Tomorrowland (26 page)

The original House bill went nowhere, but it was quickly rewritten and reintroduced by Dave Weldon (R-Florida) and became known as the Weldon Bill. The debate surrounding the bill
should have been about stem cells. It should have been about the facts. Instead, because of conflation, it was about the ramifications of human cloning, or, more specifically, eugenics, the commodification of humanity, setting a proper moral example, and — of course — the Nazis. The House passed the Weldon Bill in three hours.

6.

Irv Weissman’s kitchen is a sprawling affair. It is large and rectangular and filled with a full compliment of shiny stainless steel appliances. On the evening of December 11, 2002, Weissman stands among those appliances, wearing a long chef’s apron and a serious expression. He has a wineglass in one hand and a long wooden ladle in the other and is staring intensely at the goose he is preparing for dinner.

Seated around a long table are Weissman’s guests, which tonight include his sister Lauren, once a Hollywood producer and now the executive director of Cures Now; Leroy Hood, another top scientist and the man who invented the DNA sorter that sequenced the human genome; and Ann Tsukamoto, a scientist with StemCells, Inc. The group has gathered to celebrate an announcement made the day prior at Stanford, when the institution declared its plans to capitalize on $12 million of anonymously donated seed money and build a $120 million Institute for Stem Cell Biology to be headed up by Weissman. In other words, in the war over stem cells, Stanford just declared itself the Western Front.

And make no mistake, the research they plan to do there is much needed. Building on Weissman’s previous work with blood-forming stem cells, the Stanford institute will initially focus on discovering the stem cells that become the other major organs of the body — that way, if these organs become cancerous, they’ll have new ways to fight the disease.

“It’s not only new ways to fight the disease,” says Weissman, taking a break from goose-cooking duties to join the conversation. “That’s only the first step. We also know that there are cancer-forming stem cells. If we can isolate these, we can get to the very root of every type of cancer. This would give us new, biologically specific targets for drugs. And because the institute is in this state, California will be the first place these therapies will come out. Our biotech companies will produce them, and Californians will get the first crack at these treatments.”

As expected, Stanford’s announcement sparked a firestorm. The media jumped on the news, with the dangers of human cloning getting heavy play. The Associated Press, the first outlet to cover the story, began its article: “Stanford has said its new cancer institute will conduct stem cell research using nuclear-transfer techniques — work that many consider to be cloning of human cells.” ABC News followed suit: “The president believes that the creation and destruction of embryos for the purpose of research or reproduction is morally wrong. He is against cloning of any kind and feels there are other biomedical research avenues.”

Of course, Leon Kass also issued a press release. “Stanford has decided to proceed with cloning research without public scrutiny and deliberation,” he wrote, then went on to say that the President’s Council on Bioethics wants a four-year moratorium on therapeutic cloning and does not endorse the Stanford Institute. Oddly, no such moratorium has ever been recommended and Kass issued this statement without consulting anyone else on the council — so no one besides Kass was ever asked if they supported the institute.

Not that any of this is surprising. After all, what’s a little deception in the face of the bigger war — a war that is far from over. The cloning debate rages at all levels of the government, recently refueled by the UFO-worshipping Raelians’ 2003 announcement that they had created the world’s first human clone. Never mind that, just prior to that announcement, the Bush administration
blocked a worldwide U.N. ban on reproductive cloning that might have stopped the Raelians in their supposed work. The ban was vetoed because it did not also include therapeutic cloning and was insufficient for the religious right. Meanwhile, a middle-of-the-road estimate of how many Americans will die from diseases that stem cell research might soon cure is 130 million.

Back at the stove, Weissman lays down his spoon and nods his head: “This goose is cooked.”

Hacking the President’s DNA

THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLAYING GOD

Cowritten with Andrew Hessel and Marc Goodman

A couple months after I finished the first draft of this book, I sent it to author Howard Bloom for feedback. In his response, Howard went off on the kind of delicious, head-spinning tangent for which he is famous. Along the way, he also managed to sum up both the ideas in this chapter and the ideas in this book as a whole.

Technically, this chapter is about the upstart field of synthetic biology — a technology with both incredible and dangerous implications. But before we get to those dangers, it’s worth pausing to consider what’s really going on here. Synthetic biology unlocks one of the universe’s deepest secrets — the mystery of life, the formula for creation. It is quite a long step forward.

Or, as Howard Bloom so eloquently puts it: “It’s time to abandon the Greek idea that hubris is bad and face a simple fact — hubris is what the cosmos seems to want from us. We humans are pushing beyond the boundaries of what this cosmos has ever achieved. And that is what the cosmos seems to ache for. She has torn up her old rules over and over again. Once upon a time this universe made a big bang from nothing; then she made quarks and leptons from a raw rush of time, space, and speed. But that didn’t satisfy her. She ripped up the rules again and
made atoms, galaxies, stars, life, and mind. In our acts of invention, we are not defacing nature; we are upgrading her. And radical self-improvement is what nature has been about for 13.8 billion years. That’s what this book is about. It’s about humans who have the audacity to change the nature of reality. It’s about humans who have the audacity to join in nature’s creative process, in her quest for more than mere self-improvement, in her quest for self reinvention. Radical self-reinvention.”

1.

This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously. In the early 2000s, businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowdsourced to a larger group via the Internet. Initially, offerings were simple. We crowdsourced the design of T-shirts (
Threadless.com
) and the writing of encyclopedias (
Wikipedia.com
), but it didn’t take long for the trend to start making inroads into the harder sciences. Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into new and novel proteins were being done this way. With the fundamental tools of genetic manipulation — tools that cost millions of dollars not ten years ago — dropping precipitously in price, the crowdsourced design of biological agents was just the next logical step.

In 2008, casual DNA design competitions with small prizes arose; then, in 2011, with the launch of GE’s $100 million cancer challenge, the field moved onto serious contests. By early 2015, as personalized gene therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine’s bleeding edge, viral design sites began to appear where people could upload information about their disease, and virologists could post designs for a customized cure. Medically speaking, it all made perfect sense: Nature has done eons of excellent design work on viruses. With a little, relatively simple retooling, they were perfect vehicles for drug delivery.

It didn’t take long for these sites to be flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even designer psychoactive drugs — all appeared on the menu. What people did with these biodesigns was anybody’s
guess. No international body had yet been created to watch over them.

So, in December 2015, when a first-time visitor named Captain Capsid posted a challenge on the viral design website 99Virions, no alarms sounded; it was just one of the hundred design requests submitted that day. Captain Capsid might have been some consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and the challenge just another attempt to understand the radically shifting R&D landscape — really, he could have been anyone — but the problem was interesting nonetheless. Plus, Capsid was offering $500 for the winning design, not a bad sum for a few hours work.

Later, 99Virion’s log files would show that Captain Capsid’s IP address originated in Panama, although this was likely spoofed. The design specification itself raised no red flags. Written in SBOL, an open-source language similar to XML and popular with the synthetic biology crowd, it seemed like a standard vaccine request. So people just got to work, as did the automated computer programs that had been written to “auto-evolve” new designs. These algorithms were getting quite good, now winning over 30 percent of the challenges.

In less than twelve hours, 243 designs were submitted, most by these computerized expert systems. But the winner, GeneGenie27, was actually human — a twenty-year-old Columbia University undergrad with a knack for virology. His design was quickly forwarded to GENeBAY, a thriving Shanghai-based biomarketplace. Less than sixty seconds later, an Icelandic synthesis startup got the contract to turn the 5,984-base-pair blueprint into actual, doubled-stranded DNA. Twenty-four hours after that, a package of 10 mm fast-dissolving microtablets was dropped in a FedEx envelope and handed to a courier.

Two days later, Samantha, a sophomore political science major at Harvard University, received the package. Thinking it contained a new, synthetic psychedelic, she slipped the tab into her left nostril and walked over to her closet. By the time Samantha
had finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve and a few strands of DNA had crossed into the cells of her nasal mucosa.

Some party drug — all she got was the flu.

Later that evening, Samantha had a slight fever and was shedding billions of virus particles. These particles would continue to spread around campus in an exponentially growing chain reaction that was — other than the mild fever and some sneezing — absolutely harmless. This would change when the virus crossed paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, a sequence that would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that were not so benign. This second sequence would trigger a fast-acting neurodegenerative disease that produced memory loss, extreme paranoia, eventually death. The only person in the world with this sequence was the president of the United States, who was scheduled to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School later that week. Sure, there would be thousands of sniffling people on campus, but the Secret Service probably wouldn’t think anything was amiss.

It was December, after all — cold and flu season.

2.

Does the scenario we’ve just sketched sound like nothing beyond science fiction? If so, consider that since the turn of the twenty-first century, rapidly accelerating technology has shown a distinct tendency to turn the impossible into the everyday in no time at all. A few years back, IBM’s Watson, an artificial intelligence, whipped the human champion, Ken Jennings, on
Jeopardy
. As we write this, soldiers with bionic limbs are fighting our enemies and autonomous cars are driving down our streets. Yet most of these advances are small in comparison to the great leap forward currently underway in the biosciences — a leap with consequences we’ve only begun to imagine.

More to the point, consider that the Secret Service is already taking extraordinary steps to protect presidential DNA. According to the
Daily Mail
, in May 2011, when Barack Obama stopped off for a pint of Guinness at Ollie Hayes’s pub in Moneygall, Ireland, his service detail quickly removed the glass from which he’d drunk. According to the
Daily Mirror
, Secret Service agents carried a special bag used to hold all the objects with which he had contact. (In actuality, the Navy is responsible for presidential food preparation and laundry, so the collection job is theirs.) More important, these actions were not isolated; the president’s bedsheets, drinking glasses, and any other objects with which he has contact are routinely gathered — they are later destroyed or sanitized — to try to keep would-be malefactors from stealing his genetic material.

And the US isn’t only playing defense. According to a 2010 release of secret cables by Wikileaks, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has directed our overseas embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior UN officials. Clearly, the United States sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.

Currently, while there has been no reported use of an advanced, genetically targeted bioweapon, the authors of this piece — including experts in genetics and microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and global security and law enforcement (Marc Goodman) — are convinced we are not far from the possibility. As the recent work with highly virulent bird flu demonstrated, no giant breakthroughs are required. All of the enabling technologies are in place, already serving the needs of academic R&D groups and commercial biotechnology organizations. And these technologies are getting exponentially more powerful, particularly those that allow for the easy manipulation of DNA.

The evolution of cancer treatment provides one window into what’s happening in the biosciences today. All cancer drugs kill cells. Today’s chemotherapies are offshoots of chemical warfare
agents; we’ve turned weapons into cancer medicines, albeit crude ones. As with carpet bombing, collateral damage is a given. Now, because of advances in genetics, we know that each cancer is unique, and research is shifting to the development of personalized medicines — designer therapies that can exterminate specific cancerous cells in a specific way, in a specific person. Forget collateral damage, these therapies are focused like lasers. The Finnish pharmaceutical Oncos Therapuetics has treated over two hundred patients using just such methods. But it wouldn’t take much at all to subvert them, turning personalized medicines into personalized weapons.