by Marc Goodman
Already any number of commercial ventures have been formed to leverage the business opportunities afforded by “thought identification,” including at least two companies focused on using fMRI in lie detection, No Lie MRI and Cephos. Their tests are bolstered by the Harvard professor Joshua Greene, whose research suggests the prefrontal cortex is more active in those who are lying, a useful thing to know for police. While neuro-ethicists ponder what it all means, law enforcement officials are already attempting to use the results of brain scans in criminal cases around the world. In India, a woman was convicted of killing her ex-fiancé with arsenic after a brain scan “proved” she had experiential knowledge of having committed the crime. Of course in American courts, under the Fifth Amendment, defendants cannot be forced to testify against themselves, but how does that reconcile with fMRI technology? At present, the criminal accused can be compelled to surrender DNA and blood samples, so why not “brain samples”? As the technology improves, we can certainly expect to see requests for “brain warrants” increasing as courts call their next witness—your mind—to testify against you.
Of course if doctors, scientists, and cops have access to a technology, it’s a sure bet Crime, Inc. is not far behind, and it has been quite curious to know what’s on your mind. We can expect hackers to start first by attacking neuroprosthetics, just as they did with other implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and diabetic pumps, by attempting to subvert their communications and control protocols. For instance, an attacker might be able to turn off the stabilizing electrodes of a deep-brain stimulator in a Parkinson’s patient, which could lead to the resumption of violent tremors or grand mal seizures. Moreover, if two researchers at the University of Washington can communicate telepathically and even send motor-muscle stimulation signals over the Internet to cause another person to involuntarily move his body with a mere thought, what would prevent any malicious third party from hacking such a system and doing the same? While you were using your ultra-chic biosensor EEG to play Pong, move objects on the IoT, control your quadcopter drone, and snap a photograph with Google Glass using the awesome power of your mind, what would inhibit a third party from remotely dialing in and doing the same? As we have seen time and time again throughout this book—absolutely nothing.
It may already be starting. In 2012, researchers from Oxford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Geneva demonstrated it was possible to carry out an attack against wearers of consumer-grade EEG headsets such as the Emotiv to pilfer sensitive personal information. While wearing the headsets, researchers flashed subjects photographs of things like ATM machine PIN pads, debit cards, and calendars. Underneath the images were questions such as what is your PIN code and when were you born? The results were powerful: by reading the brain waves emanating from these $300 headsets, researchers were able to figure out a subject’s PIN number with 30 percent accuracy and her month of birth with 60 percent accuracy. The results are profound because they were obtained with increasingly popular consumer-grade biofeedback EEG devices (not fMRI machines). Both Emotiv and NeuroSky have app stores where users can download third-party apps, just as we do for our mobile phones. But given the vengeance with which Crime, Inc. has attacked phone app stores and seeded them with malware and fake apps, how long will it be before it uploads “brain spyware” to these new online marketplaces? But as we shall see, your brain cells aren’t the only part of your biology that may be under attack.
Biology Is Information Technology
Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It’s time to ring in the century of biotechnology.
WALTER ISAACSON, TIME, MARCH 22, 1999
Throughout this book, we have focused our attention on silicon-based technologies: microchips, smart phones, robotics, big data, digital currencies, and virtual reality, to name but a few. These tools speak the language of ones and zeros, the binary code mother tongue understood by all digital machines. But there is another operating system out there, one that is way more popular than Windows, UNIX, or Mac. From algae to orchids to orangutans, this operating system is utilized by flora and fauna alike. It is DNA, the world’s original operating system, and for the majority of human history we had no idea it even existed.
Watson and Crick’s impressive 1953 discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid with its four letters of the genetic alphabet—A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine)—completely changed the paradigm. But because of costs and limitations in computer processing power, it wasn’t until April 2003 that the Human Genome Project (with an assist from the entrepreneur J. Craig Venter) was able to transform the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, code common to all forms of life on the planet, into the ones and zeros silicon computers could understand. Genomics, the foundation of all biological life, had become an information technology. New devices kept appearing, each one reducing the cost of sequencing DNA, so that on average costs fell by about half each eighteen months or so. This closely tracked Moore’s law, which in turn brought better computers to process all this genetic data. Quickly, the cost of sequencing a full human genome fell from about $3 billion in 2000 to $1 million in 2006 and to $100,000 by 2008. Then, in 2008, something astounding happened: the creation of so-called next-generation sequencers caused the price of decoding human genomes to plummet. As a result, improvements in genetic sequencing outpaced advances in computing by five times. By 2014, we had reached the age of the $1,000 whole-genome mapping. Companies such as 23andMe were offering home DNA test kits to the general public for $99 or less, allowing them to merely spit into a plastic tube, ship it off via a prepaid envelope, and a week or two later receive health, ancestry, and genealogy results online.
Looking forward, the trend in DNA sequencing suggests that in a few years the price of DNA sequencing will drop to the point that some company will pay to sequence new customers, reducing the out-of-pocket costs to free—a widely used business model in computer technology. When this happens, each of us (and many companies) will have the opportunity to know our full genetic makeup, a development with radical implications for medicine and our own health care. These drastic price drops aren’t happening just in reading DNA. They’re happening in the technology to write DNA as well. Since the millennium, the cost to chemically synthesize DNA has been improving at an exponential pace, from about $20 per base in 2000 to about ten cents per base in 2014, while the length of DNA code that can be written (roughly equivalent to the complexity of the genetic program) has also increased. Because writing DNA code is the foundation of genetic engineering, today’s scientists can do much more, much faster than genetic engineers of the past, who had to physically (as opposed to digitally) manipulate the DNA molecule. This emerging field is known as synthetic biology, or synbio for short.
Synbio is the engineering of biology, from individual cells to full organisms, and allows us to redesign existing biological systems or create new ones altogether. If sequencing genomes is the reading of the base pairs of DNA, converting them into ones and zeros on a computer screen, synthetic biology is essentially the reverse process—designing genetic material in binary computer code and translating it into DNA sequences that can be produced in the real world. Genetic engineering becomes as straightforward as software engineering. As the synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel explains, “Cells are like tiny computers and DNA is their software, providing instructions on the functions they should carry out.” Today there are dozens of commercial DNA print shops, essentially bio-Kinko’s, that can turn digital designs into DNA by effectively 3-D printing the DNA molecule. There are also print on-demand online bio-marketplaces where you can upload your digital bio designs and in return get a vial of your mail-order DNA by FedEx. More sophisticated fabs can be contracted to design and build whole organisms.
Indeed, these remarkable drops in cost are democratizing biological science and genetics and have spurred an entire DIY-bio movement, enabling citizen s
cientists and amateur biologists to experiment with synbio in their homes and garages, driving vast innovations in the field. Venter boldly predicts that “over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to be the standard for making anything,” an entirely possible projection given that modern biology has now become a branch of information technology.
Bio-computers and DNA Hard Drives
If I were a teenager today, I’d be hacking biology.
BILL GATES
The integration of biology and information technology has come so far in recent years that scientists have now actually created bio-computers—harnessing DNA and proteins to perform calculations involving the storage, retrieval, and processing of data. The emerging field of bio-storage leverages synthetic biology to encode data in living things via their DNA code, taking the ones and zeros of our digital computers and translating them into the ATCGs of genetic code and embedding them into DNA. Text, images, music, and video can and have all been encoded and stored within cells, and the efficiencies are breathtaking. The legendary geneticist, molecular engineer, and Harvard professor George Church has concluded that “about four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year.”
Not only do such storage techniques vastly outlast magnetic media by a few hundred thousand years (we can still read dinosaur DNA), but they are more than a million times denser than today’s electronic storage technologies. As a result, Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab has predicted that our technological universe will expand beyond the Internet of Things to include an Internet of microbes, networks of biological things that can communicate with each other and with us. Indeed, synbio promises a host of tremendous breakthroughs and benefits for our society, and the work is only just beginning.
The ability to reprogram DNA and engineer biology holds tremendous promise for mankind to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems in the fields of medicine, agriculture, energy, and the environment. Synbio’s impact on health care alone will help revolutionize disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Armed with our own genetic sequences, we will be able to receive individually tailored medical treatments, drugs particularly designed for our own specific genetic makeups. We are already seeing this in the field of oncology, where individual tumors can be genotyped and personalized cancer treatments engineered to target and kill individual cancer cells while leaving surrounding healthy cells intact. Indeed, a whole host of therapeutics will be enabled by synbio, including new vaccines, advances in regenerative medicine, treatment of malaria, and even cures for congenital deafness. But with this new godlike power to create comes godlike responsibility.
Jurassic Park for Reals
Though children walking through New York’s American Museum of Natural History can see the skeleton of a long-extinct woolly mammoth on display, they have to use their imaginations to envision what the giant beast looked like as it walked about the earth. Soon they won’t need to imagine and might just catch one at the Bronx Zoo. Experts in paleogenomics are working to extract DNA from a twenty-thousand-year-old mammoth tusk found at a construction site in Seattle in early 2014 and are employing advanced genetic techniques to isolate its DNA, clone it, and implant it in an embryo to be carried by a surrogate African elephant.
The died-out mammoth could soon be joined by the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the Tasmanian tiger, species that may now be brought back through a controversial process known as de-extinction. Bringing back extinct animals could have benefits and certainly raises many questions, but the true power of synbio means we can also create completely new species from scratch, and it’s already happened. In 2010, Craig Venter created the world’s “first synthetic life form we’ve ever had on the planet, a self-replicating cellular species whose parent was a computer.” In another example of engineering organisms, a company called Glowing Plant is dedicated to making ordinary plants “bioluminesce,” that is, glow in the dark. Using open-source, freely available DNA designs, the company plans to provide “natural lighting without electricity,” one day replacing the streetlights on your block with trees that will merely glow in the dark when the sun goes down. This is evolution on steroids. But for as cool and awesome as it sounds, there be dragons ahead.
Invasion of the Bio-snatchers: Genetic Privacy, Bioethics, and DNA Stalkers
The 1997 film Gattaca takes place in the near future and portrays a world in which the wealthy conceive their children through eugenics, genetic manipulation ensuring citizens only possess “the best” genetic traits. Those born outside the system face a life of genetic discrimination and limited job opportunities. It was meant to be a science fiction movie. Today it may not be. Our DNA, cells, and other biological data can be captured and used in ways that most of us would never have imagined. Perhaps the most infamous such case was that of Henrietta Lacks, a poor southern African-American woman whose cancerous tumor long outlived her death in 1951. Lacks’s cancer cells had a property that had never been seen before: the unique ability to remain alive and grow outside the body. The discovery was a boon to medical research, and her immortal cells, known eventually as the HeLa line, were shipped around the globe and used repeatedly in research to help cure polio and fight cancer and AIDS. Since her death, scientists have grown over twenty tons of her cells and sold them commercially, even though neither Lacks nor her family ever gave permission. Her estate eventually sued the University of California, which was using the cells for research, but the state supreme court ruled that “a person’s discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized.” Remember that the next time you go to the doctor.
Like Lacks, we all share genetic material all the time, whether or not we realize it. Our DNA is left behind not just when we go to the doctor for a routine blood test but on every brush we use to comb our hair, on the toothbrush we use to clean our teeth, and on every glass from which we take a sip of water. As the Internet of Things (and microbes) goes online, the billions of skin cells we all shed on a daily basis will eventually be detectable by sensors at mall entrances, in airports, in stores, and throughout cities, which will make us uniquely trackable in ways a mobile phone never could. This DNA can be recovered, replicated, and sequenced at will by anybody with the means and desire to do so, and as the price of genetic sequencing drops toward zero, it will be a growing concern that we all have to face. Eventually, Henrietta Lacks’s full genome was published online in 2013 by a German scientist, again without her family’s permission. Why did they, and why should we, care? Because our genetic material reveals more about us than any hacked online account ever might and because our DNA can be used not just to treat us medically but to harm us medically as well.
Our genetic makeup also tells stories we might not want to share with others, including our physiological predisposition to obesity, alcoholism, aggressivity, cardiovascular disease, depression, schizophrenia, diabetes, bipolar disorders, ADHD, and breast cancer. Some studies have also found DNA links of varying strengths to sexual orientation, impulsive tendencies, and even criminality. In the Gattaca-inspired dystopia of the future, all of this information can and will be used against you. As a small-business owner, why would I hire a woman who had a predisposition to breast cancer? My health insurance rates would skyrocket. I want a “normal” kid; maybe I should abort the gay fetus my wife is carrying. Of course he committed the rape; his DNA proved he was hyperaggressive and had impulse control issues.
In the United States, there is very little law protecting how this information can be used, save for GINA—the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act—which makes it illegal for employers to fire or refuse employment based on genetic information. Though GINA applies to health insurance, it does not protect against insurance companies’ using genetic testing information to discriminate when writing life, disability, or long-term-care insurance policies. Several people, including Pamela Fink of Connecticut, have alleged they were fired because their employers discovered they car
ried the BRCA2 gene, which predisposes them to breast cancer, a case that was eventually settled out of court.
Meanwhile, under Danish law, all children born in the country since 1981 have been subjected to mandatory genetic testing and their samples stored in perpetuity—samples that were purportedly collected for reasons of public health but have since been used to identify numerous criminal offenders. What else might the Danish or other governments do with these data? Could DNA stored in a national database become the next Henrietta Lacks? And what happens when eventually this genetic data leak into the public domain, as did the Israeli national biometrics database, pilfered by hackers and reposted throughout the digital underground. These possibilities are troubling especially because scientists in Israel have proven it is possible to fabricate genetic evidence based solely on a DNA profile stored in a database, without even having a tissue sample from the concerned individual. This means it is now possible to plant an innocent person’s blood or saliva at the scene of a crime. The engineered samples were so good police forensic laboratories could not distinguish them from the real thing nor detect any tampering. Thanks to advances in digital biology, DNA evidence, previously the gold standard of forensic evidence, is now under assault, and anybody with an ax to grind can frame you in the strongest way possible. Good luck explaining that one to the cops as they haul you away.
