How soon will tinkering with biology be as simple as programming is now?

Question

Biotechnology is a big keyword in the industry right now, like computing was a bunch of years ago. Nowadays, anyone can pop up a terminal and start tinkering with their computer, program software, make anything from their imagination true in the virtual world. A similar trend is observable with objects and the growth of fab labs all over the world.

Will this happen with biology and how soon? At what point in our near future will we see kids play with molecules and DNA and life?

This question is NOT meant to encompass what such tinkering might result in.

Answer 1

Although my answer is surely opinion-based, I think the answer is: probably never. The reason is, that if you would like to compare human and animal genetic code to a computer code, it would look like 0 % of logic and structure and hundreds of millions years of debugging. This is how evolution works: random mutations are created and if they are useful, they spread. Computer programming can also by done this way with use of genetic algorithms. The results are often effective, but completely incomprehensible to humans.

Already today, we can insert almost any DNA we wish into a cell. One could write DNA as a long series of letters and we would be able to synthesize it. The problem is not in the technology, but that we do not know what it will do. Since it is so hard to understand the DNA code, fine changes will probably always require extensive amount of research and experiments. The code is just too messy to change it so simply.

If all animals are "very poorly written", we might ask how close are we to writing animals from scratch. It also seems very, very problematic. Unlike life, our software is very hierarchic. Higher level of programming relies on precise translation into assembler-like processor instructions, which rely on processors performing very precisely many simple tasks. Even processor is basically a simple part - transistor - copied many many times into very precise structure. Each level works perfectly and can be completely separated from the next. This allows us to understand it and write software efficiently. Basic units of life - proteins, are much more messy. They do not by any way work so cleanly as transistors and one probably needs much more trials and errors to persuade the whole machinery of proteins to work as intended, cooperating with other proteins. My estimate is that we could still need hundreds of years to find a way around it.

Answer 2

The question is really hard to answer, because of stem cell controversy wherepeople of religion object against using human embryos for purpose of science.

Even though you left out the thinking about end results of everyone being able to play around with live organisms, the real spread will be built around of "what possibilities does this bring us"

For instance, while it holds true that you are able to buy computer and write your first Hello World program, in case of "lab science" it is still sufficient enough to let you do little lab play with discovering flower cells and if you feel like want to know more, there is specialised school to learn you that.

Also, computer in every household appears because it solves more than one problem of "general household" (while "playing games" might be one of them).

Long story short, even if the general public is supporting strongly the DNA tinkering, I still believe that device to play around with DNA will be part rather of "high school lab" than common household. (So, it will never reach common household).

To guess the time, I think plausible horisont to think of is 20 to 50 years.

But keep in mind, that no matter how cool the device or technology may sound on the paper, always the general public may be against it.

Answer 3

It will not be long before we choose to use the power of DNA and biology to help us do computations (DNA based computers exist today). However, it will be a LONG time before we are comfortable mucking with existing biology because the "source code" is just too mind-numbingly difficult to understand.

We've been evolving for millions of years. "Readability of the genome" has never once been selected for (in fact, it might have even been selected against). All human code written has had "readability" as a major concern, so we design our products differently. For example, there is a meme in programming "goto considered harmful," because it makes things hard to read. There's also a philosophy to do minimize thread interactions because they are hard to follow. Nature's product uses "goto" everywhere, and the best analogy for cellular behavior would involve millions of interacting threads. Many of our quirky shapes and features are actually a result of "shared code" which mutated to be beneficial for a completely different purpose.

I like to believe we will have some power over biology at some point in our race's future. However, I do not believe that power will have a strong resemblance to today's programming. I expect it will look far more subtle.

Answer 4

Genetic engineering technology already allows us to manipulate the genomes of several model organisms with extreme precision. Homologous recombination in yeast enables researcher's to change virtually any sequence in the genome to whatever they want, and now the CRISPR/Cas9 system being developed shows enormous promise for use in more complicated multicellular organisms. Current genetic research commonly involves deleting DNA sequences, inserting DNA sequences, fusing genes together, and really anything you can imagine doing to a genetic sequence to figure out how it works. Now that isn't to say it's easy. There are time-consuming precise protocols that have to be followed that don't always work. It takes the resources of a modern lab, a fair amount of money, and a lot of expertise. For a kid to ever be able to do it the entire process would need to be automated by a machine. Some extremely well-funded labs have robotics that are capable of automating some processes, but we are a long way off from some sort of all-in-one genetic engineering personal device.

While it may be possible in the future to quickly and cheaply manipulate the genome of an organism, the larger barrier to actually making something you want is knowing what to change. We really don't understand the purpose of most of DNA in our genomes. Our current research typically involves breaking something, seeing what happens, and then coming up with a model for what that thing was doing. We are a long way off from being able to make purposeful changes to generate custom organisms.

In my opinion the biotech revolution you envision will likely need to be proceeded by a computing revolution. To actually get a complete model of how genomes work we need powerful computational models for protein structure and function prediction as well as for simulating all of the interconnected regulatory networks governing all of these proteins.

Answer 5

100,000 years from now? 1,000,000,000 years from now? Never?

There are many arguments against this ever happening, and even more arguments why this will never happen any time soon, unless we invoke science fantasy and also rapid moves towards utopian social improvements at the rate of, say, the Star Trek timeline. AFAIK Star Trek doesn't have this level of technology (nor of childhood trust).

Consider:

• Messing with your body is dangerous so until and unless we also have resurrection technology, it would be irresponsible to invite the general public to play with genetic manipulation.

• Genetic manipulation is dangerous to all life especially since in order to change an organism's DNA in a systematic way, it needs a powerful spreading mechanism, and DNA also naturally mutates. This is why it is a very bad idea to let for-profit corporations actually release GMO crops, let alone to feed them to everyone, and to not label them. For example, GMO plants spread their seeds into the environment where they end up spreading into other fields and corrupting them into GMO plants and new GMO varieties, reducing non-GMO plants. When these companies also intentionally design food crops to not be able to generate seed, to contain massive pesticide levels, etc, they're just asking for something to go wrong, potentially irreversibly. Letting Junior mess with DNA is a bad idea, and your future society is going to have a bad time.

• The analogy that DNA is like program code is theoretical and metaphorical more than it is literal and practical. Messing with DNA in seeds until you get some positive effects is the programming equivalent of randomly playing with someone else's machine code, like this: Except THAT is a very concise, logically-written and small program, so something with massive number of pages of that, and written randomly by nature, with most of the code apparently doing nothing but possibly doing something, and no linear execution, since some of it may be the part (or part of a part of a part of a system) that starts having George Lemuelson's chin hair turn grey at age 48 while reducing his libido 5%, and increasing his chance of gaining diabetes-A by 5%. And you can only cut and paste it in chunks, exchanging chunks from other versions of the same program. Your only hope is that the chunks you have to cut and paste come from other programs which have been designed to be cut & pasted and recombined. But unfortunately, many of these combinations may be infertile or lethal or cancerous, which is why GMO is done in labs where you can throw away almost all of your many many failures. Which you don't want Junior doing on himself, unless you want him to die.