Conference Presentation, Keynote
The Future Will Be Genetically Engineered
- Everything in the world, including food, therapeutics, materials, manufacturing infrastructure, and consumer goods, is expected to be genetically engineered, transitioning humanity from manual design to computer-aided design similar to electronics or aerospace engineering.
- The field is projected to move from repurposing natural parts to designing genetically encoded molecules and entire genomes from the ground up, potentially granting complete control over the flow of information, matter, and energy within living systems.
- Current applications are shifting toward computer-aided tools where half of team resources focus on computational methods, utilizing machine learning to predict neoantigens, scan DNA sequences, and simulate genetic constructs in silico before physical construction.
- Material expectations include pervasive engineered biology comparable to integrated circuits, with living components for homes and cars expected within a couple of decades, featuring self-healing driveways and materials that extract pollutants.
- Medical advancements aim to rival nature's complexity with integrated systems containing multiple layers of sensors and actuators, including personalized cancer vaccines, next-generation cell therapies, and optogenetic brain-computer interfaces using photons.
- Future engineering will involve large teams programming single living cells with specialized sub-teams for metabolism, computation, and sensing, using high-level abstractions rather than focusing on individual base pairs.
- Long-term visions extend to decades-out capabilities for manufacturing in space stations, terraforming other planets, engineering biomes, and potentially achieving whole brain emulation via genetically encoded mapping.
- Risks and challenges involve the immense complexity of biological systems which may eventually exceed human holistic understanding, necessitating unbiased statistical approaches and iterative improvement through massive datasets.
- Historical context highlights a trajectory from selective breeding millennia ago to 1970s DNA engineering, with current milestones including insulin production, over 90% of cheese production using recombinant chymosin, and recent FDA approvals for transgenic salmon and glowfish.
- The timeline for total genetic engineering pervasiveness is described as inevitable, with the sphere of possibilities growing without bound as synthetic biology addresses the "insane amount of technical debt" accumulated over four billion years of evolution.