by Jack Hitt
A viscous snapping sound shatters the concentrated silence of the room. Some lights go out, throughout the building. Patterson pulls the plug.
“I think we killed it.” A hideous yet familiar metallic smell fills the air. “Time for a cigarette break,” she says.
VIII. Salk or Frankenstein?
After Cowell showed me his secret fort in Cambridge, he also wanted to show me his public one. As with Bobe, Cowell has been struggling to navigate just how synthetic biology should present itself to the world—a demonic crew of biohackers blowing stuff up in secret locations? Or a responsible crowd of innovators poking around the front lines of what’s known in order to find something new?
For the latter, he’s rented a public lab space from a group called NUBlabs. It’s a big open warehouse in Cambridge where a bunch of designers of all kinds of things maintain their workstations. Part of it is occupied by a guy importing odd but beautiful bicycles from Europe. He sells that seven-seat circular contraption built by some corporation forward-thinker who preferred to hold his high-level meetings while people got exercise. There are programmers scattered around, and in the corner is Cowell’s space. He’s thrown together the usual amateur gear for a start-up lab. There’s an autoclave off eBay, an old centrifuge he scored, and some pipettes. There are worktables and books and all the other minor gear, but Cowell hasn’t invited anyone in yet. He’s very much aware that just what happens in the next little while is going to be crucial to how the general public understands what synthetic biology is.
This struggle has been going on for the last few years among the professional crowd. They think of it in different terms. If the kids are worried about how it will look, the grown-ups fret over how it will expand. There are three killer aps—money, altruism, hipness. Drew Endy, for instance, is trying to frame synthetic biology as the next cool science—what computer programming was in the 1980s. His parts registry idea and “gene-bashing” lingo are all sparking the imaginations of young amateurs.
“If you make biology easy to engineer, and you make it accessible, by definition people will learn about it, and write comic strips about it,” he’s said. Along with Jay Keasling of Berkeley, George Church and Drew Endy constitute the secular trinity of great minds birthing this new field.
Keasling is not writing comic strips. His boosterism takes the form of actually making synthetic biology do something. For instance, he’d like to cure malaria. (Of the three, Keasling is the one most likely to make it to a morning talk show.) The classic malaria treatment involves a substance called artemisinin, which derives from the slow-growing wormwood plant. The idea is to create bacteria that will quickly pump out artemisinin. So far, no luck. But Keasling’s bet is that they will succeed soon. And if “curing malaria” is the first thing most people hear about synthetic biology, that’s a better start than almost any other kind of headline (such as kids create deadly insect, now rogue).
Meanwhile, George Church occupies an entirely different niche in the synbio ecosystem, both in terms of who he is and what he talks about. Currently at Harvard, Church is a towering six-foot-five, with a lumberjack’s beard, a commanding presence, a seductively hyperactive and chatty mind—not to mention a brilliant scientific eccentricity: He suffers from narcolepsy. So the great man can be talking to you and boom, he blinks out for five seconds and then boots right back up. It’s the equivalent of Einstein’s hair: notice given that you are in the presence of wild and ranging genius.
Church talks up the economic approach, specifically biofuels. He wants to engineer something that makes a lot of money and gets positive attention that way. The obstacle to turning piles of organic material such as switchgrass or other high-sugar plants into easy biofuels is that the sugars in the plant are bound up by cellulose. In order to get it out, the cellulose has to be extracted. What if you could design a bacterium that would chew up cellulose and expel sugar? That would have a worldwide market, much larger and more noticeable than a malarial cure or a comic book.
“Biofuels are the low-hanging fruit of synthetic biology,” Church insisted one afternoon in his office. Pharmaceutical cures might earn good press, but the “markets are small relative to fuels, where the markets are huge.”
Everyone involved in synthetic biology recognizes on some level that if robotics, say, is a fairly mature pursuit, then synthetic biology is in utero. So they worry constantly about public relations and imagery.
“NASA had the moon shot,” Church pondered, as he struggled with how the public comes to understand the complexities of any new scientific discipline. “There was the homebrew computer club, even robotics had a cinematic push.” He recognizes that Hollywood prefers to deal in a “dystopic version of biology.” He considered the ill effects of Jurassic Park, Gattaca, or Will Smith’s I Am Legend, even though the hero of that movie was a geneticist trying to do the right thing.
“There is one isolated non-dystopic movie,” Church said, Lorenzo’s Oil, the story of parents who will stop at nothing to find a new cure for their child’s rare affliction. The movie was not exactly a hit. “You can see how hard it is for Hollywood to make a blockbuster out of lipid chemistry,” he added.
Later over coffee, Cowell and Bobe can’t help but continue this conversation. For amateurs trying to start a DIYbio group, they don’t have at their disposal massive funding and can’t really talk about engineering trees, curing malaria, or solving a planetary energy problem. Their anxiety is much more local to their group and identity.
“Even the use of the word ‘biohacker,’ ” Bobe suddenly volunteered, “my girlfriend’s parents read that word and were terrified.”
“Terminology is key,” Cowell agreed, and he reminded Bobe of the scientific tragedy that cascaded after the seemingly cool word “cloning” achieved currency at the expense of the less glitzy term “nuclear transfer.”
“The word ‘hacker’ really used to be a badge of distinction—even if they weren’t doing anything bad. We need the opposite,” Bobe said, trying to come up with a new term. “Hackers are makers. They are scientists.”
“Biomaker would be better than biohacker?”
Bobe said there would be resistance, but “we have to change the attitude people have toward hackers.”
“The Biomaking Manifesto?”
“Well, you either try to redefine biohacking as a good term or you come up with a different term.”
“I think the label is inevitable.”
“I’m just trying to be conscientious.”
“Initially, ‘biohacking’ is a good way to describe the ideas. If you go to one of these hobbyist workshops where they are building robots and you say, ‘Do you want to come to a biohacking meeting?’ they get it.”
“Depends on who your audience is. Is it PR for the public?”
“But that doesn’t make the term go away.”
“Biohacking is cool, if you’re young.”
“Bio-innovating sounds like a PR term that no eighteen-year-old will call himself.”
“Biomaker? Biocreator?”
The question occupied the entire several days I spent hanging out with Cowell and Bobe. Later there was a long discussion about the term “synthetic biology” and how that first word was awkward, suggesting something plastic and unnatural. And there used to be other terms, “bioengineering” and even, briefly, “constructive biology.” It’s not easy to domesticate an emerging science so that it’s cool enough to attract the most renegade thinkers while simultaneously not bringing down the wrath of the FBI. Later, Bobe expressed nothing but jealousy at the way the guys behind Make magazine—the new hip Popular Mechanics of our time, the DIY monthly that’s achieved national success—have pulled it off so beautifully.
“Make, which was just a small twist on ‘hack,’ is really effective,” he said.
As Cowell and Bobe attract more and more members, there will be smart, innovative people among them, and there will be people who insist on taking the mad scientist pose. The who
le field could turn on a dime, and they know just how Janus-faced the fetal science in fact is—a generation of Jonas Salks over here, Victor Frankensteins over there. They could become a collection of gee-whiz do-gooders right out of the 1950s, or they could become demonized as the fabricators of evil viruses—just as an earlier generation of computer hackers were, only this time the viruses won’t be digital.
IX. Yodeling at Bacteria
There is another way to get a plasmid into a bacterium that doesn’t require 2500 volts of electricity: “an ultrasound bath,” Patterson told me, as she planned yet another approach. This is the same technology that allows us to peer inside a woman’s womb and look at a fetus. “Ultrasound is used in labs normally for lysing cells, for ripping them open and getting out the DNA. And it is also used for sterilization—really high amplitude of ultrasound can be used to kill off bacteria.
“When the frequency is in the 40 kilohertz range, you can actually use it for transsection, one of the terms for introducing plasmids into things.” (Having failed at frying the bacteria and then Tasering them, we now hoped to yell at them.)
Of course, the issue is how do you get an ultrasound machine?
“This thing ran forty bucks,” she said—this thing being a “jewelry cleaner operating at 40 kilohertz.” The machine is small and compact, easy to handle. Dozens of them are offered for sale on eBay on any given day. Even as she presses forward in search of Glo-gurt, though, Patterson tells me her interests have recently shifted to something more, well, functional.
She’s started a conversation with an Internet pal on the DIYbio list, Jon Kline, about synthesizing a bacterium that would react in the presence of melamine: Recall that in 2008 the substance began showing up in Chinese imports of milk products, eggs, baby food, and pet food and led to numerous deaths of people and animals. Melamine-contaminated milk, alone, sickened some fifty thousand people. The scandal caused a food scare and focused attention on the fact that American agencies were testing for the presence of these lethal chemicals.
Patterson and Kline call their creation the melaminometer.
They have developed two strategies. One is to insert GFP, the same glow plasmid in Patterson’s yogurt, and use that as a test for the presence of melamine. One swab on a food sample, and if there’s a trace of melamine, then the Q-tip would glow in the dark under a black light. Another approach is to create a bacteria that, in the presence of melamine, would break it down into ammonia and water. Not all that tasty, but it beats getting sick. Maybe they can make it taste like bananas when they get around to melaminometer 2.0.
As Patterson and all her peers come up with new ideas and start trying them out, the question will get to the public sphere as just what are we permitting here? Patterson would argue that this kind of innovation, when it happens slowly and as the result of folksy methods known by 4-H-ers as “animal husbandry,” is perfectly acceptable. The “dog,” as we currently know him, is a product of the oldest synthetic biology. Thousands of years ago, the occasional wolf brave enough (or tame enough) to approach a human campfire for scraps eventually developed an emotional bond. Dogs seek out alpha dogs to be their leaders and trainers. Early humans quickly figured this out and began the long process of selective breeding that has turned the wolf into all manner of variations of itself—pit bull, collie, Chihuahua. Any major plant humans love to consume—the banana, the ear of corn, the apple, the potato, the tomato, most hot peppers—were all long ago coaxed into becoming the now seemingly fixed bounty of nature we revere. But we made them, using slow-motion synthetic biology.
“Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder,” wrote Freeman Dyson. “There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.”
Of course, that’s already happening. Folks like Patterson aren’t likely to be deterred from their passion by good press or bad. Jurassic Park or Lorenzo’s Oil—it pretty much doesn’t matter. When we spoke late one night about what it was that kept her awake, she talked—lovingly, I should add—about all the bacteria that live on us or in our gut. To her, this was a universe unto itself. And the one she was now committed to explore.
“It’s called the human micro-biome,” she said, as if referring to some nebula system a hundred thousand light-years away. Amateurs typically gather at every new frontier—colonial America, radio, air flight, the moon, the Internet. Like trendsetters in stores or early adopters with gadgets, amateurs and their fiddling tend to point us toward the next uncharted region. Amateur geneticists are already heading to the next horizon over yonder, the next alluring New World, our bodies, ourselves.
5
MIGHTY WHITE OF YOU:
A COMEDY OF AMATEURS
I. Charlemagne’s Heir
was seventeen years old when I discovered I was the great48-grandson of Charlemagne—King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. Where I grew up, it’s not unusual to find out such things. The culture of Charleston, South Carolina, is built around the pride associated with a handful of family histories. Like most of my friends downtown, almost without my knowing it, my youth was an unconscious state of perpetual genealogical questing. Might I be the descendent of a signer of the Declaration? Robert E. Lee’s messenger? I bugged my mom and aunts and uncles. Who am I really? Might my childhood friends turn out to be third cousins? In Charleston, that last one’s almost too easy.
My mother grew exhausted with my pestering and sent me to see Mary Pringle, an ancient cousin and amateur genealogist. Primed with curiosity, I arrived at cousin Mary’s elegant antebellum home on a hot summer day. After some iced tea and pleasantries, I was presented with a large, unwieldy sheet of paper, bearing a set of concentric circles. In the center, Mary wrote my name, and in the immediate outer circle, divided in half, she wrote the names of my parents. In the next circle, divided now into fourths, she wrote the names of my four grandparents. We filled it out as far as we could in every direction, and in that area where her family and mine converged—her life’s work—a seemingly unbounded wedge flew backward to Scotland and England, until my ancestors were hobnobbing with William Shakespeare and Mary Queen of Scots. “This line,” Mary said, pointing to one of the ancient British earls we could claim, “leads in a direct line all the way to Charlemagne.”
This revelation was too much past to absorb and too much pride to possess. I wanted to ask her what the Holy Roman Emperor had left me in his will. But Mary’s tone was solemn, nearly religious:
“Understand that you are the direct descendent of King Charlemagne,” she murmured. The room felt still, as the rest of the universe slowly wheeled about on its gyre—around me, just like on the paper.
I left Mary Pringle’s house feeling pretty, well, rooted. It’s an important experience for most people—knowing where they come from. And being heir to Charlemagne would serve me just fine on the young gentleman’s party circuit. Over the next few years, I became as cunning at hefting this lumbering chunk of self-esteem into passing conversation as a Harvard grad slyly alluding to attending “school in Cambridge.”
Roots are important to us—us being all Americans—because they are the source of so much of our national anxiety of not quite belonging. Has any passenger manifest been more fretted over than the Mayflower’s? The only use of the Internet by Americans that’s competitive with porn, according to several studies, is genealogy. The most significant television miniseries, Roots, spawned a wave of pride among African-Americans (and arguably even that hyphenated name) and is partly responsible for the ongoing effort to drain the word “white” of its racist intimations by recasting it as “Irish-American,” “Scottish-American,” “Italian-American,” and the like. For everyone—including Native Americans who itchily remind the rest of the nation that they might also be called First Americans—there is a deep anxiety about rootedness and its claims. When Bil
l Frist was elevated to majority leader of the Senate in 2003, he had just self-published a book. Its title cries out as much with this anxiety as it does with pride: Good People Beget Good People: A Genealogy of the Frist Family.
The truth is, this anxiety can never really be quelled. About three years after I had tea with Mary Pringle, I was in a college calculus class when the teacher made a point about factoring large numbers. He decided to dramatize it by giving an example from the real world, explaining how redundancy affected genealogy in a process called “pedigree collapse.” He noted that if you run your line back to a.d. 800, the number of direct ancestors you would have, on average, is 562,949,953,421,312. That’s half a quadrillion people, which is more than five thousand times the total number of humans (106 billion) who have ever lived.
How, he asked, could this be? Well, when one goes back in time, the number of ancestors expands arithmetically: 2 grandparents, 4 great-grandparents, 8 great-great-grandparents. But soon enough, one’s ancestors assume duplicate places on the family tree. Otherwise, the law of arithmetic progression creates all kinds of crowding problems. The number of ancestors one has by A.D. 1300 is just over 268 million people, or roughly the total population of humans on the planet at that time. Beyond that year, of course, the whole thing starts to collapse inward, and then it rapidly implodes through super-redundancy into the smaller populations that existed then.
The upshot, the teacher explained, is that nearly everyone currently living anywhere on the planet can claim (and he paused for emphasis) “to be the direct descendant of Charlemagne.”
The room felt still, if not absurd, as the rest of the universe slowly creaked about me on its gyre, laughing. “The mathematical distinction,” the teacher added, “would be to not have Charlemagne as a direct ancestor.”