Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives - Michael Specter (2009)

Chapter 6. Surfing the Exponential

The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin”—about a decade ago—he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t up on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which, by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology, seeks nothing less than to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

No scientific achievement—not even splitting the atom—has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. If they fulfill their promise, the tools of synthetic biology could transform microbes into tiny, self-contained factories—creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and entirely new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere we have nearly destroyed. To do that will require immense commitment and technical skill. It will also demand something more basic: as we watch the seas rise and snow-covered mountaintops melt, synthetic biology provides what may be our last chance to embrace science and reject denialism.

For nearly fifty years Americans have challenged the very idea of progress, as blind faith in scientific achievement gave way to suspicion and doubt. The benefits of new technologies—from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals—have often been oversold. And denialism thrives in the space between promises and reality. We no longer have the luxury of rejecting change, however. Our only solutions lie in our skills.

Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades of course—inserting, deleting, and changing them in various molecules has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of his colleagues have something far more radical in mind. By using gene sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, like manufacturing chemicals and drugs. That’s just the first step; eventually, they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a basic foundry of biological components—BioBricks, as Tom Knight, the senior research scientist from MIT who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.

“When your hard drive dies you can go to the nearest computer store, buy a new one, and swap it out,” Keasling said. “That’s because it’s a standard part in a machine. The entire electronics industry is based on a plug-and-play mentality. Get a transistor, plug it in, and off you go. What works in one cell phone or laptop should work in another. That is true for almost everything we build: when you go to Home Depot you don’t think about the thread size on the bolts you buy because they’re all made to the same standard. Why shouldn’t we use biological parts in the same way?” Keasling and others in the field—who have formed a bicoastal cluster in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Cambridge, Massachusetts—see cells as hardware and genetic code as the software required to make them run. Synthetic biologists are convinced that with enough knowledge, they will be able to write programs to control those genetic components, which would not only let them alter nature, but guide human evolution as well.

In 2000, Keasling was looking for a chemical compound that could demonstrate the utility of these biological tools. He settled on a diverse class of organic molecules known as isoprenoids, which are responsible for the scents, flavors, and even colors in many plants: eucalyptus, ginger, and cinnamon, for example, as well as the yellow in sunflowers and red in tomatoes. “One day a graduate student stopped by and said, ‘Look at this paper that just came out on amorphadiene synthase,’ ” Keasling told me as we sat in his in office in Emeryville, across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. He had recently been named chief executive officer of the new Department of Energy Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a partnership between three national laboratories and three research universities, led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The consortium’s principal goal is to design and manufacture artificial fuels that emit little or no greenhouse gases—one of President Barack Obama’s most frequently cited priorities.

Keasling wasn’t sure what to tell his student. “ ‘Amorphadiene,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ He told me that it was a precursor to artemisinin. I said, ‘What’s that ?’ and he said it was supposedly an effective antimalarial. I had never worked on malaria. As a microbiology student I had read about the life cycle of the falciparum parasite; it was fascinating and complicated. But that was pretty much all that I remembered. So I got to studying and quickly realized that this precursor was in the general class we were planning to investigate. And I thought, amorphadiene is as good a target as any. Let’s work on that.”

Malaria infects as many as five hundred million of the world’s poorest people every year. For centuries the standard treatment was quinine, and then the chemically related compound chloroquine. At ten cents per treatment, chloroquine was cheap, simple to make, and it saved millions of lives. In Asia, though, by the height of the Vietnam War, the most virulent malaria parasite—falciparum—had grown resistant to the drug. Eventually, that resistance spread to Africa, where malaria commonly kills up to a million people every year, 85 percent of whom are under the age of five. Worse, the second line of treatment, sulfadoxine pyrimethanine, or SP, had also failed widely.

Artemisinin, when taken in combination with other drugs, has become the only consistently successful treatment that remains. (Relying on any single drug increases the chances that the malaria parasite will develop resistance; if taken by itself even artemisinin poses dangers, and for that reason the treatment has already begun to fail in parts of Cambodia.) Known in the West as Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, the herb grows wild in many places, but until recently it had been used mostly in Asia. Supplies vary and so does the price, particularly since 2005, when the World Health Organization officially recommended that all countries with endemic malaria adopt artemisinin-based combination therapy as their first line of defense.

That approach, while unavoidable, has serious drawbacks: combination therapy costs ten to twenty times more than chloroquine, and despite growing assistance from international charities, that is far too much money for most Africans or their governments. In Uganda, for example, one course of artemisinin-based medicine would cost a typical family as much as it spends in two months for food. Artemisinin is not an easy crop to cultivate. Once harvested, the leaves and stems have to be processed rapidly or they will be destroyed by exposure to ultraviolet light. Yields are low, and production is expensive. Although several thousand African farmers have begun to plant the herb, the World Health Organization expects that for the next several years the annual demand—as many as five hundred million courses of treatment per year—will far exceed the supply. Should that supply disappear, the impact would be incalculable. “Losing artemisinin would set us back years—if not decades,” Kent Campbell, a former chief of the malaria branch at the Centers for Disease Control, and head of the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa, said. “One can envision any number of theoretical public health disasters in the world. But this is not theoretical. This is real. Without artemisinin, millions of people could die.”

JAY KEASLING is not a man of limited ambitions. “We have gotten to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us,” he told me. It has become his motto. “We can modify nature to suit our aims. I believe that completely.” It didn’t take long before he realized that making amorphadiene presented an ideal way to prove his point. His goal was, in effect, to dispense with nature entirely, which would mean forgetting about artemisinin harvests and the two years it takes to turn those leaves into drugs. If each cell became its own factory, churning out the chemical required to make artemisinin, there would be no need for an elaborate and costly manufacturing process either. He wondered, why not try to build the drug out of genetic parts? How many millions of lives would be saved if, by using the tools of synthetic biology, he could construct a cell to manufacture that particular chemical, amorphadiene? It would require Keasling and his team to dismantle several different organisms, then use parts from nearly a dozen of their genes to cobble together a custom-built package of DNA. They would then need to create an entirely new metabolic pathway, one that did not exist in the natural world.

By 2003, the team reported its first success, publishing a paper in Nature Biotechnology that described how they constructed that pathway—a chemical circuit the cell needs to do its job—by inserting genes from three organisms into E. coli, one of the world’s most common bacteria. The paper was well received, but it was only the first step in a difficult process; still, the research helped Keasling secure a $42.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It takes years, millions of dollars, much effort, and usually a healthy dose of luck to transform even the most ingenious idea into a product you can place on the shelf of your medicine cabinet. Keasling wasn’t interested in simply proving the science worked; he wanted to do it on a scale that would help the world fight malaria. “Making a few micrograms of artemisinin would have been a neat scientific trick,” he said. “But it doesn’t do anybody in Africa any good if all we can do is a cool experiment in a Berkeley lab. We needed to make it on an industrial scale.”

To translate the science into a product, Keasling helped start a company, Amyris Biotechnologies, to refine the raw organism, then figure out how to produce it more efficiently. Slowly, the company’s scientists coaxed greater yields from each cell. What began as 100 micrograms per liter of yeast eventually became 25 grams per liter. The goal was to bring the cost of artemisinin down from more than ten dollars a course to less than one dollar. Within a decade, by honing the chemical sequences until they produced the right compound in the right concentration, the company increased the amount of artemisinic acid that each cell could produce by a factor of one million. Keasling, who makes the cellular toolkit available to other researchers at no cost, insists that nobody profit from its sale. (He and the University of California have patented the process in order to make it freely available.) “I’m fine with earning money from research in this field,” he said. “I just don’t think we need to profit from the poorest people on earth.”

Amyris then joined the nonprofit Institute for OneWorld Health, in San Francisco, and in 2008 they signed an agreement with the Paris-based pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis to produce the drug, which they hope to have on the market by the end of 2011. Scientific response has been largely reverential—it is, after all, the first bona fide product of synthetic biology, proof of a principle that we need not rely on the unpredictable whims of nature to address the world’s most pressing crises. But there are those who wonder what synthetic artemisinin will mean for the thousands of farmers who have begun to plant the crop. “What happens to struggling farmers when laboratory vats in California replace [wormwood] farms in Asia and East Africa?” asked Jim Thomas, an activist with ETC Group, a technology watchdog based in Canada. Thomas has argued that while the science of synthetic biology has advanced rapidly, there has been little discussion of the ethical and cultural implications involved in altering nature so fundamentally, and he is right. “Scientists are making strands of DNA that have never existed,” Thomas said. “So there is nothing to compare them to. There’s no agreed mechanisms for safety, no policies.”

Keasling, too, believes we need to have a national conversation about the potential impact of this technology, but he is mystified by opposition to what would be the world’s most reliable source of cheap artemisinin. “We can’t let what happened with genetically engineered foods”—which have been opposed by millions of people for decades—“happen again,” he said. “Just for a moment imagine that we replaced artemisinin with a cancer drug. And let’s have the entire Western world rely on some farmers in China and Africa who may or may not plant their crop. And let’s have a lot of American children die because of that. It’s so easy to say, ‘Gee, let’s take it slow’ about something that can save a child thousands of miles away. I don’t buy it. They should have access to Western technology just as we do. Look at the world and tell me we shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not people in Africa who see malaria who say, ‘Whoa, let’s put the brakes on.’ ”

Keasling sees artemisinin as the first part of a much larger program. “We ought to be able to make any compound produced by a plant inside a microbe,” he said. “We ought to have all these metabolic pathways. You need this drug? okay, we pull this piece, this part, and this one off the shelf. You put them into a microbe and two weeks later out comes your product.”

That’s the approach Amyris has taken in its efforts to develop new fuels. “Artemisinin is a hydrocarbon and we built a microbial platform to produce it,” Keasling said. “We can remove a few of the genes to take out artemisinin and put in a different hydrocarbon to make biofuels.” Amyris, led by John Melo, who spent years as a senior executive at British Petroleum, has already engineered three molecules that can convert sugar to fuel. “It is thrilling to address problems that only a decade ago seemed insoluble,” Keasling said. “We still have lots to learn and lots of problems to solve. I am well aware that makes people anxious, and I understand why. Anything so powerful and new is troubling. But I don’t think the answer to the future is to race into the past.”

FOR THE FIRST four billion years, life on earth was shaped entirely by nature. Propelled by the forces of selection and chance, the most efficient genes survived and evolution ensured they would thrive. The long, beautiful Darwinian process of creeping forward by trial and error, struggle and survival, persisted for millennia. Then, about ten thousand years ago, our ancestors began to gather in villages, grow crops, and domesticate animals. That led to new technologies—stone axes and looms, which in turn led to better crops and the kind of varied food supply that could support a larger civilization. Breeding goats and pigs gave way to the fabrication of metal and machines. Throughout it all, new species, built on the power of their collected traits, emerged, while others were cast aside.

As the world became larger and more complex, the focus of our discoveries kept shrinking—from the size of the planet, to a species, and then to individual civilizations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century we had essentially become a society fixated on cells. Our ability to modify the smallest components of life through molecular biology has endowed humans with a power that even those who exercise it most proficiently cannot claim to fully comprehend. Man’s mastery over nature has been predicted for centuries—Bacon insisted on it, Blake feared it profoundly. Little more than one hundred years have passed, however, since Gregor Mendel demonstrated that the defining characteristics of a pea plant—its shape, size, and the color of the seeds, for example—are transmitted from one generation to the next in ways that can be predicted, repeated, and codified.

Since then, the central project of biology has been to break that code and learn to read it—to understand how DNA creates and perpetuates life. As an idea, synthetic biology has been around for many years. It took most of the past century to acquire the knowledge, develop the computing power, and figure out how to apply it all to DNA. But the potential impact has long been evident. The physiologist Jacques Loeb was perhaps the first to predict that we would eventually control our own evolution by creating and manipulating new forms of life. He considered artificial synthesis of life the “goal of biology,” and encouraged his students to meet that goal. In 1912, Loeb, one of the founders of modern biochemistry, wrote that “nothing indicates … that the artificial production of living matter is beyond the possibilities of science… . We must succeed in producing living matter artificially or we must find the reasons why this is impossible.”

The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Hermann J. Muller attempted to do that. By demonstrating that exposure to X-rays can cause mutations in the genes and chromosomes of living cells, he was the first to prove that heredity could be affected by something other than natural selection. He wasn’t entirely certain that humanity would use the information responsibly, though. “If we did attain to any such knowledge or powers there is no doubt in my mind that we would eventually use them,” Muller wrote in 1916. “Man is a megalomaniac among animals—if he sees mountains he will try to imitate them by building pyramids, and if he sees some grand process like evolution, and thinks it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too.”

We have been having that “whack” ever since. Without Darwin’s most important—and contentious—contribution, none of it would have been possible, because the theory of evolution explained that every species on earth is related in some way to every other species; more important, we carry a record of that history in each of our bodies. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to make it possible to understand why, by explaining how DNA arranges itself. The language of just four chemical letters—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—comes in the form of enormous chains of nucleotides. When joined together, the arrangement of their sequences determine how each human differs from each other and from all other living beings.

By the 1970s, recombinant DNA technology permitted scientists to cut long, unwieldy molecules of nucleotides into digestible sentences of genetic letters and paste them into other cells. Researchers could suddenly combine the genes of two creatures that would never have been able to mate in nature. In 1975, concerned about the risks of this new technology, scientists from around the world convened a conference in Asilomar, California. They focused primarily on laboratory and environmental safety, and concluded that the field required only minimal regulation. (There was no real discussion of deliberate abuse—at the time it didn’t seem necessary.)

In retrospect at least, Asilomar came to be seen as an intellectual Woodstock, an epochal event in the history of molecular biology. Looking back nearly thirty years later, one of the conference’s organizers, the Nobel laureate Paul Berg, wrote that “this unique conference marked the beginning of an exceptional era for science and for the public discussion of science policy. Its success permitted the then contentious technology of recombinant DNA to emerge and flourish. Now the use of the recombinant DNA technology dominates research in biology. It has altered both the way questions are formulated and the way solutions are sought.”

Scientists at the meeting understood what was at stake. “We can outdo evolution,” said David Baltimore, genuinely awed by this new power to explore the vocabulary of life. Another researcher joked about joining duck DNA with orange DNA. “In early 1975, however, the new techniques hardly aspired to either duck or orange DNA,” Michael Rogers wrote in the 1977 book Biohazard, his riveting account of the meeting at Asilomar and of the scientists’ attempts to confront the ethical as well as biological impact of their new technology. “They worked essentially only with bacteria and viruses—organisms so small that most human beings only noticed them when they make us ill.”

That was precisely the problem. Promising as these techniques were, they also made it possible for scientists to transfer viruses—and cancer cells—from one organism to another. That could create diseases anticipated by no one and for which there would be no natural protection, treatment, or cure. The initial fear “was not that someone might do so on purpose,” Rogers wrote—that would come much later—“but rather that novel microorganisms would be created and released altogether accidentally, in the innocent course of legitimate research.”

Decoding sequences of DNA was tedious work. It could take a scientist a year to complete a stretch ten or twelve base pairs long (our DNA consists of three billion such pairs). By the late 1980s automated sequencing had simplified the procedure, and today machines are capable of processing that information, and more, in seconds. Another new tool—polymerase chain reaction—was required to complete the merger of the digital and biological worlds. Using PCR, a scientist can take a single DNA molecule and copy it many times, making it easier to read and manipulate. That permits scientists to treat living cells like complex packages of digital information that happen to be arranged in the most elegant possible way.

Mixing sequences of DNA, even making transgenic organisms, no longer requires unique skills. The science is straightforward. What came next was not. Using the tools of genomics, evolutionary biology, and virology, researchers began to bring dead viruses back to life. In France, the biologist Thierry Heidmann took a virus that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, figured out how the broken parts were originally aligned, and then pieced them back together. After resurrecting the virus, which he named Phoenix, he and his team placed it in human cells and found that their creation could insert itself into the DNA of those cells. They also mixed the virus with cells taken from hamsters and cats. It quickly infected them all, offering the first evidence that the broken parts of an ancient virus could once again be made infectious.

As if experiments like those were not sufficient to conjure images of Frankenstein’s monster or Jurassic Park, researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008, scientists from the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston extracted DNA from two strands of tiger hair that had been preserved in museums. They inserted a fragment of a tiger’s DNA that controlled the production of collagen into a mouse embryo. That switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen—marking the first time that material from an extinct creature (other than a virus) has functioned inside a living cell.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with fossilized hair samples from a 65,000-year-old woolly mammoth, has already figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. “There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth—a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. rex,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial after the discovery was announced. “We’re just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth.” The next likely candidates for resurrection are our ancient relatives, the Neanderthals, who were probably driven to extinction by the spread of modern humans into Europe some forty thousand years ago.

All of that has been a prelude—technical tricks from a youthful discipline. The real challenge is to create a synthetic organism made solely from chemical parts and blueprints of DNA. In the early 1990s, working at his nonprofit organization the Institute for Genomic Research, Craig Venter and his colleague Clyde Hutchison began to wonder whether they could pare life to its most basic components and then try to use those genes to create a synthetic organism they could program. They began modifying the genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium , which contained 482 genes (humans have about 23,000) and 580,000 letters of genetic code, arranged on one circular chromosome—the smallest genome of any known natural organism. Venter and his colleagues then systematically removed genes, one by one, to find the smallest set that could sustain life.

He called the experiment the Minimal Genome Project. By the beginning of 2008, Venter’s team had pieced together thousands of chemically synthesized fragments of DNA and assembled a new version of the organism. Then, using nothing but chemicals, they produced the entire genome of M. genitalium from scratch. “Nothing in our methodology restricts its use to chemically synthesized DNA,” Venter noted in the report of his work, which was published in Science magazine. “It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.” That may turn out to be one of the most memorable asides in the history of science. Next, he intends to transplant the artificial chromosome into the walls of another cell, and then “boot it up,” to use his words—a new form of life that would then be able to replicate its own DNA, the first truly artificial organism. Venter has already named the creation Synthia. He hopes that Synthia, and similar products, will serve essentially as vessels that can be modified to carry different packages of genes. One package might produce a specific drug, for example, and another could have genes programmed to digest excess carbon in the atmosphere.

In 2007, the theoretical physicist and intellectual adventurer Freeman Dyson took his grandchildren to the Philadelphia Flower Show and then the Reptile Super Show in San Diego. “Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder,” he wrote in an essay for the New York Review of Books. “There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business.” This, of course, we have been doing in one way or another for millennia. “Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.”

He didn’t say if, he said when: because it is only a matter of time until domesticated biotechnology presents us with what Dyson describes as an “explosion of diversity of new living creatures… . Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora.”

Biotech games, played by children “down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds,” could produce entirely new species, as a lark. “These games will be messy and possibly dangerous,” he wrote. “Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.”

I have never met anyone engaged in synthetic biology who would disagree. Venter in particular has always stressed the field’s ethical and physical risks. His current company, Synthetic Genomics, commissioned a lengthy review of the ethical implications of the research more than a year before the team even entered the lab. How long will it be before proteins engineer their own evolution? “That’s hard to say,” Venter told me, “but in twenty years this will be second nature for kids. It will be like Game Boy or Internet chat. A five-year-old will be able to do it.”

Life on earth proceeds in an arc—one that began with the Big Bang, and evolved to the point where a smart teenager is capable of inserting a gene from a cold-water fish into a strawberry to help protect it from the frost. You don’t have to be a Luddite or Prince Charles—who famously has foreseen a world reduced to “grey goo” by avaricious and out-of-control technology—to recognize that synthetic biology, if it truly succeeds, will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with a world created by us.

“Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology,” the editors of Nature—who nonetheless support the technology—wrote in 2007. “Only a deity predisposed to cut-and-paste would suffer any serious challenge from genetic engineering as it has been practiced in the past. But the efforts to design living organisms from scratch—either with a wholly artificial genome made by DNA synthesis technology or, more ambitiously, by using non-natural, bespoke molecular machinery—really might seem to justify the suggestion” that “for the first time, God has competition.”

“WHAT IF WE could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring?” Drew Endy asked the first time we met. It was a startling question—and it was meant to startle. Endy is synthetic biology’s most compelling evangelist. He is also perhaps its most disturbing, because, while he displays a childlike eagerness to start building new creatures, he insists on discussing both the prospects and dangers of this new science in nearly any forum he can find. “I am talking about building the stuff that runs most of the living world,” he said. “If this is not a national strategic priority, what possibly could be?”

Endy, who was trained as a structural engineer, is almost always talking about designing or building something. He spent his youth fabricating worlds out of Lincoln Logs and Legos. What he would like to build now are living organisms. We were sitting in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where until the spring of 2008, he was assistant professor in the recently formed department of biological engineering. (That summer, he moved to Stanford.) Perhaps it was the three well-worn congas sitting in the corner of Endy’s office, the choppy haircut that looked like something he might have gotten in a treehouse, or the bicycle dangling from his wall, but when he speaks about putting new forms of life together, it’s hard not to think of that boy and his Legos.

I asked Endy to describe the implications of the field and why he thought so many people are repelled by the idea of creating new organisms. “Because it’s scary as hell,” he said. “It’s the coolest platform science has ever produced—but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer. For instance, now that we can sequence DNA, what does that mean?” Endy argues that if you can sequence something properly and you possess the information for describing that organism—whether it’s a virus, a dinosaur, or a human—you will eventually be able to construct an artificial version of it.

“That gives us an alternate path for propagating living organisms,” he said. “The natural path is direct descent from a parent—from one generation to the next. But that is an error process—there are mistakes in the code, many mutations,” although in Darwin’s world a certain number of those mutations are necessary. “If you could complement evolution with a secondary path—let’s decode a genome, take it offline to the level of information”; in other words, let’s break it down to its specific sequences of DNA the way we would the code in a software program—“we can then design whatever we want, and recompile it. At that point you can make disposable biological systems that don’t have to produce offspring, and you can make much simpler organisms.”

Endy stopped long enough for me to digest the fact that he was talking about building our own children, not to mention alternate versions of ourselves. Humans are almost unimaginably complex, but if we can bring a woolly mammoth back to life or create and “boot up” a synthetic creature made from hundreds of genes, it no longer seems impossible, or even improbable, that scientists will eventually develop the skills to do the same thing with our species. “If you look at human beings as we are today, one would have to ask how much of our own design is constrained by the fact that we have to be able to reproduce,” Endy said. “In fact, those constraints are quite significant. But by being able to design our own offspring we can free ourselves from them. Before we talk about that, however, we have to ask two critical questions: what sorts of risks does that bring into play, and what sorts of opportunities?”

The deeply unpleasant risks associated with synthetic biology are not hard to contemplate: who would control this technology, who would pay for it, and how much would it cost? Would we all have access or, as in Gattaca, would there be genetic haves and have-nots? Moreover, how safe can it be to manipulate and create life? How likely are accidents that would unleash organisms onto a world that is not prepared for them? And will it be an easy technology for people bent on destruction to acquire? After all, if Dyson is right and kids will one day design cute backyard dinosaurs, it wouldn’t take much imagination for more malevolent designers to create organisms with radically different characteristics. “These are things that have never been done before,” said Endy. “If the society that powered this technology collapses in some way we would go extinct pretty quickly. You wouldn’t have a chance to revert back to the farm or to the prefarm. We would just be gone.”

Those fears have existed since we began to transplant genes in crops. They are the principal reason why opponents of genetically engineered food invoke the precautionary principle, which argues that potential risks must always be given more weight than possible benefits. That is certainly the approach suggested by people like Thomas of ETC, who describes Endy as “the alpha Synthusi ast.” But he added that Endy was also a reflective scientist who doesn’t discount the possible risks of his field. “To his credit, I think he’s the one who’s most engaged with these issues,” Thomas said. Endy hopes that’s true, but doesn’t want to relive the battles over genetically engineered food, where the debate has so often focused on theoretical harm rather than tangible benefits. “If you build a bridge and it falls down you are not going to be permitted to design bridges ever again,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we should never build a new bridge. There, we have accepted the fact that risks are inevitable. When it comes to engineering biology, though, scientists have never developed that kind of contract with society. We obviously need to do that.”

Endy speaks with passion about the biological future; but he also knows what he doesn’t know. And what nobody else knows either. “It is important to unpack some of the hype and expectation around what you can do with biotechnology as a manufacturing platform,” he said. “We have not scratched the surface—but how far will we be able to go? That question needs to be discussed openly. Because you can’t address issues of risk and society unless you have an answer. If we do not frame the discussion properly we will soon face a situation where people say: Look at these scientists doing all these interesting things that have only a limited impact on our civilization, because the physics don’t scale. If that is the case, we will have a hard time convincing anybody we ought to be investing our time and money this way.”

The inventor and materials scientist Saul Griffith has estimated that between fifteen and eighteen terawatts of energy are required to power our planet. How much of that could we manufacture with the tools of synthetic biology? “The estimates run between five and ninety terawatts,” Endy said. “And you can figure out the significance of that right away. If it turns out to be the lower figure we are screwed. Because why would we take these risks if we cannot create much energy? But if it’s the top figure then we are talking about producing five times the energy we need on this planet and doing it in an environmentally benign way. The benefits in relation to the risks of using this new technology would be unquestioned. But I don’t know what the number will be and I don’t think anybody can know at this point. At a minimum then, we ought to acknowledge that we are in the process of figuring that out and the answers won’t be easy to provide.

“It’s very hard for me to have a conversation about these issues,” he continued. “Because people adopt incredibly defensive postures. The scientists on one side and civil society organizations on the other. And to be fair to those groups, science has often proceeded by skipping the dialogue. But some environmental groups will say, ‘Let’s not permit any of this work to get out of a laboratory until we are sure it is all safe.’ And as a practical matter that is not the way science works. We can’t come back decades later with an answer. We need to develop solutions by doing them. The potential is great enough, I believe, to convince people it’s worth the risk.

“We also have to think about what our society needs and what this science might do,” he continued. “We have seen an example with artemisinin and malaria. That’s only a first step—maybe we could avoid diseases completely. That could require us to go through a transition in medicine akin to what happened in environmental science and engineering after the end of World War II. We had industrial problems and people said, ‘Hey, the river’s on fire—let’s put it out.’ And after the nth time of doing that people started to say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t make factories that put shit into the river. So let’s collect all the waste.’ That turns out to be really expensive because then we have to dispose of it. Finally, people said, ‘Let’s redesign the factories so that they don’t make that crap.’ ” (In fact, the fire that erupted just outside Cleveland, Ohio, on the Cuyahoga River in June 1969 became a permanent symbol of environmental disaster. It also helped begin a national discussion that ended in the passage of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and many other measures.)

“Let’s say I was a whimsical futurist,” said Endy—although there is nothing whimsical about his approach to science or to the future. “We are spending trillions of dollars on health care. Preventing disease is obviously more desirable than treating it. My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don’t have so many problems to deal with. But note,” he stressed, “you can’t possibly begin to do something like this if you don’t have a value system in place that allows you to map concepts of ethics, beauty, and aesthetics onto our own existence.

“We need to understand the ways in which those things matter to us because these are powerful choices. Think about what happens when you really can print the genome of your offspring. You could start with your own sequence, of course, and mash it up with your partner, or as many partners as you like. Because computers won’t care. And if you wanted evolution you can include random number generators” which would have the effect of introducing the element of chance into synthetic design.

I wondered how much of this was science fiction, and how much was genuinely likely to happen. Endy stood up. “Can I show you something?” he asked as he walked over to a bookshelf and grabbed four gray bottles. Each contained about half a cup of sugar and had a letter on it: A, T, C, or G, for the four nucleotides in our DNA. “You can buy jars of these chemicals that are derived from sugarcane,” he said. “And they end up being the four bases of DNA in a form that can be readily assembled. You hook the bottles up to a machine, and into the machine comes information from a computer, a sequence of DNA—like TAATAGCAA. You program in whatever you want to build and that machine will stitch the genetic material together from scratch. This is the recipe: you take information and the raw chemicals and compile genetic material. Just sit down at your laptop and type the letters and out comes your organism.”

He went to a whiteboard in the office. “This is a little bit of math I did a number of years ago which freaked me out,” he said, and then went on to multiply the molecular weight of the nucleotides in those four bottles by the number of base pairs in a human genome. He used ten billion people instead of the current world population of six and a half billion and also rounded up the number of bases to ten billion, just to be conservative. “What we come out with in these bottles,” he said, placing one on the palm of his left hand, “is sixty times more material than is necessary to reconstruct a copy of every human’s genome on this planet.”

Endy shrugged. Of course, we don’t have machines that can turn those sugars into genetic parts yet—“but I don’t see any physical reason why we won’t,” he said. “It’s a question of money. If somebody wants to pay for it then it will get done.” He looked at his watch, apologized, and said, “I’m sorry we will have to continue this discussion another day because I have an appointment with some people from the Department of Homeland Security.”

I was a little surprised. Why? I asked.

“They are asking the same questions as you,” he said. “They want to know how far is this really going to go.”

The next time I saw Endy, a few months later, was in his new office at Stanford. The Bay Area is rapidly becoming as central to synthetic biology as it has always been to the computer industry. Endy looked rattled. “I just drove across the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said. “The whole way I kept thinking, ‘How does this thing stay up?’ ” I was confused. Drew Endy is a structural engineer. If crossing a bridge—particularly that bridge—worries him, who wouldn’t it worry? “Look,” he said, “there is uncertainty in the world. When it comes to engineering biology we don’t, for the most part, know enough to do useful things. But we also don’t know enough about physics. Gravity has not worked out perfectly—and yet we have the Golden Gate Bridge. And that’s okay because I am comfortable with learning by doing. Biology is a really impressive manufacturing platform. And we suck at it. But if we wait until we accumulate all the knowledge, we will accomplish nothing.”

Endy made his first mark on the world of biology by nearly failing the course in high school. “I got a D,” he said. “And I was lucky to get it.” While pursuing his engineering degree at Lehigh University, not far from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he was raised, Endy took a course in molecular genetics. Because he saw the world through the eyes of an engineer he looked at the parts of cells and decided it would be interesting to try and build one. He spent his years in graduate school modeling bacterial viruses, but they are complex and Endy craved simplicity. That’s when he began to think about putting cellular components together.

In 2005, never forgetting the secret of Legos—they work because you can take any single part and attach it to any other—Endy and colleagues on both coasts started the BioBricks Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed to register and develop standard parts for assembling DNA. (Endy is not the only biologist, nor even the only synthetic biologist, to translate a youth spent with blocks into a useful scientific vocabulary. “The notion of pieces fitting together—whether those pieces are integrated circuits, microfluidic components, or molecules—guides much of what I do in the laboratory,” the physicist and synthetic biologist Rob Carlson wrote in his 2009 book Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and Business of Engineering Life, “and some of my best work has come together in my mind’s eye accompanied by what I swear was an audible click.”)

BioBricks, then, have become the thinking man’s Lego system. The registry is a physical repository, but also an online catalog. If you want to construct an organism, or engineer it in new ways, you can go to the site in much the same way you would buy lumber or industrial pipes online. The constituent parts of DNA—promoters, ribosomes, plasmid backbones, and thousands of other components—are cataloged, explained, and discussed. It is a kind of Wikipedia of future life forms—with the added benefit of actually providing the parts necessary to build them.

Endy argues that scientists skipped a step, at the birth of biotechnology thirty-five years ago, moving immediately to products without first focusing on the tools necessary to make them. Using standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already to some extent program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer. The analogy doesn’t work perfectly, though, because genetic code is not as linear as computer code. Genes work together in ways that are staggeringly complex and therefore difficult to predict; proteins produced by one gene will counteract or enhance those made by another. We are far from the point where we can yank a few genes off the shelf, mix them together, and produce a variety of products. But the registry is growing rapidly—and so is the knowledge needed to drive the field forward.

Research in Endy’s lab has largely been animated by his fascination with switches that turn genes on and off. He and his students are attempting to create genetically encoded memory systems. His current goal is to construct a cell that can count to about 256—a number based on basic computer code. Solving the practical challenges will not be easy, since cells that count will need to send reliable signals when they divide and remember that they did.

“If the cells in our bodies had a little memory, think what we could do,” Endy said. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. “You have memory in your phone,” he explained. “Think of all the information it allows you to store. The phone and the technology on which it is based do not function inside cells. But if we could count to two hundred, using a system that was based on proteins and DNA and RNA, well now, all of a sudden we would have a tool that gives us access to computing and memory that we just don’t have.

“Do you know how we study aging?” he continued. “The tools we use today are almost akin to cutting a tree in half and counting the rings. But if the cells had a memory we could count properly. Every time a cell divides just move the counter by one. Maybe that will let me see them changing with a precision nobody can have today. Then I could give people controllers to start retooling those cells. Or we could say, ‘Wow, this cell has divided two hundred times, it’s obviously lost control of itself and become cancer. Kill it.’ That lets us think about new therapies for all kinds of diseases.”

Synthetic biology is changing so rapidly that predictions seem pointless. Even that fact presents people like Endy with a new kind of problem. “Wayne Gretzky once famously said, ‘I skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is.’ That’s what you do to become a great hockey player,” Endy said. “But where do you skate when the puck is accelerating at something that seems like the speed of light, when the trajectory is impossible to follow? Who do you hire and what do we ask them to do? Because what preoccupies our finest minds today will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three years.

“That is where we are with this technology. The thrill is real—but so are the fears. We are surfing an exponential now, and even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, what do you do then? How do you even talk about that?”

IN AUGUST 2002, Science magazine published a report titled “Chemical Synthesis of Poliovirus cDNA.” It began with an assertion few virologists would dispute: “Research on viruses is driven not only by an urgent need to understand, prevent, and cure viral disease. It is also fueled by a strong curiosity about the minute particles that we can view both as chemicals and as ‘living’ entities.” That curiosity led a team directed by Eckard Wimmer at Stony Brook University to stitch together hundreds of DNA fragments, most of which were purchased on the Internet, and then use them to build a fully functioning polio virus. The scientists then injected the virus into mice, which promptly became paralyzed and died.

The experiment, the first in which a virus was created in a laboratory solely from chemicals, caused outrage “This is a blueprint that could conceivably enable terrorists to inexpensively create human pathogens,” Representative Dave Weldon said at the time; he and five other members of Congress introduced a resolution criticizing the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science magazine, for publishing the study. Many scientists considered the research an irresponsible stunt. Then, in 2005, federal scientists deciphered the genetic code of the 1918 flu virus, which killed at least fifty million people, and reconstructed that virus too.

A renowned virologist once described Wimmer’s polio research to me as nothing more than “proof of principle for bioterrorism,” a comment I used in an article about scientists who were bringing ancient viruses back to life. He said the report would serve only to remind people how easily they could obtain the various components required to make a virus. After all, anyone can order strands of DNA over the Internet from scores of companies, nearly all of which will deliver via Federal Express. Soon after the article was published, I received a polite e-mail from Wimmer, who said I had completely misunderstood the purpose of his work, and he invited me to his laboratory to discuss it.

Wimmer met me at the door to his office, a thin, elegant man in a maroon turtleneck, gray flannel pants, and a blue cashmere sweater. He had chalked out various viral particles on the whiteboard. “I want to say before anything else that we didn’t do this work to show we were good at chemistry,” he told me. “First—and I think this is important—people need to know what is possible. It’s not as if any smart kid out there can make polio or smallpox in their homes. These are complicated viruses—yet there seems to be this idea floating around that you can just order DNA and whip up a virus as if it were a cake. That is untrue. Could somebody who wants to hurt people make such a virus? Of course. Will one be made? I don’t know, but silence isn’t going to help us prevent it or respond. We need to be talking.”

It didn’t take long for me to realize that he was right. Synthetic biology will never fulfill its promise unless it is discussed and understood by the society it is designed to serve. If not, the cycle of opposition and denialism will begin anew. Scientists will insist that research is safe and the benefits clear. A chorus will respond: how do you know? Wimmer was right about the difficulty of making viruses too, particularly in the quantities necessary for a weapon. He wouldn’t put it this way, but he believes the best defense is an offense. To protect ourselves from new diseases, including those introduced purposefully, we will need vaccines that can stop them. And to do that, scientists must understand how the parts work. (Which in the end has been the goal of his polio research.)

Before meeting Wimmer I had asked Drew Endy what he thought of the controversial research. Endy, whose fundamental approach to biological engineering is to learn by doing, has also tried to synthesize novel viruses to better understand how they work. “If it was just a single virus then I could see people wondering why he did it,” Endy said. “But if you look at the arc of Eckard’s research he has used synthesis to make viruses that have hundreds of mutations which attenuate their activity. Those changes can help lead to rapid vaccine responses.” Vaccines are made in a couple of basic ways. Live, attenuated vaccines are often the most effective; they are composed of a virus that has been weakened or altered in order to reduce its ability to cause disease, but they can take years to develop. Wimmer introduced a modern version of that approach: a synthesized virus that had been mutated could train antibodies without causing harm. Indeed, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a program under way to develop vaccines “on demand,” in large quantity, and at low cost, to interdict both established and new biological threats.

“You have to remember,” Wimmer said in reference to his original paper, “2002 was a super-scary time after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. I think the fear that people expressed was in not knowing the goals of the research. By 2005, people seemed more comfortable with the idea that there was a legitimate reason to reconstruct something like the 1918 flu virus in order to create a vaccine. With polio, which really doesn’t affect people, it is still harder to explain that we use the research to make vaccines.

“But our approach was to remodel the virus,” he went on. “I have said before—and this is true of synthetic biology in general—we have to understand that it provides wonderful solutions to terrible problems. And it can also lead to the synthesis of smallpox and polio.” Many of Wimmer’s original critics have come around to his point of view. In 2008, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “discovering the chemical structure of the poliovirus genome, elucidating genetic functions in poliovirus replication and pathogenesis, and synthesizing poliovirus de novo.”

Wimmer’s polio research did spark a discussion about whether synthetic biology could be used for bioterrorism; the answer, of course, is yes. If a group of well-trained scientists want to manufacture polio—or even the more complicated smallpox virus—they will be able to do so. (It should be noted, but often is not, that an evil scientist—or country—does not need fancy new technology or much money to cause widespread terror and death. Anthrax spores exist naturally in the soil. They can be extracted, grown, and turned into remarkably effective weapons with far less effort than it would take to create a lethal organism from scratch.) While creating deadly viruses from modern tools—or using them to revive smallpox—presents a compelling horror story (and rightfully so), more prosaic weapons, both biological and conventional, are easier to use, highly effective, and more accessible. “It doesn’t take the fanciest technology to cause destruction,” Wimmer said. “I think we all saw that on September 11.”

FOR DECADES, people have described the exponential growth of the computer industry by invoking Moore’s law. In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted the number of transistors that could fit onto a silicon chip would double every eighteen months, and so would the power of computers. When the IBM 360 computer was released in 1964, the top model came with eight megabytes of main memory, and it took enough space to fill a room. With a full complement of expensive components the computer could cost more than $2 million. Today, cell phones with a thousand times the memory can be purchased for less than a hundred dollars.

In 2001, Rob Carlson, then a researcher at the University of Washington and one of synthetic biology’s most consistently provocative voices, decided to examine a similar phenomenon: the speed at which the capacity to synthesize DNA was growing. What he produced has come to be known as the Carlson Curve, which mirrors Moore’s law, and has even begun to exceed it. Again, the effect has been stunning. Automated gene synthesizers that cost $100,000 a decade ago now cost less than $10,000. Most days, at least a dozen used synthesizers are for sale on eBay—for less than $1,000.

As the price of processing DNA drops, access (and excitement) rises. Between 1977, when Frederick Sanger published the first paper on automatic gene sequencing, and 1995, when Craig Venter published the first bacterial genome sequence, the field moved slowly. It took the next six years to complete the first draft of the immeasurably more complex human genome, and six years after that, in 2007, scientists on three continents began mapping the full genomes of one thousand people. George Church’s Personal Genome Project now plans to sequence one hundred thousand. (Church is convinced that, in exchange for advertising, companies will soon make genomes available to anyone for free—a model that has certainly worked for Google.) His lab has been able to sequence billions of DNA base pairs in the time it would have taken Sanger to sequence one. “This is not because George or Craig Venter got ten billion times smarter in fifteen years,” Endy said. “It’s because the capacity of the tools have exploded.”

In 2004, when he was still at MIT, Endy and his colleagues Tom Knight and Randy Rettberg founded iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, whose purpose is to promote the building of biological systems from standard parts like those in the BioBricks registry. In 2006, a team of Endy’s undergraduate students used those tools to genetically reprogram E. coli (which normally smells awful) to smell like wintergreen while it grows and like bananas when it is finished growing. They named their project Eau d’E Coli. By 2008, with hundreds of students from dozens of countries participating, the winning team—a group from Slovenia—used biological parts that they had designed to create a vaccine for the stomach bug Helicobacter pylori, which causes ulcers. There are no such working vaccines for humans. (So far, the team has successfully tested their creation on mice.)

This is open-source biology, where intellectual property is shared freely. What’s freely available to idealistic students, of course, would also be available to terrorists. Any number of blogs offer advice about everything from how to preserve proteins to the best methods for desalting DNA. Openness like that can be frightening, and there have been calls for tighter regulation—as well as suggestions that we stop this rampant progress before it becomes widely disseminated. Carlson, among many others, believes that strict regulations are unlikely to succeed. Several years ago, with very few tools but a working charge card, he opened his own biotechnology company, Biodesic, in the garage of his Seattle home—a biological version of the do-it-yourself movement that gave birth to so many computer companies, including Apple.

“It was literally in my garage,” Carlson told me. The product enables the identification of proteins using DNA technology. “It’s not complex, but I wanted to see what I could accomplish using mail order and synthesis.” A great deal, it turned out. Carlson designed the molecule on his laptop, then sent the sequence to a company called Blue Heron that synthesizes DNA. Most instruments he needed could be purchased easily enough on eBay (or, occasionally, on LabX, a more specialized site for scientific equipment). “All you need is an Internet connection and a credit card,” he said.

While nobody suggests that the field of synthetic biology should proceed without regulations, history has shown that they can produce consequences nobody really wants. “Strict regulation doesn’t accomplish its goals,” Carlson told me. “It’s not an exact analogy, but look at Prohibition. What happened when government restricted the production and sale of alcohol? Crime rose dramatically. It became organized and powerful. Legitimate manufacturers could not sell alcohol, but it was easy to make in a garage—or a warehouse.”

In 2002, the U.S. government began an intense effort to curtail the sale and production of methamphetamine. Before they did, the drug had been manufactured in many mom-and-pop labs throughout the country. Today it’s mostly made on the black market; the laboratories have been centralized and the Drug Enforcement Administration says candidly that they know less about methamphetamine production than they did before. “The black market is getting blacker,” Carlson said. “Crystal meth use is still rising, and all this despite restrictions.” That doesn’t mean strict control would ensure the same fate for synthetic biology. But it would be hard to see why it wouldn’t.

The most promising technologies always present the biggest dangers. That’s scary, but turning our backs on this opportunity would be scarier still. Many people suggest we do just that, though. Bill Joy, who founded Sun Microsystems, has frequently called for restrictions on the use of technology. “It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder—or even impossible—to control,” he wrote in an essay for Wired magazine called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” “The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.”

Limit the pursuit of knowledge? When has that worked? Whom should we prevent from having information? And who would be the guardian of those new tools we consider too powerful to use? It would make more sense to do the opposite. Accelerate the development of technology and open it to more people and educate them to its purpose. Anything less would be Luddism. To follow Bill Joy’s suggestion is to force a preventive lobotomy on the world. If Carlson is right—and I am sure that he is—the results would be simple to predict: power would flow directly into the hands of the people least likely to use it wisely, because fear and denialism are capable of producing no other result. This is a chance to embrace synthetic biology, and to end denialism.

To succeed we will have to stop conflating ideas and actions. There is no government conspiracy to kill American children with vaccines. I know that, and not because I believe blindly in our government or trust authority to tell me the truth. I don’t. I know it because I believe in facts. Experts chosen to represent a specific point of view are cheerleaders, not scientists. And people who rely on them are denialists. No matter what happens on this planet—even if genetically engineered foods continue to feed us for centuries—there will be those who say the theoretical dangers outweigh the nourishment they can provide for billions of people. Impossible expectations are really just an excuse to seek comfort in lies. For all our fancy medical technology, Americans are no healthier and live no longer than citizens of countries that spend a fraction as much on health care. That can only change if alternatives are based on scientifically verifiable fact.

For synthetic biology to succeed we will also need an education system that encourages skepticism (and once again encourages the study of science). In 2008, students in Singapore, China, Japan, and Hong Kong (which was counted independently) all performed better on a standard international science exam, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, than American students. The U.S. scores have remained stagnant since 1995, the first year the examination was administered. Adults are even less scientifically literate. Early in 2009, the results of a California Academy of Sciences poll that was conducted throughout the nation revealed that only 53 percent of American adults know how long it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun, and a slightly larger number—59 percent—are aware that dinosaurs and humans never lived at the same time.

Synthetic biologists will have to overcome this ignorance and the denialism it breeds. To begin with, why not convene a new, more comprehensive version of the Asilomar Conference, tailored to the digital age and broadcast to all Americans? It wouldn’t solve every problem or answer every question—and we would need many conversations, not one. But I can think of no better way for President Obama to begin to return science to its rightful place in our society. And he ought to lead that conversation through digital town meetings that address both the prospects and perils of this new discipline.

There would be no more effective way to vanquish denialism, or help people adjust to a world that, as Drew Endy put it, is surfing the exponential. It is not enough simply to tell people to go back to school and learn about synthetic biology, or for that matter, about how vaccines or vitamins or genomics work. Optimism only prevails when people are engaged and excited. Why should we bother? Not to make E. coli smell like chewing gum or fish glow in vibrant colors. Our planet is in danger, and the surest way to solve the problem—and we can solve the problem—is to teach nature how to do it.

The hydrocarbons we burn for fuel are really nothing more than concentrated sunlight that has been collected by leaves and trees. Organic matter rots, bacteria break it down, and it moves underground, where, after millions of years of pressure, it turns into oil and coal. At that point, we go dig it up—at huge expense and with disastrous environmental consequences. Across the globe, on land and sea, we sink wells and lay pipe to ferry our energy to giant refineries. That has been the industrial model of development, and it worked for nearly two centuries.

It won’t work any longer, though, and we need to stop it.

The Industrial Age is in decline, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering. That won’t happen easily (or overnight), and it will never provide a magic solution to our problems. But what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products we need in order to survive as a species. “We are going to start doing the same thing with bacteria that we do with pets,” the genomic futurist Juan Enriquez said, describing our transition from a world that relied on machines to one that relies on biology. “A housepet is a domesticated parasite… . It has evolved to have an interaction with human beings. The same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “That same thing is going to start happening with energy. We are going to domesticate bacteria to process stuff inside a closed reactor to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”

It is also the beginning of a new and genuinely natural environmental movement—one that doesn’t fear what science can accomplish, but only what we might do to prevent it.