Andrew Hessel

I am nuts about living cells. I love that all life on earth is built from them. I’m fascinated by how inert matter can become animated, how low-level metabolic systems like replication, transcription, and translation work. And I’m particularly interested in how to design and build genomes — and thus organisms — from scratch using DNA synthesis and assembly technologies. This is the core technology of synthetic biology and I think it’s the most important and powerful technology we’ve got, hands down. We started this century with the publication of the draft human genome code — a revolution in understanding human life in health and disease. In 2002, Eckhard Wimmer assembled and booted the first virus genomes. In 2010, J. Craig Venter did the same for the first bacterium, a mycoplasma. In 2019, E. coli was synthesized by Jason Chin at MRC. In 2021, Google Deepmind published the predicted structures of every human protein, plus the predicted proteins of 20 other model organisms. These and other incredible accomplishments in life science are making life programmable, and opening the door to new biological systems and organims that are beyond natural — they’re supernatural. We’re creating a new relationship between humanity and nature, one that is founded on intention, not natural selection. Which is why I find myself sharing Stewart Brand’s 1968 quote a lot: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”