Life 3.0, which doesn’t yet exist on Earth, can dramatically redesign not only its software, but its hardware as well, rather than having to wait for it to gradually evolve over generations.

A gene editing tool This amazing little system, it quickly became clear, had a truly momentous potential application: the crRNA guide could be modified to target any DNA sequence you might wish to cut. It was programmable. It could become an editing tool. The study of CRISPR would become a vivid example of the call-and-response duet between basic

At present only a fraction of synthesized DNA is screened for potentially dangerous elements, but a global effort like the SecureDNA program to plug every synthesizer—benchtop at home or large and remote—into a centralized, secure, and encrypted system that can scan for pathogenic sequences is a great start. If people are printing potentially