[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today we're in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of mood, so we figure where better to start ...

LAUREL KENDALL: Test, test.

JAD: ... than at the Museum ...

LAUREL KENDALL: American Museum of Natural History.

JAD: ... where they have on a kind of Frankenstein-y exhibit.

LAUREL KENDALL: Okay, I'm Laurel Kendall. I curate the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit "Mythic Creatures." We're standing in front of a dragon.

JAD: Now why would there be a dragon at the Museum of Natural History? Well, according to curator Laurel Kendall ...

LAUREL KENDALL: Yeah.

JAD: ... why not?

LAUREL KENDALL: The human mind loves to wonder well, what would happen if we put wings on a horse, or put a tail on a beautiful woman. That is human.

JAD: Justify it however you want ...

LAUREL KENDALL: That belongs in the museum.

JAD: ... what you see before you ...

LAUREL KENDALL: We begin the exhibit ...

JAD: ... is a hall of strange, twisting creatures, dimly lit. And when you look more closely, you realize that they're all mash-ups ...

LAUREL KENDALL: From the natural world. For example ...

JAD: She takes us over to one corner, points at a glass case where inside ...

LAUREL KENDALL: What you're seeing is ...

JAD: ... is this creepy little hybrid skeleton thing.

LAUREL KENDALL: Look at this beast and see how it really is a composite.

JAD: Half of it is a monkey, the upper half.

LAUREL KENDALL: The monkey's skull ...

JAD: And the lower half?

LAUREL KENDALL: Is a fish tail.

JAD: Like some kind of trout.

LAUREL KENDALL: With some scales.

JAD: The place is full of stuff like this: A lion with an eagle head, humans with snake tails. Just about anything you can imagine.

LAUREL KENDALL: Very operatic.

JAD: Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important part: kids.

[kids yelling]

JAD: Tons and tons of kids completely in awe.

CHILD: Oh my God, a unicorn!

CHILD: Oh!

LULU MILLER: What are we standing under here?

GIRL: Pegasus.

LULU: Can you describe what we're seeing here?

GIRL: It's a horse.

GIRL: The body's like a horse. It has these really big wings. Wings like birds, like an eagle. Maybe somehow its parents were a horse and a bird, and their—their genes formed together to make a Pegasus.

GIRL: It's just what I see—what I see just looks so exciting.

JAD: And when you ask these kids, as our producer Lulu Miller did ...

LULU: Why's it cool? Like, why is it fun to see two animals mashed together?

GIRL: Um ...

JAD: ... well, they just look at you like you're dumb.

BOY: It's a horse with wings!

LULU: Birds have wings.

BOY: Yes. Birds, they're not mythical.

GIRL: They're like regular.

BOY: Yeah.

GIRL: Every day you see them. Every time you just see a pigeon, you're like, "Oh, whatever."

JAD: Maybe it's that simple.

BOY: Yeah.

JAD: In any case, the kids ...

BOY: Have a good day.

JAD: ... sick of us and our dumb questions, ran off to this kiosk that the museum had set up around the corner.

BOY: Over here.

JAD: Where they could actually build their own creatures.

LULU: Okay, now can you describe your guy here?

GIRL: Well, he has seven heads, and ...

BOY: He has a tail with fire on it.

GIRL: Four legs.

BOY: And he has a long body.

JAD: And the thing is ...

LULU: What kind of legs are those?

JAD: ... you can't help but wonder ...

LULU: Chicken legs!

JAD: ... if these same kids in about 30 or 40 years might actually be able to do this for real.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: When they're grown up, those kids will be at home in the new world of biotechnology. They will be ready to put their skills to use. There will be do-it-yourself kits to breed new varieties of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes.]

GIRL: The body of a snake rather than, like, a bird.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.]

JAD: That is physicist Freeman Dyson. We'll hear more from him later. Now whether it's true or not what he's saying, it does seem to be the case that we are at this pivotal point now where the stuff that we used to only imagine might actually turn into reality. Which is why maybe you get an exhibit of fantasy creatures at the Museum of Natural History.

LAUREL KENDALL: This is a celebration of the human imagination, human ingenuity, human art.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! In the name of God now I know what it feels like to be one.]

JAD: That's our show today: life, but not as we know it. Life as we might invent it, tweak it, augment it.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yes, but if you augment, tweak and remake, people will quickly come to you and say, "Hey, don't fuss with this. It's not natural, it's not right."

JAD: Speaking of right, natural and fussing, who are you?

ROBERT: Oh, sorry! [laughs] I'm Robert Krulwich, who is always right, always natural.

JAD: And always fussing.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: In any case, that word you mentioned ...

ROBERT: Natural?

JAD: Yeah, that one. Natural. What does it mean, exactly? Let's just think about that.

ROBERT: It usually means—it means what's familiar.

JAD: What we know.

ROBERT: What we know.

JAD: Let's—let's just muck that up a bit.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Because it turns out when you look in nature, you will find things that are frankly very strange and not familiar.

ROBERT: Like?

JAD: Well, let me tell you a story. It's an amazing story about a woman. Heard about it from a reporter, Soren Wheeler. Hi Soren.

SOREN WHEELER: Right. Hey.

JAD: Right. So Soren, tell me about Karen.

SOREN: Well, Karen is a mother of three, a middle-aged woman living outside of Boston, in the suburbs of Boston. And she lives there with her husband Pete. The kids are out of the house now.

JAD: Tell me what you were thinking when you walked up to her door.

SOREN: Well, I—I was nervous. I was kind of strangely nervous about meeting her.

KAREN KEEGAN: Soren!

SOREN: Hi, Karen.

KAREN KEEGAN: Hi.

SOREN: But I got there and she was as friendly as can be.

KAREN KEEGAN: So come on in. I'll bring in a couple cups of tea.

SOREN: She made me tea. We sat in the living room and talked. And she was just normal, which is kind of weird given the story that she was about to tell me.

SOREN: So let's start at the very beginning.

KAREN KEEGAN: Uh-huh. Well, in 1995 I was told that I needed a kidney transplant immediately.

SOREN: What's that like? Like, what are you going through?

KAREN KEEGAN: It was frightening.

SOREN: The doctors told Karen they needed to act fast.

KAREN KEEGAN: They asked me who in my family might be willing to donate a kidney.

SOREN: So the two older boys, that's Matt and Jess, and Karen's husband Pete, they all went in to get what should have been a pretty routine DNA test.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah, they had the bloodwork done.

SOREN: And they waited.

KAREN KEEGAN: A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from the hospital and they said, "Mrs. Keegan, this is a very unusual situation that we're going to explain to you. It's something that we've never seen before, but when the DNA testing was done on your sons we found that they didn't match your DNA."

SOREN: Is that how they said it?

KAREN KEEGAN: Mm-hmm. They said they matched the father but they're not a match for you.

JAD: What does that mean that they didn't match her DNA?

SOREN: She's not their mother.

JAD: Oh!

KAREN KEEGAN: Pretty much.

SOREN: To Karen this was crazy.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah

SOREN: I mean, she told them ...

KAREN KEEGAN: Well ...

SOREN: "I was there."

KAREN KEEGAN: This could not possibly be.

SOREN: "I gave birth to these kids, I felt the pain."

KAREN KEEGAN: You know, you better do the test again because you're obviously wrong.

SOREN: And so they did do the tests again. Same result.

LYNNE UHL: The read was correct. There was not a laboratory error.

SOREN: This is one of her doctors, Lynne Uhl.

LYNNE UHL: We—we felt, particularly after the second time, that it was real.

KAREN KEEGAN: And then they said, "Now we have had situations where the husband's DNA didn't match, but we've never had a mother whose DNA didn't match their children."

JAD: So wait, if the DNA's saying she's not the mom, then what would explain that?

SOREN: Well, the first thought was that there was some kind of mix up.

KAREN KEEGAN: Some switch of babies or something.

JAD: Oh, like a baby switch right after birth kind of thing.

SOREN: Yeah, but the problem with that is that the dad is the dad. The father's right.

JAD: Ah, yeah.

SOREN: So you have to figure, like, how could they have gotten the wrong kid but the right dad?

JAD: So then what? If that's the case ...

SOREN: Here's the thing: at this point ...

KAREN KEEGAN: As we got further involved with this ...

SOREN: ... people are thinking maybe Karen's done something kind of fishy.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah.

LYNNE UHL: There must be something that you're not being told.

SOREN: Like maybe she implanted her womb with another woman's baby.

SOREN: And then she just kind of lied about it?

LYNNE UHL: Yeah, that she lied about it.

KAREN KEEGAN: They said, "Well, could you tell us what hospital you had these children in?"

JAD: Wait, exactly how—what would—I'm still confused.

SOREN: She's being accused of being some kind of monster.

KAREN KEEGAN: Somebody who maybe wished they had children. Or stolen a child, or something had to be because obviously DNA's never wrong. It's never wrong.

JAD: Wow. So how does she talk to her family about this?

SOREN: What are those conversations like?

KAREN KEEGAN: I do remember some very sort of sad moments with my sons.

SOREN: Yeah.

KAREN KEEGAN: You know, I told them. I don't think they maybe even completely realized what I was saying.

SOREN: Lynne, Karen's doctor, couldn't get this out of her head. Something wasn't adding up.

LYNNE UHL: Didn't make sense.

SOREN: And so she thought about the fact that they'd done all the tests on Karen's blood.

LYNNE UHL: Only in her blood cells.

SOREN: So Lynne started thinking maybe ...

LYNNE UHL: The next step ...

SOREN: ... they oughta look at some other parts.

LYNNE UHL: And to do that, we would need to test other tissues. Scrape the inside of your mouth, and get a little saliva and maybe a hair or two. Thyroid, bladder and a skin biopsy.

SOREN: They're getting all sorts of parts.

KAREN KEEGAN: They're getting a lot of parts. All kinds of parts from me.

SOREN: And that's when things started to get strange.

LYNNE UHL: When we got the results of the tissue studies, we identified two sets of DNA.

SOREN: Two people.

JAD: Two—two what?

SOREN: Another person in Karen.

JAD: She had another person inside her?

SOREN: Well, sort of. She did have a separate set of DNA, so it was like she had another person with its own genetic identity in her body.

JAD: Whoa!

SOREN: And the thing is Jad, that other person? That was the mother of the boys.

JAD: Well, how did it get there?

SOREN: I mean, that's what the doctors were wondering. So they all sit down, put their heads together, try to figure it out. And then it hit them.

LYNNE UHL: You were a twin.

KAREN KEEGAN: You are a twin.

JAD: She—I mean, she had a twin.

SOREN: No. She's both twins. Here's what happened. In Karen's mother's womb, originally there were two eggs.

LYNNE UHL: Two fertilized eggs.

SOREN: Twin girls side by side.

LYNNE UHL: Developing in their own separate sacs.

SOREN: Then after a couple days something strange happened. Somehow the two embryos bump into each other and they fuse.

LYNNE UHL: Into one unit.

SOREN: And that one became Karen.

JAD: Like a mixture of the two of them?

SOREN: Well, no. They didn't blend. According to Lynne, what happened is they kind of claimed different parts of her.

LYNNE UHL: They still had their own—what do I want to say, boundaries?

SOREN: One twin claimed her blood, and the other twin claimed her thyroid and her bladder, and ...

JAD: So Karen is a plural!

SOREN: Yeah.

JAD: Is this—has this happened before?

SOREN: Well, supposedly it's pretty rare, but it does happen. In fact, there's a scientific word for this condition. Karen first heard that word from her doctor, Margot Kruskall.

KAREN KEEGAN: Margot came to my bedside, explained that I was a chimera—a term which I had never heard of before.

SOREN: Did she—did she come and say, "You're a chimera?"

KAREN KEEGAN: Yes. Now that was interesting because I called my son the English major and said, "Matt, I found out I was a chimera." And he said, "Oh! You know what a chimera is, don't you?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, in the ancient Greek myths, a chimera is an animal that has like a lion head, and a donkey's hoof and a goat tail." You know, it's a mixture.

SOREN: In Greek myths, the chimera was a monster ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Get back!]

SOREN: ... that the hero was supposed to slay.

KAREN KEEGAN: That didn't make me feel very good. [laughs]

SOREN: But then Karen learned more about what "chimera" meant medically, and what could've happened to her.

KAREN KEEGAN: If the eggs hadn't fused within four days, I would have become a Siamese twin. When you hear that, you immediately have a more concrete vision of two cells. It brought home the reality that I really was a twin.

SOREN: She is a twin.

KAREN KEEGAN: One doctor said, "Do you think you have two souls?" I think of myself as the union. But there is almost a sort of subtle sadness to think that I would have had a sister.

SOREN: Yeah.

KAREN KEEGAN: And so there is sort of a shadow feeling of loss. There could've been more.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Soren Wheeler for that.

ROBERT: Let's make things a little more disturbing now.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: 'Cause human beings, scientists are now capable of creating chimeras purposely. And we talked to Lee Silver, who's a scientist at Princeton.

ROBERT: Oh, Lee. Okay, you have to say something.

LEE SILVER: Okay. You know, my left ear is receiving more than my right. Is there a way ...

ROBERT: And he told us about an intentional chimera, a creature created by a Danish embryologist named Steen Willadsen.

LEE SILVER: He took a goat embryo and a sheep embryo, and he pushed them together in his Petri dish. Put that mixture of embryo back into a female. I don't remember which species. And then what was born was an animal that was part goat, part sheep. And he called that a "geep."

ROBERT: Was it visibly kind of goat-y and kind of sheep-y?

LEE SILVER: Well, it was actually—yeah, so it was very visible. And what happened, because of the way development occurs, parts of its body looked sheep-like and parts of its body looked goat-like.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Which parts?

ROBERT: Yeah.

LEE SILVER: Well, he did this multiple times, and so he actually got multiple geeps. And sometimes the animal would have a goat head but then parts of its body would be sheep-like with wool. Other times it would have a sheep head.

ROBERT: How confusing it would be at the geep dance!

JAD: Oh, wow!

ROBERT: You wouldn't know, like, who was supposed to dance with whom!

JAD: [laughs] Could geeps relate with one another in that way?

LEE SILVER: [laughs] I don't remember.

ROBERT: He's not a geep, odd as he may look with that little beard and everything and the hooves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, goat: Baaa.]

JAD: Now just to give you a visual, we've got a picture here of three geeps hanging out near a tree. It's—do you want to describe it?

ROBERT: Well, the geep, one of them looks like a naked animal wearing a coat of shaggy hair.

JAD: It's got this streak of sheep wool running down its back, but the rest of it looks kind of goat-y.

ROBERT: Which—do you find it cute?

JAD: I kinda do find it cute.

ROBERT: Well, but now let's kind of uncute a bit. Suppose instead of talking about mixing sheep with goats.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Since you're not a sheep or a goat.

JAD: Mm-mm.

ROBERT: Let's make it more personal.

LEE SILVER: People are most worried about combining human embryonic cells and monkey or chimp embryonic cells. And so the idea is if you took a chimp embryo and a human embryo and you pushed them together, based on the geep results, based on lots of other data that scientists have accumulated, it's very likely that you'd have an organism born that was part chimp, part human.

ROBERT: Well, there once was a creature like that, because if you believe in evolution you believe that chimps eventually became humans, so somewhere in history there's someone who is 10 percent chimp and 90 percent human.

LEE SILVER: And that common ancestor evolved continuously and slowly from a chimplike individual to a human. And at every point along the hundred thousand generations, the children didn't look very different from their parents.

ROBERT: But here's the—here's the very sad Hollywood movie. I go and I go and I create a creature, a geep-like, you know, amalgamation which is 50 percent chimpanzee ape and 50 percent human homo sapien. And he's the only one. That's like creating a tragedy, it seems like because you'd be creating someone who is isolated in his physiology.

LEE SILVER: Yeah. I mean, this is ...

ROBERT: No one could breed with him, or maybe they could.

LEE SILVER: I'm gonna—because you're taping this.

ROBERT: Yeah. And you're opening something.

LEE SILVER: I'm opening something for you. This is actually a play. Here, you can look at this. It's going to be performed next week.

ROBERT: Sweet Sweet Motherhood. Is that it?

LEE SILVER: Yes, that's it.

ROBERT: So is a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. "Shelley McCann wants a baby, a human-chimpanzee baby."

JAD: Oh!

ROBERT: Oh! "Shelley's been spending too much time partying to build up a respectable grade point average, so she proposes the following senior thesis: fertilize one of her eggs with the sperm from a chimpanzee in her womb." Interesting term paper. "So Professor Harry Stein must do everything he can to stop her. The play is inspired by a true event." Really? This is your play.

LEE SILVER: Yes.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

LEE SILVER: Jeremy Kareken is the main playwright, and I collaborated with him.

ROBERT: What is the true event on which this is based?

LEE SILVER: The true event is that about 10-12 years ago now, I was talking in my usual flippant way to a bunch of students, and a sequence information had just come out showing that chimps and humans were almost 90 percent the same at the DNA level. And so I just threw out the idea, "Well, based on what we know about goats and sheep and everything else, you probably could have a hybrid develop between a chimpanzee and a human being." It was a thought experiment. What would it be? How would it develop? Which of its characteristics would be human and which would be chimpanzee?

LEE SILVER: The next day, a student, a junior, came to my office and said she wanted to do the experiment inside her own womb.

ROBERT: [gasps]

LEE SILVER: And so then yes ...

ROBERT: [laughs] In real life, what did you do? Hit her on the head with a baseball bat or what?

LEE SILVER: No, I had long—I was flabbergasted. She was absolutely serious. Because she—it's actually true. She—she was this student who partied a lot, and she needed—and the senior thesis at Princeton counts an enormous amount towards your final GPA. So she wanted to do this unique experiment hoping she'd get an A-plus on her senior thesis. And she was very naïve, obviously.

JAD: Whoa!

LEE SILVER: That was the last time I saw her.

ROBERT: She was gonna put up this little chimpanzee for adoption as soon as it was born, or was she planning to take it to school with her?

LEE SILVER: Well, no, no. Worse—worse than that. She—I asked her what she would do with this individual. I said, "Well, if it's a human being, you have to raise it like a human being. It has rights like a human being. If it's a chimpanzee you put it in a zoo, or you use it for experiments. And what's it gonna be?" And her answer to that question was she would abort right before it came time to go into labor. She'd abort. And so the whole idea of the senior thesis was to study the development of this hybrid inside of her womb.

JAD: She really wanted to do this for real? Not just on paper for a project, but actually for herself?

LEE SILVER: She wanted—yes. Yeah. There are many, many, many, many problems.

ROBERT: [laughs] Yeah. Gives new meaning to "liberal arts education."

LEE SILVER: Right.

ROBERT: You gotta be really liberal here.

LEE SILVER: And we talked for about an hour. I dissuaded her. I never saw her again.

ROBERT: Except in a way in his play, the one he co-wrote. This is the play about the teacher at the fancy university who happens just to be teaching a biology class.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: the human ovary within the ...]

ROBERT: Happens to have this notion about what would it be like if chimps and humans had babies together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: And actually, in a number of ways I am more similar to a male chimp than I am to my sister.]

ROBERT: Happens to have, in the play ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: Can we talk?]

ROBERT: ... a student who comes up after class and says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I want to combine one of my eggs with chimpanzee sperm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I don't want you to do this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: Why not?]

JAD: Except, by the way, in the play she actually goes through with it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I'm pregnant!]

ROBERT: But, you know, he—he wrote the play to keep a conversation going that wouldn't get out of his head.

LEE SILVER: And the question is: what is a human being? If you look at it developmentally, evolutionarily, through these hybrids and chimeras, where's the boundary between human being and non-human being? And at the end of my quest, I personally concluded that there is no boundary.

JAD: None at all?

LEE SILVER: No. It's fuzzy. So in other words, if you look at—and the analogy I like to give is look at the color spectrum between green and blue. When you go from green to blue along the color spectrum, it's a continuous, gradual change from one to the other. There's no point at which you say, "Here's the boundary between green and blue." And if you take that analogy, which I did to human beings, you say during development, during evolution, in terms of a chimera there's no boundary.

ROBERT: But the social effect of having staked out that position is that you aren't going to defend our species against all kinds of amendments. There is a consequence to this kind of thinking, right? I mean, you can't do a Cole Porter "Anything Goes," can you?

LEE SILVER: No. No, I believe you can do "anything goes." My purpose is to say not that anything goes, but that in theory, all these outrageous things could happen.

JAD: And actually are happening.

ROBERT: Here's an example.

LEE SILVER: Since 1980, scientists have been taking human genes, genetic information, putting it into mice. I mean, this is sort of a routine procedure in—for people who do mouse molecular genetics. And in fact, the really exciting thing that people are doing now is they're making cows that are engineered to produce human blood.

ROBERT: Whoa!

LEE SILVER: And the idea is is that you want to change all the genes in the cow that normally produce the proteins in cow blood, you want to make them all human.

JAD: Hmm.

LEE SILVER: So you'd have a cow making human blood—I don't think most people would mind that—and then you could use it for blood transfusions.

JAD: Wow! Could you make a cow with human blood and a human kidney so that you could use that too?

LEE SILVER: Well actually, they've—Israeli scientists have already created a mouse that has a tiny little functioning human kidney.

JAD: Get out!

LEE SILVER: Yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LEE SILVER: I could show you the picture. Yeah, so I mean—and, you know, and there are other people who are working with sheep and trying to make human livers inside sheep. And the whole idea is regenerative medicine.

ROBERT: Sacrifice the animals to get a new kidney for you.

LEE SILVER: Now I actually think that as long as you don't play with the external features, I think society will accept it. I mean, you know, people eat pigs, and if you can eat a pig why not grow a pig to have a human liver, kidney or heart?

JAD: As long as it still looks like a pig you're saying?

LEE SILVER: That's right. As long as it still looks like a pig and it still behaves like a pig. You know, if you put a human arm onto a pig I don't think people would like that.

JAD: But you acknowledge that the distinctions you're drawing are emotional distinctions.

LEE SILVER: Yeah.

JAD: And not rational.

LEE SILVER: Absolutely. They're emotional. And I'm saying that sometimes emotional distinctions matter. I mean, I have no solutions. I mean, I don't know where to draw lines. Society has to draw lines.

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[LEE SILVER: Hi, this is Lee Silver. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this is Radiolab. Our topic today is—what is our topic today, Robert?

ROBERT: Well, our topic today is making life that isn't there before you arrived in the room. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Okay. Life not as we know it.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: But as we might invent it or make it.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm. Well, let's talk about life, you and I, okay? So when you look around in the world of living things and I say, "Look Jad, there's a cat. And next to that is a dog. And that's a tree." And you notice that those things, of course, are different.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And later when we go to school, we learn about phylums and categories like kingdoms and stuff, so you think about the nature of those differences. And then you're taught about struggle and competition.

JAD: Darwin.

ROBERT: Darwin.

JAD: And survival of the fittest and yeah.

ROBERT: There is a new theory that's being talked about that turns all of that on its head. I heard it first from this guy.

STEVE STROGATZ: I'm Steve Strogatz. I'm an applied mathematician at Cornell.

ROBERT: And the story he told me, which is based on analysis of DNA in very tiny organisms ...

STEVE STROGATZ: Microbes.

ROBERT: ... is that once upon a time, he says, life began with a very primitive, very simple collection of cells. And these cells, said Steve, like to share.

STEVE STROGATZ: It appears that as—when you go back far enough, there's a kind of rampant sharing of molecules. It's a kind of orgy in which there are no well-defined species or organisms, and I can give you my genes, and you can pass—we're a commune. It was a commune.

JAD: What does that mean, it was a commune?

ROBERT: What do you mean what does it mean?

JAD: Well, I mean, I know what it means in the '60s free and love sense, but what does it really mean?

ROBERT: What cells are exchanging is chemicals—chemicals that give them talents and traits. Genes. Here's what happens. I did this with Steve.

ROBERT: In our—in our ancient puddle, I mean Darwin thought that life might have begun in a warm puddle.

STEVE STROGATZ: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Let's say that you and I are both cells.

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay.

ROBERT: So once upon a time, there was you in a puddle and I'm in the same puddle as you.

STEVE STROGATZ: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And it gets a little colder in the puddle, so we should all get sick, but you don't get sick. You have some kind of accidental talent: you can handle cold water. I'm shivering. Describe again what happens in—at this point.

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs]

ROBERT: In the glorious old days.

STEVE STROGATZ: Well, my membrane—that is I'm a cell, I've got a membrane. I've got my outer layer, maybe a little bit porous and maybe—whoops! Some of my genes just leaked out.

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay, we're not talking sophisticated organisms. And maybe you're porous too, and—oh, whoa! You just absorbed some of those genes.

ROBERT: So now we both have this.

STEVE STROGATZ: We both got it.

ROBERT: We both got it.

ROBERT: And if I've got this gene now, I can survive cold water because it's part of me. And if I bump into you, now it's part of you. So now this Steve gene has become a Robert gene, which has then become Jad gene, and we're doing this over and over and over. And we're getting really communal.

JAD: It sounds so friendly.

ROBERT: No, no. Actually, it's—don't think of cells like people. All these exchanges, this gene swapping was not intentional.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: It's not purposeful sharing.

ROBERT: That's Nigel Goldenfeld.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: I'm a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois.

ROBERT: And he and his colleague Carl Woese did the science that led to some of these kind of groovy ideas.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: It's not me sort of saying, "Hey, I'm gonna just help out my buddy over there. Here's a couple of genes I think you'll find handy." It's not something like that.

JAD: Even still, if we're swapping genes so much and, you know, you're giving me yours and I'm giving you mine ...

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: ... what does it actually mean to be me?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: If so much of me is spread around?

ROBERT: Well, it would be very weird. Imagine a world in which for a while I have your nose, God forbid! [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: And then I get my nose back. You have Steve's hair, then Steve would get my ear, then he would get your nose.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: Once you start having a lot of exchange ...

JAD: I'll take your chin.

ROBERT: Okay. And you can have my allergies.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: ... and then you start even asking what does it mean to be a species?

JAD: You can have my, um, love affair with doubt.

ROBERT: [laughs]

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: You may not even be able to talk about individuals.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. If the mixing is good enough, we're all kind of indistinguishable. So identity would be very strange in this ancient world.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: A lot of the concepts that we take for granted in biology become more and more nebulous as you get further and further back to the root or the origins of life.

ROBERT: Take, for instance, Charles Darwin. What Nigel's really saying is that for the first billion years of life ...

JAD: With a 'B.'

ROBERT: With a 'B.' Everything that Darwin teaches, all that stuff hasn't happened. There are no borders, no individuals, there's no species.

STEVE STROGATZ: That is Darwinism, evolution as we now understand it, that's an interlude in the real story of life. It's only what's happening now.

ROBERT: What you got back at the very beginning was a whole bunch of cells swapping genes, swapping advantages, swapping disadvantages. And it's kind of a wild time.

STEVE STROGATZ: A tremendous explosion of diversity in a way that life has not seen since then.

ROBERT: Until one dark and terrible day ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: ... three billion years ago, as interpreted by Freeman Dyson.

JAD: Freeman Dyson.

ROBERT: The famous physicist and delivered here now by our friend the mathematician Steve Strogatz. Here's Steve!

STEVE STROGATZ: One evil day a bacterium, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, refused to share. Refused to share.

ROBERT: Ooh!

STEVE STROGATZ: The first bad guy is this cellular Bill Gates who decides that "I've got an innovation that I don't feel like sharing, or possibly I've found a way to keep my membrane from leaking. That is, I'm not gonna be a sharing soul anymore."

JAD: And why? I mean, what made that one little cell decide to stop sharing?

STEVE STROGATZ: That's a good question. We don't really know.

ROBERT: But what we do know ...

STEVE STROGATZ: This is—was maybe the most dramatic moment in the history of life on Earth. This transition from the age of—well, if you want to call it the age of sharing to the age of selfishness.

ROBERT: And gradually, once one creature stopped sharing, pretty soon the others followed, and then more and more did the same thing. And now, for the first time in the history of life, finally we get Darwin. Now we get species. Now we see differences.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, so it's the age of identity. You have individualism. It's also the age of stasis.

ROBERT: Things change, but they change much more slowly.

STEVE STROGATZ: And any great thing, you know, like you are a bat and you figured out sonar? I don't have sonar. I can't get sonar. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVE STROGATZ: It would be nice to have sonar. Or like, you're a little electric fish that lives in the muddy waters of the Amazon. You don't care it's totally dark. You can see because you can see with electricity. I can't see with electricity. If I'm in the dark I'm bumping my head.

ROBERT: Okay, so here's where we end up. Chapter one ...

JAD: One!

ROBERT: A great orgy of gene swapping. Chapter two ...

JAD: Two!

ROBERT: The orgy ends. We pass genes now not to other guys, not randomly, but just to our own children. And finally, here comes ...

JAD: Chapter three!

ROBERT: ... as proposed by Freeman Dyson, the physicist.

JAD: Freeman Dyson!

ROBERT: After three billion years of life slowly evolving through random mutation, through bumps in the night, one species, Jad, human beings, you and me, we have become so smart, so—well, some of us.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: So technologically advanced that we can swap genes, we now decide who gets what genes. And thanks to us, evolution as Darwin described it is beginning to end, and now we welcome evolution as described by Freeman Dyson to the graduating class at the University of Michigan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: I see a bright future for the biotech industry, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.]

ROBERT: Freeman thinks that, in the future, everybody—and he means everybody—they will all be creating new life forms. And why? Because they can.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games designed like computer games for children down to the kindergarten age, but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on the screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they're growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. [applause]]

ROBERT: So there's your future. I would like to make it your future for the moment, rather than my own, but ...

JAD: Well, it doesn't sound that bad. I mean, maybe a little sci-fi.

ROBERT: Well actually, here's the interesting thing is that what he's describing has already begun. There are kids doing this right now, or something very close to it.

ROBERT: How old were you when you did this?

STEVEN PAYNE: I guess I was 20. I'm 21 right now.

ROBERT: Okay. Who are you? What's your name and what do you do?

STEVEN PAYNE: I'm Steven Payne. I'm a senior in biological engineering at MIT.

ROBERT: Now here's the thing about Steven: he, like most kids who are in the sciences in college, had to spend hours and hours and hours in the lab waiting for E. coli to slowly grow in a Petri dish.

JAD: E. coli, like the stuff that gives you food poisoning?

ROBERT: Well, yeah. It's the stuff—it's common bacteria and it lives naturally in your gut, and it's, by the way, a big laboratory favorite. And the problem is, says, Reshma Shetty, who's a grad student at MIT, is E. coli in the raw ...

RESHMA SHETTY: Actually smells really bad.

ROBERT: What does it smell like?

RESHMA SHETTY: It actually kinda smells I guess maybe like poo? [laughs] I don't know. What do you think it smells like?

STEVEN PAYNE: Feces.

ROBERT: But anyway, Steven and his friends got it into their heads that they could make ...

RESHMA SHETTY: Make E. coli that smelled ...

ROBERT: ... you know, nicer.

RESHMA SHETTY: Yep.

ROBERT: Like cinnamon or cherry.

RESHMA SHETTY: Or, like, minty fresh.

STEVEN PAYNE: We ended up deciding on wintergreen.

JAD: Wintergreen?

ROBERT: What, you got something against wintergreen?

JAD: No.

ROBERT: In the real world who has wintergreen?

STEVEN PAYNE: It's the petunia plant.

ROBERT: Petunias have wintergreen? I had no idea.

RESHMA SHETTY: Yeah. A lot of folks study why plants make nice smells, so why do roses smell nice, why do petunias smell nice? So what we did was we requested from one of these folks, Natalia Dudareva from Purdue University, we asked her to send us a sample of one of the genes she had studied that produces this wintergreen smell.

STEVEN PAYNE: She mailed it.

RESHMA SHETTY: Through the mail.

ROBERT: They opened it up.

RESHMA SHETTY: We took it.

STEVEN PAYNE: Took it out.

ROBERT: What were you taking out? A little bit of gunk?

STEVEN PAYNE: It's actually living cells, living dried cells.

RESHMA SHETTY: Yeah. We pulled out the DNA, put it into a new cell ...

ROBERT: And once the new DNA had done its thing, Steven called everybody into the lab ...

RESHMA SHETTY: And we all came over and we were like, "Whoa! These—you know, this E. coli culture actually does smell like mint."

STEVEN PAYNE: And we were like, "Yay." [laughs]

RESHMA SHETTY: That's crazy!

ROBERT: Yay.

JAD: So instead of smelling poo all day, they get to smell wintergreen.

ROBERT: Well actually, there was more than that because after their wintergreen success, Steven and Reshma decided, "You know, why should we stay in the lab all day even though it smells nicer now, because we have to sit there and watch these E. coli grow and grow and grow until they're ready to be experimented on. We could be outside playing frisbee." So they decided to put a little trigger inside the E. coli, so when it's done growing it switches from wintergreen to banana!

JAD: Banana?

ROBERT: Banana!

RESHMA SHETTY: Yeah. The banana ...

ROBERT: So banana.

RESHMA SHETTY: You know, it smells like a banana milkshake. I mean, it smells more like a banana than a banana does.

ROBERT: [laughs] So wintergreen means it's still growing, and banana means we're done.

RESHMA SHETTY: Yup.

JAD: Wow, that's kinda awesome!

ROBERT: Awesome's a word.

ROBERT: I want to discuss the awesome question here.

STEVEN PAYNE: Okay.

ROBERT: Were you at all intrigued by the idea that, as far as I know, and maybe as far as you know, maybe as far as anybody knows, in the history of the E. coli creature, there has never been an E. coli that smelled like wintergreen?

STEVEN PAYNE: Yeah.

ROBERT: You made it yourself.

STEVEN PAYNE: Well, with the help of my team members, yes. [laughs]

ROBERT: Did you feel a little spooked by the fact that you just created a lifeform new to—new to creation?

STEVEN PAYNE: I mean, at least we're doing something that's—you know, smells pleasant. [laughs]

ROBERT: But you didn't feel like Dr. Frankenstein or God or ...?

STEVEN PAYNE: Not at all.

ROBERT: What does it feel like to make something that's never existed before?

STEVEN PAYNE: Just feels like basic engineering.

RESHMA SHETTY: Yeah. We're engineers. I would say we're engineers. We're building stuff.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Reshma Shetty: Building stuff. Building stuff. Building stuff.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Building stuff, stuff, stuff. And not just stuff, stuff stuff. Living stuff! The road ahead is bright and clear because we're bioengineers. We'll fix the problems of today by building stuff with DNA. We're slicing genes, we're building creatures, adding extra useful features. No more wasting, Darwin's done, swapping genes is much more fun!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Reshma Shetty: Building stuff. Building stuff. Building stuff.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] The road ahead is bright and clear because we're bioengineers. I'd rather be swapping genes! It's mankind's only fighting chance, designer genes not denim pants. We'll stop disease and greenhouse gasses sequencing nucleic acids. Crack the code, we've seen the light, we're building stuff, we're building life. They're building life!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] The road ahead is bright and clear because we're bioengineers. We're building stuff!]

JAD: Thanks to Josh Kurz and Shane Winter for that music. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: My name is Alyssa Hargrave and I'm calling from Shakopee, Minnesota, where it is currently -25° Fahrenheit outside. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: And I am Robert.

JAD: And this is Radiolab. And today our topic is ...

ROBERT: Tinkering, I guess. Tinkering ...

JAD: With nature.

ROBERT: Yeah. Or life.

JAD: Yes. But not as we know it.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: 'Cause before the break, we heard about some kids doing something that they call ...

STEVEN PAYNE: Yes, directed evolution.

JAD: By sticking wintergreen into a place where wintergreen has never been before.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Which definitely qualifies as life not as we know it.

ROBERT: But now let's get into the true grit of this, because those kids are looking at life in a—in a fairly different way than most of us do.

LEE SILVER: Yeah, it's very interesting that the people who are creating these living systems are engineers.

ROBERT: This is Lee Silver from Princeton University.

LEE SILVER: I mean, they really look at a living system as no different than a computational electronic device.

ROBERT: And you—your hunch is they're right. My hunch is they're wrong, I don't know quite why.

LEE SILVER: My hunch is they're right, but most of the world doesn't believe that. [laughs]

ROBERT: Which would include me, because I find it very hard to imagine that a lifeform, something that's animate, that lives for a span of years and then dies, you know, it's like when they die and the spirit kind of goes up—it's hard for me to believe that that is just a chemical machine assembled from parts.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, okay. I mean, I guess I can understand that. But let me introduce you to a guy now whose whole admittedly young career is based on the idea that life is a machine, that it's made of parts, parts that he can build and sell.

BRIAN BAYNES: Okay, so I'm Brian Baynes.

JAD: Brian we met actually just down the street from those MIT kids. He is 31.

BRIAN BAYNES: That's right.

JAD: Just 31. And he runs his own biotech company.

BRIAN BAYNES: I'm one of the founders of Codon Devices here. We make custom synthetic genes.

JAD: From scratch. And he's doing pretty well.

BRIAN BAYNES: The industry's basically doubling every two years at this point.

JAD: And just to give you a sense of what Brian does, you with me?

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Just take your example, those MIT kids. Let's say I'm one of those kids or someone else who's heard about them and I want to take my stinky bacteria and make it smell better.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Or maybe I want to make it glow. All I have to do is call Brian.

BRIAN BAYNES: Sure.

JAD: Because he'll sell me a simple gene like that for about $1,500. I just have to go online, look up the chemical recipe for how to glow in the dark. Yes, here it is: 1,200 letters.

[COMPUTER VOICE: A, T, G, C, A, C ...]

JAD: These are letters of DNA.

BRIAN BAYNES: The A, G, a T and the C are four fundamental building blocks of DNA.

JAD: And the next step?

BRIAN BAYNES: Just list out those As, Gs and Ts and Cs.

JAD: Yeah. Just type them into an email.

BRIAN BAYNES: Generally they're not typing it themselves. Imagine trying to type in 2,000 letters by hand without making a mistake.

JAD: Yeah, that would take too long. All right, just copy and paste them into an email, send them to Brian.

[COMPUTER VOICE: G.]

BRIAN BAYNES: When we get that in house, we—we're gonna take that into our factory.

JAD: Brian then plugs the string of letters into this machine which is about the size of a desktop computer.

BRIAN BAYNES: We have a synthesis system where it literally has a bunch of little As in a jar and a bunch of Gs in a jar and Ts and Cs.

JAD: Now mind you, these chemicals are inert, they are store bought, $100 a bottle. The machine they're all connected to reads all the letters that Brian plugs in, and when it sees an A, the machine—squick!—squirts out some A dust. And when it sees a T—squick!—squirts out some T dust.

BRIAN BAYNES: We can add an A or a G or a T or a C to a growing strand of DNA. And so we're literally adding one base at a time.

[COMPUTER VOICE: A, C, C.]

BRIAN BAYNES: So what starts as one-letter pieces then grows to 50, then grows to maybe 500, then grows to maybe 5,000.

JAD: And at a certain point, all of these inert chemicals hold hands.

BRIAN BAYNES: And that's literally how you make DNA chemically.

JAD: That is how you go from dust to something that is not exactly alive, but if I take this little speck of DNA and stick it into my cell, amazingly it will start to glow. Or smell better, or whatever it is that I want it to do, it will do it. It's almost as if the cell is a computer, and this little bit of DNA is a software program.

LEE SILVER: I mean, that's the way synthetic biologists think about it.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And what synthetic biologists are hoping for, says Lee, is that the "software" quote-unquote, will get standardized, it will come down in price so that one day, installing new features into organisms will be just as easy as when you install new software on your home PC.

LEE SILVER: Put a word processor, you put a spreadsheet program.

JAD: User friendly.

LEE SILVER: That's kind of the logic.

ROBERT: Yeah, but that's not the—that's—we're talking about life here. Life isn't like, you know, a game of Legos.

JAD: Well, what if it is? I mean, I know it's weird to think.

ROBERT: It's wrong is another word to describe it.

JAD: [laughs] But what if it's not wrong? Just imagine, you can start to look at things in a completely new way. You can look at that creature over there and say, "That creature right there has a talent that I really like. And that one over there, the second one, it also does something cool. Maybe if I take talent one and talent two, stick 'em together, put them into a third creature, then I've got a little factory that can do really cool stuff!"

LEE SILVER: Create living things that have very important functional value.

JAD: As an example, in our earlier conversation with Lee Silver, he brought up a guy named George Church.

LEE SILVER: George Church is a scientist at Harvard Medical School. He's thought to be absolutely brilliant by everybody that knows him.

JAD: Lee actually happened to have a picture of George on him, and he showed us.

JAD: Oh, is that—that him?

LEE SILVER: That's him.

JAD: He does look like a radical.

ROBERT: Let me see. Let me see what his face looks like.

JAD: Describe him.

ROBERT: He's wearing an army shirt of some kind. He's got a nice bushy beard and a spit curl. He could be Santa Claus played by Clark Gable.

LEE SILVER: [laughs]

JAD: Well, we had to visit him.

JAD: Hi.

GEORGE CHURCH: How are you?

LEE SILVER: And George is unusual as scientists go.

GEORGE CHURCH: I'm George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

LEE SILVER: For the last 20 years he's been going further and further and further in terms of synthesizing life.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: I'll slide—you know what I'll do? I'll slide.

GEORGE CHURCH: He's—he's stuffing some kind of big black rod up my nose.

JAD: That would be the mic.

GEORGE CHURCH: [laughs]

JAD: Now the kind of creatures that George Church engineers are the same kind that those MIT kids use: E. coli. By taking these little tiny E. coli and, you know ...

GEORGE CHURCH: Adding a few genes from other organisms and tweaking the internal chemistry ...

JAD: ... he has gotten the E. coli to suck in sugar—which is what they normally like to eat—but poop out ...

GEORGE CHURCH: All kinds of things.

JAD: Most notably—drum roll, please. Diesel!

ROBERT: [laughs] For real?

GEORGE CHURCH: Oh yeah. So I mean, the company I co-founded has produced hydrocarbons.

JAD: That is just a fancy way of saying, among other things, diesel!

GEORGE CHURCH: Three different kinds to run in three types of engines—cars, trucks and planes.

JAD: I was curious to see how it all worked, so he took me to a room at the back of his lab where he's perfecting the process, and he pointed to a small container.

GEORGE CHURCH: So here's an example where we might grow up a large batch of cells in a fermenter.

JAD: So this big vat right here which is—I don't know, what's the size of a ...

GEORGE CHURCH: This is a couple of liters.

JAD: Pretty small—it's about the size of a Coke bottle. And right now he can only make a few drops, so there are some scale issues to solve. But I asked him ...

JAD: If you were to close your eyes and ...

JAD: ... you know, where does he imagine this stuff going? Project forward into the future, and he painted ...

JAD: Describe it for me. What would it look like?

JAD: ... an amazing picture of huge bodies of water.

GEORGE CHURCH: Giant ponds or lakes.

JAD: Of gas. I mean, just imagine: we could take a boat, paddle around. There'd be beautiful birds chirping. Except under the surface, trillions of bacteria would be busily eating plant life, burping out diesel fuel ...

GEORGE CHURCH: Which then float to the surface.

JAD: ... as this kind of gassy foam.

GEORGE CHURCH: And you can skim it off.

JAD: Skim it off, throw it into a pipe, and there you have it. I mean, this could be the oil refinery of the future. No more pumping it out of the ground and fighting wars. Forget that, that's old! Now we're talking microbes and microbes. And this could be just the beginning. I mean, according to Lee Silver, people are hoping that this kind of bioengineering can produce all kinds of stuff.

LEE SILVER: You know, a drug that cures malaria, something that makes plastic. I mean, anything.

ROBERT: Well, it would be good.

JAD: Yeah, it would.

ROBERT: But there is part of it that makes me a little uneasy.

JAD: Why?

ROBERT: And—well, I want to introduce you to another bioengineer. He's often called the leader of the pack.

JAD: Like the Rat Pack?

ROBERT: [laughs] Sort of like the Rat Pack. His name's Craig Venter, and like the Rat Pack folks he's very talented, he's very ambitious, he's very driven. He's also working on a bug for fuel. He also thinks that the Earth is in trouble.

CRAIG VENTER: We're messing our nests something terrible.

ROBERT: And when we were at the 92nd Street Y in New York, he said right out loud, bioengineering, creating new life, is our last hope.

CRAIG VENTER: It's probably our one major chance of having our species survive on this planet. I mean, this is the engineering of the rest of this century.

ROBERT: Now that's a little, I mean—stand aside, young man. I'll rescue you now with my magical scientific ability and my natural engineering skills.

JAD: If he could save the world I'd stand aside and throw him a parade.

ROBERT: Well, except you don't realize just how ambitious. These guys are going ...

JAD: What's wrong with ambition?

ROBERT: Nothing, really! But you don't know is just how bold this guy is. He not only wants to mix and match traits that already exist in life to make new forms of life, he wants to do original design. He wants to think of things that life has never done before, things that are in his head that are entirely new. He even dreams of life from—from scratch.

ROBERT: From scratch. Completely like 4.1 billion years ago, kind of. Like in Genesis.

CRAIG VENTER: It'd probably take a little longer, but ...

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

CRAIG VENTER: ... I think there will be new life forms.

ROBERT: You think it will be possible in your lifetime that someone will go into a store, buy dust, figure out what it is that they have to do with that dust so that what they make will be unmistakably alive?

CRAIG VENTER: Not alive, then alive.

ROBERT: Yes.

CRAIG VENTER: But using the knowledge that we have from studying this four billion years of evolution. We know how to ...

ROBERT: This is the thing about—what if I told you that I thought no? I don't know why, just no?

CRAIG VENTER: I think you reviewed my grant.

ROBERT: [laughs] No, but there's a can-do-ness to scientists that puzzles me a little bit. Isn't there something that you think—and this would be really close to it—creating life that just might be out of our grasp? It might be forever mysterious. And yet you guys, like—I mean, is there anything in the way of engineering life, is there anything that you think is not doable? Do you think it's never going to happen that you'll create a conscious life form from scratch, or it will never happen that you will create a morally—you know, a creature with moral sense of right and wrong? But I don't know. I think you think that everything is possible. Everything.

CRAIG VENTER: I think you're right.

[audience laughs]

JAD: Okay, I get that Craig and people like him might have a little bit of a—of an attitude about what they can accomplish, but is that your problem, that it's his attitude?

ROBERT: No, no, no. It's a sense of life I think is wrong here. I really appreciate, because of Darwin and Darwinian evolution, that it takes 100 million, 200 million, a billion years for creatures to figure out how to live in the neighborhood of life, how to know what to eat, what to avoid, how to fit in. In other words, if you're gonna sustain, you've gotta learn how to live harmoniously with the rest of nature. It takes a while.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: But here come these engineers and suddenly they think, "I have a new idea. Maybe it'll eat oil, or I don't know." And then you stick it into the world, and you've just stuck something into a rich fabric of life and you have no idea of all the different consequences that could follow from that decision.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: Look at what happens right now with antibiotics.

ROBERT: That's scientist Nigel Goldenfeld, whom we heard from before.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: 50 years ago we declared war on microbes. We fed antibiotics to cattle, to kids when they had virus infections.

ROBERT: We poured so much antibiotics into our bodies and into our food that the bacteria we were trying to kill figured out a way to avoid our medicines, and now they're stronger than ever.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: Not smart.

ROBERT: We didn't know.

NIGEL GOLDENFELD: There were things that we didn't really understand, that we didn't know that we didn't understand, and we're paying the price for that now.

ROBERT: I am frightened that these people have so much ambition and so much certainty in them that frankly, they don't fear what biologists don't know about life.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's really a Frankenstein story, that is there's so much hubris in this ...

ROBERT: And as Steve Strogatz will tell you, biologists, in fact scientists in general, know very—we now know how much we don't know about life.

STEVE STROGATZ: If biology really is about collective behavior, the interactions of billions of molecules, billions of species and this network of—of life, we barely understand. You know, we keep being surprised about life. On the one hand, we can tinker in this engineering way like the MIT students do or like Venter is doing, but on the other hand, the best biologists are still mystified that we only have about the same number of genes as a worm. We're really still missing 99 percent of the picture—literally. So it's a scary time to start playing Dr. Frankenstein, given how ignorant we are.

ROBERT: Do you know that at Stony Brook University, where your mom worked for all those years.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT: There was a scientist maybe a few doors down from your mom who made from scratch using the dust particles we've been talking about, the polio virus, which the whole world has been working to eliminate, he made a new polio virus.

JAD: Why?

ROBERT: I don't know why. [laughs] There was a lot of controversy around it, but there is a guy perhaps in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan who wants to make a polio virus, and who will use it against us.

JAD: Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right.

ROBERT: So this technology comes with not just risk because ...

JAD: You are right that there is—there are some bad things that can happen.

ROBERT: Very bad things.

JAD: So the question is: then what? Like, what do you do in the face of that risk? How do you proceed? Do you say to these guys, "Stop?" Would you have these guys stop doing what they're doing, stop doing their experiments, asking questions, being curious?

ROBERT: That'd be ridiculous to tell science not to do science.

JAD: So what then?

ROBERT: [laughs] I—I—I don't know. I don't know exactly, but do I want them to not do experiments? No!

STEVE STROGATZ: I'm not saying don't. So I'm not gonna be a troglodyte and say we shouldn't play with these.

ROBERT: And Steve Strogatz agrees.

STEVE STROGATZ: I think it's great to play with them, but I'm scared, too. I don't know. I'm confused about it because we have to play. That's how we make all science—you know, they speak of Homo Ludens, human beings as the player. That we are what we are because we like to play with nature, with ideas, with language. This is how we learn things. So we're gonna play, but we have to be very careful about how we play, and we don't want to fall into the idea that we know more than we do. We have a vast ocean to discover before us.

JAD: Okay, well I guess that's all the time we have. Anything that you heard this hour that you want to hear again, more information, it's all on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Any creature you'd like to build or any design for a creature that you'd like to build or any monster that you have in your head that you'd like to make into real, living flesh ...

JAD: Send that to us, too.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: While you're on our site, send us an email as well: Radiolab@wnyc.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Lulu Miller, Rob Christiansen, Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler. Production support by Sally Herships, Sarah Pelegrini, Arielle Lasky, Heather Radke, Linda Everett, Jonathan Miller, Josh Kurz ...]

[LISTENER: I'm Shane Winters. Thanks to Nicholas Vanderkoch, Ken Maston, Priya George, Kate Heinz and Tom and Foster Hudson. Radiolab's webmaster is Valentina Powers. Check out our website at Radiolab.org with a new design by Kevin Hoda, Jacob Smallions and Howard Parnell.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

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New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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