EmTech: Get Ready for a New Human Species

BIOMEDICINE

Now that we can rewrite the code of life, Darwinian evolution can't stop us, says investor Juan Enriquez.

• BY EMILY SINGER

The ability to engineer life is going to spark a revolution that will dwarf the industrial and digital revolutions, saysJuan Enriquez, a writer, investor, and managing director of Excel Venture Management. Thanks to new genomics technologies, scientists have not only been able to read organisms' genomes faster than ever before, but they can also write increasingly complex changes into those genomes, creating organisms with new capabilities.  

Enriquez, who spoke at Technology Review's EmTech conference on Tuesday, says our newfound ability to write the code of life will profoundly change the world as we know it. Because we can engineer our environment and ourselves, humanity is moving beyond the constraints of Darwinian evolution. The result, he says, may be an entirely new species.

Enriquez is the author of the global bestseller As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth. His most recent publication is an eBook, Homo Evolutis: A Short Tour of Our New Species.

Technology Review senior editor Emily Singer spoke with Enriquez after his talk.

TR: Why do you think there is going to be a new human species?

Juan Enriquez: The new human species begins to engineer the evolution of viruses, plants, animals, and itself. As we do that, Darwin's rules get significantly bent, and sometimes even broken. By taking direct and deliberate control over our evolution, we are living in a world where we are modifying stuff according to our desires.

If you turned off the electricity in the United States, you would see millions of people die quickly, because they wouldn't have asthma medications, respirators, insulin, a whole host of things we invented to prevent people from dying. Eventually, we get to the point where evolution is guided by what we're engineering. That's a big deal. Today's plastic surgery is going to seem tame compared to what's coming.

How is this impending revolution going to shape the world?

Ninety-eight percent of data transmitted today is in a language almost no one spoke 30 years ago. We're in a similar period now. But this revolution will be more widespread because this is software that writes its own hardware.

People think this technology will just change pharma or biotech, but it's much bigger than that. For example, it's already changing the chemical industry. Forty percent of Dupont's earnings today come from the life sciences. It's going to change everything; it will change countries, who's rich and who's poor. It's going to create new ethics.

New ethics?

It will change even basic questions like sex. There used to be one way to have a baby. Now there are at least 17. We have decoupled sex from time. You can have a baby in nine months, or you can freeze sperm or a fertilized egg and implant it in 10 years or 100 years. You can create an animal from one of its cells. You can begin to alter reproductive cells. By the time you put this together, you've fundamentally changed how you reproduce and the rules for reproduction.

What does it take to make a new species?

We're beginning to see that it's an accumulation of small changes. Scientists have recently been able to compare the genomes of Neandertals and modern humans, which reveals just a .004 percent difference. Most of those changes lie in genes involved in sperm, testes, smell, and skin.

Engineering microbes alone might speciate us. When you apply sequencing technology to the microbes inhabiting the human body, it turns out to be fascinating. All of us are symbionts; we have 1,000 times more microbial cells in our bodies than human cells. You couldn't possible digest or live without the microbial cells inside your stomach. Some people have microbes that are better at absorbing calories. Diabetics have a slightly sweeter skin, which changes the microbial fauna and makes it harder for them to cauterize wounds.

One concern about human enhancement is that only some people will have access, creating an even greater economic divide. Do you think this will be the case?

In the industrial revolution, it took a lifetime to build enough industry to double the wealth of a country. In the knowledge revolution, you can build billion-dollar companies with 20 people very quickly. The implication is that you can double the wealth of a country very quickly. In Korea in 1975, people had one-fifth of the income of Mexicans, and today they have five times more. Even the poorest places can generate wealth quickly. You see this in Bangalore, China. On the flip side, you can also become irrelevant very quickly.

Scientists are on the verge of sequencing 10,000 human genomes. You point out this might highlight significant variation among our species, and that this requires some ethical consideration. Why?

The issue of [genetic variation] is a really uncomfortable question, one that for good reason, we have been avoiding since the 1930s and '40s. A lot of the research behind the eugenics movement came out of elite universities in the U.S. It was disastrously misapplied. But you do have to ask, if there are fundamental differences in species like dogs and horses and birds, is it true that there are no significant differences between humans? We are going to have an answer to that question very quickly. If we do, we need to think through an ethical, moral framework to think about questions that go way beyond science.

New Malware Brings Cyberwar One Step Closer

COMPUTING

Stuxnet-like code found on industrial machines in Europe may have performed reconnaissance in preparation for attack.

• BY DAVID TALBOT

Audio »

A newly discovered piece of malicious code dubbed Duqu is closely related to the notorious Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran's nuclear-enrichment centrifuges last year. Although it has no known target or author, it sets the stage for more industrial and cyberwar attacks, experts say.

"This is definitely a troubling development on a number of levels," says Ronald Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, an Internet think-tank at the University of Toronto who leads research on cyberwarfare, censorship, and espionage. "In the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned."

Indeed, the spread of such code could be destabilizing. The Pentagon's cyberwar strategy, for example, makes clear that computer attacks on industrial and civilian infrastructure like chemical factories or power grids as well as military networks could be regarded as equivalent to a conventional bombing or other attack, if civilians were endangered.

Duqu was described Tuesday by the security firm Symantec, which says its purpose appears to be gathering intelligence from computerized industrial control systems. It doesn't do damage, but rather spies on them to gather information relevant to making future attacks.

Symantec researchers wrote that Duqu has circulated for 10 months and is "essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack," but with the target unknown. The code can monitor messages and processes, and look for information including the design of so-called SCADA systems (for "supervisory control and data acquisition"). These are computer systems that are used at industrial plants and power plants to control things like pumps, valves, and other machinery.

The code was originally discovered at a handful of unnamed sites in Europe by an undisclosed research team and given to Symantec for analysis on October 14, the company says.

The Stuxnet worm was highly specific to the Iran's Natanz facility, where uranium enrichment is conducted in hardened underground bunkers. Iran maintains that Natanz is an entirely peaceful effort to make fuel for nuclear power plants, but some observers fear it may also serve as a bomb-making program.

Stuxnet went far beyond shutting down or disrupting operations. After infecting Seimens-made control systems, it sent out instructions that would damage delicate centrifuges, in which bomb- or reactor-grade uranium is separated from naturally occurring uranium. In a Hollywood touch, the worm also displayed normal information on computer screens so that human operators wouldn't notice the attacks.

Stuxnet is widely regarded as the most sophisticated piece of malicious software ever created. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Stuxnet was tested by Israeli agents on centrifuges at an Israeli site, and pointed to this and other clues that Stuxnet may have been "designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program."

But much is not known. "We don't what it's for; is it newer; is it older. The initial speculation is that it was a precursor to the next Stuxnet, but we don't know anything," says Bruce Schneier, the cryptologist and security expert. "It is what it is. We don't know."

Duqu creates a kind of "back door" that can receive commands from, and deliver information to, a so-called command-and-control server somewhere in India. (That server is not known to have sent out instructions, Symantec says.) The company says the back door stays open for only 36 days, and then the malware deletes itself.

Symantec says its researchers—after sending out a detection tool following the discovery of the code in Europe—have found Duqu on industrial computers "around the globe." Like Stuxnet, which infected thousands of computers in 155 countries last year, Duqu got aboard victim computers by means of a stolen digital certificate—a cryptographic code that authenticates a piece of software on a target machine. "On the whole, this underscores the critical importance of cyberspace security policy and practices, national, regionally, and internationally," Deibert says.

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Nearby Planet-Forming Disk Holds Water for Thousands of Oceans

An illustration depicting the sprawling cloud of cold water vapor that astronomers have detected around the burgeoning solar system at the nearby star TW Hydrae. The cold water vapor could could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets that are forming in the system. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC/Caltech))

Science Daily — For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.

University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin is a co-author of a paper on the findings published in the Oct. 21 edition of Science.

Water is an essential ingredient for life. Scientists have found thousands of Earth-oceans' worth of it within the planet-forming disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae. TW Hydrae is 176 light years away in the constellation Hydra and is the closest solar-system-to-be.

The researchers used the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on the orbiting Hershel Space Observatory to detect the chemical signature of water.

"This tells us that the key materials that life needs are present in a system before planets are born," said Bergin, a HIFI co-investigator. "We expected this to be the case, but now we know it is because have directly detected it. We can see it."

Scientists had previously found warm water vapor in planet-forming disks close to the central star. But until now, evidence for vast quantities of water extending into the cooler, far reaches of disks where comets and giant planets take shape had not emerged. The more water available in disks for icy comets to form, the greater the chances that large amounts will eventually reach new planets through impacts.

"The detection of water sticking to dust grains throughout the planet-forming disk would be similar to events in our own solar system's evolution, where over millions of years, these dust grains would then coalesce to form comets. These would be a prime delivery mechanism for water on planetary bodies," said principal investigator Michiel Hogerheijde of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Other recent findings from HIFI support the theory that comets delivered a significant portion of Earth's oceans. Researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans.

HIFI is helping astronomers gain a better understanding of how water comes to terrestrial planets -- Earth and beyond. If TW Hydrae and its icy disk are representative of many other young star systems, as researchers think they are, then the process for creating planets around numerous stars with abundant water throughout the universe appears to be in place, NASA officials say.

Shoot Now, Focus Later

Point and shoot: Lytro’s new camera uses software to refocus images later.
Lytro

COMPUTING

A startup's new camera lets you refocus photos and capture 3-D images.

• BY TOM SIMONITE

Audio »

Click on the image above to refocus on different parts.
Credit: Lytro.

Looking over a haul of digital photos can involve as much regret over fudged shots as reminiscing over golden moments. A camera from Silicon Valley startup Lytro promises to change that by allowing a user to focus a photo after it has been taken. The camera also has a novel "lightfield" sensor that enables photos to be viewed in 3-D. It is available to order today and will start shipping next year.

The camera has a novel design reminiscent of a telescope. It features only two buttons: one to turn the device on or off, and one to take a photo. Only after a photo is taken does the user need to worry about focusing the resulting image.

The photos are dynamic and interactive. When viewing them on the camera, a user taps on the device's touch screen to choose the object or area that should be in focus. Everything closer or farther away is artfully blurred. A photo can also be set to show everything in sharp focus. The same experience is possible when viewing an image on a PC, with Lytro's software, or online, with tools for sharing images via Facebook or embedding them in a Web page. (See a galleryof interactive images taken with a Lytro camera.)

Rather than just a convenience for bad photographers, photos that can be refocused also allow more playful and creative photography, says Ren Ng, who founded Lytro to commercialize research he began at Stanford University. "Refocusing the image becomes a new way to tell the story," he says. "It injects a drama into the viewing moment, like when you discover a face that was out of focus in the background."

It seems ambitious for a startup to take on the camera industry, but Ng says Lytro is more than a camera maker. "It's not just a consumer electronics company—it's a Web 2.0 company as well," he says, referring to the Facebook sharing tools and other online features. Ng says he expects word of mouth to drive interest in Lytro when people encounter and "like" the photos it produces.

The light sensor is what makes Lytro's product different from any other consumer camera. In a conventional camera, the sensor's pixels come in three versions that record red, green, and blue light to build a full-color image. On Lytro's "lightfield" sensor, pixels are more discriminating. As well as being specialized to red, green, or blue, each detects only light coming from a particular angle.

Knowing the angles that different rays of light travel allows the camera's software to simulate the photo that would be produced by a virtual cameras focused in a particular way. When a person interacts with a Lytro photo, software tweaks the settings of that virtual camera to produce the new, refocused image.

Lytro's sensor is made by bonding a carefully etched sheet of glass on top of a conventional digital-camera sensor. The glass is patterned with tiny lenses, ensuring that specific pixels can receive light only from the specified angles. That gives Lytro's software the information it needs to refocus photos.

Another consequence of this design is that the camera records depth, which makes it possible to reproduce 3-D images. "We're not going to be emphasizing it from the start, but these pictures are inherently 3-D," says Ng, who showed Technology Review images from a Lytro camera on a laptop with 3-D-capable screen.

Lytro's approach to camera design and photography emerges from a relatively young area of research known as computational photography. Researchers in that field use various computing and mathematical techniques to achieve novel feats of photography and videography, including taking cell-phone photos in very low light or even taking pictures around corners.

Ramesh Raskar, who heads the computational photography research group at MIT's Media Lab, says that Lytro is the first company to try to commercialize computational photography. "The camera industry looks at what we do as very new and experimental," he says. "If Lytro are even partially successful, they will make people realize that computational photography can be practical." Raskar says that Lytro's basic design approach is sound and that he believes users of conventional cameras will be interested in the ability to focus after the fact.

However, Raskar adds that Lytro's sensor design causes its output to be of lower resolution than an equivalent sensor configured normally, because of the need to restrict pixels to receive light only from certain angles. Raskar's own research group have an alternative design that places a sheet perforated with small holes slightly in front of a camera's sensor. That arrangement doesn't have the effect of specializing pixels to certain directions of light as in Lytro's sensor, but it does attenuate light rays in a known way such that the path of different light rays can be mathematically worked out from what the sensor records. An image can then be refocussed as with Lytro's design.

Most importantly, the MIT lab's approach cuts the resolution of photos less, and in a way proportional to the amount of depth range a person chooses to be in focus, says Raskar. By contrast, Lytro's resolution penalty is always the same and likely means a cut of at least ten times in a sensor's output in each dimension, he says. Raskar says there is strong interest in commercializing his group's design, although he is far from ready to launch a competing product to Lytro's.

Ng says camera sensors are today so high-resolution that any resolution penatly should not be a problem. He argues that marketing efforts by camera manufacturers have led to consumers to believe they need more megapixels than they do. "Most of photos that are shared are a tiny fraction of a camera's ability," he says. Ng wouldn't say what the output quality of Lytro images is, preferring to say that his sensor captures 11 million light rays of data (or 11 "megarays"). The largest images shown by the company online are 800 pixels square. A standard six-by-four-inch photograph requires a digital photo that is 1,800 by 1,200 pixels in size.

The history of AIDS

Heroes and villains

The story of AIDS involves many larger-than-life characters, good and bad

ANNIVERSARIES are times for reflection, and this one should be no exception, for the 30-year history of AIDS is a mirror in which humanity can examine itself. From questionable scientists to philanthropic billionaires, people’s actions against AIDS, and reactions to it, have shown up the best and worst that humans have to offer.

Such dualism was there from the beginning, in the question of who discovered the AIDS-causing virus. There were two claimants. One, Robert Gallo, is American. The other,Luc Montagnier, is French. Dr Gallo called his discovery HTLV-3. Dr Montagnier called his LAV. They were in fact the same thing. It turned out, however, that Dr Gallo’s virus had come from Dr Montagnier’s laboratory. It was never conclusively proved how, though a contaminated sample may have been to blame. And Dr Gallo was exonerated of any wrongdoing by an official investigation and is universally recognised to have done important work on AIDS. But only Dr Montagnier won the Nobel prize—eloquent testimony to some people’s opinion of the whole affair.

Another source of conflict was whether HIV, as the virus eventually came to be known, was truly the cause of AIDS. At the beginning of the epidemic, that might have been debatable. Perhaps HIV was merely a passenger that took advantage of an immune system weakened by another cause? One once-respected scientist, Peter Duesberg, who did early research on viral causes of cancer, would not drop the idea. He insisted—and still insists—that the weakening of the immune system characteristic of AIDS is caused by drug-taking (he blames both recreational drugs and AZT, one of the early anti-AIDS drugs), and that HIV is, indeed, a passenger.

Among the heroes, Bill Gates looms large. The foundation into which he poured much of his Microsoft fortune took AIDS seriously from the beginning, forming a particularly fruitful partnership with the government of Botswana, one of the worst-affected countries. And Nelson Mandela, the heroes’ hero, also cleaved eventually to the path of righteousness, even while admitting he had not done enough to combat AIDS during his own presidency of South Africa.

This theory would not have mattered much except thatThabo Mbeki, a former president of South Africa, latched on to it. Since South Africa has the world’s largest number of AIDS cases, and one of its highest infection rates, this was bad news, as was Mr Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who was appointed mainly because she agreed with him, and recommended beetroot and garlic as treatment for the disease. Only with the election of Jacob Zuma, who has himself been publicly tested for HIV (he did not have it), did South Africa return to sensible anti-AIDS policies.

Mr Gates and Mr Mandela are easy to admire. One hero that many AIDS activists have difficulty accepting, though, is George Bush junior. Activists do not much like born-again Christians, who take a dim view of the sort of sex lives that help to spread HIV. But Mr Bush was responsible for setting up the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and for making sure it had plenty of money. PEPFAR is one of the two main organisations, along with the Global Fund, that dish out the cash that rich countries give poor ones to combat AIDS. Last year, it spent almost $7 billion on AIDS and the tuberculosis that often accompanies it, and it is responsible for helping half of the 6.6m people now on anti-retroviral drugs. Many activists may be reluctant to give Mr Bush credit. But handsome is as handsome does.