The One and Only Popular Synthetic Biology Book

Three months ago, the first popular synthetic biology book was released. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves is the work of Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis, who team up to tell the story of life on Earth and speculate about the roles technologies like synthetic biology might play in its narrative. I had the pleasure of reading it over my winter holiday.

Each chapter carries the name of a stretch of geological time, which serves as a jumping off point for the contents. Of particular intrigue are the recurring ideas that humans can (and in his view should) alter the biochemistry of our industrial microbes, and eventually ourselves. The simplest approach to this would be to tweak the genetic code, which dictates how sequences of nucleotides (A, C, G, T/U) in DNA and RNA are translated into the set of 20 amino acids used in proteins. Viruses, whether they are human pathogens or E. coli pathogens, take over their hosts by exploiting the universality of the code. Tweaking the code or making a new one entirely would bestow total invulnerability to viral infection. To my surprise, we actually have a lot of the pieces needed to accomplish this, though putting them together is another matter.

The potential of genome-wide engineering extends beyond viral resistance. Church offers them as a practical alternative to the whole genome synthesis approach of the J. Craig Venter Institute: one genome could be evolved into another in the laboratory. This could mean introducing exotic genes that make humans a hardier species, perhaps for safer space travel. And, he suggests, extinct species with surviving DNA but no surviving cells could be resurrected from living relatives, perhaps avoiding ecosystem collapses. Church also proposes using this technology to bring back the Neanderthals, with the stated goal of bringing more genetic diversity into the human gene pool. However, it's not entirely clear why he specifically suggests this, since diversity presumably could be introduced into humans directly without the need of the Neanderthals. Nevertheless, perhaps human society would benefit from a relaxed self-importance that would likely result from the reawakening of the Neanderthals.

Church posits that, maybe, this is only the beginning. Maybe future scientists will be able to push our biochemistry even further, creating organisms with inverted stereochemistry of chiral molecules ("mirror life.") Humans with mirror-image biological molecules would be free not only from the burden of viral infection, but from all infections. However, they would have to endure the added burdens of being unable to eat any of the food we eat today (which matches the now-universal biochemistry) and reproductive isolation from the rest of humanity.

Though his narrative sometimes wanders into the obscure, he is at his best when discussing contemporary emerging technologies. DNA sequencing and synthesis are exploding, at a rate which far exceeds the growth of computer technology. So much so, that Church made 40 billion copies of Regenesis, encoded entirely in DNA. Surely an object of human creativity has never been copied into a physical medium so many times.

Image credit: Book cover used under fair use for the purpose of identification.