The Future of Species review by Adrian Wolfson – Are we about to create artificial life? | Science and nature books

TThe Prophet Ezekiel once claimed to have seen four beasts emerging from a flaming cloud, “shining like the color of burnished copper.” Each of them has two wings and four faces: the face of a man, a lion, a bull, and an eagle. Likewise, a creature called Buraq, which is between a mule and a donkey and has wings and a human face, was said to have carried the Prophet Muhammad on his journeys; While the ancient Greeks gave us the centaur, the legendary human-horse hybrid that JK Rowling recently reintroduced in the Harry Potter books.

“The drive to blend anatomical features of other species with those of humans seems to be rooted in our imagination,” says Adrian Wolfson in his provocative and disturbing analysis of the biological revolution that he believes is about to sweep the planet. Very soon, we will not only dream of imaginary animals, but we will turn them into biological reality.

According to these predictions, species shaped by billions of years of natural selection will soon be forced to share their world with artificial copies designed and built by humans, with disastrous consequences. “Synthetic species can be harnessed to produce biofuels, medicines, biosensors, drought-resistant crops, and countless other innovations,” he says. “We might build houses instead of building them.”

This is the stuff of science fiction. Yet the London-born, Oxbridge-educated Wolfson – founder of Genero Genetics in San Diego and author of two previous popular science books – insists that the nature of life on Earth is about to transform. He described his book as a wake-up call. We are facing a “Second Genesis” that can bring great benefits but also has very dark and disturbing consequences.

So, what has happened in recent years to bring us to the brink of such a revolution? How exactly will it appear? How can the positives be maximized and the risks reduced?

In answer to the first question, Wolfson points to two major inventions. The first involves technologies, such as the Sidewinder method developed at Caltech, that can construct DNA fragments of “unprecedented size and complexity, quickly and efficiently.” Entire genomes can now be synthesized in record times. The second comes thanks to artificial intelligence, which has helped scientists solve scientific problems that were previously intractable, especially those related to the shapes of proteins.

Proteins are the basic building blocks of life. They make up our hair, bones, skin, and muscles and are composed of folded sequences of amino acids. Scientists knew how to create one-dimensional chains, but they could not predict how the resulting amino acid chains would fold to form three-dimensional proteins, whose shape determines their function. This greatly restricted their ability to produce new proteins.

Then, in 2020, AlphaFold2, relying on neural network technology also used in systems like ChatGPT, was able to decipher the folding code. The structures of complex proteins can now be predicted with confidence, and as a result we are able to create new proteins for use in medicine or elsewhere.

And if we can make new proteins, we can also think about creating new forms of life, Wolfson writes. “Biology is now on the threshold of transitioning from a largely descriptive science to a generative science. In the future, we will not only catalog species, we will create them.”

It is not difficult to imagine that problems might occur when this happens. How will organisms shaped by evolution over eons exist in a world that also includes artificial newcomers? Would the latter have the same legitimacy as natural species? Wolfson doesn’t think so, but he warns that the distinction between natural and artificial life forms will become increasingly blurred.

There may also be opportunities to improve existing Earth creatures. We are the end products of the random forces of heredity, chance, and natural selection—and we bear the scars. Take the human spine. “It’s a design disaster,” writes Wolfson, who points out that it evolved into a quadruped and is hopelessly unsuitable for a bipedal animal. Can we now improve it? Why not? It could “direct life into uncharted territories, endowing it with entirely new properties that would reinvent the way living organisms function.”

Wolfson’s descriptions can become exaggerated and overwrought. He has a tendency to exaggerate the influence of the so-called second formation. But his arguments are persuasive and his prose is generally clear and direct.

Of course, many aspects of the coming biological revolution look much less rosy or comfortable, and Wolfson has cataloged these pitfalls as well. Bioterrorists can easily amass arsenals of man-made pathogens. As DNA synthesis and AI tools become more accessible, it will become more difficult to track what is being created and by whom.

Tampering with phages — viruses that infect bacteria — could inadvertently destabilize the ocean carbon cycle and accelerate climate change. Then there are the ethical consequences of increasingly patching humans with mammalian genomes – for example, making mice more like humans and thus making them better models for drug testing. But where do you stop? Could we end up with half-human hybrids worthy of Ezekiel?

Wolfson doesn’t think so, insisting we have to move on. Although he supports a ban on designer babies and parentless humans, he claims that simply stopping AI-led genome research will not work, when the benefits to humanity, the planet and the animal kingdom are too great to consider restrictions on science. In this, he may be too negligent about the risks that lie ahead. The risks of unintended consequences appear very real.