolfson: It's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me on.
OUTRO: If you’re enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts orSpotify or wherever you listen. It really helps get the word out. If you’re interested, you can also sign up for the 3 Takeaways newsletter at 3takeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes.
You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Facebook.
I’m Lynn Thoman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.
This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors.