Midway through The Matrix, Cypher glides a knife through an enormous steak, gazes at the hunk of meat dangling off his fork, and acknowledges that his reality is not, well, real. That steak is a construct, part of a digital program telling his brain that it is “juicy and delicious.” Angry and disillusioned with the harsh, scorched real world, Cypher asks for safe passage back to a virtual one, where he'll once again be fed a steady stream of preprogrammed electrical signals to be interpreted by his mind as a luxurious experience.
That scene stayed with me, back in 1999, after the credits rolled and I exited a Tokyo movie theater not too far from Akihabara, a dense hub for vendors selling electronics, video games, and experimental displays, all of which presaged a Matrix-like future. We'd escape into a digitized reality, using headsets or wires, to frolic in virtual landscapes.
Two decades later, something unexpected looms: The future of reality will be virtual, yes, but also synthetic. Starting with components from the natural world—DNA, more basic molecules, cells–scientists are already altering biology, performing a kind of alchemy that allows these materials to serve a new or better purpose. Cypher's future meal will not be a digital construct but a physical one, synthesized from animal cells.
And scientists are synthesizing more than just dinner. The opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine, human performance, and materials science are enormous. But biology has a tendency to evolve in unexpected ways. Our new designs for life have the potential to morph into unrecognizable mutations of what we see today, leading to a cascade of unintended consequences.
The forces driving the synthesized meat movement are practical. Modern agricultural systems are helping destabilize Earth's climate and ecosystems, while extreme weather events add immense uncertainty to farming and ranching. Scientists at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam have estimated that cultured meat would require 7 to 45 percent less energy, occupy 99 percent less land, and produce 78 to 96 percent less greenhouse gas than conventional animals farmed for consumption.
A synthetic-biology-centered food supply mitigates greenhouse emissions in other ways too. For one thing, it promises to shrink the distance between various operators in the supply chain. Once eaten only in Japan, sushi now requires a CO2-intensive operation of commercial fishing grounds, fishermen, freezers, temperature-controlled airplanes, and refrigerated trucks to bring raw fish to the masses. Synthetic tuna would remove most of those steps while coming close to the real thing; Finless Foods, based in California, is already developing cultured bluefin tuna meat. In the next decade, large bioreactors might be situated just outside major cities, producing cultured meat to be used by schools, hospitals, and perhaps even restaurants and grocery stores. Sea life currently threatened by overfishing could once again flourish in our oceans.
But once we're able to synthesize meat, we'll face a novel regulatory challenge. Theoretically, we'll have the capability to culture meat from any animal, which means that some people will choose to culture and consume animals we'd never consider eating today because of their high level of intelligence, like dolphins, chimpanzees, and elephants. Someone, somewhere, might just attempt to make cocker spaniel kebabs, which, technically, will fall outside the jurisdiction of current regulatory agencies. A ban on certain synthetic meats might go into effect, but a black market and an underground speakeasy scene for thrill-seeking diners would potentially emerge.
Your favorite wine, beer, and spirit is about to be synthesized too. If, like me, you're a bourbon drinker, you know how important the aging process is—seasonal temperatures constrict and expand the wood of the barrel, producing rich flavors over several years. If something goes wrong during that long process, it can be financially catastrophic for the distiller (not to mention heartbreaking for the drinker). But a synthetic booze, designed using artificial intelligence to identify patterns in a massive data dump of possible style and flavor combinations, would reduce the uncertainty of waiting. A synthesized whiskey could be made out of its molecular components to have the characteristics of a product from a Kentucky distillery, but be bottled in a lab in San Francisco. Bay Area companies like Bespoken and Endless West are producing engineered spirits now.
Synthetic flavors are going to call into question what we think of as authentic and good, and what roles humans must play in cultivating what we eat and drink. We assume that consumers will pay for craftsmanship, and that may still be true in the future, with a twist: What if they value chief bioscientists and their work more than master brewers?
If we can see beyond the haze of our synthetic Old Fashioneds, the current moment—in which we are learning to manipulate molecules, engineer microorganisms, and build biocomputing systems—is the start of a new era in the evolution of civilization: the Biological Age. What we build during this new age will unlock new business opportunities, mitigate or even reverse environmental damage, and improve the human condition in countless other ways. In May 2010, scientist J. Craig Venter and his team announced an astonishing discovery: They could destroy the DNA of an organism called Mycoplasma capricolum and replace it with DNA they had written on a computer that was based on another similar bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. Using special software, DNA sequences are loaded into a sort of text editor for DNA code. After the DNA is written or edited to a researcher's satisfaction, a new DNA molecule is generated from scratch using something akin to a 3D printer. What I'm describing isn't cloning life but, rather, redesigning it using synthetic biology, a new field of science that reengineers organisms to have new capabilities.
Venter's team named their 907-gene creature JCVI-syn1.0, or Synthia, for short. It was the first self-replicating species on the planet whose parents were, technically, computers, and the project was designed to help the team understand the basic principles of life, from the minimal cell up. In 2016, Venter's team created JCVI-syn3.0, a single-celled organism with even fewer genes—just 473—which made it the simplest life-form ever known. The organism acted in ways scientists hadn't predicted. It produced oddly shaped cells as it self-replicated. Scientists came to believe that they'd taken away too many genes, including those responsible for normal cell division. They remixed the code once again, and in March 2021 announced a new variant, JCVI-syn3A. It still has fewer than 500 genes, but it behaves more like a normal cell.
These variants are now considered by some to be a new branch on the tree of life—one where humans redesign and shape novel species. This level of control unlocks huge new opportunities. We've already had a glimpse of one, in the form of messenger RNA, found in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. Lab-manufactured mRNA delivers a set of instructions to cells that help them thwart the virus's attack. This approach—using synthetic RNA—is far more effective and adaptable than long-standing vaccine protocols. In effect, Moderna and BioNTech are crafting genetic instructions that can be written like software and packaged into the equivalents of nanoscopic USB drives. Once these biological drives are inserted into cells, those cells dutifully download mRNA instructions, translating a string of letters into a protein. The mRNA is then (metaphorically) ejected, and the cells produce certain components of the coronavirus in order to kick-start the immune system. Such vaccines would potentially be safer and easier to control, because unlike gene therapies, which can lead to permanent or even inherited genetic changes, mRNA only exists in our cells ephemerally, like a disappearing Instagram story. These vaccines for Covid-19 are just the first of many wonders that tomorrow's bioeconomy will create.
Using mRNA, scientists could instruct the body to build up its immunological defenses to find and kill cancers. Long before they were making Covid-19 vaccines, both Moderna and BioNTech were researching just that. After analyzing a tissue sample from a cancerous tumor, the companies run genetic analyses to develop custom mRNA vaccines, which encode protein-containing mutations unique to the patient's tumor. The immune system uses those instructions to search and destroy similar cells all throughout the body. BioNTech is currently in clinical trials for personalized vaccines for many cancers, including ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma. Moderna is developing similar cancer vaccines. Both companies understand that the most powerful drug factory on Earth may already be inside you. We just need to figure out how to harness it.
Biology is the most important technology of this century. However, unlike digital or inorganic physical technology, which tends to degrade or to seize up if not maintained, biology often self-sustains, even when we don't want it to. Here's where those unintended consequences come into view. Creating a minimal viable genome, or any other novel organism, could lead to a cascade effect and be impossible to manage in the wild, though the possibility of JCVI-syn3.0 escaping and causing harm is low. But what happens when engineered genes mix with wild populations and native species? So-called outcrossing could lead to new types of weeds, or a new pathogenic microorganism that could spread disease to other animals. A lab accident could result in today's harmless laboratory bacterium becoming tomorrow's ecological catastrophe.
The technologies used to edit and rewrite life are already in use, in some unexpected ways. In 2017 researchers at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University reported that they had injected a rat embryo, which had been edited to grow without a pancreas, with special mouse stem cells. As the rat matured, it formed a pancreas made entirely of mouse cells. The team then transplanted cells from that pancreas back into a mouse that had been given a drug to cause diabetes and cured it of the disease. In a more worrisome milestone in biology, in 2021 scientists at institutes in China, Spain, and the US announced they had grown macaque monkey embryos that were injected with human stem cells. They grew in the lab for as long as 20 days before dying.
There is a term for these synthetic, hybrid life forms: chimeras, which in Greek mythology were part lion, part goat, and part serpent monsters. And a monkey-human hybrid is an ethical minefield. At some point, such chimeras will inherit qualities that are somewhere between humans, on which experimentation isn't allowed, and animals, which are often bred specifically for research. We don't have a system in place to define “human” characteristics in a world of animal-human chimeras. How will we decide when an animal becomes too human? What if chimeras escape and outcross in the wild?
Depending on where you stand, our coming synthetic realities land somewhere between “really exciting” and “gravely concerning.” The Matrix movies urged us to wake up and resist authoritarian rule. In our quest to break free of constraints, to rewrite life as we see fit, we may find ourselves grappling with an inverse problem: a total lack of control. Within the next decades, we will need to make decisions, like how to rethink our global supply of food and whether a commercial entity should be given the keys to evolution. If we're not careful, we might cleave society in harmful new ways. What if the digital divide that so worries people today is followed by a synthetic divide, in which only the wealthy enjoy the benefits of enhanced medicine and improved bodies? With powerful biotechnology systems in place, to whom will we grant the authority to program life, or to create new life-forms? As individuals, we have free will and a responsibility to make good choices about the coming bioeconomy, which we will need to survive on this planet and beyond. The code for our futures is being written today. It is where humanity's new origin story begins.
This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. Subscribe now.
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