biology is technology

Rob Carlson :: Learning to Fly, Ch 2

Here are a few pages of Chapter 2:

Ch 2.  Building Biology in the Mind’s Eye, and Using Human Hands.

Legos are by far my favorite toy.  When Legoland California recently advertised a competition for a Master Model Builder, it was hard not to drop everything on my plate and move into a plastic, knobby-surfaced world.

Some people prefer Tinkertoys, Erector Sets, Zoob, or Tente, but the unifying feature, and the utility, of these toys is that the pieces fit together in very understandable and defined ways.  This is not to say they are inflexible – with a little imagination anything can be built from Legos.  But it is easy to see how two bricks (or any of the other new-fangled shapes) will fit together just by looking at them.  When I was young, Legos were for me a way to build the fruits of my imagination.  More importantly, though I haven’t touched a plastic brick in decades, Legos are a design language I utilize to this day.  The notion of pieces fitting together – whether those pieces are integrated circuits, microfluidic components, or molecules – guides much of what I do in the laboratory, and some of my best work has come together in my mind’s eye with what I swear was an audible click.

So what does this have to do with biology?  Building with Legos is the perfect metaphor for the future of building with biology.  The primary reason biology is today so slippery a technology, as it were, and the reason that we fret about bioterror and bioerror, is that in human hands biological components just aren’t Legos.  But they will be, some day relatively soon.

Every Piece Has Its Purpose

Legos are so broadly used and understood in our culture that they are utilized to advertise other products.  There is a metaphorically and visually elegant television commercial for the Honda Element that opens with an image of a single Lego brick.  That computer generated brick is soon joined by a myriad of others, with different shapes and colors, each flying into its assigned place with inspiring precision.  The wheels and floor of the vehicle quickly take shape, followed by clever folding seats, and finally the sides and roof.  It is clear that all the parts of this building block car are carefully conceived, designed, and built.  At the end of the spot, a smooth voiceover brings it all together; “Every piece has its purpose.”

The implication is clear: Honda has built a new vehicle, and each and every part does exactly what it is supposed to.  We can feel confident that each part performs precisely as intended.  This, after all, is a modern car and is the fruit of sophisticated modern engineering practice. 

There are many unspoken assumptions built into this representation of engineering.  Among the most important are that 1) all the parts are the result of a careful design process, 2) the parts can be constructed to function according to the design, and 3) when assembled the parts actually behave as predicted by the design.

The experience of everyone watching the commercial contributes to the communication of these unspoken assumptions.  Not only do we the viewers have considerable exposure to other products of this engineering process, but, given the number of Honda cars and trucks on the road, many of us demonstrate confidence in the engineering and manufacturing prowess of Honda in particular.

Just as the broad public understanding of Legos can be used to imbue a sense of careful design and manufacturing into a new Honda, the notion that the products of modern engineering are safe and predictable can be used to sell other technologies.

From the rhetoric promulgated by some biotechnology companies in the 1980’s and 1990’s you might think that plants could be assembled out of building bricks just like the Element.  Those companies, of course, wanted both consumers and government regulators to think that such capabilities did exist.  The use of the phrase “genetic engineering” conveyed the message that biology can already be manipulated with the facility of Legos.  This is an unfortunate fallacy.

Current genetic “engineering” techniques are quite primitive, akin to swapping random parts between cars to produce a better car.  Biological engineering in general does not yet exist in the same way that electrical, mechanical, or aeronautical engineering does.  These mature engineering fields rely on computer aided design tools – software packages like SolidWorks for mechanical engineering and Spice or Verilog for circuit simulation – that are based upon predictive models.  These predictive models are constructed using a quantitative understanding of how parts of cars and airplanes behave when assembled in the real world.  Unlike the vast majority of modified biological systems, where there are no design tools, the behavior of a finished engine or integrated circuit can be predicted from the behavior of a model, which today is universally determined using computer simulation.

Implementation of computer-based automotive, electronics, and aircraft design efforts is aided by standardized test and measurement gear such as oscilloscopes, network analyzers, stress meters, pressure gauges, etc.  The combination of these items with predictive models constitutes an engineering toolbox that enables the construction of physical objects.  Facilitating this construction process, programs like SolidWorks and Spice can send instructions to automated manufacturing tools, turning design into artifact in relatively short order.  Though biological raw materials are quite different from those usually subject to the labors of this style of engineering, biology will soon have its own engineering toolbox.

The development of relevant tools is already well underway.  Technologies used to measure and manipulate molecules and cells will be critical components of the toolbox.  Laboratory instruments such as DNA sequencers and synthesizers, which read and write genetic instructions, respectively, are plummeting in price while becoming exponentially more powerful.  This technology is changing so rapidly that, within just a few years, the power of today’s elite academic and industrial laboratories will be available to individuals at minimal cost.

Engineering tools for biology are highly portable.

Rapid increases in the power and availability of technology raise obvious questions about who gets to use it, and to what end.  The anthrax terrorist attacks in the United States in the fall of 2001, evidence from Afghanistan that Al Qaeda was preparing to produce biological weapons (as reported by The New York Times [1, 2]), and the discovery of offensive biological weapons in Iraq after the first Gulf War[3], all have prompted calls by public figures to regulate who gets to pursue what kinds of biological research.  Often left out of this discussion is whether or not it will be at all possible to implement such measures, or whether we will be safer as a result.

As I will explore in later chapters, the pace and proliferation of biological technologies is such that attempting to guarantee safety through regulation will likely prove unfeasible.  It may still be possible to slow down some people who want to alter biological systems, or to slow the use of particular technologies.  But absolute prohibition is probably already beyond our grasp.  In all likelyhood, prohibition will make us less safe because many practitioners will be driven underground, dramatically curtailing our ability to find out what is going on in the world.  The use of distributed and inexpensive biological technology will be difficult to control because the know-how necessary both to build instrumentation and to perform experiments with genetic manipulation is already widespread.  Of equal importance, biological raw materials are universally available, and it is less difficult to reproduce challenging experiments first performed at universities than many academics will readily admit.

Moreover, the United States and Europe, traditional leaders in biological research, are no longer alone in advancing relevant technologies.  Many in the West still consider Asian countries technologically impoverished, but this conceit is undermined by rapid scientific advances in areas such as genetic modification of plants, therapeutic applications of stem cells, and gene therapy.  These advances are not always mirrored in western achievements.  With the aid of significant government resources, China and Singapore are leapfrogging the “start-up” phase of genetic modification that western scientists spent years laboring through.  It is not the US, but rather China that has approved the first gene therapy for humans.  It is not the US, nor even Great Britain, but rather South Korea that first successfully produced cloned human embryonic stem cells.  The availability of western technology and training are facilitating this rapid development.  It is clear that no single country will be able to dominate the international discussion of what biological research should allowed.  Recent U.S. attempts to push a worldwide ban on human cloning through the UN have been stymied by countries with fewer moral qualms and a greater interest in potential health and economic benefits.  This story is by no means complete, however, as the current U.S. administration is ideologically opposed to human cloning and will no doubt raise the issue of a worldwide ban again.

Regulation will be problematic in any event, whether pushed by safety concerns or moral considerations.  Research aimed at improving human health is the very same research targeted by opponents who feel that the use of biology as technology is somehow immoral or improper.  Popular examples today are embryonic and therapeutic cloning for the purpose of producing organs and stem cells, and modification of those cells with artificial chromosomes to introduce new traits (more about this in a later chapter).  Given likely impact of this research on the quality of life of older Americans, their significant socioeconomic influence on this debate should not be underestimated; political pressures due to age demographics alone will push research forward.  People with wealth will spend as much as is necessary to buy health.  Technologies developed to improve human health will then find applications in other arenas, many of them unexpected.

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References:

1.      Miller, J., THREATS AND RESPONSES: TERRORIST WEAPONS; Lab Suggests Qaeda Planned To Build Arms, Officials Say, in The New York Times. 2002: New York. p. 7.

2.      Gordon, M., A NATION CHALLENGED: WEAPONS; U.S. Says It Found Qaeda Lab Being Built to Produce Anthrax, in The New York Times. 2003: New York. p. 1.

3.      Seelos, C., Lessons from Iraq on bioweapons. Nature, 1999. 398(6724): p. 187-8.

4.      Logan, Environmental Science and Technology, 2004.