TechBlog

If such predictions of exponential change have come true for the electronics industry, and the population, then isn’t it possible the same could hold true for changing education, medicine, replacing the petrochemical industry, and saving the environment?

Similar exponential growth is seen in genomics - a term that did not even exist prior to the Eighties. While the initial discoveries came slowly, they were followed by an ever increasing pace of change. For example, in 1955 Fred Sanger at Cambridge determined the sequence of the protein insulin. It was the first protein to be sequenced in history. Twenty-one years later in 1976 and 1977 the first two viral genomes were decoded. However, it would be 18 more years in 1995 when my team used disruptive techniques to decode the first genome of a living organism, Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis in children. This genome has 1.8 million letters of genetic code making it 300 times the size of the first viral genomes.

Armed with this new method only 5 years later, we increased the scale of what we did by 100 times by determining the first insect genome, the fruit fly, which had 180 million letters of genetic code. We followed this one year later with the 3 billion base pair haploid human genome which was equivalent to over 600,000 viral genomes and over 1,600 bacterial genomes.

So over a short period of time genome projects, which 10 years ago required several years to complete, now take only days. Within 5 years it will be common place to have your own genome sequenced. Something that just a decade ago required billions of pounds and was considered a monumental achievement. Our ability to read the genetic code is changing even faster than changes predicted by Moore’s Law.

Using genomics has also rapidly accelerated the discovery of new species. Earlier this year from my institute’s Sorcerer II Expedition, which included a sailing circumnavigation on my 95 foot yacht, Sorcerer II, we applied the tools we developed for decoding the human genome and used them to decode the DNA of the world’s oceans. We published a single scientific paper describing over 6 million new genes. This one study more than doubled the number of genes known to the scientific community and the number is likely to double again in the next year.

We are now using similar approaches to identify the microbes that live inside of us. We have identified more microbes in our guts than the 100 trillion human cells we have in our bodies. We have also catalogued the tens of thousands of microbes and viruses that are in the air we breathe.

These modern tools of genomics and DNA sequencing are rapidly revealing to us the incredible world of microbes that we exist within and exist within us.

Young students of science can today make more discoveries in one year than major institutions or countries could make in a decade just a short while ago.

So, what is the value of these discoveries? The answer is many things but one of the most important is a better understanding of life and its evolution on Earth. And what can we do with all this new information that is coming at an exponential pace? We can use these millions of newly discovered organisms and genes to tell us how the environment is changing as a result of human activities.

But above all I believe the best examples of disruptive technologies that could change our future are in the new fields of synthetic biology, synthetic genomics, and metabolic engineering. These fields can change the way we think about life by showing that we can use living systems to increase our chances of survival as a species. Simply put: this area of research will enable us to create new fuels to replace oil and coal.

Imagine scientists in the near future sitting at their computers and designing the chromosome of a new organism, an organism that perhaps could produce fuels biologically, fuels like octane, diesel fuel, jet fuel even hydrogen all from sugar or even sunlight with the carbon coming from carbon dioxide.

Imagine that after designing the new chromosome, the computer directed a robot to chemically make the DNA strand encoding all that information, and that once constructed, the new chromosome would be inserted into a bacterial cell where it becomes activated causing the cell to turn into the species that the scientist designed. And now imagine that new species in a bio-reactor making millions of copies of itself and each copy is producing a new fuel from only renewable sources. Sounds like science fiction right? Not to me, because I believe this is the future.

For the past 15 years at ever faster rates we have been digitising biology. By that I mean going from the analog world of biology through DNA sequencing into the digital world of the computer. I also refer to this as reading the genetic code. The human genome is perhaps the best example of digitising biology. Our computer databases are growing faster per day then during the first 10 years of DNA sequencing. The databases have been filling even faster with the results of our global ocean sequencing project. As a result we have now over 10 million genes in the public databases, the majority of which have been contributed by my teams.

We and others have been working for the past several years on the ability to go from reading the genetic code to learning how to write it. It is now possible to design in the computer and then chemically make in the laboratory, very large DNA molecules. A few months ago we published a scientific study in the journal Science where we described the ability to take a chromosome from one bacterium and place it into a second bacterial cell. The result was astonishing - the new DNA that we added changed the species completely from the original one into the species defined by the added DNA. You could describe this as the ultimate in identity theft.

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