Michael Specter on “Higher Animals” & the Biotech Revolution

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Michael Specter, welcome to the show.

MICHAEL SPECTER, AUTHOR, “HIGHER ANIMALS:” I’m very pleased to be here, Walter.

ISAACSON: You know, the Covid vaccines that we got expose us to the wonderful molecule of Messenger RNA, mRNA. But in your new audiobook that’s coming out this week, you explain that mRNA is gonna be part of even something larger, a great revolution in biotechnology. First of all, explain to us what Messenger RNA is and what it does in our cells.

SPECTER: Well, Messenger RNA is basically the thing that ferries blueprints around the body. It sends information around the body. And it’s able – with the vaccines that we’ve all come to know – it’s able to build blueprints that tell our body how to form the antibodies that we need to protect ourselves against the virus. But it can do a lot of other things with other viruses and other substances.

ISAACSON: In other words, it basically says build a protein. And in the case of the coronavirus, it said – to protect us from it – it says, build that little spike protein, a facsimile of it gives us immunity. So as a vaccine, it kicks up our immune system. Is that about right?

SPECTER: Yeah. And it’s radically different than anything we’ve had before because we used to basically – and we still to some degree do – operate on the principle that you take a bit of whatever is ailing the people. You take that virus, a dead version or some sort of inactivated version, you shoot a little into your body, it – that activates your antibodies and that protects you. And that usually works, doesn’t always work. But this is a much – it’s quicker, it’s easier, it’s more specific, and we can alter it the same way we could alter words on a page. It’s just very facile and easy to use.

ISAACSON: So when you say we can alter it, it means that we could create any other protein for – any other virus and anything else? What? What else could we use it for?

SPECTER: Well, I mean, we are getting to the point, and a lot of this book is about the fact that – synthetic biology is getting to the point where we’re able to master some things that will allow us to think about making vaccines for some really terrible diseases. It will also make it possible for people to do things we don’t want them to do if we’re not careful because it’s getting easier. It’s like when – after World War II, a computer took up an entire room, and now the computer on my watch is more powerful than the one that sent astronauts to the moon. That’s sort of what’s happening in biology. We’re moving into a landscape of personal biology where people are gonna be able to make, assemble, print and produce cells and organisms and alter them. And that is both really exciting and also kind of scary.

ISAACSON: Well, you call the audio book that’s coming out this week, “Higher Animals.” What do you mean by that?

SPECTER: What I mean by it actually is us. I think a lot of people think of “higher animals,” it means we’re gonna create some sort of super organism. And we may be able to do that in not as long from now that you might think. But I’m really referring to humans. We are becoming higher animals in the sense that we are able to control biology in ways that we never have in 4 billion years. We’re able to make things, alter things, produce – the idea that, you know, the Covid vaccine was basically assembled in a couple days once it was downloaded from the internet. And by the way, those words ought to be profound. We downloaded the blueprints from the internet. And when you can do that, you can do a lot of things. It means biology moves at the speed of light now.

ISAACSON: One of the things I learned by listening to this audiobook last night was that it’s much bigger than vaccines.

SPECTER: Much. It’s true. I mean, we, for one thing, we can use it to make chemicals. We can grow chemicals instead of produce them. We ought to be able to use it to work with environmental species – species that are endangered. I have one chapter in the book about the black-footed ferret. That is the most endangered species in North America. And it’s endangered because it gets the plague. The plague is something we have a vaccine for, but you cannot run around the entire west of the United States vaccinating every single black-footed ferret. What you can do is you can take that vaccine and embed it into the germ cells of an individual who will then give birth to other black-footed ferrets. And those progeny will be basically born with a heritable vaccine. And people are working on that now.

ISAACSON: And you make it sound like this is a revolution that we’re suddenly entering. In fact, I think we’re suddenly entering two revolutions. One of artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, especially with ChatGPT, and then this, molecules being the new microchip where we can reprogram our body to do things. First of all, it seems strange to me that we’re in a revolution and we actually know it. I don’t think anybody woke up one day in 1760 and said, oh my God, the industrial revolution has just begun. But in the past two or three months, I thought, my God, we’re hitting two revolutions.

SPECTER: I completely agree with you on both counts. I think the reason that we see these revolutions, whereas in the past, they’ve only been really evident when we look backwards, is because things, when things move at exponential speed, it’s very difficult not to notice them. So the things that are happening with biology are moving so fast. The things that are happening with AI and biology combined are moving so fast that it’s really difficult not to notice them and notice their impact.

ISAACSON: One of the characters in your book, Kevin Esvelt, who you – I know you’ve written about when you’re writing for the New Yorker, and now I think you’re teaching with at MIT – talks about the ethical implications we’re gonna face. I know you teach a course in that. Tell me about those.

SPECTER: Well, I mean, the question is what do we wanna do with this power that we have to be able to alter the basic elemental structure of genes of humans and other animals? We need to be careful about how we use this power. You know, I don’t know of a technology in human history that we discovered and then said, nah, we’re not gonna use it. I just – I’d like to be told of one, but I haven’t heard of one. So I have to assume we’re gonna edit genes and we’re gonna edit germline genes that people can inherit, and we’re gonna edit the genes of species and we’re gonna do all sorts of other things. And we need to be really thoughtful and maybe for the first time, say, should we be doing this particular thing? Sure, it would be great to get rid of diabetes, but are we really gonna edit someone so they can be an inch and a half taller in the next generation? I mean, you know, we have to have those conversations and they’re not conversations that we’re used to having or have ever really had.

ISAACSON: Well, you talk about the gene editing revolution, and that uses something that you’ve written about extensively, which is CRISPR, a way to easily edit our genes, which also has RNA at its core. And so it has a guide RNA that edits DNA, and the messenger RNA helps us build proteins. Show me how those two things are related.

SPECTER: Well, I think of CRISPR as like maybe the most prominent tool in the synthetic biology toolbox. There are other tools coming along, and there are something called prime editing and base editing, which you’re aware of, that are kind of refined versions of the ability to change DNA around. But when you take the ability that CRISPR gives you to change DNA and you pair it with something like a gene drive, which allows a genetic predisposition to be forced through generations, you can basically change the gene pool in whatever way you want.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, let me stop. Because you – you did that on mosquito – about mosquitoes, right? Explain a concrete example of that.

SPECTER: Okay, so malaria kills millions of people. It’s one of the worst things on earth. If we could figure out a way to get rid of Anopheles mosquitoes, just those mosquitoes that are here to carry malaria, that would be a big deal. Well, researchers have figured out a way. They’ve taken genes and they’ve changed the genetic structure of those insects so that when they lay their eggs, the eggs die. They don’t continue living. So what you eventually have is a gene pool that disappears. Now, this hasn’t happened in real life yet, because as with all these technological advances, it’s really gonna be up to the people to decide whether they wanna deploy this, and there are a lot of questions. There’s a long history of humans introducing species, changing species and doing bad things. So, and who would decide? The African people, the people this affects. I mean, we can’t fly down to Mali and release 300 million genetically altered mosquitoes and say, Hey guys, congratulate us. This has to be something that they wanna do. And also, you know, mosquitoes might be, that might be something people in Mali wanna do, but mosquitoes don’t stop at the border. They don’t say, Well, Mali said okay, but Central African Republic doesn’t really think so. It’s going to have to be something that is broadly accepted by the population. And I can tell you that’s a, that’s a hard thing to get people to agree to.

ISAACSON: And what about broad acceptance of inheritable gene editing?

SPECTER: Well, that’s something we’re gonna have to face really soon. I have a feeling that if you went around to people and said, we have a way to get rid of diabetes, sickle cell, things that really are devastating and cause endless harm to people, most people would say, that would be great. Let’s get rid of that. The question then becomes, are there other consequences of that? What if we can edit a different gene to have a different result? And maybe there are IQ points involved, or height or abilities. It becomes, I hate to use the phrase a slippery slope, but if it was ever apt, it is here. It’s gonna be really difficult to decide when those powerful tools should be used and when they shouldn’t. But we’re gonna have to decide.

ISAACSON: We talked about two revolutions happening almost simultaneously. And we’re gonna look out the window and watch ’em happening. One being the synthetic biology revolution or whatever you want to call it. The other being artificial intelligence and the chatbots that have come along. How do those two intersect?

SPECTER: They intersect really powerfully. I’ll tell you why. There’s a problem in biology called protein folding. Proteins fold in really weird ways that look like balls of yarn or spaghetti. And they do this trillions of times a second. And when you’re trying to design a drug, you need to kind of interact with the three-dimensional space those proteins represent. And it has been almost impossible to figure out how proteins fold. What you’ve had to do until recently is spend about a year and $80,000 using x-ray crystallography and take endless pictures from around a protein. It’s very cumbersome, expensive and difficult. The artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which is owned by Google, decided they would try to solve this problem a couple years ago. And people thought it was kind of crazy until last year when they announced that they had solved the problem. And they have – people will quibble with the word “solve” – but DeepMind published 200 million proteins now and people are using those proteins to try and make cancer drugs, other types of drugs, other solutions to diseases. It’s a very radical AI/biology revolutionary step. And it’s – I once said to a guy, how do you know when you sent these proteins to DeepMind and they solved them, that they really solved them? And he showed me two slides and he said, we actually solved this protein, but we didn’t tell them. We spent $80,000 in a year to solve it. And he put the slides up and they were identical to the atom. To the atom. So this is an example of biology really being exciting when you compare – combined with artificial intelligence. Again, I have to say, you don’t have to have a crazy science fiction imagination to see ways where this could go wrong.

ISAACSON: Well, tell me how it could go wrong.

SPECTER: Well, I mean, if you have the power to use AI to make very complicated biological solutions to problems, you have the power to use AI to make very complicated problems that don’t easily get resolved. And –

ISAACSON: You mean new bioweapons or new ways to design humans?

SPECTER: Well, I’m mostly talking about bioweapons or just altering the structure of viruses so that they’re impermeable to the vaccines that we have now –

ISAACSON: So it would be an offense and a defense, somebody could create new vaccines. Are we gonna be able to find some – a way of fighting viruses that’ll make us be able to stop these new ones?

SPECTER: I think there are ways. I think there’s some good ways. And actually you mentioned Kevin Esvelt, he’s been working on some of them. One of them is, we should be testing the wastewater at every airport in this country, and in every major airport in the world, because if something is deadly, if it’s man-made or even just natural, it’s gonna exponentially grow.There are other solutions. I mean, we can figure out ways to, a little bit better, do a better job of regulating how we allow people to print DNA, make DNA. All of that’s free. If I wanna go print the sequence of any virus you name, I can do it. No one’s gonna stop me. It’s not illegal. It’s kind of immoral, but it’s not illegal. And in fact in the academic world, it’s encouraged.

ISAACSON: One of the themes you’ve had for 30 years of your writing has been anti-science, science denialism. And to some extent, I think as I read you, it connects into sort of a Ludditism about technology in general. Do you think we’ve gotten into a worse situation with science denialism?

SPECTER: I’m really sorry to say that I think we have. And I think part of that problem is people don’t accept authority and there are lots of reasons, some legitimate, why they wouldn’t. And there are lots of reasons, some legitimate, why they are unexcited by new technologies. But in the end, and even with the covid vaccines, there have been plenty of people who won’t get them and plenty of people who say crazy things. But 14 billion of those vaccines have gone into human arms in the last three years. So some people are perfectly willing to take something that was made synthetically in a lab and put it in their body to keep from dying.

ISAACSON: Let me read you a really cool sentence from your audio book. And I want you to expound on it a bit. You write, “Anyone who has listened to this book might have sensed some of my ambivalence about where synthetic biology could lead – could lead us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited and optimistic about our prospects, but we are edging into a world in which we’re not wholly prepared.”

SPECTER: Look, I don’t think it’s a secret that we’re not very good at solving global problems. Climate change has been going on for a while. The problem here is that things move exponentially, they move really fast. And I don’t know who’s gonna – what government body is gonna sit down and say, here’s how we regulate synthetic biology. Here’s how we combine artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, so we do wonderful things for humanity – which we definitely will do – without doing terrible things for humanity. 

ISAACSON: Okay, but let me add to one more sentence you wrote because I want you to end on a more hopeful note, which is, “And yet I’m going to bet on humanity and on the future of biology.” Why?

SPECTER: Cause I think we’re a resourceful group. I think humans are resourceful and they wanna prosper. And as I just said, with the Covid vaccines, you can say a lot about things about the reaction. But ultimately it was magical that we produced a vaccine four times faster than we ever have before. We saved millions of lives. And this was just the first swing at a whole new revolutionary technology. And I think we’ll get better. And as we get better, people will appreciate what it can do for them. And that’s why I’m optimistic. Because ultimately I think people aren’t idiots, I think they worry. So we need to figure out a way to help them not worry as much.

ISAACSON: Hey, Michael Specter, thank you so much for joining us.

SPECTER: Oh, Walter, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.