The Future (38 page)

There are obvious advantages to the use of the power of the profit motive and of the private sector in exploiting the new revolution in the life sciences. In 2012, the European Commission approved the first Western
gene therapy drug, known as Glybera, in a
treatment of a rare genetic disorder that prevents the breakdown of fat in blood. In August 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
approved a drug known as
Crizotinib for the targeted treatment of a rare type of lung cancer driven by a gene mutation.

However, the same imbalance of power that has produced dangerous levels of inequality in income is also manifested in the unequal access to the full range of innovations important to humanity flowing out of the Life Sciences Revolution. For example, one biotechnology company—Monsanto—now controls patents on the vast majority of all seeds planted in the world. A U.S. seed expert, Neil Harl of Iowa State University, said in 2010, “
We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of [seed genetics].”

The race to patent genes and tissues is in stark contrast to the attitude expressed by the discoverer of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk,
^†
when he was asked by Edward R. Murrow, “This vaccine is going to be in great demand. Everyone’s going to want it. It’s potentially very lucrative. Who holds the patent?” In response, Salk said, “The American people, I guess.
Could you patent the sun?”

In Salk’s day, the idea of patenting life science discoveries intended for the greater good seemed odd. A few decades later, one of Salk’s most distinguished peers, Norman Borlaug, implemented his Green Revolution with traditional crossbreeding and hybridization techniques at a time when the frenzy of
research into the genome was still in its early stages. Toward the end of his career, Borlaug referred to the race in the U.S. to lock down ownership of patents on genetically modified plants, saying, “
God help us if that were to happen, we would all starve.” He opposed the dominance of the market sphere in plant genetics and told an audience in India, “We battled against patenting … and
always stood for free exchange of germplasm.” The U.S. and the European Union both recognize patents on isolated or purified genes. Recent cases in the U.S. appellate
courts continue to uphold the patentability of genes.

On one level, the digitization of life is merely a twenty-first-century continuation of the story of humankind’s mastery over the world. Alone
among life-forms, we have the ability to make complex informational models of reality. Then, by learning from and manipulating the models,
we gain the ability to understand and manipulate the reality. Just as the information flowing through the Global Mind is expressed in ones and zeros—the binary building blocks of the Digital Revolution—the language of DNA spoken by all living things is expressed in
four letters: A, T, C, and G.

Even leaving aside its other miraculous properties, DNA’s information storage capacity is incredible. In 2012, a research team at Harvard led by George Church encoded a book with more than 50,000 words into strands of DNA and then read it back with no errors. Church, a molecular biologist, said a billion copies of the book could be stored in a test tube and be retrieved for centuries, and that “a
device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole internet.”

At a deeper level, however, the discovery of how to manipulate the designs of life itself marks the beginning of an entirely new story. In the decade following the end of World War II, the double helix structure of DNA was
discovered by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin. (Franklin was, historians of science now know, unfairly deprived of recognition for her seminal contributions to the scientific paper announcing the discovery in 1953. She died before the Nobel Prize in Medicine was later awarded to Watson and Crick.) In 2003,
exactly fifty years later, the human genome was sequenced.

Even as the scientific community is wrestling with the challenges of all the data involved in DNA sequencing,
they are beginning to sequence RNA (ribonucleic acid), which scientists are finding plays a far more sophisticated role than simply serving as a messenger
system to convey the information that is translated into proteins. The proteins themselves—which among other things actually build and control the
cells that make up all forms of life—are
being analyzed in the Human Proteome Project, which must deal with a further large increase in the amount of data involved. Proteins take many different forms and are “folded” in
patterns that affect their function and role. After they are “translated,” proteins can also be chemically modified in multiple
ways that extend their range of functions and control their behavior. The complexity of this analytical challenge is far beyond that involved in sequencing the genome.

“Epigenetics” involves the study of inheritable changes that do
not
involve a change in the underlying DNA.
The Human Epigenome
Project has made major advances in the understanding of these changes. Several pharmaceutical products based on
epigenetic breakthroughs are already helping cancer patients, and other therapeutics are being tested in human clinical trials. The decoding of the underpinnings of life, health, and disease is leading to many exciting diagnostic and therapeutic breakthroughs.

In the same way that the digital code used by computers contains both informational content and operating instructions, the intricate universal codes of biology now being deciphered and catalogued make it possible not only to understand the blueprints of life-forms, but also to change their designs and functions. By transferring genes from one species to another and by creating novel DNA strands of their own design, scientists can insert them into life-forms to
transform and commandeer them to do what they want them to do. Like viruses, these DNA strands are not technically “alive” because they cannot replicate themselves. But also like viruses, they can take control of living cells and program behaviors, including the production of
custom chemicals that have value in the marketplace. They can also program the replication of the DNA strands that were inserted into the life-form.

The introduction of synthetic DNA strands into living organisms has already produced beneficial advances. More than thirty years ago, one of the first breakthroughs was the synthesis of human insulin to replace
less effective insulin produced from pigs and other animals. In the near future, scientists anticipate
significant improvements in artificial skin and
synthetic human blood. Others hope to engineer changes in cyanobacteria to produce products as
diverse as fuel for vehicles and
protein for human consumption.

But the spread of the technology raises questions that are troubling to bioethicists. As the head of one think tank studying this science put it, “Synthetic biology poses what may be the most profound challenge to government oversight of technology in human history, carrying with it significant economic, legal, security and ethical implications that extend far beyond the safety and capabilities of the technologies themselves. Yet by dint of economic imperative, as well as the sheer volume of scientific and commercial activity underway around the world, it is already functionally unstoppable … 
a juggernaut already beyond the reach of governance.”

Because the digitization of life coincides with the emergence of the Global Mind, whenever a new piece of the larger puzzle being solved is
put in place, research teams the world over instantly begin connecting it to the puzzle pieces they have been dealing with. The more genes that are sequenced, the easier and faster it is for scientists to map the network of connections between those genes and others that are known to appear in predictable patterns.

As Jun Wang, executive director of the Beijing Genomics Institute, put it, there is a “strong network effect … the health profile and personal genetic information of one individual will, to a certain extent, provide clues to better understand others’ genomes and their medical implications. In this sense, a personal genome is
not only for one, but also for all humanity.”

An unprecedented collaboration in 2012 among more than 500 scientists at thirty-two different laboratories around the world resulted in a major breakthrough in the understanding of DNA bits that had been previously dismissed as having no meaningful role. They discovered that this so-called
junk DNA actually contains millions of “on-off switches” arrayed in extremely complex networks that play crucial roles in controlling the function and interaction of genes. While this landmark achievement resulted in the identification of the function of 80 percent of DNA, it also humbled scientists with the realization that they are a very long way from fully understanding how genetic regulation of life really works. Job Dekker, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said after the discovery that every gene is surrounded by “an ocean of regulatory elements” in a “
very complicated three-dimensional structure,” only one percent of which has yet been described.

The Global Mind has also facilitated the emergence of an Internet-based global marketplace in so-called biobricks—DNA strands with known properties and reliable uses—that are easily and inexpensively available to teams of synthetic biologists. Scientists at MIT, including the founder of the BioBricks Foundation, Ron Weiss, have catalyzed the creation of the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, which is serving as a global repository, or universal library, for thousands of DNA segments—segments that can be used as genetic building blocks of code free of charge. In the same way that the Internet has catalyzed the dispersal of manufacturing to hundreds of thousands of locations, it is also dispersing the basic tools and raw materials of genetic engineering to laboratories on every continent.

The convergence of the Digital Revolution and the Life Sciences Revolution is accelerating these developments at a pace that far outstrips even the speed with which computers are advancing. To illustrate how quickly this radical change is unfolding, the cost of sequencing the
first human genome ten years ago was approximately $3 billion. But in 2013 detailed digital genomes of individuals are expected
to be available at a cost of only $1,000 per person.

At that price, according to experts, genomes will become routinely used in medical diagnoses, in the tailoring of pharmaceuticals to an individual’s genetic design, and for many other purposes. In the process, according to one genomic expert, “It will raise a host of public policy issues (privacy, security, disclosure, reimbursement, interpretation, counseling, etc.),
all important topics for future discussions.” In the meantime, a British company announced in 2012 that it will imminently begin selling a small disposable
gene-sequencing machine for less than $900.

For the first few years, the cost reduction curve for the sequencing of individual human genomes roughly followed the 50 percent drop every eighteen to twenty-four months that
has long been measured by Moore’s Law. But at the end of 2007, the
cost for sequencing began to drop at a significantly faster pace—in part because of the network effect, but mainly because multiple advances in the technologies involved in sequencing allowed significant
increases in the length of DNA strands that can be quickly analyzed. Experts believe that these extraordinary cost reductions will continue at
breakneck speed for the foreseeable future. As a result, some companies, including Life Technologies, are
producing synthetic genomes on the assumption that the pace of discovery in genomics will continue to accelerate.

By contrast, the distillation of wisdom is a process that normally takes considerable time, and the molding of wisdom into accepted rules by which we can guide our choices takes more time still. For almost 4,000 years,
^‡
since the
introduction by Hammurabi of the first written set of laws, we have developed legal codes by building on precedents that we have come to believe embody the distilled wisdom of past judgments made well. Yet the great convergence in science being driven by the
digitization of life—with overlapping and still accelerating revolutions in genetics, epigenetics, genomics, proteomics, microbiomics, optogenetics, regenerative medicine, neuroscience, nanotechnology, materials science, cybernetics, supercomputing, bioinformatics, and other fields—is presenting us with new capabilities faster than we can discern the deeper meaning and full implications of the choices they invite us to make.

For example, the impending creation of completely new forms of artificial life capable of self-replication should, arguably, be the occasion for a full discussion and debate about not only the risks, benefits, and appropriate safeguards, but also an exploration of the deeper implications of crossing such an epochal threshold. In the prophetic words of Teilhard de Chardin in the mid-twentieth century, “We may well one day be capable of producing what the Earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce:
a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life.”

The scientists who are working hard to achieve this breakthrough are understandably excited and enthusiastic, and the incredibly promising benefits expected to flow from their hoped-for accomplishment seem reason enough to proceed full speed ahead. As a result, it certainly seems timorous to even raise the sardonic question “What could go wrong?”

M
ORE THAN A
little, it seems—or at least it seems totally reasonable to explore the question. Craig Venter,
who had already made history by sequencing his own genome, made history again in 2010 by creating the
first live bacteria made completely from synthetic DNA. Although some scientists minimized the accomplishment by pointing out that
Venter had merely copied the blueprint of a known bacterium, and had
used the empty shell of another as the container for his new life-form,
others marked it as an important turning point.

In July 2012, Venter and his colleagues, along with a scientific team at Stanford, announced the completion of a software model containing all of the genes (525 of them—the smallest number known), cells, RNA, proteins, and metabolites (small molecules generated in cells) of an organism—a
free-living microbe known as
Mycoplasma genitalium
. Venter is now working to create a unique artificial life-form in a project that is intended to discover the
minimum amount of DNA information necessary for self-replication. “We are trying to understand the fundamental principles for the design of life, so that we can redesign it—in the way
an intelligent designer would have done in the first place,
if there had been one,” Venter said. His reference to an “intelligent designer” seems intended as implicit dismissal of creationism and reflects a newly combative attitude that many scientists have understandably come to feel is appropriate in response to the aggressive attacks on evolution by many fundamentalists.