What does DNA mean to you?

In an earlier incarnation of this Aminopop blog, I was approached to answer the question, "What does DNA mean to you?" My answer:

I've always been a technologist, a hacker. For me that inclination has played out mostly in the arena of computers and software, but the larger Hacker Ethos -- of using existing technologies in new or unexpected ways, or of combining new and old technologies in surprising ways -- keeps leading me towards DNA. And DNA seems like the most hackable substance on the planet at this point. 

For me, that insight started with an interest in Genetic Algorithms -- a programming approach that leverages raw computing power, profligate mutation and fitness selection over traditional software design. It was really great for a broad range of problems: classification, optimization, etc. I was using them mostly in the context of financial instruments and risk underwriting.

But I had this persistent sensation of the hairs going up on the back of my neck -- once I started to grok how GAs worked, I started getting this strange, gut feeling for the billion-year, mondo genetic algorithm demolition-derby/continuous-birthing-process that is Life On Earth: here's this linear data stream -- the genome, or better yet, all the genomes -- written in this foreign language, totally protean in expression, capable of transforming a planet... I mean, infotech is great, but it's really nothing next to the power of sequenced protein. 

How can you not be just totally hypnotized by that awesome power? And once people harness it, I think it's going to make the infotech boom look like a tea-party. And I've always been kind of a closet Life Sciences geek, so that suits me fine. So that's it: to me, DNA represents the Next Great Hack -- maybe the Last Great Hack; who knows what the world -- what humanity -- will look like on the other side of the biotech boom? 

As an investor, DNA means opportunity: huge leaps in efficiency, innovation, design and scale of drugs, foods, fuels, manufactured hard goods, even information technology. Hard to even imagine all of it. I don't think people generally get it, yet. That's why I'm doing my blog, Aminopop.com -- as a regular discipline to try to get a handle on it all. I don't even feel like I'm very good at it, yet, but not to try seems kind of insane, especially at this moment in history. So I just jump in.

As a humanist, DNA suggests a moment of truth, historically speaking. Wresting our ongoing genetic definition from the mostly cruel forces of natural selection is going to be a profoundly defining moment. What is human? It's what we say it is -- and what we write that it is, when we master the glyphs, grammar and syntax of the genome. It's the ultimate act of existentialism.

Exactly, Jean Paul

Doudna = Do U DNA. Coincidence? You decide.

Jennifer Doudna.
"Doudna" -- Add two spaces and you get
Do U DNA? (Yes, emphatically. Yes, she does.)

Really? Am I the only person to observe this?

Broken Metaphors

I mean, much of the progress of humanity has hinged on the artifice of harnessing nature's engines of creation: cultivation and selective hybridization of any number of plants and animals; hitching biochemical rides on various yeasts, bacteria and fungi to convert ordinary organic compounds (milk, fruit juices, grains) into extraordinary ones (Roquefort, penicillin, beer, Chateau Margaux 1978). And all of those were just happy accidents, coy redirections of existing organisms' agendas, painstaking, time-intensive efforts to hotwire the millenia-consuming processes of natural selection.

And now we have the means and methods to be far more direct in the way we harness those engines of creation: the fermentation of a huge matrix of garbage, agricultural and industrial byproducts into any of another matrix of wildly useful drugs, foods and fuels; custom sequenced proteins to crush whole classes of human ailments; even more to tune, tweak, and optimize even the most healthy among us; to bring whole new kinds of leisure and delight to the human endeavor.

Put it this way: sequenced protein plus cellular reproduction resulted in an awesome explosion of entropy reversal on this little planet. It gave rise to the most complicated object in the visible universe: us (and our brains). Up to this point in history, humanity has been able to harness that power only indirectly -- as a cyclist might draft in the slipstream of some larger object, like a car. I believe we're right on the edge of a time when we don't have to draft that car anymore. We can attach a cable to it. Or jump right in. Except that it's more like a train. Or a Boeing 777. My metaphors break down. But you know what I mean.

Why All This?

Maybe I saw Blade Runner too many times. Maybe, as a Silicon Valley veteran, I've just seen how new technology can just blow away life as we know it with change -- good change. Exciting change.

Because I was a programmer in Palo Alto during the '80s and '90s. I went from a barely-networked, stand-alone LISP box in a small, elite environment of hackers who made no sense to the outside world, to the millennial crescendo of TCP/IP-driven Internet Dot.com economic hyperdrive which changed the world as we knew it, forever. Change? How about: Now you've got a networked workstation in your pocket -- tap a few buttons, and a car shows up to take you somewhere. Tap a few more, and any one of Amazon's 10,000,000 inventory items show up at your door. Tap a few more and you've instantaneously texted someone on the other side of the planet. All for less than the price of dinner for two in Manhattan. That's change. And I had a walk-on role in that war, and I know what that kind of tectonic shift feels like. 

Now I'm a venture capitalist. And I feel like it's happening again. Especially when I walk around in San Diego, and walk around shops like Illumina. And I'm excited like I was excited in 1985 Palo Alto.

Excited? Really, you ask? Maybe it's my optimism; I think more technology is better than less (when has the converse ever been the case?), the present is better than the past, and the future will be even better still.

Maybe it's just this feeling I have that the biotech boom is going to make the infotech revolution seem like a children's tea-party.

Hey -- don't people understand what's going on here? You mean we're going to harness the engines of creation -- those processes, that molecular machinery that give rise to us? -- the most sublimely complicated, productive objects in the visible universe? Come on. What could be more exciting that that? 

So, where's the cool of biotech? These protein-jockeys are going to change the world in a big way. In fact, they're beginning to change it right now, right under our noses. They're entitled to a little attitude. They deserve it. They should be celebrated as cool, in the same way we celebrated computer hackers in the early 80s. CRISPR/Cas9 is at the very least as cool and as world-changing as TCP/IP. Now Mark Zuckerberg -- the man who gave us little more than a means to stalk our ex's and know who gained weight after graduation -- is the reigning philosopher-king? At the same time that Jennifer Doudna just figured out how to cut-and-paste DNA like text in a word-processor? Really?

I remember when computers started to get cool, in the late 80's -- Mondo 2000, Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, Slashdot, etc. Hey -- I was one of the original members of the Hackers Conference. I was right there when a number of theoretical practitioners stepped in to define the scene for the rest of us -- most notably folks like Steve Jobs, Timothy Leary (veteran agent provocateur of social ferment), Ted Nelson (Cyber-Svengali deluxe, though he was my guru way back when, and believe me he was able to read the digital tea-leaves better than most anyone, in the same way as Alan Kay and Doug Englebart and Vannevar Bush...)

So the question is, who's going to be the Steve Jobs of biotech? Who's going to make it stylish and cool? Craig Venter? Lacks a certain charisma. Kary Mullis? Too much of a crank. Juan Enriques? Maybe too academic. Stewart Brand? Yes, if he lives to 110 (which I hope, because he's my hero, and I don't want to think of a world without him). Who's going to make this stuff visible, accessible, and most importantly, the stuff of dreams? -- dreamable? Who's going to make it sexy/cool to a non-biochem-geek audience? Because, just like computers making this exciting to a non-technical audience is going to make the world a better place. I just don't quite think we've found the language for it, yet. We have plenty of language for biotech scare-mongering and jeopardy narratives: franken-food, terminator seeds, #OccupyMonsanto, blah blah. Luddism and Fear Of Science live in every age.

I'm trying to work the Dream side. Not the Nightmare side.

Come with me for the ride.

Norman Borlaug: the coolest guy you've never heard of. 

Why This Stuff Matters: Because it will dwarf Infotech.

The global pharmaceutical market is about $781 billion as of 2014, of which 23 percent, or $179 billion, comes from biologic drugs, more than double the $82.5 billion memory chip market. 

The market for contract manufacturing of biologics is expected to surge to $7.2 billion by 2017 from $4.6 billion five years ago. 

Why This Stuff Matters: Because people love life (and don't want to get old).

Getting old sucks. Extended morbidity -- long, grinding degradation of physical and cognitive power -- adds insult to injury. Sure, everybody's got to die (unless you're Ray Kurzweil, but that's another conversation) which makes the quality of the life you have left an even more urgent matter. We all hope for a dramatic "compression of morbidity": active, engaged, enjoying travel, family, friends until that moment when some health catastrophe overtakes you suddenly, in a matter of days or weeks -- or even a single moment of cardiac arrest or brain hemorrhage (okay, fine; morbid, but we are talking about aging. Me? I'd like to spontaneously, rapidly sublimate, like a chunk of dry ice.)

Biotechnology is hard&fast on the case. It's Craig Venter's Human Longevity Institute's whole business model, and 76.4 million baby-boomers are standing by to reap (and pay for) the results. Remember that scene from the classic, biotech-premonition film Blade Runner?

Tyrell: What seems to be the problem?
Roy Batty: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction. You...
Roy Batty: I want more life, father.

Exactly. Prophesy.

"I want more life."