The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 11

The United States imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation, about 19 percent of its total foreign supply, and around half of that now comes from the oil sands. Anything that reduces our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, many Americans would say, is a good thing. But clawing and cooking one barrel of crude from the oil sands emits as much as three times more carbon dioxide than letting one gush from the ground in Saudi Arabia. The oil sands are still a tiny part of the world's carbon problema"they account for less than a tenth of one percent of global CO2 emissionsa"but to many environmentalists they are the thin end of the wedge, the first step along a path that could lead to other, even dirtier sources of oil: producing it from oil shale or coal. "Oil sands represent a decision point for North America and the world," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Inst.i.tute, a moderate and widely respected Canadian environmental group. "Are we going to get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the unconventional-oil track? The fact that we're willing to move four tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is running out of easy oil."

That thirsty world has come crashing in on Fort McKay. Yet Jim Boucher's view of it, from an elegant new building at the entrance to the besieged little village, contains more shades of gray than you might expect. "The choice we make is a difficult one," Boucher said when I visited him last summer. For a long time the First Nation tried to fight the oil sands industry, with little success. Now, Boucher said, "we're trying to develop the community's capacity to take advantage of the opportunity." Boucher presides not only over this First Nation, as chief, but also over the Fort McKay Group of Companies, a community-owned business that provides ser vices to the oil sands industry and brought in $85 million in 2007. Unemployment is under 5 percent in the village, and it has a health clinic, a youth center, and a hundred new three-bedroom houses that the community rents to its members for far less than market rates. The First Nation is even thinking of opening its own mine: it owns 8,200 acres of prime oil sands land across the river, right next to the Syncrude mine where the ducks died.

As Boucher was telling me all this, he was picking bits of meat from a smoked whitefish splayed out on his conference table next to a bank of windows that offered a panoramic view of the river. A staff member had delivered the fish in a plastic bag, but Boucher couldn't say where it had come from. "I can tell you one thing," he said. "It doesn't come from the Athabasca."

Without the river, there would be no oil sands industry. It's the river that over tens of millions of years has eroded away billions of cubic yards of sediment that once covered the bitumen, thereby bringing it within reach of shovelsa"and in some places all the way to the surface. On a hot summer day along the Athabasca, near Fort McKay for example, bitumen oozes from the riverbank and casts an oily sheen on the water. Early fur traders reported seeing the stuff and watching natives use it to caulk their canoes. At room temperature, bitumen is like mola.s.ses, and below 50 degrees F or so it is as hard as a hockey puck, as Canadians invariably put it. Once upon a time, though, it was light crude, the same liquid that oil companies have been pumping from deep traps in southern Alberta for nearly a century. Tens of millions of years ago, geologists think, a large volume of that oil was pushed northeastward, perhaps by the rise of the Rocky Mountains. In the process it also migrated upward, along sloping layers of sediment, until eventually it reached depths shallow and cool enough for bacteria to thrive. Those bacteria degraded the oil to bitumen.

The Alberta government estimates that the province's three main oil sands deposits, of which the Athabasca one is the largest, contain 173 billion barrels of oil that are economically recoverable today. "The size of that, on the world stagea"it's ma.s.sive," says Rick George, CEO of Suncor, which opened the first mine on the Athabasca River in 1967. In 2003, when the Oil & Gas Journal added the Alberta oil sands to its list of proven reserves, it immediately propelled Canada to second place, behind Saudi Arabia, among oil-producing nations. The proven reserves in the oil sands are eight times those of the entire United States. "And that number will do nothing but go up," says George. The Alberta Energy Resources and Conservation Board estimates that more than 300 billion bar rels may one day be recoverable from the oil sands; it puts the total size of the deposit at 1.7 trillion barrels.

Getting oil from oil sands is simple but not easy. The giant electric shovels that rule the mines have hardened steel teeth that each weigh a ton, and as those teeth claw into the abrasive black sand 24/7, 365 days a year, they wear down every day or two; a welder then plays dentist to the dinosaurs, giving them new crowns. The dump trucks that rumble around the mine, hauling 400-ton loads from the shovels to a rock crusher, burn 50 gallons of diesel fuel an hour; it takes a forklift to change their tires, which wear out in six months. And every day in the Athabasca Valley, more than a million tons of sand emerge from such crushers and is mixed with more than 200,000 tons of water that must be heated, typically to 175 degrees F, to wash out the gluey bitumen. At the upgraders, the bitumen gets heated again, to about 900 degrees F, and compressed to more than 100 atmospheresa"that's what it takes to crack the complex molecules and either subtract carbon or add back the hydrogen that the bacteria removed ages ago. That's what it takes to make the light hydrocarbons we need to fill our gas tanks. It takes a stupendous amount of energy. In situ extraction, which is the only way to get at around 80 percent of those 173 billion barrels, can use up to twice as much energy as mining, because it requires so much steam.

Most of the energy to heat the water or make steam comes from burning natural gas, which also supplies the hydrogen for upgrading. Precisely because it is hydrogen rich and mostly free of impurities, natural gas is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, the one that puts the least amount of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Critics thus say the oil sands industry is wasting the cleanest fuel to make the dirtiesta"that it turns gold into lead. The argument makes environmental but not economic sense, says David Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary. Each barrel of synthetic crude contains about five times more energy than the natural gas used to make it, and in much more valuable liquid form. "In economic terms it's a slam dunk," says Keith. "This whole thing about turning gold into leada"it's the other way around. The gold in our society is liquid transportation fuels."

Most of the carbon emissions from such fuels come from the tailpipes of the cars that burn them; on a "wells-to-wheels" basis, the oil sands are only 15 to 40 percent dirtier than conventional oil. But the heavier carbon footprint remains an environmentala"and public relationsa"disadvantage. Last June Alberta's premier, Ed Stelmach, announced a plan to deal with the extra emissions. The province, he said, will spend over $1.5 billion to develop the technology for capturing carbon dioxide and storing it undergrounda"a strategy touted for years as a solution to climate change. By 2015 Alberta is hoping to capture 5 million tons of CO 2 a year from bitumen upgraders as well as from coal-fired power plants, which even in Alberta, to say nothing of the rest of the world, are a far larger source of CO2 than the oil sands. By 2020, according to the plan, the province's carbon emissions will level off, and by 2050 they will decline to 15 percent below their 2005 levels. That is far less of a cut than scientists say is necessary. But it is more than the U.S. government, say, has committed to in a credible way.

One thing Stelmach has consistently refused to do is "touch the brake" on the oil sands boom. The boom has been gold for the provincial as well as the national economy; the town of Fort McMurray, south of the mines, is awash in Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians fleeing unemployment in their own provinces. The provincial government has been collecting around a third of its revenue from lease sales and royalties on fossil fuel extraction, including oil sandsa"it was expecting to get nearly half this year, or $19 billion, but the collapse in oil prices since the summer has dropped that estimate to about $12 billion. Albertans are bitterly familiar with the boom-and-bust cycle; the last time oil prices collapsed, in the 1980s, the provincial economy didn't recover for a decade. The oil sands cover an area the size of North Carolina, and the provincial government has already leased around half of that, including all 1,356 square miles that are minable. It has yet to turn down an application to develop one of those leases, on environmental or any other grounds.

From a helicopter it's easy to see the industry's impact on the Athabasca Valley. Within minutes of lifting off from Fort McMurray, heading north along the east bank of the river, you pa.s.s over Suncor's Millennium minea"the company's leases extend practically to the town. On a day with a bit of wind, dust plumes billowing off the wheels and the loads of the dump trucks coalesce into a single enormous cloud that obscures large parts of the mine pit and spills over its lip. To the north, beyond a small expanse of intact forest, a similar cloud rises from the next pit, Suncor's Steepbank mine, and beyond that lie two more, and across the river two more. One evening last July the clouds had merged into a band of dust sweeping west across the devastated landscape. It was being sucked into the updraft of a storm cloud. In the distance steam and smoke and gas flames belched from the stacks of the Syncrude and Suncor upgradersa""dark satanic mills" inevitably come to mind, but they're a riveting sight all the same. From many miles away, you can smell the tarry stench. It stings your lungs when you get close enough.

From the air, however, the mines fall away quickly. Skimming low over the river, startling a young moose that was fording a narrow channel, a government biologist named Preston McEachern and I veered northwest toward the Birch Mountains, over vast expanses of scarcely disturbed forest. The Canadian boreal forest covers 2 million square miles, of which around 75 percent remains undeveloped. The oil sands mines have so far converted over 150 square milesa"a hundredth of a percent of the total areaa"into dust, dirt, and tailings ponds. Expansion of in situ extraction could affect a much larger area. At Suncor's Firebag facility, northeast of the Millennium mine, the forest has not been razed, but it has been dissected by roads and pipelines that service a checkerboard of large clearings, in each of which Suncor extracts deeply buried bitumen through a cl.u.s.ter of wells. Environmentalists and wildlife biologists worry that the widening fragmentation of the forest, by timber as well as mineral companies, endangers the woodland caribou and other animals. "The boreal forest as we know it could be gone in a generation without major policy changes," says Steve Kallick, director of the Pew Boreal Campaign, which aims to protect 50 percent of the forest.

McEachern, who works for Alberta Environment, a provincial agency, says the tailings ponds are his top concern. The mines dump wastewater in the ponds, he explains, because they are not allowed to dump waste into the Athabasca, and because they need to reuse the water. As the thick, brown slurry gushes from the discharge pipes, the sand quickly settles out, building the dike that retains the pond; the residual bitumen floats to the top. The fine clay and silt particles, though, take several years to settle, and when they do, they produce a yogurt-like goopa"the technical term is "mature fine tailings"a"that is contaminated with toxic chemicals such as naphthenic acid and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and would take centuries to dry out on its own. Under the terms of their licenses, the mines are required to reclaim it somehow, but they have been missing their deadlines and still have not fully reclaimed a single pond.

In the oldest and most notorious one, Suncor's Pond 1, the sludge is perched high above the river, held back by a dike of compacted sand that rises more than 300 feet from the valley floor and is studded with pine trees. The dike has leaked in the past, and in 2007 a modeling study done by hydrogeologists at the University of Waterloo estimated that 45,000 gallons a day of contaminated water could be reaching the river. Suncor is now in the process of re-claiming Pond 1, piping some tailings to another pond, and replacing them with gypsum to consolidate the tailings. By 2010, the company says, the surface will be solid enough to plant trees on. Last summer it was still a blot of beige mud streaked with black bitumen and dotted with orange plastic scarecrows that are supposed to dissuade birds from landing and killing themselves.

The Alberta government a.s.serts that the river is not being contaminateda"that anything found in the river or in its delta, at Lake Athabasca, comes from natural bitumen seeps. The river cuts right through the oil sands downstream of the mines, and as our chopper zoomed along a few feet above it, McEachern pointed out several places where the riverbank was black and the water oily. "There is an increase in a lot of metals as you move downstream," he said. "That's naturala"it's weathering of the geology. There's mercury in the fish up at Lake Athabascaa"we've had an advisory there since the 1990s. There are PAHs in the sediments in the delta. They're there because the river has eroded through the oil sands."

Independent scientists, to say nothing of people who live downstream of the mines in the First Nations' community of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca, are skeptical. "It's inconceivable that you could move that much tar and have no effect," says Peter Hodson, a fish toxicologist at Queen's University in Ontario. An Environment Canada study did in fact show an effect on fish in the Steepbank River, which flows past a Suncor mine into the Athabasca. Fish near the mine, Gerald Tetreault and his colleagues found when they caught some in 1999 and 2000, showed five times more activity of a liver enzyme that breaks down toxinsa"a widely used measure of exposure to pollutantsa"as did fish near a natural bitumen seep on the Steepbank.

"The thing that angers me," says David Schindler, "is that there's been no concerted effort to find out where the truth lies."

Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was talking about whether people in Fort Chipewyan have already been killed by pollution from the oil sands. In 2006 John O'Connor, a family physician who flew in weekly to treat patients at the health clinic in Fort Chip, told a radio interviewer that he had in recent years seen five cases of cholangiocarcinomaa"a cancer of the bile duct that normally strikes one in 100,000 people. Fort Chip has a population of around 1,000; statistically it was unlikely to have even one case. O'Connor hadn't managed to interest health authorities in the cancer cl.u.s.ter, but the radio interview drew wide attention to the story. "Suddenly it was everywhere," he says. "It just exploded."

Two of O'Connor's five cases, he says, had been confirmed by tissue biopsy; the other three patients had shown the same symptoms but had died before they could be biopsied. (Cholangiocarci-noma can be confused on CT scans with more common cancers such as liver or pancreatic cancer.) "There is no evidence of elevated cancer rates in the community," Howard May, a spokesperson for Alberta Health, wrote in an e-mail last September. But the agency, he said, was nonetheless conducting a more complete investigationa"this time actually examining the medical records from Fort Chipa"to try to quiet a controversy that was now two years old.

One winter night when Jim Boucher was a young boy, around the time the oil sands industry came to his forest, he was returning alone by dogsled to his grandparents' cabin from an errand in Fort McKay. It was a journey of twenty miles or so, and the temperature was minus 4 degrees F. In the moonlight Boucher spotted a flock of ptarmigan, white birds in the snow. He killed around fifty, loaded them on the dogsled, and brought them home. Four decades later, sitting in his chief-executive office in white chinos and a white Adi das sport shirt, he remembers the pride on his grandmother's face that night. "That was a different spiritual world," Boucher says. "I saw that world continuing forever." He tells the story now when asked about the future of the oil sands and his people's place in it.

A poll conducted by the Pembina Inst.i.tute in 2007 found that 71 percent of Albertans favored an idea their government has always rejected out of hand: a moratorium on new oil sands projects until environmental concerns can be resolved. "It's my belief that when government attempts to manipulate the free market, bad things happen," Premier Stelmach told a gathering of oil industry executives that year. "The free-market system will solve this."

But the free market does not consider the effects of the mines on the river or the forest, or on the people who live there, unless it is forced to. Nor, left to itself, will it consider the effects of the oil sands on climate. Jim Boucher has collaborated with the oil sands industry in order to build a new economy for his people, to replace the one they lost, to provide a new future for kids who no longer hunt ptarmigan in the moonlight. But he is aware of the tradeoffs. "It's a struggle to balance the needs of today and tomorrow when you look at the environment we're going to live in," he says. In northern Alberta the question of how to strike that balance has been left to the free market, and its answer has been to forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow is not its job.

MICHAEL SPECTER A Life of Its Own.

FROM The New Yorker.

THE FIRST TIME Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word "artemisinin," about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. "Not a clue," Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world's most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn't an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, whicha"by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biologya"seeks to a.s.semble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually, they intend to construct genesa"and new forms of lifea"from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a kind of foundry of biological componentsa"BioBricks, as Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick part, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.

"When your hard drive dies, you can go to the nearest computer store, buy a new one, and swap it out," Keasling said. "That's because it's a standard part in a machine. The entire electronics in dustry is based on a plug-and-play mentality. Get a transistor, plug it in, and off you go. What works in one cell phone or laptop should work in another. That is true for almost everything we build: when you go to Home Depot, you don't think about the thread size on the bolts you buy, because they're all made to the same standard. Why shouldn't we use biological parts in the same way?" Keasling and others in the field, who have formed bicoastal cl.u.s.ters in the Bay Area and in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, see cells as hardware, and genetic code as the software required to make them run. Synthetic biologists are convinced that with enough knowledge, they will be able to write programs to control those genetic components, programs that would let them not only alter nature but guide human evolution as well.

No scientific achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. The benefits of new technologiesa"from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticalsa"often have been oversold. If the tools of synthetic biology succeed, though, they could turn specialized molecules into tiny, self-contained factories, creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In 2000 Keasling was looking for a chemical compound that could demonstrate the utility of these biological tools. He settled on a diverse cla.s.s of organic molecules known as isoprenoids, which are responsible for the scents, flavors, and even colors in many plants: eucalyptus, ginger, and cinnamon, for example, as well as the yellow in sunflowers and the red in tomatoes. "One day a graduate student stopped by and said, 'Look at this paper that just came out on amorphadiene synthase,'" Keasling told me as we sat in his office in Emeryville, across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. He had recently been named CEO of the Department of Energy's new Joint BioEnergy Inst.i.tute, a partnership of three national laboratories and three research universities, led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The consortium's princ.i.p.al goal is to design and manufacture arti ficial fuels that emit little or no greenhouse gasesa"one of President Obama's most frequently cited priorities.

Keasling wasn't sure what to tell his student. "'Amorphadiene,' I said. 'What's that?' He told me that it was a precursor to artemisinin, an effective antimalarial. I had never worked on malaria. So I got to studying and quickly realized that this precursor was in the general cla.s.s we were planning to investigate. And I thought, amorphadiene is as good a target as any. Let's work on that."

Malaria infects as many as 500 million of the world's poorest people every year and kills up to 1 million, most of whom are children under the age of five. For centuries, the standard treatment was quinine, and then the chemically related compound chloroquine. At ten cents per treatment, chloroquine was cheap and simple to make, and it saved millions of lives. By the early nineties, however, the most virulent malaria parasitea"Plasmodium falc.i.p.arum a"had grown largely resistant to the drug. Worse, the second line of treatment, sulfadoxine-pyrimethanine, or SP, also failed widely. Artemisinin, when taken in combination with other drugs, has become the only consistently successful treatment that remains. (Reliance on any single drug increases the chances that the malaria parasite will develop resistance.) Known in the West as Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, the herb that contains artemisinic acid grows wild in many places, but supplies vary widely and so does the price.

Depending so heavily on artemisinin, while unavoidable, has serious drawbacks: combination therapy costs between ten and twenty times as much as chloroquine, and, despite increasing a.s.sistance from international charities, that is too much money for most Africans or their governments. Artemisinin is not easy to cultivate. Once harvested, the leaves and stems have to be processed rapidly or they will be destroyed by exposure to ultraviolet light. Yields are low, and production is expensive.

Although several thousand Asian and African farmers have begun to plant the herb, the World Health Organization expects that for the next several years the annual demanda"as many as 500 million courses of treatment per yeara"will far exceed the supply. Should that supply disappear, the impact would be incalculable. "Losing artemisinin would set us back years, if not decades," Kent Campbell, a former chief of the malaria branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the Malaria Control Program at the nonprofit health organization PATH, said. "One can envision any number of theoretical public health disasters in the world. But this is not theoretical. This is real. Without artemisinin, millions of people could die."

Keasling realized that the tools of synthetic biology, if properly deployed, could dispense with nature entirely, providing an abundant new source of artemisinin. If each cell became its own factory, churning out the chemical required to make the drug, there would be no need for an elaborate and costly manufacturing process, either. Why not try to produce it from genetic parts by constructing a cell to manufacture amorphadiene? Keasling and his team would have to dismantle several different organisms, then use parts from nearly a dozen of their genes to cobble together a custom-built package of DNA. They would then need to construct a new metabolic pathway, the chemical circuitry that a cell needs to do its joba"one that did not exist in the natural world. "We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us," he told me.

By 2003 the team reported its first success, publishing a paper in Nature Biotechnology that described how the scientists had created that new pathway, by inserting genes from three organisms into E. coli, one of the world's most common bacteria. That research helped Keasling secure a $42.6-million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Keasling had no interest in simply proving that the science worked; he wanted to do it on a scale that the world could use to fight malaria. "Making a few micrograms of artemisinin would have been a neat scientific trick," he said. "But it doesn't do anybody in Africa any good if all we can do is a cool experiment in a Berkeley lab. We needed to make it on an industrial scale." To translate the science into a product, Keasling helped start a new company, Amyris Biotechnologies, to refine the raw organism, then figure out how to produce it more efficiently. Within a decade, Amyris had increased the amount of artemisinic acid that each cell could produce by a factor of one million, bringing down the cost of the drug from as much as ten dollars for a course of treatment to less than a dollar.

Amyris then joined with the Inst.i.tute for OneWorld Health, in San Francisco, a nonprofit drug maker, and in 2008 they signed an agreement with the Paris-based pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis to make the drug, which they hope to have on the market by 2012. The scientific response has been reverentiala"their artemisinin has been seen as the first bona fide product of synthetic biology, proof of a principle that we need not rely on the whims of nature to address the world's most pressing crises. But some peo ple wonder what synthetic artemisinin will mean for the thousands of farmers who have begun to plant the wormwood crop. "What happens to struggling farmers when laboratory vats in California replace farms in Asia and East Africa?" Jim Thomas, a researcher with ETC Group, a technology watchdog based in Canada, asked. Thomas has argued that there has been little discussion of the ethical and cultural implications of altering nature so fundamentally. "Scientists are making strands of DNA that have never existed," Thomas said. "So there is nothing to compare them to. There are no agreed mechanisms for safety, no policies."

Keasling, too, believes that the nation needs to consider the potential impact of this technology, but he is baffled by opposition to what should soon become the world's most reliable source of cheap artemisinin. "Just for a moment, imagine that we replaced artemisinin with a cancer drug," he said. "And let's have the entire Western world rely on some farmers in China and Africa who may or may not plant their crop. And let's have a lot of American children die because of that. Look at the world and tell me we shouldn't be doing this. It's not people in Africa who see malaria who say, whoa, let's put the brakes on."

Artemisinin is the first step in what Keasling hopes will become a much larger program. "We ought to be able to make any compound produced by a plant inside a microbe," he said. "We ought to have all these metabolic pathways. You need this drug: OK, we pull this piece, this part, and this one off the shelf. You put them into a microbe, and two weeks later out comes your product."

That's what Amyris has done in its efforts to develop new fuels. "Artemisinin is a hydrocarbon, and we built a microbial platform to produce it," Keasling said. "We can remove a few of the genes to take out artemisinin and put in a different gene, to make biofuels." Amyris, led by John Melo, who spent years as a senior executive at British Petroleum, has already engineered three microbes that can convert sugar to fuel. "We still have lots to learn and lots of problems to solve," Keasling said. "I am well aware that makes some people anxious, and I understand why. Anything so powerful and new is troubling. But I don't think the answer to the future is to race into the past."

For the first 4 billion years, life on Earth was shaped entirely by nature. Propelled by the forces of selection and chance, the most efficient genes survived, and evolution insured that they would thrive. The long, beautiful Darwinian process of creeping forward by trial and error, struggle and survival, persisted for millennia. Then, about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors began to gather in villages, grow crops, and domesticate animals. That led to stone axes and looms, which in turn led to better crops and a varied food supply that could feed a larger civilization. Breeding of goats and pigs gave way to the fabrication of metal and machines. Throughout it all, new species, built on the power of their collected traits, emerged, while others were cast aside.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our ability to modify the smallest components of life through molecular biology had endowed humans with a power that even those who exercise it most proficiently cannot claim to fully comprehend. Human mastery over nature has been predicted for centuriesa"Francis Bacon insisted on it, William Blake feared it profoundly. Little more than a hundred years have pa.s.sed, however, since Gregor Mendel demonstrated that the defining characteristics of a pea planta"its shape, its size, and the color of the seeds, for examplea"are transmitted from one generation to the next in ways that can be predicted, repeated, and codified.

Since then, the central project of biology has been to break that code and learn to read ita"to understand how DNA creates and perpetuates life. The physiologist Jacques Loeb considered artificial synthesis of life the goal of biology. In 1912 Loeb, one of the founders of modern biochemistry, wrote that there was no evidence that "the arti ficial production of living matter is beyond the possibilities of science" and declared, "We must either succeed in producing living matter artificially, or we must find the reasons why this is impossible."

In 1946, the n.o.bel Prize-winning geneticist Hermann J. Muller attempted to do that. By demonstrating that exposure to X-rays can cause mutations in the genes and chromosomes of living cells, he was the first to prove that heredity could be affected by something other than natural selection. He wasn't entirely sure that people would use that information responsibly, though. "If we did attain to any such knowledge or powers, there is no doubt in my mind that we would eventually use them," Muller said. "Man is a megalomaniac among animalsa"if he sees mountains he will try to imitate them by pyramids, and if he sees some grand process like evolu tion, and thinks it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too."

The theory of evolution explained that every species on Earth is related in some way to every other species; more important, we each carry a record of that history in our body. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick began to make it possible to understand why, by explaining how DNA arranges itself. The language of just four chemical lettersa"adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thyminea"comes in the form of enormous chains of nucleotides. When they are joined, the arrangement of their sequences determines how each human differs from all others and from all other living beings.

By the 1970s, recombinant-DNA technology permitted scientists to cut long, unwieldy molecules of nucleotides into digestible sentences of genetic letters and paste them into other cells. Researchers could suddenly combine the genes of two creatures that would never have been able to mate in nature. As promising as these techniques were, they also made it possible for scientists to transfer virusesa"and microbes that cause cancera"from one organism to another. That could create diseases antic.i.p.ated by no one and for which there would be no natural protection, treatment, or cure. In 1975 scientists from around the world gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center, in northern California, to discuss the challenges presented by this new technology. They focused primarily on laboratory and environmental safety and concluded that the field required little regulation. (There was no real discussion of deliberate abusea"at the time, there didn't seem to be any need.) Looking back nearly thirty years later, one of the conference's organizers, the n.o.bel laureate Paul Berg, wrote, "This unique conference marked the beginning of an exceptional era for science and for the public discussion of science policy. Its success permitted the then contentious technology of recombinant DNA to emerge and flourish. Now the use of the recombinant DNA technology dominates research in biology. It has altered both the way questions are formulated and the way solutions are sought."

Decoding sequences of DNA was tedious. It could take a scientist a year to complete a stretch that was ten or twelve base pairs long. (Our DNA consists of 3 billion such pairs.) By the late 1980s, automated sequencing had simplified the procedure, and today machines can process that information in seconds. Another new tool a"polymerase chain reactiona"completed the merger of the digital and biological worlds. Using PCR, a scientist can take a single DNA molecule and copy it many times, making it easier to read and to manipulate. That permits scientists to treat living cells like complex packages of digital information that happen to be arranged in the most elegant possible way.

Using such techniques, researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world's largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008 scientists from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, extracted DNA from tissue that had been preserved in the Museum Victoria, in Melbourne. They took a fragment of DNA that controlled the production of a collagen gene from the tiger and inserted it into a mouse embryo. The DNA switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen. That marked the first time that any material from an extinct creature other than a virus has functioned inside a living organism.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammothsa"one of them 60,000 years old and the other 18,000a"has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant's egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. "There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammotha"a s.h.a.ggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. Rex.," the Times editorialized soon after the discovery was announced. "We're just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth."

The ultimate goal, however, is to create a synthetic organism made solely from chemical parts and blueprints of DNA. In the mid-1990s, Craig Venter, working at the Inst.i.tute for Genomic Research, and his colleagues Clyde Hutchison and Hamilton Smith began to wonder whether they could pare life to its most basic components and then use those genes to create such an organism. They began modifying the genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, which contained 482 genes (humans have about 23,000) and 580,000 letters of genetic code, arranged on one circular chromosomea"the smallest genome of any cell that has been grown in laboratory cultures. Venter and his colleagues then re moved genes one by one to find a minimal set that could sustain life.

Venter called the experiment the Minimal Genome Project. By the beginning of 2008, his team had pieced together thousands of chemically synthesized fragments of DNA and a.s.sembled a new version of the organism. Then, using nothing but chemicals, they produced from scratch the entire genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. "Nothing in our methodology restricts its use to chemically synthesized DNA," Venter noted in the report of his work, which was published in Science. "It should be possible to a.s.semble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order." That may turn out to be one of the most understated asides in the history of science. Next Venter intends to transplant the artificial chromosome into the walls of another cell and then "boot it up," thereby making a new form of life that would then be able to replicate its own DNAa"the first truly artificial organism. (Activists have already named the creation Synthia.) Venter hopes that Synthia and similar products will serve essentially as vessels that can be modified to carry different packages of genes. One package might produce a specific drug, for example, and another could have genes programmed to digest carbon in the atmosphere.

In 2007 the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, after having visited both the Philadelphia Flower Show and the Reptile Show in San Diego, wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books noting that "every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business." This, of course, we have been doing in one way or another for millennia. "Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people."

It is only a matter of time before domesticated biotechnology presents us with what Dyson described as an "explosion of diversity of new living creatures ... Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora."

Biotech games played by children "down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds" could produce entirely new speciesa"as a lark. "These games will be messy and possibly dangerous," Dyson wrote. "Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious."

Life on Earth proceeds in an arca"one that began with the big bang and evolved to the point where a smart teenager is capable of inserting a gene from a cold-water fish into a strawberry to help protect it from the frost. You don't have to be a Ludditea"or Prince Charles, who, famously, has foreseen a world reduced to gray goo by avaricious and out-of-control technologya"to recognize that synthetic biology, if it truly succeeds, will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.

"Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to G.o.d, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology," the editors of Naturea"who nonetheless support the technologya"wrote in 2007. "For the first time, G.o.d has compet.i.tion."

"What if we could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring?" Drew Endy asked the first time we met in his office at MIT, where, until the summer of 2008, he was a.s.sistant professor of biological engineering. (That September he moved to Stanford.) Endy is among the most compelling evangelists of synthetic biology. He is also perhaps its most disturbing, because, although he displays a childlike eagerness to start engineering new creatures, he insists on discussing both the prospects and the dangers of his emerging discipline in nearly any forum he can find. "I am talking about building the stuff that runs most of the living world," he said. "If this is not a national strategic priority, what possibly could be?"

Endy, who was trained as a civil engineer, spent his youth fabricating worlds out of Lincoln Logs and Legos. Now he would like to build living organisms. Perhaps it was the three well-worn congas sitting in the corner of Endy's office, or the choppy haircut that looked like something he might have got in a tree house, or the bicycle dangling from his wall, but when he speaks about putting together new forms of life, it's hard not to think of that boy and his Legos.

Endy made his first mark on the world of biology by nearly failing the course in high school. "I got a D," he said. "And I was lucky to get it." While pursuing an engineering degree at Lehigh University, Endy took a course in molecular genetics. He spent his years in graduate school modeling bacterial viruses, but they are complex, and Endy craved simplicity. That's when he began to think about putting cellular components together.

Never forgetting the secret of Legosa"they work because you can take any single part and attach it to any othera"in 2005 Endy and colleagues on both coasts started the BioBricks Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed to register and develop standard parts for a.s.sembling DNA. Endy is not the only scientist, or even the only synthetic biologist, to translate a youth spent with blocks into a useful scientific vocabulary. "The notion of pieces fitting togethera"whether those pieces are integrated circuits, microfluidic components, or moleculesa"guides much of what I do in the laboratory," the physicist and synthetic biologist Rob Carlson writes in his new book, Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and Business of Engineering Life. "Some of my best work has come together in my mind's eye accompanied by what I swear was an audible click."

The BioBricks registry is a physical repository, but it is also an online catalogue. If you want to construct an organism or engineer it in new ways, you can go to the site as you would to one that sells lumber or industrial pipes. The const.i.tuent parts of DNAa"promoters, ribosome-binding sites, plasmid backbones, and thousands of other componentsa"are catalogued, explained, and discussed. It is a kind of theoretical Wikipedia of future life forms, with the added benefit of actually providing the parts necessary to build them.

I asked Endy why he thought so many people seem to be repelled by the idea of constructing new forms of life. "Because it's scary as h.e.l.l," he said. "It's the coolest platform science has ever produced, but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer." If you can sequence something properly and you possess the information for describing that organisma"whether it's a virus, a dinosaur, or a human beinga"you will eventually be able to construct an artificial version of it. That gives us an alternate path for propagating living organisms.

The natural path is direct descent from a parenta"from one generation to the next. But that process is filled with errors. (In Darwin's world, of course, a certain number of those mutations are necessary.) Endy said, "If you could complement evolution with a secondary path, decode a genome, take it offline to the level of information"a"in other words, break it down to its specific sequences of DNA the way one would break down the code in a software programa""we can then design whatever we want, and recompile it," which could permit scientists to prevent many genetic diseases. "At that point, you can make disposable biological systems that don't have to produce offspring, and you can make much simpler organisms."

Endy stopped long enough for me to digest the fact that he was talking about building our own children. "If you look at human beings as we are today, one would have to ask how much of our own design is constrained by the fact that we have to be able to reproduce," he said. In fact, those constraints are significant. In theory, at least, designing our own offspring could make those constraints disappear. Before speaking about that, however, it would be necessary to ask two essential questions: What sorts of risk does that bring into play, and what sorts of opportunity?

The deeply unpleasant risks a.s.sociated with synthetic biology are not hard to imagine: who would control this technology, who would pay for it, and how much would it cost? Would we all have access or, as in the 1997 film Gattaca, which envisaged a world where the most successful children were eugenically selected, would there be genetic haves and have-nots and a new type of discriminationa"genoisma"to accompany it? Moreover, how safe can it be to manipulate and create life? How likely are accidents that would unleash organisms onto a world that is not prepared for them? And will it be an easy technology for people bent on destruction to acquire? "We are talking about things that have never been done before," Endy said. "If the society that powered this technology collapses in some way, we would go extinct pretty quickly. You wouldn't have a chance to revert back to the farm or to the pre-farm. We would just be gone."

Those fears have existed since humans began to transplant genes in crops. They are the central reason that opponents of genetically engineered food invoke the precautionary principle, which argues that potential risks must always be given more weight than possible benefits. That is certainly the approach suggested by people like Jim Thomas, of ETC, who describes Endy as "the alpha Synthusi ast." But he also regards Endy as a reflective scientist who doesn't discount the possible risks of his field. "To his credit, I think he's the one who's most engaged with these issues," Thomas said.

The debate over genetically engineered food has often focused on theoretical harm rather than on tangible benefits. "If you build a bridge and it falls down, you are not going to be permitted to design bridges ever again," Endy said. "But that doesn't mean we should never build a new bridge. There we have accepted the fact that risks are inevitable." He believes the same should be true of engineering biology.

We also have to think about our society's basic goals and how this science might help us achieve them. "We have seen an example with artemisinin and malaria," Endy said. "Maybe we could avoid diseases completely. That might require us to go through a transition in medicine akin to what happened in environmental science and engineering after the end of World War II. We had industrial problems, and people said, Hey, the river's on firea"let's put it out. And, after the nth time of doing that, people started to say, Maybe we shouldn't make factories that put s.h.i.t into the river. So let's collect all the waste. That turns out to be really expensive, because then we have to dispose of it. Finally, people said, Let's redesign the factories so that they don't make that c.r.a.p."

Endy pointed out that we are spending trillions of dollars on health care and that preventing disease is obviously more desirable than treating it. "My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with. But note," he stressed, "you can't possibly begin to do something like this if you don't have a value system in place that allows you to map concepts of ethics, beauty, and aesthetics onto our own existence.

"These are powerful choices. Think about what happens when you really can print the genome of your offspring. You could start with your own sequence, of course, and mash it up with your partner, or as many partners as you like. Because computers won't care. And, if you wanted evolution, you can include random number generators." That would have the effect of introducing the element of chance into synthetic design.

Although Endy speaks with pa.s.sion about the biological future, he acknowledges how little scientists know. "It is important to un pack some of the hype and expectation around what you can do with biotechnology as a manufacturing platform," he said. "We have not scratched the surface. But how far will we be able to go? That question needs to be discussed openly, because you can't address issues of risk and society unless you have an answer."

Answers, however, are not yet available. The inventor and materials scientist Saul Griffith has estimated that powering our planet requires between fifteen and eighteen terawatts of energy. How much of that could we manufacture with the tools of synthetic biology? Estimates range between five and ninety terawatts. "If it turns out to be the lower figure, we are screwed," Endy said. "Because why would we take this risk if we cannot create much energy? But if it's the top figure, then we are talking about producing five times the energy we need on this planet and doing it in an environmentally benign way. The benefits in relation to the risks of using this new technology would be unquestioned. But I don't know what the number will be, and I don't think anybody can know at this point. At a minimum, then, we ought to acknowledge that we are in the process of figuring that out and the answers won't be easy to provide.

"It's very hard for me to have a conversation about these issues, because people adopt incredibly defensive postures," Endy continued. "The scientists on one side and civil society organizations on the other. And to be fair to those groups, science has often proceeded by skipping the dialogue. But some environmental groups will say, Let's not permit any of this work to get out of a laboratory until we are sure it is all safe. And as a practical matter that is not the way science works. We can't come back decades later with an answer. We need to develop solutions by doing them. The potential is great enough, I believe, to convince people it's worth the risk."

I wondered how much of this was science fiction. Endy stood up. "Can I show you something?" he asked, as he walked over to a bookshelf and grabbed four gray bottles. Each one contained about half a cup of sugar, and each had a letter on it: A, T, C, or G, for the four nucleotides in our DNA. "You can buy jars of these chemicals that are derived from sugarcane," he said. "And they end up being the four bases of DNA in a form that can be readily a.s.sembled. You hook the bottles up to a machine, and into the machine comes in formation from a computer, a sequence of DNAa"like T-A-A-T-AG-C-A-A. You program in whatever you want to build, and that machine will st.i.tch the genetic material together from scratch. This is the recipe: you take information and the raw chemicals and compile genetic material. Just sit down at your laptop and type the letters and out comes your organism."

We don't have machines that can turn those sugars into entire genomes yet. Endy shrugged. "But I don't see any physical reason why we won't," he said. "It's a question of money. If somebody wants to pay for it, then it will get done." He looked at his watch, apologized, and said, "I'm sorry, we will have to continue this discussion another day, because I have an appointment with some people from the Department of Homeland Security."

I was a little surprised. "They are asking the same questions as you," he said. "They want to know how far is this really going to go."

Scientists skipped a step at the birth of biotechnology, thirty-five years ago, moving immediately to products without first focusing on the tools required to make them. Using standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer. However, genes work together in ways that are staggeringly complex; proteins produced by one will counteracta"or enhancea"those made by another. We are far from the point where scientists might yank a few genes off the shelf, mix them together, and produce a variety of products. But the registry is growing rapidlya"and so is the knowledge needed to drive the field forward.

Research in Endy's Stanford lab has been largely animated by his fascination with switches that turn genes on and off. He and his students are attempting to create genetically encoded memory systems, and his current goal is to construct a cell that can count to 256a"a number derived from the mathematics of Basic computer code. Solving the practical challenges will not be easy, since cells that count will need to send reliable signals when they divide and remember that they did.

"If the cells in our bodies had a little memory, think what we could do," Endy said the next time we talked. I wasn't quite sure what he meant. "You have memory in your phone," he explained. "Think of all the information it allows you to store. The phone and the technology on which it is based do not function inside cells. But if we could count to two hundred using a system that was based on proteins and DNA and RNAa"well, now, all of a sudden we would have a tool that gives us access to computing and memory that we just don't have.

"Do you know how we study aging?" Endy continued. "The tools we use today are almost akin to cutting a tree in half and counting the rings. But if the cells had a memory, we could count properly. Every time a cell divides, just move the counter by one. Maybe that will let me see them changing with a precision n.o.body can have today. Then I could give people controllers to start retooling those cells. Or we could say, Wow, this cell has divided two hundred times, it's obviously lost control of itself and become cancer. Kill it. That lets us think about new therapies for all kinds of diseases."

Synthetic biology is changing so rapidly that predictions seem pointless. Even that fact presents people like Endy with a new kind of problem. "Wayne Gretzky once said, 'I skate to where the puck is going to be.' That's what you do to become a great hockey player," Endy told me. "But where do you skate when the puck is accelerating at the speed of a rocket, when the trajectory is impossible to follow? Whom do you hire and what do we ask them to do? Because what preoccupies our finest minds today will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three years.

"We are surfing an exponential now, and, even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, how do you even talk about that?"

For decades, people have invoked Moore's law: the number of transistors that could fit onto a silicon chip would double every two years, and so would the power of computers. When the IBM 360 computer was released in 1964, the top model came with eight megabytes of main memory, and cost more than $2 million. Today cell phones with a thousand times the memory of that computer can be bought for about a hundred dollars.

In 2001 Rob Carlson, then a research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Inst.i.tute in Berkeley, decided to examine a similar phenom enon: the speed at which the capacity to synthesize DNA was growing. He produced what has come to be known as the Carlson curve, and it shows a rate that mirrors Moore's lawa"and has even begun to exceed it. The automated DNA synthesizers used in thousands of labs cost $100,000 a decade ago. Now they cost less than $10,000, and most days at least a dozen used synthesizers are for sale on eBaya"for less than a thousand dollars.

Between 1977, when Frederick Sanger published the first paper on automatic DNA sequencing, and 1995, when the Inst.i.tute for Genomic Research reported the first bacterial-genome sequence, the field moved slowly. It took the next six years to complete the first draft of the immeasurably more complex human genome, and six years after that, in 2007, scientists from around the world began mapping the full genomes of more than a thousand people. The Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project now plans to sequence more than a hundred thousand.

In 2003, when Endy was still at MIT, he and his colleagues Tom Knight, Randy Rettberg, and Gerald Sussman founded iGEMa"the International Genetically Engineered Machine compet.i.tiona"whose purpose is to promote the building of biological systems from standard parts. In 2006 a team of Endy's undergraduate students used BioBrick parts to genetically reprogram E. coli (which normally smells awful) to smell like wintergreen while it grows and like bananas when it has finished growing. They named their project Eau d'E Coli. By 2008, with more than a thousand students from twenty-one countries partic.i.p.ating, the winning teama"a group from Sloveniaa"used biological parts that it had designed to create a vaccine for the stomach bug Helicobacter pylori, which causes ulcers. There are no such working vaccines for humans. So far the team has tested its creation on mice, with promising results.

This is open-source biology, where intellectual property is shared. What's available to idealistic students, of course, would also be available to terrorists. Any number of blogs offer advice about everything from how to preserve proteins to the best methods for desalting DNA. Openness like that can be frightening, and there have been calls for tighter control of the technology. Carlson, among many others, believes that strict regulations are unlikely to succeed. Several years ago, with very few tools other than a credit card, he opened his own biotechnology company, Biodesic, in the garage of his Seattle homea"a biological version of the do-it-yourself movement that gave birth to so many computer companies, including Apple.

The product that he developed enables the identification of proteins using DNA technology. "It's not complex," Carlson told me, "but I wanted to see what I could accomplish using mail order and synthesis." A great deal, it turned out. Carlson designed the molecule on his laptop, then sent the sequence to a company that synthesizes DNA. Most of the instruments could be bought on eBay (or, occasionally, on LabX, a more specialized site for scientific equipment). All you need is an Internet connection.

"Strict regulation doesn't accomplish its goals," Carlson said. "It's not an exact a.n.a.logy, but look at Prohibition. What happened when government restricted the production and sale of alcohol? Crime rose dramatically. It became organized and powerful. Legitimate manufacturers could not sell alcohol, but it was easy to make in a garagea"or a warehouse."

By 2002 the U.S. government had intensified its effort to curtail the sale and production of methamphetamine. Previously, the drug had been manufactured in many mom-and-pop labs throughout the country. Today production has been professionalized and centralized, and the Drug Enforcement Administration says that less is known about methamphetamine production than before. "The black market is getting blacker," Carlson said. "Crystal-meth use is still rising, and all this despite restrictions." Strict control would not necessarily insure the same fate for synthetic biology, but it might.

Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, has frequently called for restrictions on the use of technology. "It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence hardera"or even impossiblea"to control," he wrote in an essay for Wired called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." "The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge."

Still, censoring the pursuit of knowledge has never really worked, in part because there are no parameters for society to decide who should have information and who should not. The opposite approach might give us better results: accelerate the development of technology and open it to more people and educate them to its purpose. Otherwise, if Carlson's methamphetamine a.n.a.logy proves accurate, power would flow directly into the hands of the people least likely to use it wisely.

For synthetic biology to accomplish any of its goals, we will also need an education system that encourages skepticism and the study of science. In 2007 students in Singapore, j.a.pan, China, and Hong Kong (which was counted independently) all performed better on an international science exam than American students. The U.S. scores have remained essentially stagnant since 1995, the first year the exam was administered. Adults are even less scientifically literate. Early in 2009, the results of a California Academy of Sciences poll (conducted throughout the nation) revealed that only 53 percent of American adults know how long it takes for Earth to revolve around the sun, and a slightly larger numbera"59 percenta"are aware that dinosaurs and humans never lived at the same time.

Synthetic biologists will have to overcome this ignorance. Optimism prevails only when people are engaged and excited. Why should we bother? Not just to make E. coli smell like chewing gum or to make fish glow in vibrant colors. The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.

The hydrocarbons we burn for fuel are believed to be nothing more than concentrated sunlight that has been collected by leaves and trees. Organic matter rots, bacteria break it down, and it moves underground, where, after millions of years of pressure, it turns into oil and coal. At that point, we dig it upa"at huge expense and with disastrous environmental consequences. Across the globe, on land and sea, we sink wells and lay pipe to ferry our energy to giant refineries. That has been the industrial model of development, and it worked for nearly two centuries. It won't work any longer.

The industrial age is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering. That won't happen easily (or quickly), and it will never solve every problem we expect it to solve. But what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products our species will need to survive. "We are going to start doing the same thing that we do with our pets, with bacteria," the genomic futurist Juan Enriquez has said, describing our transition from a world that relied on machines to one that relies on biology. "A house pet is a domesticated parasite," he noted. "It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn"a"a crop that didn't exist until we created it. "Same thing is going to start happening with energy," he went on. "We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life."