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On my podcast, The Rhys Show, I just finished five interviews for my Rewriting Biology Series.
Biology is underrated.
Thereâs lots of focus on how âsoftware is eating the world.â Elon buying Twitter, Instagram ruining teens mental health, blah blah blah.
But at the same time, under our very noses, weâre beginning to rewrite the biosphere itself.
Our 2020 biosphere is just a happy accident of 4 billion years of evolution. In the coming centuries, weâll completely re-engineer it.
This is happening on a few fronts:
Weâre rewriting our own biology
Weâre rewriting our food and industrial supply chains
Weâre rewriting completely new organisms into existence
1. Rewriting Our Own Biology
Before 1900, global life expectancy was under 40. Half of kids died before the age of 5 and you rarely made it to 60.
Now global life expectancy is 73. Hooray!
Surprisingly, that progress was all before we knew anything about DNA. Now we can code a healthier life. Iâm hoping life expectancy will be 100 by 2100, but it may be much higher.
Scientists are coming at this from two angles:
First, we are making healthier babies. Preventing problems before they start.
Second, we are eliminating diseases. Fixing problems after they start.
A. Healthier Babies
I did two interviews on healthier babies:
Genetic Screening to Rewrite Future Generations with Stephen Hsu
How to Protect Your Future Baby From Inheriting Genetic Susceptibility to Disease with Noor Siddiqui
Steve and Noor are the founders of companies (Genomic Prediction and Orchid, respectively) that help families have healthier babies by using polygenic screening. This allows parents to test for a holistic set of genetic risks instead of just single-gene diseases like Down syndrome.
You can think of polygenic screening like v2 of Down syndrome screening. It is especially effective in risk screening for diseases like schizophrenia, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, and hypertension.
We can do polygenic screening on either embryos (to check how much risk a baby will have) or on parents (to check how much risk you will pass onto your kids).
Noor explains how they do polygenic screening on embryos here. This is so Cool Scienceâ˘! When babies are just 125 cells, they pull off 5 cells and screen them.
(Click the tweet text to watch a 1min video, then come back to this email!)
After you screen, some embryos are more likely to experience those diseases, some less. Then the parents need to decideâwhich should I choose?
Steve calls this the âembryo choice problemâ:
But you can also do polygenic risk scores (PRS) for parents too. Noor explains here:
Polygenic screening is just getting started. The first IVF baby was born in 1978. The first polygenically screened baby (chosen among four embryos) was born in 2020.
It is a bit scary, but polygenic screening will be net good for society.
Itâs like preventative healthcare on steroids. Weâll save a ton of money with all of the healthier babies (and then adults) running around.
It will decrease the ultimate form of privilege, genetic privilege. I am lucky to have good genes. I want everyone to have good genes too.
But polygenic screening isnât a panacea. It surfaces questions of who belongs and who gets first access to technology.
Who belongs? Letâs look at Down syndrome as an example. In Denmark and Iceland, there is almost no one with Downs because screening is commonplace.
Whether you think this is good or bad, there is something strange about folks with Downs going extinct like the Dodo bird.
Plus, does âfixing Downs before it startsâ lead to âcreating a world with less accomodation?â Itâs the classic âadaption vs. mitigationâ debate. By mitigating harms, we make society less adaptable.
Who gets first access to technology? Yes, polygenic screening costs more than $10,000 and will only be available for rich families who are already doing IVF. But as Steve explains below, we will eventually decrease the price for all:
The fears shown in Gattaca loom large, but Iâd argue for a pluralistic perspective. When you hear âeugenicsâ or âdesigner babiesâ, also add âhealthier babiesâ and âreducing genetic privilegeâ.
As Kathryn Paige Harden argues in "The Genetic Lottery", strive to distinguish between three camps:
Eugenic: Extreme right. We should cull the weak and idolize the strong.
Genome blind: Extreme left. Genes have no impact on IQ or health. Donât talk about them.
Anti-eugenic: The middle road. Genes affect our lives. We should make them better.
Plus, with intense words like genocide, racism, or eugenics, itâs always good to ask: what actually âcountsâ as that bad thing?
Aella asks this question in 20+ polls below. What counts as eugenics?
In the end, these discussions need to be informed by an educated public. The public understands all kinds of things we didnât understand a century ago like DNA, abortions, and the internet.
We need the public to understand CRISPR and other genetic technologies.
Melinda Kliegman, the Director of Public Impact at Jennifer Doudnaâs Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), talked about their specific educational strategies here:
B. Eliminating Diseases
In addition to preventing diseases before they start (with polygenic screening on embyros), we can stop diseases after theyâre present.
The poster child for this effort is sickle-cell disease. The sickle-cell gene mutation evolved to help us fight malaria. But if we have two of the recessive genes, we get sickle-cell disease itself.
Melindaâs team at IGI is working on a CRISPR-based sickle-cell therapy that cuts out the mutated gene and replaces it with a healthy one.
This trial is just one of many CRISPR trials.
Expect dozens of CRISPR therapies in the market by 2050.
2. Rewriting Supply Chains
Meanwhile, weâre also rewriting our industrial and agricultural supply chains.
As Melinda explains here, genetic editing will start with real needs, whether those needs are healthier humans (the last section) or better production processes (this section):
This is just beginning, but here are a couple of initial examples:
A. New Meat: Earlier this year, the FDA just approved the first CRISPR cow. Itâs a âSlick Cowâ (on the left) that has been bred to have less hair. Climate change will make the earth hot, so we need cooler cows.
B. New Veggies: At the end of last year, an ag company in Japan started selling the first CRISPR-modified food, a tomato that helps lower blood pressure.
C. New Farming: Synthetic fertilizer is responsible for massive fungal blooms, 5% of GHG emissions, and 2% of the worldâs energy supply.
Instead, we can use Pivot Bio microbes. Pivot mapped millions of microbes and mass produced the ones that can most effectively fix nitrogen for plants.
Out with nitrogen fertilizer, in with engineered microbes.
3. Coding New Organisms
Finally, weâre also coding up entirely new organisms. One of these organisms is the xenobot, a little collection of cells that moves in liquid:
I interviewed the creators of the xenobot and their new Institute For Computationally Designed Organisms, Josh Bongard and Michael Levin.
Here Josh describes how theyâre exploring morphospace, the space of all possible body plans:
Our morphospace is about to get weirder.
Coming Soon⢠to a reality near you:
At the smaller level, these designed xenobots can be used to do tasks for humans like cleaning up plastic. But they are also used as a way for us to break down biology and understand the collective intelligence of cells. Michael explains here:
To conclude:
Weâre rewriting our own biology
Weâre rewriting our food and industrial supply chains
Weâre rewriting completely new organisms into existence
Thanks to Alta, Stephen, Melinda, Michael, Josh, and Noor for helping me understand this. â¤ď¸
All of the episodes can be found here.
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Hope you have a great week!
Warmth, Rhys