Lisa Poole / AP file

Harvard geneticist George Church shows off the DNA sequence of a colleague.

By Alan Boyle

In the future, genetically modified organisms could be making our medicines, our fuel, our housewares, our houses and they could even help us remake ourselves. All that may sound like science-fiction, but the future is already arriving, in the form of the bioplastic bottle you may be holding in your hand. Harvard geneticist George Church lays it all out in a new book, "Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves," written with Ed Regis.

"We are already remaking ourselves and our world, retracing the steps of the original synthesis redesigning, recoding and reinventing nature itself in the process," they write.

Even the book has been reinvented through DNA: "Regenesis" is one of those rare books that's been the focus of a research paper in the journal Science. All of its 53,426 words, along with 11 images and one Javascript app, were encoded into chunks of DNA, and then read back, just to prove it could be done. But DNA as a next-generation information storage medium is just one of the applications addressed in "Regenesis" and that's not really all that far out.

If you want to talk about far-out, how about regenerating extinct species, ranging from woolly mammoths to Neanderthals? How about synthetic methods for photosynthesis, the process that turns carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into oxygen and fuel? How about tweaking the human genome to make ourselves immune to multiple viruses? Heck, why not make ourselves virtually immortal?

Basic Books

"Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves" is written by Harvard geneticist George Church and science writer Ed Regis.

"Regenesis" explores all these issues the possibilities and the realities, the pros and the cons. Not even the sky is the limit: "We need to get at least some of our genomes and cultures off of this planet or trillions of person-years will be lost," Church and Regis write. They believe that biotechnology is the key to immortality, for the human species and perhaps for individual humans as well. But is all this a biotech pipe dream? I did a reality check during a telephone interview with Church this week. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Read the original:
How synthetic biology will change us