In this panel discussion, Bryan Johnson and a group of experts explore the emerging field of synthetic biology and its potential to make living matter fully engineerable. They frame biology as a programming discipline, likening it to Lego blocks that can be rearranged to create new functions. The conversation highlights two contrasting viewpoints: one that sees synthetic biology as a transformative force for the human condition, and another that focuses on reshaping our relationship with the planet through new interfaces. Participants discuss a wide range of applications—including engineering wild species, environmental conservation, bio‑based chemical production, medical therapeutics, and the creation of novel materials such as bio‑fabricated houses or space‑grade polymers. They debate whether synthetic biology will compete with or complement the petroleum industry, envision a future where manufacturing capacity is abundant and people become "citizens of technology," and stress the need for broad public engagement and critical oversight. The dialogue ends with a call for collective responsibility in shaping how programmable biology will change the nature of nature.
Chapters
Could you ever imagine growing a cell phone? Could you ever imagine growing a car? You know, what are the limits when living matter becomes fully engineerable?
Synthetic biology is making possible what we could once only dream of, showing us that life is programmable. Now, what we do with this is up to our imagination.
We think about engineering as a very clean discipline. But what's interesting about synthetic biology is what we're really talking about is decay and life, death and reproduction.
The way I parse what Daisy's trying to teach me is, now, let's see, we're going to make living matter fully engineerable, and everything's going to stay the same. And that just doesn't make any sense.
We need to be very aware that what we're doing is designing living systems. It's a very particular kind of design, different to any other kind of design that we've been involved in.
There's two tribes that show up when people encounter synthetic biology. So there's one tribe that basically says, we're effectively going to transform the human condition. We're going to change what it means to be human. And who knows what's on the other side of that transformation? I'm not a member of this tribe. I don't want to see advancing biotechnology change what it means to be human so much as change our interfaces, change our relationship with the rest of the planet.
Synthetic biology is many things, including harnessing the incredible diversity that we get from ancient evolution and laboratory evolution.
So fundamentally, biology is programming discipline, right? It's about taking a sequence of letters and turning it into atoms and living entities that can reproduce and function.
Synthetic biology is like playing with Lego. You just manipulate functional units. You manipulate blocks of Lego.
Let's say you have a certain trait or certain property in one bacteria or a yeast or a plant or an animal, and you want to insert that ability, that trait, into another animal or plant or bacteria. It's the method of doing that.
Applications of synthetic biology include engineering wild species.
You've got people in Italy making antimalarial medicines and fermenters, reversal of aging, and.
Even mammals that are resistant to all.
Viruses, probiotics that are specifically intended to fight off infections.
Environmental conservation, including bringing back extinct species.
All these capacities are eminently programmable through genetic code and genetic code and information. Zeros and ones are fungible.
In a way. We get to say, well, what do we want to design? What kind of world do we want to make?
It turns out the way we're configured with nature, you know, from our industrial processing developed over the Last two centuries doesn't scale, it doesn't work very well. It's effectively trashing the planet.
We have to find something that's something efficient.
A lot of what we make comes from biology that lived a long time ago, millions of years ago, potentially have been turned into the black gold of crude oil.
Could you actually replace that entire petroleum derived chemical infrastructure with a bio based infrastructure?
Some of my colleagues consider that synthetic biology is in competition with petroleum. I think of it more as a partnership where any chemical that is available in the environment can be processed by biological systems.
So converting energy into biology to make new matter, there's a speeding up of that process where we get to decide also what the energy input is.
You think about organisms, they're either going to quote, unquote, eat sunlight, they're going to be photosynthetic, or they're going to eat sugar, which is produced by photosynthetic organisms.
We can combine a photosensor from plants with the gene responsible for bioluminescence in E. Coli, for example. Light is not an object anymore, it's a growing material.
But now think about a gas supply company delivering content, if you will, for manufacturing through organisms that love to eat methane. It turns out that you could feed that natural gas into a container full of organisms that would convert that methane to food or into plastics for use in your 3D printers.
For me, the most mind blowing thing is we can build and tailor and create entirely new materials that have never been evolved. Maybe those will be the materials that we use for new spacesuits, space elevators or tethers, or entirely new ways of building cars or houses.
We just design a tree to grow into a house, or mushrooms or something else to provide our furniture for us, right? So it's about doing things the way nature would by leveraging much more sort of living organic matter for the everyday things we need.
If we actually describe the vision of what we're trying to get to, there is the potential to make things that could be friendlier to the environment, where consuming may not be as damaging as it is now.
Imagine a future where there's a surplus of manufacturing capacity. With programmable biology, people are no longer merely consumers of technology, but we are collectively citizens of technology. Otherwise, it's just not going to be a good future for most.
I mean, the future is not inevitable. It requires a great deal of thought, and not just from thought leaders. Everyone really should be getting up to speed.
People shape technologies. And so while we can be optimistic about what a technology can do, we should also constantly be critical and critiquing that technology and finding ways to make it better.
Synthetic biology is changing the nature of nature. But how that happens is up to all of us. So what kind of world will you help build?
