Every culture has a legend of a kind of cure-all substance, something that can cure any and all diseases and increase longevity. From the Greek panacea to Chinese ginseng to alchemist elixir of life, humanity has been obsessed with the idea of one solution that could solve all of our health problems. Have the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology come up with a solution? Or something worse alternative?
Researchers at MIT have been working on this idea for a while: programmable bacteria, living cells that can be “hacked” and given a function to carry out. This could include monitoring disease in the human body, diagnosing it, and even possibly treating it, according to a past MIT Spectrum article.
Recently the researchers have made a significant leap: they’ve created a new language, which has already been used to create biological circuits that respond to up to three inputs in different ways, according to Futurism. It’s a language based on Verilog, a popular coding language for programming computer chips, and allows just about anyone to program living cells even if they have no training in genetic or biological engineering.
“You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That’s what’s really different about this,” Voigt says. “You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence.”
But that’s the part that seems most frightening: the lack of understanding of the human body needed to get started, the ease of customization, and the speed at which these “DNA circuits” take to be designed. Where it may have needed years to previously be designed, it now could take “the mere touch of a button” to create your own programmable bacteria.
Is this a good thing? Certainly. It allows humanity to start taking control of our bodies at a much, much deeper level; to learn how to proactively respond to our biological flaws and eventually to root them out entirely. But it could just as easily allow for catastrophic biological disaster.
Whether intentional or not, one wrong “program” could create programmable bacteria that alters something in our body that shouldn’t be altered. We could have one of two options. Either a long-term near undetectable issue in our bodies that takes a few generations to catch, or some kind of pandemic that spreads before we know how to react.
Is this paranoia? Perhaps. This new language for programming cells–and its accessibility–could lead to a worldwide collaborative effort. Something that allows just about anyone to look at our biological troubles from another angle and lend a hand at solving humanity’s problems.
But it also allows for an accessibility that could just as soon add to our problems. Programmable bacteria should be accepted whole-heartily, but approached with some caution. It may be wiser to take careful steps before opening the floodgates too wide, lest we drown in our mistakes.