55. Adrian Woolfson: Writing Life From Scratch
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DNA is a language. Only four letters, ACGT, and every living thing is a sentence written with them. For four billion years, only evolution held the pen. Slow, clumsy, with no plan at all.
Lately, we got good at reading that language. CRISPR lets us fix a typo here and there. But my guest today wants to do something bigger. He wants to write whole new sentences. New books, even. From a blank page.
Adrian Woolfson is a doctor trained in Oxford, an author, and the founder of Genyro, a company building the tools to design and print full genomes. He just published a book about it, called On the Future of Species. I wanted to know what it actually means to become an author of life, so I asked him.
From Reading DNA to Writing It
Most of us know, roughly, what DNA is. The instruction manual tucked inside every cell of our bodies. But Adrian's work lives one level up, at the level of the genome, the entire book those instructions are written in.
"Think about DNA as just another language," he told me. "No different to Spanish or English or French, but the alphabet comprises just four letters, four chemicals, ACGT. English has 26 letters, and all of the sentences in English literature are combinations of those 26 letters. In the same way, in the language of life, the alphabet comprises four letters."
And the genome? That's not a sentence or a page. It's the whole story.
"Think of a genome as being the whole story. Instead of a page of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it's the whole One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's the whole book, the whole story."
Up until now, our best tool for touching that story has been CRISPR. But Adrian draws a sharp line between editing and authoring. "CRISPR just edits what evolution has given you. And that's very, very constraining. But imagine if you could actually imagine what life could be like, and then make it happen. That's a pretty formidable power."
The Library of Life That Was Never Read
Here's the part of the conversation that stuck with me the most. Adrian describes all possible genetic combinations as an infinite library, and most of it has never been touched. Every species that has ever existed, from the hen to the potato to the tomato, is just one book pulled off that shelf. Everything else is still sitting there, unread.
"Most possible life has never existed," he said. "The life that does exist or once existed but is now extinct is just the tiniest grain of sand in a universe of possible life."
He used the dodo as an example. The dodo went extinct because sailors introduced pigs to Mauritius, and the pigs ate the eggs. But the dodo's genome, the information itself, never disappeared. "We know that the genome that makes a dodo, the sequence, the information, has a timeless existence. It will always be there."
That idea, that information is more permanent than the body carrying it, is one Mizter Rad Show listeners have run into before. It's close to the territory James Glattfelder explored when we talked about consciousness and the deeper structures underneath physical reality. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, it pairs beautifully with this one.
Feeding the World, Storing the Internet, Fixing the Ocean
So why write new genomes at all? Adrian gave me a list of problems that today feel almost impossible, and tomorrow might just be engineering.
Feeding a growing population without destroying what's left of the wild. "Imagine if you could grow food more efficiently and in places that are inhospitable, like deserts." Turning seawater into drinking water using engineered bacteria. Storing massive amounts of data inside DNA instead of energy-hungry server farms, since, in his words, "ten to twenty percent of the earth's energy is going to be used to support AI." Even producing bioenergy far more efficient than anything evolution ever stumbled into.
None of this is about replacing nature, though. Adrian was firm on that point, and it surprised me. "For me, nature is sacred. We have to value nature. It's come down over four billion years. It's something really essential to who we are as humans." His hope is that synthetic biology lets us stop destroying wild ecosystems by giving us better tools than farmland and fossil fuels, tools built from biology instead of against it.
This is the same tension we explored with Andrew Hessel, when he described building a biological backup of the human body using synthetic DNA. Both conversations circle the same question from different angles: if biology becomes programmable, what do we owe the natural world we're copying from?
The Lines He Won't Cross
Every powerful tool needs guardrails, and Adrian has thought about his more carefully than most. He compared humanity's current relationship with this technology to "three year old kids who've been given a key to a Ferrari."
His personal red lines are specific. Nothing heritable in humans, meaning nothing that gets passed on to future generations, at least not yet. "We don't understand things well enough. It's not fair on a future people that we do that." And any intervention in humans today should be aimed at treating illness, not radically rewriting what a human being is. A modest boost to longevity, sure. Adding centuries to a human life, not yet. "What if you could extend it by hundreds? What would that actually mean for human society, for human nature? Would we still be human as we know it?"
Could We Bring Back a Neanderthal?
Then the conversation went somewhere I did not expect. Adrian has previously argued that we should never write the genome of an extinct human species, like a Neanderthal. He changed his mind.
"I initially wrote under no circumstances should we ever try to write the genomes of extinct human beings. I subsequently revised it." His reasoning: several human species once lived on Earth at the same time, the same way pigeons, ostriches, and flamingos coexist today. "Wouldn't the Neanderthals have been nicer than us? Would they have had a greater sense of ethics and morality? We don't know."
He's not advocating for it. He's simply saying he couldn't find a solid argument to rule it out entirely. As he put it, raising a Neanderthal without biological parents is really no different from a child raised through IVF with a donor. "That's no different."
Beyond the Genetic Code
I pushed Adrian on something that had been on my mind. Learning a language's grammar is one thing. Living inside a culture, picking up the gestures and idioms that only come from being there, is another. Is there a layer of life we can't write into a genome?
"There's development, learning, culture, microbiome, environment. The genome is the foundation," he said. In his analogy, biology hands you the architecture of the building, the shape and number of the rooms. Culture and environment are what furnish it. "We can make a dodo. What we couldn't make is a historical dodo, because they developed their own cry, their own behavior."
Two Futures, Side by Side
I asked Adrian the question I ask almost every guest on this show. Are we heading toward two futures that split apart, one embracing designed biology and transhuman possibility, the other retreating back to something more natural and spiritual?
His answer was honest, and a little unexpected coming from a man building the technology to rewrite species. "I kind of like humans the way they are. They're tried and tested, they're kind of amusing, they're imperfect, they're paradoxical, they're unpredictable. And they're kind of lovable because of that."
But he left the door open to a harder truth. "Will we be able to compete with AI? I don't know. Maybe there's a necessity for us to use this to upgrade. It's not something I believe, but there is an argument."
We are, in his words, time travelers now. Able to reach backward into extinct genomes and forward into ones that have never existed. The tools are here. The instruction manual is still being written. And the question Adrian leaves us with isn't really about biology at all. It's about what kind of species we choose to be while we hold the pen.
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This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools. The Mizter Rad Show is hosted by Mizter Rad.
Guest: Adrian Woolfson, Founder of Genyro. Author of “On the Future of Species”.
Follow Adrian on LinkedIn.
Listen to the full conversation with Adrian on the Mizter Rad Show.
Stay curious, question everything, and maybe just maybe… the most sophisticated machine ever built is not the one in the cage, it's the one reading this sentence right now.
Mizter Rad
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Adrian (00:01.65) biology I think will become part of the infrastructure of human existence in the same way that steel became part of our infrastructure in the nineteenth century. And rather than being a kind of artisanal material as it is today, we've got a few people, you know, making proteins using old fashioned recombinant biology and Stella McCartney making clothes from mushrooms. You know, this is very artisanal and very few people doing it.
But I think, you know, looking forward ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years, everything's gonna change.
Mizter Rad (01:00.792) Beautiful humans, welcome back. Let me ask you something. Think about the last time you held a seed in your hand, this little tiny seed. And inside that tiny thing, all we know, there is a complete set of instructions for building a tree of a or a plant, a living, breathing, growing tree, all written in a language called DNA, a language that has been evolving, refining itself for four billion years.
For four billion years. Nobody wrote that language on purpose. At least that's what we know. Evolution wrote it through mistakes and survival and time, slow, blind, indifferent. It didn't care about you or me. It just selected what worked and threw away the rest. Now here's the thing. We've been learning to read that language for decades. The human genome project, CRISPR, genetic testing, all of those things.
Are just getting us better at reading, understanding what's written. But reading is just one little thing. What if we could write? I'm not talking about editing or correcting a typo, but actually sitting down with a blank paper and write new life. Design a genome the same way an engineer designs a bridge or a road, or the same way a programmer, software developer writes code.
My guest today has dedicated his life to exactly that question. He's the founder of a company called Genyro, which is building technology to design and construct DNA all the way up to full genomes. And he just wrote an important book about it. It's called On the Future of Species. He's a scientist, a thinker, and someone that has spent a long time asking the question. If we are about to get the ability
To write new species into existence. What are the rules? What can we touch? And what should we never ever touch? This, in my opinion, is the perfect guess for the Mr. Rat show. Adrian Woolfson, how are you, man?
Adrian (03:14.494) Bene. I mean Italy actually. So I'll reply in Italian. But hey, what a beautiful summary and description of this problem, if you like, that we have to solve as as humankind in a civilizational level. But beautiful summary and probably one of the most consequential issues that we'll ever have to face as a species. But I'm well, I'm here in Italy and looking forward to speaking to you today.
Mizter Rad (03:42.798) Thank you so much for accepting the invite, Adrian. Before I ask you anything, I want to share something with you and with everyone listening. Like I told you in the beginning, it's a little dispatch from the future, a little news clip. Of course, this comes from a world that doesn't exist yet, but that your work seems to be pointing towards. So let's just listen for a second.
News from the Future — Lena Ferreira (04:09.666) This is Lena Ferreira, reporting for the Global Biology Network. Dateline 2077. This morning, the World Species Council approved the first ever commercial license for a designed vertebrate species. The organism engineered to restore soil fertility across the Sahel region of Africa contains no ancestral DNA sequence. It is, in the truest sense, a new form of life. Critics from the Natural Heritage Coalition called the decision the point of no return.
Supporters called it the beginning of the age of authored ecosystems. Architects across Europe are meanwhile celebrating the fifth anniversary of the first living building. A structure grown, not built. Its walls breathe. Its roof repairs itself after storms. And, somewhere in a laboratory in Seoul, a team is reportedly working on what they are calling a living data center. A structure using synthesized DNA to store the equivalent of the entire internet in a space the size of a shoebox.
Back to you, Mr Rad.
Mizter Rad (05:10.37) So Adrian, is that crazy or is that just a normal Tuesday in twenty seventy seven?
Adrian (05:17.87) I think it's perfectly possible that that we that could happen. biology, I think will become part of the infrastructure of human existence in the same way that steel became part of our infrastructure in the nineteenth century. And rather than being a kind of artisanal material as it is today, we've got a few people, you know, making proteins using old fashioned recombinant biology and Stella McCartney making clothes from
mushrooms, you know, this is very artisanal and very few people doing it. But I think, you know, looking forward 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years, everything's going to change. Biology is going to become your go-to technology. It's a beautiful technology. It's complex, it's sophisticated, it's clean, it doesn't destroy the environment. What's there not to like about it, right? The only thing stopping us from using it is we don't know how
How it works, right? We don't have the instruction manual. We don't understand the rules just yet, but we're getting there.
Mizter Rad (06:23.04) Right. So let's start with something basic, Adrian. What what is it that you do and w what is the problem that you're trying to solve?
Adrian (06:30.53) Yeah, the problem I'm trying to solve is is one that I've kind of been fascinated by since I was a kid, right? Basically, what is life? You know, and the only way to understand what life is is to work out how it got here in the first place, which was my very first book, Life Without Genes, right? And then what it's going to look like in the future, which was my second book. And then this book is really about how could you actually reinvent life? You know, how could you become an author of life?
rather than just a receiver of life that just comes down from an evolutionary tree. How can you take a blank page and just write what you like? Imagine how life could be, rather than taking a text and redlining it, which is what CRISPR does. CRISPR just edits what evolution has given you. And that's very, very constraining. But imagine if you could actually imagine what life could be like.
And then make it happen. You know, that that's a pretty formidable power which could be used to do some pretty important and constructive things for humanity.
Mizter Rad (07:36.598) Hmm. So basically for for me to understand and for the audience to have it very clear, most people know what DNA is, roughly, I believe. And and just you know, to to put the base out there, it's in very simple words, the instruction manual in inside every cell of our bodies. And I wanna understand what the genome is, just so people have it clear as well. And why does it matter?
that we can now start writing a genome from scratch, like you said on a blank paper.
Adrian (08:12.546) Yeah, first of all, for your readers who are not, you know, scientists, you know, just think about DNA as just another language, right? No different to Spanish or English or French, but the alphabet comprises just four letters, you know, four chemicals, ACGT. English has 26 letters, and all of the sentences in English literature are combinations of those 26 letters. In the same way, in the language of life, the alphabet comprises four letters. And
Everything you can say in biology, all of life is coded by sentences, if you like, written and whole written in those combinations of those four chemicals. So the genome is the book, right? You know, it rather than just sentences or paragraphs or pages, think of a genome as being the whole story, right? It's instead of a page of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it's the whole a hundred years of solitude, right?
A thousand years? A hundred years, right? Yeah. it's the whole book, right? And the genome is the whole book. It's not a page, it's not a sentence, it's the whole book, the whole story.
Mizter Rad (09:18.998) Okay. And why is it important that we start writing a new genome from from from the scratch, let's say?
Adrian (09:24.866) Well, the the many, many reasons. You know, the first reason obviously would be to do things that we need to do on a daily basis, like feed the world, right? And how do you feed the world? You can either the problem we have right now is you've got a you know exponentially growing population and we're just destroying the environment around us, destroying wilderness to create more farming land. And eventually there won't be any wilderness left, right, on earth. And that's a real problem. But imagine if you could
growth food more efficiently and in places at the moment that are inhospitable, like deserts and places with a lot of salinity or
Mizter Rad (10:02.678) Like here in Saudi Arabia, for example.
Adrian (10:05.022) Exactly. Imagine if you could turn that desert green. And I think that the ability to write biology gives you the opportunity to engineer the design of plants from first principles to allow that to happen. That's you know, that's one example, right? Another example is as you said beautifully in your introduction, that evolution got us to where we are today without any intention. You know, there was no plan, there was no
Organization, there was no mind saying, hey, these are the species that we're going to evolve, right? It just happened and there's a lot of chance in there. And imagine if, as a result of that chance process, the hen had never evolved. You'd never have an egg in the morning. Imagine if the banana had never evolved, or the potato, or rice, or tomatoes, right? Well, just in the same way that those things do exist, right?
Just imagine all the things like that that don't exist, right? Not because they're not useful or could really help us, but just because history didn't go down that route, right? So if you can understand how biology works and you have a ma a method for building biology, you can begin to look around in this kind of infinite library of books and yeah, I'd like I'd like to take that book off the library. It's never been read.
By anybody in history, but that book potentially could feed the world because it's a crop that grows in the desert, is highly nutritious, doesn't need much water, and could be really, really useful for humans. So it's a question of optimizing things that do exist and discovering things that don't exist. And statistically, you know, you could almost argue that most of life or most possible life has never existed, right? Because
The life that does exist or once existed but is now extinct is just the tiniest grain of sand in a universe of possible life. It it exists mathematically, if you like, in this kind of DNA virtual space, but it's real, right? Because let's think of an example. Think of the dodo. We all know about dodos, right? They used to live on on Mauritius, and then the the Portuguese sailors came along, they killed all the dodos because they introduced
Adrian (12:28.576) wild pigs on the island which ate all the dodo eggs, right? So there are no more dodos. Does that mean that dodos no longer exist? Actually no, because we know that the genome that makes a dodo, the sequence, the information, has a timeless existence. It will always be there. So
Mizter Rad (12:48.11) So where is that? Sorry to jump in there, but where is that genome? I mean, did did someone it
Adrian (12:53.558) It doesn't have a physical existence today, right? Well, actually, it does. It does have a physical existence because there are stuffed dodos in museums like this one in Oxford, right? So we can actually see sequence, we can read the the genome of a dodo. And then if we're able to make genomes with technologies like the one we use, we invented at Genyro, then yeah, you could make a dodo, right? Now I only use that example because I'm trying to explain to your readers.
That creatures that once existed and no longer exist still do exist in the sense that their information is always going to be there because we know that a dodo-like creature can be made, because evolution once made one. We just killed them all, right? Now imagine that there are many, many, many other such creatures which have never existed, right? We've never tested them, they've never come out of the box, right? But their information.
Is somewhere in that library of all possible life, right? And that's what the ability to write life gives you. It kind of opens up this endless, infinite library of possibility that we can explore. It's like a treasure trove that we could use to help humanity. So for example, imagine if we could create a bacteria that could take seawater and turn it into drinking water, right? Imagine that. Imagine if we could make a bacteria that could
eat up microplastics in the environment, for example, right? Now I'm not saying there are no dangers with creating new species and releasing them. And actually I think we have to be very careful about releasing new species into environments because we know that ecosystems are very fragile and very difficult to predict the effects of altering them. However, I think that if we use these technologies really cautiously and kind of contain them,
Then we could use them to our advantage. So for example, you could imagine an instrument where you fed in salt water and drinking water comes out the other end, and you have these bacteria in the middle that are kind of getting rid of the salt, right? For example, right? Another kind of example of how new species could be useful. imagine we could engineer write out the sequences of bacterial genomes.
Adrian (15:19.618) That could make bioenergy, right? Imagine if we could use biology to store information. I mean, ten to twenty percent of the earth's energy is going to be used to support AI and other such thing. Imagine if we could do all of that without using all that energy, which destructs the environment, creates greenhouse gases, and so on, right? Imagine if we could use that same information also to kind of reverse engineer our own biology.
And work out why we get ill or why we only live as long as we do. Imagine if you could live
Mizter Rad (15:54.028) Let's let's go step by step because I like I like that part that you talked about storing information and creating new forms of energy. How would that specifically work? If we are able to, you know, design, synthesize a genome, what kind of genome would you think should we should be synthesizing to create new energy? How would that work? Just for me to have it clear.
Adrian (16:20.226) Yeah, well that that's probably one of the easier, easier problems we have to solve, right? Because there are all kinds of different ways of of making bioenergy. And in fact people are are doing that as we speak, right? But they're doing it in a quite a simple way, just generally playing around with existing organisms, right? But if you can take life out of evolution, put it into the garage, right, put out your kind of
you know, piece of paper and your graphic design and all of that, and sketch out a new a new design for a for a bacterium that can produce a kind of energy that's way more efficient than any existing organism might do, then that could be the be a real game changer, you know. And so it's really it's really just moving away from the kind of infrastructure that evolution has created for us.
And just thinking outside of the box using AI, because I don't think we're able to do this without AI. I mean, AI is proving to be incredibly useful for working out these kind of generative rules. because I I made the an analogy between languages and and DNA as a language. And like like a spoken or written language, DNA, the language of DNA has a grammar, right? We just don't fully understand those rules. But when we do
We can use them in every domain that I've talked about so far.
Mizter Rad (17:48.824) So you're saying that we need AI to read those rules. And I wanna I wanna get into that in a second, but I wanna wait a minute here because what you're saying basically is we're entering this post-Darwinian age, basically. I grew up thinking that evolution took, you know thousands of years based on Darwin's theory and that we cannot manipulate it and that, you know, like I was saying in the intro, some of the stuff from my body.
helps me and a lot of stuff doesn't help me and therefore I'll I'm a dying species, let's say dying individual, dying organism. sounds tragic, but it is what it is. That's the sort of roughness of this kind of theory evolution theory, let's say. But now you're saying we're going into this post-Sarwinian age where there will be two types of sort of
lives coexisting in the planet, a life shaped by that natural evolution that I'm talking about, but also a life shaped by human design, artificial. What does that actually look like for someone walking down the street in 20 years from now?
Adrian (19:05.656) Yeah, well it might it might not look very different. I mean, you're absolutely right. There's there's a new show in town, right? There's no longer one author of life, which is natural authorship. There's a new author, and that author is us working closely with AI. The end result hopefully won't look very different, right? I mean, life life is life, right? and I suspect it's gonna be some time before we're kind of bold enough to start to release well, I hope we're bold enough, because
There are risks, right? But before we start to release new life into the environment, right? So I don't think things are going to look very different, but I think what you're going to start to see is the is is infrastructure built using biology, whether it's biomaterials or information storage or biocomputing, where you know the stuff around you is going to look the same. I'm not suggesting we're any mad rush to release new life into nature, right? I think we need to be really
really cautious before we consider doing that. But what I'm hoping actually is that by by increasing the efficiency of the things that we do, like storing information, making food, you know, biocomputing, energy production, all of those things, by using biology, that we will stop destroying nature. You know, because it's funny, when people think about what I'm doing, which is synthetic biology, they sometimes think, you're trying to
You're trying to move away from nature, right? Actually, paradoxically, it's almost the opposite. For me, nature is sacred. We have to value nature. You know, because it's, you know, it's come down over four billion years. It's something really essential to who we are as humans. You can't really separate us from the world we live in, but we're destroying that world, right? So I think that we can use synthetic biology to return a lot of the world to wilderness to let species.
do their thing to exist, to evolve naturally. But if we use synthetic biology really thoughtfully and carefully and responsibly and ethically and in a way where everybody benefits equitably, right? Then we can use it for the greater good of us and for nature and help preserve that heritage because I think it is worth preserving. It's something special.
Mizter Rad (21:24.414) Absolutely. And I this is a good bridge to ethics and and those lines that we cannot cross or we should not cross that I think you've talked about before in previous conversations that you had, but also speeches that you've had that I can see online and anyone that is listening to this conversation wants to know more about your life and your background should go and check you out on YouTube. You find a lot of content, good content of Adrian.
But talking about those lines that we kind of cross, you're describing that we we have now and and increasingly we will have more and more this ability to write new species, to create life. And you yourself have called before to create us humans to create some guardrails, some some bands on certain things and some oversight. So I want to ask you directly, why do you think are those non negotiable
lines, those things that should not be crossed, no matter how good our technology gets. What is that sacred, sacred thing?
Adrian (22:29.986) Yeah, great great great question. And I'll just before I answer, I'll just simply say as well that right now, the way I see us, so we're like kind of three year old kids who've been given a key to a Ferrari, right? You know, we're sitting in a Ferrari and we have no idea how to really to to drive it. And and frankly, you know, if we do drive it, we've got to drive it really, really slowly with an adult on board, right? And somebody who knows a little bit about, you know.
various things like navigation and the dangers of drug right. So I got that's how I kind of see us. We've kind of unleashed this incredibly powerful and consequential technology, which is improving almost exponentially, you know, month by month, right? So so we we most importantly caution. Go slowly, you know, be be careful governance. But to answer your question specifically, I think personally that I'm
I I would draw the line right now at any, first of all, for the time being, anything heritable in humans, right? That we should not at the moment do anything to humans which is passed on to our offspring. So we can do things somatically which aren't inherited, but at the moment I I I think we're not ready to do anything which involves heredity because we just don't know at present, we don't understand things well enough, right? It's not fair.
on a future people that that we do that, right? Number one, right? number two, anything that we do to humans now, somatically, i.e., not in an inherited way, should only be addressed to illness. That's to me really important, right? So I think it's okay to treat disease. It may be okay eventually to increase longevity by a certain amount, right? But then
You get to my and that so I disease fine. You know, anything that involves treating diseases somatically, I non-inherited totally fine. Anything that increases longevity by a reasonable amount, and that's a philosophical debate, what reasonable is, is okay. Right. If if tomorrow somebody worked out a way of increasing longevity by a hundred years, I would, you know, this is concerning to me, right? Because as a society, we're just not
Adrian (24:55.342) structured or ready in any shape or form to deal with that, right? And people don't often think about these things, you know, in advance. Everybody's looking for, I mean, the investment in longevity is huge right now, right? But nobody but nobody stopped to think, what if you actually succeed, right? What if you you're able to extend life not by five years, not by ten years? What if you could extend it by hundreds? What would that actually mean?
For human society, for human nature, right? Would we be, would we still be human as we know it, right? So I think that I would draw the line for any intervention in longevity beyond like, you know, five or ten years. You could argue that's totally irrational, right? Because you could argue that, hey, if we'd had this conversation in the 19th century, right? Where
the average life expectancy might be two or three decades at the most, right? And and if we had this conversation and and and and you were asking me, hey, what if we could invent something called this hypothetical antibiotics, which meant that when you got an infection you wouldn't die, right? Or some of you when you've got cancer, wouldn't I? And I'd say, no, no, no, because living to ninety, which is more or less what we could hope to live to today if we live in
know with the right resources and are fortunate enough to be able to feed ourselves et cetera etc right you might say well no because humans are only meant to live 30 years right and to live to 90 is unnatural and of course now we would say no of course we want to live to 90 it's perfectly natural right so I think the concept of natural and artificial itself is is a very interesting concept because in a sense what's possible is natural.
Right. So if you could live to 200. I mean, the bristle cone pine in California, I think it's California, but it but lives for up to four thousand years, right? So there is a press there is a precedent of a living organism that can live for four thousand years. Go figure that, right? So imagine if imagine if we could understand how that happens. This I mean, I'm not saying we that you can just transfer the biology of
Adrian (27:14.12) Bristle comb pine to a human. But let's hypothetically say that you as a scientist tomorrow, you know, suddenly discovered a a way to do that. I mean, would we really want to do that? Right. I mean, I think the answer has to be a resounding no, right? But you know, is that part of nature, but at the extremes of nature or in a sense, anything we can do is natural, right? But
The rate at which things are changing today, including AI and you know, it can be very, very disruptive to our way of life, to society, to our economies, to the way that we are human, right? So
Mizter Rad (27:55.054) Adrian, because how do we set the rules for that not to happen? Because we live in a world that is driven by profit. And if you have the poison, the remedy for people to live 200 years today, and that person that invents that that company that comes up with that formula is obviously
you know, in the marketplace they're probably driven by profit. They're not gonna stop and not sell that if they have you know like who like I I understand y what you're saying, I completely agree with that, but but who's gonna set the rule who's gonna put the stop?
Adrian (28:30.2) Yeah, yeah.
Adrian (28:39.922) yeah, the the our conversation is getting into areas now, which is so interesting that I kind of feel we need to have an eight hour show to to really discuss this, right? But but you know, here's the thing, right? I'm a I'm a doctor, I I trained as a medical doctor in Oxford in England, right? And as a doctor, you know, why why do you become a doctor? You become a doctor because you don't want people to suffer, you don't want people to get ill, and actually you don't really want them to die, right? I mean, that's why you become a doctor, right?
Now, for all of human history, it was perfectly okay for physicians to work with that mindset, right? Because honestly, there was never really a prospect, a realistic prospect, that you would ever get rid of all disease, right? And and the idea of extreme longevity or immortality was always restricted to mythology, right? I'm always I've always been of the belief that anything humans can imagine is possible. Look at
religious iconography, angels, humans with wings, right? I mean, those guys, those artists were anticipating synthetic biology, right? Right there, because they imagined, look at chimeric creatures in in ancient Greek mythology, you know, crossing, look at unicorns, horses with you know, with the with these big narwell like horns, look at griffins, look at dragons, you know, all of our mythology basically preempted
Synthetic biology, right? Because we know that we can play around with morphology and mix and match and all of that. We know that we can engineer biology, right? But when it comes down to human health and longevity, we never really seriously believe that we could actually achieve the goal, right? And and so we've never had to sit down and think about it, right? But actually, you know, there is a real prospect that sometime, and I I can't give you a time frame, but
You know, it might not be as long as we think, right? There may well come a time in a reasonable time frame where we could actually get rid of a lot of disease which isn't environmentally driven or economically driven, and we could actually greatly increase our lifespan. So what does it mean to be a doctor? What is what is you know, where are we heading as a species? What does it mean to be human? Where are the boundaries of Homo sapiens? You know, as we as we understand it, right?
Adrian (31:04.014) You know, the the the rates the rate at which science is advancing is so fast now that we we're barely able to keep up the the philosophy, if you like, is barely, you know, we're barely able to keep up with the science. There's a huge disconnect between the science and our ability to understand, interpret it at a kind of societal level. Because you know, AI AI can can do everything which isn't morality, ethics.
Mizter Rad (31:33.162) Right. Engineering wise. It's very good at that. Yeah.
Adrian (31:37.132) Yeah, but it can't do the rest, which is why you have human brains, right? At the moment it can't. And if it could, we can't be certain it would do it in a way that we would feel is reasonable. So there's a massive, massive disconnect right here, right now, between s the rate at which science is moving and the rate at which our ability to kind of deal with that and structure it in a kind of moral, ethical, and s societal manner.
Yeah, there's a massive disconnect there. And and I I don't think that the answer is to slow down science, right? But it is an issue and and and we we need to find out a fight discover a way to deal with this.
Mizter Rad (32:16.77) That that's the reason why I like to have these conversations. And I think that's the reason why listeners to the this podcast tune in every two weeks. Because we just not talk about the future in a doom bust way, like a lot of news channels do, but we talk about the science and what can we actually do as human beings to to stay human, I guess. So on that note.
And I know you've talked about this before, and I can't get this out of my head. When you talked about in a conversation with someone else about synthesizing the genome of a Neanderthal, and you gave this as an example, of course, and you started imagining, okay, you synthesize the genome of a Neanderthal. Now you have a Neanderthal in contemporary times, contemporary London in a university, going to study there with normal people, let's say. So that makes me think.
If you can, you know, construct construct the past, build the past, bring it, bring it back to the present, and you can, based on what we've talked today, build the future and bring it back to the present, are we starting to sort of play with time itself, like some some sort of time travel in a way?
Adrian (33:38.19) We we've already become time travelers. The minute you can materialize anywhere in DNA sequence space, you're a time traveler, right? Because DNA, the space of all possible genomes, is a timeless space, right? Time only runs when you build something, right? But if you can navigate that entire space with a a a technology that can design DNA and write it, then you have a time machine, right? So you can go backwards in time and you can go into the future.
Before the future's been written, right? Now you you said normal humans. I mean, Neanderthals are normal humans, right? They're just a different species. They're as normal as we are, right? But so let me let me tell you something interesting. When I when I wrote my book, because you asked me about barriers and things where I'd absolutely draw the limits. And when I well the 12th chapter of my book is called A Manifesto for Life. And I I refer to it as a sketch for a manifesto because no individual
has the right in my view to trying to write a manifesto for life. That's a kind of human, you know, human activity for all of civilization. But but we have a I have a right to write a sketch for a manifesto because then you guys, you know, everybody in the world can start to refine it and build on it. And you know, so I wrote a sketch for a manifesto. And when I wrote my manifesto, I initially, and I'm just being very transparent with you here, right? I initially wrote under no circumstances should we ever
Try to write the genomes of extinct human beings, right? And that would include Neanderthals. I subsequently revised it, and I'll tell you why in a second. And I said something like this: I said, the issue of whether we should ever write the genomes of extinct human beings is a thorny one, right? And I'll tell you why I changed my mind on that, right? In other words, I left the door open a little bit instead of fully closing it, right? Right. Here's the reason why.
Because those guys once existed, right? Like the dodo. There were, you know, as we know, there were five, six, seven or more species of humans on Earth living together. I wouldn't say necessarily in harmony, we because we don't know that they were, but they were there in the same way that today you've got pigeons and ostriches and pelicans and flamingos and sparrows, all these different species of birds, right? They kind of more or less look the same, but they're different, right?
Adrian (36:04.226) And we know nothing about those guys. You know, like wouldn't the Anatoles have been nicer than us? Would they have had a a greater sense of ethics and morality? Would they have started fewer wars? Would they have been able to write the magic flute? Wouldn't the Andetal have been able to write, you know, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? You know, would they have been able to paint a Matisse painting? We don't know, right? We've no idea, right?
But I can tell you one thing, right? That I'm almost certain I I'd I'd be if anyone is watching this in however many hundreds of years' time, this is a a bet that can only be realized in the future, right? But I would bet you, if this ever happens, that if we were to build a Neanderthal, right, and if we were to educate them in the same school and the same university, that they they wouldn't be that different from us, right?
Other than the fact they may have different skill sets to us. They might be brilliant mathematicians or terrible mathematicians or brilliant artists or terrible, you know, we don't know, right? but they they may have different ground rules for morality kind of wired in, or a propensity to be more or less emotional, or whatever it is. But fundamentally, I don't think they'd be that different to us. Just, you know. So you could argue that.
you know, the there's nothing intrinsically wrong or immoral about recreating an ancient species of human. Now people will say, but they don't have parents, right? But that happens the whole time. What what happens when we do IVF with donors, right? Those guys don't have biological parents. They're raised by loving parents who aren't their biological parents. That's no different, right? So I don't I couldn't in when I thought about this carefully and I really did.
In the end, after a lot of thought, I couldn't come up with a good reason. And I'm sure a load of other people will come up with good reasons, right? But you know, I couldn't come up with a good reason to totally rule it out. I'm not saying I'm an advocate of this. I'm not saying it's wrong or right to do it. I'm just saying I couldn't categorically say you should never do it on that particular one.
Mizter Rad (38:19.054) So th that makes me think that you maybe you agree with this, actually, that there is much more beyond the genetic code and we're just scratching the surface. And what I mean with this is like when you talk about describing DNA as a language, and you said that if you wanna learn German or Portuguese or Spanish, you have to learn the grammar to learn the language. And if you want to write genome.
In this case, you would have to learn the grammar of DNA. But then here's my thought and my challenge to you. One thing is learning the grammar, and I've been doing that actually recently with German, maybe you with Italian. But a totally different thing is being in, for example, spending some time in Italy and understanding that this movement with the hands means something, or in German that this movement means something as well, or understanding the idioms.
the things you only get from being embedded actually in the in the culture. Do you think there's a layer of life? Do you think there's a layer of life, something beyond that genetic code that we still don't understand, that maybe we cannot program?
Adrian (39:31.628) There's development, learning, culture, microbiome, environment, you know, all of that. Right. So the dream the genome is the foundation, right? And you're touching on the key issue and the the the issue which is a let's say a controversial issue between people like me who are optimists about the ability to use biology predictively and other people who say, it's too complicated, you're never going to be able to model it, precisely for that reason because
You know, if you if the temperature is high or low, you become a male or a female if you're if you're a fish or whatever, you know. The environment clearly has wrong. But what my argument is is that basically to use the g the the language analogy, so you you may speak with a different dialect or accent or whatever of Italian, depending where in Italy you are, Sicily, Milan or whatever. Fundamentally, assuming you all learn Italian rather than dialect.
I mean, I'm talking about local dogs, but proper, you know, the national Italian that everybody speaks. fundamentally, you may speak it with a different accent, you may not do the sort of, you know, the Italian mannerisms or whatever, right? But we'll still be able to recognize that you're speaking Italian, right? So what I'm saying is that biology can predict the kind of the basics. So we can make a dodo. What we couldn't make is a historical dodo, because they learned, they developed their own cry, their own behavior.
There's another kind of parallel track of information which organisms some organisms transmit culturally, right? But more or less, you know, the biology in in a kind of deterministic manner gives you the bare bone structure. You know, it's like you can, you know, when people buy apartments in newly built buildings, right? The building's architecture is going to be standard. The the shape of the rooms, the number of rooms.
But what they let you do is they let you put in your own furniture or decide how many windows there are or you see what I'm saying? So I'm saying that that the the genetics gives you the bare bone structure, which, you know, you can tell what that building is going to look like. And then environment, learning, culture fills in some of that detail.
Mizter Rad (41:41.652) Hm. So with with everything that you just said, do you think we're getting closer to understanding where we come from? Or are we building a sort of like a a new you know a new something so new that the question of origin basically stops mattering?
Adrian (42:02.54) No, the the pr the issue of how we got here will always be an immensely important scientific problem. And, you know, evolution is a pretty good you know, explanation. How life originated remains a kind of problem that we don't fully understand, how something came from nothing, how the universe itself came from nothing is something our minds aren't able to comprehend. Maybe AI will eventually be able to do that, right? But
But I think there's kind of separate problems. You know, one is how did we get here? The other is does it matter now that we can write things from scratch, right? So we're no longer constrained by history. We can kind of draw a line. The very concept of species itself, you could argue, for remains relevant for natural life, but totally irrelevant for designed life because the concepts of species was meant to kind of capture descent, linear transmission of information.
And the prov you know, interbre the the fact there was reproductive isolation. When you can just mix and match DNA a as you please and write it from scratch, actually the concept of species is no longer even relevant, right? So it's just a f it's totally you're going in a totally new direction.
Mizter Rad (43:16.428) Right. Well, I have to say that there's still always a question in my head when I talk to people like you that are very forward thinking, and that is I have this feeling that we're heading toward two very different futures existing by side by side. And on the one side, people that embrace all of this design buddies, author biology, transhuman possibilities, all these futuristic futuristic topics. But then on the other side, people who
go the opposite direction, back to nature, more spiritual and more present. Do you think both of these futures can coexist or do you think eventually one of them will win?
Adrian (43:56.684) Yeah, I'm gonna be really succinct because I I know we're almost out of time and that's such an amazing question. So forgive my brevity, right? It deserves a longer answer than I can give, right? But basically I I'm kind of in both camps, but mainly in the second, right? Maybe irrationally, and I think it is irrational if I'm honest. I kind of like humans the way they are. They're tried and tested, they're kind of amusing, they're imperfect, they're paradoxical, they're unpredictable.
And they're kind of lovable because of that, right? So I kind of like this hodgepodge mixture of characteristics that we have, this craziness of being human. I think the world would be really boring if we were totally rational, if we didn't make mistakes, if we had perfect memories and all of that. So I'm of the camp that, hey, let's try and keep humans kind of the way they are. Having said that, will we be able to compete with AI? I don't know. If we don't upgrade a little bit, you know, like.
Would they even keep us as pets to amuse themselves? Maybe not. Maybe we would become as irrelevant to AI as, you know, is the yeah, I I never tread on ants myself. I'm like those Indian monks, but some people do, right? Maybe we'll be like mosquitoes or ants, you know, that our relevance will be really in question. Maybe there's a necessity for us to kind of use this to upgrade. It's not something I believe, right? But there is an argument. But it's been such a pleasure talking to you. I really
I've enjoyed it, Mario, honestly.
Mizter Rad (45:23.96) Exactly. This has been a very mind expanding conversation and I have to say that we you're one of the best forward thinkers I've had in my show. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for taking me in this journey.
Adrian (45:37.676) My pleasure. And let's let's do it again in ten years and see where we are.
Mizter Rad (45:41.294) Thank you, Adrian. Have a good evening. Yeah. Chao, ciao.
Beautiful humans until next time stay curious, question everything, and maybe just maybe think about the following what you are today may be just a draft of yourself.