Inside the lab where scientists want to rewrite our DNA from scratch

ARTIFICIAL BIOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE COULD CHANGE HUMANITY FOREVER.

- CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER

We're entering an era of artificial biological intelligence - and, according to scientist Adrian Woolfson, the UK has a unique opportunity to be world-leading. But the country will have to move fast to capitalise on the rapid advances of synthetic biology, which goes beyond gene editing, or risk becoming irrelevant.

"I think the UK has a unique and unprecedented opportunity to jump on this and to make it the UK's principal industry and to lead the world," he says. "Because if we don't, then we're just going to fall behind."

Woolfson would know. The entrepreneur, molecular biologist and author of a new book, On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence, is British-born and San Francisco-based, where he runs Genyro, a lab he founded to turn genome construction into something closer to an industrial process.

The book is Woolfson's attempt to prepare the public for breakthroughs that make it easier to write DNA using AI, pushing innovations made by scientists Francis Crick and James Watson more than 70 years ago. He believes we're on the cusp of being able to throw away evolution, and design life from scratch, cheaply, accurately and at scale.

He compares the moment to the invention of the printing press which made books cheaper but also changed who could publish ideas and how quickly they could spread.

"I think we're at that moment where we're going to be able to print genomes, before too long," he says. "The question is, what are we going to say, and who's going to say it, and who's going to decide what people are going to say."