“If You Don’t Take Risks, You Don’t Make Progress”

Lab Times: You have written a number of science fiction books, in which you present your personal visions of the future of humanity and what the impact of current technologies will be on it. Why do you like making predictions so much? Why do you care about them?

Dyson: It’s a very good question. I remember when I wrote my first book, a sort of auto-biography, “Disturbing the universe”. I think it was rebellion against the world I grew up in. In the city where I grew up, Winchester, everything was six hundred years old; I grew up in the Middle Ages and so I started being a sort of rebel by nature, I was saying I wasn’t interested in that stuff, I wanted to live in the future. I suppose that is a good explanation. It came when I was very young, when I started reading Jules Verne, but then it came very naturally.

These days, everybody is looking at Synthetic Biology, which is considered an emerging discipline at the interface of engineering and life sciences. In 2005, synthetic biology was defined as “… the engineering of biology: the synthesis of complex, biologically-based (or inspired) systems which display functions that do not exist in nature”. Since then, there has been much hype about its potential applications, for example, that one day we will be able to build pancreatic cells that will release insulin and cure diabetes. Do you have the same confidence that synthetic biology will make things like this possible?

Dyson: I have just experienced that myself. Just four weeks ago I had a pacemaker put in. It’s a clock that tells the heart to be regular. It changed my life. That really works and it is old-fashioned electronics, not chemistry; but I think the same thing will happen with the pancreas; it doesn’t exist yet, of course, but I think it will happen. The cardiac pacemaker took a long time coming but now there are millions of such devices and a lot of people rely on them completely. It is magic and that’s why I believe in synthetic biology: that kind of magic can work, it only takes time.

In the field of synthetic biology, some people like to consider living systems as an ensemble of independent elements that can be separated and reassembled as components of a circuit. Do you think that molecules and cells can be considered as parts and machines? In your opinion, is it a good analogy?

Dyson: No, it is not. But of course it is part of this, it’s a useful part. These things are all tools, but the tools by themselves will not do the job.

In your article “Our biotech future” in 2007, you prospected a future with domesticated biotechnologies, where children will play with biology and build up their own pets and flowers. Four years earlier, at the MIT Boston, the Registry of Standard Biological parts was started. The Registry tries to collect standardised and well-characterised biological components, devices and parts -- named BioBricks -- that can help make the engineering of biology easier. This initiative was actually meant to finally provide the tools for such a “domesticated biotech era”. However, despite great efforts to build up a collection of useful components for the design of gene devices and systems most of those parts have not been fully characterized, yet. So, how do you think we can deal with this problem and what will be possible to do with them

Dyson: Well, I’ve not seen it, so I can’t tell. But I am interested in what you’re saying, although it obviously won’t be so easy. In fact, I’m not surprised that most of what is there is rubbish but the point is that it has always been this way. Only a few turn out to be brilliant and those are the ones you remember. I’m very pleased that you (the synthetic biologists) are doing that. I don’t know the answers but you could find out. It’s probably like in the world of astronomy. Amateur astronomers have been doing very well recently because they have really good tools -- tools that just 20 years ago were available only for professionals. Of course, most of what they are doing is really boring but among all of this there are some really serious people who are actually discovering things that are important. I think it will be probably the same in synthetic biology but I can’t tell you now. We will see in a hundred years.

Synthetic Biology started with single parts and components, i.e. single genes and proteins, but then we have encountered a lot of complexity; biological elements are not really as static as electronic parts. Is it possible, in your opinion, instead of looking at the single parts, to look at whole patterns or behaviours?

Dyson: Yes, of course. We have done that all the time. Just look what chemistry was like until recently. We had already understood a lot of chemistry before we understood the atoms, for example.

In 1953, you were discussing with Enrico Fermi the difficulties of fitting experimental data to theoretical numbers. At a certain point he replied with the famous quote from John von Neumann, “… with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk”. In synthetic biology, there is a wide use of models trying to reproduce the behaviour of living systems. Furthermore, you often have to deal with a high number of parameters in order to build complex models for complex systems. With your experience, do you think this is reasonable? Does this approach make sense or is it just a “mathematician game” that won’t lead us anywhere?

Dyson: Sometimes it does. It all depends on how much detail you can accurately observe. The obvious example is the climate. I believe there are too many parameters but the experts believe they have the right numbers. In the case Fermi was talking about, it was a very simple set of experiments with three very smooth curves -- and to fit that, four parameters were certainly too many. He was right in the end. But the information was very small. When you come to something like a bacterium or the climate, of course you can observe a huge amount of detail and, therefore, you need many more parameters. So, you might have a hundred parameters, which may be fine if you have more than a hundred observations, more than a hundred independent degrees of freedom. That’s a question of judgment. It can work. However, the measurement process has to be a part of the analysis; it has to be put into it from the beginning.

Nowadays, synthetic biology and its promises are a focal point for public opinion and a lot has been said about the future challenges and applications biological engineering will face. From your point of view, what will become possible with synthetic biology in future?

Dyson: Well, of course, I don’t know. I think we will design living creatures: maybe we will make an elephant coming out of an egg! Ultimately, it will happen but it could take 50 years, five hundred or even five thousand; I have no idea. But it is interesting. I think it is a question of timescale: we don’t know what the real difficulties will be. For example, I’m very much impressed by the piece of work by Haussler (http://www.cbse.ucsc.edu/people/haussler) that has studied the HAR1 and HAR2 sequences. His work was published in Nature (vol. 443, 167-72) and I think it’s really important research. He is not a biologist, he is a computer expert. So, he was interested in what makes human different (from the other species). He took the chicken, the rat, the mouse, the chimpanzee and the human and compared them in very great detail. He found out that there are two pieces of DNA, the HRA1 and HAR2, that don’t change from chicken to chimpanzee. It’s something like 300 million years from the common ancestor. So, this piece of DNA must have been doing something really important because it was strictly selected. Then, when you look at the human, it is quite different. It has eighteen mutations. Something changed that was quite dramatic. These sequences do not code for a protein, they are not genes. We have no idea about what they do but surely they tell the human to do something really different. HRA1 is active in the brain cortex and the HRA2 is active in the wrist – that is what makes the human hand different from every other hand. The HAR1 and HAR2 are just different parts of the genome and have different mutations. I think it’s very beautiful and this observation indicates how far away we are from synthetic biology. It will be a long time before we understand all of this.

In this context, what do you think will be the impact of synthetic biology on evolution?

Dyson: Well, to my mind, of course, this is connected closely to going to space. These are two things that will go completely together. We will explore the universe, we will go and live in each kind of place in the universe and we will be adapted wherever we go. If you want to live in space, you can’t do this as the humans we are, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not interesting to go and live in the universe if you always have to live indoors. You also have to live outside. So, it all goes together: if we are going to live in the universe, we have to develop into all kinds of creatures -- and not only human ones. And, of course, synthetic biology and biological engineering might play a big role in this. I am sure it is only a question of time before this happens. On the other hand, in the last fifty years we have done a wonderful job exploring the universe without humans and it seems that we don’t need to go (out) there now. The same may be true with synthetic biology. Maybe we will do it better with computers. To me, the whole thing is completely unknown. What is exciting is that it is happening; whatever it is, it is happening. The future of synthetic biology will be a mixture of computers and creatures. There’s so much that we can do with computers. Maybe we will even design humans, fresh, with built-in pacemakers in the heart, so that they won’t need operations!

But we were not made to be eternal…

Dyson: That is true. That is a big problem. To me that is one of the really bad problems. People don’t worry about this but it will be very hard to deal with.

In 2000, you received the Templeton Prize for Progression in religion. In your acceptance speech, talking about the future of biotechnologies, you said, “… Like all the new technologies that have arisen from scientific knowledge, biotechnology is a tool that can be used either for good or for evil purposes […]. I see no scientific reason, why we should not achieve the good and avoid the evil. […] Now, in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes. Let us hope that we can reach a consensus on this question without fighting another civil war. Scientists and religious believers and physicians and lawyers must come together with mutual respect, to achieve a consensus and to decide where the line at the door of the temple (Matthew 21:12-13) should be drawn”. Where do you think the “line” should be drawn for what we are doing -- and will do -- with biotechnologies? Do you see something wrong and something right?

Dyson: I believe it’s a problem of law, basically. Making laws can be done in two ways: either you can get some wise people, think about the problem and write the laws in the way they consider the wisest, or else you wait until the actual cases come up and settle them individually. This is the English system; laws are always created for examples, not for general principles. The French system, i.e. the Roman system, is based on general principles. Well, I happen to be English, so I like the English way; in fact, you can’t tell what will be wise until you have the actual example and try; so, that’s my prejudice. Basically, it is a choice on how much risk you want to take. The English method is more risky, people always do stupid things and then you have to fix it afterwards. But, at the same time, if you don’t take risks, you don’t make progress. Nevertheless, I think that maybe both ways work; probably it’s a good idea to have two different systems working together.

Scientific progress in life science has been very fast in the last decades. We are facing new frontiers and, with them, new tools and potential applications that were unimaginable in the recent past. The public opinion is scared by what can happen. So, what do you think about this?

Dyson: There is always a reason to be scared, but the amazing thing is how tough we are; I suppose the reason why I’m so willing to take risks is because I lived through World War II. At that time, everybody could be killed and there was a terrible risk. Most of us survived, not everybody. In the end, we are all dead, whether we take risks or not. If we were immortal it would be much more difficult and there would really be something to worry about.

Interview: Francesca Ceroni