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We present the best case scenario over the next 25 years across different domains of life.
Kevin Kelly (00:00)
Hello, welcome to another episode of the best case scenarios. I'm Kevin Kelly, co-host is Dan Pink and we welcome our guest, Drew Endy.
So this is going to be a fantastic episode of the Best Case Scenarios with Drew Endy. Drew has a whole bunch of ideas. I really thought his idea of a ⁓ personal biomaker in every home was really, cool. This is idea that you would have something that would
generate all kinds of biological things for you without any kind of training.
Daniel Pink (00:30)
Yeah, that was kind of amazing. He also has an idea for a new American institution, not a library, but a laboratory scattered all over the country where people can do experiments, where people will their supplies, where we actually are equipping citizen scientists all over the United States.
Kevin Kelly (00:48)
Right. And I think his most far reaching and consequential vision is what he calls e-bio, which is this idea of using abundant solar electricity to generate biological stuff. Just like have e-bikes. Right. So you have e-bikes now you have e-biology. And so it will bring in this ⁓ era of abundance.
Daniel Pink (01:00)
Yeah, I mean essentially turning sunlight into protein.
And Kevin, one last thing here, are you gonna start working on your home-cooked vaccine right now? Because that's another thing that he promised.
Kevin Kelly (01:17)
Yes, alongside of my fungal cream.
Daniel Pink (01:23)
Anyway,
there's lots of stuff in this episode, folks. Well, we hope you enjoy it.
Kevin Kelly (01:27)
Hey Drew, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?
Drew Endy (01:31)
Hey, Kevin. Hey, Dan. Sure. I'll do my best. I'm Drew Endy. I'm a bioengineer at Stanford by day. What that means is I teach on campus and I do research. My area of research is in synthetic biology. Think about the word synthesis. Think about a musical synthesizer. Putting things together. Instead of composing music, I compose living systems at the molecular cellular scale. A putting together of biology. And so that's what I do. And that's what I'm known for.
Kevin Kelly (01:46)
Mm-hmm.
Drew Endy (01:58)
By night, I have other roles. Over the last 20 years, I've helped start two gene synthesis companies. One failed, one got acquired. I'm on the board of three different charities that promote open source biotechnology and bioengineering education. I run a policy shop called Biostrategy and Leadership on campus and things like that. So that's me in a nickel tour.
Kevin Kelly (02:19)
That's really fantastic. You seem to be the ideal person to try and paint some very optimistic scenarios of the future of what could happen in 25 years. So thank you for joining us.
Drew Endy (02:32)
A pleasure.
Daniel Pink (02:32)
So Drew, what we're gonna do here, and listeners, what we're gonna do here is we're going to hear your best case scenario for synthetic biology and even some of the knock-on consequences of synthetic biology, perhaps even democratic governance for the next 25 years. Then we're gonna move on to some tropes from science fiction and we're gonna explore with you the possibility of whether these things are plausible or whether they're just complete cockamamie BS. Then we're gonna ask you to make a bet.
put your own money on the line, and then we're gonna have you give us one for the road.
Drew Endy (03:02)
Sounds good. Let's do it.
Kevin Kelly (03:03)
Okay. So, Drew, if you think about the next 25 years, what, what, what is, what is your best case scenario of the kind of, first of all, maybe the kinds of things that you're working on right now. And then we can go beyond that, but give us, give us the success date. Give us a raging success. What you're working on.
Daniel Pink (03:06)
Hahaha!
Drew Endy (03:21)
Yeah,
All right. You know, don't I don't come to bioengineering to start. I'm actually a civil engineer. So you're at risk of thinking me as the bio guy. I am. I'll get back to that. But but I think about civilization. think about things at scale. I think about things from the the dimensions of nerddom, of energy information and stuff or jewels, bits and atoms. Right. So so when you ask me about my best case scenario.
I'm thinking about Jules Pitz and Adams, I'm thinking about reality and a reality strategy. And I love the 25 year time scale. That's about 8,859 days from today gets us to January 1st, 2050. And it's like, I'm tracking that number on my whiteboard. I increment it down, it increment every day. So Jules Pitz and Adams, right? So my best case scenario is buyer before the year 2050, we've equipped up to 10 billion people, Homo sapiens.
Kevin Kelly (03:55)
Yes.
Drew Endy (04:11)
to have good lives on this planet in partnership with the rest of the planet without trashing the place. So I call that the physics of flourishing. And the physics of flourishing seem possible to me right in front of us for the first time in the history of humanity. And so let's walk through it. I'm saying that not as an academic, just to be totally clear. I'm saying that as an earthling who wants this to be true and believes it's possible. So now I have to deconstruct that into how are we going to do the energy
Kevin Kelly (04:33)
Okay.
Drew Endy (04:39)
how we're gonna do this stuff, how we're gonna do the information.
The living things, the living matter on the planet, they're operating at the intersection of energy, photosynthesis, information, the genomes, the DNA, and the atoms, the stuff. The leaves on trees grow on trees. They don't come from a factory in Detroit that gets shipped and then you tape and staple the leaves to trees. So the living systems on Earth are distributed manufacturing platforms, naturally. They're all over the place.
They're already harvesting through photosynthesis over 100 terawatts of energy and using that energy to organize stuff. Biotechnology lets us partner better with biology to make things. so right there, we've got an engine for handling the atoms. We're not perfectly configured with biology right now. That's an understatement. Things are going extinct. There's all sorts of bad things happening in the living world that we know about.
But could we turn that corner? And feeling to me like we can, in part because we're starting to get good at bioengineering, right? And so people think of bioengineering appropriately as still being a domain of research because the field is in this pre-Edisonian era where when we design something as bioengineers of any sophistication, we'll do our best job designing it, but we won't really know if it works because we put our designs and DNA into cells and then we have to see what happens.
Tinker and test, right? That's the whole field right now. But we're starting to chip away at that Edisonian puzzle, and we're heading into a post-Edisonian world where bioengineering is routinized, like structural engineering, bridge engineering is routinized. When you build a bridge, it's not an experiment in physics anymore. So now I just want to make one more linkage.
Kevin Kelly (06:11)
Hehehehehe
Drew Endy (06:18)
We probably already have, through photosynthesis, sufficient capacity to manufacture the physical stuff 10 billion people need. But wait, there's one more thing that's showing up. It turns out that we have the possibility of taking electricity, however we generate it, and using that to fix carbon out of the air and make organic molecules. One of them is called formate, F-O-R-M-A-T-E. And then we can change metabolism to grow on formate.
instead of glucose, a sugar. So microorganisms like Brewers East for making beer, Saccharomyces, the name of that organism is sugar-loving fungus. Saccharomyces, sugar fungus, cerevisia beer. Imagine changing that organism to grow on formate instead of set of glucose. And so now we have the possibility of a shunt from primary energy generation, electricity from solar panels, fixed carbon out of the air, and Dubai manufacturing, in addition to natural photosynthesis.
And because the solar panels have an efficiency of harvesting energy of like 25%, that turns out to be 10 times more efficient than photosynthesis in leaves. Yeah, photosynthesis is only a few single digit percentage efficient. And so that means on a per land use basis, you can do 10 times more energy harvesting and diversion into biomass on paper starting with solar panels.
Kevin Kelly (07:20)
Really? Wow.
well.
Drew Endy (07:37)
So I call this electro biosynthesis or e-bike, you know, like e-bikes, you got electric bikes or e-bikes. Like in the future, I think we're gonna have a new word called e-bio, right? And so that's the opening in terms of Joules and Adams. If we're heading to energy generation, but now to your question about how do we pay for it all, good question, right? And what's the pricing structure? The reason I make the connection to bio,
Kevin Kelly (07:40)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Drew Endy (08:01)
is not just to talk about the energy. By the way, think this is probably, e-bio is probably as important, or could be as important as ⁓ learning to burn methane to fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere to make ammonia to do synthetic fertilizers for plants, which doubles the human population effectively in the 20th century. So I think e-bio is a big deal. It just hasn't been reduced to scale in any practical sense yet.
Kevin Kelly (08:23)
What would be some of the first materials that you would make with eBio?
Drew Endy (08:27)
It depends.
mean, like for some it would be food, right? Microbial protein production for food.
Kevin Kelly (08:32)
Well, walk me through that little path. So you've got the carbon, which you're turning with electrical power. You're turning it into this methane. What do call it?
Drew Endy (08:39)
You have.
Let's walk through it, right? So this is the work of Ron Milo and others who worked up this analysis. Imagine you've got a hectare of land and you cover some of it with solar panels. That generates electricity. Then you do direct air capture carbon and you make formate, which is the organic feedstock for the microbes. And then you got a little brewery on a corner of the lot that's doing formate to protein production using microorganisms.
So it's called microbial protein production. So sunlight, solar panels, electricity, direct air capture, organic feedstock called formate, feed the formate to the microbes. Microbes make proteins and whatever the microbes make. Now, the simplest thing to start with is protein because they do that already. But you could make other things with this platform, anything you can program biology to make.
Kevin Kelly (09:27)
And so besides the carbon, there is the hydrocarbons you're taking also the hydrogen from the water. Are there any other inputs that are needed?
Drew Endy (09:36)
you're going to need carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, like the whole shebang of what biology needs. But it's mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in that order. So you probably have a little bit of a composting stream going on to fill in the other elements on the periodic table.
Kevin Kelly (09:50)
Is there a waste stream? there, there waste products produced by
Drew Endy (09:54)
compost stuff.
Kevin Kelly (09:55)
Okay, so you have this thing where you're getting protein from sunlight.
Daniel Pink (09:56)
So.
Drew Endy (09:59)
Which by the way, we already do that naturally called farming. It's just a parallel process. It's an engineered process.
Kevin Kelly (10:01)
Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.
Daniel Pink (10:06)
And so, but if we go back just being fixing on this 25 year horizon, if this stuff, when this materializes, when we have these processes in place, what does individual day to day life look like that is different from today? So like, don't give me, you gave us on a scale 10 billion people flourishing.
Drew Endy (10:12)
Hmm.
Daniel Pink (10:27)
Turn the other side of the telescope. What does a day in the life of one person look like now if this comes to pass?
Drew Endy (10:34)
In the simplest form, it looks like now, except we're not trashing the planet. Right?
Daniel Pink (10:38)
huh.
So I have abundant food, but it's not coming with the externalities of pollution and all that. Yeah. Yeah.
Drew Endy (10:48)
Like take Singapore as a
simple case study, right? Singapore wants to get to 2050 and they want to be net zero on carbon. And I think they mean it, right? In a way that's different than some other places. And what's interesting about Singapore is they have about 20 % of their GDP is onshore manufacturing. And they want to keep at least 20 % of their economy onshore manufacturing.
Daniel Pink (10:59)
Mm-hmm.
Drew Endy (11:14)
They view that as an issue of sovereignty. If we can't make stuff where we are, then other people who make things for us have power over us. And so those two goals are in competition with each other. If you just add more conventional manufacturing, you're adding more carbon emission. And if you just try and cut your carbon emissions, you're at risk of cutting manufacturing. So how does Singapore get to 2050? And so in one view,
I'm not asking you to imagine a different day to day so much as a different underpinning of the civilization scale infrastructure that lets us have what we have now in a way that's compatible with agility and optionality around parameters having to do with nature, climate, biodiversity, and so on. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (11:57)
So again, you kind of mentioned this idea that we'd have this, you could see the possibility, best case scenario, of in 25 years, a world of abundance. But it seems like, well, what would happen after 100 years or 200 years? It's like, is it, what wouldn't be working in 25 years? It's like,
Give me a resolution to answer Dan's question of, you're saying, well, in 25 years, we would have what we have now for more people, and we wouldn't be raising the temperature of the planet. But we would be covering a lot of the territory with solar panels, by the way. Well, more than we have now.
Drew Endy (12:38)
not too much.
Sure, but it's like fractional percentage. I mean, come on. Not that.
Kevin Kelly (12:43)
Well, I don't
know how many acres of solar panels would you need to generate the terror wires that you're talking about.
Drew Endy (12:47)
the single digit percentage of land. Single digit
percentages of land, right? It's not that much. But look, it's interesting. So actually, let me just hold the mirror up to our conversation. I'm showing up and I'm going, hey guys, I think we can solve the physics of flourishing. The napkin math's fine. We've got an open question, like how are we gonna pay for it? Because if you drive the cost of electricity generation to zero,
Kevin Kelly (12:55)
Cheers.
Drew Endy (13:12)
That means the market demand is not going to pull the full scale manufacturing forward that we need to get to this. So that's a puzzle. Right. And then and then all I'm promising in my my initial instantiation is we can all I'm promising is that we can operate individually like we're operating now without trashing the place. I'm not promising. I'm not promising some utopia of Star Trek replicator things. Right. It's just like how about we stabilize what we're currently doing with a with a population capacity up to 10 giga people.
Daniel Pink (13:22)
You
Right.
Drew Endy (13:40)
Right. And I can show up with the napkin math on the physics. Right. And we've got the puzzle of economics. we got it. Then I think we have the puzzle of terms and conditions. Right. So it's like, look at Northern California as the cost of generating electricity is going down. Why is my PG &E bill going up? Why is my utility bill going up? We got a puzzle there. I think, Dan, you really nicely said it. It's like, Drew's claiming physics of flourishing are good. And we've got a puzzle called the politics of plenty. Right.
It's like navigating on roads in New England. Like can't get there from here. You know, like how do get there? Anyway, but that's my assessment of where we've gotten to pretty fast. Now, Kevin, when you ask me, how about the year 2100 or how about the year 2200 is valid? I don't know. Right. mean, there's other things going on in that time constant. But like when I think about the next 8,859 days,
Right? Which is the number between now and 2050. So I can imagine that we're getting the foundational tools and capacities we need finished up within the next five to 10 years. They get deployed. We figure out how to deploy them where they need to be at scale in the 2030s such that by the 2040s, people have the capacities locally where they are to get to this stable good life. Right?
Kevin Kelly (14:54)
So,
yeah. So I really liked that scenario. Thank you for that. That's really good, big, broad, civilizational scale thing. But tell us a little bit more about some other things, other biological or synthetic biological things that might also come out of that abundance. What other kinds of specific innovations might you expect in your best case scenario?
Drew Endy (15:16)
Well, mean, we're going to make bioengineering real. And so what that means is within the next five years, we've learned how to routinize the engineering of cells, including building cells from scratch, constructing life. That's coming true in real time, frankly. It's just not equally distributed. It's not fully reported yet. And so the way I think about that is
Kevin Kelly (15:33)
Mm.
Drew Endy (15:36)
You know, some people use the metaphor of a well to talk about the Earth. We live in a gravity well, and rockets take us up out of the Earth's gravity well, right? And then you can orbit and see. With that same way of thinking, I think of the Earth as a life well. We live at the bottom of the Earth's life well. There's all this life that's around us. It's amazing, yet it's constrained. It's constrained by three things. It's constrained by lineage, the life that came before.
and it's constrained by needing to reproduce, make offspring, and on a changing planet evolve over longer time scales. And so these three requirements of life, that it comes from lineage, that it has to reproduce and it has to evolve, really limit what life can be. By learning how to construct life from scratch, we're giving ourselves optionality, clawing up out of the Earth's life well to see what all the things life could be. And it's not like the boring vacuum of deep space.
It's literally all the possibilities of life. So just to give you some numbers to think about, if you took a strand of DNA that's 140 letters long, the number of combinations is four raised to the 140th power. Now that gets you a number so big, it's bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe. What that means is the possibilities of life are actually literally beyond astronomical and we'll never see it all on this planet.
And so within the decade, by learning how to construct, there'll still be mystery, by the way. I'm using the word construct on purpose as an engineer. Just like a bridge builder will build the Golden Gate Bridge because we understand enough about gravity to make a bridge, but the physicists are still studying the mysteries of gravity. So when I'm talking about building cells and stuff like that, there'll still be mysteries of life all over the place. We'll just have this operational capacity to get up out of the Earth's light pole and see all this stuff.
That's relevant if I come back to the first part of our discussion because of what biology could be used to make. So we think of biology for making food and fuel and medicine and some other materials like sustainable carpet thread. But biology is a general purpose technology. It's organizing atoms with really good precision. And so you can use a brewing process for making beer or wine or medicine. You can also brew energetics for a rocket, literally.
There's roadmaps from the Semiconductor Research Corporation for programming biology to grow computer hardware. We think of making computers through top-down manufacturing lithography, but biology does bottom-up patterning with beautiful atomic precision. Those organic patterns contemplate inorganic materials, including electrical stuff, right? So, so, so...
Kevin Kelly (18:00)
So yeah, so I have a question just
on that. Is my understanding that the current biological world is a world of, it's aqueous, it's all in water. And when I hear about using biology to make other materials, can it make things outside of a water-based system? Is your synthetic biology, yeah?
Drew Endy (18:26)
There are bits in, what are your teeth made of? Like proteins and minerals, right?
Kevin Kelly (18:26)
Okay. Yeah, but they're
surrounded by a very wet mouth.
Drew Endy (18:32)
when they're being made and used, right? Or think of the Venus flower basket sponge from the Pacific Ocean that grows fiber optic cables. Yeah, but you could harvest the sponge and now you have a fiber optic cable. Or think of the magnetotactic bacteria that make tiny little arrays of magnets that are 60, 80 nanometer diameter magnets all lined up. You're right, it's grown in an aqueous environment, 100 % Kevin, but
Kevin Kelly (18:38)
huh. Underwater.
Okay, sure.
Drew Endy (19:01)
But once it's grown, you can extract it from that environment. And so what's interesting, and I think the key thing implied by what you're observing is these bio-manufacturing processes can be operating under ambient conditions. It's without toxic chemicals all over the place, without crazy high temperatures. Exactly. Like we talk about computer supply chain problems because we've made a system that makes making computers hard.
Kevin Kelly (19:04)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (19:05)
So.
Kevin Kelly (19:19)
or high pressures.
Drew Endy (19:26)
What if we made computers like grow in zucchini? Like, yeah, I'll need a dirty garden and fertilizer and water, but if I can get it to grow, then I harvest it and dry it off and brush it off.
Daniel Pink (19:36)
So let's focus again. I want to come back to something even more concrete. So biology becomes or we can think it already is, you're saying, essentially an engineering process as an engineering. We're going to use it as an engineering process. it's 2050. You are in what town are you in, Drew? Are you in Palo Alto or Menlo Park? so we somewhere in Palo Alto, there's a 16 year old.
Drew Endy (19:51)
Yeah, yeah.
I'm on Stanford campus.
Kevin Kelly (19:56)
you.
Drew Endy (20:01)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (20:02)
All right, remember
Drew Endy (20:03)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (20:03)
that 16 year old is not even born yet. That 16 year old is born in 2034. What is that 16 year old building in her garage using biology as a manufacturing tool that will blow our minds?
Drew Endy (20:16)
Yeah, I mean, she's she's doing a lot of gardening, you know, all sorts of interesting flowers that emit different wavelengths of light. She's got a whole garden of nightlights that can be brought inside or walkway lighting. So the bio
Daniel Pink (20:28)
Okay,
so she's making sort of phosphorescent plants that will illuminate her parents' house.
Drew Endy (20:32)
pro pro yeah
programmable plants and she's competing in flower shows and that works. If she needs to ⁓ get a medicine, there's ⁓ a personal bio maker in her kitchen or in her workshop, the PB that goes along with the PC and the personal bio maker takes in electricity and methane from the gas line if we still have those, which we probably do.
Daniel Pink (20:51)
Nice.
Drew Endy (20:58)
and is programmed with DNA code to make what she needs. It could be an antibiotic. It could be, ⁓ that's right, whatever she needs the medicine for that we can brew up. There are friendly commensal microorganisms that live ⁓ in and on her. So she has skin creams that have friendly skin microbes that ⁓ help keep her safe from melanoma.
Daniel Pink (21:03)
Antibiotic personalized to her genome. Yeah.
Drew Endy (21:22)
both by producing pigments, a type of living sunscreen, but also things that can tickle her immune system to create soft immune responses to problematic conditions. She's got microbes that are also friendly that live in her sinuses that are naturally uptaking nucleic acids from the environment. If there's a pathogen that she experiences,
Daniel Pink (21:32)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Drew Endy (21:43)
that's sensed by the programmable systems in those sinus microbes and changes the... Some of these she's making, some of these are coming from the drone drop shipping. Yes, and there's a fairly big marketplace for bioengineered organisms on Amazon. It already exists today. There's only maybe six...
Daniel Pink (21:48)
Is she making these things with her PB or?
Kevin Kelly (21:59)
Yeah. ⁓
Daniel Pink (22:10)
Yeah.
What's, for these microphones, what's the, is there a, I don't even know if this is the right question, Drew. Is there a delivery system for, not the drone delivery, but is there a delivery system? it, how is it applied? how, uh-huh.
Drew Endy (22:20)
A little spray, like, you
know, it's a little spray. ⁓ She is, you know, thinking about, you know, if she's, if she's entrepreneurially bent or like tech, tech, tech excited, right, she might be thinking about new coding opportunities, right? Like, what could I get biology to do? She's asking herself.
Kevin Kelly (22:22)
It's great, it's great.
Daniel Pink (22:24)
Thank you.
Drew Endy (22:40)
And what does the world need biology to do? And maybe I could make that. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (22:44)
What you're eating?
Is this deathless meat? that in your...
Drew Endy (22:49)
I think deathless meat, that's so interesting. I'm excited about not like cell culture meat where you take animal cells and feed them in a vat. I'm much more interested in fungal meats, right? And what you can do with things that eat wood.
Kevin Kelly (23:01)
You
Daniel Pink (23:04)
I would recommend
a change in the branding of that. yeah, because the marketer in me just doesn't like fungal meats,
Drew Endy (23:06)
Sure, Yeah,
myco-meats maybe. Maybe it's myco-meats. Myco-meat.
Daniel Pink (23:15)
Yeah.
Super protein, how about that?
Kevin Kelly (23:17)
Yeah.
Drew Endy (23:18)
Yeah, protein plus plus. In any case, protein plus plus. Yeah. But the takeaway is, you you think about a young person today, a 16-year-old today, and where they have agency and how they can interact with things. But then what is the surface of things that is a critical part of their life and to which they have no agency or interaction or interface? And it's the living world.
Daniel Pink (23:18)
Yeah, protein plus, yeah.
Interesting.
Drew Endy (23:44)
Right? the, know, yes, you could have a pet cat or a dog or a goldfish or a house plant, but underneath the surface behind the molecular curtain that's currently inaccessible. so that interface, Dan, I expect is opening up such that the as yet unborn 16 year old of 2050 is inheriting that world. just like, you know, like my kids are growing up and they're thinking it's normal to talk to computers.
Daniel Pink (23:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very interesting, yeah.
Drew Endy (24:10)
and then the generation before them learned it was normal to touch screens. Those types of transitions, I think, will continue. And so this 16-year-old of 2050 will think it's normal to interact with biology and program biology and listen to biology from its molecular music out to what we care about. There's some other things that are going to need to happen that I think we can be optimistic about. We're going to have to make infectious diseases obsolete.
Kevin Kelly (24:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right on!
Drew Endy (24:37)
Right? So, you know, so it's, know, this 16 year old isn't going to go to middle school or high school and come back surprised that she's vomiting with COVID 3.0, right? Because that's simply not going to happen. And that's not going to happen because we've implemented a bio-intelligence framework, a public health framework, and a biosecurity framework.
that makes infectious diseases, including natural ones, obsolete.
Kevin Kelly (25:03)
So, I mean, in the world of scenario making, which I was involved with many, many scenarios talking about pandemics into the future, this was like 20 years ago, 25 years ago. Not one time in the multiple times of doing those scenarios, did the idea of vaccine denial ever come up? It was not.
Daniel Pink (25:24)
Mmm.
Kevin Kelly (25:25)
even considered a possibility. So you're talking about sort of eradicating this.
Daniel Pink (25:26)
Interesting.
Kevin Kelly (25:30)
And yet we have this cultural allergy right now. And so what do you imagine would, in the 25 year horizon, would overcome that kind of a thing?
Drew Endy (25:34)
Yeah, so, so...
what if vaccines are like Thanksgiving dinner? And go, what do you mean? well, when you needed a vaccine, it'd be a special occasion.
and you made it yourself in your kitchen with the best available ingredients that you sourced and you made it with love because it was for your loved ones. You took great care with it. You followed a careful recipe and you knew that there was no wifi chip in it because you didn't put it in the recipe. Zero ambiguity about Bill Gates controlling you. Right. That's the vaccine.
Kevin Kelly (26:00)
You
Daniel Pink (26:04)
Hmm.
Drew Endy (26:05)
that would like some design thinking applied to their vaccines to get us vaccines that are designed with empathy so that people have the vaccines we want. And then on the back end, think about all the advances and standards and reliability and composability of biotechnology that have to be made real for this to be safe and effective. But we could do that. nobody's applied design thinking to vaccines. But meanwhile, we can just change the interfaces.
This skin cream that vaccinate you against melanoma, that's not a hypothetical. Michael Fishbach at Stanford prototype that two years ago. It works in mice. Whether it works in people, we're going to have to do more work. But it's like, we can really change these. The thing that's so exciting for me about biotech is, you know how Xerox PARC back in the day changed the interface between people and computers? Biology is ripe for that. We can change the interface between people and biotech. And that's going to matter a lot.
Daniel Pink (26:49)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Drew Endy (26:56)
Right,
and I think whether we get it right or not, Kevin, will impact how people feel about it.
Daniel Pink (27:00)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (27:00)
So
what the PARC did with the Xerox PARC interface is they invented these conical pointer mouse folders that we have. What do you think some of the interfaces that would be coming for biology that would change that? What do you imagine that?
Drew Endy (27:20)
Yeah, we've already hinted at one of them, right? The PB, right? The personal bio maker and all the things that have to be true. I mean, in one version, it's just a countertop box that has inputs of energy and stuff and outputs of the seed corn of the bio thing, right? Think of it like a molecularly programmable bread machine, right? Is one version of that. I suspect
Daniel Pink (27:25)
Yeah, describe what that might look like, Drew, what the people...
Drew Endy (27:45)
you know, Dan and Kevin, that a lot of the human interfaces are surfing on top of what we've already developed, right? It'll be natural language, it'll be spoken. It's like, hey, you know, like I need a Moxicillin, right? Right? Like, it's like you just speak to the thing and it makes it for you, right? The more deep tech stuff will be in between, you know, the human natural language interface and actually making this real, you know, and so...
Daniel Pink (27:56)
Okay
Drew Endy (28:09)
You know, it's like to make the internet work, need Cisco routers, TCP IP, all these IETF standards. That's where there's going to be a lot of hard, hard engineering research that needs to get done to make it, make it real and reliable. But I think the human interfaces are fairly, fairly, we're just floating on top of the other innovations in, in, in interface world.
Kevin Kelly (28:28)
You mentioned the 16 year old having a garden of bioluminescence plants. But one of the things I know about gardening today is that there's an incredible amount of skill required because they're living things. And you think, I have a bush growing, it's been growing great. And then two years later, suddenly there's something different about it. The idea of gardening is as constant maintenance. It's ongoing.
maintenance forever because they're living things. Does synthetic biology change that? Does it make it, you say, more engineered so it's more stable, it's more reliable? Or is it that one of the skills that people would acquire in their life is dealing with these things that require constant maintenance?
Drew Endy (29:13)
Yeah, I love that question, Kevin. I gardeners, gardens need gardeners. Like that the words go right together. I kind of hope that doesn't change.
Kevin Kelly (29:17)
Right?
Well,
for me, I mean, like, I don't know if I want to spend my life, you know, maintaining all the things, all the biological things in my house.
Drew Endy (29:30)
We
all choose what to garden. And you might garden your library of books or your workshop of tools. Some people will garden living things. We're all gardeners in different ways. You garden ideas and so on. So we're all gardening. It's just choose where you want to spend your gardening energy. There are edge cases in synthetic biology that we're exploring that
maybe impact how we think about maintaining biology. An example I could give you is evolution. So we think of, in biology, we think of evolution as inevitable. And when you lift the lid on that, that's because you look at how the genetic code is structured and how mutations change proteins and how changes in proteins change behavior and properties. And it's all baked in, like all the way down. Evolution, it's like,
inevitable unless you change the genetic code. And so it turns out you can rewrite the very genetic code table itself, how the letters of DNA map to proteins. And we have an example of what we call a failsafe genetic code that is such that any mutation in the DNA makes an organism that is less fit.
And that's interesting in an evolutionary context because those organisms would be selected against. imagine you want to bioengineer an organism and release it and you didn't want it to drift and become different, you because you wanted to provide assurance to people that this thing's not going to mutate like Jurassic Park and go crazy, right? And it turns out we have ideas for how to do that bottom up inside out by changing the very codon table. know, so there are edge cases where we can push for
Kevin Kelly (30:37)
Right.
Daniel Pink (30:37)
Yeah.
Drew Endy (30:58)
reliability. ⁓ And as academics, we've been exploring it just because it's intellectually interesting. Whether it becomes practically interesting depends on implementation.
Kevin Kelly (30:59)
Okay.
So we kind of skirted around a major industry in the biological realm, which is agriculture. So if you are able to, in the 25 years, make biology more of an engineering thing where you're not really experimenting, you have a theory, it's predictable, how does that change agriculture in 25 years? Give us a picture of what...
Drew Endy (31:17)
Hmm.
Kevin Kelly (31:35)
Your best case scenario is for agriculture in 25 years.
Drew Endy (31:38)
I'm going to be pretty low-hanging fruit. How about we just have a reliable and sustainable food supply in a changing climate context, right? ⁓
Kevin Kelly (31:46)
What does that look like? What would be
different if we walked out to Iowa on a big farm in Hawaii? What would look different and what would be different?
Drew Endy (31:55)
Hopefully,
it wouldn't look different. You'd be doing less synthetic fertilizer application because we'd have more nitrogen fixing through microbes associated with the plants so you weren't burning methane to grow food. ⁓ Yeah, why not? Of course we are. Right now, we definitely are. But the blessing is going to be we can still grow corn at scale. We can still grow wheat at scale if temperatures go up, if rain patterns change.
Kevin Kelly (32:08)
Are we still growing corn? I don't know.
Drew Endy (32:20)
So don't knock things looking the same in a context where the planet is changing quite a lot. So what synthetic biology unlocks is, for example, how do you change root morphology quickly? So if you needed to change the root structure of a complicated plant, instead of being shallow and broad, you can go deep and then branch out. That's the sort of capacities we're unlocking. Above the surface, like, thank goodness we still have plants that are making corn or wheat or rice at scale.
Daniel Pink (32:24)
Yeah.
Drew Endy (32:46)
because we can still operate that stuff, we have basically resilience and agility with respect to changing physical conditions. ⁓
Daniel Pink (32:53)
Does
price or output change?
Drew Endy (32:56)
As we all well know, of course, right? Is China buying soybeans or not? And who are they buying them from? Right? So all those things are still massively in play. And another way to think about it, which sort of comes out of this is, by increasing the operational ability to partner with biology and make stuff, we're giving ourselves options. We're increasing optionality, right?
And so that's just going to be important because we have a, it's like harder predict exactly what's going to go down when and where. Right? So my mom's always like, it's good to have options. Right? And if I make a little bit of connect the dot, the other reason it's good to have options is that's how you avoid oppression. Right? If you are oppression. So, ⁓ well, if there's something I need and there's only one place I can get it.
Kevin Kelly (33:33)
That's how you word it, the depression you say? Oppression, oppression.
Daniel Pink (33:35)
Oppression, yeah.
Because it's more decentralized?
Drew Endy (33:43)
that place or person has potential political power over me. In a market, it'd be called a monopoly. But if there's only a single supplier of something you need, that sole source has potential power over you. And so by unlocking biology as a general purpose technology such that we can grow more stuff where we need to grow it, gives everybody options. It's de-globalized. It's decentralized. It's increasing optionality for making things we need.
I mostly am going to want to buy things from a marketplace that's more efficient. But if I have this backstop of, I could grow the stuff I need, that's an interesting wrinkle on this. That's why I think biotechnology appropriately developed could be freedom's natural ally or a democratically biased technology.
Daniel Pink (34:26)
That's interesting.
Kevin, can we move to the tropes?
Kevin Kelly (34:30)
Yeah. So do we kind of, when we think about the future of biotechnology and synthetic life, there's a lot of Hollywood versions of things. And we'd to get your, take a rapid response to what people in Hollywood have imagined the future would be like. And you can tell us whether it's. ⁓
Drew Endy (34:40)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (34:51)
ridiculous or plausible or what your reactions are. Dan, do you have a couple to start?
Daniel Pink (34:57)
Well, mean, one would be basically designer babies. let ⁓ me actually build on what we were talking about before. The 16-year-old is feeling lonely one day, and she goes to her PB in her parents' kitchen, and through the voice interface, where now we're interfacing with biology with our voice in the same way we can do with Chet Chee Pt, she says, I'm lonely.
Drew Endy (35:01)
designer
Kevin Kelly (35:02)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (35:21)
Build me a girlfriend.
Drew Endy (35:23)
I guess you could get an egg coming out of that, but then what happens, right? But technically that's on a ⁓ plausible technology roadmap. Genome construction's a thing. The Wellcome Trust just created seed funding towards building human genomes. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (35:31)
In five years.
Daniel Pink (35:39)
Her
mom says, her mom and dad say, you know what, 16 year old, don't really, like you're sort of a disappointing child. We wanna have actually a child who is more attuned with our values and our perspective on the world. So they go to the PB and they forget about the boyfriend or girlfriend. They build a designer baby, all right? You basically build the kid whom you want. Plausible, not plausible.
Drew Endy (36:02)
Yeah.
I think the issue is more of the parents. like, we've got plenty of, it's like, where's the Johnny Ives or who's the designer in all this really? Right. And it's like too much baby, not enough design. then underneath all of this is there's a question, which is what does it mean to be human? And who gets to ask and answer that question? And we need to practice that one a lot more. You're like, at some point, 400 years ago, Homo sapiens invented human.
Kevin Kelly (36:06)
Okay.
Drew Endy (36:27)
And we're kind of stuck in that concept. And so it's a very rich topic that is being explored in a very superficial and poor way. ⁓ Yeah. Well, it's like two, two. OK, so then two.
Daniel Pink (36:36)
Well, that's what these tropes are. And that's what we specialize in, superficial and poor. let's keep, let's, let's, so designer,
so seriously, like parents designing their own babies, is that complete sci-fi or is it somewhat plausible?
Drew Endy (36:51)
Too much baby, not enough design. mean, it's already happening, right, if you do sex determination, right? So it's happening in an indirect way. It's just not being done in a very interesting way. ⁓
Daniel Pink (36:55)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (37:04)
And it won't
be in 25 years is what you're saying.
Okay, next one. Instant tissue regeneration. you're in, you're having a sword fight, lightsaber cuts your arm off, whatever, as you go into the vat, you come out, you've got your regrown limb. I mean, that's engineering, that's an engineering challenge, right? I mean, can we do that?
Drew Endy (37:11)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's.
Yep.
Yes. So totally plausible. The key thing to pay attention to is the cost of the ink. No, because you're going to have tissue printers. Those are possible. Those exist. we need the ink for these tissue printers is slurries of cells. they need to be the ink has to become the problem is like we're starting with HP ink cost. Right. Like we need to make the cost of the tissue printing ink a million times cheaper than it works.
Kevin Kelly (37:28)
You
Uh-huh.
Drew Endy (37:47)
at scale.
Kevin Kelly (37:47)
However, you can ask people how much they would pay to have a new arm, and they might pay a million dollars.
Drew Endy (37:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, some people will, but it's kind of, it's like right now, New Arms is like probably like a hundred million dollars in ink. Right? Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (37:58)
Okay. ⁓
Daniel Pink (37:59)
well.
Kevin Kelly (38:02)
So how about we have a coming population implosion in the next coming century for sure. How about artificial wombs? ⁓ That would seem like a good thing to have. And I've seen those on the other futures. We're going to have artificial wombs in 25 years?
Daniel Pink (38:11)
Mmm.
Drew Endy (38:21)
Yeah,
technically plausible, been demonstrated with lambs, terms and conditions fraught with peril.
Daniel Pink (38:29)
Explain more
about that. Just give us some texture to that.
Drew Endy (38:31)
It was like,
whose whom is it? Right? Like, who's in charge of it? Who owns it? Who's responsible for it? Right?
Kevin Kelly (38:37)
Yeah.
So you're saying technically it can, but culturally there issues. Is that what you're saying?
Drew Endy (38:43)
Yeah,
yeah. And you can look at the case studies of what popped up in the late 2010s around artificial wombs for animals and then the idea of moving that over to humans and it becomes a significant and important conversation about the term.
Kevin Kelly (38:55)
Well, tell
us about artificial wounds for animals because I know nothing about that.
Drew Endy (38:59)
Plastic bag, embryo, media comes in and out, keep the temperature stable, grow baby lambs. You can find that on the internet, it's not AI generated.
Kevin Kelly (39:10)
Okay, and ⁓ so.
Daniel Pink (39:12)
And
do the lambs then survive or is it one of those things like, yeah?
Drew Endy (39:16)
I don't know, I don't
remember how far they took it. Did they take it to term or not? It was pretty far along.
Daniel Pink (39:21)
So this could be the secret, Kevin, to the depopulation. You basically just have a massive, just massive government program where you have, you know, baby farms to repopulate the United States.
Kevin Kelly (39:27)
Wait.
Drew Endy (39:29)
Okay, guys, terms and conditions,
Kevin Kelly (39:31)
You
Drew Endy (39:32)
right? What's the relationship between the citizen and the state, right?
Daniel Pink (39:36)
Yes, exactly. No, this
is a dystopian. mean, I'm not, I'm not advocating for that. I'm just sketching the possibility of.
Drew Endy (39:42)
Right. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (39:45)
Yeah,
well, but again, Drew, I think what you're saying is that technically we could, but culturally we have all these issues about do we want to? Is that right? OK. What about the tricorder scanner, which I think is desperately needed? We can have one in 25 years.
Drew Endy (39:55)
Yes, I would agree with that.
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And the MRI imaging tubes don't count? They just take too long or too expensive? ones that a whole body MRI? hand.
Kevin Kelly (40:14)
It's hand held. It doesn't look
like what it looks like, right? It's a handheld thing. You scan it over, it detects, it can do a full body scan for sure.
Drew Endy (40:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
There's some things like that. I don't think so. I think what's more interesting to me is not using hardware to instrument the wetware, but instrumenting the wetware with biology itself. Like, how can I get my body to tell me more about what's going on inside my body so I don't need to bring this other gizmo over that's a piece of electronics? Like, how do I – what's my blood glucose level right now? And how come I can't smell my wrist and there's a
Daniel Pink (40:44)
interesting,
Drew Endy (40:51)
a nice little bit of perfume that's telling me what my blood glucose is or things like that. So I think we can use bioengineering to change bio-IO and get more biosignal out of people by programming the biology as an IO interface.
Kevin Kelly (41:05)
So describe more of what that bio-io interface looks like. said smell might be one of them. What are some of the other examples of that biological interface?
Daniel Pink (41:05)
Interesting.
Drew Endy (41:16)
It be smell, could be like a tingling, you know, like a magic. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (41:19)
Could you, mean,
possible, some kind of visible signal on your skin, you know? Like almost like a warning, you know, like a warning sign.
Drew Endy (41:27)
Yep,
could have a ⁓ tattoo that's a state variable tattoo, right?
Daniel Pink (41:29)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (41:31)
Is there
a evolutionary reason why we are not more aware of our own metrics and things?
Drew Endy (41:38)
Probably. Some things are just working till they're not working and if you stop to think about it that'd be risky. You don't want to, hey heart, beat again. Hey heart, beat. If you had to tell your heart to beat every beat and you messed up, that's your problem.
Daniel Pink (41:46)
You
Kevin Kelly (41:50)
Well, no, but I mean,
why don't we have a natural way to detect around glucose levels?
Daniel Pink (41:56)
We might have something similar. We have something similar that's just like incredibly blunt and inefficient. mean, pain is a signal that something has arrived.
Kevin Kelly (42:02)
Thank ⁓
Drew Endy (42:05)
We're also optimizing a system, the human being, that's having a very different ⁓ lifespan relationship compared to what we were selected for. So lot of these puzzles we have around diabetes and cancer, we're not the main things that our bodies were selected for in evolutionary history.
Kevin Kelly (42:22)
Right. So, I think going back to some of these interfaces, you're suggesting rather than having gizmos that you have to either wear or apply to yourself, you want to have something that is more a biological interface that would come out of the body itself. ⁓
Drew Endy (42:38)
Yeah. It's
like software, hardware, wetware. So it's like bioengineering is operating with wetware, just to try that word on. And so if we can instrument the wetware with programmable bio stuff, then we'll get changes in smell, color, maybe your hair standing up in a different way. And there's all sorts of senses and modulators we can activate.
Right? ⁓ That would let us get information out of ourselves. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (43:05)
Right.
So another trope, a very common trope in Hollywood is lab leak pandemics, zombie. And you talked about getting to the point where we don't have to worry about things like pandemics, but Hollywood has a different idea. What do you think in 25 years? Stop what?
Drew Endy (43:13)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Stop it.
Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop,
Kevin Kelly (43:31)
Okay.
huh.
Okay.
Drew Endy (43:53)
The thing, in my opinion, we have to do is we have to disallow research with pathogenic viruses, period. We already do this for smallpox. If you do research with smallpox and you're not in one of these two labs, in the United States, it's a prison sentence, federal crime, 25 years to life, and it's a $2 million fine. If you do research with human influenza or human coronavirus or human adjacent of either of those, it's not the same. We have to have a much stricter governance framework for these pathogens.
The question of where did SARS-CoV-2 come from is a fine question that nobody can answer, which reveals a more important question, which is why can nobody answer the first question? And we have to disallow certain things to make it easier to answer these important questions. So no ambiguity here. I want us to have a much stricter governance framework and stop research with certain pathogens of pandemic potential, period.
Kevin Kelly (44:29)
Yeah, yeah, wait, wait.
So no gain of function research.
Drew Endy (44:46)
There'll be gain of function research because that's such a broad term, it almost doesn't mean anything, right? But there will not be research with certain pathogens of pandemic potential, right? So no gain of function research with certain pathogens of pandemic potential, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (45:02)
Bye, you.
Daniel Pink (45:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, think that makes perfect sense. There's obviously a political and governance issue of international cooperation with that because you need, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Drew Endy (45:12)
And because it's such a absolutely and because it's such a serious there's a real serious topic. So let me just explain something.
The governance framework we inherit made sense for a world where building viruses from scratch was not possible let alone routine. Some point in the last decade building viruses from scratch became routine. And as soon as that happened we needed to update our policy framework and we didn't. And we have to do it now. And if we do it now then Kevin to your question lab leaks.
Daniel Pink (45:25)
Right?
Drew Endy (45:39)
There's always going to be lab leaks. They're just not going to be labs working with the dangerous stuff. So it just won't matter.
Kevin Kelly (45:43)
Right.
Right, right. So it's not that you're preventing lab leaks, it's just you're preventing the research.
Drew Endy (45:48)
You're preventing the dangerous leaks.
Kevin Kelly (45:50)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, right. Dan, did you have any other tropes?
Daniel Pink (45:53)
no, I think that's good. I think that's, I think that's, I think we're good on those.
Kevin Kelly (45:57)
I have one more that I hear about, is nanobots in your bloodstream. That seems to be a recurring science fiction story. And it's a little bit maybe against your idea because you're putting the devices right into your bloodstream. So 25 years, do you think we have those?
Drew Endy (46:14)
Sure. I mean, we already have some. You're seeing, you know, like these mechanical capsules you ingest that sample your gut microbiome. You know, it comes out and you can see a tape recorder of what exists in your your alimentary canal. But you're talking about bloodstream. You know, for that stuff, I wouldn't call it nanobots. I call it biobots. Right. Again, it's just like we're going to use the wetware for the wetware. Right. And so you already see this with the immunotherapy, like CAR T cells.
for treating cancers. You take your immune cell out of your body, you bioengineer it to target a disease, you put it back in yourself, right? And it's the biobot that's doing this magical thing. Here's how I think about it. What was it, Magic School Bus or Fantastic Voyage, where they shrink the doctors down in a submarine and inject it like a nanobot? The problem is the physicists had never given a shrinking raise, right? So the
Kevin Kelly (46:58)
Yeah. ⁓
Drew Endy (47:04)
The better thing is to shrink the doctor's prescription down into DNA, put the doctor's prescription in DNA, put that inside cells and have the cells implement the doctor's prescription. So nanobots are gonna be biobots and it's already happening. For the win, like for the win. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (47:19)
So
you don't even need that. basically get the cells to essentially reprogram themselves rather than introduce something else inside of it.
Drew Endy (47:25)
The bioengineers
are our 16 year old, 2050 young woman. The people are programming the biobots and the biobots are doing the work.
Kevin Kelly (47:36)
And the bio-bots are cells, right? They're cells. So we have bio-engineered cells to do what we want and you put them in your blood or you send your blood through them some ways. ⁓
Drew Endy (47:38)
That's right.
I mean,
that's currently state of the art for treating certain cancers, blood cancers and so on. It's already on ramping into the future.
Kevin Kelly (47:58)
And give me a description of how that works, just so we're clear in our scenario.
Drew Endy (48:04)
You take one of your immune cells, the immune cells are the cells in your body that are defending you from invaders. You pull it out and you culture it in a laboratory context and you give it some designer DNA that tells it to target the cancer you have. Then you grow a bunch of those cells, you put them back in your body and they go do that.
Kevin Kelly (48:09)
Right.
Okay.
And that works right now.
Drew Endy (48:24)
It works well for non tumor cancers, Like blood cancers where you can, whereas a tumor, it's hard for the immune system to get all the way into the center of the tumor as a physical object. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (48:34)
Right.
And the last thing on the frontier that's not just a science fiction, but seems to be moving into the mainstream in some ways, longevity, longevity pills, longevity treatments. ⁓ Do you imagine a success in 25 years?
Drew Endy (48:47)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
kind of surprised more isn't happening already given how much effort's pushed on this, right? Because the way I think about it is it starts by doing genetics on things that live longer, right? And then you find the natural things that are associated with living longer, and then you look for chemical modulators of those things, and those should be turning into medicines. And so that algorithm for longevity therapeutic development seems to have been running for over 20 years now.
And so I'm not quite, I would have expected that we already have more in that area. so I'm just pausing a little bit to wonder why hasn't more like California Life Company, Calico, why isn't there more coming out of Calico already? I just don't know. Am I missing it or are they hitting a roadblock? But it seems like it's plausible that we could get medicines that would be directly related to longer lifespan and longer healthy wellness lifespan.
That seems plausible to me and I'm curious why we aren't getting more. And then the other side of this is, in the spirit of a trope, these sound like lazy pills to me. They're not life spans pills, they're lazy pills. Right, because if I change my diet and exercise, I have another way of helping with life span and wellness, but that's just harder. So are they life span pills or are they lazy pills? I don't know.
Kevin Kelly (50:05)
Mm-hmm.
You can do both. Well, do thanks for playing along with us on those tropes. I think we'd like to move to the next session to see if there's anything that you feel really certain about in the next 25 years that you'd be available and willing to make a hundred dollar bet about it saying I.
Drew Endy (50:11)
Yeah, But like lazy pills.
Kevin Kelly (50:32)
I can't see the future, but I'm pretty certain that this is going to happen. you either, we could take the other side of it, or we may actually agree with it, but just something that you'd be willing to bet on.
Drew Endy (50:42)
I'll
give you some bets. Like number one, I'll bet bioengineering is going to become boring as a technology. Like it's just going to work. By 2030, building cells from scratch is going to become routine. And on top of that, like using biology as a reliable technology in this molecular scale sense is going to become routine by 2050.
Kevin Kelly (50:48)
Thank
What would be a falsifiable verification that we could use to adjudicate that? Like what would.
Drew Endy (51:09)
Oh, sure.
When you need to get something done with biotechnology in 2050, do you have to hire a bunch of postdocs and give them a lab and a budget and you're not confident it will work or not because it's a whole bunch of scientific mystery and gobbledygook? Or is it like, oh, it's like software programming. You have to hire good programmers, but if they're competent, it'll work and you're not doing foundational science, right? So in other words, let's say you wanted to brew a new medicine.
in 2050. Option one, you hire some coders and it works. Option two, you have to hire a whole bunch of PhD postdocs in biology and these weird sciences and life sciences and maybe they can get it to work, maybe they can't. So does that make sense as a false, you're willing to take that bet? Biotechnology becomes boring. It just works.
Kevin Kelly (51:58)
Yeah.
So it becomes boring because you could hire one person instead of a team of people.
Drew Endy (52:05)
And the type of person you're hiring is different. You're not hiring a professional scientist. You're hiring a skilled technician, a programmer.
Kevin Kelly (52:15)
And what's the difference between those two? How do we tell the difference between the professional and the...
Drew Endy (52:20)
The professional
scientist is writing PhD thesis proposals and defending her dissertation and asking for lots of strange equipment that nobody knows how to operate. The technician has everything they need to get your product to work and is happy to give you a quote and it's like repairing your garage.
this is wild. You guys can't even imagine biotechnology just working. This is really wild.
Daniel Pink (52:42)
No,
Kevin Kelly (52:44)
No,
no, I'm really...
Daniel Pink (52:44)
we're just, yeah, we're just, I think we're thinking more about the mechanics of the bet and the, yeah, yeah, honestly, like I totally can imagine that. It's just a matter of like, what are we betting on? ⁓ Do you have a bet on maybe like an over under on the household penetration of that personal bio bread maker thing?
Kevin Kelly (52:49)
Yeah, the mechanics of the bed. It's like how... Yeah, yeah, I want to be able to...
Drew Endy (52:50)
Alright, alright, alright, that's fair.
that's a good one. Or let's go with... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Pink (53:10)
So we can do an over under on like household, like what's
Kevin Kelly (53:13)
The
Daniel Pink (53:13)
the over
Kevin Kelly (53:13)
PB,
Daniel Pink (53:13)
under on the household, household, household penetration.
Kevin Kelly (53:16)
PBs.
Daniel Pink (53:17)
And we can probably chart that, I mean, I don't have the data in front of me, but we can probably chart that with the trajectory of PCs in households.
Drew Endy (53:25)
Yeah, that's a good one. All right, I like that, Dan. Another one, another one. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (53:27)
So what would you say?
Daniel Pink (53:29)
But what's the,
what's 2050? Is it, is it, is it 5 %? Is it 10 %? What's the over under?
Drew Endy (53:34)
10 % 10 %
Kevin Kelly (53:36)
10 %
of American households would have a PB? Well, that's very, very verifiable.
Daniel Pink (53:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might actually, I might take the over on that.
Drew Endy (53:48)
Somebody's gonna have to make a new company called Banana to you know, like Apple did the PC and Banana will do the PPC
Daniel Pink (53:53)
Hahaha
Drew Endy (53:54)
So I might be able to bias the outcome here.
Kevin Kelly (53:56)
Okay. Well, that's, that's, that's great. A hundred dollar bet. Okay.
Daniel Pink (53:59)
Where, Kevin,
where are you on that? The 10 % penetration of the PB by 2050.
Kevin Kelly (54:04)
It doesn't sound unreasonable to me. don't think I would take, I mean, I think I would take Drew's side.
Daniel Pink (54:06)
No, doesn't at all.
Yeah, I mean, you can, I mean, there two ways to do it. I mean, you can take, can basically, Drew is basically, Drew is either the odds maker or the better. So, so when he's the better, I don't want to take, I'm not taking the other side of the 10%. If he's the odds maker and saying 10 % is the over under, you can bet the over under.
Drew Endy (54:16)
but
Kevin Kelly (54:23)
Thank
Drew Endy (54:25)
Dan, where would you shift the percentage to think it's a balanced bet, a coin flip?
Daniel Pink (54:30)
mean, think 25 years is a very long time, you know, and, we sometimes we, we underestimate it. So if you were to say, if we were to make a bet 20 years ago and say 25 years ago, let's go back to 2000 and say, what percentage of the human population has a supercomputer in their pocket? You might've said, that's totally plausible. I can see that it's going to be like five, 6%. And it's now, you know, on order of magnitude higher than that. So.
So I don't know where I would put it, but my guess is that we'll be surprised that it'll be higher than 10. So maybe 20.
Drew Endy (55:08)
I that's
a really good historical example. I might be feeling like we're closer to 1975 in terms of computing history, and we're looking at the 25-year period from 75 to 2000, and how many people got computers, PCs on that time scale. Because the industry behind the making of computers, I think, needed to fill in to have that handy phone, mobile phone thing.
Daniel Pink (55:26)
Pretty,
Right.
Drew Endy (55:35)
push so fast.
Daniel Pink (55:36)
Right, and the 25 years is gonna look different. The trajectory of the 25 years is gonna look different. So, 1980 doesn't look that much different from 1975, but 1999 looks very different from 1989.
Drew Endy (55:40)
Yeah.
That's right. That's right. So I'm actually feeling like the 10 % is a good even odds. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (55:53)
Okay. So just to re-state
Daniel Pink (55:54)
I'm taking the over.
Kevin Kelly (55:58)
the bet then, Drew and Dee bets $100 that by 2050, 10 % of American households will have a personal bio machine, bio maker. Okay. That's cool. Fantastic. All right. Great. Thanks, Drew. So we're headed into the last part of our...
Drew Endy (56:11)
Biomaker. The PB.
Daniel Pink (56:12)
Bye, Maker. I
love it.
Kevin Kelly (56:20)
little journey here for the best case scenarios. So Drew, what's either a one for the road, a recommendation of something that people should read that kind of fills out your vision or a action item that people could take to make what you were suggesting happen or a question that we should be asking ourselves.
Drew Endy (56:43)
Can I do one pointer and one ask? Okay, so it's like, okay, cool, thanks. Mahalia Jackson, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, I think it was the 28th of August of 1963, Martin Luther King's giving a speech and he needed a little bit of encouragement.
Kevin Kelly (56:46)
Yeah.
I was not expecting that. Okay, go ahead.
Daniel Pink (56:55)
You
Kevin Kelly (57:02)
Okay.
Drew Endy (57:04)
And according to the stories, she was sitting up on stage and she shouted over his shoulder, tell him about the dream. Right? Because telling people about dreams is hard and it requires courage. And so I just want to point people to her role in Martin Luther King's, have a dream speech. Cause I think what you guys are doing is challenging us to collectively courageous and helping each other around these best case scenarios. So there's a pointer like
Kevin Kelly (57:11)
huh.
Mm-hmm.
Drew Endy (57:29)
Track down what Mahalia did and see if there's maybe something for you in that history. And then the ask, here's an ask for everybody. I want you to mutate the word library by changing the first letter I in the word to the letter A. And now you get a library. And I want you to start a library wherever you are.
⁓ Just like the United States made thousands of public libraries in the late 1800s and early 1900s with the support of Carnegie and others, right? In order to get literacy and citizenship, we could create libraries, a network of public libraries staffed by librarians that help people understand what's going on around them, help people become citizens of science and technology, and off we go. So that's my ask. Please mutate the word library.
to make a librarian become a librarian or support your local librarian.
Kevin Kelly (58:23)
And give me a little bit more picture of what a library would look like. It's sort of like, it's down in the municipal center, it's at the city hall, whatever it is, there's a room, is it a room? It's got, what's inside the library and what's coming in and out? Do you have 55 gallon drums of amino acids? What are we talking about?
Daniel Pink (58:23)
Ha
Drew Endy (58:48)
It's everything you can imagine. Everything from the big civic space, right, to a side room and an existing library that gets repurposed to understand biology and introduce people to biotechnology. It could be a community garden that's upgraded a little bit. Wait a minute, you could even have a little free library on a post outside on your sidewalk. And what's inside there? could be...
Kevin Kelly (59:02)
huh.
Daniel Pink (59:05)
Mm.
⁓
Drew Endy (59:14)
infectious disease testing kits. ⁓ It could be a magnifying glass. It could be a specimen collector. just anything that helps people have optionality in the agency with respect to understanding the natural world and interacting with it. Anyway, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (59:16)
Uh-huh.
Daniel Pink (59:29)
love the
labrary idea. Like at this point, I want to be labrarian of Congress to help make this happen.
Drew Endy (59:32)
Yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
And so write your member of Congress to provide support to the Congressional Research Service so that they can offer a library in the Library of Congress. Did you know, that on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next July, we got some money to the Library of Congress to build DNA that's encoding the nation's digital treasure?
in bioengineered DNA. And that's going to be in the lobby. And so everybody can see that. So please, Dan, go be the librarian of Congress.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:03)
⁓ wow.
I think we just
need to unpack what you just said so people are clear, so I understand. It's possible to take all the data in a book and translate it into the particles of DNA, into the letters. And then you can put that into a cell which can replicate so you have a way of reproducing or replicating the information in the book. Is that correct?
Daniel Pink (1:00:22)
ACTJ.
Drew Endy (1:00:23)
Yeah.
Exactly. like here's or you can take a book and you can encode the DNA encoding the book and put it in a little metal canister and where it's just stable. So you don't have to put it back in. It could just be a tape recorder.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:46)
Right,
so the idea is you do this with the US Constitution.
Drew Endy (1:00:51)
the declaration of it, all our nation's treasures digitized and stored in DNA. And you have to read the DNA to read it back up. The cool thing about it is the DNA can last a very long time. And as a digital data format, it doesn't get old because we love DNA. So you can have confidence that in a thousand years somebody will know how to read DNA.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:09)
Could you add it to your own DNA? Could you put it into your own body?
Daniel Pink (1:01:12)
Yeah.
Drew Endy (1:01:13)
Yeah, if you really wanted
to with your PB, maybe that makes PB adoption go up by 20%.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:16)
I mean, you know, for
like the real page, yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:01:18)
So you embody the
US Constitution.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:23)
Right,
right, for the real patriots, you've got the DNA, you've got the Constitution in your DNA!
Daniel Pink (1:01:24)
Yeah.
Or even
Drew Endy (1:01:29)
I
Daniel Pink (1:01:29)
better, during the tough times we're in right now, we could give people, you know, Constitution vaccines to remind them of what hero means.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:37)
for me.
Drew Endy (1:01:38)
I don't, those are really interesting ideas, guys. I don't know that I'd recommend some of them, but like, you know, you could make, you could take your library, you could digitize all the books in your library and turn that into a probiotic, a yogurt, right? And feed it to people. And then you'd just be dispersing your writings all over everywhere you go, right? That seems more plausible and safer to me. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:01:41)
You
Alright. Yeah. Yeah.
Alright.
Kevin Kelly (1:02:02)
Well, I think that's a fabulous way to end. It's really fantastic. Drew, thank you for taking time and sharing with us your best case scenarios, which I am very, very excited by. That's really fabulous. Thank you for your dream, for sharing your dream.
Daniel Pink (1:02:04)
Yes.
Drew Endy (1:02:08)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:02:09)
Yeah, fascinating, Drew. Thank you for Drew. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Drew Endy (1:02:17)
Thank you.
Daniel Pink (1:02:18)
And I'm also very impressed by your ability to talk about these very sophisticated things in language that people can understand. I think some of these new coinages that you have are actually really helpful in people imagining a, know, showing, to your Mahalia Jackson things, showing them the dream.
Drew Endy (1:02:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you guys. I really appreciate your questions. Thanks, Peace. Bye.
Daniel Pink (1:02:38)
right, thanks Drew.
Kevin Kelly (1:02:38)
All right,
good. Thank you.