 I'm Robert Wright. I'm a fellow at the New America Foundation. And thanks, Andrew, for that great presentation. I think you drove home at least a couple of points. One is that DNA is digital information no less than computer code and is in principle as infinitely manipulable as computer code. And the other is that there's no reason to believe that we will not see a kind of accelerating rate of change in the field of synthetic biology just as we have in computer science. Hello, George. Can you hear me? I'm not sure everyone is as upbeat about that as Andrew sounded. And one thing we'll be looking at today is whether we should be. In fact, the title of this panel is Pros and Serals of Synthetic Biology Today. And I've got several people very well qualified to talk about it. OK, they're going to come to you in a little bit. Is at Arizona State University, but is actually based here in Washington because he's a policy guy and has some very interesting ideas about the relationship of policy to science and technology, as we'll be hearing. And you are the associate director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Society. If we had time, I'd get into a kind of a Jesuitical question about the exact difference between nanotechnology and synthetic bio and which is a subset of the other. But we don't. You're also the co-director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes. Robert Sawyer is a science fiction writer. Now, I understand there are three major awards you can win as a science fiction writer for best novel, and you have won all three. Is that true? Hugo Nebula, John W. Campbell Memorial. And only seven people in the history of the universe have won all three. Is that right? There's not one eighth, but yes. Oh, eight, OK. And that's this universe we should specify when I'm talking to a science fiction writer. But that's still. And only one in Canada. That's true. That's me. I'm a Canadian. I have no choice but to call you the dean of Canadian science fiction writer. Globe and Mail says that. OK. OK. Now finally, I was going to say that we are very lucky to have a truly seminal figure in the field of synthetic biology with this George Church. But he weather prevented him from flying in here and notwithstanding the rapid progress in synthetic biology, we were unable to reconstruct an organic version of George Church on such short notice, maybe if we'd had a week. So we're left with an audio-visual manifestation. But I think for these purposes, that's really the main thing we need. He's at Harvard Medical School, a professor of genetics and the director of the Center for Computational Genetics. And he wrote the first automated DNA sequencing software ever, and I think was ahead of everyone else by years on that. And also, along with Walter Gilbert, did the first direct genomic sequencing method. So far and away, he has the most hands-on experience in synthetic biology. So George, I thought we'd start with you and ask you to give us a sense for what we can realistically expect. I mean, the good things you hear about are new kinds of fuels that are clean or little microorganisms that take the unclean things out of the air, new ways to cure disease and so on. On the bad side, you hear about bioterrorism and so on. Maybe you could let us know in either category or both what kinds of things we can expect that we don't have now five, 10, maybe 15 years down the road, whatever you're comfortable with. Or I could raise questions about whether my audio is making it to Boston at the very end. He didn't laugh at your jokes earlier. So either there's no audio or he's a very doer man. Either means I should quit making jokes or I should start raising questions about the... OK, thank you. It takes a long time for us to get to Boston. Boston's a long way from here. Yeah. So I could hear you fine. Thanks for adding some drama to the moment. OK. OK, I'll just launch into your question about five, 10, 20 years from now. So to really think concretely here, we have to consider the fact that costs can drop. They can drop by as much as a million fold in six years. In the case of reading and writing DNA a little bit more slowly for the computer industry that Andrew Heslals has told us about. And so in principle, all food, drugs, fuel, materials, phones could be as little as half a dollar per kilogram because that's how much that biological systems currently can produce very complicated structures for. We have the dragons of no technology. That is to say, if we don't do anything or if we go back even a few decades, we can't support the number of people that are currently on the planet, maybe a three billion fold. So we're talking about technology. It's not just synthetic biology. It's all integrated synthetic biology with all the other technologies. And this is basic access to clean water, food, roads, and education. And this may not sound super high-tech, but we predict that in the next 10 years, synthetic biology will continue to integrate with these better and better. And when we go forward, we don't want to just, we don't want to talk about just what we don't want, but what we do want, humane cities, predictable agriculture, affordable personal health. Right now, agriculture is without technology, would be cycles of drought and famine. And with it, we can reduce that. So as we move from about 3% of us to 80% of us living in cities, the family structure changes from a rural average about 7.5 children to about 1.2 children per family in cities. So for sustainability, we have synthetic biology on cyanobacteria, which can turn carbon dioxide into food, building materials, and clean energy and clean chemicals that can do this possibly at 10-fold higher per square kilometer. And in lands that are marginal agricultural, but they're not useful agriculturally, possibly preventing the spread of deserts. This is not that far in the future in that we already have companies like Juul Unlimited, which is making such carbon dioxide into green chemistry. We may see less travel, like we're seeing today, less consumption of meat, which is about as much as 15 times more costly than directly than vegetable matter and cyanobacteria conceivably even less costly. So I think we're seeing more safety and surveillance in our lives. And this includes biological surgery that we can do today as unconceivable a few decades ago from a safety standpoint. Same thing for vaccines, even though they get in the news for whenever they're not safe, they're overall greatly improved public health as has clean water and other hygiene. All of this can be part of synthetic biology. Heart disease is plummeted by a factor of two in many countries. Adult stem cells are really working well. They've gone from basically impossible to routine DNA nanotechnology and other molecular nanotechnologies actually work very predictably. And we're starting to see the first pharmaceuticals being produced by those technologies, the smart pharmaceuticals. So this is probably enough for now and we have more time for discussion. OK, now can you hear me, George? Yes. OK, just one follow-up. What exactly do smart pharmaceuticals do as opposed to the kind we're used to? And what's an example of one that might be on the horizon? Yeah, yeah, actually the Skype version is coming in kind of broken up. OK, so maybe we will let people Google that question on their smartphones. Thanks, we'll hold off for a second. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum. So this is somebody with a lot of hands-on experience and maybe you have a little. I don't know. It sounds like anybody can do this stuff now. Right, well, we all do. We are it. But you're a science fiction writer and I'm wondering what is the far end of the speculation? Let's say the speculation in the literature that seems even remotely plausible to you. Well, if it's science fiction, it is at least remotely plausible. It's not fantasy. It's a literature of reasoned extrapolation from what we know now to what might reasonably plausibly be in the future. Those of you who read my article in Slate last week that came out of this conference, I kind of set the groundwork for that there. I think that what we're talking about, and it's exactly what we were just told, is that the cost of sequencing is coming way, way down. The speed of sequencing is going way, way up. Which means that the manufacturing of synthetic life, anything that's possible in the idea space of those four nucleotides being recombined into anything you want, will be doable not just by big corporations, but ultimately, and by ultimately, I mean before the end of this century, by individuals. We talked about in the opening foundational talk, garage labs. The idea, and this is, I guess, where it touches onto governance, the idea that you can regulate something that people can do in their basements is going to be the biggest problem here. Once the equipment is widely available, a decade ago I was writing about, I called them codon writers, but devices that let you essentially word process life forms, we're going to have people doing it regardless of what we say industry can do, because individuals will be able to do it. Talk about a $5,000 device now, it means it's a crackerjack prize in 10 years when you get the device that lets you write or design your own DNA. So we're talking about making life utterly malleable, utterly reconfigurable, and not only that, but utterly novel in the sense that, what Benter did was boot up one set of genetic material in another genetic shell, creating completely from scratch, as we learn to understand, how to read that book of life that you referred to. It becomes authorship of life, not just by big corporations, but by individuals as we go down the road. That would be the vision for the decades to come. Does that alarm you at all? Well, science fiction is unlike advocacy for industry. Science fiction is a literature of case studies, starting right back with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, which was the first synthetic bio case study. So let's do this and see if it's a good idea. Oh, it actually wasn't in that particular case. The interesting thing about Mary Shelley's case was actually she was, Frankenstein's widely taught, not just as a first book in science fiction courses, but also in a lot of bioethics courses and in women's studies courses. It's particularly taught in women's studies because her message was that without compassion, that women bring to the creation of life men, Victor, not Victoria Frankenstein, but Victor Frankenstein would bring a lack of compassion to the notion of synthetic biology. So as a science fiction writer, you look at individual cases and you say sometimes this is gonna be frightening and frightening tends to make a better story than not frightening. Other times it's going to be terrific. The classic science fictional example from films now 25 years old is the Genesis effect and the Genesis planet and Star Trek to the wrath of Khan where Spock refuses to evaluate, it says I'm not attempting to evaluate its moral ethics. McCoy says we're talking about universal Armageddon with this machine and Dr. Carol Marcus thinks it's the most wonderful thing in the universe to be able to create life from, as she says, lifelessness and science fiction will give you that panoply of answers to the question. Do I personally fear it? I think there's no point in fearing the future. The future is gonna come regardless. It's like fearing Christmas. It's gonna be here December 25th, whether you like it or not. So you might as well learn to live with that. Actually, I guess the question I'd raise about that analogy is Christmas does always come December 25th, whereas I'm not sure it's inevitable how soon we get to certain thresholds in science. Bill Joy in this famous some years ago piece in Wired, the future doesn't need us, recommended that we basically halt scientific inquiry along some avenues because it was so dangerous. You had eight years of that here under George Bush and how's that working out for you? It is by far, by long shot, not the most objectionable thing I've found about those eight years, but fair enough. What we do have, the point you make, I mean, of course he didn't halt scientific progress, but the point you make is the point I'd like to highlight. We have some control over the rate of technological progress. You have some control, you mentioned George Bush. You have some control in the United States over the rate of technological progress. You have very little control over the rate of technological progress in China or North Korea or the former Russia. The problem with trying to do governance of any emerging technology is either you opt in, you're part of it, or you opt out and let other people do it, but we don't have a world government that says, or nobody does it because we're uncomfortable with that. Or you move toward global governance, but that is such a hobby horse of mine that I will nobly resist the impulse to deliver a sermon on the importance of it and instead turn to our policy guy, Dan. And if you wanna pick up there, you could. I know that you think that there's something a little too simple about framing it as promise versus peril, but if I could encourage you to think about peril for just one moment. Oh, I have no problem thinking about peril. You have no problem thinking about it. I'm just the man I'm looking for, Dan. If you fail to scare people, I'm willing to intervene and try to help, but we have a science fiction writer who can help us with that. He didn't terrify them quite as much as I had hoped. I'm an optimist amongst my colleagues. We have some of the optimistic guys here. So we turn to you. Yeah, so the problem I have with the promise or peril framing is it makes it look like technologies deliver their impacts in little discrete bites. It cures a disease or it causes an oil spill or it kills a person. And in fact, the consequences of technology that matter most are not about the little individual discrete things they do, but about the systemic ways that they transform society and culture. And those waves of technological change that sweep across society, they're known to economists as creative destruction for very good reason. They create wealth, they create new industries, they create opportunity, they create social progress, and at the same time, they destroy what was in their path. That means destroying jobs, they can destroy cultures, they can destroy social relations. So I think the right way to look at something as potentially transformative as Senbio, and I should say, I think it's very important for everybody to recognize that part of what we're hearing here is the hype of a technology whose future is unknown. It may turn out to be as transformative and wonderful as its advocates say. It may turn out to be largely a disappointment. Who knows? Or maybe transformative and horrible. It could all, well, I think things tend to be both horrible and wonderful depending on which side of the wave of transformation one sits. And so I think part of the problem that we've had in the past in terms of managing and governing emerging technologies is our efforts to govern them in a kind of piecemeal way with risk benefit analysis that quantifies particular impacts rather than thinking systemically about how waves of technology transform society. Let me just say, I mean, one of the things that I think separates the types of scenarios about technological futures that science fiction writers do from what advocates for particular technologies might do is science fiction writers think about what technology means when embedded in a society given the limits of human behavior and human emotions and human psychology and institutions. And for example, in the story that we heard from the first speaker about the emergence of computer technologies, it was sort of an immaculate conception. There was no mention of the institutional setting of the markets of the applications of the choices that were made that all determined the trajectories that the technology would take. So the problem I have with promise or peril is it way oversimplifies and feeds into a tendency to just look at technology as something that does something in some local domain rather than as part of a very societally transforming set of phenomena. And of course, it'll have different effects depending on whose hands it's in and what they wanna do. I should flesh out a little the Bill Joyce scenario I referred to. I mean, I think among the things he was worried about, this was actually before 9-11, I think that piece. Yeah, so maybe we have a sharper focus on this question now, but in principle, if you were a terrorist, use your imagination. I mean, you might want to design a microorganism that afflicts conceivably a particular ethnic group. There's all kinds of things you can imagine, but that's the kind of concern that's out there. I think that after the early years of recombinant DNA work, initially there was the fear that you'd be doing stuff in a lab and things would just go out of control. Oops, the world is gone. And I think that strikes pretty much everyone as a lot less plausible now. And that may not change with synthetic biology, but I think the intentionally malicious use of it is something that's of concern. And as you've suggested, it's very hard to regulate at the national level. Now, George, can you hear me now? Yeah. That's a good sign. I can hear you. First, I just ask, surely people confront you with this question, right? I mean, surely you've heard this fear that someone who uses technology maliciously try to design a microorganism that would wipe out lots of people or all of them or something or use it in some other nefarious way. Is it a concern that you think is overblown? No, I think we need to take these quite seriously. In particular, it's not sufficient to just monitor, say, the companies and it's not sufficient to just deal with voluntary methodology. I think we need active surveillance of all possible participants. And it doesn't have to be unilateral as something that Canon is already happening by getting companies to buy in to this internationally before their governments have a chance to decide and then to get customers to go along with whatever the international norms that are safer and then government can jump in at any moment and contribute as well. But it helps to have some movement internationally, multilaterally, by any method we can. Okay. And I guess I'm kind of wondering, even in the presentation we saw whether that's enough. I mean, I have this image of kids working in their basement able to order this stuff, mail order, the components. And I think the whole point of synthetic biology is that it's not as if you can deny them access to particularly threatening forms of life. The whole point is there's not that many building blocks, right? As I understand it. And once you've got access to all the building blocks, if you have sufficient knowledge, you can in principle do anything. And it seems to me that what Rob is gesturing is if he has something to say here. What's the farthest idea that people have gone with in science fiction? The farthest idea is that this, us, all of us are a synthetic bio experiment from some super advanced kid who's got a garage bio lab out there in the multiverse and all of us are- A theological honest name here. That's your take, Bob. I read Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny. He didn't introduce himself, but probably your best known book, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright. And you shade towards that near the end of it. I'm avoiding using a theological language here, although we are playing God. I mean, the subtitle of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's book, Frankenstein is Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods is what we're talking about here. But you're exactly right. When you say the kit of parts is something that you cannot regulate. You cannot say that you cannot buy these four base pairs. People are going to buy it, and what you do with them is going to be wide, wide open. It's interesting, introduced to me as a science fiction writer primarily in a Canadian, secondarily. I think in some ways being a Canadian is more significant here. I was once asked to contribute to a libertarian science fiction anthology, and I had to tell the editor, I don't think it's technically possible to be both a Canadian and a libertarian. The issue of governance and oversight is bread and the bones of Canadians. We do this. We don't believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We believe in our founding document, peace, order, and good government. And there has to be oversight for this. But how you can have oversight of something that is so basically simple is very, very difficult. What the oversight should be, I don't know. Should there be oversight, absolutely. If you can hear me, do you have any thoughts on that? Once you've got these basic building blocks, and they are accessible, and knowledge tends to diffuse and be hard to contain, that in some sense, it's hard to imagine how you stop any really smart person from doing what they want. Maybe we're just as well off not knowing the answer to that question anyway. He knows. He knows. He hasn't knowing. Look. George, can you hear us? I think after a while, you take that as a no. Well, I will jump in here if I have George. Sure. I mean, a couple of things strike me. First is, no, there's no limits to the surveillance state at this point. If we really want everybody to be surveilled. I'm sorry. There's an eight-second delay on one, and it's garbled on the other. I hope I'm not interrupting now. But I think the key thing is it's very difficult and not desirable to prevent these all sorts of innovation, but our ability to do surveillance can get better and better. And there's all sorts of things that currently can be done in kitchens like manufacturing of illegal drugs, which are subject to surveillance. And I would argue that synthetic biology is, if anything, slightly easier, because there are bottlenecks that don't exist in other synthetic chemistry, such as the phosphoramidiates and the instruments that people use for building them. And I think it's really, the stakes are even higher than it is for psychoactive drugs. So I think it's something where we won't restrict the innovation, but we will make sure that we know what everybody's doing. And if somebody is specifically doing something without announcing, transparently, to the world what they're doing, I think that's a tip-off right there. Okay, let me ask you one quick follow-up, George, and then we're gonna turn to Dan. The question is, I don't know much about the kind of machinery that is inherently involved in this in the near future. But is it sufficiently complicated? If you really wanna do something big in this field, create a whole new life form, even at the single cell level, is the equipment you need sufficiently complicated that in principle we could have a law that says, say, you can't, it's illegal to possess equipment, to manufacture possess equipment like this, unless it has within it monitoring equipment that tells us what is being done with that equipment, something like that. So kind of a built-in surveillance in the, again, this would ultimately have to be international, I guess, if it were to be effective, but leaving that aside is the equipment so complicated that that is a bottleneck. In other words, it's not like making drugs in a bathtub. You don't just go buy the stuff at the hardware store. And I think within eight seconds, George may have thoughts on this. Yeah, I think that that is, it's not that complicated, but it could be, nevertheless, made, there are some choke points that could be capitalized and made a little bit more regulatable, more easier to do surveillance, at least for a few years while we get better feeling for what the risks and benefits actually are. I think it's very desirable, the sort of scenario that you painted of focusing on what we can do to increase the surveillance and not depend entirely on voluntary transparency, but any anyone that's going outside of that clearly is sending a message. You know, it's a little bit like the fact that scanners now have built into them chips that prevent them from scanning banknotes. If they see a banknote, they won't scan it. And your color printers, all actually watermark color printouts, because if you're scanning and printing a banknote, it actually, there's a serial number watermark. Here's a printed in yellow on white, like the Google there, very, very small. We have that technology built in at the assistance of the United States government. Recognize a banknote? Recognize American banknotes. You can counterfeit Canadian banknotes, but not American ones, because this is required for the sale of commercial printers in the United States and scanners in the United States. It's not widely advertised, but it's required. You can easily weed out the amateurs who want to circumvent the law. The professional criminals in always find ways around us, so what we will do is not have to worry about the 14-year-old kids creating the virus that's going to wipe out humanity, because there will be the safeguards in the gene sequencers that you'll go and buy at CVS or wherever at your local drug store, or your gene writers, excuse me, that you'll buy at CVS. But there will always be ways for the professional terrorists, the professional criminal to circumvent this kind of technology. The cutting edge people, Dan. Which is why, again, I think the promise of pearl framing isn't that useful. It's easy to drift into either totally utopian or totally dystopian views of what's going to happen with the technology, but obviously it's going to be a mix, and the things that present themselves as very concrete immediate risks, I think, will be addressed. The much more difficult problem is the big picture systemic stuff. I mean, you think about something like antibiotics, which seem like such an unalloyed benefit boon to mankind, and you think about the long-term consequences of attempts to control disease, pathologies, infectious disease using antibiotics, and the breeding of super organisms, and the complexities that that introduces into the medical system. I think that's the sort of, that's a too easy example of the sort of imagination that we need to actually begin to exercise here to address some of these complex consequences, because it's not just the obvious threats. It's not the obvious threats we have to deal with, because those are the obvious threats. It's the way that SinBio will unfold in society, and I think we just really need to attend to the reality that technologies are social creations. They're not just these things that get thrown out for our use. They exist within contexts, and we need to understand and address those contexts, and that's what one of the things that science fiction writers are so good at, and policy walks are so bad at. Okay, I guess maybe a final question on how you handle kind of downside, the downside part, is if it's so hard to anticipate the specific perils, is there a case for trying to adjust the sheer rate of technological change? The idea being that there's a rate of change beyond which the countermeasures cannot keep up with the threats that are surfacing, and again, nobody's buying into the Bill Joy, very few people, the extreme version of the Bill Joy scenario of just halting scientific inquiry along certain paths, but on the other hand, governments do certain things to actively increase the rate of technological change in certain areas, and in some cases, they do it for the best of reasons, and it might even have positive payoffs, but at the same time, it might in the long run be a little perilous. I'm just wondering if any of you have thoughts about rate of technological change as a thing you might try to actively adjust? Yeah, ideally, I think you would adjust it so that you could catch up, but that's very difficult to do, so what you really want to adjust is your capacity to think through what's going on, and one way you do that is you start really early to talk about possible future scenarios. I mean, this sort of meeting would not have happened 20 years ago around Ag Biotech, or 40 years ago around nukes, and so building in a capacity to deliberate, to bring all the different sectors and institutions and perspectives who have something to say about an emerging technology is one way to increase the social intelligence around governance, so I would certainly would have, I think to use Bill Joy's term, would have no philosophical objections to tapping the brakes. I don't think we're very good at knowing how to do that, but I think we are, we are naturally able to diversify and complexify the discussions around these technologies by expanding what counts as expertise, and I think that's what we're doing here today, and I think that's a really important tool. George, do you have any thoughts on the rate of change question? I'm just going to use a little bit of an excuse. Or the rate at which information is transmitted from Washington to Boston. Sorry for the delay, the rate of change question is very difficult to control. That would be something that, I think you can get international agreement. It's easy to, relatively easy to regulate surveillance and to get some international agreement on that. I think it's very hard to get every player to crank back on a particular technology. It tends to go forward and then everybody copies, but it certainly is something worth considering and discussing in settings like this one. And looking very far forward is definitely protective and I think it's great. Can I just follow up with one quick point, which is, I think it's important to note that George and I are talking about two very different types of governance. One is formal through national and international agreements. And another is evolving social capacity to actually engage in discussions about what's going on and build that into a culture of decision making. And so we need to pursue both, but we typically ignore the latter. Yeah, I agree with that. I think the, however, that science fiction's role has long been to contextualize things in the human condition as Asimov's definition, the responses of human beings to changes in science and technologies, what he defines science fiction as. But again, I'll make a little Canadian comment here. Canada was the third country in the world to launch something into space. Sputnik, the Soviets were first, America's second Canada was third, with our satellite, Alouette. And then we decided too expensive for a small country to have its own launch vehicle industry. We also opted out of big particle physics, too expensive. What we found is that biotech, not only when it started, but certainly within a very few years afterwards was something that countries with much smaller economies than the United States could have a major role in. And what we see here is it's not a superpower industry biotech. It's going to be an industry where little countries that missed out on previous technological revolutions are able to say, this is one that we can get in on the ground floor of or whatever floor we're up to now, the second floor of this infinite skyscraper of biotech. And that is what makes international consultation interesting, but it's just like trying to say to China right now, you really should be putting in pollution controls and everything. No, no, no, we're leapfrogging into the 21st century and you can't stop us from leapfrogging. Canada's going to do this. And you're going to see countries that we think of as second tier technological or third tier technological nations deciding this is where they're going to put their money and move their young people and emphasize their educational programs into synth bio and biotech. Because the cost of doing it, the entry level cost now and certainly by the end of this decade is so low for doing major work. And that makes international agreement hard. It's easy for the big countries, the big rich countries, the scientific and technological leaders to say, okay, let's, as you say, tap the brakes in a build joy fashion. It's hard to say to a country that's looking to jump ahead to primacy in an area of science and technology that you guys got to put the brakes on too when they're saying, no, no, this is our chance to catch up. Okay, and if experience is any guide, people who are looking for government subsidies in this field will be emphasizing exactly what you're talking about that if we don't do it, the Chinese will do it. But that's not to say that government subsidy never has a legitimate role. And I'd like to kind of turn to that question, kind of the upside, whether there are things that we should be encouraging, which for one reason or another, the market is not attending to. And specific thing, if there's a specific kind of payoff, a specific disease that might be cured sooner, if we focused on it, and warrants that kind of emphasis by virtue of the number of people at a flix or something like that. And I think I'm gonna ask, and I think I've now learned to wait about, actually 12 seconds after asking the questions of George and not intervening after eight seconds, which only throws him off once he's started to answer. So I think I'll ask George, and then patiently wait, wait for the answer. Are the things, are the places where you think the public interest really demands a more concerted government effort than we've seen? Oh, sorry, okay, sorry for the delay. I think in terms of a biotech applied to medicine, we're already seeing increased number of personalized medicines, diagnostics going together with therapeutics for cancer and many other things. And we hope to see this not only happening in the developed nations, but in developing nations as well. The world's poorest people also have diseases and treatments and so forth, which can have disastrous effects if they're treated in a one-size-fits-all. This is a future of synthetic biology. The present is making less expensive drugs like Artemisinin and trying to get those out into the countries that have malarial problems among their poorest people. I think we could go on, there are many, many opportunities with the smart pharmaceuticals that I unfortunately tend to find earlier where they actually can sense the environment they're in and be very, very targeted rather than dosing the entire body and just doing local dosing. Okay, and I'm sure that there's a certain amount of non-profit support for that. I'm sure that this has not escaped the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example. What about the environment and the question of clean energy, George? I don't know that this is specific focus of yours, but I'm sure you get asked about this. In reading on this subject, I've seen some estimates that are said to be plausible about dramatic impact on issues like climate change that are possible through this technology. And of course, in Washington, this has been kind of the libertarian line all along is be patient, technology will solve the problem. And I'm wondering, George, if you think a problem like climate change might wind up having a sheerly technological fix, although of course, there's a time lag with climate change as there is, much like the one we're about to see if you could address the question, George. So climate change, whether you think that it's human or not, it is the carbon dioxide levels have an impact and there are roots to increasing our ability to fix carbon and turn it into usable substances, not just fuels, but building materials and so on, which in a way is carbon sequestration, but rather than sequestering it into someplace where it's not useful having it available for building materials and so on. This, the cyanobacteria do this about 10 times more efficiently than the best agricultural species, crops and those best crops do it better, or is the magnitude better than the worst? So there really is a huge opportunity here and using marginal lands, as I mentioned earlier, that otherwise would turn into deserts but can't be used with current agriculture. This is big impact on producing alternatives to petroleum, which we're using up and green chemistry in general. And your question of whether I was involved a little bit mainly through the Department of Energy and two startups, LS9 and Jewel LS9, just got the Presidential EPA Green Chemistry Award this year. Okay. Thank you. Any climate change thoughts or energy thoughts? I don't wanna get me started on climate change, but I may not be able to stop myself, but just one. I'll be in charge of stopping. You'll be in charge of stopping. You'll be able to start. Okay, so I mean, I think a key point to you, is that I guess I don't agree with your characterization of understanding climate change. Stop, stop, stop. As a technological problem is libertarian. In fact, it will have technological solutions on the dealing with carbon dioxide end. And this is exactly the sort of complex socio-technical system problem that I've been trying to get everyone to obsess about along with me. And it turns out that it's incredibly difficult to take a highly embedded global technological system like the energy system and make it something else so that it will have an output that we care, that we're a particular output that we care about, which is less carbon emissions. So to the extent that synthetic biology offers the possibility of fuels that are going to be able to lead to that transition, I think that's something that we ought to take extremely seriously. That being said, we also ought to approach it with the same skepticism that we now can use towards claims that ag-biotech would cure global hunger. Not because ag-biotech is not a powerful magnifier of agricultural productivity, but because these are social systems that create all sorts of obstacles to change that are beyond simply the technological capability. So again, if we don't attend to both the social systems and the political systems as well as the technology, we're gonna find ourselves disappointed. So we need to understand the types of technological systems that we're trying to replace and not just say that because we will create synthetic fuels suddenly the problems will go away. Any climate change or energy thoughts? Well, since it's Washington DC and I'm a visitor here and I've got the chance to say it, it's human cost, okay? Listen, it's human cost, we have to deal with that. The second issue there I think is that, yes, this may be a use for synthetic bio, but it isn't in the minds of the public who is going to respond positively or negatively to regulation, what the key issue is. The key issue is health, the key issue is longevity, the key issue is quality of personal life, curing cancer, curing Alzheimer's, curing all these things. And I think that is gonna be the prime mover. I was asked actually when Bill Joy did his article in WIRE, the future doesn't need us to rebut it or to respond to it for the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, sfwriter.com slash joy.htm is my rebuttal. And my point to him then, and it is my point now, is you can't put the brakes on anything related to biotech if you know anybody in your life who has Alzheimer's, who has heart disease, who has breast cancer, you can't possibly be so heartless metaphorically to say this is a technology that is too dangerous. And when we start saying, well, let's focus on what it might do for climate change or let's focus for, we all are concerned about global hunger, but those are for most people in their day-to-day lives, abstract issues. What's gonna drive governance and what's gonna drive the public dialogue is how it's actually gonna affect health for people here in the first world. Can I just add a dimension to that? Because if you think about the, say the embryonic stem cell debate, okay, and try to back off a little bit from one's ideological views about the prior administration and instead think about that as a problem of governance. Well, what you see is different countries approaching stem cell research in different ways, partly as a result of very different moral, ethical and political and cultural commitments that they have. In Germany, killing embryos is not allowed. And I bet that it's not very hard for people in this audience to have a kind of empathic understanding for why that makes sense in Germany, okay? Now here it was a huge political issue and we saw it as the efforts of the right-wing nutcases to interfere with the rationality and the freedom of science, okay? So these things are culturally situated, but the point is that as a result of that, science is better, not worse, okay? It's better that there are disagreements about what counts as a good way to intervene in human health, what the moral limits of certain types of science might be, because that leads to a diversity of explorations of avenues for doing things like curing disease. So I guess what I wanna say is that while I think it's true that it's very hard to put the brakes on human aspiration to cure suffering and pain, why would we wanna do that? The ways that that gets constructed in different countries is very, very different and that's actually good for science, even though it's often discussed within a particular context as bad because it means we're restricting what scientists do. Let me pause for a tangential sociological question. I'm just curious, is it true that science fiction writers in general, Rob, tend to have a libertarian bias, in which case you as a Canadian science fiction writer, I would think would be a very unpopular person among science fiction writers, but is it? Why not my friends, people like me? There are more libertarians in the science fiction community, readers and writers, than there are in the general population, but they are by no means the majority, okay? There's simply a large vocal minority within science fiction. There's this general, you know, don't wanna get into a big sociological thing, but there's this general misfit culture about being a science fiction person and people who don't fit in well don't like rules and regulations that are defined for the majority. So there's a natural psychological drift towards libertarianism. I would have thought it also had to do with an exuberance about the possibilities of the future being something that gets you into science fiction as well. Well, absolutely, very much so. We all, many of us were very excited about, you know, we saw 2001 when it came out in 1968 and thought that was a promissory note that in 2001, we would have cities on the moon. You were happy about the way things worked out. We were happy about the way, what it was going to be. We thought this is what the future was going to hold for kids who saw that film in the 60s, like myself. But there are a lot of science fiction writers on the whole range of the spectrum. I'm on the left, Kim Stanley Robinson is on the left. We both write about governance and biotech and other, and I write a lot about the internet and so forth. There are other people on the right. It is a dialogue, and what makes science fiction interesting is that it's a dialogue between opposing points of view within the genre. You've got the classic example is Joe Haldeman and Robert Heinlein on whether or not war is an ennobling thing, and clearly, there's a dialogue there. And it is out of that dialogue about this. I know the Canadian position on that, by the way. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So I think that in science fiction, we do have this trope that goes right back to Mary Shelley, which is that you can do science without government at all, right? Victor Frankenstein was not subject to any oversight or really any judicial consequences for what he did. He just decided, you know what? I can create life in my basement laboratory, so I shall, and that will be the nature of science. And we have that template that's gone ever since we're almost 200 years now. We're coming up to the Frankenstein Bicentennial in 2018. I would have escaped my attention had I not been sitting next to you. It won't in 2018, believe me. OK, so as long as we're talking science fiction, I'd like to move from one-celled human-built organisms to multi-celled organisms and look a little further into the future. Now, in one sense, this is not so far out into the future. And reading up on this, somebody apparently has a plan to recreate woolly mammoths by inserting the reconstructed woolly mammoth genome into an elephant egg. And I guess this could work. And I guess someday you could actually wouldn't need to be, you wouldn't be reconstructing some organism, wouldn't need the egg to put it. And I guess someday you could just build the thing from the ground up, not a reconstructed organism, but an invented, multi-celled organism. And I think George is the person best positioned to tell us whether that's crazy. And if it's not, how far off into the future, some of these kinds of things are, George. OK, sorry for the delay. It's not that far off. And in fact, we just got a major NIH grant for engineering human genomes in human adult stem cells. And this is mainly for sorting out the hypotheses that are flowing out of genome projects at a huge rate. But it also clearly is setting the stage for better forms of gene therapy that don't involve random viral integration, which can cause cancer, ways that you can do very high quality constructions of genomes that could make cells multi-virus resistant or more cancer resistant or slower at aging. If you're going to be getting a cell therapy anyway, as many people do for bone marrow or skin transplants on a regular basis, shouldn't those be of the highest quality cells you can get? And that might involve genome engineering. So the whole establishment of human stem cells from adults, from skin or blood or a variety of tissues now, is really quite routine in many labs. And then the engineering of them precisely so that you put one change in, one place in the genome is also getting to be quite routine. So I think with the kind of exponentials we've been hearing about today, we can see this changing quite significantly over the next couple of years. Yeah, I made an interesting point though. You talked about not just modifying existing life, but De Novo creating completely unique novel organisms. Okay, so. Absolutely. And there are way more ways to be dead than there are to be alive. Most pregnancies spontaneously abort, right? It's a reality that it really is very hard to make the chemistry of life work. So the notion that as a writer or a musician, I can just do a riff at my keyboard and come up with something that's unique and original and it's readable as text or it's playable as musical on a musical instrument if I'm a composer, but it's not necessarily self reproducible as a life form. It doesn't necessarily work. So we're gonna see most of synthetic bio for a very long time is going to be shading and modifying existing life forms to tweak them to what we want. The notion that we're going to be very soon saying, okay, I've imagined in science which we have Larry Niven, a great creator of Aliens. He's got the puppeteer, a three legged thing with two arms with eyes on the end of each arm that, okay, I wanna make one of those in my lab. Where you're gonna find that it's not just as Vettner had 99% failure rate, but a 99.99999 on for a couple of blocks of nines. Failure rate at trying to create things randomly because it really is very hard to get complex systems of systems, which is what a big organic life form is to actually function on a macro scale that is living for years and decades and centuries. At the same time, I've been surprised in my reading to find how interchangeable the parts are, how neatly interchangeable. So you read about a gene in a cold water fish being put into a strawberry plant and conferring the same property, cold resistance on the strawberry. Now that to me sounds like, oh, I had a problem with my Volkswagen so I grabbed something off my bicycle and put it in the engine and everything was fine. And of course, in that scenario, you're still modifying life, you're not creating life de novo. At the same time, that degree of interchangeable, in other words, the discreteness of the functionality in the thing suggests to me that it's, it may not be as hard as we think, you know. It's an interesting point, but setting aside the notion that maybe there's a shadow biosphere, you know, we have the arsenic-based life that recently was brought to attention. Setting that aside, our general consensus is that there's exactly one biogenesis event in the history of life on Earth that 3.8 or 4.0 billion years ago, life emerged and that the DNA genome, the super genome of all life on this planet is one common descent, is a common descent from one original creation, a biological creation. And given that, the interchangeability of parts makes a certain amount of sense. The idea that you can start without that same suite of history and make up parts that are gonna plug in is a much more difficult problem. Also, there's the, I mean, George should really address this, but the idea that you can, from substituting one particularly well discreet trait, or transferring it from one species to another, gives you a predicted outcome. It's a completely different problem than the problem of actually assembling a complex system that is an organism. So I'm not even sure that those are analogous. It's not a linear scale up. New parts that have no connection to that mega genome that we were talking about just a moment ago, that ancestral genome, which will, you can make new parts, new proteins and new RNAs. If you know how to select for them, they don't have to have any ancestry and they can be plugged into current systems in a variety of ways. The key thing is knowing what you want is having a selection for a functionality for an enzymatic reaction that you want or a particular shape that you want. Furthermore, we can build DNA nanostructures where you can actually just specify the shape. And then you have computer aided design software, very similar to the kinds of CAD software used for automobiles that will then make that shape that atomically precise. And that tends to work pretty close to first time unlike many other CAD and molecular design tools. So you can make new parts from scratch that have either enzymatic or other functions or shapes. Making genomes from scratch I think is not that valuable but it is really remarkable how adaptably are. Not just that they can use parts from other organisms but that you can put in something that you wouldn't think that they're ready for and they can do it. For example, you can put in a new photoreceptor into a mouse and suddenly you can see a new color. And so I think that really the adaptability of current genomes means we don't have to change everything in order to have very radical effects and we're going to get collectively much better at that. And George, have you thought much about along that very line what kind of demand there's gonna be among the human population? In other words, if the market has its way in response to human demands to improve ourselves, I mean, I'd like to be able to see another color. I'd like to be able to see farther than I can see. I could go on all day about ways I'd like to be different, different and better. See without glasses. Could you give us a sense for what kinds of capabilities people are going to in principle have within, let's say 10, 15, 20 years to improve ourselves by these kinds of manipulation and add additional capabilities. And of those, the ones you think that people are going to be most interested in endowing themselves with. Okay, sorry for the delay. We have to keep in mind that our inheritance is not just DNA. Our evolution includes really excellent electronic and other components. So when we say we'd like to see additional colors, we can already see the full spectrum of the electromagnetic, all the wavelengths by augmenting with false colors or something else. And a lot of the things that would have been terrific dreams several decades or centuries ago of superhuman strength or speed and so forth become less critical because we can go at high speeds with cars and rockets and so forth. And in a way we're becoming a less physical species. So probably what we will want is a longer, healthier life and possibly some augmentation to our mental capabilities to be able to remember more than seven numbers at a time in short-term memory, ability to access long-term memory which might be ability to quickly access the entire internet as if it feels to us as if it's our own memories. It's organized in a way that and integrated with our short-term memory so that we can quickly do that. That's something that may be quite desirable. The longer, healthier lives society put such an investment into education now, our education is lasting longer and longer. It might be desirable to study the people who make it past 110 years old in living vibrant lives and actually abusing their bodies in various ways without consequences. That might be something that is also of interest and we can obtain some hints into that by looking at people that are already living that long. Okay, and I thought I would throw out without us probably having to dwell on it unless maybe, Dan, you wanna say something is, you know, what happens when the potential for self-enhancement is left to the market? And clearly, you know, it's always gonna be the case that the newest, greatest thing is accessible to the people with the most money in the absence of something way beyond Obamacare, I would say in terms of what it covers. If anybody has thoughts on that, they could weigh in. Now, I'm seeing a couple, yeah, go ahead. The biggest area of self-enhancement currently is vanity. Breast implants, teeth whitening, hair implants, things like that. Number one thing people want to do is be attractive. It's a reality. Number two thing they want is given back what they used to have. I would like to have my hair back if it was easy and trivial to have it as a gene therapy to have it done. I would like to be able to see without these. When you said see another color, that was very interesting because you wanna go beyond what you ever had. All I want back is what I had when I was young. And I think for most people, that's a real qualitative difference. Most people when they talk about what you can do for me, I just want what I used to have. They don't want to have web fingers so they can swim. They don't wanna have wings so they can fly. They don't wanna see in the infrared. They do want to be able to abuse their body eating spicy food and not having to deal with the consequences of that the way they could when they were young. They wanna be able to cross time zones without being jet lag, the way they could when they were young. They want those things given back to them. And I think that's what's gonna drive it. It's first vanity and second, just give me back what I used to have. Is spicy food a Canadian's idea of dangerous youthful excess? It's our solution. I went to an American college and maybe we should chat afterwards. It's our solution to get our G-prices. Now, Andres, my taskmaster, we didn't talk about a Q&A session, but I noticed, and we're running out of time, but I noticed a couple of hands in the audience. Should I? Only a couple, because nobody has asked for three hands, you see. What do you think? Sure, particularly eager person right here. My name is Anne Raquilla-Robbins. I just feel quite a disconnect with this conversation. And I just wanted to, although I'm glad that we were having it, but I find it difficult to be articulate in my thinking and even in my speaking with this heavy overlay of digital, what I would call metaphor, on this whole discussion. I don't think it's adequate for what we're trying to do. And I mean, the most profound question is, we don't even know what life is to begin with. So the idea that we're gonna create it, and of course, who's gonna be responsible for its death? And we live in a world where this is a little bit of the American disconnect, where you have billions of people that are greatly creative and are not even in this discussion. And you're talking about how you can live to be 100 years old or improve those kinds of things or make our very affluent life much better. This is a disconnect that I don't think is acceptable in this kind of conversation. I would just like to make that point. Okay, thank you. One more question here, and then the woman who you had your hand up some time and then, yes, sorry. Can I give 10 seconds of response to that? I was actually gonna ask, let them both ask their questions and then go around because we're close to the end and give you each like 90 seconds if I can do that. Hi, my name is Rachel Oswald. To your point that people would be more likely to choose self enhancement, beauty, get back what they had. I would offer back to you the movie, Gattica. If you haven't seen it before, you did see, of course, very excellent movie. But to me it seems very clear that people would choose to enhance, ask for memory enhancers. We already have those drugs in the marketplace and I think it definitely confers an advantage to the already wealthy. If you can extend your memory, you're gonna have better access to jobs and people who can't afford these memory enhancers. And it seems to me self evident people would not stop at just getting back what they lost due to growing age. I agree they will stop at that but their first priority will be getting back what they have. And Larry and Sergei did a wonderful job of enhancing my memory and everybody else's on the planet. I don't actually need to monkey around with the biochemistry of my brain to know everything the human race knows and to know it with a retrieval time of about five seconds. And to your point over here, very good point. I think absolutely these parallels, although it's cute cell phone and cells, very interesting way to start the conversation. In fact, they're very different technologies. We saw just this past week that Egypt could decide to say, you know what, we're not going to be an internet country anymore for a couple of hours or days as they shut that down. There's no master switch that Obama can throw and say, you know what, we're not doing biotech anymore in this country. They're completely different kinds of enterprises and they have very, very different ways that you have to approach the governance of them. I think absolutely. Dane, closing thoughts in response to you? Yeah, I also, I mean, I actually share your discomfort and hopefully that we'll get into these issues as the day progresses. But I think the point about the technology being aimed towards vanity and money is right. It's what we see. It's why continually the promises that new technologies will cure this problem or that end up in many cases frustrating our expectations and it's why governance is necessary and important. Just as one particular example, again, just revisiting Ag Biotech, which was supposed to solve global hunger. Of course, in this country, it's been used as a way to enormously enhance the productivity of large agricultural companies, which is fine. But in fact, innovation in Ag Biotech is mostly ground to halt not because of those goofy Europeans who still want to have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, but because the intellectual property thicket around Ag Biotech is so incredibly complicated that nobody can actually figure out how to innovate within it anymore, which is an effort to govern. So the point I want to leave everyone with is it's not just about the technology. It's about the technologies in society. And you can go all over town and hear other meetings about visionary technologies. It's very difficult to know how these things are going to unfold because these are social phenomena, not just the phenomena of brilliant people like George Church working in laboratories. Speaking of George Church, I think we'll give him the last word. George, have anything you want to say? OK, sorry for the delay again. I completely agree with a comment about the disconnect. I don't think this conversation is disconnected in that we are drawing attention to things that need to be considered. If there is market forces that's focusing on healthy, long life, even if that is tested, if the original guinea pigs on that are the wealthier nations, they will be bad consequences for the wealthy as they test out new technologies. And hopefully with a delay, the good aspects will make it into many nations. And I think we also had some balance in the conversation by talking about all the things like clean water, food, roads, education, which can have technological and do have technological components. So I think that we have to be mindful of all these things. I don't really think there's a disconnect in any particular country or in this conversation. But you can't really plan if you ignore a particular type of market force and you need to embrace as an early effort all of the aspects of developing as well as industrialization. I should mention that some of these long-lived individuals do live in fairly impoverished environments. It's not entirely something you study only in developing nations, which have very bad health habits. OK. Thank you. And I might add in closing. We mentioned bad consequences for the wealthy early adopters. Another kind of bad consequence might be if things go very well for them in terms of the early adoption, but if there's a lot of resentment among people who are poor and don't have them, whether at home or abroad. Sorry about the ideological subtext of that comment. I want to thank everyone. George, I want to thank you in particular for enduring the time delay. I think as time delay communication goes, this went fairly well. I mean, it's apparently a true fact documented in the Nantucket Library in the documents from the whaling era that one time it took like six, eight weeks to get a letter to a ship. And the wife of a whaler sent a letter that said, where is the axe? And however many weeks later, she got the reply that said, why do you want to know? And I just thought this went a lot better than that. And I want to thank everyone for being so patient. And George, for his insights, you for your insights. Before I ask people to give you a round of applause, I want to mention our next speaker. We're going to move from organic digital information back to electronic digital information and hear a little about the internet from Bruce Gottlieb, who is the general counsel of Atlantic Media and was at the FCC for five years, most recently as chief counsel and senior legal advisor to the chairman. OK, now you can give our panelists their well-deserved.