(So-Called) Life

Summary

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Radiolab: “(So-Called) Life”

Original Release: April 7, 2008
Hosted by: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Production: WNYC Studios

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Overview

Radiolab’s “(So-Called) Life” dives into the boundary between what is natural and what is possible when it comes to life itself. Exploring advances in biotechnology, synthetic biology, and the philosophical tensions they provoke, this episode guides listeners from mythical hybrids at the Museum of Natural History to cutting-edge experiments in genetic engineering. Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich blend human stories with science, probing the meaning of “natural” in a world where we can invent life—sometimes quite literally.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure of Hybrids: Myth to Biology

[00:45 – 05:12]

• Setting: American Museum of Natural History, “Mythic Creatures” exhibit.
• Mythical Mashups: Dragons, unicorns, and other chimeras highlight humanity’s fascination with combining parts from different animals—a creative instinct echoing through to biotechnology.
  • Laurel Kendall (curator): “The human mind loves to wonder, well, what would happen if we put wings on a horse or put a tail on a beautiful woman that is human?” (01:23)
• Children’s Perspective: Kids marvel at the exhibits and build imaginary creatures, fueling a vision of a future where genetic engineering could make new creatures a reality.

Notable Quote:
Freeman Dyson (via narration): “Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.” (04:05)

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2. A Real-Life Chimera: The Case of Karen

[05:46 – 14:31]

• Karen’s Story: When seeking a kidney transplant, Karen discovers that DNA tests reveal her children are not her own—according to the test.
• Medical Mystery: Tests indicate two sets of DNA in her body—ultimately revealing she is a human chimera, the result of two fertilized eggs merging in utero.
  • Karen (on hearing the term chimera): “...in the ancient Greek myths, a chimera is an animal that has, like, a lion head and a donkey's hoof, a goat tail… it’s a mixture.” (12:36)
  • Karen, reflecting: “There is almost a sort of subtle sadness, to think that I would have had a sister.” (14:16)

Notable Quote:
Karen’s Doctor Lynn Yule: “We've never had a mother whose DNA didn't match their children.” (08:10)

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3. Intentionally Created Chimeras and the Ethics of Blending Life

[14:37 – 25:14]

• Scientific Chimeras:
  • Lee Silver (Princeton): Describes Danish embryologist Steen Willadsen’s “geep” (goat-sheep hybrid) experiments, where animal bodies are mosaics of both species.
  • Raises ethical questions: What about human-animal hybrids? How do we define boundaries between species?
    • Lee Silver: “Based on the geep results… it’s very likely that you’d have an organism born that was part chimp, part human.” (17:10)
• Art as Inquiry: Discussion of a play exploring the possibility and moral implications of a human-chimp hybrid, inspired by a real student's proposal to attempt such an experiment.

Boundary Discussion:
Lee Silver: “If you look at the analogy I like to give...look at the color spectrum between green and blue...there’s no point at which you say, here’s the boundary between green and blue...If you take that analogy to human beings...there’s no boundary.” (22:05)

• Genetic Engineering Today: Routine creation of animals with human genes (e.g., cows producing human blood, mice with human kidneys)—mostly accepted if the creature’s appearance is left unchanged.

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4. What is Natural? The Origins of Life and Sharing Genes

[29:36 – 36:04]

• Ancient “Commune”: Applied mathematician Steve Strogatz and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld describe how early life was defined by rampant, non-selective gene sharing—a genetic “commune”—rather than species boundaries.
  • Steve Strogatz: “...when you go back far enough, there’s a kind of rampant sharing of molecules. It’s a kind of orgy in which there are no well defined species or organisms.” (30:48)
• A Turning Point: Over time, one bacterium stops sharing, ending the “commune” era, enabling species and individuality—but also slowing innovation.

Notable Quote:
Robert Krulwich: “For the first billion years of life...everything that Darwin teaches, all that stuff hasn’t happened. There are no borders, no individuals, there’s no species.” (33:56)

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5. The Third Age: Human-Directed Evolution

[36:30 – 39:32]

• Freeman Dyson’s Vision:
  • Predicts an age where anyone can tinker with DNA as a hobby (even children), creating new life on-demand.
  • Dyson: “There will be do it yourself kits...The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.” (38:44)
• Already Here: College students at MIT engineer E. coli to smell like wintergreen and then banana; genetic engineering is already democratizing.

Notable Moment:
Stephen Payne (MIT student): “Did you feel a little spooked by the fact that you just created a life form new to creation? ...Just feels like basic engineering.” (42:08–42:30)

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6. Synthetic Biology in Practice: Accessible, Modular Creation

[46:29 – 54:40]

• Standardizing Life: Synthetic biologists like Brian Baines (Codon Devices) manufacture custom DNA for anyone who emails a genetic “recipe.”
  • Brian Baines: “We make custom synthetic genes from scratch… The industry’s basically doubling every two years.” (48:10–48:17)
• Dreams and Worries: Reduction of life to “building blocks;” creation of diesel-producing bacteria; vision of future energy made by engineered microbes.
• Philosophical Skepticism: The analogy of life as a “machine” or a “game of Legos” prompts hosts’ ambivalence—does something crucial get lost, or misunderstood, in this conception?

Notable Conversation:
Robert Krulwich: “It’s hard for me to believe that that [life] is just a chemical machine assembled from parts.” (47:26)

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7. Cautionary Tales: Hubris, Unknowns, and Unintended Outcomes

[54:46 – 62:13]

• Ambition vs. Caution: Craig Venter’s vision—creating life forms “from scratch”—sparks concern over the balance between innovation and humility.
  • Venter: “This is the engineering of the rest of this century. And that’s a little...I mean, stand aside, young man. I'll rescue you now with my magical scientific ability…” (55:23)
• The Not-Knowing: Releasing engineered life into the environment may have unforeseen consequences, as history with antibiotics and resistant bacteria shows.
• Knowledge Gaps: We barely understand how life works at a collective level; our capacity to engineer radically outpaces our understanding.
  • Steve Strogatz: “We’re really still missing 99% of the picture, literally. So it’s a scary time to start playing Dr. Frankenstein, given how ignorant we are.” (59:29)
• Dual Use Fears: Even viruses (like polio) have been artificially created in university labs, posing biosecurity concerns.

Notable Exchange:
Jad Abumrad: “Do you say to these guys, stop? Would you have these guys stop doing what they're doing? Stop doing their experiments, asking questions, being curious?” Robert Krulwich: “That’d be ridiculous to tell a scientist not to do science.” (60:37–60:58)

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8. Conclusion: The Importance—and Danger—of Playfulness

[61:13 – 62:13]

• Science is powered by curiosity and a willingness to play, but also demands awareness of our vast ignorance.
  • Steve Strogatz: “We are what we are because we like to play with nature, with ideas, with language… But we have to be very careful...We have a vast ocean to discover before us.” (61:19)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Laurel Kendall: “The human mind loves to wonder, well, what would happen if we put wings on a horse…” (01:23)
• Freeman Dyson: “Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.” (04:05)
• Karen: “I gave birth to these kids. I felt the pain.” (07:58)
• Lee Silver: “If you think about it, there's no firm boundary between human being and non-human being.” (22:05)
• Nigel Goldenfeld: “Once you start having a lot of exchange...then you start even asking, what does it mean to be a species?” (33:20)
• Freeman Dyson: “The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.” (38:44)
• Stephen Payne: “Just feels like basic engineering.” (42:30)
• Steve Strogatz: “We keep being surprised about life...We’re really still missing 99% of the picture...” (59:29)
• Steve Strogatz: “So we're going to play, but we have to be very careful...We have a vast ocean to discover before us.” (61:15–61:19)

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Structure & Tone

Radiolab’s signature is an energized, conversational blend of playful curiosity and philosophical probing. Listeners are taken on a voyage from the mythic, through the medical and scientific, to the existential—never shying from playful music numbers or uncomfortable questions.

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Timestamps of Major Segments

• Mythic Creatures/Museum: [00:45–05:12]
• Karen the Chimera’s Story: [05:46–14:31]
• Goat-Sheep “Geep” & Chimeras: [14:37–25:14]
• Ancient Gene Sharing / Origin of Species: [29:36–36:04]
• Freeman Dyson’s Biotech Vision: [36:30–39:32]
• DIY Genetic Engineering (MIT students): [39:15–43:36]
• Synthetic Biology (Brian Baines/Codon Devices): [46:29–54:40]
• Cautionary Perspectives (Venter & Strogatz): [54:46–62:13]

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode illustrates how the line between invented and natural life has blurred: From mythological chimeras to real human genetic mosaics; from engineered scents in bacteria to possible new fuel-creating bugs; and—from the perspectives of scientists, ethicists, and storytellers—whether we should be excited or afraid (or both) as life’s rules are rewritten. Throughout, the tension between human ingenuity and humility in the face of the Unknown gives the episode its emotional current.

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Final Thought

Radiolab’s “(So-Called) Life” compels listeners to confront the question: What does it really mean to be “natural”—and what are the promises and perils of humans taking evolution into their own hands? As the episode closes, listeners are left marveling both at our growing power and our persistent ignorance about the greatest mystery of all: life itself.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

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[Laurel Kendall]

You're listening to Radio Lab from New York Public Radio, Public Radio, W N Y C and npr.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's alive.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

It's alive.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's alive. It's alive.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's alive. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today we're in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of mood. So we figure where better to start than at the museum?

[Robert Krulwich]

American Museum of of Natural History, where.

[Jad Abumrad]

They have on a kind of Frankenstein Y exhibit.

[Laurel Kendall]

Okay. I'm Laurel Kendall. I curate the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit Mythic Creatures. We're standing in front of a dragon.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, why would there be a dragon at the Museum of Natural History? Well, according to the curator, Laurel Kendall, why not?

[Laurel Kendall]

The human mind loves to wonder, well, what would happen if we put wings on a horse or put a tail on a beautiful woman that is human?

[Jad Abumrad]

Justify it however you want.

[Laurel Kendall]

That belongs in the museum.

[Jad Abumrad]

What you see before you is a hall of strange, twisting creatures, dimly lit. And when you look more closely, you realize that they're all mashups from the natural world. For example, she takes us over to one corner, points at a glass case where inside is this creepy little hybrid skeleton thing.

[Laurel Kendall]

Look at this beast and see how it really is a composite.

[Jad Abumrad]

Half of it is a monkey. The upper half, monkey's skin.

[Laurel Kendall]

In the lower half there's a fishtail.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like some kind of trout with some scales. A place is full of stuff like this. A lion with an eagle head, humans with snake tails. Just about anything you can imagine.

[Laurel Kendall]

Very operatic.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important part. Kids. Tons and tons of kids completely in awe.

[Laurel Kendall]

Oh my God.

[Jad Abumrad]

Unicorns. Aww, look at his claws, boys and girls.

[Reshma Sethi]

Look at his tail.

[Robert Krulwich]

What are we standing under here?

[Jad Abumrad]

The pegasus.

[Reshma Sethi]

Can you describe what we're seeing here?

[Laurel Kendall]

It's a horse.

[Jad Abumrad]

The body's like a horse. It has these really big wings. Wings like birds, like an eagle maybe. Somehow its parents were a horse and a bird, and their genes formed together to make a Pegasus. It's just what I see, what I see.

[Reshma Sethi]

It just looks so Exciting.

[Jad Abumrad]

I think that it just looks really cool. And when you ask these kids, as our producer Lulu Miller did, why is it cool?

[Reshma Sethi]

Like, why is it fun to see.

[Robert Krulwich]

Two animals mash together?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, they just look at you like you're dumb.

[Laurel Kendall]

It's a horse with rings.

[Jad Abumrad]

Birds have wings. Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Birds.

[Laurel Kendall]

They're not mythical.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're, like, regular. Every day you see them. Every time you just see a pigeon, you're like, oh, whatever. Maybe it's that simple.

[Laurel Kendall]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Any case, the kids, sick of us and our dumb questions, ran off to this kiosk that the museum itself set up around the corner where they could actually build their own creatures.

[Steve Strogatz]

Okay, now, can you describe your guy here?

[Jad Abumrad]

He has seven heads, and he has a tail with fire on it. Four legs, and he has a long body. And the thing is, what kind of legs are those? You can't help but wonder if these same kids, in about 30 or 40 years, might actually be able to do this for real.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

When they're grown up, those kids will be at home in the new world of biotechnology. They will be ready to put their skills to use. They will be. Do it yourself. To breed new varieties of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Embody like a snake rather than like a bird. Oh, can I do it? Because I never got to do it.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is physicist Freeman Dyson. We'll hear more from him later. Now, whether it's true or not what he's saying, it does seem to be the case that we are at this pivotal point now where the stuff that we used to only imagine might actually turn into reality. Which is why maybe you get an exhibit of fantasy creatures at the Museum of Natural History.

[Laurel Kendall]

This is a celebration of the human imagination, human ingenuity, human art.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

It's a liar in the name of God.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now I know what it feels like to be God.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's our show today. Life, but not as we know it. Life as we might invent it, tweak it, augment it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, but if you augment, tweak and remake, people will quickly come to you and say, hey, don't fuss with this. It's not natural, it's not right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Speaking of right and natural and fussing, who are you?

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Robert Krulwich. Who was always right, always natural, and always fussing.

[Laurel Kendall]

Always.

[Jad Abumrad]

In any case, that word you mentioned, natural. Yeah, that one. Natural. What does it mean exactly? Let's just.

[Robert Krulwich]

It usually means. It means what's familiar, what we know, what we know.

[Jad Abumrad]

Let's just muck that up a bit because it turns out when you look in nature, you will find things that are frankly very strange and not familiar.

[Robert Krulwich]

Like.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, let me tell you a story. It's an amazing story about a woman. Heard about it from a reporter, Soren Wheeler. Hi, Soren. Right. Hey.

[Reshma Sethi]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

So, Soren, tell me about Karen.

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, Karen is a mother of three, a middle aged woman living outside of Boston in the suburbs of Boston, and she lives there with her husband Pete. The kids are out of the house now.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tell me what you were thinking when you walked up to her door.

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, I. I was nervous. I was kind of strangely nervous about meeting her.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hi, Karen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi.

[Reshma Sethi]

Hi.

[Soren Wheeler]

But I got there and she was as friendly as can be.

[Laurel Kendall]

Come on here, bring in a couple cups of tea.

[Soren Wheeler]

She made me tea. We sat in the living room and talked. And she was just normal, which is kind of weird given the story that she was about to tell me. So let's start at the very beginning.

[Laurel Kendall]

Well, in 1995, I was told that I needed a kidney transplant immediately.

[Jad Abumrad]

What's that like?

[Soren Wheeler]

Like, what are you going through?

[Laurel Kendall]

It was frightening.

[Soren Wheeler]

The doctors told Karen they needed to act fast.

[Laurel Kendall]

They asked me who in my family might be willing to donate a kidney.

[Soren Wheeler]

So the two older boys, that's Matt and Jess and Karen's husband Pete, they all went in to get what should have been a pretty routine DNA test.

[Laurel Kendall]

Yep. They had the blood work done and they waited. A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from the hospital and they said, Mrs. Keegan, this is a very unusual situation that we're going to explain to you. It's something that we've never seen before. But when the DNA testing was done on your sons, we found that they didn't match your DNA.

[Soren Wheeler]

Is that how they said it?

[Brian Baines]

Mm.

[Laurel Kendall]

They said they match the father, but they're not a match for you.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that mean? They didn't match her DNA.

[Soren Wheeler]

She's not their mother?

[Laurel Kendall]

Oh, pretty much.

[Jad Abumrad]

Karen.

[Soren Wheeler]

This was crazy. Yeah, I mean, she told them I was there.

[Laurel Kendall]

This could not possibly be.

[Soren Wheeler]

I gave birth to these kids. I felt the pain.

[Laurel Kendall]

You know, you better do the test again because you're obviously wrong.

[Soren Wheeler]

And so they did do the test again, same result.

[Laurel Kendall]

The read was correct. There was not a laboratory error.

[Soren Wheeler]

This is one of her doctors, Lynn Yule.

[Laurel Kendall]

We felt, particularly after the second time, that it was real. And then they said, now we have had situations where the husband's DNA didn't match. But we've never had a mother whose DNA didn't match their children.

[Jad Abumrad]

So wait, if the DNA is saying she's not the mom, then what would explain that?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, first thought was that there was some kind of mix up.

[Laurel Kendall]

Some switch of babies or something.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, like a baby switch right after birth kind of a thing?

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah, but the problem with that is that the dad is the dad. The father's right. So you have to figure out, like, how could they have gotten the wrong kid but the right dad?

[Jad Abumrad]

So then what if that's the case?

[Soren Wheeler]

Here's the thing.

[Laurel Kendall]

At this point, as we got further involved with this, people are thinking maybe.

[Soren Wheeler]

Karen's done something kind of fishy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Laurel Kendall]

There must be something that you're not being told.

[Soren Wheeler]

Like maybe she implanted her womb with another woman's baby and then she just kind of lied about it.

[Laurel Kendall]

Yeah, that she lied about it. They said, well, could you tell us what hospital you had these children in?

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly how. What would. I'm still confused.

[Soren Wheeler]

She's being accused of being some kind of monster.

[Laurel Kendall]

Somebody who maybe wished they had children or stolen a child or something. Had to be, because obviously DNA is never wrong. It's never wrong.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So how does she talk to her family about this?

[Soren Wheeler]

What are those conversations?

[Laurel Kendall]

Like, I do remember some very sort of sad moments with my sons. You know, I told them. I don't think they maybe even completely realized what I was saying.

[Soren Wheeler]

Lynn, Karen's doctor, couldn't get this out of her head. Something wasn't adding up.

[Laurel Kendall]

Didn't make sense.

[Soren Wheeler]

So she thought about the fact that they'd done all of the tests on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Karen's blood, only in her blood cells.

[Soren Wheeler]

So Lynn started thinking maybe the next step, they ought to look at some other parts.

[Laurel Kendall]

And to do that, we would need to test other tissues. Scrape the inside of your mouth and get a little saliva and maybe a hair or two. Thyroid, bladder and a skin biopsy.

[Soren Wheeler]

They're getting all sorts of parts from you.

[Laurel Kendall]

They're getting all parts. All kinds of parts.

[Soren Wheeler]

That's when things started to get strange.

[Laurel Kendall]

When we got the results of the tissue studies, we identified two sets of DNA.

[Soren Wheeler]

Two people.

[Jad Abumrad]

Two what?

[Soren Wheeler]

Another person in Karen.

[Jad Abumrad]

She had another person inside her?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, sort of. She did have a separate set of DNA, so it was like she had another person with its own genetic identity in her body.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa.

[Soren Wheeler]

And the thing is, Jed, that other person, that was the mother of the boys.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wh to. How did it get there?

[Soren Wheeler]

I mean, that's what the doctors were wondering. So they all sit down, put their heads together, try to figure it out. And then it hit them.

[Laurel Kendall]

You were a twin. You are a twin.

[Robert Krulwich]

She.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean she had a twin?

[Soren Wheeler]

No, she's both twins. Here's what happened. In Karen's mother's womb, originally, there were.

[Laurel Kendall]

Two eggs, two fertilized eggs.

[Soren Wheeler]

Twin girls, side by side, developing in.

[Laurel Kendall]

Their own separate sacs.

[Soren Wheeler]

Then after a couple days, something strange happens. Somehow the two embryos bump into each.

[Laurel Kendall]

Other and they fuse into one unit.

[Soren Wheeler]

And that one became Karen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like a mixture of the two of them?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, no, they didn't blend. According to Lynn, what they happened is they kind of claimed different parts of her.

[Laurel Kendall]

They still had their own. What I want to say.

[Jad Abumrad]

Boundaries.

[Soren Wheeler]

One twin claimed her blood, and the other twin claimed her thyroid and her bladder.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Karen is a plural.

[Soren Wheeler]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this. Has this happened before?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, supposedly it's pretty rare, but it does happen. In fact, there's a scientific word for this condition. Karen first heard that word from her doctor, Margo Kreskal.

[Laurel Kendall]

Margo came to my bedside, explained that I was a chimera, a term which I had never heard of before.

[Soren Wheeler]

Did she come and say you're a chimera?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Laurel Kendall]

Now, that was interesting, because I called my son the English major and said, matt, I found out I was a chimera. And he said, oh, you know what a chimera is, don't you? And I said, no. And he said, well, in the ancient Greek myths, a chimera is an animal that has, like, a lion head and a donkey's hoof, a goat tail. You know, it's a mixture.

[Soren Wheeler]

In Greek myths, the chimera was a monster.

[Jad Abumrad]

Get back.

[Soren Wheeler]

That the hero's supposed to slay.

[Laurel Kendall]

That didn't make me feel very good.

[Soren Wheeler]

Then Karen learned more about what chimera meant medically and what could have happened.

[Laurel Kendall]

To her if the eggs hadn't fused within four days? I would have become a Siamese twin. When you hear that, you immediately have a more concrete vision of two selves. It brought home the reality that I really was a twin.

[Soren Wheeler]

She is a twin.

[Laurel Kendall]

One doctor said, do you think you have two souls? I think of myself as the union. But there is almost a sort of subtle sadness to think that I would have had a sister.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Yeah.

[Laurel Kendall]

And so there is sort of a shadow feeling of loss. There could have been more.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks to reporter Soren Wheeler for that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let's make things a little more disturbing, because human beings, scientists, are now capable of creating chimeras purposefully. And we talked to Lee Silver, who's a scientist at Princeton. Oh, Lee. Okay, Lee, you have to say something.

[Lee Silver]

Okay. You know, my left ear is receiving more than my right. Is there a way?

[Robert Krulwich]

And he told us about an intentional chimera, a creature created by a Danish embryologist named Steen Willitson.

[Lee Silver]

He took a goat embryo and a sheep embryo and he pushed them together in his petri dish, put that mixture of embryo back into a female. I don't remember which species. And then what was born was an animal that was part goat, part sheep. And he called that a Geep.

[Robert Krulwich]

Was it visibly kind of goaty and kind of sheepy?

[Lee Silver]

Well, it was actually, yes, it was very visible. And what happened? Because of the way development occurs, parts of its body look sheep and parts of its body look goat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like which parts?

[Lee Silver]

Well, he did this multiple times, and so he actually got multiple geeps. And sometimes the animal would have a goat head, but then parts of its body would be sheep, like with wool. Other times it would have a sheep head.

[Robert Krulwich]

How confusing it would be at the geep dance. You wouldn't know, like, who was supposed to dance with whom.

[Jad Abumrad]

Could geeps relate with one another in that way?

[Lee Silver]

I don't remember.

[Robert Krulwich]

He's not a Geep, odd as he may look, with that little beard and everything and the hooves.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just to give you a visual, we've got a picture here of three Geeps hanging out near a tree. Do you want to describe it?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, the Geep, one of them looks like a naked animal wearing a coat of shaggy hair.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's got this streak of sheep wool running down its back, but the rest of it looks kind of goaty.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which. Do you find it cute?

[Jad Abumrad]

I kind of do find it cute.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, but now let's un cute it a bit. Suppose instead of talking about mixing sheep with goats, since you're not a sheep or a goat, let's make it more personal.

[Lee Silver]

People are most worried about combining human embryonic cells and monkey or chimp embryonic cells. And so the idea is, if you took a chimp embryo and a human embryo and you push them together based on the geep results, based on lots of other data that scientists have accumulated, it's very likely that you'd have an organism born that was part chimp, part human.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, there once was a creature like that, because if you believe in evolution, you believe that chimps eventually became humans. So somewhere in history there is someone who is 10% chimp and 90% human.

[Lee Silver]

And that common ancestor evolved continuously and slowly From a chimp like individual to a human. And at every point along the hundred thousand generations, the children didn't look very different from their parents.

[Robert Krulwich]

But here's the. Here's the very sad Hollywood movie. I go and I go and I create a creature, a geep like, you know, amalgamation, which is 50% chimpanzee, ape and 50% human, Homo sapiens. And he's the only one. That's like creating a tragedy, it seems like, because you'd be creating someone who is isolated in his physiology.

[Lee Silver]

Yes. I mean, this is.

[Robert Krulwich]

No one could read with him. Or maybe they could, but who would like.

[Lee Silver]

Well, I'm gonna this. Because you're taping this.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're opening something.

[Lee Silver]

I'm opening something for you. This is actually a play here, you can look at this. It's going to be performed next week.

[Robert Krulwich]

Sweet, Sweet motherhood.

[Lee Silver]

Is that it? Yes, that's it.

[Robert Krulwich]

So this is a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Shelley McCann wants a baby, a human chimpanzee baby. Oh. Shelly's been spending too much time partying to build up a respectable grade point average. So she proposes the following senior thesis. Fertilize one of her eggs with the sperm from a chimpanzee in her womb. It's an interesting term paper. So Professor Harry Stein must do everything he can to stop her. The play is inspired by a true event. Really? This is your play?

[Lee Silver]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Aha.

[Lee Silver]

Jeremy Kerrigan is the main playwright and I've collaborated with him.

[Robert Krulwich]

What is the true event on which this is based?

[Lee Silver]

The true event is that about 10, 12 years ago now, I was talking in my usual flippant way to a bunch of students and a sequence information had just come out showing that chimps and humans were almost 90% the same at the DNA level. And so I just threw out the idea. Well, based on what we know about goats and sheep and everything else, you probably could have a hybrid develop between a chimpanzee and a human being. It was a thought experiment. What would it be? How would it develop? Which of its characteristics would be human, which would be chimpanzee? The next day, a student, a junior, came to my office and said she wanted to do the experiment inside her own womb. And so then. Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

In real life, what did you do? Hit her on the head with a baseball bat or what?

[Lee Silver]

No, I had long. I was flabbergasted. She was absolutely serious because it is actually true. She was this student who partied a lot and she needed. And the senior thesis at Princeton counts an Enormous amount towards your final gpa. So she wanted to do this unique experiment, hoping she'd get an A in her senior thesis. She was very naive, obviously. That was the last question.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're going to put up this little chimpanzee for adoption as soon as it was born?

[Lee Silver]

Well, no, no, worse than that. I asked her, what would you do with this individual? I said, well, if it's a human being, you have to raise it like a human being. It has rights like a human being. If it's a chimpanzee, you put it in a zoo or you use it for experiments. And what's it going to be? And her answer to that question was she would abort. Right before it came time to go into labor, she'd abort. And so the whole idea of the senior thesis was to study the development of this hybrid inside of her womb.

[Jad Abumrad]

She really wanted to do this for real, not just on paper for a project, but actually she wanted herself.

[Lee Silver]

Yes, now there are many, many, many, many problems.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, this gives new meaning to the liberal arts education. You gotta be really liberal here.

[Lee Silver]

And we talked for about an hour. I dissuaded her. I never saw her again.

[Robert Krulwich]

Except in a way in his play, the one he co wrote. This is the play about the teacher at the fancy university who happen teaching a biology class. The human ovary within the mouse's body happens to have this notion about what would it be like if chimps and humans had babies together. Actually, in a number of ways I am more similar to a male chimp than I am to my sister happens to have in the play.

[Steve Strogatz]

Can we talk?

[Robert Krulwich]

A student who comes up after class.

[Laurel Kendall]

And says, I want to combine one of my eggs with chimpanzee spray.

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't want you to do this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why not? Except, by the way, in the play she actually goes through with it.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm pregnant. Well, you know, he wrote the play to keep a conversation going that wouldn't get out of his head.

[Lee Silver]

And the question is, what is a human being? If you look at it developmentally, evolutionarily, through these hybrids and chimeras, where's the boundary between human being and non human being? And at the end of my quest, I personally concluded that there is no boundary. No, no, no, it's fuzzy. So in other words, if you look at the analogy I like to give is look at the color spectrum between green and blue. When you go from green to blue along the color spectrum, it's a continuous gradual change from one to the other. There's no point at which you say, here's the boundary between green and blue. And if you take that analogy, which I did to human beings, you say during development, during evolution, in terms of a chimera, there's no boundary.

[Robert Krulwich]

But the social effect of having staked out that position is that you aren't going to defend our species against all kinds of amendments. There is a consequence to this kind of thinking. Right. I mean, you can't do Cole Porter Anything Goes, can you?

[Lee Silver]

No, no, I don't believe you can do Anything goes. My purpose is to say, not that anything goes, but that in theory, all these outrageous things could happen and actually are happening.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here's an example.

[Lee Silver]

Since 1980, scientists have been taking human genes, genetic information, putting it into mice. I mean, this is sort of a routine procedure for people who do mouse molecular genetics. And in fact, the really exciting thing that people are doing now is they're making cows that are engineered to produce human blood. And the idea is that you want to change all the genes in the cow that normally produce the proteins in cow blood. You want to make them all human. So you'd have a cow making human blood. I don't think most people would mind that. And then you could use it for blood transfusions.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. Could you make a cow with human blood and a human kidney so that you could use that too?

[Lee Silver]

Well, actually, Israeli scientists have already created a mouse that has a tiny little functioning human kidney.

[Jad Abumrad]

Get out.

[Lee Silver]

Yeah, I could show you the picture. Yeah. So, I mean. And you know, and there are other people who are working with sheep and trying to make human livers inside sheep. And the whole idea is regenerative medicine.

[Robert Krulwich]

Sacrifice the animals to get a new kidney for you.

[Lee Silver]

Now, I actually think that as long as you don't play with the external features, I think society will accept it. I mean, you know, people eat pigs, and if you can eat a pig, why not grow a pig to have a human liver, kidney or heart?

[Jad Abumrad]

As long as it still looks like a pig, you're saying.

[Lee Silver]

That's right. As long as it still looks like a pig and it still behaves like a pig. If you put a human arm onto a pig, I don't think people would like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you acknowledge that the distinctions you're drawing are emotional distinctions and not rational.

[Lee Silver]

Absolutely, they're emotional. And I'm saying that sometimes emotional distinctions matter. I mean, I have no solutions. I mean, I don't know where to draw lines. Society has to draw lines.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[Robert Krulwich]

Message one. Hi, this is Lee Silver, Radiolab is.

[Brian Baines]

Funded in part by the Alfred P.

[Steve Strogatz]

Sloan foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC New York.

[Steve Strogatz]

Public Radio and distributed by by npr, National Public Radio.

[Laurel Kendall]

End of message.

[Brian Baines]

Radiolab is supported by bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if.

[Reshma Sethi]

You have to, BILT works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through Bilt, you can.

[Brian Baines]

Earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next lift ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for BILT members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbuilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com.

[Reshma Sethi]

Radiolab.

[Brian Baines]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r-ip p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply.

[Reshma Sethi]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this is an ad by BetterHelp. So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter, and basically once it becomes dark outside of my window, I feel like the rest of the world disappears and I'm alone and there's nothing left to do but watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon. And yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I haven't responded to and you know what? I'M gonna write them back right now. Hi. Sorry I've been missing. How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner? Therapy is the same. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire and they find a licensed therapist who they think you'll like. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Brian Baines]

Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all, protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Birdie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krelwin.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. Our topic today is. What is our topic today? Robert?

[Robert Krulwich]

Our topic today is making life that isn't there before you arrived in the room. Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Life, not as we know it, but as we might invent it or make it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, let's talk about life, you and I. Okay? So when you look around in the world, at least living things, and I say, look, dad, there's a cat. And next to that is a dog, and that's a tree. And you notice that those things, of course, are different.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

And later, when we go to school, we learn about phylums and categories like kingdoms and stuff. So we learn about the nature of those differences. And then you're taught about struggle and competition, Darwin and species and all that. There is a new theory that's being talked about that turns all of that on its head. I heard it first from this guy.

[Steve Strogatz]

I'm Steve Strogatz. I'm an applied mathematician.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the story he told me, which is based on analysis of DNA in very tiny organisms, is that once upon a time, he says, life began with a very Primitive, very simple collection of cells. And these cells, said Steve, these cells like to share.

[Steve Strogatz]

It appears that when you go back far enough, there's a kind of rampant sharing of molecules. It's a kind of orgy in which there are no well defined species or organisms. And I can give you my genes and you can pass. We're a commune. It was a commune.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that mean? It was a commune.

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean, what does it mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

I know what it means. In the 60s, free in love sense. But what does it really mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

What cells are exchanging is chemicals. Chemicals that give them talents and traits, genes. Here's what happens. I did this with Steve in our ancient puddle. Queen Darwin thought that life might have begun in a warm puddle. Let's say that you and I are both cells, okay? So once upon a time, there was you in a puddle, and I'm in the same puddle as you. And it gets a little colder in the puddle, so we should all get sick. But you don't get sick. You have some kind of accidental talent. You can handle cold water. I'm shivering. Describe again what happens at this point in the glorious old days.

[Steve Strogatz]

Well, my membrane, that is, I'm a cell. I've got a membrane. I've got my outer layer maybe a little bit porous, and maybe, whoops, some of my genes just leaked out. Okay, we're not talking sophisticated organisms. And maybe you're porous too. And, oh, wow, you just absorbed some of those genes.

[Robert Krulwich]

So now we both have this.

[Steve Strogatz]

We both got it.

[Robert Krulwich]

You both got it. And if I've got this gene now, I can survive cold water because it's part of me. And if I bump into you now, it's. That's part of you. So now this Steve gene has become a Robert gene, which has then become a JAD gene. And we're doing this over and over and over and we're getting really communal.

[Jad Abumrad]

It sounds so friendly.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, actually, don't think of cells like people. Shut up. All these exchanges, this gene swapping was not intentional.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

It's not purposeful sharing.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Nigel Goldenfeld.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

I'm a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he and his colleague Carl Woese did the science that led to some of these kind of groovy ideas.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

It's not me sort of saying, hey, I'm gonna just help out my buddy over there. Here's a couple of genes that I think you'll find handy. It's not something like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Even still, if we're swapping genes so much and, you know, you're giving me yours and I'm giving me mine. What does it actually mean to be me if so much of me is spread around?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, it would be very weird. Imagine a world in which for a while, I have your nose. God forbid. And then I get my nose. Have Steve's hair. Then Steve would get my ear, Then he would get your nose.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Once you start having a lot of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exchange, I'll take your chin.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay. You can have my allergies.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Then you start even asking, what does it mean to be a species?

[Jad Abumrad]

You can have my love affair with doubt.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

You may not even be able to talk about individuals.

[Steve Strogatz]

Yeah, if the mixing is good enough, we're all kind of indistinguishable. So identity would be very strange in this ancient world.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

A lot of the concepts that we take for granted in biology become more and more nebulous as you get further and further back to the root of the origin of life.

[Robert Krulwich]

Take, for instance, Charles Darwin. What Nigel's really saying is that for the first billion years of life with a B. With a B, everything that Darwin teaches, all that stuff hasn't happened. There are no borders, no individuals, there's no species.

[Steve Strogatz]

That is Darwinist evolution as we now understand it. That's an interlude in the real story of life. It's only what's happening now.

[Robert Krulwich]

What you got back at the very beginning was a whole bunch of cells swapping genes, swapping advantages, swapping disadvantages. It's kind of a wild time.

[Steve Strogatz]

A tremendous explosion of diversity in a way that life has not seen since then.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Until.

[Robert Krulwich]

One dark and terrible day 3 billion years ago, as interpreted by Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist, and delivered here now by our friend, the mathematician Steve Strogatz. Here's Steve.

[Steve Strogatz]

One evil day, a bacterium anticipating bill gates by 3 billion years. Refuse to share. Refuse to share. The first bad guy is this cellular Bill Gates who decides that I've got an innovation that I don't feel like sharing. Or possibly I found a way to keep my membrane from leaking. That is, I'm not gonna be a sharing soul anymore.

[Jad Abumrad]

And why? What made that one little soul decide to stop sharing?

[Steve Strogatz]

That's a good question. We don't really know.

[Robert Krulwich]

But what we do know, this was.

[Steve Strogatz]

Maybe the most dramatic moment in the history of life on Earth. This transition from the age of. Well, if you want to call it the age of sharing to the age of selfishness.

[Robert Krulwich]

And gradually, once one creature stopped sharing, pretty soon the others followed. And then more and more did the same Thing. And now, for the first time in the history of life, finally we get Darwin. Now we get species. Now we see differences.

[Steve Strogatz]

Yes, it's the age of identity, of individualism. It's also the age of stasis.

[Robert Krulwich]

Things change, but they change much more slowly.

[Steve Strogatz]

And any great thing, you know, like you are a bat and you figured out sonar. I don't have sonar. I can't get sonar. It'd be nice to have sonar. Or like you're in a little electric fish that lives in the muddy waters of the Amazon. You don't care. It's totally dark. You can see because you can see with electricity. I can't see with electricity. If I'm in the dark, I'm bumping my head.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, so here's where we end up. Chapter one one, a great orgy of gene swapping. Chapter two. The orgy ends. We pass genes now, not to other guys, not randomly, but just to our own children. And finally, here comes chapter three, as proposed by Freeman Dyson, the physicist freeman Dyson. After 3 billion years of life slowly evolving through random mutations, through bumps in the night, one species, Jada, human beings, you and me, we have become so smart, so. Well, some of us so technologically advanced that we can swap genes. We now decide who gets what genes. And thanks to us, evolution, as Darwin described it, is beginning to end. And now we welcome evolution, as described by Freeman Dyson, to the graduating class of the University of Michigan.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

I see a bright future for the biotech industry, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.

[Robert Krulwich]

Freeman thinks that in the future, everybody, and he means everybody, they will all be creating new life forms. And why? Because they can.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

There will be do it yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids, kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age, but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they're growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.

[Robert Krulwich]

So there's your future. I would like to make it your future for the moment rather than my.

[Jad Abumrad]

Own future, but it doesn't sound that bad. I mean, maybe a little sci fi.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, actually, here's the interesting thing, is that what he's describing has already begun. There are kids doing this right now or something very close to it. How old were you when you did this? I guess I was 20. I'm 21 right now. Okay. Who are you, what's your name, and what do you do? I'm Stephen Payne.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm a senior in biological engineering at mit.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, here's the thing about Stephen. He, like most kids who are in the sciences in college, had to spend hours and hours and hours in the lab waiting for E. Coli to slowly grow in a petri dish.

[Jad Abumrad]

E. Coli? Like the stuff that gives you food poisoning?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, yeah, it's the stuff. It's common bacteria, and it lives naturally in your gut. And it's, by the way, a big laboratory favorite. And the problem is, says Reshma Sethi, who's a grad student at mit, is.

[Reshma Sethi]

E. Coli in the raw actually smell really bad?

[Robert Krulwich]

What does it smell like?

[Reshma Sethi]

It actually kind of smells, I guess maybe like poo.

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't know.

[Reshma Sethi]

What do you think it smells like?

[Robert Krulwich]

Feces. Anyway, Stephen and his friends got it into their heads that they could make.

[Reshma Sethi]

Make E. Coli that smell nicer. Yep, nicer.

[Robert Krulwich]

Smelling like cinnamon or cherry or, like, minty fresh. We ended up deciding on wintergreen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wintergreen?

[Robert Krulwich]

You got something against wintergreen? No. In the real world, who has wintergreen? It's the petunia plant. Petunias have wintergreen? I have no idea.

[Reshma Sethi]

Yeah, a lot of folks study why plants make nice smells. So why do roses smell nice? Why do petunias smell nice? So what we did was we requested from one of these folks, Natalia Dudareva from Purdue University. We asked her to send us a sample of one of the genes she had studied that produces this wintergreen. She mailed it through the mail, they.

[Robert Krulwich]

Opened it up, we took it, took it out. What were you taking out? A little bit of gunk. It's actually living cells. Living dried cells.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[Reshma Sethi]

We pulled out the DNA, put it into a new cell, and once the.

[Robert Krulwich]

New DNA had done its thing, Stephen called everybody into the lab, and we.

[Reshma Sethi]

All came over and were like, whoa, this E. Coli culture actually does smell like mint.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we were like, yay.

[Reshma Sethi]

That's crazy.

[Jad Abumrad]

So instead of smelling puoli, they. To get to smell wintergreen.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, actually, there was more than that, because after their wintergreen success, Stephen and Reshman decided, you know, why should we stay in the lab all day? Even Though it smells nicer now because we have to sit there and watch these E. Coli grow and grow and grow until they're ready to be experimented on. We could be outside playing Frisbee. So they decided to put a little trigger inside the E. Coli. So when it's done growing, it switches from wintergreen to banana.

[Jad Abumrad]

Banana.

[Robert Krulwich]

Banana.

[Reshma Sethi]

Yeah, the banana. So banana, you know, it smells like a banana milkshake. I mean, it smells more like a banana than a banana does.

[Robert Krulwich]

So Gwynda green means it's still growing and banana means we're done.

[Reshma Sethi]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, that's kind of awesome.

[Robert Krulwich]

Awesome's a word. I want to discuss the awesome question here. Okay. Were you at all intrigued by the idea that as far as I know, and maybe as far as you know, maybe as far as anybody know, in the history of the E. Coli creature, there has never been an E. Coli that smelled like wintergreen?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

You made it yourself? Well, with the help of my team members, yes. Did you feel a little spooked by the fact that you just created a life form new to creation? I mean, at least we're doing something that's, you know, smells pleasant, but you didn't feel like Dr. Frankenstein or God or not at all. What does, what's it feel like to make something that's never existed before? Just feels like basic engineering.

[Reshma Sethi]

Yeah, we're engineers, I would say we're engineers. We're building stuff Building stuff, Building stuff.

[Robert Krulwich]

Building stuff Building stuff, stuff stuff. And not just stuff stuff stuff but living stuff the road ahead is bright and clear because we're bioengineers we'll fix the problem problems of today by building.

[Brian Baines]

Stuff with DNA we're splicing genes we're.

[Robert Krulwich]

Building creatures Adding extra useful features no more waiting Darwin's done Swapping genes is.

[Reshma Sethi]

Much more fun Building stuff, building stuff.

[Brian Baines]

Building stuff the road ahead is bright.

[Robert Krulwich]

And clear because we're bioengine I'd rather be swapped it's mankind's only fighting chance.

[Steve Strogatz]

Designer genes, not denim pants we'll stop.

[Brian Baines]

Disease and greenhouse gases Sequencing nucleic acids.

[Robert Krulwich]

Crack the code We've seen the light we're building stuff we're building light we're.

[Brian Baines]

Building lights the road ahead is bright.

[Robert Krulwich]

And clear because we're bioengineering.

[Lee Silver]

We'Re building.

[Jad Abumrad]

Stuff thanks to Josh Kerrs and Shane Winter for that music. Radiolab will continue in a moment. My name is Alyssa Hargrave and I'm calling from Shakopee, Minnesota, where it is currently negative 25 degrees Fahrenheit outside Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is supported in part by the National.

[Jad Abumrad]

Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information About [e-mail] is supported by.

[Brian Baines]

Rippling Finance teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating, and that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all, protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello, I'm Jad.

[Brian Baines]

And I am Robert and this is Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

And today our topic is.

[Robert Krulwich]

Tinkering, I guess.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tinkering with nature?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, or life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, but not as we know it. Because before the break we heard about some kids doing something that they call yes, directed evolution by sticking Wintergreen into a place where Wintergreen has never been before, which definitely qualifies as life. Not as we know.

[Robert Krulwich]

But now let's get into the true grit of this. Cause those kids are looking at life in a fairly different way than most of us do.

[Lee Silver]

Yes, it's very interesting that the people who are creating these living systems are engineers.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Lee Silver from Princeton University.

[Lee Silver]

I mean, they really look at a living system as no different than a computational electronic device.

[Robert Krulwich]

And you, your hunch is they're right? My hunch is they're wrong.

[Lee Silver]

I don't know quite why my hunch is they're right, but most of the.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

World doesn't believe that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which would include. Because I find it very hard to imagine that a life form, something that's animate, lives for a span of years and then dies. You know what it's like when they die? Spirit kind of goes off. It's hard for me to believe that that is just a chemical machine assembled from parts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, okay. I mean, I guess I can understand that. But let me introduce you to a guy now whose whole admittedly young career is based on the idea that life is a machine, that it's made of parts, parts that he can build and sell.

[Brian Baines]

Okay. So I'm Brian Baines.

[Jad Abumrad]

Brian. We met, actually, just down the street from those MIT kids. He is 31. That's right, just 31. And he runs his own biotech company.

[Brian Baines]

I'm one of the founders of Codon Devices here. We make custom synthetic jeans from scratch.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he's doing pretty well.

[Brian Baines]

The industry's basically doubling every two years.

[Jad Abumrad]

At this point, just to give you a sense of what Brian does. You with me? Yep. Just take your example, those MIT kids. Let's say I'm one of those kids or someone else who's heard about them, and I want to take my stinky bacteria and make it smell better. Or maybe I want to make it glow. All I have to do is call Brian.

[Brian Baines]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because he'll sell me a simple gene like that for about 1500 bucks. I just have to go online, look up the chemical recipe for how to glow in the dark. Yes. Here it is. 1200 letters.

[Brian Baines]

A T, G, C, a C. These.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are letters of DNA.

[Brian Baines]

A G, a T and a C of four fundamental building blocks of DNA.

[Jad Abumrad]

The next step, just list out those.

[Brian Baines]

A's, G's, and T's. And C's.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, Just type them into an email.

[Brian Baines]

Generally, they're not typing it themselves. Imagine trying to type in 2000 letters by hand without making a mistake.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, that would take too long. All right, just copy and paste them into an email, send them to Brian.

[Brian Baines]

When we get that in House. We're going to take that into our factory.

[Jad Abumrad]

Brian then plugs the string of letters into this machine, which is about the size of a desktop computer.

[Brian Baines]

We have a synthesis system where it literally has a bunch of little A's in a jar and a bunch of G's in a jar and T's and C's.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now mind you, these chemicals are inert. They are store bought, hundred dollars a bottle. The machine they're all connected to reads all the letters that Brian plugs in. And when it sees an A, the machine squirts out some A dust. And when it sees a T, T squirts out some T dust.

[Brian Baines]

We can add an A or a G or a T or a C to a growing strand of DNA. And so we're literally adding one base at a time. So what starts as one letter pieces then grows to 50, then grows to maybe five letters, then it grows to be 5,000.

[Jad Abumrad]

And at a certain point, all of these inert chemicals hold hands.

[Brian Baines]

And that's literally how you make DNA.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chemically, that is how you go from dust to something that is not exactly alive. But if I take this little speck of DNA and stick it into my cell, amazingly, it will start to glow or smell better or whatever it is that I want it to do. It will do it. It's almost as if the cell is a computer and this little bit of DNA is a software program.

[Lee Silver]

That's the way synthetic biologists think about it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what synthetic biologists are hoping for, says Lee, is that the software, quote unquote, will get standardized. It will come down in price so that one day installing new features into organisms will be just as easy as when you install new software on your home PC.

[Lee Silver]

You put a word processor, you put a spreadsheet program.

[Jad Abumrad]

User friendly.

[Lee Silver]

That's kind of the logic.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, but that's not we're talking about. Life is like, you know, a game of Legos.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, what if it is? I mean, I know it's weird to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Think it's wrong, another way to describe.

[Jad Abumrad]

It, but what if it's not wrong? Just imagine you can start to look at things in a completely new way. You can look at that creature over there and say that creature right there has a talent that I really like. And that one over there, the second one, it also does something cool. Maybe if I take talent one and talent two, stick them together, put them into a third creature, then I've got a little factory that can do really.

[Lee Silver]

Cool stuff, create living things that have very important functional values as an example.

[Jad Abumrad]

In our earlier conversation with Lee Silver, he brought up a guy named George Church.

[Lee Silver]

George Church is a scientist at Harvard Medical School. He's thought to be absolutely brilliant by everybody that knows him.

[Jad Abumrad]

Lee actually happened to have a picture of George on him, and he showed us. Oh, is that him?

[Lee Silver]

That's him.

[Jad Abumrad]

He does look like a radical.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let me see. Let me see what his face looks like.

[Jad Abumrad]

Describe him.

[Robert Krulwich]

He's wearing an army shirt of some kind. He's got a nice bushy beard and a spit curl. He could be Santa Claus played by Clark Gable.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, we had to visit him.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hi, how are you?

[Lee Silver]

And George is unusual as scientists go.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

[Lee Silver]

For the last 20 years, he's been going further and further and further in terms of synthesizing life.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, I'll slide.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know what I'll do? I'll slide.

[Robert Krulwich]

He's stuffing some kind of big black rod up my nose.

[Jad Abumrad]

That would be the mic. Now, the kind of creatures that George Church engineers are the same kind that those MIT kids use, E. Coli. By taking these little tiny E. Coli.

[Robert Krulwich]

And, you know, adding a few genes from other organisms and tweaking the internal.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chemistry, he has gotten the E. Coli to suck in sugar, which is what they normally like to eat. Eat, but poop out all kinds of things, most notably. Drumroll, please. Diesel.

[Robert Krulwich]

For real? Oh, yeah. So, I mean, the company I co founded has produced hydrocarbons.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is just a fancy way of saying, among other things, diesel.

[Robert Krulwich]

Three different kinds to run in three types of engines, cars, trucks and planes.

[Jad Abumrad]

I was curious, curious to see how it all works. So he took me to a room at the back of his lab where he's perfecting the process. And he pointed to a small container.

[Robert Krulwich]

So here's an example where we might grow up a large batch of cells in a fermenter.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this big vat right here, which is. I don't know, what's the size of a.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is a couple of liters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pretty small. It's about the size of a Coke bottle. And right now, he can only make a few drops. So there are some scale issues. But I asked him, you know, where does he imagine this stuff going? Project forward into the future? And he painted. Describe it for me. What would it look like? An amazing picture of huge bodies of.

[Robert Krulwich]

Water, giant ponds or lakes of gas.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, just imagine, we could take a boat, paddle around and be beautiful birds chirping. Except under the surface, trillions of bacteria would be busily eating, eating plant Life burping out diesel fuel, which then float to the surface as this kind of gassy foam.

[Robert Krulwich]

And you can skim it off, skim.

[Jad Abumrad]

It off, throw it into a pipe, and there you have it. I mean, this could be the oil refinery of the future. No more pumping it out of the ground and fighting wars. Forget that. That's old now. We're talking microbes, man. Microbes. And this could be just the beginning. I mean, according to Lee Silver, people are hoping that this kind of bioengineering can produce all kinds of stuff.

[Lee Silver]

You know, a drug that cures malaria, something that makes plastic. I mean, anything.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, they would be good, but there is part of it that makes me a little uneasy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, I want to introduce you to another bioengineer. He's often called the leader of the pack.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like the Rat Pack?

[Robert Krulwich]

Sort of like the Rat Pack. His name is Craig Venter. And like the Rat Pack, folks, he's very talented. He's very ambitious. He's very driven. He's also working on a bug for fuel. He also thinks that the Earth is in trouble. We're messing our nests something terrible. And when we were at the 92nd Street Y in New York, he said to write out loud, bioengineering. Creating new life is our last hope. It's probably our one major chance of having our species survive on this planet. I mean, this is the engineering of the rest of this century. And that's a little. I mean, stand aside, young man. I'll rescue you now with my magical scientific ability and my natural engineering skills.

[Jad Abumrad]

If he could save the world, I'd stand aside and throw him a parade.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, except that you don't realize just how ambitious these guys are going.

[Jad Abumrad]

What's wrong with ambition?

[Robert Krulwich]

Nothing, really. But what you don't know is just how bold this guy is. He not only wants to mix and match traits that already exist in life to make new forms of life, he wants to do original design. He wants to think of things that life has never done before, things that are in his head that are entirely new. He even dreams of life forms from scratch. From scratch? Completely. Like 4.1 billion years ago. Kind of like in Genesis. It would probably take a little longer.

[Soren Wheeler]

But.

[Robert Krulwich]

I think there will be new life forms. You think it will be possible in your lifetime that someone will go into a store, buy dust, figure out what it is that they have to do with, that does so that what they make will be unmistakably alive? Not alive, then. Alive, yes, yes. But using the knowledge that we have from studying this 4 billion years of evolution, we know how to write. What if I told you that I thought, no, I don't know why. Just no, I think you reviewed my grant. No, but there's a can doness to scientists that puzzles me a little bit. Isn't there something that you think, and this would be really close to it, creating life that just might be out of our grasp. It might be forever mysterious. And yet you guys like, is there anything in the way of engineering life? Is there anything that you think is not doable? Do you think it's never going to happen, that you'll create a conscious life form from scratch or it will never happen? That you will create a morally, you know, a sense of a creature with moral sense of right and wrong or. I don't know. I think you think that everything is possible. Everything. I think you're right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, I get that Craig and people like him might have a little bit of an attitude about what they can accomplish, but is that your problem, that it's his attitude?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, no, no. It's a sense of life I think is wrong here. I really appreciate, because of Darwin and Darwinian evolution that it takes 100 million, 200 million, a billion years for creatures to figure out how to live in the neighborhood of life, how to know what to eat, what to avoid, how to fit in, how to, you know, if you're going to sustain, you've got to learn how to live harmoniously with the rest of nature. It takes a while, but here come these engineers over some we can think. I have a new idea. Maybe it'll eat oil or I don't know. And then you stick it into the world and you've just stuck something into a rich fabric of life, and you have no idea of all the different consequences that could follow from that decision.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Look at what happens right now with antibiotics.

[Robert Krulwich]

That scientist, Nigel Goldenfeld, whom we heard.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

From before 50 years ago, we declared war on microbes. We fed antibiotics to cattle, to kids when they had virus infections.

[Robert Krulwich]

We poured so much antibiotics into our bodies and into our food that the bacteria we were trying to kill figured out a way to avoid our medicines. And now they're stronger than ever.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Not smart. We didn't know there were things that we didn't really understand that we didn't know that, that we didn't understand. And we're paying the price for that now.

[Robert Krulwich]

I am frightened that these people have so much ambition and so much certainty in them that frankly, they don't fear what biologists don't know about life.

[Steve Strogatz]

It's really a Frankenstein story that is. There's so much hubris in this.

[Robert Krulwich]

And as Steve Strogatz will tell you, biologists, in fact, scientists in general know very. We now know how much we don't know about life.

[Steve Strogatz]

If biology really is about collective behavior, the interaction of billions of molecules, billions of species, this network of life we barely understand. You know, we keep being surprised about life. On the one hand, we can tinker in this engineering way, like the MIT students do, or like Venter is doing, but on the other hand, the best biologists are still mystified that we only have about the same number of genes as a worm. We're really still missing 99% of the picture, literally. So it's a scary time to start playing Dr. Frankenstein, given how ignorant we are.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you know that at Stony Brook University, where your mom worked for all those years, there was a scientist maybe a few doors down from your mom who made from scratch, using the dust particles we were talking about the polio virus, which the whole world has been working to eliminate. He made a new polio virus. Why? I don't know why. There was a lot of controversy about it. But there is a guy, perhaps in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, who wants to make a polio virus and who will use it against us.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this technology comes with not just.

[Steve Strogatz]

You're right.

[Jad Abumrad]

You are right that there are some bad things that can happen, very bad. So the question is, then what? Like, what do you do in the face of that risk? How do you proceed? Do you say to these guys, stop? Would you have these guys stop doing what they're doing? Stop doing their experiments, asking questions, being curious?

[Robert Krulwich]

That'd be ridiculous to tell a scientist not to do science.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what then?

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't know. I don't know exactly. But do I want them to not do experiments?

[Steve Strogatz]

No, I'm not saying don't. So I'm not gonna be a troglodyte and say, we shouldn't play with these.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Steve Strogatz agrees.

[Steve Strogatz]

I think it's great to play with them, but I'm scared, too.

[Brian Baines]

I don't know.

[Steve Strogatz]

I'm confused about it. Because we have to play. That's how we make all science. You know, they speak of Homo ludens, human beings, as the player, that we are what we are because we like to play with nature, with ideas, with language. This is how we learn things. So we're going to play, but we have to be very careful about how we play. And we don't want to fall into the idea that we know more than we do. We have a vast ocean to discover before us.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, well, I guess that's all the time we have. Anything that you heard this hour that you want to hear? Again, more information. It's all on our website, Radiolab.org any.

[Robert Krulwich]

Creature you'd like to build, or any design for a creature that you'd like to build, or any monsters that you have in your head that you'd like to make into real living flesh.

[Jad Abumrad]

Send that to us too. Yes, while you're on our site, send us an email as well. Radiolabnyc.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[Laurel Kendall]

Radiolab is produced by dad, Adam Ride, Lulu Miller, Rob Christensen, Ellen Horn, Lauren Wheeler Production support by Sally Hership, Sarah Pellegrini, Ariel Lasky, Heather Radke, Linda Everett, Jonathan Miller, Josh Kurtz and Shane Winter.

[Nigel Goldenfeld]

Thanks to Nicholas Van Der Kolk, Ben Maston, Priya George, Kate Hines and Tom and Foster Hudson. Radiolab's webmaster is Valentina Powers. Check out our [e-mail] with a new design by Kevin Lahoda, Jacob Smullian Oates, Richie Chai and Howard Parnell.

[Laurel Kendall]

End of mailbox.

[Brian Baines]

Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests. Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to 1 in 3Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we. The National Forest foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience and expanding recreation access for all. Last year, they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn [e-mail] Radiolab this is Ira Flato.

[Robert Krulwich]

Host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.