 I just am going to briefly introduce these two people who almost everyone here must know and then we'll just have a conversation. And on my left is Fr. Spokayama, who is the Oliver Nomolini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He's also a lot of other things at Stanford, and if I read them all, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. He's an incredibly accomplished political philosopher, a thinker who's written on many issues including this one very clearly, and he has a lot of provocative things to say about where we draw the line with human existence, with creating new organisms, with pushing our ability in science and who should be able to control what we do. On my right, Drew Endi is also at Stanford. He's in the Department of Biological Chemistry, Biological Engineering, because he is in fact an engineer. And he was at MIT for a long time. This is the first actual Department of Biological and Chemistry Engineering that he's been in, because he's been sort of on the edge of other things, always a little bit ahead, and now the world is almost catching up to him. And Drew is one of the big evangelists for the possibilities of synthetic biology, though I know him well enough to know that there are an endless number of caveats attached to his evangelism. So I think what I would do is just sort of start, and I'll start with a comment that Jay Kiesling, who teaches at Berkeley and is also a pioneer in this field, has said to me, and I think has said to others, we have reached the point in human history where we do not have to accept what nature has given us. We can modify it to suit our needs. Now, he has done that to some degree with Artemisinin, which is a malaria drug, which is difficult to cultivate in the wild, and he's frozen in his lab now and puts it in a vat, and you can put enough of it in one vat to serve the needs of the entire world. And that's the sort of shining example of synthetic biology. There are other issues, and this quote doesn't make everyone feel particularly comfortable. So I guess I would just start asking Frank, is that like a great thing, a scary thing? You know, we don't have to be hemmed in by nature anymore? Are we pleased? Well, all these statements that say that somehow we've hit this threshold that we can manipulate nature, and we couldn't do that before seemed to me just silly, because what's the steam engine, or what's a horse, there's lots of technologies that make us do things that allow us to move faster or communicate better that nature by itself didn't give us. You don't see this as a sort of fundamental break? I don't see it as a fundamental break, and I also suspect that a lot of the hype is not going to play out, because this has happened in technological revolutions in the past, and part of the reason that it doesn't play out is that there are always unanticipated social consequences of these advances that lead to backlash or to, you know, the modification of the way they're used, and I think that's what's going to happen in the case of these technologies. Now, having said that, obviously what people are focused on is the, you know, is the genetic technology and the ability to change, you know, to do germline engineering first in, you know, relatively simple creatures and then ultimately in human beings themselves, and that is something that's genuinely new, and I think that for people like me that have a concern about this, I mean, that's, you know, that's really the big issue. And I'll ask Drew, do you see that as the first big issue, or do we have other sort of fundamental rivers to cross before we even deal with germlines for humans? I recognize that as an issue. It's hard to anticipate that becoming practically true for the cultural and political reasons that Frank mentions quite plainly. Technically it's an interesting one to think about as we've discussed previously where if you see what's happening with the construction tools for assembling genetic material from information and a hundredfold increase in the capacity to put things together over the last six years, getting us to about a megabase of genetic material from information, if that carries forward by the end of the decade it should be apparent that we're going to be constructing hundred megabase fragments. Hundred megabase fragments is an interesting length, as I've noted elsewhere, in that it's most microorganisms but it's almost the average length of a human chromosome and it's the length of the genetic complement of a fly or a worm and so on. And we'll have no idea how to put those things together. We'll know how to do, if anything, simple recapitulations of natural sequences. So while that's technically foreseeable politically, culturally, the concerns around that in advance of that are so strong that they would almost seem to preclude public investment in the making true of those technologies. But then how do you ever get where you want to go? For instance, I'll just... Yeah, so let me come back to your question then. So I think it creates a swerve that pushes things to the mundane, which are really not mundane. So I think microbiological engineering is incredibly interesting. I think it has the potential to reroute material supply politics. The example of Artemisinin is an example of that, right? Instead of getting your chemical for treating malaria from the bark of a wormwood tree that's grown in situ in a distributed fashion, you have centralized manufacturing of that compound in a fermenter under the control of a smaller number of people. So that's a rerouting of material supply politics. The same sorts of things come up around the manufacturing of bulk fuels and other chemicals using biology. A lot of the questions that arise are ones of who controls it and where does the flow sort of get routed. If you project that forward, which seems to be something that's much more likely to be obtainable from a political and cultural perspective, meaning making microbes much easier to engineer, all sorts of interesting things become true that aren't being readily discussed. And that's where I'm starting to spend more of my time thinking about stuff. You should be capable of imagining that baker's yeast will be able to ferment most things that are now produced in plants. So if you watch the journal Nature Chemical Biology and see what they publish, you'll see that people are working on opiate biosynthesis. So it's one thing to make an anti-malarial compound in a fermenter, but what happens when you reroute material supply politics for things that are grown in New Zealand, Australia and Afghanistan? And what happens when you put that technology in a manufacturing platform that's baker's yeast, which is a reproducing machine that could be incorporated with Samsung's consumer electronic breadmaker division? And off that goes. So those sorts of hidden things, because it's not germline engineering, strike me as being much more likely, because we have examples of them already coming true for things like artemisum, and at risk of being invisible because they're not us, although they really are, the microbes, that's another thing that's coming up. Our understanding of how microbes on and inside us are us is just absolutely unbelievable. So more to say on that, but let me just leave it at that for now. Did those things make you uncomfortable, or do you feel that... I mean, how do we deal with something like the ability to bake whatever we want in a bread machine, and I said this last night at dinner? In 20 years, I could sit down in front of my laptop, probably get some sugar, get a print 3D printer, and print out the gasoline that I want to make to drive to Chicago. And that would be kind of great for all sorts of environmental and economic reasons. There are some downsides that one could envision to that ability. Where do you... who controls that? I mean, how do you even start to talk about that? I suspect I was put on this panel because I'd be the big negative person saying, no, no, no, no, you can't do that, and stop it. I'm not going to do that, because actually... Then I'm going to have to do it, and I really don't want to be put in that. So let me just continue. So basically as a part of material science, or new kind of gasoline, or dealing with carbon capture, there's lots and lots of things where this is very promising. I've never really had a problem with agricultural biotechnology, the way a lot of Europeans have, because it just seems to me it's a pretty straightforward safety and efficacy issue, and I've just never seen any convincing evidence that this stuff is really... That's because there is none. Yeah. There just isn't evidence that this stuff is dangerous. I would think that in certain... when you get up to multicellular organisms, you're starting to deal with systems of a sufficient complexity, that you could have all sorts of funny feedback mechanisms, environmental ones that you're not anticipating, when you first introduce the organism into a different environment. But that's the kind of thing that we do all the time. We're constantly zebra mussels and so forth. That's not as if that's something new. So yeah, so that stuff I think is really not of ethical concern. The other thing is in terms of what I think about is how you regulate this stuff. And I think that in this sphere it's actually a pretty easy issue, because you're really dealing with the same set of issues as in prior biomedical regulation, which is efficacy and safety. We have an existing framework for doing that. We regulate this stuff extensively. But the more important thing is there's a big social consensus that we don't want someone creating a microbe that's going to get out of the lab and do dangerous things. Is there a personal element to this that there isn't now with medicine and other efficacy-related issues? Part of the excitement and the tingling and fear also, I think, is that the garage technology world where you go into a garage and start Apple or Google, you now can start these sorts of, you know, Rob Carlson, who you guys know, many people know, he has spoken and written often about garage biology and even became a garage biologist to see how far it could take him. It can take you pretty far these days. And that is a regulatory framework that doesn't really exist very well right now. And I'm not sure how to make it exist. Yeah. Well, I mean, Drew would have to answer, you know, the question of how, you know, what your high school, 17-year-old high school kid is really going to be capable of. Actually, Drew could answer that, I think, because of iGem. The question is what to make of the Garajistas? The Garajistas. And what can a smart kid do with a few pieces of DNA and some sugar? I think the successes, they get branded in the press as a do-it-yourself success. But if you unpack what the successes actually are, I think they're a do-it-together success. You know, some of the best examples would come out of iGem. This is the International Genetically-Engineered Machines Competition, a genetic engineering Olympiad, if you will, for college students. And so, for example, if a team of students at a university, Cambridge University in 2009, for example, re-engineers seven strains of a bacteria to produce pigments, like a Crayola box of colors, that's a biosynthesis project that costs about $25,000 U.S. It's competitive to a first order with what previously was a $25 million R&D project to make one chemical like artemisinin. And they're able to begin to do that because they can get access to the genetic componentry for about half of the stuff they need for free from a community collection, so an open technology platform. They are getting practically free access to DNA synthesis, so an ability to synthesize going from information to genetic material, the remainder of the stuff they need. So matter compilers for genetic material are useful. And then they get from a company a strain of an organism that already makes a lot of the precursors. So you put all those three things together, and they're able to do, in three months, as a collection of a half-dozen teenager, something that I could not do as a PhD student or as a professor running a lab at MIT. But that's just sort of the nature of scientific research. So does that map beyond institutional boundaries? Or does that trigger issues and concerns? Yes. Is it like somebody starting a personal computing company in Menlo Park, circa 1970 something? No. And there's one reason for that, basically. When Apple and other things like it got started in the garages and Hewlett Packard before that and so on, there was an infrastructure in place around that physical substrate that reflected public investments for different purposes that provided tools that were relatively sophisticated. So for example, Apple Computer gets started in a world where Texas Instruments has made the transistor-transistor logic data book of a form, at least. We don't have that infrastructure for engineering in place for biotech. What we do have in spades, and I think this is just an overabundance of something that complement the lack of technology is enthusiasm. People, if you think of the... I'm an amateur around this, but if you think of the sociology around the personal computers coming to life, if you will, people appear to be fed up with limited access to computing. It's so exciting. Let's go make our own computers. Biology is a more exciting and compelling technology platform for reasons that should be obvious. It's already taken over the planet, so you don't have to worry about the gray goo. We have green goo, as George White's side would say. We are of biology, so we know it matters to us. You can kind of naively imagine thinking of it as programmable via genetic material. It's a nanotechnology that works, you know, and so on. It just goes on and on. So as a thing that is compelling to people who want to make, you just simply can't do better than biology as a manufacturing platform right now. So whether or not that will counterbalance the lack of tools and by counterbalance, I mean you actually have to sustain enthusiasm within a community so that you can bootstrap the tools, you know, remains to be seen. So you both seem enthusiastic about what's going on now and feel it's of a scale and a nature that isn't challenging in a way that we should be concerned about. But I know that you both have concerns about down the road and the Bioethics Commission report I thought was pretty fair. It basically said keep going but let's watch what we're doing, which seems to be what you're saying. When do we start leaping into action? What is the thing that should make us worried about when someone does what or when a company does what or when we reach a certain scientific threshold? And then how do we respond to that? Because one of the big fears I have or just worry about is reining in scientific research doesn't ever seem to work very well. I think there are many things to be concerned about now. I don't think it's some arbitrary point in the future and I'll open up a different dimension of concern. Consider the anthrax attack of 2001 of order 24 casualties via biology, so intentional misapplication of biology to cause harm. Were we prepared for that event? How have we responded to that event? We being, let's just call it the United States as one grouping of people. Well, the consequences of that perturbation to our culture and political structure include the following. You see an order of magnitude increase in the Civilian Biodefense budget. Pretty interesting. That's a significant Delta base 10 increase. So we're now about six billion Civilian Biodefense. One of the artifacts of these programs include a very impressive facility called NBAC, which is a BL-4 laboratory for forensics and analysis at Fort Detrick. Maybe people here don't know what BL-4 is. Well, BL-4 is biosafety level four facility, a facility capable of safely within the margins handling things that are, you know, don't have cures for and might kill you. So my laboratory at Stanford will be BL-1. There's four safety levels, one, two, three, four. In a BL-1 facility we're doing recombinant engineering of E. coli, non-pathogenic strains of E. coli, believed to be safe with a human generation of experience doing this work to support that to a degree. So BL-4 is the highest biosafety level we have from a governance perspective. It's a very impressive facility at Fort Detrick, which to note is the site, one of the sites of the offensive biological weapons program the United States ran from mid to early 20th century through the Nixon administration. So as a consequence of order two dozen casualties in 2001 we see an order of magnitude increase in our civilian by defense budget and a partially classified BL-4 facility for doing forensics and analysis at the site of the past offensive weapons program. The big improvement, there are many, but one of the big improvements in this facility is architectural. There are windows. So I was privileged to walk the facility before there was any biologics in it and so that means you didn't have to wear the suits and you could just go from room to room as well intentioned people, well designed. There were windows. So you could see into the inner laboratories. You weren't working. If you were working in there you're no longer isolated. You could also see out of the building and when you look out of the building what you can see is the past laboratory of the person who was accused of having initiated the anthrax attack. So at a very simplistic level this looks like a political autoimmune response. What happens now when I travel overseas and talk to other nation states around security concerns having to do with biotechnology? At minimum the reasonable posture has to do with the following. The United States is freaked out about biosecurity. Maybe we should be. The United States is building semi-classified BL-4 laboratories. Maybe we should do that. That's the best case rational response scenario. The worst case scenario is you cannot provide assurances that this is a responsive reactive defensive facility. So one of the concerns I have right now is we're so ill-prepared politically and culturally to accept casualties from biology that our overreaction could ironically lead to an increasing chance to remilitarize biotechnology which would at a nation state level be a mistake of the highest order. So I have a concern, right? It's a real concern today. It's quite a puzzle. How do I work through that? But isn't that a sort of basic human or at least American concern that's broader than that? If a new drug that is useful to millions of people kills 11 people that drug that's yanked off the market. So we have built into ourselves this need for absolute perfection in biological systems. And there is no perfection. I want to get this to Frank, right? So let me try and go meta on this for a second. We like to celebrate and defend and strengthen representative liberal democracies. The living world is not instantiated on that basis. So when things happen like a significant fraction of Europe dies due to a plague centuries ago that still resonates within us. From a human biology perspective it created some genetic selections but really humans are still doing pretty good, right? But from a cultural political perspective quite a perturbation. So I suspect there's this underlying mismatch between the expectations of a representative liberal democracy that wants to protect the rights of individuals against tyranny of the majority and other things and the reality of biology. And I've struggled to figure out how to connect those. Yeah, I mean I'm not sure that we've done that bad a job in setting these regulatory boundaries because there's back and forth debate over, and actually I guess in, I forget if it was Dan Sarowitz or someone yesterday was talking about the case of HIV AIDS where the FDA was really restrictive and then as a result of other lobbying groups they basically are standards for permitting new antiretrovirals to come to market. I'm not sure that, you know, at this big meta level, yeah, I mean if you're looking like perspective that says, well, you know, out 30% of the human race is nature's adjustment mechanism because there's too many organisms, human organisms but that's fine, we'll just move from that. I think that, you know, that's not the right level to think about it. I feel a little bit trained by this synthetic biology naming of this topic because I do think that there are other areas of biomedicine when you get a lot of innovation and things done where I think right at this very moment you need a much stronger regulatory framework that you don't take. Well, for example, the whole field assisted reproductive technologies, AREs, it's completely unregulated, it's a piece of medicine where the, you know, basically it's the clinicians that we set their own standards and that is where most innovation is going to take that worries me. I mean, that is actual manipulation. The germline manipulation is going to start there oddly, you know, you work with stem cells, aligns of things and we, you know, in this kind of amazing way because so deadlocked politically over the legacy of, or the moral status of embryos we have not been able to, you know, get to a political point where we can actually have a reasonable way of saying, you know, this is a good and useful thing but it needs to observe certain kinds of limits. But those are more immediate concerns but I don't think they're going to be any different than what we'll face with synthetic biology should it progress in the way that I think we expect it to because there are going to be moral issues and the question for me is how do you regulate, legislate, decide? I mean, do you vote on them? That doesn't always work out so well. Well, look, we do this in a lot of different areas, right? In the area, okay, so I have actually thought a lot about how you regulate ARTs, for example. There's one political obstacle that we have to just put aside which is the fundamental disagreement over the status of the embryo because that's not a regulatory issue. That's a political one. But what happens is that Congress is sovereign. You know, Congress gets to decide who makes the rules. It delegates a rule-making framework to a regulatory agency that then is usually based on the epistemic community that does the science, right? So you want it to be mostly scientists but it also includes other people that can bring in other non-scientific kinds of concerns into that decision-making process. And, you know, that's, and we have a lot of actual examples of that. The human fertilization and embryology authority that the British set up already, it's now almost 20 years since this organization has been going, is, you know, based in science. It wants to promote stem cell research but it also takes in input, democratic input, from other stakeholders who are not scientists who have, you know, other concerns with this kind of research. Yeah, I agree. I actually now with, I retract my permission for you to talk about these things. Just a little joke. Because what I do wonder about, and again I just want to draw it back to synthetic biology, simply because maybe the moral issues will be different. I'm pretty sure they will be different. I'm not sure how I would define them and I'm not sure, you know, how blue America, red America, whatever. I don't know how it will break out. There will be moral issues over whether we can create, you know, new critters. But I'm not sure who's going to go for what and I just wonder in the context of those kind of difficult decisions, you know, we have this world where science moves really fast. The guys who work on Capitol Hill don't move really fast. But we don't really, at least I don't think scientists should be getting to decide everything they do anymore because that's where the dragons be. On the other hand, I really don't want the House of Representatives to decide what we do anymore. And I know I don't personally get to make this decision. But again, that's why you set up a regulatory institution, right? You give a broad grant of authority and the regulatory institution is staffed by people that come out of that epistemic community. But which one is flexible enough, fast enough, and responsive enough? Okay, well that's an important, so this is a really interesting issue. I think you probably need a new regulator because I'll give you this following example. The Commerce Commission was created in the 19th century to regulate railroads. When trucking became an issue, a technologically possible thing, the ICC took over the regulation of trucking. And most regulatory experts say that was a big mistake because economics of railroads is completely different from trucking. When airplanes came along, you could have given it to the ICC as well, but because of that prior experience, they said we'll create a new regulator because it's a completely different economics, different technology, different, you know, a group of experts. And I think when you get a fundamentally new technology, it's going to call for not just an expansion of the mandate of some of the existing regulators, but it's going to call for a very specialized institution. There's another problem because Drew was just saying that he was recently in Shenzhen where the Beijing Genomics Institute is basically churning out, you know, work at blinding speed. And so let's say we have a new regulatory body. Let's say it's even a sophisticated and successful one. Other countries aren't going to have that regulatory body. Let me jump in and use the example of genetic engineering mapping to real practice to try and illuminate aspects of this issue. So I'm a would-be genetic engineer operating in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I propose in my laboratory at MIT to do some genetic engineering work. What is the regulatory framework that comes into place? Well, I have to ask permission. I ask permission of the CAB, the Committee for the Assessment of Biohazards. This comes from political decision-making in the 1970s where the Cambridge City Council outlawed genetic engineering in the city of Cambridge. And so an institution, a company or a research university has to review any genetic engineering work internally. The CAB at MIT has to include, I think, two members of the public in reviewing the work happening in the laboratories at MIT. And so I'll propose something. I'll think about it ahead of time. So the burden is on me initially to think about what I'm doing and to anticipate how this CAB is going to react. They might approve it, they might deny it. For the sort of work I do, they typically approve it. Now let's move to a future where it's not Shenzhen just yet. It's the school bus. And instead of working with cutting and pasting of enzymes and ligases and PCR, the tools of the first generation of biotechnology, I'm going to work with DNA printers, with DNA synthesizers. And on my phone, I've got the Biobrick Studio Mobile, right, which is a genetic engineering CAD tool that I can run on my phone or my iPad or whatever. And as a teenager, I'm reprogramming microbes that have to do with my epidermal ecosystem because I want to smell differently. And I'm doing this on top of some technology platforms that allow me to do rapid prototyping. The thing may or may not work. It's going to be a real experiment when I compile it down and try and see if it operates. But this is something that's in the immediate now, right? Those software tools work. The component libraries are beginning to exist. The compile tools exist. So then how do we adapt, extend or complement a biosafety review framework in a world where it's extra institutional to get back to what you were saying? But it's happening on a scale and with a pacing that doesn't allow for top-down governance. The sorts of lessons we've come up with so far in limited experience is basically to amplify the lessons of 35 years ago, which is to push responsibility out to the nodes and to individuals and try and strengthen that. Not that that should be satisfying, but that it's a first move and it needs to be complemented by other moves. So what do we mean by that? Well, if people are working with genetically encoded objects, the workers of those objects, the makers of those objects can note on them what they think about their safety implications or ramifications. Sometimes they'll know. Sometimes they won't. It's imperfect. You can create a culture of people. So with the iGEM community, these teenagers working in genetic engineering, this is, you know, of order 2,000 students a year now around the world, they weren't alive when a Silamar and recombinant DNA biosafety was worked out. They know nothing about that. And they're not microbiologists oftentimes. So how do we pass the baton so they lead biosafety for the next generation of would-be biotechnologists? We ask them questions and we ask them to ask themselves questions and we promulgate that in the judging requirements of a student competition, globally faster than any official government or multi-government body could do. Again, not sufficient but better than nothing. So that's the sort of stuff that's at play right now. Will there be accidents? Yep, more accidents. That's why I come back and become interested in sort of cultural and political preparedness and making sure... Is that going to be a three-mile island? And by that I don't necessarily mean the actual impact of the physical accident. And I mean the impact emotionally. Because, you know, if 14 people die in a biobrick hazard accident, your industry is going down the tubes. Maybe, maybe not. I think those scenarios are interesting ones. So, let me just articulate two or three scenarios. Somebody uses de novo synthesis of DNA to make a hemorrhagic fever and kills themselves and the 20 people around them. What's the ramification of that? Somebody takes a biobrick part, over-expresses the toxin and goes to the salad bar. And people fall ill from that. And something else, right? Does that take out biotechnology as an industry? No. No. Does it put various systems at risk of different types of responses? Absolutely. What do we do now if anything to prepare for that? Well, at least we're talking about it. But where do we go? Just on this question. First of all, I agree completely with Drew that, you know, one of the major responses has got to be kind of the socialization of people that work in this field. It can't be just top-down regulatory, you know, things of that sort. I think that the accident scenario is a useful one to think about because you said, well, what about Shenzhen and people doing this abroad? If you look at other areas of regulation, you know, stock market regulation and safety or other things, there's no international race to the bottom. I mean, Americans are not rushing to Thailand to get some sleazy drug that the FDA hasn't approved just because someone's cut corners to make it there. In fact, there's kind of a race to the top. I mean, people want to stick with the best-regulated system. And so I think what's very likely to happen is the big accident actually may not happen in Cambridge or in Palo Alto. It'll happen in Shenzhen and, you know, a lot of Chinese will die. And then a lot of people around the world will say, wow, look at this, you know, this is what happens when you do this without the adequate framework to, you know, to look at safety issues and so forth. And that will actually increase the domestic pressure that, you know, something like this be done. I think it depends what the big accident entails. If it's an accident-accident, yeah. If it's somebody trying to make something then I think there will be a problem. And, you know, again, I'm not someone who believes, you know, in all human history there are very few examples of people doing harm in this way. So it's not like I think that's inevitable. But it's certainly possible and it's, I think, crazy to go forward with something so transformational and not figure out some response. And I'm not sure people rationally think about the response because most people don't even get this far with their thoughts. They just wait until the product is there. And I think that is one of our biggest problems. I don't know how you counter that, but the educational level, the level of sophistication about this sort of science or any science in our country is, I think it's fair to use the word pathetic. I mean, and it's really deleterious to our nation. I don't think this stuff is going to happen successfully if we don't get a country that can understand its implications The most exciting project I've been peripherally associated with over the last year is called synthetic aesthetics. And it has to do with bringing together researchers from synthetic biology laboratories with creative designers and artists and setting them up in residencies and elsewhere, all over the world. And most of them are just kind of interesting, but one of them, one of the most residencies has really struck me. It's a woman from Berlin who works on scents and fragrances and a microbiologist from Harvard, another woman. So they spend a month at Harvard, a month in Berlin, and what comes of this? Well, the person who's an artist with smell and odorance shows up and asks what's exciting in microbiology, and the microbiologist relates, hey, we're studying the microbes that live on the human skin. The community that lives on the front of your knee is different from the back of your knee, but it's like the right knee cap, and isn't that neat? What's interesting to you? Cheese, says the woman from Berlin, and so they go off to the cheese shop next to Harvard Square. They get a special tour and they see the aging cave and they bring a rack of test tubes and they start taking core samples of the stinkiest cheeses and bringing them back into the laboratory and they start learning about the process of artisanal cheese making and the manual working of the material and hey, wait a minute, they're microbes that live on us, there's microbes in the cultures that make the cheese. What's the relationship between those two? Ideas or facts, and the next immediate thing they're doing within a week is they're taking samples of microorganisms from all the folks they can find at Harvard and then they go to a farm and get raw milk and they start making cheese. Within two weeks of this they now have a platter of about 36 or 48 cheeses they've made. Human micro-cheeses? Yeah, so Daisy's armpit cheese, the cheese from the bacteria that live on the Tova philosopher and so on. They were not available for consumption but you could smell them and Daisy's armpit cheese was beautiful. It was a flowery bouquet, citrusy, really quite lovely and the philosopher's Toche's was the wrongest that's not the right word, but the wrongest smell I've ever experienced. So I didn't know what to make of this other than just sort of be overwhelmed but given a moment to parse it you begin to think about things like instead of your mother telling you you are what you eat you eat what you are so we live, we've been decoupled from physical experience with biology and this is a reconnection by synthesizing things not at the molecular level but at the microbiological level. Had dinner that night trying to explain this with somebody who is a fund manager at Fidelity and he immediately picked up on this by jumping to the idea of celebrity cheese. So you could have I see a reality cheese TV show coming where you have Lady Gaga goat cheese right? Obama cheese and you could have the holiest of cheese is where this ended up made from a relic called leading to cheeses so so that's some of this is outrageously funny and just interesting but it leads me to be hopeful that if we engage with biology more and a lot of times when I haven't had a lot of opportunities to share this story it's so new people just sort of going I need to think about that especially people who don't do anything with technology or biology or anything like that because normally when I have any conversation with synthetic biology that's a horrible name or you use the word DNA and the eyes just glaze I can't understand it it's chemistry but there's an opera we are of biology and we can use our capacity to make with biology to reengage and that leads me to be hopeful around many things if we can figure out how to frame it actually the Artemisem example is like that in that if people get anxious about synthetic biology and you sort of explain that there's this drug that's essential that it can be made in a controlled sophisticated clear way that it's hard to make in other ways people and that it can be cheap and that the patent has been given so that it will be free with notice to exceptions like displacement of other sources of manufacturing and livelihoods and so on there are 10,000 people who will lose their jobs in Africa and Asia as a result of a drug that could save the lives of 1.7 million people a year or so you do the math but the truth is that is something that people can sort of latch on to whereas the idea of creating new types of organisms isn't an idea people feel excited about let's jump back to that so what do you do with the electrical engineering professor at MIT who wants a tail a tail a tail? like his own personal tail does he have tenure? yes that's a problem and the reason the fashion selection for this remember electrical engineer the great frustration of trying to solder wires together wouldn't it be great if you had a third thing that could hold the iron wow so full on regenerative medicine that actually worked would make things like that true a tail for soldering do we really worry about that at this in the year 2011 because that's how we're built if you're asking should we really worry about it that's a different question well okay an actual counterpart to that is sports doping why is it that people don't like athletes taking steroids exactly like your tail why not compete on the basis of who's got the best pharmacologist rather than who's the best natural baseball player but I do think that there's if you think about that there is a feeling that people have that nature made us a certain way and we shouldn't play with that and that you're going to compete it really ought to be on those natural characteristics but I think with the competition thing it's just that it's sort of like if I'm doing really well and I'm going as fast as I can and I'm going 60 miles an hour if the guy using EPO is going 90 miles an hour and I'm observing the speed limit it doesn't matter if the playing field was level I'd say let everyone use what they want obviously you want a level playing field but why doesn't the equilibrium rest out at everybody should do steroids and let's just compete on steroids and people don't like that people are really uncomfortable with that I kind of think through why it is that we're uncomfortable with a world where all of our biggest athletes you could grow a picture if you had a cyborg arm you could pitch a 200 mile an hour pitch and why not that Is everything in humanity to do with competition is an interesting question I'm just sort of wrestling with from the framing yes, that we think about bike races and that's a form of competition but so is everything else and in that context senses of normality and fairness are very powerful arguments but if there's a more open-ended generative constructive creative element of humanity where it's not only about competition or it might not be about competition at all then that opens up different modes of celebration so if I come from the clan of opposable thumbs making more opposable thumbs could be a good thing but if that gets framed in an unfair competition setting oh my gosh, I couldn't text message as fast as that guy with four thumbs I don't know this conversation is getting way too interesting and I want to bring it back to the dull regulatory framework with which I was enticed to come here but I'm just actually sort of interested if you could foresee a regulatory framework that would encourage rapid science, rapid change flexibility, evolution and also control the things we're worried about is that even theoretically possible and you're positing we don't have that today oh, we totally don't have that today really? are you putting me on the spot yet? my whole life I've inherited matter compilers for genetic material that chemistry did not exist when I was born I'm not saying that the bulk of the actions of humans are within boundaries that we find acceptable it's just that I'm not sure the regulatory framework is the thing that keeps those actions within boundaries by regulatory framework are you only including things that are laws on the books ordinances I guess what I'm concerned with yeah, I guess what I'm thinking about are the things that would prevent someone from pushing something to an outer edge because it's against the law or they need approval or they need a vote or that sort of thing yeah, so yeah, laws and ordinances internal combustion decisions so in that framing my immediate response would be to do this you can't look only to laws and ordinances you have to look to social norms, human constructs groupings of people relationships of networks I think one of the I was having this conversation and a gentleman claimed that modes of human political organization have been exhausted and that we were returning we were on a path to return to the city state as the dominant mode of meaningful organization of people and that struck me as being very interesting but I was struggling to figure out how to map that into the world where as we've heard not fully anticipated and ramifications still working out people are connected in different ways via TCP IP so we can have new entire modes of political and cultural and social organization that can create soft and hard laws I agree with you I think the point of this conversation is is this a field where we're going to go to a point where the modes of normal social communication and interaction become frayed where we go to a point where we don't feel comfortable anymore and I think some people maybe you're one think the answer is yes well yeah but I guess the burden is on you to explain to me why this field is so different from other areas of technology development that it will not be susceptible ultimately to creation of an institution that tries to trade off all these social goods about permitting legitimate development putting certain bounds I don't argue that it won't be susceptible I just think it probably needs some new sort of framework and I'm wondering what that framework would be is it just a new group of people are they some industry people some research people religious people anything that humans do ought to be susceptible to human governance I just don't think that the governance structures that exist today are probably the ones we'll want look I think that there's actually a lot of room for creativity in the design of regulatory institutions because the existing framework that we have this gets very boring and only the lawyers in the room are going to be interested in this part of it but you know a lot of our existing regulation comes out of this 146th administrative practices act all the notice and comment it actually allows the loudest most organized lobbies in the room to set the boundaries on what's permissible and what's not and what it doesn't permit is democratic more grassroots participation so again I know this wanders off the field of synthetic biology but just in the whole you know embryo business you've got the scientific community that wants to charge ahead and the anti-abortion people that want to prevent it and it turns out that about 70% of the American people would actually like to use excess embryos to you know to do stem cell research but you can't get to that coalescence of that 70% behind a reasonable policy because the regulatory framework does not permit them to express their views in a way that you know makes that politically possible so yes I think that at that level there's lots of stuff that we can do to think through how you get democratic input so it's you know obviously you delegate a lot to the scientists and to the research community but there have to be other voices there are ways of doing this and I think yes we need to rethink that in a big way I want to let people ask questions but before they do I want to give each of you guys a chance if there's anything else magnificent you want to say otherwise you can just respond to questions I've been thinking about this in terms also of the concerns that we've had as a nation over the last 40 years about nuclear security and in the last 10 years about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the whole concern we had about the AQ Kwan network and the dissemination of this information, this technology which is a magnitude of order larger to get your hands on it's more expensive it's more difficult to put together and yet there's been legitimate and genuine concern that people would use this against us in a negative way with synthetic biology it seems as we've been hearing it's getting easier and easier for people who have who may have been brought up in a different way don't have the same socialization have different agendas to use this technology so that the concern is not my end question my end point is that the concern is not what happens how do we control an accidental release but more what sort of things can we put in place what sort of regulations are there what sort of security things are there for a intentional intentional release I would ask that the questions be questions so I guess my question is I guess my question is is there a way is there a regulatory framework is there a security framework that we could out there or do we need to start thinking about a security framework to protect against intentional intentional release of these as a weapon well I mean first of all your nuclear example is a good one if you read the literature after Hiroshima written in the late 40s people were predicting that nuclear weapons would proliferate to 30 countries within the next generation that they'd be routinely used in war and we've managed to slow this down so there's no perfect framework that does this and nuclear weapons are a lot easier to control than synthetic biology but it's possible to do I suspect there's actually a framework in place already in terms of the biosafety stuff so yes I mean there are things you can do quick compliment to that safety and security in the English language are different words safety gets framed as a safety belt in your car security is a door lock right where you can't rely on the intentions of third parties biology proliferates itself right we now map biology in terms of genetics onto information via sequences and that proliferates in a totally different scalable fashion so containment is not an order magnitude different and antiproliferation is not an order of magnitude different than nuclear and biology is totally different there's a lot of moves in biosecurity and there's an industrialization of biosecurity but I would not say that as a nation state we or anybody else has a coherent strategy for biosecurity and I would certainly welcome a lot more public discussion of that my name is Lien Chao Khan I'm a student I was a student of Dr. Fukuyama and Dr. Cash who spoke yesterday and I am also a member of the DIY bio community and I think I have a quick comment and a quick question I think the post post human arrow will be here sooner or later regardless of government regulation because the rabbit democratization of knowledge and technology will enable individuals to do stuff to themselves and by themselves and just two example I think one like in China all of the nature journals and science all these journals are free for everybody the entire country can read that there are no articles for free if it's break through articles they have a team rapidly translate into Chinese and in Germany this girl cut herself up and put implant so many chips and I guess it's most likely it's going to start from gene therapy and then human enhancement and we eventually we will cross the species at some point so my question is assuming this is going to happen can we preserve humanity in this arrow if we can how if we cannot why not thank you whoa I need to lie down can we get back to in 30 years okay we have five minutes worth of impossible to answer questions left it's the next questions coming in I mean I guess parameters around what you're discussing have to do with are these possible changes going to be fashion I don't mean that in a pejorative sense are they going to be competitive are they going to be promulgating you know I suspect that many of the things that are likely to occur in you know various visions are more of the category of fashion that they're not going to lead to segregation and speciation culturally that could happen but it's a different conversation yeah I mean I just in response to that I just think that it would be relatively simple to make laws that will make enhancement much more costly than therapeutic uses of any of these technologies so you're not going to ever prevent it from happening you know it'll continue but I think that you can shape you know the way that people spend limited resources on these new technologies and you know and push them in more socially useful ways than growing tails or you know whatever maybe that is useful you're pretty inventive no you're right maybe we have time for a couple more questions oh go ahead you have the microphone I wanted to ask both of you gentlemen but I think Dr. Fukuyama might have an interest in one of these questions and probably the gentleman who has just asked this rather far-reaching question I was going to ask the question is there in your opinion a human clone out there amongst us already I think about the boys from Brazil Dr. Mengele the escaped surgeon from Nazi Germany that was my first question yes or no do you think he's there the second question is on steroids which Dr. Fukuyama mentioned about enhancing the competitive edge but also the damage to the human anatomy as it is currently understood to be frail and finite if tampered with I know or knew a young tremendously talented agile and very muscular athlete he was a wrestler from Canada I was introduced to him in Florida he became quite well known in circles that watch pro wrestling but he was also now famous for what happened because of the overuse of steroids and that was Chris Benoit who killed his wife and child and then hung himself in the basement we only have a couple minutes so I'd like I really doubt that there's a clone living among us because I think if you tried to do the experiment and you'd know about it good answer now the other statement about steroids well they're bad if you take them too much go ahead I think we have time for that and one other question and then we're being shooed my name is Anne McQueen-Robbins I'm wondering if there's room in this conversation for discussion about organizing principles and values and it seems to me that in a democracy we are we do work on organizing principles and particularly the intersection with laws have to do with rights and I know if I'm the only one that's a little concerned that there's no conversation about whether or not we have the right to create these microbes, create and kill them or whatever we're doing without being foolish about that but I'm wondering how that can be projected into this conversation and into the regulatory process don't look at me yeah that's a really tough one because we create new organisms all the time I mean by crossbreeding and so forth and so we've already crossed a lot of those lines hundreds of years ago I'm not sure what we wouldn't have the right to do and I also, I personally feel very uncomfortable with the discussion of rights the shrine in Kyoto to bacteria is interesting it's a shrine to bacteria thanking them for their contributions to our civilization and the students of the University of Kyoto took me there to see it, they were very proud of it that they had this artifact and the celebration of that so that's as close as I've come directly to what you're representing I've not had any conversations with a representative from the people for the ethical treatment of bacteria and I say that seriously not to make light so I would agree that we've crossed if there was a threshold here this sort of thing quite a while ago so a thousand years from now could I imagine a framing where if you take the selfish gene premise that face value functional genetic information has some sort of representational right in the universe perhaps I don't have that to work with right now it's interesting one more question that person with the aching arm up there and then that's probably going to be it because people keep waving at me to stop hi thanks for taking my question David viewers we've talked a lot in this conference about augmentation and enhancement using both synthetic biology and digital technology to enhance human beings what about the other end of that what about using we also talked about DNA as binary code what about using synthetic biology and the information and the complexity of biology to enhance machines and computers or bio implants or bio functionalities within computing systems sure you know I think biology is still so undeveloped as a technology relative to other modes of technology other physical substrates we're more capable with that much of the immediate future work is going to be to bring more into biology so for example if you think about computation it's unlikely that computers based out of biology itself are going to be competitive on a computational power basis with dope silicon right however bringing a little bit of computation into living systems would be absolutely mind blowing so if you had the equivalent of 8-bit information storage array that you could put inside every living cell like a USB memory stick but instead of a gigabyte it's only 8 bits right that would be totally transformative to the study of developmental biology to the control of developmental biology you could implement things like counters that could count how many time cells divide an 8-bit counter would let you count to 2 the 8th 256 so you're not going to be competing with your anything based on silicon but you're going to be bringing other types of technologies instantiated in the stuff of life if you will into places where there is no equivalent and that's important so that's where I see most of the action last word for the gentleman whose insights are endlessly useful to all of us and this has been a great experience for me and I hope to meet you