Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to take your questions now.
Fiona, the assistant editor of Cosmos Magazine, is holding a mic and she has a question.
She will take your questions.
There's a gentleman over there I see and then we can come back and of course see.
I have a line up already.
I've got Heather.
Oh, I see.
There's a...
I'm coming.
And then there's gentlemen.
Okay.
You've got all the control.
Whatever Fiona says.
This is a blinger in Claudia, I guess.
Claudia, you...
I think the big question probably a lot of people are thinking about is ethics.
Yeah.
Because we're talking about, you know, I guess in the public imagination science which is
potentially creating artificial life.
You spoke before about the ability to manipulate cells and said, you know, we think of them
as programmable machines.
Are they?
And at what point can we make that kind of ethical decision?
Obviously it's different for what kind of different uses that they have.
What's your thoughts about when it comes to the crunch and when you say, you know, we
need an ethical way of thinking about this or, hey, you know, we've just got to go out
there and find out what we can do in the research first and then make that decision?
Yeah, sure.
So firstly, I think the ethical side of things is really important and that has to grow and
evolve along with the science as it grows and evolves.
It's not something that you can sort of do retrospectively or try not to think about.
And as scientists, we all have to engage with that.
It's a really important part of doing frontier science and things that people aren't familiar
with and aren't comfortable with.
In terms of, I mean, cells are most definitely programmable machines.
That's how they work.
I mean, so DNA is a code and the code is decoded to a message and the message makes the protein
which is the word course of the cell.
So for all intents and purposes, a cell is indeed a programmable machine.
So I think that's, you know, almost an inarguable point.
In terms of the ethics, I mean, it's a new field and it's developing as we go along and
we really have to be prepared and happy to engage with that and move with it.
And there will be issues that come up and that we deal with as we sort of go forward
in the science and we really have to be open and talk to the community about it and make
sure that it's dealt with to the satisfaction of the community.
Well, I think, I mean, I think that Claudia is absolutely right in saying that this is
something where the ethics have to evolve with the science.
It's far better for us to have the conversations right from the very beginning than to try
and have a conversation when the science is already very well developed.
So if we think that, you know, it certainly is the case that synthetic biology is still
in its early stages of development.
And so now really is the time to sort of start engaging the public with issues to explain
what synthetic biology is, to think about what the possibilities might be.
And we're not going to be able to predict entirely at this stage what all of those possibilities
will be and we need to be upfront about that and just, you know, continue to have those
conversations with each other.
Hi, I've learned all my science from Star Trek.
And the two episodes that was related to this discussion are the Trouble with Tribbles,
where you had those reproducing Tribbles that pulled up the entire space of everything
on that limited spaceship.
And also the episode in the Star Trek, the new generation, about nanites, which got into
the computer system and took over the ship until they were able to reframe the nanites
and find the safe home for these new creatures.
So I'm rather concerned about this synthetic biology.
From the ethical viewpoint, as the previous question was, I think it's one of the key issues here.
As a former scientist and a science communicator, I know how science evolves, but I don't know
how ethics evolve.
And I think that's what you just said, ethics has to change people for science.
And I'm just wondering if scientists need to be trained in ethics as part of their studies,
or whether, if they take into account ethical considerations, will that minute their scientific research?
Yes, so we're starting to do that now.
We're starting to train our undergraduates in ethics.
We're certainly option as part of the degree programs that we offer.
I think informed debate is a real key.
So doing things like this where we all come together and ask questions and have open dialogue
is really important.
And just inflexibility in the way that we think and feel about things.
I'm also not an ethicist, so I don't really know a lot about how ethics changes and evolves
as science changes and evolves, but I think just being willing to commit to it
and take care of it is the most important thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think the, I haven't, I haven't grown up with Star Trek.
I haven't seen the two episodes that you talked about, but I think that though, you know,
what Star Trek was playing off there is a fear that, you know, that is fairly widespread.
I mean, since the days of Star Trek and probably before, that, you know, that we will engineer,
you know, if we play with living systems that will, you know, will end up with something
that gets out of control, right?
And I think that is, that's a real fear.
But on the other hand, it should, you know, and I think this is why it's so important
that we have these discussions is that, you know, the public needs to understand that,
you know, what, where that risk really is, right?
So there are regulations that have been in place for a long time already.
You know, to, you know, to control or to regulate the use of modified,
genetically modified organisms, right?
So we, so if, you know, if we're going to make an organism that kills cancer, let's say,
and that's a very real possibility, the level of testing that would have to be involved
before something like that would actually become a therapeutic would be immense, right?
I mean, I don't think we've, we've never had a treatment like that before,
but obviously there is a well-established protocol for testing the safety of new drugs,
for example, or new treatments in general.
So I think obviously there will have to be, you know, well, maybe Belinda's in a better position,
whether or not there has to be new laws to address a specific therapeutic that, you know, comes about.
Well, I think one of the things that we do have to do as we're dealing with any new technology
is to continue to look at the adequacy of our laws and to decide whether they still,
you know, whether they're adequate to deal with the way the science has developed.
It may be that our existing frameworks and our existing laws are perfectly adequate
to deal with the issues that come up with a, that are presented by new technology.
It may be that in time, though, that we'll need to adjust those laws to take account of new developments
in the science or technology.
And so we need to be constantly looking at our legal frameworks
and making sure that they are adequate.
And one of the key questions that I guess we need to decide
is whether we do need to craft entirely new laws for a new area
or whether we can build upon our existing frameworks
and the sort of frameworks that Desmond's already spoken about that we have in place already
provide us with a really solid foundation
and we can then continue to monitor the way that the science is developing
and this is part of the continued dialogue with scientists and ethicists in the public
and make sure that our laws continue to be adequate for questions of risk.
What's the difference between ethics and law?
No.
Are you asking, like, is there such a thing as an ethical lawyer?
Come on.
You know what's intriguing to me, Melinda, is nobody ever asks about the ethics of killing cancer.
You know, where's the argument for protecting cancer? Nobody ever cares about that.
Nobody ever asks, what about the ethics of putting ethics classes on?
You know, forcing students to take ethics classes. What about that?
They're all concerned.
There's a whole series of new discussions.
New territories. You have a question, sir?
Oh, hi guys. Thank you for a fascinating thing.
Just to make sure I'm a German graduate, it seems to me that a million base pairs
with a four letter alphabet is more than a megabyte.
So in terms of the IT, it's fairly trivial.
And living organisms will brutal along doing their thing once you've got them going.
What we need in the middle is a kind of wet printer that will take this quarter of a megabyte,
spit it out into a cell, and then it'll go.
So how far away is this wet printer?
Because that's when the revolution's going to happen.
We can prototype something and just, you know, spit it out into a petrogish
affordably and in real time.
And what's going to happen when the terrorists get hold of it?
It's really close.
So the wet printers that you're talking about do exist.
You can make oligonucleotides with a machine.
This is DNA.
Yeah, sorry.
So you can make very short DNA sequences of maybe 20 and 30 base pairs of machines that you buy.
And in fact, you know, obviously this is one of these concerns.
You can buy those machines off eBay.
You can buy a lot of the lab equipment actually off eBay because they're about to be offloaded.
We've got equipment off eBay before.
Right.
So the wet printers do exist.
The problem is being able to print something that long.
And at the moment that's incredibly costly.
So that printer, the ones that we have at the moment can't print something that long.
What's happening is that the cost, and you know, when this is really going to take off,
is when the cost of printing these sequences becomes low enough that it's within reach
of the average lab on the small budget or the average person on the small budget.
Or the average terrorist on the small budget.
Right, right, right.
So at the moment you can synthesize a gene for maybe a few hundred dollars or maybe about a thousand dollars.
And so a gene is typically about a thousand base pairs.
So it'll be at the current rate at which the technology is evolving.
It'll be somewhere between about 10 to 20 years before we over sequence a microbial genome for that price range.
If it continues to evolve the way that it's evolving.
You mean build a microbial genome?
Right, right, build a microbial genome.
And obviously that happens and that will really change the game.
Talking about the terrorist aspect, you know, again this is a valid concern because viral genomes are very small.
So theoretically there's enough public information,
so you can find the sequences of a lot of viruses that are available on public databases.
And theoretically there's enough public information about the smallpox virus
that somebody that is quite determined could synthesize that.
So there is some regulation in the industry at the moment though.
So I mean you can't, at the moment we get genes, we clone by phone, we email, you know,
because we prefer that and we're not very good at talking to each other.
So you sort of email the company and say this is a sequence that I want and they make it for you
because it's labor intensive and too expensive to do it yourself
and there's been said that costs a couple hundred dollars.
But if you send them a sequence that's codes for a protein that's a no one toxin
then they're going to come back and say I don't think so.
So you can't actually order things that are no one toxins and dangerous things now.
If they didn't know it was a toxin then maybe you could order it.
The breakfast will ultimately become affordable.
But the ethical situation has changed.
So I think it was Oppenheim and probably some of the audience will correct me
who said when he saw the Boilman Hiroshima said it becomes the destroyer of worlds.
Never realised or never really thought that that was the danger of the technology
that was being created and that he was a part of creating.
We're not that naive I guess nowadays where we're really sort of a bit more on top of it
and a lot more careful and a lot more aware of ethics and of public sensibilities
and also of bioterrorism.
I mean since 9-11 the world changed forever and we live in it now and we accept that
and we respond to that.
It was Oppenheim and it was Trinity the first atomic bomb.
I mean there is a basic question that comes about with many technologies
is sort of this dual use question.
So as the technology develops and we find good and productive ways to use that
we also have to think about how do we regulate or how do we put in the safeguard
the kinds of things that Claudius talked about.
So at the moment if you want to sequence a large chunk of DNA it is out of the reach of the average person
and that's a good place to do the regulation is at the companies or the facilities that do that.
But as the technology continues to evolve then I guess we have to keep assessing whether that's sufficient
because there are bad people out there who like to use technology for bad things.
But you said that you outsourced that work of work. It's a drudgery.
It's hard to get it right. It's expensive.
And your argument is if terrorists use it they're going to go to the same sort of thing.
It's not necessarily easy to do.
If they try and do it themselves at home it's not necessarily something you can just whack together in the cooking pot is it?
No but I think the other thing that you need to keep in mind is that the technology for dealing with bioterrorism
is also growing and accelerating. I mean it's going through the airport particularly if you travel in the states
it's a different story than it was 10 years ago. Substantially different.
So it's not like the technology is progressing and we're just not dealing with the bioterrorism side of it at all.
There's an enormous amount of technology that's being developed to deal with that.
We have a question from the floor.
And then we'll have some more from back here. Maybe one more after this. Is that cool?
Yeah, sure.
We've heard a lot about genetics and genetics and the importance of that during all this synthetic biology.
Is it interesting or partly your work to deal with proteomics?
Yes.
So I've broken this and the Systems and Synthetic Biology Group at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Technology
and systems biology is the science of looking at an organism as an entire system.
So you look at the, it thinks at a whole lot of different levels.
So you look at the DNA which is the code, you look at the RNA which is the message,
you look at the protein which is the workhorse.
So that's the proteomics that you're talking about.
And you also look at the metabolism.
So all the actual biochemicals that are moving around inside the organism.
And you look also at the flux.
So the flux-owned, so the movement of carbon through the biological system.
So if you think of the cell as a network and almost like an electrical circuit or electrical complex,
electrical circuit where electrons are running through the system, carbon are the electrons of the biological cell.
And we look at the flow of carbon through that system as well.
So these are all omics that you're talking about and the proteomics that you're talking about
is specific to the study of the protein levels.
So what's going on when the organism is responding to a different kind of environmental cue
or whether you, if you change the organism by putting in or taking away one or several genes.
And then you measure that response at the systems level.
And proteomics is one of those levels.
Question down the back, anyone?
Anyone around the back has a question?
Yeah.
This gentleman down here.
That's the clearest exploration of proteomics I've ever heard.
Very nice visual there.
The carbon molecules, those electrons of the biological world.
Very interesting.
May I look now?
Hi, we heard a lot tonight about the DNA being a programming language as I'm a computer scientist by a trainee.
And to me, if there's a language, then it has to have things that make it a programming language,
which would be a vocabulary, a grammar, a synthetic type, a semantic type, sorry.
And so on. My question is how much of this language do we know?
Yeah, it's like four bases long.
It's the simplest language you came across.
So I'm going to let this man answer this.
This is really your specialty.
It's an extraordinarily simple code and it's remarkable that so much genetic diversity can come from four bases.
I mean, it's a little more complicated than that.
There's add-ons and languages that it interacts with.
So you can get different coding languages speaking to each other.
That's just like saying that English is only 42 characters long.
Yeah, that's right.
But English is surely more than that.
Yeah, well, that's obvious. It's a more complicated thing.
You have languages and accents and you have local dialects and colloquialisms and all these interesting words that we come up with in Australia.
But that's right.
DNA has the same things.
It's a chemical that sits on the DNA and changes the way that they respond to different environmental cues and such forth.
But there's been really elaborate on this.
That's really the area.
Right.
Well, so to have a working computer program, as you say, you have to have a way of interpreting computer code, right?
And of course, at the most basic level, it's just some binary sequence that codes for instructions.
And then these instructions cause you to do certain things.
So when it comes to DNA, we know some of those instructions, but not all.
And so that's why we can't write, you know, we can't write a DNA sequence entirely from scratch and just say, okay, I want to know.
And this is the dream, right?
So the dream is, you know, you would say, I want an organism that does whatever.
Then, you know, then I know completely what the code does.
So I write that sequence up.
I get my wet printer.
I would print that and then I would put that into a cell.
That may or may not ever happen, but, you know, but that's certainly the sort of the, you know...
That's the nirvana, isn't it?
Yeah, the synthetic biology nirvana, right?
Yeah, so what we're doing now, right, is we're trying to reverse engineer.
It's like, you sort of came along, you do nothing about computers.
Maybe you're a stone age person and there's a computer sitting on the ground and then you kind of work out what does it do and how does it work.
That's what we've been doing with cells for the last, or with DNA for the last 100 years or so.
And we're kind of getting somewhere now, but we've still got a lot to learn.
Why? Stone age, huh?
Any other questions?
Yeah, one more.
Just a follow-on from that.
What are your thoughts? Do you think that the focus on DNA over the last few decades has actually taken some focus off proteins and other aspects of our chemistry
and perhaps taken us down a path that has slowed some of our learning in some of those areas?
So that's a really wonderful question. I'm glad you asked it.
So, DNA is something that we can work with very, very easily
and we understand quite a lot about it relative to the rest of the complex network.
As a metabolic engineer, I find that the most important part of the whole network system is actually the pointing end of the stick.
So that's not the DNA. That's what's happening. All these steps down from that at the metabolome level.
So what I was talking about before, the flow of carbon through the network, which is actually one step further down than the protein network, is the most important thing
because you're actually really trying to make more of it, or in my case, an industrial biochemical, and if you want to make more of that compound,
then you have to be able to measure it and you have to be able to redirect carbon into that compound.
So that's really perhaps even more important than DNA.
DNA is what you alter to try to get changes all the way down the network, and let me tell you, it doesn't work the way you'd like it to.
A lot of the time you make changes at the DNA. There's so many steps between the DNA to the compound and the organism,
and it's so awfully good at stopping you from doing what you want to do that it's actually far more important to be able to measure and analyse what goes on at different levels in the network.
So the focus on DNA hasn't stopped this, I guess, from learning per se, because we've really accelerated the huge amount in that area,
but it's certainly, we're losing that focus now, moving on to perhaps more interesting and exciting areas in the network.
So are you effectively hot-wiring genomes? Is that what you're doing?
Sure.
Wow.
That's illegal.
Question.
Hi. About six months ago I saw a documentary movie called Food to Ink, and it was really interesting,
and so when Desmond was talking about, we've been using genetic multiplication in the past,
but you didn't say how many years because you were interrupted people, so I was wondering how many years we've been having that,
and also I actually stopped eating chicken about 15 years ago because I have a sister, my older sister has chicken farm,
and I know exactly what goes into the chicken.
And yeah, thousands of chickens in the cage, they don't even move, and one day I took one of the chickens out of the cage
and just took the chicken to go for a walk.
Can't even walk, because basically it's a baby chicken, but pumped up with all of these poisons and disgusting stuff,
and carrying all this weight, it's a baby chicken that has to carry this weight, it's just disgusting.
And so from that point, I just stopped eating chicken under now, I don't eat chicken anymore.
I just had chicken earlier.
You bet.
So, what I'm going to ask you is, do you have, in Australia especially, I don't care about USA,
it has some kind of rules of regulation, so they or you guys don't go out of control,
and you see all this kind of stuff with the chicken.
So, thanks.
Okay, so that's the first question about the history of genetic modification, so it really depends on how you count it,
because we've been breeding, I mean, human beings have been domesticating and selectively breeding living organisms
since a lot of time, or since the beginning of recorded history.
But in terms of things that we've actually called genetic engineering,
where we actually spliced genes into cells or into seeds,
that's the last, I guess, two or three decades or so, I'm not sure.
We just called recombinant DNA, I think.
Yeah, so I'm not sure on the precise history, so they made this probably something good.
Which I'm right, because the whole food industry has been created by our intervention,
so bananas were originally this big, 5,000, 6,000 years ago,
and a whole range of apples were this big, and it's through selection and modification,
using genes that are already in there, that we've actually created the food groups that we currently take for granted.
What's different is that we're taking, in genetic engineering, we're taking genes from things like fish,
and putting it into marathons, or that's different.
So I think that the question is really a bit more aimed at how do we regulate this technology
and stop it from getting to a point where the chickens are really at the moment.
Not a point that we really want to be at anywhere in the civilised world.
In Australia, specifically we have some pretty strong regulations,
it's not something that I'm an expert in.
And around genetic modification we have extremely strong regulations,
extremely strict rules, in fact some of the most strong regulations in the world,
relative to genetic modification.
Synthetic biology is not at that stage yet where we're releasing things at that sort of a scale
into the environment, I guess.
And I think it's just really important to again keep in mind that the ethical side of things
does need to grow and evolve with the technology as we develop it.
The reason that there are chickens in those environments that you talk about
is because of this massive demand for protein in the enormous growing population that we have,
that again itself is an enormous ethical question how do you deal with that
and how do you deal with the fact that everybody wants to be living in a first world standard
and that should everybody be living in the first world standard
and should we be living the way that we do ourselves?
There's a very complicated question and it's a very long answer
and I don't think that there's really a good answer for that, that we can get to tonight anyway.
But there's a limit, right? How much you gain from that kind of stuff
about looking at the chicken?
You only focus on the chickens, don't you?
I don't work with chickens. In fact, I don't work with any animals.
Generally speaking, the question we had earlier about computing
made me realise that the stuff that you do with synthetic biology these days
is really hair curling maths, isn't it?
You have to do stochastic differential equations,
Boolean networks, graph theory.
It's not the sort of thing, there's nothing to do with chickens, is it?
Right, right.
That's actually one of the things that is very interesting about biology as a science
and why I was trained as an engineer and why I had no trouble answering that question
is that biology used to be a very descriptive science
but I think now it is becoming, essentially, part of biology is becoming
an engineering discipline so we use maths to model how living systems work,
computers to decide how to make modifications.
So making a microbe should be no different in my mind than making an airplane.
I mean, obviously, in the detail it's very different but in the process,
it's a complicated thing that we should use all the computer and mathematical tools
that we can to assist in that process.
So you can model inside the computer what a biological system will do.
Right, right, yes, that's a large part of my life.
So now, no petri dishes for you?
Yeah, well, I also do petri dishes.
At some point, you've got to, you know, the proof is in the pudding so you've got to make the pudding.
That's something interesting.
It's kind of internal warfare between the theoretical scientists and the real scientists
and the experimental scientists.
So who's a theoretical, is he?
That's what we call them anyway.
So he has theoretical advances, you have real advances.
That's the way it goes.
We couldn't do without him.
So in the real world, as opposed to the theoretical world, in the real world,
you're trying to do sucrose to bioproducts.
Is that a fancy name for making moonshine or what is that?
Well, actually, it builds on that, you know, because we've been using sucrose
to make high-value products for a long time, you know, like, you know,
Thunderbird, Grail and Forex.
That's not a good example, right?
But we've been making high-value products out of sucrose for a long time
and sucrose or sugarcane is an enormous industry in Australia.
So you've got particularly Queensland and New South Wales
and it's one of our largest agricultural exports.
And it trade on the commodities market and price fluctuates
and it's something which we can farm, especially in a difficult year.
And it will be much better if we could turn that sucrose,
which is a sugar that we get from sugarcane, into a high-value product
that's worth by 10, 15, 20 times the cost of raw sugar.
Why shouldn't we be selling that
instead of trying to compete with the international sugar market?
So you mean something more expensive than Bundy Rump?
Something higher value than Bundy Rump.
So what would be the sort of thing?
You've got something about alcohol, you've got something else.
Yeah, so I mean, we're, for example, we're looking at making jet fuel
at the moment.
Really? Jet fuel?
Yes.
Can you drink that?
Well, maybe you can drink it.
Wow, jet fuel.
And you know what I mean?
Well, I think you can really put it into the jet and make it fly.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Because that is quite expensive.
It's highly processed petrochemical base, isn't it?
Yes, petrochemical base.
So you try to replace petrochemicals?
Yeah, very much so.
So a lot of the chemicals and the biochemicals that we're making
are replacements for petrochemicals.
So we make biodegradable plastics that replace things
that come from petrochemicals.
I'm particularly interested in this compound called isoprene
that I talked about before,
that you can make synthetic rubber out of.
And the driver for that is the increase in cost of petrochemicals,
the non-renewable issue that we have with petrochemicals,
and of course the environmental issues.
So all of these three issues we can address
using a biological process.
Now, in the theoretical world, Desmond,
you're trying to use microorganisms to...
what's called on your website bioenergy.
Is that like using microorganisms
to convert solar power into fuel?
Is that the same sort of thing?
Right, yeah.
So I'm interested also in using E. coli to make...
That's a bacterium.
That's a bacterium, yeah,
to make complicated compounds for fuel.
But that's sort of an intermediate goal.
So what we'd like to take it, of course,
is to make an organism that directly takes carbon dioxide
and solar energy.
So there are organisms obviously that do that,
algae do that.
Blue-green algae say that bacteria do that,
to take one of those organisms
and make them make fuel compounds for us directly
from carbon dioxide.
And all sorts of fuel?
Any of the type of fuel you're working on?
I'm interested in making biogasoline,
so just a direct replacement for gasoline and carbon.
Wow.
Some of the research projects, though,
aim at making self-replicating systems
from entire synthetic components.
That sounds a little bit spooky, though.
That sounds a sort of area where we're crossing into
that ethics legal concern.
Well, I mean, obviously,
but the first thing that we've got to do,
and I think Desmond and Claudia alluded to this already tonight,
is decide on the definitional issues.
So there's the question about what is it that we mean by
synthetic biology?
Are we creating something entirely from scratch,
or are we taking something existing
and putting it into an existing cell?
And those definitional issues are really important,
because they help to set the parameters around
how we might think about things,
how we might decide to regulate them,
what things will count as being included
in any regulatory framework,
and what things will not be included.
So we've got to sort of make those clear definitional questions.
And the issue that you've just raised
is one of trying to think through the questions
about how we're going to manage issues
of where the science might go
and how we might manage issues of risk.
One of the things that I think has been clear
from the comments that Desmond's made tonight
is the way that technologies are increasingly converging.
So while we used to think about information technology,
so we used to think about engineering,
we used to think about biology,
we used to think of all of these different areas
as being quite separate.
What we're seeing increasingly is that areas of knowledge
and different technologies are all starting to converge.
So the sort of advances that are happening
around synthetic biology,
Desmond's been talking about the use of computers
to sort of model developments in those fields.
And so all of these technologies are starting to come together
and support each other so that we can kind of leverage off them
to develop, you know, take science further, actually.
Now that means that we need to think about these issues
in ways where we acknowledge the convergence
of those technologies and that we start to think about
the way that those different systems come together
rather than thinking in the traditional silos
that we've often used in the past.
So you're thinking the issue now is
synthetic biology is becoming a mosh pit of science.
It's all going to make stuff.
Okay, let me give you a definition then.
We're talking about a definition of issues.
The design and construction of new biological functions
and systems not found in nature.
That seems to me like a legal minefield.
But one of the things I was thinking about is,
okay, what if you invent an organism, you know,
a novel de novo, as you like to say,
you think you invent an organism and it does a bunch of stuff,
and if it doesn't do that bunch of stuff,
do you then sue the person who created that organism?
Well, I mean, these are the things that we're going to have to
work out on the scientific frontier,
and that's why lawyers will still be there
on the scientific frontier, I guess.
I mean, the question is, what are we aiming to have something do?
And in the early stages,
we're still at the very early stages of science.
We're not going to be able to promise for some considerable time
that something will or will erupt in something in a commercial application.
So we're still very much in the early stages,
and we still just have to, you know, take it step by step.
Claudia, you can use synthetic biology theoretically around
to build engineered critters that process data,
that manipulate chemicals, that fabricate materials and structures,
generate energy, create food, even repair human health.
Is there anything that theoretically we can't do?
Or is it all biology, basically, you can replicate?
Is there anything that we can't do?
I think, really, our imagination is our own limitation.
Well, our imagination and our technical capabilities are our limitations,
and both of those things grow and evolve as the science grows and evolves
and as the technology grows and evolves.
So I wouldn't say that there's nothing we can't do,
that's a little megalomaniac, a little bit despicable for me, you know,
but I think, certainly, there's a lot of really fun and making things
that we can't do with it.
But it's very blue sky.
You're saying we're learning to crawl at the moment,
but it's very much we could be flying space shells.
I think we're maybe a little past the crawling stage,
but we're not at the flying space shell stage yet.
Okay, and, yes?
Yeah, I think that's fair.
You know, we kind of know, we have some other parts,
kind of know what we're doing,
but we definitely don't have it down to the sides.
It's actually really exciting and wonderful to be part of this technology
that is growing and evolving.
Yeah, as we walk in and consider that this is growing and evolving,
and that's, as you mentioned...
Hopefully not on a disk.
Well, hopefully not on a disk, yes.
I don't know if it's a privilege to be part of.
Tell me, so people often worry about the hazards of things,
and I think science fiction plays a really good role in it.
There's a gentleman that mentioned Star Trek.
Science fiction quite often is a way of us imagining the future,
whether the dystopic or the utopian reviews of what might happen.
But a lot of people do think about the imagined hazards
before they've had the chance to consider the imagined benefits.
What are some of the amazing things that you guys have thought about?
When you put your lab code, you hang up your lab code,
you've gone home and you talk about it at a dinner party,
what are some of the amazing things you've thought about?
Wow, we might one day do this.
Can you give us some examples?
Well, okay.
Well, I think even the fuel is...
Before we get onto them really,
even the fuel is kind of boring.
I would say that's probably the most important thing
that we're working on at the moment.
And $1.24 a liter is not boring.
It's not $1.24, hey, it's $1.24.
There you go.
I'm not telling you where I get mine.
Well, I mean...
Not Brisbane.
The really challenging thing about biofuels
is that in fact, fuels are incredibly cheap.
You go to the pump, you pay the whole...
I don't know how much you pay in Australia,
but at the moment it seems like quite a bit
because you're comparing to how much you paid yesterday.
But in comparison to a drug,
what you get per liter of chemical is very, very cheap.
And that's what makes making biofuels so difficult
because we have to make...
I think in order to make biofuels a viable alternative
to fossil fuels, we have to make them cheaper.
I mean, that's what will make people use biofuels
other than regulation forcing them,
which I think is very unlikely.
The only way to do it is to make it cheaper.
In terms of the really exciting things that I think we can do,
I think it'll be like...
So just imagine that a living cell
is essentially a little nano-machine.
It's a small, little thing per micrometer inside.
Anything you can imagine, like a little micro-machine doing,
potentially we can make an organism does that.
And what's better about the organisms is that once we make one,
once we go to how to make one of them,
potentially we can make as many of them as we want.
They self-replicate.
So I think some of the really exciting applications
are in medicine.
We have no good ways at the moment
of really selectively targeting cancer.
And if you can imagine that's something
that you'd want an intelligent little thing doing,
that would be an amazing thing.
We could also make microbes that go and find the nasty microbes
that, you know, tuberculosis cells and do something to that.
Personally, I think that's really exciting.
So when we get down to a thousand-build genome,
it actually becomes a reality.
It's a little more complicated than that.
This is personalized medicine where it's not medicine
that works necessary for me,
but it works really well for you and a few other people.
Yes, that's right.
And once we have enough information,
I'd like to be able to actually look into an individual's genome
and we can use that information to treat them specifically.
So instead of going in with a great big blunt hammer over,
you know, some kind of drug like a stashon or something
that deals with your eucalysteroid problem,
you can deal with that on a very specific individual level.
That's what most people don't know,
that drugs have to work on the largest possible group of people,
which means they don't work very well
because they have to work for very large groups of people,
whereas there's lots of drugs that actually work
really, really well on certain people,
but not on the majority of people.
So generally speaking, tailoring drugs to an individual
would be brilliant, wouldn't it?
So I think that's a really exciting application
and also doing things that we currently do
in really dirty ways, you know,
making energies is one issue.
But a lot of things that create industrial environmental pollution,
doing those with biological systems
is much more promising way to be able to do that
in environmentally friendly fashion.
I'm particularly interested in this,
and I'm going to do things that,
in ways that don't lead an enormous footprint on our world.
I can see a situation where a gentleman
is talking about bio printers or wet printers.
It's a situation where somebody comes in,
their genome's been done, you go,
oh, you've got that, well, we'll just print you out
a genome sequence that will just fix you up.
Take two of these and see me in the morning.
That'd be a brilliant world, wouldn't it?
Gene therapy, yeah.
Right on the money, right there in front of you.
Yeah, that would be awesome.
But then it caused illegal implications.
What if the printer wasn't working,
and I was, oh, I pressed the wrong button, hey,
I've got to agree with the printers.
Printed manufacturers fault, then, yeah.
I can see that you're right, Belinda.
There's always going to be word for lawyers.
Most synthetic biology is really just biology, isn't it?
Although you'd think that most synthetic biology
is just really biology,
and we're taking control and pulling the leaders.
But some scientists argue that actually
we shouldn't be doing any of this,
that there should be stringent containment
of novel organisms, and we shouldn't be releasing them at all.
Have you heard the sort of thing?
There aren't concerns about this, are there?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think the sorts of things
that Desmond and Claudia have spoken about,
that's sort of the promise and the hope
for scientific advances.
And that's the bit that we'd all like to have.
We'd all like to have a great new fuel
that could replace petrol and that was not polluting.
We'd love to have medicines that would effectively treat cancer.
We all want those things.
And part of the question or part of the challenge for us
is trying to work out how we can allow the science
to develop in ways that will allow us to have those things
while at the same time minimizing any risks
that might be there in the processes of development.
And the tricky part of that is that at the outset
we often don't know what we don't know.
And because we don't know what we don't know
when something is very new,
I think that's why we have to often take things
within sort of a regulated system.
That's why we have to have laws and ethical debate
happening right from the outset
so that we can have systems in place
that will allow us to review things on a regular basis
so that there's the science develops
and as community values change over time
we can adapt those laws.
But we need to sort of take things in a way
that takes account of our developing knowledge of a new area.
And because we all want to share those benefits
that science potentially brings us.
And that really is the exciting part of it.
To have that new fuel, that fuel for cancer
or some other wonderful thing that scientists have thought of
that is beyond the realm of imagination for a mere lawyer.
And we all want those things,
but we want them to be done in a way
that is going to be safe for us all.
Well, I couldn't wrap up any better than Belinda has.
That's very forward-looking.
I had some mumbo jumbo that I was going to finish with,
but that was just brilliant.
So congratulations.
