Andrew Hessel Hacking Cancer Viruses & Rewriting Your Genome #526 Full Episode
In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, host Dave Asprey interviews synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel, CEO of Humane Genomics and co‑founder of Genome Project Wright (GP Wright). Hessel explains synthetic biology as the reverse‑engineering of life—designing and building genomes from scratch rather than dissecting existing ones. He clarifies that the cellular machinery is conserved across billions of years, so the challenge is reprogramming genomes, not recreating the entire cell. The conversation explores GP Wright’s ambition to engineer large genomes, including human DNA, to create programmable life forms. Hessel shares whimsical future visions such as a milk‑producing “tribble” for infant feeding and living homes that grow from seeds, illustrating the long‑term potential of programmable biology. He addresses safety concerns, dismissing fears of a biological “grey‑goo” by noting that natural ecosystems already contain robust safety checks and that synthetic biology inherits many of these safeguards. The interview delves into the limits of current knowledge, including quantum effects in enzymes and mitochondria, and argues that full mechanistic understanding isn’t required to begin reprogramming at the DNA level. Hessel highlights the rapid decline in DNA sequencing costs—from billions of dollars to under $200—and predicts a near‑future explosion of affordable, mass‑scale genome sequencing that will fuel a sandbox for bio‑R&D. He draws parallels to computer‑aided design (CAD), describing emerging biodesign tools such as Autodesk’s Genetic Constructor and startups like Asimov that aim to give biologists the same design environments engineers enjoy. Overall, Hessel paints a picture of accelerating bio‑technology that will soon become as commonplace and user‑friendly as software design, with profound implications for health, environment, and everyday life.
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Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that a keto diet may protect your eyes. Well, at least if you're a mouse and probably if you're a human. According to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, switching mice destined to develop glaucoma onto a low carb, high fat diet, which is the template for bulletproof, although it's not always keto, but it protects the cells of the retina and their connections to the brain. And the study adds to a bunch of other findings that this kind of diet has neuroprotective effects on Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and als. You might have noticed that a lot of the research in my book Headstrong about mitochondria relied on research on those three things, because when the brain breaks, that's bad. When you do things that make broken brains healing and you do those to brains that are already, well, they kind of kick ass more, which is the idea behind it. And in this study, they concluded that higher rates of glaucoma in people with diabetes also suggest a potential connection between that eye disease and metabolic stress. And the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is that when you make your metabolism work better, your risk of every disease and your risk of dying from any cause other than a piano falling on your head goes down. And there's no double blind clinical trials on pianos falling in your head either. But we just kind of know that now. If you like a bulletproof radio, you like what you hear, I would love it if you took a few seconds to go to bulletproof.com iTunes, which will get you right over to the Apple page where you can leave a five star review and say, hey, this show is cool. I'd appreciate it. Today's guest is Andrew Hessel. Imagine building something like a cell phone or a car or a house and that one thing just reproduced itself. Well, that's kind of the idea behind what the Human Genome Project Wright or GP Wright, intends to do. Starting with the basics. They want to build a human cell from the ground up and complete it with all the DNA that's required to produce more human cells. The idea is that by mastering this technique, we could wipe out diseases that we just don't understand yet. Because in order to build something from the ground up, you have to understand it in a way that you don't understand when you're looking at something that's already built. And Andrew, today's guest is the CEO of Humane Genomics, which is a seed stage company developing virus based therapies for cancer, starting with dogs. And he's also a co founder of GP Wright, or Genome Project Wright, which is an international scientific effort working to engineer large genomes, including ours. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Dave.
When I decided I wanted to interview you, I checked you out and the GP Wright, the Human Genome Project Wright is one of those things that sounds like science fiction. I looked at what you're doing and you describe yourself as a synthetic biologist, which is a set of words that did not exist even 15 years ago. What the heck is a synthetic biologist?
Well, what's a biologist? What's a molecular biologist? Synthetic biologists are. It's a new field where you don't take apart genomes and try and understand what they do. That's kind of the reverse engineering of biology. It's aspiring to go and design and build genomes from scratch. And if you can build a genome from scratch, you build organisms from scratch. The two are completely linked.
You're starting your work with viruses, but to date, at least in my understanding, no one's ever been able to build a life from the ground up. We could put all the building blocks together, but there's some animating force, to quote 17th century alchemists or something, that makes it turn on and start working. Have we cracked that code yet?
Well, there's a group of people that are trying to crack it at the very low level and build all the cellular machinery from the ground up. But I take a different point of view and again, I speak for myself, not the field, but all life on this planet, from a simple bacterium to all the way to you and me and plants as well, have a common architecture when it comes to how the cell operates. So it's essentially conserved, even though there's millions of species of animals. So you don't really have to build life from scratch. The only difference between these different organisms is really their genomes. The genome with the common architecture, the machinery of the cell, can create massive diversity. So I'm not out to create new life forms in the sense of rebuilding architectures from the ground up. I'm just out to reprogram them and make new versions of life forms.
So you're going to start with a platform that's basically a bacteria or a virus or something, although viruses may not really be alive, and then sort of do rebuilding from the foundations up, rather than assembling a bunch of amino acids and fats and saying There you go. I've got a life form.
Well, you can look at it this way. The machinery of life is conserved and has been for 4 billion years on the planet. Think of it as a really powerful printer. All you have to really do to make a new life form is just send new code to the printer. So I'm not out to rebuild life from scratch. I'm just out to learn how to program it and make versions of life that do really useful and powerful positive things.
If you took off your what's possible glasses and projected yourself 50 years into the future and you had unlimited resources, what life would you create?
Oh, wow. No one has ever asked me that. I tend to be very pragmatic and I tend to work bottom up. So just as a foundation. The thing that I've been talking about recently, because it's really pragmatic, is I've got two young children, one's three and a half and the other one's nine months. And the types of things I want to build are things that just make it easier to support kids because that's what I'm thinking about on a day to day basis. And honestly, I talk about the milk tribble. I want a small furry object with a nipple that just produces milk so I don't have to make bottles, I don't have to. I can actually feed the baby. And if it purrs and coos, that would be terrific too. And once it's kind of been drained this disembodied breast, put it in the garden, it grows into a beautiful flower. So that's kind of one thing I'd like. But on a more pragmatic basis, I'm not much of a homeowner, keeper maintainer. I would really just like to plant seeds and grow homes. I think that would be totally awesome.
So now you're entering the world of cyberpunk, Neal Stephenson, sort of science fiction, where you have this idea of you plant a seed that literally could grow into a tree that has the components of a house and is alive.
Why not? Why chop the trees down and plane them and make lumber when you could just have a large object that's made of wood. It's living, it's photosynthesizing, it's maintaining the right temperature for human inhabitation. It just seems like we've got this incredible machinery now, the cell, to start working with. And we really don't know how far we can take that machinery in terms of science fiction. We know where it's been limited in terms of evolution and nature. But nature's got a really different set of objectives compared to human intention. So I'd just like to see how far we can take the cell.
Are we going to see that in our lifetimes?
I think it's going to happen quickly. These things tend to start off pretty slow because you're feeling them out, you're learning the basics. But the beautiful thing about life, if you kind of look at it as a manufacturing platform the way that I do, it's everywhere already. It's universal on this planet. As deep as you can drill a hole, you'll find microbes. Clouds are filled with microbes. So life is literally everywhere. And there's only one programming language, and it's been the same language for billions of years. So I think the more that people get into this and start to concentrate their research and development and put it into a community, the faster this is going to snowball. It's like you don't have to go build a new factory. The factories are already there. You just have to learn how to put a design into the factory.
You're a faculty member at the Singularity University, and I've lectured there and actually have an adjunct faculty position too, even though I've never actually taught a class there. And one of the things that they cover there is nanotechnology and the idea that, well, we don't have to make life forms. We can just make tiny little robots that self replicate and do essentially the same thing that life does. But one of the scenarios that we come across there is the grey goo scenario, where you make the wrong robot that turns everything it meets into another nanomachine, and pretty soon the whole planet is basically lifeless except for little robots trying to eat each other. How do you know that you won't make synthetic biology that just makes organic grey goo?
Well, man, I remember a synthetic biologist, one of the founding people of the field of synthetic biology, Tom Knight, kind of laughing at this idea and saying biology is nanotechnology that actually works.
Exactly.
And when you look at the machinery of the cell, it is nanoscale, but it works with a very different set of principles. I think if you just take a look at bacteria and fungi and other just single celled organisms, that's what takes complex objects and decomposes them back into the goo that other things grow out of. We call it soil. So I don't really have a fear of creating a biological goofy that just turns everything into mush. That's kind of what happens after we die. So I suppose the closest thing to that would be some sort of pandemic where it knocks out most life. I think that if that type of thing could spontaneously arise, it would have already have been tried out by nature. I think in general, nature is the most definite, secure technology there is. It is really hard to hack biology. There are numerous safety systems and checksums and mechanisms. You know, compared to computers, it's just not that much of a worry for me.
That's a fair answer. When I wrote my book Headstrong about mitochondria, I delved into the realm of quantum biology, which is you say the word quantum and immediately you've got people with robes and crystals and things like that who are using the term, but it actually is a real term in quantum biology. And there are strange quantum effects happening where DNA releases a biophoton for a femtosecond every 40 seconds or so. And we know that mitochondria communicate via lasing also with biophotons. And there's quantum tunneling going on inside there. Do we really know enough to build that from the ground up? Because it seems like there's some things going on in cells that cellular biologists don't understand yet.
Oh, I completely agree with you. I look at just an average enzyme, one of these biological catalysts that turn substrates into different products, as being the almost magical chemists. They do things that organic chemists can only dream of. So we know that they're manip matter in ways that we have a lot of difficulty understanding today and even modeling, because as you note, some of the effects are quantum that they've been able to tap into. That being said, you don't have to understand all of the machinery of the cell to be able to reprogram it, because you just have to move up to the level of DNA code and programming to be able to understand how to build certain structures. The more you can understand and model, the better. But we don't have a unified model of even a simple cell, the same way we have a unified model of planet Earth as we do with Google Earth, where we're constantly layering on more and more detailed information. So the cell is clearly a very complex machine. But I think as we start to focus on doing this type of modeling, as we start to really build a field of biology that isn't just a few specialists, that is really much more like the field of computing, where you get people from basically all walks of life, all industries, kind of adding to it. I think we'll start to crack some of the lower level problems below. The programming of DNA, what's the timeframe.
You think that's gonna happen in?
Again, these things are all accelerating because again, if you just look at the DNA sequencing world, where the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with a $3 billion budget and a 15 year timeframe, it came in two years early and on budget, which for a government project almost never happens. And that's because the technology of reading DNA advanced so quickly even during those 15 years that they were able to hit their targets. And since the first, you know, since the genome was essentially complete in 2003, that technology has only continued to accelerate, at times outpacing Moore's law by over 500%. And it's not over. Today you can go and get your genome, complete genome, not just sampling like 23andMe your complete genome commercially for 18 months for under $1,000. And what I hear is that it'll be as low as $200 in the next 12 months if you, you know, granted there's always some caveats, but that's amazing to go from billions of dollars to a couple hundred bucks in a timeframe of, of under 20 years. So I think we're going to see the same thing on the synthesis side and even on the comprehension and design side as we start applying the latest efforts in computing and in DNA synthesis.
How is this going to affect our everyday lives in five years?
I think that you'll start to see it soonest in the world of DNA sequencing. Like already I've been impressed that DNA sequencing, DNA testing, let's just look at it as testing has exploded in the last couple of years. Like it's just taken off. Today you see ads for 23andMe or Ancestry or National Geographic all the time. They're big sellers at Christmas time or on Prime Day. That's amazing. So DNA testing has suddenly become something we're a lot more comfortable with. I think what we're starting to see now is kind of a next generation testing industry that's going to explode and not bring in 5 or 10 million people. I think they'll figure out the business model so that everyone can be sequenced in the same way that basically anyone that wants one gets a free Gmail or Facebook account. I think we're going to see, I think the trend in DNA sequencing is that it's going free and probably will flip to actually starting to pay the contributors in some way to incentivize them to join. So I think in five years we're going to see a mushrooming of DNA testing which will bring millions, maybe hundreds of millions of genomes online over the next decade. And that's just going to be a giant sandbox for accelerating R and D and life science, as well as allowing us, and by lowering the cost of sequencing in general, allowing us to sequence the world around us, whether it's our microbes or plants, animals that we share the environment with. So that's going to be the biggest change. And all of that is just feedstock for being able to better design useful biology going forward. But the DNA synthesizers and even the design tools have lagged the reading of DNA and tools for comprehending and trying to figure out what that DNA does.
There are some parallels from my career in technology. Many people by now have heard of CAD or computer aided Design. And almost everything you buy today was designed on a computer first, so you could look at how it would rotate in space. And then it's sent to a machine that makes die parts and cuts it and things like that or casts it. And that includes the lid to your ready to drink bulletproof cold brew that was designed on a CAD machine somewhere or with CAD software. And then about 25 years ago, they started taking those tools and saying, well, why would you use them to build structural steel? Why don't we use them to design semiconductors? And I did a lot of work in my early career putting a company called Synopsys on online, which was one of the big public companies doing that. And it turns out that companies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make it more efficient for an engineer to line transistors up in the right way to do something. And that visualizing on a computer was really powerful. But those tools are mostly missing for biology. You still see biologists talking about a C, G and T, but you never see computer scientists talking about zeros and ones because they sort of have a language and a design environment to write code. When am I going to be able to tell my kids, hey, go take a class using this graphical design tool to build some DNA to do something cool?
That is an absolutely great question. And I've said the same things for years. In 2012, I joined the largest CAD company in the world, Autodesk, with the intention of helping them build a biocad. And in fact, they did a very good job on that front. And they have a tool now called Genetic Constructor, which.
Oh, there is one.
Yeah, they made one. And now there's other groups coming along. One of the more interesting ones is a company called Asimov that really takes the circuit design from EDA electronic design and.
