Genesis Machine: Synthetic biology will allow us to program living organisms like computers

In the coming decades, a new wave of technology will force us to confront the most foundational questions our species has ever faced. Do we want to edit our genomes so that some of us can have children with immunity to certain diseases, or with more intelligence, or with the potential to live longer? Are we committed to holding on to our place at t

In the twentieth century, scientists identified the elementary building blocks of nature: particles, atoms, and molecules are the constituents of all matter; genes, proteins, and cells are the components of life; bits, codes, and networked systems underpin intelligence and information. In this century we will begin to engineer new realities with th

The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.

"(Genetic engineering) faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution.... Up to now, living organisms have evolved very slowly, and new forms have had plenty of

What happens when a human mind has instantaneous access to computation and information on the scale of the internet and the cloud? It’s almost impossible to imagine, but researchers are already in the early days of making it happen. As the central general-purpose technologies of the coming wave, AI and synthetic biology are already entangled, a spi