The future of biotech

Drew Endy

Michael Specter

https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1035747336343904256

JZ: These are literally two of my favorite people. Drew, whenever I get the chance to hang out with him... ... like seriously... and Michael, if I had somebody interview me about anything in my life, I could not ask for anyone else but Michael Specter. He's one of the most enjoyable people I've ever been able to talk wit hhim. I've been fortunate to be able to have lunch with him. Both of these guys are brilliant people and htey think outside of any boxes you have ever thought of. The last talk was hard to beat, that's the problem. I hope you all really enjoy this talk of Michael and Drew. Just really listen.

DE: Michael, you're a staff writer for The New Yorker. Is that right?

MS: Yes.

DE: ...

MS: ... Well ..

DE: Maybe one that ...

MS: Yes. I'm a staff writer. I've been writing a book about gene editing. It's been taking a lot longer than I thought.

DE: Gene editing, wasn't that invented in the 1970s?

MS: It was, but I'm slow.

DE: What's made it cool?

MS: You. There's a few technical aspects of biology. What I do think is more important, more challenging, is what the landscape of biotech is going to look like in 10, 20, 30 years from now. You guys talk about DIY and community and it's confusing to me. I would tell you, and this is going to sound like a weird thing to say... in 1994, a company called Calgene introduced... it was the first genetically modified... and it kind of.. it did one thing, which was.. grow rapidly. It stuck and they had a business. It went out of business because it sucked, not because people hated it or people hated the company. And, that, interested me because at some point after 1997, half of Americans, thought that this stuff was dangerous. And they still do. Facts don't matter. So I'm kind of looking at the role of genetic editing. We're all talking about genetic editing ourselves, or in small labs or small communities. Is that going to work? Some people are going to be delighted, but other people are going to freak out. What regulations are going to be created? There will have to be some. Drew?

DE: What are you really asking?

MS: How are we going to control these freaky people?

Q: YEAH! Biohack the planet!

DE: The same way that we control Bob Dylan.

MS: How's that?

DE: The same way we control speech or poetry. It's not the framework we've inherited. If you think of biology as a generative substrate where you can implement creative thoughts, then there's an infinite combinations of things that can be realized so it's an open-ended domain. My view on things is that we exist in a time where a certain type of press is being created, for transmuting human intentions into biological matter whether hman editing or DNA editing-- it's a time of press. Language is a system for translating human intentions from one system to another, whether us using english, me using python, it can be uothers using an un-yet unnamed language... And then the question becomes, how does one govern the press and speech? Although we use the label "free speech" in the US, that's not really what we mean-- speech is heavily constrained, like Ohio... having to do with obscenity... and lawlessness. And so, what's interesting about these cases is that they don't say in any particular instance that this speec his protected or not but they created a framework that allows for local context to be included in the consideration of whether it's okay to go ahead and say something. I think there's a point of departure that looking at these two cases in particular is a good way to change thinking in part because ... is doing this in biology likely to be considered obscene, yes or no? This can be defined in a particular context- perhaps in an academic institution, but not in a community lab. It might be something that incites lawlessness, in which case it shouldn't be okay.

MS: I agree with you that a lot of those cases make sense as reference points. This is about spoken langauage. It's an analogy, biotech is different. How are we going to deal with the obscene and the things that we are worried about, like error? Things are going to get fucked up. That's okay. But, when you say, well, let's regulate it in the way that we regulate speech. There's a guy in here trying to make a drug, but...what do we do? Do we call the police? Do we do a tribunal? Or do we just say cool?

DE: What do you do if someone publishes an article in a magazine and it causes people to go out and cause harm? How do you hold the author of that article accountable?

MS: It depends. But I do think it's worth thinking about this. I don't think this is what we're talking about.

DE: ... the last time.. the army or the navy... yeah. It's real interesting. We had just got ourselves in a local trap going full Hausian and, ... and I think the reason here is warping in a self-reflective way. Everything implied by what you have heard rpeviously and things represented in a scalable governance for distributing responsibility... is one in which people wish to do something constructive, and the upside of that is under selection, to outweigh what could happen otherwise. The internet is likely to work tomorrow. It's likely to be the case that I can use email tomorrow, and while my computer crashes and hard drives crash, there's so many collective incentives for the internet to ebe working. So many people can become local heroes restoring internet connectivity. The reason why the intenret will work tomorrow is because most people wish for it to work tomorrow. If you want to talk about the bionet and the biosphere, then to the same extent that we're getting better at inserting our intentions into biology, then I think we need toconstruct a culture to do this.

MS: There has been 2 trillion doses of... consumed by humans. There's never been a documented case where that has caused harm. 46% of Americans do everything they can to avoid GMO, though. I'm not talking about what's right or what we all in this room or other rational people think will work. I'm talking about the way that people express themselves and think. All this crap about designer babies is crap except that people talk about it all the time.

DE: Let me try to interpret that. Sounds like there's a lot of abstractions,l and even if we make things incrementally better and distribute them and what can be realized is more and more actually awesome... then these inherited wedge issues or distracting topics will prevent anything supercool from spontaneously coming true?

MS: I don't feel that it "will". I feel we have a chance now, we came up with toothpaste and GMOs but we're still at a point where society is not toally freaking out. Some people are going to freak out sure, but we're still at a point where people can be influenced in value this kind of thing. Some of the things in my book are things like, the .... the editing... ... edit.. malarial mosquitos in Africa... and I've been to Mali and I've talked to actual witchhunters there. Actual witchhunters.

DE: Where does the hate come from?

MS: France. Most of the reasons these countries hate that... the previous colonial folks told them to hate them. Let me finish this. When you talk to these people in Mali about editing mosquitoes, I never heard-- I've never found anyone that said no we don't wnat to do that. Everyone knows someone who has died from malaria and it means something to them. I think this is different. We have to spend more time trying to figure out how to do that, and not wake up in 20 years and have this stupid fucking machinery.

Q: I'm super stoked. There's two things in life I'm excited about: science communication and science. You are a scientist, and you're a communicator. How do we prevent the fear of science in people who don't know science? It's in the way that we communicate science to people. In highschool, I learned things that my parents never learned. It's this fear of unknown that is propagated over a certain number of years. If oyu understand it, then it gets better. As a scientist journalist... and scientists do a terrible job of talking about science.

MS: If you did a good job at that, then I wouldn't have a job. I'd like to see kids doing editing genes and swapping genes out. There's no reason not to be aggressive about that. But they aren't doing that. We can make up in 20 years and suddenly say, wow we really should have done htat. This is too big, this is too important. We're talking about controlling life, changing life.

DE: I feel like, as someone who has spent a lot of time talking about this issue, I feel like most of that time has been wasted. My suspicion is that outside of a very few small number of edge cases, a lot of the conversation could just be skipped and reality could be constructed. The cost of the conversation that happens which mostly doesn't yield anything, is an opportunity cost. You spend your time on it, and also, it keeps everybody from acknowledging what might actually change. Daisy Ginsberg made a nice observation: the synthetic biology revolutionaries... that they promise... say we could engineer you but everything stays the same, it doesn't make sense. There's a puzzle: we're working towards operational mastery of living matter. And that's kind of a big deal. If you don't allow for the possibility of what seems like the extreme likelihood that many things could change structurally like supply chains and power relationships, and if you don't allow for that, and try to placate the inherited stalled conversations, then you're propagating status quo power relationships into the future to make things stay the same. I don't know what to do about the worry. Except for a few edge cases, I'd rather just go build things that are true. Including the cultural politics, but not try to spend too much time trying to make people feel happy about it. When things change, not everyone is going to be happy about it.

MS: I just don't want people to be irrationally afraid about it. Do you think it's a fair analogy that the ... the PC revolution.. that this is any way a fair analogy? I don't think anyone in this room thinks the future of biology should be controlled by... a few people in Palo Alto.

DE: There are a few puzzles here. By the time we got homebrew computing in 1975, we were 30 years into massive federal sustained investments into computing infrastructure. Texas Instruments went from catching reflections off the ground for oil, to a submarine detection company during ww2 for the navy. And from that, it got some investments to develop wafers. By the time you got to the point of transistor logic data plucks and composable logic elements in the 60s and 70s, you're many $100s of millions of dollars of public investments into electronics infrastructure. By the time you got to the time of Dell, things were composable at a significant scale. When someone was talking about building a cell right now, things aren't composable that much right now. The investment hasn't been done yet. There's a wish there, which is well-intentioned, but the sustained investments in getting the engineering infrastructure in place hasn't been three. Nobody wants to say "yeah let's militarize biology" like we did electronics to pay for it. So there's a puzzle. There's another puzzle, which is about industrialization. For a few hundred years now, we've been operating in the context of centralized manufacturing and efficiencies from certain scales of operation had become normal, and with the internet showing up, supply chains about that are going gangbusters. Biology in its current form is growing up in this context. If you look at the national strategy about how to structure investments in biotech, they are getting titles like "industrialization of biology" but the irony is that biology is a pre-distributed thing. And so the cliches on twitter is that even though the report says industrialization of biology, it's really about biologizing industry, but that's just on twitte.r The capital, though, is flowing in the way of working such that most of the money is going to big companies in a few isolated locations. I think it would be interesting to say maybe this is something that community labs could pick up or the dog breeders could pick up, how does one structure flow of capital to developthe technical infrastructure to support distributed biomanufacturing? We have plenty of existence proofs in biology, but we haven't mapped biology into that domain. We don't have the infrastructure yet, and capital flow selects for centralized intensive capacities.

Q: We have billions of years of source code out there. There's tons of vulnerabilities. It pretty much runs but people are afraid of touching it. What strategies could we make, possibly informed by our misadventures in software, what could we do to mitigate the risks and maybe this dovetails into what you were talking about- is there a way to say that distributed biological capability is something that we need, specifically if we were to create a global immune system, or from software being able to deploy offensive technologies? What mitigations can we deploy?

MS: One of the things that .... responsible for... is this analogizing... this is a revolutionary new way of looking at things. We shouldn't just slap on and say "it's like computer processors" or "it's like software" or anything that we want or even biology before. I really do think, I don't see a strategy at all, for people to understand what may happen in the near distant future. Even things like the genetic modification of mice.. which could get rid of a significant problem... it's causing a lot of anxiety.

DE: I have a lot to say about that question. But first let's hear another question.

KG: I have a question from the livestream. Somoene asks, Drew, would you be interested in having a conversation/debate with Jim Thomas from ETC Group like the one you had a decade ago at the long now foundation? Would you be interested in revisiting the predictions you made?

DE: Sure, happy to. Jim and I were... had a meeting at the quaker friend house up in Toronto up in December put on by the world council of churches. It was a 3-day intensive conversation about synthetic biology and agriculture and food production. ETC was one of the co-organizers and they had one reps of all of the major world religions as well as various native peoples and so on. It was a great conversation. I learned a lot. I would welcome a debate or any type of conversation with people who have different views. I learned from a vanilla farmer in Mexico how they experienced the rise of synthetic chemistry and artificial vanilla as it relates to the cultivation of vanilla plants in the forest and how they adapted to that and how they returned to something previously... they valued the relationship with land more than they valued money, and relationships with each other, and learning that they have done some interesting things. There were also some disagreements. One of the points in the room last December in Toronto was a team that wanted to ban gene drives, like amplifying genetic casettes that might be released in the environment. I was presented this in the context of a circle of friends. I hear what you're saying- ban is a strong word, be careful when you use it. I'm interested in banning prayer.... so what do you say about that? Well we got to talking, and certain kinds of public prayer have been banned in a particular way, and that resonated and we had a disconnect that resulted in a connection. The prior topic-- the interpretation of the question in part has to do with security and how one does biosecurity. I look at biology as an open distributed network operating on a natural itmescale and things are sharing atoms and information and people can interface with that and you're trying to secure a network and some mal-intentioned network wants to cause harm. You don't know how long you have to respond, but the adversaries have unlimited time to find exploits. This is not unlike other adversary situations in other contexts. There's significant centralized capacities of knowledge and combined with dissemination of that knowledge, like the NSA. We often remark that how one might reformat their family doesn't really make sense, but I would like to see more cluefulness and sustained energy in people working together to tackle biosecurity. At a public level, once you get the centralized powers that be in the government sphere, it's difficult to sustain the conversations due to the public liability revealed by Michael's case where it is uncomfortable to admit that there are these problems coming in. Any time anyone in a political position tries to talk outloud about what is happening in biology, that happens. That doesn't help anyone. Something missing in this conversation but it's implied in everything coming before this evening is, what type of society do we want to be part of? Do we want to be consumers of technologies? Where we are subjects of networks and relationships? Where we are objects within systems? Or do we want to be a society of citizens? In this context, I mean citizens not with respect to national immigration or frothy short-term politics but I mean citizens in terms of rights and responsibilities and access to capacities. To the extent that we can renew a conversation about what it means to be a citizen to be a part of society, then this allows us to engage in a more direct and modest way on the topic of how are we going to develop strategy and make sure tha teach of us have the option of fluourishing in the ways that are meaningful to each of us. This is often missing. But everyone gets caught up in reactionary politics about safety and normative values.

MS: In the context of gene drives... there's more discussion in open science and the world of people of scientists and participants, than there ever has been. It can go a lot further and it should go a lot further. I do think that people are talking about this,... in a way tha tthey have not before. And I think this should be improved.

Q: I have a question. I can't tell you how many people have talked about bioterrorists or whatever. Will Alzheimers medication be made or whatever. How do you communicate through your idea of biology being a right of free speech to people who are not even interested in lab spaces- inaccessible to community labs? Do you think it will die out with older generations being afraid of it? Or will the fear be sustained with younger generations?

MS: I would be willing to die out as a sacrifice. I think the word science communicator is... I think it's important to talk to people honestly. This is an exciting field and there's lots of dragons and curing cancer and all sorts of cool stuff. I think many of those things, are eventually possible. We need to reel in our expectations. I've been around a while. Often reporters get ahead of reality. People who don't understand science, just grasp on to the latest thing they have heard. It's really important. I've talked to scientists a lot. Scientists think their job is to be on the bench and that's enough to be a good scientist. I'm sorry to say, that's not enough anymore. Every single person in the lab needs to explain to everyone what their lab does. If nobody in the lab can talk to anybody outside, then that's a disaster waiting to happen. You need to have communication, and you need to have reality checks. Every single day, CRISPR cures another disease. I think it will cure some diseases, but so far, nobody is cured. I can show you thousands of... literally every day, ... so, we need to ....

DE: It's important to let people have the option to learn about something, instead of telling them something is happening. When we say science literacy, often we mean some high priestist who is telling the public, like "let me tell you about what I can do and what it means" and htis is a weird kind of asymmetric literacy which is very different from the kind of literacy we mean when we talk about human language which means reading and writing. So much attention is spent on "let's all talk about it" and "let's talk about it at the expense of investing and figuring out how to make it an option how to make people practice this themselves in a way that is meaningful to themselves".

MS: Every schoolchild should be working with gene editing.

DE: It's interesting in your question, you inevitably embed a type of worst case scenario- is the person next to you a terrorist and how would we know? Here's a puzzle: the reality is that there are some things in biology which are edge cases and truly bad. The tools that are being developed make it the case that access to the things that could cause harm and derivatives that could be imagined as worse, the barriers to entry are dropping. I tend to not worry about KG or people in the room. But I do tend to worry about nation states. I think the framework that we inherit from the Nixon administration around demilitarization of biotech is a framework from a generation ago and it might be foregotten. That's a risk. As we look at how things are operating internationally, I have further decreasing confidence that we might stumble on a path where we might see a group of people under the banner of a nation remilitarizing some aspects of biology. When you look at things and you try to reign in the hype, what do you think about real concerns or what if anything bothers you? Biosecurity?

MS: I agree with you completely. Nobody cares what KG is doing. The nation state is a bigger concern. I don't know of any tech that has ever been developed that hasn't been used and pushed forward that wasn't used for... So I don't think it's unrealistic to think about that. We should go forward with it. We don't think we should feel anxious about biosecurity. I think it would be crazy not to think about it. It's possible to produce things, and it's going to be more possible, and hte barrier to entry is going to be down, and the barrier to figuring out how to fix cancer is also going to be dropping.

Q: I agree we should have tech in every schoolchild and a curriculum. I was thinking... I should give a book on viruses to every 6th grader I know so we could get more people like KG> But I think you're saying the biohacker community is not going to move forward if we don't acknowledge the real risks in this. Biology is really possible. You have lots of cautionary tales about putting the mongoose on Hawaii and now you have a mongoose and rat problem. You have prickly pears going to Australia and then 10% of the land mass in Australia it was covered in prickly pears. Because of the abiliuty to reproduce, there is real danger here. In the 70s, with the early revolution of biotechnology... scientists said here are our rules, we're going to impose rules on ourselves before the federal government tries to do that. The biohacker community could do that, and here's the biohacker ethos we're imposing on our community before the government comes in. First and foremost, one shall not engineer a pathogen.

MS: What about the guys who did, though? Asylmar... I don't think we can have an Asylmar anymore. This is a distributed technology which is going to be becoming more distributed. I think that's good. I think that's really good. I talked with a sicentist recently and I asked him what's his biggest fear. He said his biggest fear is having the president of the United States use the word "gene drive". So far he hasn't, but that's something we have to address. If you put this in politics, something ridiculous is going to come out, even if well-intentioned.

Q: I haven't heard either of you definitively state what the rights and responsibilities of a biocitizen should be. You have the opportunity to say, in some kind of realm of imagination to this room what you truly believe to be the defensible responsibility for us to be...

MS: That's a good question and Drew would love to answer it.

DE: I've already answered it. But maybe it was obtuse. Do whatever you want, but do not be obscene, and do not incite lawlessness that you intend to realize. That would be my version of it. That's a prototype of a position for a discussion and debate.

MS: Be mindful of what the implications are of what you are doing.

Q: Can you define that?

MS: You'll know it when it kills you.

Q: Is there something that defines that?

DE: It's called the bill of rights.

MS: It's going to get complicated. You can't ask those questions.

Q: I have two questions. First, do you guys have a podcast? Second, it's an active year of articles written about this community... what type of goal should this community be in engaging with those stories? If it's not conversation, then it's action, then what should their role be?

MS: Everyone in this room should be talking with the press, openly, intelligbly, and not hyping. If people don't talk to the press, then we're going to hear some things, but we're going to get it wrong. There are some journalists that suck, yes. But there's a lot of good journalists out there. There's good people working hard to do a good job.

DE: I've been inspired by the wisdom coming from the community labs as represented earlier. I'm very keen to see the practical scaling of that. And so, maybe in response to what you're asking about, I would turn to that duet and ask others who are on the ground- what would it take to scale that? Less talk, more doing. Maybe talking is part of solving the puzzle. Talk is cheap. No offense.

MS: It's truly not. It's so expensive.

Q: What about engineering?

DE: ... Someone published on the digital biology archive, his thoughts from when he was working in Berkeley 15 years ago on biosecurity. "Valley the shadow of death" and he starts with the current time, still the current time, and he says operationally what we're doing is making moves to buy ourselves time so that we can get to the second part of the plan where we've operationally secured master of biological matter, to better then react to what's being surprised of the day. So just to make a point, 20 years of political theater carefully orchestrated by the world health organization is leading up to the assembly up to finally getting the last smallpox place in syberia destroyed. In Fall of 106, Alberta colleagues-- the smallpox horsepox virus from scratch... The significance of this practically is that the detector systems and therapeutics systems and treatments and vaccines for smallpox viruses could be worked around in a way via synthesis which was not so practical previously. How do you deal with that? How do you adjust a big political system at a global level to navigate that? It's hard, and it's probably not possible. If you live in this future future that Roger describes-- 15 years ago, he was describing every human would be born with a new chromosone using RNAi and target the major viral classes for typical human pathogens. And everyone would be born with a defense system. Today we call it CRISPR, but whatever. Other things would have to be addressed-- hiddne in the conversation about building cells are osme profound puzzles, like which make biosecurity in a real framework not possible now. If you look at the genome recoding efforts, you get to microbes that hvae 450 genes, all essential for the reproduction of that organism. 100 of those genes have functions that nobody knows the function of, and that's true for 20 years now. It's not because we're not smart geneticists, it's because we don't know what they do. The physical functions of htese genes are essential for life- we don't know what they are doing. If you want me to develop a biosecurity apparatus that has to be prepared for anything showing up,l and even in the simplest reproducible system I don't know 1/3rd of the functions I would necessarily be on reactive footing. From a public health basis, from a biosecurity basis, it would be worth having national lab scale efforts that are truly securing the basic scientific understanding of what all of thes ethings are, such that we can have a comprehensive description of what the cells require to copy themselves. At that point, I would be willing to talk about security, where we can do computer security where you don't know what half the ports are on the network and you can't turn them on and off, and you can't-- it would just be crazy. I think there's a science technology side of this. It's equally important enough to do things smartly on the human side.. One of the things I heard from the anthropologists talking about human-human ntworks and computer networks-- humans wish to know who is looking at them... So, you know that feeling you get when you are sitting there and someone is looking at you. So the thinking was, that, when you linked one thing on the net to another thing on the net, to have that link be symmetric and not asymmetric... So Michael links my webpage, I would automatically know that, there would be ab acklink that, but the problem is that the web is asymmetric and if he hyperlinks me then I have no idea. It's easy to implement that, but it doesn't satisfy this wish that we want to know who is looking at me. This creates a vacuum and over time this gets filled by pagerank or alphabet or facebook... it does it centralized. This concentration of power is a problem though because it leads to other vulnerabilities. We have to think about the human and technology and the flourishing of citizens. We have examples where we got some things right but other things wrong. I don't think the analogy ports exactly. It seems like we could be as smart as we can be, or aspire to be as smart, and you should interpret my words that I'm operating at the performance limits of any conversation I've had-- there's a lot of room for people to contribute to biosecurity.

Q: The journalists alway,s always bring the conversations back to "dangerous" stuff. How do we control that conversation?

MS: You don't, you never will. Or talk to better journalists. It's easy to write a story about how KG is going to wipe out a generation of humans. But it's also irresponsible. You need to lay things out. You're not all that smart. You're just going to have to work with what you got. Yoour goal should not be to never have anyone talk about the potential downsides- if you want that, then never talk to anybody and don't read anything. In journalism, when someone tells the story, the better the journalist is going ot be able to write what seems to be real.

DE: Sometimes you have to create a valley and push what you care about into it. When we got hammered over and over again from... to WMDs... WMDs, WMDs, we had to come up with TMCs-- tools of mass construction. No we don't work on WMDs, we work on toosl of mass construction. If you want to talk with us, we're going to tlak about tools of mass creation. That's how we do it.

MS: Put out the story that you want. Don't expect journalists to do it for you. Give a good story to tell. One of the things I have never understood about pharmaceutical companies is why they don't talk to journalists. There's a lot of discovery and cool stuff and science. And there's all the tobacco companies and stuff.. but they don't talk to journalists.

JZ: We're going to have to end this.

Q: I have a quick question. It's not that quick. I think these discussions about biosecurity obscure other important discussions. I think it's guaranteed that these things will become politicized and I think the edits that we choose to make will also become racialized and genderized and I think our biological technology already shows evidence of that. I think we have a great tendency to propagate our own desires and our own images of ourselves and that becomes really problematic in society. With your discussion about flourishing vs fear, or remaking reality and don't talk baout it. I have a lot of concerns about that. I also ask questions, what's the job of the scientist? I think we need to become more interphysically married with that and ask, what's the job of the artist in terms of envisioning the future and the possible and those kinds of things?

Q: If you could genetically modify yourself, would you do it? Would you genetically modify your child to be free of disease or something like that, would you do it?

MS: If you are asking whether I would like my child to be free of disease, yes. I wouldn't mind modification. Yeah, sure. If I could do it, and there's no huge downside, then sure. Sure. Why not.

Q: What about some downsides?

MS: Show me the label. Some sideeffects are okay, some aren't. There's ups and downs and risks and methods... You don't really know what the risks and benefits are, often. If I know the risks, then I can tell you whether I wnat the benefit.

DE: There's so much tendency among people to think about people. I find the question kind of boring. It's a good question, but how about the rest of the planet? How about our relationships there? It's just natural for people to get caught up in this. One of the tihngs in biology is that biology is not people... So I guess I wonder, how could I morph your question into a question about how do we change our interfaces with the rest of the living world? If you can tell me what it is to make me do that, then okay.