On the Future of Species: Book explores power to design future lifeforms

Human beings may soon have the ability to intelligently design future lifeforms. This book offers a glimpse into that unsettling and thought-provoking future

On The Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence

by Adrian Woolfson 

Published by Bloomsbury

480 pages  ₹699

  “Intelligent Design” is a controversial phrase. It features in oft-acrimonious debates between atheists and theists. The atheists argue undirected evolution with its random mutations can create life in all its complex forms without need for a guiding hand. The theists believe life can only arise from intelligent manipulation by a “creator”.

 

This book discusses the real possibility of human beings intelligently designing future lifeforms using “artificial biological intelligence” or ABI. ABI is a self-explanatory term coined by the author to describe artificial intelligence (AI) that can reorder and manipulate biological processes to potentially create a wide range of things. While Charles Darwin is referenced in the title, the ability to interfere with, and accelerate evolution in this fashion is something he could never have imagined.

 

The author is a molecular biologist. He co-founded Genyro, a biotech company. He is also an accomplished popular science writer. He has a gift for riffing on ideas that are edging from the realms of science fiction to the cusp of being technically possible.

 

A sequence of big breakthroughs in the last three decades have driven this revolution. The human genome was sequenced circa 2001 (we still don’t know what much of it does and the sequencing is not complete). Tools like CRISPR Cas9 — biological scissors that can literally cut-and-paste gene sequences — were developed in the 2010s.

 

AI made a great leap forward in the last decade on the back of more number-crunching power, and smarter algorithms. AI algorithms like Alphafold have revolutionised our understanding of protein-folding.  Sidewinder, which was developed very recently at Caltech can build DNA fragments of large size and complexity, enabling genomes to be synthesised quickly. (Genyro is using Sidewinder to try to write genes from scratch, which would be a prerequisite for designing new forms of life.)

 

Adrian Woolfson likens us to children just learning to write when it comes to artificial evolution. Scientists can assemble synthetic genomes of simple organisms like viruses, bacteria and yeast. We can create and introduce new molecules to alter genes and proteins. Mr Woolfson believes we will inevitably learn how to create more complex lifeforms and eventually be able to extensively edit human genomes.

 

ABI could “decode life’s generative grammar”, and give us “a chemical printing press capable of rendering the genome sequences of species as if they were books,” Mr Woolfson writes. He speculates that once we’re freed from nature’s blueprints, we would even begin to author new species.

 

A decade or two from now, ABI, along with other advances, could enable some of the following. We may design microorganisms that ingest waste products to churn out biofuels for cars and aircraft. We may be able to create artificial livers and pancreases. We may be able to design microbes to clean up sewage, plastics and air pollutants.

 

More ambitiously, we may even be able to eventually reengineer humans to survive in extreme conditions such as arctic environments or even on Mars. We may be able to revive long-extinct species.  We may be able to synthetically design crops to survive droughts and climate change; eradicate diseases; create bullet-proof vaccines, and overall, greatly extend human lifespan and “healthspan”.

 

Many serious scientists, backed by serious funding from venture capitalists are working on such apparent long-shots. There are anecdotes about this kind of research & development scattered through the book. One of the more intriguing projects is the Synthetic Human Genome project, which is trying to produce human cells with synthetic chromosomes. Such cells could be made virus-resistant, for example.

 

Mr Woolfson moves further into speculative territory in some thought experiments about what we may do with synthetic life. For instance, consider a living smartphone, or a house grown from organic material (a sort of super-wood), or smart living clothes that interact meaningfully with us.

 

It is easy enough to consider nightmare scenarios that may arise from an ability to manipulate biology processes with such ease and dexterity. We could create new lethal viruses, to mention just one possibility. Intelligent living beings (including humans) may be designed with built-in planned obsolescence. Parentless “super-children” may be created.

 

In the last section entitled “A Manifesto for Life”, Mr Woolfson points out some of the potentially horrific risks and the multiple ethical dilemmas that would be part and parcel of this brave new world. He discusses the possibility of setting guiding principles and creating a manifesto to ensure ABI delivers benefits equitably and natural diversity is preserved along with respect for fundamental rights (which would presumably have to be extended to intelligent creatures we create).

 

But it may be very hard to build the legal fences and ethical structures required and the genie is perhaps out of the bottle already. Given an ability to redesign and rewrite forms of life, people will end up doing many strange things for sure.

 

This is an unsettling and thought-provoking book centred on trends at the confluence of biology and AI.  The great power to intelligently design life should come with great responsibility. But as a species, we tend to misuse the former and ignore the latter.