Before we make art
Before we make art
Hallucinations on the future of biotechnology
There’s this same conversation I’ve had for the past few months, at different times, with some of the most interesting people I know in biotech, including PhD students, investors, writers, creatives, biohackers, professors, etc. This is my response to those conversations, a reflection on essays I read, a place for the thoughts I’ve thought while doing experiments and going on walks. It’s a vision in progress so I hope you keep the conversation going.
If you forced me to tell you what this ‘essay’ is about, I would—on the most part— call it a series of hallucinations, at most hypothesis and questions, on the future of biotechnology. Founded on a weak understanding of technology and a vast ignorance of biology, I’ve arrived to a heuristic that I’ve called “The mirror”: a magical friend that tells me how the tech and biotech industries are growing in parallel ways, yet in different directions. It’s kinda sci-fi, a bit philosophical, perhaps pseudo-scientific. So far, the mirror has told me 3 main things:
Technodynamics: tech goes from the simple to the complex, biotech goes from the complex to the simple.
Art x science: for Steve Jobs to paint, the tech needed to precede the art. Our BioApps are already here. Will we, conversely, understand biology by making art?
Carbon Valleys: tech imposes, biology adapts. Biotechnology is meant to deglobalize the world, enhance each culture, bloom in every corner of our wonderful world.
Without further ado, let’s look at the mirror…
Technodynamics
It is commonly said that one of the greatest differences between computers and living things is that the former were invented and the latter is being discovered. I interpret this as computers going from nothingness to ‘everythingness’ and living things running in reverse.
Computer engineers are increasing the complexity of these devices. From barely being able to add and subtract, to having highly complex algorithms that are starting to work like the human mind. Meanwhile biology, is a collection of already extremely complex machines which we are attempting to simplify by transplanting genes from complex organisms into simpler ones, by abstracting complicated pathways into building blocks.
Thermodynamics tells us about the curve of increasing complexity, to maximum complexity, to of the heat death universe, back to decreasing complexity. While computers are increasing in complexity, biotechnology is decreasing biology’s complexity.
Tech is trying to become more like bio while bio is trying to become more like tech. We are trying to build machines or code that think more like humans and organisms that behave more like machines.
Neural networks and solar panels are only the most famous examples. There are countless ways in which computer engineers are mimicking biology: building robotic arms that move like elephant trunks, using algorithms like those that insects already have encoded, and even creating new internet protocols that evolve like DNA.
In biology, we are taking concepts such as refactoring, abstraction, and modularity as we’re building genetic circuits. We are building genetic logic gates, genetic counters, and brain organoids that think rather as computers than as humans.
As we transition to an era of more complex machines, I wonder if computers had been dead to live and biology was born to die. If one of the most promising applications of AI is in biology, the mirror shows how we are living code writing code that will eventually write more code, that will write its own code, and the cycle keeps going like a replicator. Bottom line, the (multi-)universe might be a perpetual evolution machine and we are only one iteration of it.
Was the invention of computers contingent? Meaning, is it a ‘natural jump’ in the evolution and progress of our species or is it something that wouldn’t have happened without the intersection of specific agents?
We see life as one of the most miraculous things in the universe, implying the low probabilities of it happening. The mirror tells me we can’t say the same thing about computers. Once we have intelligent-enough beings (i.e. humans) it seems obvious that such devices would arise. As mentioned earlier, they're also enabling us to have more advanced biotechnology—what an lovely interweaving!
There’s a wonderful, profound, song in Spanish by the Uruguayan artist Jorge Drexel that touches on this topic. I hope the message is not lost in translation:
Art x science
The next question is why, as allegedly agents of change in this universe, are we interacting with these two kinds of technologies in the way we are doing it?
From listening the first few chapters of The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, I learned that one of the big motivations for creating computers was to enhance our computing/calculating capabilities as humans. Again, making computers more complex to make human life easier sounds like something that would not break my hallucionational technodynamic principles.
Now, the fact that people like Alan Turing and Gordon Moore came before Steve Jobs, that the computer preceded the personal computer and the latter preceded the AppStore, is what I generalize as “before we make art”.
Before we make art is a statement about the fundamental technologies that needed to be created before something like the iPhone was possible: the pieces of the puzzle, the tempo they set. Greatness was not planned in the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, touch technology had to be there for there to be an iPhone, we needed enough GPU power and cloud computing before running chatGPT on our smartphones.
From my humble and ignorant point of view, computers started as engineering and are becoming art. In the mirror, however, I see biotechnology is in a utterly artistic era. We can appreciate the beauty that evolution has created in every single living thing, yet in trying to replicate it we’re merely working at the surface level, putting genetic parts together in a trial and error—design, build, test, repeat—fashion, rather than using a fundamental understanding of the physical or chemical interactions that would make these parts work in the conditions that we want them to.
Isn’t this black box also present in artificial intelligence? Yes. And there’s a little word that effective altruist bros continuously spit in each one of their expensive meetups: alignment. Would it be accurate to bring biological alignment to the table without sounding stupid?
Back to the mirror, I wonder: if art is indeed (and ironically) preceding science in biotech1, what are other types of art that we can create as humans using biology, if any at all? Was Steve Jobs an artist who made art with tech or tech through art? Is the mirror telling us to understand biology through art?
To bring this down to earth, think about the computer and the AppStore. You already know which came first. Now, in my view, present biotechnologists are already building a variety of apps: mRNA vaccines, lab-grown leather, mining microbes, CRISPR paper diagnostics, DNA data storage, plant-derived cosmetics, and the list goes on. Whether those are actually solving the problems they intend to or are making successful businesses is another story.
Does that mean, however, that the actual biological equivalent of apps is already here? Are we going from art to science? Are we moving in the reverse direction, towards the biological equivalent of a computer?
The vision of a biological computer is very blurry to me. It feels like a forced comparison. Reasoning by analogy rather than from first principles. After all, haven’t I said that cells are already computers in a sense but we haven’t understood them entirely just yet? Would a biocomputer be a general purpose machine that can make anything that all of biology has devised for millennia? Is that what the minimal cell is about? I don’t know.
The mirror tells me though, that whereas computers preceded silicon apps, more people building carbon apps could lead us to something like a biological computer or at least, build a most interesting future.
Yes, what I am saying is that we absolutely want to create a future in which we understand biology from first principles AND the way there, might as well be to explore more, to create more. Can you imagine the collective information and power we could all benefit from if anyone anywhere could build with biology?
A bioculture of love
In the mirror I see the concepts of backend and frontend, the subtle and the evident, the visible and the invisible, the external and the internal.
Computers have gone from being huge-ass dinosaurs and ridiculous bricks to occupying parts of our bodies most of the hours in a day. We hold our smartphones and type on our laptops for hours at a time as if they were a mere extension of our bodies and our souls. Successful or not, products like the Apple Vision Pro and Neuralink’s brain chips seek to bring that a step closer: from the frontend to the backend, from an external agent that is hard to miss, to a part of our operating system as a human society.
Conversely, biology has always been here, sitting quietly in the backend. Sure, causing some trouble here and there but overall passing unnoticed and taken for granted by one of its parts, i.e. us humans. The so-called biological revolution seems to be an attempt of biology to come to enter the spotlight, from the internal to the external.
Think about the cells we drugs we derive from plants, the genomes and proteins we modify, the cells and tissues that we want to grow in vats. They’re going from the backend to the frontend. Once produced ‘naturally’ without attention, we are now concentrating their production.
From my incredibly limited point of view, it seems that we are doing nothing but concentrating and accelerating biological evolution. It might as well be that calling ourselves artists is a massive overstatement, a lie we shall apologize for by acknowledging our place as thieves instead.
You: thieves you say?! Are you calling bioengineers thieves, you mischievous child?
Well, think about all the operations that a plant performs as a platform: quantum computing, solar energy conversion, biochemical synthesis of pesticides, food and materials manufacturing, carbon capture and cycling, flowers for goodness sake! If that was not enough, they also provide shadow in these summer days… not to mention the www (a.k.a., the Wood Wide Web).
Now look at us, mediocrely stealing that to grow it in a vat. Is that copying like good artists or stealing like the greatest?
Since some months before, I’ve been having a conversation with the magic mirror about decentralization. Learning more about Drew Endy and Elliot Hershberg’s ideas has only reinforced in me this hallucination.
There’s a chapter in Steve’s biography when he reflects on how globalized the world had become since he was younger. Teens in Japan or Africa could be wearing the same clothes and listening to the same music as Americans despite being kilometers apart, and Apple had been part of that. He saw how technology homogenizes.
The tradeoff is to try the essence of a culture without leaving it unaltered. As mundane of an example as this may be, tacos in the US or anywhere else are just never gonna be the same as in Mexico :p.
Today, technology allows me to have mangoes grown in Kenya, clothes grown in India that were processed in Vietnam and shipped to Mexico, medicine taken from a plant in Ecuador whose genome was sequenced in Canada and is now manufactured into proteins in Sweden. Obviously, the internet globalized us so I can transmit my thoughts to wherever you are in the world—maybe one day even in another planet!
That is not the case for biology though. Biology adapts. Biology is different in every single place because it follows a local configuration, an engrained logic through which the atoms accommodate. We see it in our inherited traits as humans like darker skin in sunnier places and wider noses in more humid ones. Kenyan mango trees don’t actually grow in Mexico and vice versa.
“The adaptations of an animal, its anatomical details, instincts, and internal biochemistry are a series of keys that exquisitely fit the locks that constituted its ancestral environments — they’re a key to reconstruct the environment they were in. If we could read the genome appropriately, we could get a negative imprint of ancient worlds, a description of the ancestral environments of the species: the genetic book of the dead”— Richard Dawkins is publishing a new book!
Will the bioeconomy be the complete opposite to a digital economy? If atoms are local, the mirror shows me a deglobalization of supply chains, it shows me distributed manufacturing, and most importantly, the re-flourishing of every culture in every corner of the world.
Silicon Valley came to be through quite a homogenous handful of lucky folks who happened to be at the right place at the right time and had an interest in computers. Building up on the concept of the BioNet, as described by Elliot, the bioeconomy is not only about enabling local production of anything we can imagine: it could be the blooming of the Carbon Valley in every corner of the world.
In my hallucinations I urge you, dear reader: don’t write a book about your roots. Don’t make a TED talk on your festivities and traditions, don’t post Instagram stories about the dishes your grandma used to make for all your family as a kid, don’t wear the custom you used to wear in that far away place, oh PLEASE don’t dare to remind me of the music that makes you vibe or reminisce on the scents that are still on your mind.
Show. Me. Ins-tead.
No.
Better yet.
SHOW THE WHOLE. FREAKING. WORLD. INSTEAD.
Show us how to make those colorful clothes, from the organisms that create the textile to those that synthesize the dye. Share with us the exact herbs you use for that tea you drink at sunrise. Teach us what a great spice should actually taste like. Oh please do enlighten us with the natural sounds from your backyard.
A world in which the information encoded in atoms, think a genome, flows freely and integrally through bits (online) sounds like trying to get information about a particles by looking at waves = impossible ??? If it was possible, what would the non-hallucinational, societal implications of such world be?
I think it depends on what the energy of this exchange is: are we stealing or are we sharing? Forget about the bioeconomy for a while: how can we grow a bioculture of love? If that’s too much, how can biotechnology enable us to create a global culture where every living thing, human or not, lives their best lives? It’s the question that everybody asks.
The vision of growing anything, anywhere, anytime2 is not new. We’ve tried and unarguably failed with food processors, more arguably with vertical farms. Now companies like GALY, Upside foods, Pomodyne, and even myself are making better attempts through cellular agriculture.
When I call for deglobalization I’m not at all expressing we should deprive ourselves from eating Kenyan mangoes or getting the best Swiss medicine. All the opposite, I wonder what it would look like to be able to produce those products locally, whether that’s through a personal bioprocessor or simply buying it from your local store that produces it in their basement or gets it from a factory that’s less than 100 km away.
Beyond that, I wonder what a world where biotechnology enriches culture looks like. Will there be genome minters turned millionaires? 16-year-old bioApp developers reaching billions of downloads duplications?
What if I find an entirely new microbe? If atoms are local, does that mean that I can’t culture it, scale it up, and send it across the world to New Zealand so folks there can use it? Will cells themselves be useful at all if we have something like a minimal cell that can do it all? Is that our biocomputer? Again, I have no f*cking clue!!!
Apple is special because they create an exceptional, closed-loop experience out of every interaction with them and their products, from beginning to end. When I first fell for synthetic biology I wanted people to touch biotechnology. Not to read about it or work on simulations only, but to live it.
I think the closest I’ve got to that has been my recent visit to a chocolatier this weekend, and by closest I actually mean we don’t have that. Labs are scary, uninviting, people don’t wanna mess with little tubes with weird liquid let alone with imposing HPLC machines and not even the best biotech builders I know use OpenTrons routinely.
Bottom line
What needs to be true for more people to build with biology? My next post could be a more factual study of this question, with an emphasis on tools for biotechnologists.
Whatever the mirror continues to tell, we might as well look for the things that don’t change: that is us, the agents of change.
Let’s grow biotechnology that enriches every single corner of the world. Let’s make the Carbon Valley decentralized. Let’s reverse-Picasso and wait no more before we make art.
Of course, this is not meant to say at all that we are not doing science or that we should not be doing science with biology. I’m rather thinking about the unexplored paths to better understand biology. Art, potentially?
LOL, sounds like Everything Everywhere All At Once. I should coin the bio equivalent, I like it.
What came first? Satan or his art?
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/generative-ai-the-new-hollywood-images