How Synthetic Biology Will Revolutionize Science

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, here in the U.S., the future is here with new technologies raising challenging new questions. Our next guest is award-winning author and futurist Amy Webb. She co-authored “The Genesis Machine,” which examines the world of synthetic biology. Webb sat down with Hari Sreenivasan to talk about the potential and the concerns for redesigning our lives.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Amy Webb, thanks for joining us. So, let’s go to the kind of the biggest potentials that you see. I mean, you lay this out down in the book. You have a whole section on how we got here, and I think that people are probably a little bit more primed to think about in the area of medicine, how this sort of synthetic biology is going to affect them, especially coming after COVID, and hearing, at least, the race for mRNA vaccines and even if they don’t understand it, they know that technology had something to do with how much more efficient these vaccines are.

AMY WEBB, AUTHOR, “THE GENESIS MACHINE”: So, you know, if you’ve had either the BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, you have synthetic — you have used synthetic biology. So, these are messenger RNA derived vaccines, that essentially deliver new code to your body. And the code is a set of instructions telling the body to fend off this novel virus. The easiest way to think about this, for me at least, is video games. If you’ve ever played a video game, like “The Legend of Zelda” or something that involves fighting and a quest, you know, if you encounter a new enemy for the first time, you might have to tools but you don’t have any idea how to use them. So, you are very vulnerable. And once you have the instructions on how to use the tools, then you are, sort of, good to go. Well, SARS-CoV-2 was like a new, you know, blob of bad stuff in the game, and the messenger RNA is a set of instructions that tells us how to effectively fight it. What’s so cool about this though, is that, it’s a — if we think of this as an instruction delivery mechanism, what else might we deliver? So, already in the works are similar messenger RNA techniques for universal flu vaccines or even cancer. So, outside of messenger RNA vaccines, though there is a lot more happening that includes genetic surgery to treating age as a pathology.

SREENIVASAN: What’s happening when it comes to the price and technology and speed when it comes to synthetic biology?

WEBB: So, the best way to think about this, is the sort of the moment that the first demonstrations of the telephone happened. So, this is, you know, the turn of the century. Alexander Graham Bell is in New York State, in Chikurin (ph) Hall, standing at a stage, demonstrating this new crazy contraption. There is an audience assembled for this demonstration. And all of a sudden, they hear the sound coming out from this machine, where they don’t see anybody — they don’t see a physical person singing. They are incensed. So, they go up on the stage. They pull back the curtains and demand to see the Wizard of Oz, right, singing into a little microphone. And, when they realize there is no human there, that this thing really does work, you know, it sets the stage. It completely demolishes their mental models. It took a little bit of time to build the infrastructure, the telephone poles, the wires, the components, you know. But, within the first few decades, there were transatlantic wires, which eventually led to an ecosystem, which gave birth to satellites, which gave birth to the internet, which makes it available for you and I to be in totally different places having this conversation. Today, if you try to put evaluation on the total cost of this entire telecommunication, this ecosystem, there is no way to do it. It just is. The only way to calculate it, for real, would be to take things away and see what we would lose. So, synthetic biology is at the Chikurin (ph) Hall stage right now. It exists. It works. And the ecosystem, the critical infrastructure is in the process of being built.

SREENIVASAN: One of the sections in the book that you talk about in regards to how we could ease the stressors on our planet is how we create food. Explain how that will work.

WEBB: Yes. Well, I’ll give you a concrete example. So, commercial chicken farming requires lots of resources, feed, you know, it’s a lot of work. It’s not great for the planet. It’s not great for the chickens. And my question is, what if in a couple of years, we enjoy chicken wings, but those chicken wings were never attached to a living, breathing chicken that required all of those resources? So, here is how that would work. You would start with stencils from a heritage chicken. So, a chicken that’s, you know, never been pumped full of antibiotics or hormones, and feed that into what’s called a bioreactor. You feed it amino reactions and all of the stuff that it would have had access to inside the mother hen. And in a short amount of, time you wind up with tissue, edible tissue, that again, it is molecularly the same as something that would have come off of a chicken but it requires fraction of the amount of time, very few resources and it’s, in many ways, much healthier than something you would’ve gotten on a commercial farm.

SREENIVASAN: One of the big implications, you talk about a lot in the book, is how synthetic biology is going to help us adapt to the effects of climate change that, as a society, we are clearly not capable of stopping climate change, as we should. But how — what are ways that we could be altering ourselves or our future selves to live with where the climate is going to be like on this planet?

WEBB: We keep coming to the table over and over again, never aligning on a single thing, which is drastic, fast reduction in Co2. We should aspire to that. But can we make room for other alternatives in the meantime? So, if we use synthetic biology to edit leaves and enable those leaves to suck Co2 out of the air, Co2 is just a feed stock. And if they are engineered to suck additional Co2 out of the air and excrete totally organic fertilizer effectively, you know, that makes a dent. There’s no silver bullet here, but this allows us to change our mental model, make a dent. And it also nourishes the topsoil. You know, it’s the year 2022, and we’ve created some existential threats that are just not going to go away overnight. And our current ways of mitigating them are through punitive measures. I would like to — for us to try something different, which is certainly to try to convince everybody to stop damaging, right? But can we try some alternative solutions that help mitigate some of these problems?

SREENIVASAN: How would or could humans use this type of technology to adapt to climate change?

WEBB: So, again, I want to caution that this is not tomorrow, that we are some ways off. But what if we were open to the idea that small tweaks in our — you know, in our basic makeup would make us more resilient? What if we had literally thicker skin and thicker fingernails, you know, that like some of our ancestors that gave us the ability to withstand slightly colder or windier climate situations or warmer climate situations? The truth of the matter is that we have — you know, we have created and inherited now extreme weather events, and our bodies are not evolving as fast as the conditions around us. So, we can either start making much heavier coats and just be willing to wear a lot of layers, or again, can we think of a future in which we are allowing ourselves to adapt a little bit faster? So, that might mean changing our skin, changing our skin color, making ourselves more resilient to certain pathogens before we are born, which means editing embryos, in order to be more resilient. So, again, I think that there are some options, but they come with risks. And we — one of the things we don’t know is the longer-term impacts of that type of genetic editing, there is also a huge risk with genetic privacy and making sure that our information is not being used by a third- party without our knowledge. And of course, equity, none of these solutions are good solutions if they don’t put all of us at the center, which means we have to make sure that solutions are equitable and widely distributed to everyone, not just some wealthy few.

SREENIVASAN: If I can sequence my genome from $100, do I own it because it’s me or does the company who is doing the sequencing have a right to it? Does the government have an option to take a look at it, to rule me out as not a suspect in a case, so to speak?

WEBB: I think we keep coming back to this question with every modern technology that we talk about because we don’t have clear answers in the United States, that puts us in a very dangerous situation. There is no clear guidance right now on who owns your DNA, who owns your sequence and what can be done with it and under what circumstances. And that, I think, should concern us because we are seeing similar situations — or we’re seeing situations outside of the U.S. in places like China where the government, the CCP, is forcibly extracting DNA from ethnic minorities, the Uyghur population in particular, and banking that in a sort of national genetic database without informed consent and without any real understandings of how those data might be used. In the United States, we do things differently. It is sort of an open free market. And so, anybody can give up their sample to anybody that they want for the purpose of finding a long lost relative or your personal genetic makeup or whatever. But you need to be very clear on who else might use those data and under what circumstances. I mean, this is a place where we really should not let the markets decide, I think.

SREENIVASAN: Are you optimistic that given how difficult it is for countries to have conversations about borders and about policies that we can as humanity kind of come to the table and say, these are the things that we ought to use synthetic biology for together and these are the things that we definitely cannot allow, approve in any way?

WEBB: We have no singular viewpoint on how to use any of this technology around the world. Unfortunately, science is drastically politicized and the COVID crisis has exacerbated that. And so, here we are, you know, the technology that ultimately, we may need to stay alive, we can’t even have a conversation about it right now because it involves us having meaningful conversations about when life begins and what and how to use stem cells and how to think about embryos. And we’ve gotten to a point where we can’t seem to come to a middle on — you know, to have that conversation, let alone conversations about vaccines. So, we’re — this puts us now nationally at a pretty significant strategic disadvantage. We have no long-term plan — planning for science or technology. This is going to have to be a ground up thing where we’re going to have to decide that we want a better future, and therefore, we were willing to come together to have meaningful conversations that advance us versus keep us mired in controversy and salacious, you know, arguments back and forth.

SREENIVASAN: What are some examples that you have run across where there is legitimate concern about health and safety to populations because synthetic biology can be manipulated for people for evil?

WEBB: Everybody that I know working in this place is exceptionally careful and is regulated. And so, I don’t think that there is an immediate cause for alarm. However, some researchers were curious to know if we are now designing organisms — if we are designing in researching on computers and that code is sent somewhere else to be synthesized, which is to say, that the code turns — you know, we take the code and we create genetic material with it and then, get those samples back in the mail. Is it possible that there could be malware, malicious code, entered in without anybody knowing? And the answer, it turned out, was yes. So, it is a strictly regulated process, but there have been vulnerabilities. And basically, they sent benign code and got potentially really horrific genetic material back through the mail. When I discovered this and I started asking questions to folks about it, rare as the case may be, the bottom line is that we are not prepared for something like that in the United States. I talked to many different government officials in different departments, nobody knows. If something like that were to happen, we don’t have a center of cyber biological warfare, right? We’ve got cybersecurity. We’ve got bio security. But we do not have anything that combines the two, and we are really not thinking that through. So, that is certainly of concern. And listen, it is hard not to take a look at some of the research that has come out of China lately or some of the rhetoric that has been spoken in China, and not think that they are intentionally experimenting right now to see if they can enhance parts of the population. We are already seeing some experiments being done with regard to intelligence. And again, like, we barely understand how the brain works. So, some of this research is dubious. But they have very different opinions and ideas around ethics and values and consent. So, I think that there are — I am sort of — I am concerned that we are just not playing this forward. And as a result, something bad, at some point, will probably happen and just — we’re not going to be prepared. We have time right now. We can prepare in advance by rehearsing the future, but we have to actually do that.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you led to the book off with a rather personal story about your challenges of having a child. And I think it is one of the things that people take for granted of all of the different complexities biologically that are there. But what do you think the future will hold for families who might be in that similar struggle? Who are just trying to have a baby?

WEBB: I have been pregnant nine times, and I have one child. Some of those pregnancies are what doctors call chemical pregnancies, which I’ve always thought was a really awful way to describe. It’s just early-stage pregnancy. But we don’t talk about miscarriage at all in the United States, and it’s not just the person who is pregnant that goes through it, it is everybody. It’s their partner, it’s their friends. It is an awful thing when it happens. You know, for some people, getting pregnant is very easy. And for many people, it is not. So again, can we introduce more control? Can we reduce uncertainty? And I think the answer is yes. So, let’s say IVF was a standard of practice rather than just something that is available to very wealthy people who have the types of jobs that allow for IVF. Well, if that was the case, then you could create embryos, screen those embryos, potentially perform genetic surgery on embryos and implant the one that was most optimize, the most likely to come to terms. Well, then you would reduce a lot of heartache. You are not creating super children. You are just enabling a pregnancy to happen in a more controlled environment. You know, I think we might look back a couple decades from now and think that we were barbaric for trying to have children naturally and leaving so much up to happenstance and serendipity. I hope my daughter, who is nowhere near the age to have children, but I hope a couple decades from now from now when she does that IVF is available to everybody and that genetic screening happens to everybody, you know, and that this process is just better.

SREENIVASAN: All right. The book is called “The Genesis Machine.” Author Amy Webb, thanks so much for joining us.

WEBB: Thank you, Hari.