The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [1]
As always, I am indebted to my loyal and very companiable agent Antony Harwood, whose continuing input has been invaluable. The long, multiyear process of writing a book inevitably has its ups and downs, and I could not ask for a better agent or friend. At my publisher Fourth Estate, my editor Robin Harvie—himself an accomplished author—played the invaluable role of helping me see that this book was not quite finished when I thought it was, and has improved the end result immeasurably in the process. Copy editor Steve Cox’s succinct additions and deletions have benefited the manuscript hugely—I can only hope that one day I learn how to get “that” and “which” the right way round.
I don’t dare embark on a long list of friends and colleagues who have helped in case I leave someone important out. You know who you all are. Thank you. My wife Maria deserves a special mention though, as do my children Tom and Rosa. It is them—and our nonhuman friends of all kingdoms and phyla—to whom this book is dedicated.
PREFACE
Then Man said: “Let there be life.” And there was life.
Thunderbolts do not come much more momentous than this: In May 2010, for only the second time in 3.7 billion years, a life-form was created on planet Earth with no biological parent. Out of a collection of inanimate chemicals an animate being was forged. This transformation from nonliving to living took place not in some primordial soup, still less the biblical Garden of Eden, but in a Californian laboratory. And the Divine Creator was not recognizably godlike, despite the beard and gentle countenance. He was J. Craig Venter, a world-renowned biologist, highly successful entrepreneur and one of the first sequencers of the human genome. At the ensuing press conference, this creator and his colleagues announced to the world that they had made a self-replicating life-form out of the memory of a computer. A bacterial genome had been sequenced, digitized, modified, printed out, and booted up inside an empty cell to create the first human-made organism. As proof, the scientists wielded photographs of the microscopic “Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0” cells, busily obeying the original divine command to be fruitful and multiply in one of the J. Craig Venter Center’s many petri dishes. The new discipline of synthetic biology had come of age.
Forget all your fears about genetic engineering (GE); synthetic biology makes GE look as quaint and old-fashioned as a horse and cart at a Formula One rally. Old-style biotech was about mixing and rearranging small numbers of existing natural genes from different species and hoping that the right thing happened. Synthetic biology is an order of magnitude more powerful, for it gives humanity the potential to design and create life from scratch. Venter and his team didn’t quite achieve that: Their synthetic genome, after being stitched together with the help of some well-trained yeast, was transplanted into the empty cell of a closely related bacterium that was arguably already “alive,” at least in form if not in function. But the structure the new cells took was that prescribed by the scientists, featuring specially designed DNA “watermarks” that included three quotes, the names of the researchers on the project, and an email address for anyone clever enough to successfully decode and sequence the new genome.
The next steps for Venter’s team—and other competitors rushing to pioneer novel methods in the same field—point the way towards a new technology of awesome power and potential. Once the function of every gene is understood, scientists can begin to build truly new organisms from scratch with different useful purposes in mind. Microbial life-forms could be designed to create biofuels or new vaccines, to bioremediate polluted sites, or to clean water. In the hands of a modern-day Bond villain, they might also be used to forge virulent new superbugs that could wipe out most of the world’s population.