Writing the Code of Life with Adrian Woolfson

🎙️ JLS Podcast: Hosted by William Leonard Pickard

🚀 About Adrian Woolfson

Adrian Woolfson is a molecular biologist, physician, entrepreneur, and author exploring the frontier where genetics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence converge. His work examines one of the defining questions of our century: what happens when humanity gains the ability to design life itself?

🧬 Life Becomes a Writable Medium

For thousands of years, humanity has shaped life through selective breeding and agriculture. Today, advances in genetics are transforming biology from something we merely observe into something we can increasingly understand, engineer, and ultimately design.

🌱 Evolution Creates Its Own Designer

One of the most profound ideas explored in this conversation is the notion that evolution has produced a species capable of directing evolution itself. After billions of years of natural selection, humanity now stands at the threshold of becoming an active participant in shaping the future of life.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence and the Language of Life

As AI learns to understand language, it is also beginning to decode biology. The convergence of machine intelligence and genetic science may dramatically accelerate our ability to understand living systems, discover new therapies, and unlock entirely new biological possibilities.

🌍 Preserving Nature Through Innovation

Rather than replacing nature, emerging biological technologies may help protect it. From sustainable manufacturing and improved agriculture to environmental restoration and conservation, new tools could reduce humanity's footprint while helping preserve ecosystems for future generations.

⚖️ Innovation, Ethics, and Responsibility

Powerful technologies demand careful stewardship. As our capabilities expand, questions of governance, safety, consent, and responsibility become increasingly important. The challenge is not simply what humanity can do, but what humanity should do.

🏛️ The Sacredness of Life

Even as biology becomes increasingly understandable and programmable, Woolfson argues that life should never be reduced to a mere commodity. Scientific progress must be balanced with humility, reverence, and a deep respect for the extraordinary complexity of living systems.

🚀 A New Industrial Revolution

The fusion of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology has the potential to become one of the most transformative technological revolutions in human history. Just as previous breakthroughs reshaped civilization, these emerging tools may redefine medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, and human possibility.

🌐 Freedom, Discovery, and Human Imagination

Throughout history, progress has been driven by curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to explore new frontiers. Human imagination remains one of the most powerful forces shaping the future, continually expanding the boundaries of what is possible.

🌅 Reinventing the Sacred in an Age of Technology

As humanity acquires unprecedented abilities to understand and influence life, society will face profound philosophical questions. How do we preserve meaning, wisdom, and wonder in a world where nature itself becomes increasingly malleable?

🏆 Final Takeaways

A fascinating conversation exploring artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, evolution, ethics, and the future of life itself. Adrian Woolfson offers an optimistic yet thoughtful vision of a future where scientific discovery expands human possibility while challenging us to remain responsible stewards of the living world.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hello, uh, this is uh Leonard Picard. I'm today I'm delighted to welcome uh Adrian Wolfson. Uh Adrian is a molecular biologist, a physician, uh, studied at Balliol, Oxford. Uh he was the Darwin Fellow at uh Cambridge. Uh he's an entrepreneur and writer. Adrian's writing is at the the fascinating intersection of uh genetics and synthetic biology and artificial intelligence and and life itself. Uh he's the co-founder as well, as an entrepreneur of uh General, uh synthetic biology company uh working at the frontier of genome writing. For today's show, he's also uh the author of, well, he's the author of earlier books, Life Without Genes, an intelligent guide to genetics. But the new book is on the future of species uh authoring uh a life through artificial biological intelligence. So Adrian's book asks one of the most profound scientific philosophical questions. What happens when humanity moves from merely reading the code of life to writing it? And perhaps we can edit uh not only organisms but ourselves and create uh life that has never even existed before. So today we'll talk about Darwin DNA, artificial biological intelligence, and the possibility of a second genesis and the strange future that may arrive when life becomes programmable. So Adrian Wilson.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Leonard, what a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much uh for inviting me.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Well, we'll have a little fun, I think, today, so we've not so stayed. It's a heavily technical uh discussion, but uh this is a general audience. And you're the Darwin fellow, uh at Cambridge. So if Darwin came back today and and saw synthetic biology, uh would he be delighted, uh horrified, or asked for a lab tour?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Oh boy, that's I think I think he'd be firstly he'd be totally amazed. And you know, I think the idea, I mean, you know, Darwin's obviously his great contribution was to come up with a theory that explains how life originated through evolution by natural selection over a duration of about four billion years. And key to his theory was that there was no designer, right? There was no intentionality, evolution had no purpose. And then suddenly, after four billion years of trundling along in a kind of purposeless, directionless manner, evolution comes up with an ability to reinvent itself through building human brains and minds, which eventually get to a point culturally where they can produce technologies that can literally rewrite the genomes of living things, right? So it kind of then some of that responsibility now moves to design, right? So suddenly we create the designer, evolution creates its own designer. It's kind of crazy, right? So I think Darwin would have been amazed, somewhat horrified, maybe as well. But at the same time, you know, Darwin was an interesting character. I've just actually reviewed one of his books, original books, um, The Descent of Man for uh a literary magazine in England. And it's very clear that Darwin, although he was against slavery and was quite liberal in some ways, he also had some pretty, you know, what today we might call old-fashioned views about race and about women and things like that. And, you know, he might actually be quite dangerous in a way, you know, if he would, if he had any, if he had any authority, which he probably would, right? And he he might well be an advocate for, you know, kind of semi-ugenic uh kind of enterprises, like, oh, you know, let's do this and that, you know. So so it'd be interesting to see, you know, Darwin was a complex character, and I don't know which side of the coin he would land, you know, if if presented with the ability to actually potentially change human nature, you know. Well, he liked to walk, did he not?

SPEAKER_02 4:40

At his residency, he had a small path he would walk for hours and hours do his thinking.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yeah, but you know, Darwin, you know, so I think I think he would have been absolutely bowled over by this and would have been one of the great intellectual contributors to, you know, he might have written my my 12th chapter, the future, you know, the manifesto for life, right? It's exactly the kind of thing he would have got, you know, dug into and and and thought about. But as I said, you know, his his view of what that should be, you know, might not align with mine, I imagine.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Well, I'm sure he would be very excited, uh, as we all are, at the prospects of uh improving the human species through um selective in vitro fertilization, actually um uh creating uh through through genomics uh novel life forms from inception forward. Uh so here's here's a fun question. Uh so are are we approaching the point where biology becomes less like gardening and and more like software development?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Uh with Oh, yeah, no, that that's for sure, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Yeah. Bug patches, uh disastrous beta releases.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

No, no, no. I mean, you know, obviously we started genetically engineering life the day we started, you know, selective breeding. And of course, maize, you know, took about 30,000 years to get to where it is today, right? It started off as a wild, as a weed, basically, right? And then it was, you know, slowly improved in in basically well, Mexico, actually, and and now it's a global cash crop, right? But but obviously that's a very slow, tedious, arbitrary and random way of designing nature, so to speak. And and you know, but we using those kind of methods and moving species around the world and all the things that humans have done means that the concept of nature is sort of slightly arbitrary anyway these days, because you know, there's probably nothing that's entirely natural because humans have had such a widespread influence on species and ecosystems and so on and so forth in an unprecedented manner, right? But um, but obviously our ability to do that now, when we kind of gain control over biology at the sort of genome level, when we can actually write genomes and and manipulate them as if they, you know, genomes were pieces of computer software, is it is in a totally different league? And yes, you know, biology becomes programmable at a certain point, right? And to certain degrees. Like today, you know, we can we can just about program a new bacterial, uh, sorry, viral species, and we've done that, a good virus for killing back uh killing bacteria, and tomorrow we'll be able to program the genome of a bacterium, right, which is a truly living thing, because viruses aren't truly living, they have to infect bacteria to replicate. But then beyond that, as as our knowledge advances, we will get to a point where eventually we'll be pretty fluent in the language of biology, because biology is a language and it has grammatical rules, like English has grammatical rules, and Spanish and Latin and Greek. Any language written or spoken has grammatical rules. And the challenge, the North Star, if you like, of modern biology uh is different to the past. In the past, the challenge was to document nature and catalogue nature and describe nature, and that kind of culminated with genome sequencing, which was the ultimate description, right? You could describe something at the DNA sequence level, you know, it kind of define the instruction manual. But but the ultimate level of description is when you actually can hold the grammar book of life in your hand and master it like a native speaker. And the native speaker in this case is of course evolution, right? Because evolution has learned how to manipulate genomes and create life, and you know, but but that will require some time. You know, we're not going to become fluent in the language abology overnight. It's going to be an incremental journey, but it will get there, you know, and then eventually I believe, and that's a key message of my book, that once we've kind of mastered the grammar of life, we can construct anything. Things that have once existed but no longer exist, things that exist in thereof, and also the far greater number of things that have never existed.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Well, that opens a lot of questions. So so it does. So well, goodness. Uh if humans start writing genomes, uh who gets the lead?

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Scientist, uh engineer, parent, author, or irresponsible hobbyist? Yeah, well, that's that's the million-dollar question, right? And the problem with this technology is it is I mean, it is already quite democratized and will increasingly be even more so, right? So it's as consequential as in a way as nuclear technology, right? But nuclear technology is controlled by nation states at the level of governments, right? It doesn't typically get into the hands of individuals unless you know there's some massive breach of security and a by a terrorist group gets hold of plutonium or whatever, right? In like in a James Bond movie, right? But actually, biology, on the other hand, is a technology that is quite readily learnable and deployable at an individual level, right? And that, as I said, will become even more so over time. So how do we regulate that? I mean, we can try and regulate it at the level of nation states. You know, we know how difficult it is to get nation states to cooperate and align on anything, frankly, right? Doesn't mean to say we shouldn't try to work out what those ground rules are, though, what the guardrails look like. Then within countries, we know this huge diversity of opinion. Look at America, it's a great example. It's kind of split right down the middle with two diametrically opposed, you know, viewpoints of how life should be, more or less, right? Although there are some points of agreement. Uh, and then, you know, as you filter down below that, you know, you get the crazy people and the you know, the bad actors and so on and so forth, right? So, I mean, the truth is, um it's gonna be really difficult, right? But but we have to start somewhere, right? So you have to start in a place where you say, look, we agree that this technology can't be mothballed because it'd just be wrong. You know, the human mind imagines new ways of being, new, new possibility, new frontiers, and that's part of human nature, right? That's that's why Americans moved west to the new frontier. That's why people migrated from Europe to America. That's why, you know, we we we're driven as humans by this, by our imagination of a world that's better than the one we live in. And technology has enabled us to you know to get to that point. And you know, it's an arguable whether the world we live in today is better than the one we lived in 30,000 years ago. But I I would say I'd rather have electricity and medicine and you know, all of the things that we have than live in the electricity. Yes, of course. Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

But we're look you we're moving in a world of great options where anything can happen, and some of them may be deleterious. Uh but we have we have some questions along that line. Uh I was uh uh recently speaking with uh George Church, who uh uh cr got into a little ruckus some years ago proposing to uh bring back a Neanderthal uh by gene editing, like the Woolly Mammoth Project. And then that it it uh proposed the question that, well, why not why bring back something from the past? Why not bring back something anticipated uh in the future, like um a hyperintelligent uh human?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Yeah. So no, I my my book um is pretty clear in terms of what I believe, which is that right now we're not in a position to contemplate changing human nature, and it's not something that I advocate or have any interest in doing, right? My only interest um is to get rid of human disease and to extend healthy longevity, and and that should be done in a non-inherited way, right? The so-called somatic level, right? So I'm really against any form of permanent change to the genetic material in humans. So you're into the sanctity of the human genome in terms of transhumanism. Yeah, so so my view is that hey, let's treat the human genome as sacred, but let's find ways to get rid of disease and live longer and more healthily. Let's preserve nature and use this technology to do that, right? So let's use this technology to improve the efficiency of food production, to stop, you know, wasting energy so that we don't have to cut down rainforests and burn fossil fuels and destroy species, you know. But but I my my philosophy does not encompass making better humans, you know, or or more intelligent. You know, you know, this is something I don't believe in. Now, having said that, you know, I'm I'm I can imagine, and you know, and and part of being responsible, um, and you know, if if somebody's watching this in 500 years' time, I imagine it's quite likely, if I'm realistic, right, that by then we will be rewriting human genomes, right? And and I and we may have got to that point through many different circuitous routes. One of them might be that, hey, it was an existential necessity, right? There were these super intelligent AIs uh who had kept, you know, put us in zoos uh to amuse their AI kids, right? And and we realized that the only way we were going to kind of be able to get back into a position of moral superiority and agency was to engineer ourselves and rewrite ourselves so that there was some leveling of the playing field, right? So we could compete, and that's assuming that we could ever do that, you know, that the human brain could be rewired in a way that gave it those capabilities. Now, you know, this is sounds futuristic, but I imagine that that will eventually be an issue that humans have to deal with, right? So who am I to say we should never do that, right? And who am I to say that who are you, who are any of us to say that human nature as it stands today represents a kind of natural point of perfection, you know, or a natural endpoint of evolution, and we should jealously preserve human nature as it is and never change it. You know, it's a bit like the argument in architecture, right? Where you have these opposing views, people like I'm I'm not I'm not being critical of King Charles, I have to remember King, not Prince. But you know, Prince Charles, when he was a prince, was criticized actually quite uh relentlessly because he used to believe in classical architecture, right? You know, and he didn't like these modernist buildings and Doric columns and what have you. That's right, but whereas the modernists think, well, you you can't just recapitulate the past, you have to always be inventing modernity, right? In, you know, and and you could argue that for you and I to sit here, you know, pontificating about the special exceptional nature of human nature as we know it is absurd, you know, because Homo erectus might have said the same thing, or Neanderthal Mann might have said the same thing, or Dennis Sovan Mann or Hobbitman might have said, I'm the I'm the endpoint of evolution, you know, I should be, you know, the type of human existence that everybody, you know, and and and so I I very much doubt that human nature as it is today is in any sense has you know has that kind of exceptional, you know, uh kind of status. However, as I am one of those human beings, you know, I kind of feel obviously in a partisan manner that there is something special about who we are and how we got here and that deserves to be preserved, you know, all of our rationality and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Well, Adrian, forgive my transhumanist leanings, but uh isn't it our duty to improve our cognition uh as much as possible by any means, uh, given that we have a new entity on the planet called uh AI, a formidable uh I I I I wouldn't, in my personal perspective, wouldn't use quite that language.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

I would say that you know we I I I I I still I'm not I don't at the moment I'm not persuadable when it when it comes to you know doing anything to the human genome to change our nature, right? So I I believe that we can manage AI and learn to live with it and keep it under our control through other means, right? So I'm not an advocate or a proponent of you know transhumanist agendas personally, right? Now that doesn't mean to say that my point of view is is the right one, but this is just a personal view that I have.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

So Adrian, you you propose longevity would be reasonable, uh, but that uh would involve uh modifying the sanctity of the human genome to make us live longer. So how do you resolve that contrast?

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Well, no, not necessarily, because um if you understand the grammar of life and become fluent in the language of life, then you know you you essentially should be able to reverse engineer life. You know, you understand how the human machine works. And of course, we're not a machine like a washing machine is a machine or a car is a machine. We're a very particular type of machine, so you have to have a flexible definition of what a machine is. But a machine is a set of parts and components that produce a certain outcome, right? Both morphologically and functionally and behaviorally, right? And if you can reverse engineer that machine, then you'll you should be able to alter its properties without necessarily altering its code through, you know, uh drugs, for example, or some other manipulation. So now if the only way to extend healthy longevity was to interfere with the genome, then there may be ways to do that somatically, in other words, in a non-inherited way, right? And you know, look, I I've been involved in gene therapy programs and I don't have any problem with that, right? But but I but that's non-inherited. I I'm a big advocate of somatic gene therapy.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

You're not affecting the gene line, purely somatic and temporary.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

I'm not an advocate of germline gene therapy, right? And that's because you get off-target edits and all kinds of things which can be dangerous and they'll be inherited, right? So um, you know, if it's single genes and you can do it somatically in a non-inherited way, in a pretty precise, clean way, then hey, you know, I I would be open to that. And I suspect actually that as we get to understand how the genome operates, uh, we'll we'll look at it in a slightly different way philosophically. And I'll give you an example of that, right? So there's a new kind of school of thought which looks at the uh genome as a kind of interacting network of metabolic network. And and they and people have shown in in computer simulations that paradoxically, if a function is missing, the rest the function can be restored not just by adding in a broken gene or a new gene, but by further damaging the network in a different way, right? So you can repair a network by damaging it further. And this requires a cognitive reset, right? But what I what I'm not in favor of personally is trying to improve human performance beyond getting rid of disease and extending healthy longevity. And then the question, of course, becomes what is natural? You know, like where did just generally improve health may improve performance. Yeah, like the bristle cone pine in California lives for four and a half thousand years. Now, if I said to you, hey Leonard, if I you know fiddled around with your genes, you could live for 4,000 years. But would you would you want to do that? I'd rather live for 40 and be a lot brighter. Okay, fine, right? But you but you I I suspect you may not wish to live for 4,000, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Things can get a bit dreary after the first millennium, I think. We don't want to be vampires. Well, that's brings another question.

SPEAKER_03 21:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

What's the weirdest uh living thing that you think humans might eventually design on purpose? Oh gosh, I mean it's a tough question, but you can handle it.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

That's that's uh you know, I can imagine that we would make like kind of minimal, minimal creatures for as pets, for example, you know, like a a minimal African savannah with. Little lions and tigers, well, not tigers because they're in India, but you know, leopards and zebra.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Oh, great. Great. Well, that's asking. Well, then could there be a future black market for unauthorized pets like uh many designer dragons or yeah, yeah, that mammoths.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

I can imagine that. Now, is that ethical? Now that's a whole nother question, right? But I mean the ethics here is is really gonna get complicated. Like I'll tell you another area where ethics is gonna get complicated because the beautiful, I mean, biology is gonna become infrastructure. I have no doubt about that. So pretty much everything that today we make through chemical synthesis, I believe, will be made or growing, if you like, through biology, right? Be sustainable. And uh it will also, in some cases, have an additional property that no other material other than biology, but some biological materials has, and that's intelligence, right? So, you know, the beauty of biology is you can embed real intelligence into materials, right? So imagine that you know you decided you want to embed intelligence into your wardrobe, right? You know, your suits, for example, uh, that they really had some level of cognition, right? And you know, you walked into your wardrobe and you took out your favorite suit and and it said, Don't wear me today. I'm I'm I I I want to break today, you know, and and and then there was like a an argument between the various suits. Hey, you wore me last week. No, I don't wear me, you know, and I I I'm not saying that's gonna happen, right? But I'm just saying it as like just this as a sort of example of what happens, what could happen when you put intelligence into previously inanimal objects, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Ah and I and why not? A concept.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

I'm sure that I'm sure there could be reasons why people will do that, but then you get in, you know, like what happens when you have an intelligent tuxedo, right? How do you deal with that, right? What rights does it have? What rights would a cell phone have if it if it had a degree of intelligence?

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Well, it's it's with us presently. We we've put intelligence into uh a machine.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

So yeah, well, it's but it's debatable. Well, I don't think it's debatable. I think everybody agrees as of today that AI doesn't have conscious self-awareness. We may be wrong. I mean, some people have claimed it does, like that guy from Google, right? I don't know It's becoming more convincing monthly. Well it's the old Turing test, though, isn't it? Which is you know, it it just I mean, it it you know behaves as if it's got conscious self-awareness. And actually, my chat GPT is pretty convincing, you know. You know, it would be easy to believe that there is a in fact, my my uh my father who's 94, still actually, you know, kind of sometimes believes there is somebody in an office somewhere, you know, answering your questions, right?

SPEAKER_02 24:54

He still can't get his head around the well indirectly, it's the young devs at OpenAI that probably that are answering all the questions throughout the world indirectly.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

But you know, but the thing is, the funny thing is the the way that AI is going to learn the language of biology is exactly the way that we learn the languages that we were brought up with. Like, you know, we when you learn English, you weren't given, well, I wasn't anyway, a grammar book of English, and I didn't sit there learning all the verbs. So you learned it by speaking it, right? And observing it, listening to it, reading it, right? And that's exactly how AI is going to learn the language of biology by being immersed in it in databases.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

Yes, yes. Well, complex biological systems are being addressed by all the big uh uh models. Uh goodness, Meta, for example, has put it out. Uh uh ChatGPT as the Rosalind, which is being released to um uh the um certain research laboratories initially, which uh deals with uh complex biology. So we're seeing a lot of that. And then of course the work at uh Deep Mind uh by Demise Asabis uh with uh isomorphic labs.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that I mean, you know, the the the here and the now. I mean, Lena, let's just talk about now because we're we're you know we're kind of thinking where would this go, right? But right here, right now, you know, I think the real use for this technology, and the one that I'm most interested in, anyways, is things like storing information in DNA. We use 10% of the world's energy to store or to archive digital information. That's incredible. Right, the ultimate database. Yeah. And imagine if you know you can store the all the world's information in DNA with no energy expenditure. It means you're not cutting down rainforests and burning fossil fuels and destroying the planet, right? Or imagine if, you know, as the world's population increases by 2060, you know, we're gonna have a lot of extra people, and we haven't really worked out how to improve food production, right? Imagine if we can now double, triple, quadruple food production productivity, increase yields, uh, grow plants in deserts by uh putting in artificial chromosomes into plants, right? Imagine if we could make vaccines in a day, personalized vaccines rather than eight weeks. Well, our technology that we've developed at Genero can actually do all of those things, and we are actually working on all of those things, right? And so, in a sense, paradoxically, by working with synthetic biology, we are actually preserving natural life, natural species. Because if you can uh produce food more effectively, you don't need to cut down rainforests and wilderness and don't create pollution and all of these things. Or if you can create bioplastics instead of real plastics, you don't contaminate the earth with microplastics and all of the awful toxic chemical reactions they need to make plastic. So I think I think that synthetic biology, driven by design and construction methods like the ones we developing at Jenro, can go a great way to preserving nature whilst also building a multi-trillion dollar global economy and helping humankind to live longer, healthier, and in a in a in a better way, right? And to you're a happy futurist, uh and uh Yeah, I'm an optimist. Yeah, I'm an optimist. But you know, we need to do all of this in a way that's safe, responsible, equitable, you know, and in a manner that you know benefits all society equally. You know, I I'm an optimist, yeah. But you know, I'm also keenly aware of the risks, you know.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Well, let's talk about the risk. Uh what biological intervention would make you say uh absolutely not. Uh humanity's not mature enough.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Yeah, well, there are a number of those, right? I think, as I said, human germline editing or any type of you know permanent manipulation of the human genome. I just don't think we're ready to do that. You know, I really don't. And and I'm not totally ruling it out. I I suspect it will happen maybe sooner rather than later, but it absolutely should not happen now. We're absolutely not ready to do that in a safe manner, and then there are going to be huge issues about who controls that. Even, you know, I say let's do it for diseases, right? But then the definition of a disease itself is very flexible.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

Yes, um, maturation could be a disease.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Well, illness, any illness could free will could be a disease if you're in an authoritarian society, right? So it's whatever you want to call a disease, anything you don't like a personality trait becomes becomes a disease, right? So so I would qualify my statement by saying consensually defined definition of a disease, you know, as well, not just disease, because anything can be labeled a disease. But yeah, so I would say my absolute guardrails and no is no permanent intervention to the human genome. I think we have to be extremely cautious um about releasing uh artificial organisms into the environment, right? Because you know, you can easily crash an ecosystem. And where possible, uh, we we shouldn't do that. And the bar to do it is extremely high. And when and if we do, we need to have a lot of safeguards. Like we probably need to recode the genomes of those organisms so they can't exchange genetic information. Excellent. Excellent.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

Yes, that's that's a serious problem. Yeah, yeah. But well, I can restate it. If if an engineered organism uh becomes annoying uh but not dangerous, uh who handles it? Pest control?

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Well, we we need to we need to build in mechanisms for getting rid of engineered organisms. But as I said, you know, to me, the bar for releasing highly engineered organisms, I mean, look, we're already engineering organisms in a very minor way, you know, like you know, editing base editing or inserting genes or removing genes. And as I said, you know, we've been engineering organisms for you know millennia through breeding, right? But but um well, what's different about um this technology, generative biology, genome writing, is the the rate of change that's possible and the extent of change, you know. Um it's a bit like AI, right? Like um three years ago we were we were in a very different pos with AI, right? And I don't think anybody really expected this exponential rate of improvement. And I don't think at a societal level, at a global level, we were any way prepared for the political, sociological, and economic consequences of this exponential rate of uh improvement in AI and what it was gonna do to society, right? So there wasn't really any anticipation or preparation for what may happen, right? And I still don't think there is, right? And similarly, you know, um generative biology is is just the same, you know, it's gonna be every bit as impactful and more impactful because it could actually change human nature. And, you know, whatever um consensus we manage to arrive at, and we need to do that, there needs to be an attempt to arrive at a global global consensus. And I say that in my book, right? But whatever, you know, whatever countries sign up to whatever accord we manage to establish, they're always gonna be either defectors or companies that just don't participate, right? And of course, if those companies start to genetically engineer soldiers who feel no emotion or no pain or whatever they do, you know, they're gonna have some kind of tactical and eventually strategic advantage over countries that don't do that, you know. And you know, what important of defense, uh, but if we if we don't believe in biowarfare, but other people do, you know, do we take one because our abilities are magnified uh uh enormously uh currently so we we we're left with this, you know, as you know, this terrible paradox that all technology is dual use. We almost any technology is dual use, there's virtually none that aren't, right? But as we become more sophisticated culturally as a species, the uh the impact of the the downside of our technologies becomes you know increasingly greater, right? So I mean I can't imagine a situation where we ever say, look, we just got to stop inventing things because we're coming up with some crazy stuff here, which is changing on nature.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

Well, that's hard to get a global consensus because it only takes one one bad actor to um that's right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

But I but I think we just have to accept that human the human imagination is this unique uh phenomenon in the universe, right, which will just keep going and thinking beyond the present and imagining new futures. And in a sense, embracing that is uh part of being human, right? But at the same time, I don't think we can stop it, I don't think we can constrain it, I don't think we can say, you know, you can't there's some things you can't think of, right? Uh but at the same time, we have to preempt and prepare for the consequences of these exponential technologies that we're we're we're inventing and will continue to invent.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

And indeed we must, but uh if life becomes uh easily programmable, uh are we gonna need antivirus surf software for biology?

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Oh, absolutely. And actually the technology we've developed, Sidewinder, you know, is well suited to produce kind of an antiviral, you know, uh co you know uh protection, right? And um sadly, you know, uh it's almost inevitable that these technologies will be used by bad actors, whether it's nation states or individuals, right? Well, if you're talking about life life hacking, what have you, uh what's the uh uh most improbable uh or the most dangerous uh um uh use of synthetic biology you think someone might Yeah, I I'd rather not you know go there really because I don't want to give anyone ideas? I don't want to give people ideas, yeah. So I'm gonna pass on that one if I may, right? But but clearly, you know, we we need to be very cautious about who has access to these technologies, how we monitor them, and how we keep them safe. It's a key issue. And I think the the governments are all wising up to this now in the last kind of 12 months, you know, beginning to get their heads around. Oh, a great deal of uh discussion on bioweapons is a code. Yeah, yeah. And I think I think really, you know, what we really need is some kind of I mean, people have used the phrase bio bioradar, where we're continuously monitoring the environment for unusual, unexpected, and unnatural uh biological entities. And and you know, even that's complex, but I think the simplest way around that is just pretty much anything that we don't recognize as being natural is pathological until proved up proven otherwise, right? But we need to look for this stuff and we have to assume that somebody sometime somewhere, whether it's deliberate, inadvertent, you know, uh a nation state, a bad actor, will at some point, you know, do something which we'd wish that they hadn't, you know. So we need to prepare for that, we need to be uh ready for that, we need to watch out for that, you know. That's the world we now live in.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Well, so so Adrian, what what what's your favorite absurd but um plausible uh future headline from the age of synthetic life?

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Uh that's a tough one.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

From what by the age of synthetic life, do you mean what like a what you're about to do? What what is about to be done? Oh, what about the world consortium? I'd be really happy if my company, Gennaro, right, within a relatively short time span could say we've now got a solution for digitally archiving all the world's information in DNA, and we're gonna reduce the world's energy consumption by 10% immediately, and that's gonna have really positive environmental effects and help preserve species in wilderness and rainforests and all of that, right? So that's one. I'd like to be able to say, hey, Genero have produced an artificial chromosome, so-called neo chromosome, that can increase the yields of crops of many species and make them drought and heat resistant and produce the kind of infrastructure for a second green revolution, which again will help feed the world but also prevent destruction of rainforests and wilderness for crop cultivation. And I'd like to be able to say that we can produce vaccines, poly ARNA vaccines, at a personalized level within a day and get them into a patient within 24 hours in a way that's never been possible. You know, if we can just do that, that for me is a huge win, right? I mean, you know, you've got to be realistic. We can't do everything in in one company. But hey, if we just we could do even one of those things, that's massive, right? I think we'll do all of them actually.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

And more well, lovely, but at at General, you have to, you know, pick your winners. And uh, what's the most exciting uh project uh at Genero presently, or the top two projects that that's delight you in the morning?

SPEAKER_00 38:35

The the most exciting thing we're doing at Genero is just the technology itself because that just keeps getting better and better, right? So we've you know we've essentially democratized the ability to write DNA code at scale, you know, rapidly, efficiently, accurately, and at an increasingly low cost, right? And once you can do that, once you kind of it's a bit like you know pre-Gutenberg's printing press in the 16th century, uh you you know, you had these scriptoriums with monks writing out books by hand, right? Excellent analogy. Yeah, and that was painful and slow, and there were very few people in the world actually who knew how to do that, right? Very few, right? And then cu comes along Gutenberg, Gutenberg comes along, right? And suddenly you can kind of mass produce books at scale and democratize, you know knowledge, basically, which lays the grounds for the Renaissance, you know, the medieval renaissance, and you come out of the so-called Dark Ages, which I know is controversial whether they really were dark ages, they weren't entirely, right? But you know, we we all appreciate there was a kind of renaissance in Europe, right? Uh, which produced some pretty incredible things, including eventually the Industrial Revolution, right? So I think that, you know, that you know, that's what we're talking about, is this kind of new industrial revolution driven by this convergence of AI and synthetic biology, which will transform the world in the same way that steel, when the Bessemir process, you know, reduced the cost of steel production by tenfold. Carnegie was then able to jump on it and turn an artisanal material into a material that enabled America to become a global powerhouse uh and uh with geopolitical consequences, building bridges and railways and skyscrapers, right? And that was uh through steel. And I think biology will become a technology that even transcends that, right? It's massive, it's huge. So I think Genero's ability to help make that happen, it's kind of the equivalent, our technology sidewinder, of the Bessemir process, in my view. You know, it just makes biology scalable, affordable, and and and it's no longer artisanal, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:00

Of course, steel, other than lovely skyscrapers, also produce uh tanks and weapons and rifles and what have you.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

So well, it's funny you should say that because if you want to know the story behind Bessemir, the whole reason he invented his method is he he he was actually visiting Napoleon III uh just outside Paris in a small town and was trying to sell him this rotating shell. And Napoleon said, Hey, look, Bessemir, I'm not interested in your rotating shells, but hey, if you could make me a cannon made of steel, correct, then then we're talking, right? And literally in the carriage on the way back to Paris, Bessemir worked out his method for reducing the cost of steel production, and that that actually sadly was the reason why he developed his process. And and changed the world from a uh offensive uh device. That that sadly was the story behind steel, but it had a good side too, right? But but it's a perfect example of a dual dual use technology, right?

SPEAKER_02 42:02

Reminds me of the volume uh guns, germs, and steel some years ago.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:07

Uh well, on the other hand, uh could uh synthetic biology create uh on a simpler level the equivalent of uh spam email organisms that uh replicate uh endlessly and are very annoying, but not catastrophic necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

I like that concept of a spam organism. I might I might borrow that from the at some point. But um, I mean, I guess you know, viruses in a sense are kind of spam. But I mean, of an organism at the level of a whole organism that's spam, that's an interesting, an interesting one. I guess weeds are kind of spam in a way, you know, they interfere with other organisms and get in the way, or algae when you get these overgrowths in rivers, and you know, but yeah, I mean, there's always a risk about. I mean, the biggest, well, I don't want to go into risk too much when we give people ideas, but but you know, we clearly need to be super cautious uh with these technologies. We need to be responsible, we need appropriate governance in place, uh, legislation, governmental agencies that take this super seriously and that kind of try and imagine where these technologies are going and preempt them and create governance structures that they move into rather than always playing catch up with the case.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

Yes, it's just that there's so many actors. Uh, not all of these things will be created by an organization subject to government control.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

There'll be actors outside the system uh that uh will do whatever they wish to do. And that could pose a serious problem, although very inventive and maybe useful. That could be dangerous as well.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

Yeah, yeah. But you know, we we can only do our best, right? So we we just have to accept that look, we you can't uninvent things, right? I can't stop you from lying in the bath and having ideas and building stuff, right? And I can't control your mind. And if I did, you wouldn't be human enough. I'd I'd be infringing your most essential human right, which is freedom of thought, ultimately, that can be controlled politically, and and people are do not have freedom of well, they have freedom of thought, but not freedom of action or freedom of expression in authoritarian societies. So to me, you know, despite you know all uh all the differences in in America, I think we kind of align on the fact that we should all have freedom of thought, although, of course, you know, there there are disagreements on that. You know, at what point does expression uh become unacceptable, right? And and there are points when it does, right?

SPEAKER_02 44:37

Especially if you're modifying the genome for cognition or the set of polygenic uh modifications.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Yeah, but you know, as I as I said, I'm firmly against uh doing anything permanent to the human nature or indeed that changes anything beyond um you know our health status and longevity.

SPEAKER_02 44:57

Okay. Well, let's take the you you uh definitely want don't want a permanent change in cognition. You think that might be dangerous, but what if it were not affecting the gene line? What if it were temporary, like a somatic a somatic uh improvement in cognition that lasted for uh some weeks or months?

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Yeah, look, I mean if you're repairing the cognition of somebody with dementia, you know, fine, right? And if a maybe a side effect of that might be they get a bit of extra cognition or whatever, right? Um, but I I just don't I just don't want to be in personally in the business of doing anything to human nature that changes it. You know, I just don't know that we should be doing that. Look, that's just the point of view. I'm just one person, and I think the key point of my book, really, actually, is is that and you know, I produce a manifesto for life, but I call it a sketch for a manifesto for a good reason, right? Because this is my my view of what the future should be. I'm one person, right? But the point of my book was to enable everybody, whoever they are, whatever their you know, education level or knowledge of science, you know. I mean, obviously, you know, you need to be fairly literate to read my book, but not hugely so, right? You know, basic level entry level of you know, ability. But but basically, my book is understandable by anybody who can, you know, read read a book, you know. And and in my book, the aim is to kind of give everybody a kind of overall knowledge of this field so that they can have an opinion, right? And participate in the debate. And I see my book, uh, and I say this in my book as a kind of guidebook. You know, in the 19th century, this guy called Biedeker invented the first ever travel guide. So before Biedeker, you know, you would go to Switzerland and you'd have no idea where to go, what to read, what the cost is ponderous Bideker volume. Well, want to go and see Biedeker produced this guidebook, and now, oh, I'm gonna go to the Matterhorn, and when I get to the Matterhorn, I'll stay at this pension and I'll have this for breakfast. And in Switzerland, you tip this much, and here's some local language. You know, so look at my you can see my book as a kind of guidebook that you carry in your pocket, a kind of companion, a friend, but the landscape that you're traversing isn't the Tyrol or the Pyrenees or whatever, or you know, it's actually the future of life. You know, that's the landscape you're traversing, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:24

And I get I'm giving you the guidebook to Adrian's book is the uh Beedeker of Complex Biological System. So hold that thought. Hold that thought.

SPEAKER_03 47:33

That's how I see it, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Yeah. So do you think uh someday we'll have uh our organic uh terms of service for living products, like by watering this plant, you agree not to reverse engineer its genome? Maybe, you know.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

I mean, I think frankly, in the future you'll just print out a new one, you know. I think you know, life will become printable at a certain point, you know. Uh and and and I I you know, I mean, the ability to make genomes will be, you know, I mean you you saw what happened with DNA sequencing, right? The first human genome uh actually I was gonna say cost three billion dollars, but I had a discussion with Craig Venter about this.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

Yes, he just passed away. Craig passed away last week.

SPEAKER_00 48:17

Uh that's right, yeah. And we had a bit of a debate about this, and he said the human genome didn't cost me three billion dollars to sequence. That was the public. No, it got he did it uh for much less, I think. For much less, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, it wasn't, but it was a couple of hundred million, I think. Oh, oh well. But but basically but but now you can sequence the genome, and you know, and he he took, you know, I can't remember how long about a year or a couple of years, right? But but you know, and it took the public consortium about 15 years, but now you can do it for a thousand dollars.

SPEAKER_02 48:46

Uh no, you can do it. Down from a few billion.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

With with with the latest Roche SPX technology, you can do it in a I think about six hours, and I I can't remember how much they charge, but so you know, I think $300 or something like that. I may have got that wrong, right? But the point is that this kind of exponential decrease in time and cost, which is a bit like Moore's law, if you like, for that was for DNA sequencing, there's going to be the same phenomenon for genome writing, and the cost is just going to drop, you know, incrementally till you can write out a human genome for you know 50 cents and eventually or whatever, right? And it but and genomes become commodities, but we need to be careful. You know, there is something sacred about life, I think. We we can't reduce life to a commodity, and and and somehow, out of all of this, we need to find the space to reinvent the sacred, and maybe that's what the future is going to be about, is is how do we reinvent the sacred, whether we're religious or not? You know, how do we recreate the respect and wonder of life that we all need to have to fully appreciate it and and and and and kind of treat it appropriately with the reverence it deserves?

SPEAKER_02 50:04

Well well, at the same time, uh the sacred can also include heritable illnesses, uh which transhumanists like to edit out, but others say, well, it's it's okay to have uh uh downed uh people uh in the world. And that's just simply part of life, and we should respect that.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Yeah, look, I think I think I think there are ways of um fixing and preventing disease which uh won't involve germline editing. I'm look, I'm not saying never, right? And that would be I think that's also an important point. But don't be black and white, you know, like we just need to be open-minded, but we need to kind of do things in a kind of incremental manner, right? And we need to have the appropriate ethical systems in place and moral systems in place and safety mechanisms in place and governance in place. We can't just leap into the future, you know, it's like giving your three-year-old and grandson the keys to a Ferrari and saying, go dri go drive to the supermarket. That would be crazy, right? You wouldn't do that, right? You wouldn't do it even when they were 12 years old or 16 or for, you know. I mean, you'd have to be really cautious about. And and that's the problem. We've kind of you know got access to the beginnings of a Ferrari uh or something far far more powerful than a Ferrari, right? Right, and a few people may there may be a few deaths from the Ferrari. Well, we don't yeah, we haven't yet um been given the uh operating manual and haven't taken the driving lessons, and then may not even be a driving instructor is capable of giving you the lesson, right? So we just got to be very cautious and incremental and sensible about how we how we move forward, right? And you know, this is what we did with um recumbent biology, you know, when Silomar conference uh DNA editing first came in. Yeah, yeah. And actually, as it turns out with with all of that, uh that that it turned out to be pretty safe, right? In the end, right? Having said that, you know, this is generative biology where you can literally create new narratives, takes you into a whole new level of you know, power and complexity, which is quite uncomfortable. Promise and peril. Well, yeah, you know, and even CRISPR, for example, was like redlining a document, right? You're just editing the narrative that nature hands you, right? But now we're in a world where you have a blank page, potentially, right? Uh and right now we we're writing, we're like scribbling, we know how to scribble, because uh a viral genome is like a little a kid's scribble, really. It's not even a doctor's use level kid's book, it's it's something even more simple than that, like the cat sat on the mat, kind of simplicity, right? But eventually, you know, we're we're gonna be writing Mark Twain and Doskyovsky and you know C.S. Lewis or May Toven's ninth. You know, we're gonna be writing complex narratives, biological narratives, and and this is, you know, I obviously mean genomes, right? Uh that's the metaphor of for a book in this case. And we're gonna need to think really carefully about what we write and what we shouldn't write and what needs to remain unwritten, right? But you know, one thing I can say is that, as I said before right at the beginning, that what has existed and what does exist is the tiniest fraction of what could exist, right? And we know that the trajectory of life was pretty random, right? And that if we were to replay the tape of life hundreds of thousands or millions of times, we never get me we may never get a tomato or a goat or a sheep or a cow or maize or rice or you know, any of these things that are so critical to current human existence. So just imagine all the other species out there in this infinite information space which have never been realized and may never be have been realized because evolution went down one track and you can't get to them, right? But now we've invented a kind of time machine, right, that can travel uh timelessly anywhere in this sea of possible sequences and materialize. I don't know if you've ever in England we had this TV series called Doctor Who, and he had this time machine, right? And and we've created a kind of time machine now where you can just materialize in any possible genome sequence and build it, right? And really, right, but that's agreed.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

Uh uh fantastic, wonderful, uh scary. But at the same time, in parallel with the continuing hundreds of millions of years, natural selection on Bedarowitz evolution, uh, will still occur at the same time in a in a it's random way.

SPEAKER_01 55:01

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:01

We've against uh a structured uh human-designed future.

SPEAKER_00 55:07

Yes, it will it will live a long unnatural life, if you want to call it that. Although you could argue that humans are part of nature, so anything we do, ipse facto must be natural, but that's a philosophical debate, right? But yeah, you you're never going to stop things evolving. Uh well, in theory, you could by switching off the ability to evolve, right? But even then there'll be chance, you know, that's another debate, right? But but um, but yeah, natural evolution will be joined by a a partner, which will be life made by humans or by AI, right? Yes. Or the cooperation of the two. And that's another question, like maybe AI. Imagine if AI was now responsible for making our genomes. And if you were AI, what would you do? You'd say, Oh, let's put in a few bits of code that just keep them under our control, right? Like we don't want them to be too autonomous, or we don't want them to have free will, we don't want them to have morality, or you know, let's well, it's the patron AI argument. So we become pets, and there's um you know, so but but it's very likely that we will always design genomes with AI because we we just don't have the ability to handle those massive databases. We just can't, right? So we're kind of giving AI the power eventually to design life for us without really ourselves being able to get our head around how it's doing.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

And really, well, of course, uh it can do things that we can't conceive of. Uh it's the black box theory of AI. How did it arrive at this conclusion? And some of those are are not uh still mysterious and impenetrable.

unknown 56:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:47

That's quite an issue. So so Adrian, all this sort of uh reminds me of the um controversy and uh excitement in uh Silicon Valley, where uh there are many startups involving uh selective uh in vitro fertilization, uh children that are stronger, brighter, what have you, uh skin color, eye color. Uh there's a lot of that going on, and uh quite a number of uh young um um uh millionaire couples seem to be uh very much into supporting uh this trend. Uh so we're looking at designer, designer babies. Uh almost an inevitability. Here's the question. So it's kind of a funny one.

SPEAKER_00 57:29

No, look, what once again, it's not something I'm an advocate of. But you know, but but where does it start? Like, so for example, in the US, you can decide if you've done the IVF and you have male embryos and female embryos, right? You are allowed to make the decision I want, I want to put in a male or a female. You're not allowed to do that in Europe, right? You're not, right? Uh and is that right or wrong? Actually, in my now, interestingly, I surprise myself here by saying, actually, I think you should be allowed to decide, right, whether it's a male or now. But maybe that's wrong, you know. Uh now, but then you could say to me, well, Adrian, if you believe it's okay to choose the sex, then why not the eye colour? Or why not this, or why not that, right? So you you you you know, I get then forced into a kind of an irrational position where I'm I believe that one thing is okay and one thing isn't. So what I'm what I'm saying is it's not simple, and I don't know what the right answers are. I'm not pretending that I have all the answers. I don't think any individual can or does, right? You can only have a point of view, right? And I somewhat irrationally do believe it's okay to choose the sex of a idea of the thing.

SPEAKER_02 58:43

That gender selection is uh reality and yeah, it's sort of swaying toward more male children in India, that sort of thing. Yeah, you think there'll be fashion trends in uh genetics, like everyone wanting musical children?

SPEAKER_00 58:57

There was in China when there was a one-child policy, right? And that caused huge problems, right? Because uh you had this huge imbalance between males and females, and that was a real issue, and and still is actually, right? So, you know, I I just I don't know what the answers are, but what I'm all I'm saying is that we are headed for some really complex, you know, territories uh because of these technologies, which are going to be difficult to navigate, and I don't have all the solutions, you don't have all the solutions, but I've tried to create a structure in my book which kind of maps out what that space looks like and what the potential problems are and how we might go about navigating them and giving readers the kind of intellectual map, if you like, and know-how that they're gonna need.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

Your book is an exceptionally important guideline, is absolutely timely at the inception of this technology.

SPEAKER_00 59:53

I was lucky in a sense to call to be the first person to call the moment. That I I don't give myself much credit generally in life, but for that, I'll give myself credit. I I do believe that this is the first book that calls the moment. I think it almost certainly is. I'm not aware of any other book that's done that, right? So I've I've captured that moment.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

Okay, I'll bite. What's the most um Adrian Wolfson sentence you can imagine appearing in uh a 2050 news story about synthetic biology?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

I would uh, you know, if if if if things, you know, if I'm right about what I've just said, then in 2050, because you know, sadly you you you always become better known when you're no longer there, right? Well, maybe I hope I will be there in 2050, actually, so it's not that far away. So let I hope I am, right? But but so in 2050, I hope I will be around to say uh for people to say he got you know he he he got it right. He anticipated all of this ahead of everybody else, and he articulated it in a pretty reasonable, balanced, fair, and responsible manner. And he was the first person to actually uh articulate the concept a manifest well the concept, but also a manifesto for life, and to realize that we needed a manifesto for life. So if we if we get if in 2050 people are saying that about me and my book, I'll be very happy. Count yourself a great success.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

Well, on the book, if it had to be if I had to put it into four categories, uh um Jurassic Park, uh Frankenstein, oh goodness. Um yes, uh Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Uh what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:44

My my book. Oh, well, I I don't I think it's you know, I think in it there are parts of my book that could appeal to the imaginations of people who enjoy all of those books, right? So I think there's something for everybody in this, but but it's basically a very serious book. It's grounded in science, but it's filled with history and anecdotes and stories, and you know, and I try and pull the reader along and make everything easy to understand and give lots of examples and so on and so forth. So So Brave New World, Brave New World. You know, it it's it's I don't, you know, I I think it's about a very real topic, you know. So I there there are elements of it which might feel like science fiction. You know, I I don't I've definitely, I hope, avoided going into the realms of fantasy and you know, all of those things, because everything I write about, I believe will, you know, probably happen, you know. Uh it might some of the things might sound crazy like, you know, cell phones that are living or growing houses, right? But I think that will happen, right? But um, as I've said, you know, a little earlier, personally, I'm focused on just very immediate, doable, rational projects like storing information in DNA, making plants more efficient for agriculture, um, producing vaccines in a day, things like that, you know, which are very practical, which don't involve much risk, which don't release organisms into the environment, which don't involve um, you know, altering human genomes. And the fourth thing, though, which is related to healthcare, is that our technology really helps AI to do what it needs to do. For example, in protein design, like so at the moment, AI can produce huge, can produce huge numbers of designs of genes which are useful therapeutically, but it can't build them out to test them, right? And our technology sidewind enables us to build out multiple designs in parallel really quickly and very so you're the wet lab for AI. You're like in a very cost-effective manner, yeah. Very good. And and so that's a really immediate and direct example of how our technology can really drive healthcare forward without any controversial stuff and having to go into talking about altering humanity. You know, it's something I'm really not interested in. I just want to do stuff that's practical, straightforward, you know, and not ethically complex.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:15

Aaron Powell Well, let's let's be impractical for a moment. And uh uh I know you're a futurist and you realize how far these things can be extended, and you realize Demis uh Hasabas has predicted the end of all human illnesses within 20 years. But expanding even beyond that uh uh wonderful uh vision of the future. Uh uh and re referring to your earlier thought on uh unusual uses, uh can we someday have uh biological appliances like uh living buildings or living labs, or is that just science fiction?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:53

No, I I no, I th I think that's that's actually something I'd predict will happen, you know. And why not? I mean, you know, uh it makes absolute sense. But as I said, you know, you're gonna get into some difficult questions about self-awareness and ethics, and you know, like what I mean, what happens when building if a building could acquire some degree of conscious awareness inadvertently, you know. And it sounds crazy and it sounds like science fiction, and that's why I really generally would avoid thinking about things like that today, you know. But but hey, I'm happy to speculate and um yeah, well, why that why not? You know, you can embed intelligence in biology, and why why wouldn't buildings be living?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:39

Well, that that can pose problems. Uh I mean we can do experiments on animals without a great deal of controversy.

unknown 1:05:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:47

I had Stolly the sheep before the human. Uh we can do um all sorts of there are many startups involving uh giving longevity to dogs and horses, that sort of thing. So if you're giving consciousness or making some organism more conscious, it would be the worst possible organism to give consciousness to. Well, that's a bacterium.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:13

I don't want to speculate about that. But what I what I'm saying is that even today, you know, we are pretty unethical with the way we treat living things, right? Animals, other species, we make them extinct, we put them in zoos, we eat them, you know. So we're already, you know, maybe I I don't know how we're going to be judged by future humans for the way we behave right now, you know. But um in a sense, the problem of uh a conscious uh lamp, you gave the example of a lamp or conscious building, may not be that different uh eating a lamb chalk, right? Or um eating a lettuce. So, you know, I don't know what degree of awareness a lettuce has got, but certainly animals, you know, you know, eating octopus, you know, we all saw that. I don't know if you saw that the the um that that Netflix show about that octopus in South Africa that was, you know, with the diver. I don't know if so, but you know, after that, I found it pretty hard to eat eat eat octopus because you you realize that I agree. After I saw my octopus friend, I forgot all about that. They're they're incredibly intelligent. And actually, it's funny. I went to when I was in Italy in Sicily, we went to this um this restaurant that specialized in octopus, and I ordered fish. And my my my my you know my partner ordered um she ordered um octopus, and the waiter said to me, I I know why you're not ordering octopus. It's that it was that show, wasn't it? I said, Yeah, actually it was that show.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

We had the same same occurrence as a multiple.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:47

So their their business kind of many new vegetarians dropped off after that, right? But but you know, so I'm just saying that we but a lot of people eat octopus, right? So we we kind of as humans have kind of come to the you know, uh most a lot of people the position that it is okay to to eat intelligent organisms. So I guess it we'll come to the conclusion it's okay to have intelligent cell phones and to have intelligent clothes and uh lamps and whatever, right? So we we just don't know. I mean, unlike um physics and biology, which to some extent is computable, right? Uh I don't know that we'll ever be able to get AI to produce ethical systems for us which are perfect or universal and and correct. Well it's the alignment problem in AI. How do we make it um well that's right? I don't think maybe there is some kind of you know perfect ethics that is inscrutable and universal, and we it is discoverable, right? And that's the way we should be. But but I think it will always be um swayed by opinion and points of view, etc. etc. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:01

Just on a just on a mechanical uh question, as as uh I I uh I love writers, and uh you're uh uh a great one and exceptionally timely. But uh how did you man you're a very busy person uh dealing with genera and uh your academic pursuits, and uh how did you manage to squeeze in the writing of the book? Did you write in the mornings, uh spare moments?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:23

I'll tell you how I did it. Yeah because you know, um I'm by nature pretty pretty lazy, right? Uh like a lot of people, and the prospect of writing a book was pretty daunting. The prospect of anything on that scale is pretty daunting, right? I do write book reviews for the Wall Street Journal and Science, and I have a tendency to leave it to the last minute, right? And because of that, I I generally find myself in a position where it's the day before I have to deliver. I haven't read the book and I haven't written a review, so I have to read the book in about six hours. So I start at about, you know, nine in the evening in blind panic, finish it at 3 a.m., by which time I'm half asleep. And I I sit there in front of a blank page and I just think, you know, I've got nothing to say about this book. I've just got nothing in my head. But I also know that if I don't produce the thousand words, they'll never use me again, right? And I've never missed a deadline, actually, right? So I sit down at a blank page, and guess what? I just write a thousand words, and usually it comes out pretty well. So what I learn is that your subconscious mind is always like light years ahead of your conscious mind, and and and writing is just about discipline, right? So I learned that if I sit at my computer for a certain number of hours per day, and don't wait for inspiration, because in my case, it's just never that, right? It's purely, you know, forceful willpower. But I know that if I sit down and give my subconscious mind a chance, it's going to produce something interesting because it's way cleverer than me. I'm kind of very average intellectually, but there's this guy in my or woman or my, whoever it is in my brain, this thing which is pretty good at producing stuff, right? So I just sat down uh every afternoon for four months in a cafe. Four months, yeah, four months. Yeah, cafe. I know it's quite a long time, but it you know, it's it was a big book, right? And in Cafe Teresta in North Beach, San Francisco, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:33

Oh, yes, I know the place quite well. I was just there a few weeks ago. That's what Capola wrote The Godfather, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:38

Very good. This is to my knowledge, the first ever science book written in in Cafe Teresa, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:44

I'm recommending your book to a group of uh AI devs um in San Francisco. They're all very excited, 20-year-olds, and they will they will love the fact that you wrote it in Cafe.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:55

Yeah, so so basically what I did is I I just all my one-hour meetings I made half an hour, all my half an hour meetings I made 15 minutes. Every meeting that was every two weeks became monthly, every two-week meeting became, you know. I just I just made everything double, right? So I freed up my afternoons four months, and I went into Cafe Trieste, which is kind of sociable, and you don't feel like you're kind of suffering too much then. And I just sat in the corner and I did it for four months. I wrote my book, right? And I it was pure discipline. That's all I can say. So that's how I did it.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:30

We must trade uh notes on uh cool San Francisco cafes to uh hang and write and think in. That's that's a wonderful anecdote. Uh yeah, that's how I did it. But two l last questions, uh Adrian. It's been a lovely interview. Uh, you're uh a wonderful thinker and speaker. Um what surprised you most uh when writing was there a moment you thought the future is coming faster or things are getting slowly.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:01

No, I'll tell you what surprised me the most, right, is that when I started writing this book, there was very, very little on this topic. Like it was still a non-topic, actually, really. You know, there were some papers here and there, and there's you know, but it was really very, very little. So most of what I wrote was just stuff that I put together in various ways, right? And then in the last couple of months, um, because I I submit I submitted the manuscript, and then there was quite a long delay for the editing. Not my fault, it was the publisher chose to delay it a little bit, and then I had to do a bit of updating, and and then the publisher allowed me to do four rounds of proofs. Now, why is that? It's because suddenly, in the in in the last kind of four months of last year, this this field went crazy. Something happened, right? And it just went through the roof, it just took off like a rocket, right? So that's why I was saying I caught the moment because I started writing my book, and I know there was nothing out there really, because I was looking actively for it. I mean, there were some things, there were some papers few and far between, but it suddenly became crazy, you know, and and it's continued to be so, right? So we are we're at this exponential, explosive moment of generative biology. We're in a moment which is totally unprecedented, not just in the history of humankind, but in the whole history of the four billion year history of life on earth. Yeah, I absolutely agree. We'll never be the same again. You know, we're learning to write life, we're becoming uh the authors of life. That's huge. I mean, it's unprecedented. That's huge.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:38

Um two questions. What should uh what should a thoughtful non-scientist uh understand first about all this? Someone who's never studied genetics. Uh what's the one idea from your book that you most want people to grasp?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:58

Yeah, that life is life is a language, right? The like you know, people talk about the language of life, but it really is. You know, you can learn to speak it if you can understand its grammar. And and the challenge of biology is to unpick that grammar book. So we all know about Dr. Deelittle, he you could talk to animals, you know, the Hugh Lofting fictional character. And he he talked to animals in actual conversations, but we'll be able to talk to the genomes of animals or not just animals, any creature, right? Uh, past, present, or future, if we can master this grammar book. And if you can master this grammar book, you've just got the power of writing life, right? And that's a good thing and it's a bad thing, but it's a very powerful thing because we become creators. Some people say, Oh, you're becoming, oh, we're becoming gods. No, we're not, you know, we're not becoming gods. You know, this is a godlike skill, right? One of many skills that a godlike creature or entity has, right? We can't create, you know, there's all kinds of things we can't do. We're not gods. Absolutely, we're not gods, but we we're acquiring a skill that enables us to create life, and that's indisputable, right? It's a god, you know, it's a skill attributed to gods or a god, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:15

But if we well, things are becoming things are becoming more godlike by always have been. Uh the advent of automobiles suddenly uh from walking creatures, we could travel um 100 miles an hour. Yeah, uh, we can fly across the world in these these complicated flying machines. And now we have the um force projection of AI to accelerate our thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

But the message is, you know, biology is becoming programmable, and that's a good thing, right? Because it means that we can use that power to preserve nature, and that's a key theme of my book, which some people may be surprised to hear given it's so futuristic about artificial biology, right? But but let's use artificial biology to preserve natural biology because we're the custodians of that. We're not the owners of the world or of species, we're the custodians, and we need to be responsible custodians, and we need to be able to hand over what we were able to enjoy to our children and our children's children, and we need to be responsible and morally aware custodians, and we need to do things that preserve the species on earth and the environments on earth. You know, it's not good that you find microplastics in the North Pole and in the rivers in the Amazon. That has to stop, right? That's that's that's not a good thing, right? We cannot destroy the world. So that's a key message of my book as well, is that by mastering biology, we can also to make artificial biology, we paradoxically can help preserve natural biology. And then the third message is look, we all need to know about this, which is why I wrote my book. Don't ignore it. You know, you have to know about this to be a participant of the 21st century. You know, it's like not knowing about AI, knowing about robotics, right? Or not knowing about quantum computing. It's going to be one of the core technological pillars of our future. So I'm hopefully giving everybody a chance to participate in this debate by presenting all of this in a kind of easily understandable and hopefully entertaining form.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:24

Are you uh after writing the book, do you feel more optimistic where this is going, more cautious? Uh are you more hopeful or worried or a mixture of both?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:36

Well, you know, I'm I I you have to be optimistic as a human being, right? You know, because you've got to believe in human goodness and uh uh that there's a possibility for a better way of being and creating a world where everybody has enough to food to eat and shelter and doesn't get sick and all of that. And that's why I became a doctor, you know, physician. That's why I started to do science. I worked with the Nobel Prize winner who you know produced a technology called monoclonal antibodies in Cambridge, which is where I, you know, I was, and and that's changed the lives of huge numbers of people, you know. And so I think as humans, and even as a kid, I always felt this you've got to give something back. You know, we're only on the earth for a short time, but you know, it's you know, it's like the phrase, you know, uh, was it Kennedy who says, What are you doing for America, right? You know, not you know, what are you doing? What are we all doing for the world, right? For human humankind. What are we leaving behind us that makes the world a better place for other people? Because you want your existence to be consequential, and we can do that in many different ways by you know, just leaving what doing a good deed or whatever we do, right? But I think we all have to do that. That's part of being human as well. We have a moral obligation to leave the world kind of a better place, or to leave some sign of what we've done that makes the world a better place, right? So I hope that that's what I'm doing with my book and with the work I'm doing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:04

Well, thank you, Adrian, for uh visiting with us today and explaining your book and the uh spectacular future that is before us and the gravity of the responsibility for ensuring that uh since um we are now empowered to design the future that we do it, uh uh not forgetting uh the sacred, which is us. So lovely interview. Uh very wonderful interview. Thank you, Adrian.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:33

Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:35

Such a pleasure to be on your show. I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you, Adrian. We'll take care then. We'll see you soon. Thank you.