Directing evolution | Laurie Garrett | TEDxDanubia

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
Writer and journalist Laurie Garrett examines the consequences of health care and biotechnology. She claims Charles Darwin a true hero, as he is the one recognizing the essence of existence: the evolution. In her speech, she points out how wonderful evolution is in its natural way. Unfortunately, humanity would like to control it.

Ever since I was a small child,
this has been my hero.

This is Charles Darwin, of course.

And one of the reasons
he's always been my outstanding hero

is because he looked at the same things

that humanity
had been looking at for centuries,

without seeing it.
And he saw it: evolution.

He had no special tools,
he had no high-tech,

it was just insight.

A very powerful way of seeing the world.

And he created an absolute revolution
that started with telling humanity,

if we had our way, as a species,
we would destroy this world.

Because we will always seek to push
evolution in our favour as a species.

And of course, his 1859 manuscript,
Origin of the Species,

was the greatest revolution in biology
for all time prior.

And its basic thesis was:
the strong survive;

the weak, if they cannot adapt,
cease to exist and go extinct.

And, while there may be controversies,
he built the monument

upon which the three great revolutions
of biology today are standing:

metagenomics, the ability to mass-sequence
that which we see around the world

and know its DNA
at the absolute nucleotide level;

synthetic biology,
the ability to manipulate

that which we now understand;

and gain-of-function,
the ability to give species capacities

that nature never gave them
and probably never would.

These three are the big revolutions.
Let's start with metagenomics.

This says:
I can look at everybody in this room

and tell everybody's DNA sequence.

I now have that toolkit.
You have that toolkit.

And we can tell the sequence of everything
in our natural environment.

This is so revolutionary,
it has so completely changed

the way we look at the natural world,

that it is at least equivalent
to Charles Darwin's ability

to revolutionarily think about the world.

We go from looking into the world
from outside, through the microscope,

to actually deciphering it.

Because now the toolkit is available
to rapidly, quickly, and cheaply tell us

what is the DNA sequence of everything
we choose to look at.

And now we have the capacity
to decipher life,

in a way we never did before.

This is so new and it's
all in the last decade and less in time.

In fact, the speed at which this
is happening is so tremendous

that nobody in the entire scientific
community can tell you where we stand

in any given species analysis
at any given moment. It's going that fast.

And it is changing the entire
perspective of humanity on the planet,

even if you personally
don't know the biology.

And to see
how fast and rapidly it is changing:

our first sequenced human genome took
15 years and billions of dollars,

and then in 2010 we were able to do it for
10,000 dollars, an entire human genome.

That's "passé."

Now, it's under a thousand dollars.

So this going faster than
Moore's Law predicted

the declining costs
in computer technology.

The synthetic biology, genomics revolution
is taking the cost of sequencing down

to a level that is really incremental.

It's spare change.

And you can buy your own home sequencer

and be your own personal biohacker
in your kitchen,

and sequence your whole genome
now overnight.

And it will have cost you
practically nothing to do it.

Consider what the options are.

Well, there's a lot of people doing
their metagenomic sequencing of pathogens.

Let's look at the black death,
Yersinia pestis, smallpox, chickenpox,

the Justinian plague.

And in every case, all the sequences are
posted open-source on the internet.

You too can mess with smallpox,

you too can mess now
with your Yersinia pestis.

With pretty much any microorganism.

1918, an influenza
that killed 15 million human beings.

Whatever you choose to play with,
it's open-source, it's being sequenced

and it's happening at lightning speed.

And Darwin reminded us:

all this information we will utilize
only for the good of our own species.

And, in fact, the utilization is called
directed evolution.

That means humanity is deciding now
what is evolution on planet Earth.

We are changing the direction of
the entire course of planetary history.

And we're doing it in everything
from high school labs, all the way

up to the most sophisticated multinational
laboratory systems.

Among the choices we're making is,
which long-extincted species do we,

as Homo Sapiens,
wish to bring back to life?

This is not something that somebody else,
God, or whatever you believe in, decided.

This is us, human beings, saying "I want
woolly mammoths to walk on Earth again."

And indeed, already,
a graduate student of Berkeley

brought back a form of plant that had been
extinct since the Devonian age.

And it's back, it's alive,
it's replicating,

it's part of Earth again.

Who made that choice?
This kid.

And similarly, because of climate change,

we're getting the devastation
of permafrost zones

and deep glaciated zones,

and things that had been frozen
for millenia are coming back to life.

And scientists are making choices

about which ones
to resurrect out of the permafrost,

like this Pandora virus, which fortunately
does not infect human beings.

But what else lurks
beneath the permafrost?

What's the next thing to come forward?

Well, just three years ago,
our National Academy of Sciences in the US

predicted, they thought quite boldly,

that soon people would be building
life up from the DNA,

actually creating wholly new living creatures.

This was considered outlandish,
but it's already been done.

So that entire report is now
not only not controversial,

it's ancient history.
Three years ago.

What's been done?

Well, who you're seeing,
everybody picks and chooses

how to experiment with life.

So that now the scientist is directing

and is in charge of the evolution
of everything which he or she is viewing,

deciding the pace of the life
they are observing will take.

Manipulating it,
to see, "What if?", "What if?"

This is a revolution.

And it's a revolution that gets coupled
with what's called synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology means -

you might not know about it,
but your kids do

because they're all doing it
now in high school.

It means that you are actually taking
the sequences and manipulating them,

to produce a previously
non-existent microorganism.

There's a competition for
high school students and college kids.

Last year, sixty countries participated.

Every team that participated had to create
a previously non-exsistent life form.

And to prove that it was alive
and that it could replicate.

And these kids
were inventing all kinds of things.

Mostly very very great, wonderful things
you would say, "That's terrific.

I'm so glad you made
an asbestos eating bacteria."

But that is also part of the industry now.

And every kind of company
from agriculture, to cosmetics, to drugs,

everybody is now saying,
"Why wait for miracles to happen?

We're going in there and direct life,

make it produce what we want it to make,

and wow, this is
a revolution for the industries."

Huge profits down the lines,
tremendous possibilites,

just in antibiotics alone.

Mining a single species of yeast
and going through their entire sequence

to determine what synthetic biology
could produce from it

could come up with twenty candidates
[for] new antibiotics.

So this means that
there are tremendous upsides

and fantastic incentives associated
with this entire new sort

of synthetic biology
meets metagenomics era.

But I've just had to redo this powerpoint
right up until this morning

because things are breaking so fast.

A whole new chromosome,

a higher-order organism,
made from the DNA nucleotides up,

it has now self-replicated,
just published last week.

So this is a man-made yeast.

It's just one step away
from the next stage

which will be multicellular creatures.

But outdone already,

just announced this week,
is man-made new DNA pieces.

So instead just ACTG,
as the base pairs of DNA,

there is now X and Y.

And they have inserted it into
man-made organism and it replicated them.

So now, welcome to a whole new world.

Human beings have decided there shall
actually be a form of DNA on this planet

with creatures in it

that can make not 20 amino acids,
but 172 amino acids,

which means a whole new encyclopedia
of proteins is coming our way.

Well, one of the people that really
got this ball rolling is Craig Venter,

one of the greatest biotechnologists
on Earth.

He was part of sequencing
the original human genome project.

In 1999, he was the first person to create
a previously non-existent organism.

Actually, it had existed,
he just replicated it.

A Phage which is a tiny virus
that infects bacteria.

He proved it could be done
and he moved on,

and in 2010, he actually made the first
wholly synthetized living creature,

a yeast, and named it after his institute,
the J. Craig Venter Institue.

It replicated, it's alive,
it's sitting in freezers,

but this is a man-made life form.

So this was the first, serious one.

This year, he put out a new book

describing what he thinks
is the next stage.

He says: "Stop asking whether
it's a GMO food or whatever.

Just ask: 'Is the DNA man-made or not?'

If it's man-made
it's a synthesized organism."

It's as simple as that.

And now that we know
that all there is to DNA

is the actual sequence of the base pairs.

That's computerized software.

So now, life boils down to information
which he says can be transmitted.

Where?

It can be transmitted to somebody
else's computer or to a 3D printer.

And so he is now describing a new era
and he is testing it out with NASA,

sending a launcher to Mars
that will scoop up DNA samples

and send them back to Earh.

And he'll 3D print whatever is on Mars.

That means it's time to stop
thinking about DNA as a mistery

and it's time to start thinking about it
as an enginnering project.

Why think of 3D printers
as being about wooden plastic,

when they can be about nucleotides
including even the new ones, X and Y?

And your 3D printer can produce
whatever you can imagine as a life form.

This is our new era.

It goes like this:

you do your sequencing, it gets
cheaper every day and faster every day.

You send it to a computer anywhere
in the entire world.

You could be anybody
with any motive doing this.

It prints out through a 3D printer
and bingo! You have a life form.

This is an impossible thing to regulate.

An impossible thing
for intelligence forces.

And the key goal of synthetic biology
is to give functions to life forms

that they would not
naturally have evolved -

or at least we don't think
they would have -

to try and test the limits
on what life forms can do

is called gain-of-function work.

And it's extremely controversial.

It was really kicked off by folks
looking at bird flu, the H5N1 virus,

which rarely infects people.

People get it from birds.
It doesn't spread person to person.

But when a person does get it,
60 percent of them die of it.

So this is one of the most dangerous
viruses in the world.

And several different scientific teams
were wondering, but why?

Why doesn't it spread between people?

And they decided the best way to answer
was to go ahead and make a form of it,

deliberately, in the lab,
that would spread and kill people.

So they made three different gene changes,
three base pairs of DNA.

Two different labs
independently competing.

They ran the altered viruses through
ferrets, as a substitute for humans,

and after a few rounds of passaging,
the animals indeed got an airborne,

mammal-to-mammal transmitting
super bird flu.

Well, this of course was
highly controversial,

but the Chinese said:
"Ah, big deal!"

And the made a 127 new bird flus,

5 of which spread
through the air between guinea pigs,

causing lethal infection
in another substitute for humans,

another mammalian species.

So, now, we've opened the flood gates,

to human-directed evolution
being about testing for virulence,

testing for the trasmissibility
of organisms,

altering them
to infect different species.

We've also opened the door
to creating factories for pharmaceuticals,

and all sorts of likely production.

And finally, possibly for using cells,
man-made cells as substitutes for animals,

for testing of drugs
and of pharmaceuticals and so on.

Is this safe?

Particularly, when I tell you
the pace of which this is all going on,

and I've described
to you the explosive nature

of this research field.

Well, the only control mechanisms
we have over this are:

1969 Biological Weapons Convention,
the International Health Regulations,

which are to be enforced by
the World Health Organization,

which is frankly
on the edge of bankruptcy.

The World Health Organization
has been running on a huge deficit

for 3 years now,

laid off 20% of its staff,

and shut down its pandemic and
emergency outbreak response capacity.

So, oops!

Who is in charge here?

Really, being in charge requires
some kind of global solidarity

that we don't really have right now.

It requires transparency.

Every nation, every group must disclose
what they're doing and be honest about it.

If you have an outbreak,
you have to report it.

You don't cover it up
like China did with SARS in 2003.

We have to figure out
how to share not only the risks,

associated with directed evolution
and natural outbreaks,

but the benefits, the vaccines,
the drugs, which we don't.

And we have to have mutualism,
like the sharks swimming with pilotfish.

The big guys and the little guys
have to mutually get something,

back and forth, from each other,

that makes it beneficial
for them to coexist.

Can the big shark countries coexist with
the little pilotfish countries

in a way that is mutualist?

This is the only way
we'll get through this.

Well, right now, that's not the case,

as this gentleman taught me
when I visited him in Bangladesh.

He is a poultry farmer, sophisticated guy,
he computerizes all his farms,

but his farm got hit by bird flu.

And he was so upset by the pain
and suffering his chickens went through

that he willingly went along
with the goverment mandate,

that he slaughtered his entire flock.

It's farmers like him that are keeping
everybody in this room safe.

They live in poor countries,
nobody is compensating them

for destroying their infected animals,
whether it's chickens, ducks, whatever.

And it's in laboratories of this caliber
that most of your safety is being ensured

by grossly underpaid people
that are trying to figure out

what lurks in nature.

And now, we are going to throw at them.

You think lurking in nature is bad,

wait, till you'll see what we're going
to make in rich countries

and throw your way as man-made,
directed evolution organisms.

Try being ready for that one,
boys and girls!

It's not mutualism.

We don't have the kind of world
where the shared risk and benefit ratio

makes any sense at all.

I can assure reasonable amount of safety
for any of us or the animals we eat.

So, what are my predictions?

And you can hold me to these the next time
you see me at some TED meeting.

First of all,
metagenomics is going to on steroids.

Costs are going to come down even more,
the speed of this machines more,

people are going to sequence
entire oceans,

they're going to sequence entire forests,

we are going to know more about the world
than we can imagine.

We will see larger organisms man-made.

I predict that by the end of next year,
a multicellular organism will be made.

Completely synthesized.

Something nasty will come out
of the permafrost or the glacier melts.

And it's really just a question

of what kind of living
current species it will affect

and what willl science do
with this nasty organism.

We will see the 3D printing of life
become normalized,

become a routine function
in the pharmaceutical industry,

and food industry,
it will become absolutely normal

by the end of this decade.

Nobody will believe
that any of you are even stunned by it.

And the benefits of all this
actually will be very real.

We'll be looking at
a 15 to 20 billion dollar industry,

within the next 4 years, 5 years.

And many products
that you will be utterly dependent on

will come from
the synthetic biology industry.

But the speed of it and the safety of it
will be dangerous, mistakes will be made,

something will leak from a laboratory,

or be deliberately leaked
by somebody of malevolent intent.

And it will only then be
that a moment comes

when the nations come to their senses,

and think about
how to properly regulate this new world.

Thank you.

(Applause.)