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've 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?

STEPHEN 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?

STEPHEN PAYNE: I'm Stephen Payne. I'm a senior in biological engineering at MIT.

ROBERT: Now here's the thing about Stephen: 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?

STEPHEN PAYNE: Feces.

ROBERT: But anyway, Stephen 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.

STEPHEN 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?

STEPHEN 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.

STEPHEN PAYNE: She mailed it.

RESHMA SHETTY: Through the mail.

ROBERT: They opened it up.

RESHMA SHETTY: We took it.

STEPHEN PAYNE: Took it out.

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

STEPHEN 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, Stephen 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."

STEPHEN 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, Stephen 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.

STEPHEN 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?

STEPHEN PAYNE: Yeah.

ROBERT: You made it yourself.

STEPHEN 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?

STEPHEN 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 ...?

STEPHEN PAYNE: Not at all.

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

STEPHEN 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.

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

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.