[Science Solitaire] How to print life

Maria Isabel Garcia

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Will evolution be a relic of the past?

Last week, I was looking at a full skeleton of a human female, as kids around me played and tinkered with exhibits at the new Exploratorium in San Francisco. The sign on the female skeleton reminded me that those bones were once part of a living human being – with dreams, hopes and emotions. She was more than her bones and her cells. She had her days and nights to make herself known to the world and she encountered the world in her own way. 

This skeleton was the image that was floating in my head like a feather as I listened to a very recent conversation of NPR’s Ira Flatow with Craig Venter, the brilliant biologist who in 2010 with his colleagues, was the first to have synthesized a genome and inserted it in a bacterium that has been stripped of its own genome, an organism they nicknamed “Synthia”. “Synthesize” in science means that it was made from scratch, which for this science, meant the genome inserted was made not from DNA that already existed or belonged to existing organisms.

Flatow and Venter were discussing the latter’s recent book Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life which speculates that with current technological advances in genetics, we could one day “print” our own vaccines, analyze DNA, copy them and send the information which would enable that DNA to be synthesized. It would be the mother of all DIYs (Do-It-Yourself). 

It was in 2010 that Venter and his colleagues proved that they can make DNA and insert it in a cell and make those cells reproduce – which in biology is the operational definition of life at the cellular level. True enough, that cell, like in “natural scenarios”, was being “controlled” by this artificial DNA which Venter and his colleagues tailor-made for insertion to this cell. Since then, many have warned of the intended and unintended consequences of this kind of science, including “Frankenstein” scenarios.

Fast-forward to today and Venter, as he discussed his book with Flatow, does an appraisal of the scientific scene bearing on genomics, where he is a major player. He particularly focuses on biology’s junction with digital technology and tells us that the future will turn “old-fashioned” biology, i.e., “evolution”, which took hundreds of millions of years, to a rather quaint relic of a principle. He thinks that digital technology, which now enables information mapping of the 4 bases that make up DNA would enable us to “print” life at a pace that would relegate “evolution” as the main guiding principle of biological life, to the dusty archives of a natural history museum. 

What does it mean to “print” life in that kind of future? Imagine a 3-D printer where instead of ink or fiberglass as its material, you have 4 cartridges, each of them containing the basic nucleotide bases – adenine, thymime, guanine and cystosine. Maybe you could even have an additional cartridge to spew off the sugar ribbon-like balusters where the 4 bases hang. Since biological life cannot exist without DNA, the key to making life, according to Venter, is basically making DNA. And if you can make DNA, he says then life happens. Since he has already demonstrated that this could be done, the next steps such as “printing” life now seem to be closer to humanity’s reach.

On the useful side, the thought of being able to design your own DNA, based on what is known about genes, could heal us, other creatures we care about, and save or extend our lives. The other side, which is the “unknown”, is open to so much as well – multiple stupidities as well as layered dangers, if these are taken on by incompetent, unethical and unscrupulous individuals. The later scenario is as likely as the first since every aspect of human life has so far demonstrated that purity is an imaginary concept.

It is too easy to simply balk at this kind of future characterized by digital biologies. I tried to imagine it and in my head, the image of the skeleton I saw at the Exploratorium is joined by an image of an electronic page entitled “My Digital Biology”.

Playing with the images where  on one hand, I have a skeleton of Homo sapiens, which took over 3.5 billion years to craft since the first living cell, with genes upon genes rolling out across billions of years, in random elbow-rubbing and hooking up to define its own DNA sequence – its own genome. On the other, an outline of a being with a digital palimpsest of 4 coordinates -“My Digital Biology”. It is a map of a DNA sequence, designed and printed at the rhythm of a “click”, where most, if not all the genes were deliberately chosen, calculated, to meet the intentions and desires of its own designer.

If indeed this kind of biology will happen, if not to us humans, but to other living beings, what would our stories be like? What kind of natural histories would we now tell and pass on? Would it be more accurate to characterize them as “natural quickies” rather than “histories”? How would we look at our biological past when “slow cook” was still nature’s norm? Would we transform our “Maker Faires” – the tinkerer’s festivals – to also make way for those who can make their own designer genes?

I go back to my female skeleton at the Exploratorium, mute and supine on a platform, as very young kids circle her, with their hands on the present unaware that they are now perhaps half-claimed by a kind of future where digital biology would at least be an option. History bears that there is no stopping humans from exploring in many directions once science has started opening up a whole new world. We just have to oppose or participate or however you want to stand on this idea and practice of “printing life.” We shall, I predict, benefit and suffer in turns, as we ride this direction. We shall see. The ultimate trick or treat is life itself. 

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire”.  Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.

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