Power to the people: An interview with bio-genome engineer Andrew Hessel

Andrew Hessel never underestimates the power of viruses. He not only appreciates their abilities, but he spends much of his time trying to harness these so they work for us, rather than against us. He is not only confident that scientists will enable us to beat Covid-19, but also that bio-engineering will help us to overcome far greater long-term challenges, including global warming, and create a more sustainable world. In the future, he believes bio-engineered humans will be able to replace their worn-out bodies, “switch off” diseased cells and adapt to live on other planets.

This vision also makes him a passionate advocate for transparency. Scientific research into the current coronavirus and into future bio-engineered solutions must be shared worldwide. If it is not, he warns, it will become a weapon. Experience with the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the example of global technological developments, make him an optimist that this can be achieved.

“At the moment there’s a lot of noise in the system – lots of countries tackling Covid-19 in different ways. There’s no right or wrong system, no standardised approach and lots of different issues emerging,” he says. “Once the dust settles we will see rationalisation and, I hope, a global plan to enable humanity to monitor these agents better, catch them early and establish a systematic way to deal with them. We need to create a global immune system.”

This is vital because biology is the one truly universal technology. If one group has a vaccine or a manufactured biological advantage, they can decide who lives or dies, he points out. However, this universality plus digital technology means that, based on our experiences with semiconductor technology, new tools that are developed in this field should be widely available and possible to replicate. This is not science fiction. Indeed,
bio-tech is already used in many industries. For example, there are current moves to make common drugs such as insulin cheaper by producing them via opensource technology.

Hessel’s own work focuses on bio-engineered viruses because they are a superbly efficient way of getting medical interventions into the human body. They, like bio-engineering in general, hold great promises as well as threats. “Everyone is now getting an education in biological risk. Covid-19 is the most expensive outbreak we’ve ever had. It’s a one-in-100 years event that has made us realise the power of an infectious agent to affect our operations and our lives,” he says.

But this power also makes a virus useful. “If I engineered a lion and it was ferocious and liked to eat people, it wouldn’t affect anything like the number of people affected by a virus,” he points out. “Even bio-engineering people wouldn’t have as much effect. We already have some people who are almost super-human in some fields and they don’t disrupt the lives of everyone else significantly.”

But won’t the Covid-19 pandemic make people even more suspicious of bio-engineered viruses – however good the intentions? Hessel points out that nature is constantly evolving viruses whether or not we want it to. “A single drop of sea water may contain ten million viruses, so the numbers are beyond our imagining,” he says.

Closed systems R&D

He believes that we need to do more research and development within closed systems in future, so we can keep natural and man-made environments separate. This will both protect the natural environment of earth and teach us how we can create a sealed biosphere that will work on other planets.

“At the moment we just dump everything everywhere and trash the earth. We can’t go on doing this,” he says. “Our history of resource extraction is comparatively recent and it’s still primitive. We’re new at this and we’ve made mistakes, but we’re learning fast and we will sort out the problems we’ve created and become sustainable.”

This will lead to a period of re-balancing, he argues. And the key to this, ironically, could be carbon dioxide.

“We currently get the carbon we need by sucking it out of the ground, but what if we could manufacture everything we need by sucking carbon out of the air instead?” he asks. “We could stop polluting the planet and return the CO² levels in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels and still manufacture all the products we want.”

This should eventually be cheaper than our existing manufacturing processes, he adds, since it won’t rely on a massive, expensive extraction industry. We can learn from the plants and algae that already do it.

Clean-up operations

While manufacturing things from CO² in the air is not here yet, we are already using bio-engineering in products from synthetic dyes to cleaning products, such as detergents that use enzymes that are bio-engineered to work at cold temperatures.

“Right now, I make viruses because they are some of the simplest organisms to make. These can be used to make vaccines, gene therapies and drugs for cancer treatments,” Hessel explains. “But there are so many other opportunities for bio-engineered products from cosmetics to pesticides and fertilisers, and advanced cleaning and remediation processes. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible and it’s getting cheaper all the time.”

As it becomes more accessible, we need visionary people to imagine what can be done with the technology. Hessel points to bio-engineered organisms that biodegrade our plastic waste and break it into its component parts for recycling. “If biology can make it, biology can degrade it – whereas our existing chemical engineering creates toxic products that are far harder to degrade,” he says.

This is why he is confident that bio-tech will become the basis of our economy in future and will enable us to stop using oil-based products. “This will totally re-engineer some organisations and what they do,” he says. “But it won’t happen overnight. Most people don’t need to understand how the science works, but we will all need to know the opportunities it creates and how these can help us.”

The children growing up today will have very different approaches to technology and its potential uses, Hessel adds. “Look at how much the world changed between 1900 and 2000,” he says. “We’re only 20 per cent of the way through our century and we’ve already achieved so many things from the ability to sequence any genome at an incredibly low cost to artificial intelligence, social networks connecting billions of people and the world’s library on Google. What else will we be able to do by 2100?”

The future?

While today’s children are far more adept at using computers than most of their parents, future generations could be even closer to technology.

“If you are born with a neural interface that records everything you learn and all your experiences from your first breath and you could directly access all this on a computer, it would be a game-changer,” Hessel enthuses. “The human memory is not that reliable. You could download knowledge. Even more importantly, you could establish contact with each cell, so that if one becomes infected you could shut it down. You could eradicate infectious diseases and cancer.”

If a body becomes old or damaged, then all the experience and knowledge that makes up a person could be transferred into a new, cloned body.

This potential, of course, raises massive ethical issues. It is also why Hessel believes that transparency of governments and organisations – and corporate governance – will become increasingly important. We will need protection using technologies such as blockchain that will make it much harder to change historical records of transactions and other processes. We will also learn to trust technology at the things it’s good at – for example, spotting human errors or malpractices and diagnosing problems.

Next we need to move artificial intelligence up to the management level of organisations, rather than confining it to production level. Amazon, Hessel says, has already automated most of its supply chain, and others need to do more of this.

At the moment, he adds, government, legislators and education tend to lag behind technological developments – and these will be the most disrupted sectors. We will need them to come up to speed, and they may do so only after abuses occur. There is also a real potential for new technologies to create terrifying weapons.

“This is planet-changing technology,” Hessel says. “When you get AI-driven bio-technology, that’s when things start to get exciting. The next 80 per cent of this century is going to get wild.”

The work of a bio-genome engineer

“I build genomes from scratch" Hessel explains. “I don’t start with an existing, living genome. I start with a digital computer genome and then bring it into the real world, rather like printing out a book that has been written on a computer.

“Biology is the only technology that humans didn’t create and it had a four-billion-year head start on us, so it is the most advanced technology we know and experience. Nature builds everything from atomic building blocks. This is incredibly powerful technology and, because we didn’t build it, we don’t fully understand it.

“Biologists are not engineers, they are reverse engineers – they take things apart to find out how they were built. As we reverse the process, we start to understand that there are rules and machinery and that it’s understandable.

“We’ve now reached the point where we can build organisms from scratch. We’re not yet that creative – we tend to recreate organisms that nature has provided – but using digital technology we can change and reorganise them.

“This is a remarkable feat that may scare some people, but it gives us the opportunity to do truly amazing things, far more sophisticated than old-fashioned chemical engineering, which has proved toxic and damaging.

“We have to remember that nature is not ‘nice’ to people – it’s generally out to kill you and eat you. If we didn’t have an immune system we’d be dead very quickly. I want to domesticate nature and make it work better for more people. Those who fear GM crops per se are generally not hungry. All our crops have been engineered. Why is it OK to mutagenize an organism with radiation and chemicals but not with technology?

“However, we should keep a significant barrier between the natural and the engineered world. Typically, we haven’t done this in the past with crops, but we have with pharmaceuticals. We need to look at how we can manufacture at scale in controlled environments.”

Above, below and beyond the earth's surface

Hessel is confident that the Earth can support many more people, but warns that we need to get off the surface of our planet and stop polluting it. This may mean going down, as well as up into space.

“Our cities disrupt living ecosystems, so we need to develop our capability to support ourselves without the infrastructure of cities,” he says. “If we moved all our cities about 20 feet underground, then the whole surface of the Earth could revert to nature and we would only be disrupting microbial ecologies. Plus, being underground would protect us from disruptions and risks such as floods and storms.” It would also make far larger areas of the Earth inhabitable.

For those who dislike the idea of being underground, he points out that we already live in “boxes” and that we would be able to experience wild nature, rather than city parks, simply by going “upstairs”. “At the moment every time we put up a fence or build a factory we are disrupting nature – and it’s killing us,” he says.

“We don’t understand the systems we are disrupting, which makes people a cancer on the world that is spreading uncontrollably. But we’re not a dumb disease and we can learn from our mistakes.”

In the longer term, he believes that our experiences building closed systems underground will make it possible for us to move to other planets and colonise them. This may also involve bio-engineering people to be better adapted to living in different environments and atmospheres.

Andrew Hessel will be speaking at the Internal Audit Conference on 30 September-1 October.

This article was first published in July 2020.