JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: 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.]

 

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