Hugely urgent, and it is truly revolutionary.

We're kind of now in an exponential phase of development rather than a lag phase.

In 25 years, biology will become infrastructure and it will be driving this new industrial revolution.

You're, you're involved in biotech, and this book I think is a wonderful, uh, reflection on what it is that we're on the cusp of.

Yeah.

You know, I, I've been-- I'm a physician.

Uh, I'm also a, a molecular biologist.

Uh, I did at least 10 years in a lab in Cambridge with Nobel Prize winner César Milstein, who made monoclonal antibodies, which have revolutionized medicine.

So I've, I've actually lived through the experience of working closely with someone who's fundamentally changed healthcare and, you know, saved countless numbers of lives, right? So I've seen it happen.

I've seen molecular me- medicine in action, right? And I've also worked in companies that are involved in gene editing.

... with what's, what was termed Homo erectus, which was a revolutionary step.

Mm.

Your house, you might grow your house rather than build your house.

Your cellphone may be living.

Your clothes may have embedded intelligence.

Your, uh, your crops, uh, may have been grown in the Sahara Desert because we can engineer and rewrite the genomes of crops to grow in the desert or in, you know, s- high saline environments or, uh, in extreme cold or in areas where there's very little light, right? So what I'm trying to say is, is that pretty much all of the infrastructure around us could benefit from using biology, and biology is a sustainable material.

So, you know, one of the th- the key messages of my book actually is that in working with synthetic biology and artificial biology and generative biology and, and, and, and turning biology into programmable material, actually what that can help us to do is to preserve the natural world as we know it, prevent us from mowing down rainforests.

You know, in 2060 we're gonna have more than 10 billion people on planet Earth.

The humans have devastated their environments from time immemorial.

So are we approaching the point where biology becomes less like gardening and more like software development.

Oh yeah, that's for sure.

Bug patches, disastrous beta releases.

Obviously we started genetically engineering life the day we started selective breeding and of course maize took about 30,000 years to get to where it is today.

It started off as a weed basically.

And then it was, you know, slowly improved in basically, well, Mexico, actually.

And now it's a global cash crop, right? But obviously, that's a very slow, tedious, arbitrary and random way of designing nature, so to speak.

yes, the Asilomar conference, the DNA editing first came in.

Adrian, how would you respond to someone who says we might be moving too fast? We don't understand what...

Well, let's just move to a different field quickly to answer that.

Look at AI itself.

So AI is...

I mean, it's been going for years, but it was abandoned because we didn't have the right hardware to make it happen in an efficient manner.

And then it was only recently that AI has just suddenly taken off due to these things called GPUs, which enable huge amounts of information to be managed in a massively parallel manner, right? And so let's say AI really...

is you know three to five years old at the most modern ai right now we were totally unprepared for this right and in particular for the impact that ai is going to have on society in terms of job loss and i think we've hugely underestimated its impact right so Now, knowing what we know today, would we have stopped AI and said, no, you can't do this? I really doubt that we would, right? Because we would have done.

Could you briefly talk about what you mean by generative grammar of biology and why origami is a wonderful analogy for it?

If we can engineer organisms on demand, does life itself become a kind of manufacturing platform for drugs, materials, even technology?

Yes.

I mean, let's not lose the wonder of life and the wonder of human existence because I think that's special.

I don't think anything I'm talking about excludes that, or I have no wish to try and destroy belief and all of those things, right? I'm simply saying that, yes, when we turn biology into a predictive engineering material, we can use it for the benefit of humanity, and we can use biological systems to do things that help humans, like help us grow more food, to store information, to create energy, to create biomaterials.

So for example, you know, right here, right now, the population of the Earth is just growing every year, and we're having to destroy rainforests to create the land to farm, to produce enough crops.

There was a green revolution, but it's kind of stalling a bit.

The rate at which our food productivity is increasing isn't quite enough.

And to recap, what you're saying is that essentially programming life will be like programming code, and we will be able to potentially eliminate disease, create new species, create new attributes or characteristics for existing species, including humans.

So maybe you can take us through the rationale that maybe this post-Darwinian ABI can be better than what we've gone for the last 4 billion or whatever years.

Yeah.

I mean, football, you know, as you know, all life is rooted in a universal common ancestor, right? So it is a tree of life, literally, because there is a lineage and it can be traced, in theory, all the way back to the primordial soup however long ago, you know, approximately four billion years ago, right? Yeah.

Yeah, look, evolution's done a pretty good job, right? It's created us, right? And that's not a kind of trivial achievement.

At the same time, evolution, if it were a person, would be kind of irritating because evolution would be that kid in class who's kind of a bit lazy and just does what's good enough, you know, like whatever works.

If it works, hey, that's good enough, right? And that's how evolution operates.

It just takes a solution and then the next solution.

there's potentially any uh construct um and you know back uh when venter did the mycoplasma mitoides uh where he basically booted up in the cell a synthetic uh genome that was uh back in 2016 i think right was that the first time that we saw you know this phenomenon