On the last day of 2019, lost in the revelry of ringing in a new decade, Chinese officials announced a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan.
Like a lightning strike in a tinder forest, Covid set the world ablaze. In my mind, 2019 was the year humanity reached “peak social.” Like the concept of peak oil, which states that after a maximum rate of extraction, petroleum supplies will start to wane, peak social for me is the maximum amount of travel, congregating, and human contact, before the party has to ease up. There’s no going back to the social conditions of 2019.
The World Economic Forum calls the Covid crisis the great reset. The costs have been so great, in lives lost, in daily disruption, and in money—by some estimates almost $30 trillion—that we must be compelled to reboot and reinvent. This includes how we protect ourselves from viruses.
Humankind has grown complacent with viruses. We’ve eradicated polio and smallpox, and have suppressed dozens more, but never invested enough money and effort to fully conquer them all, which is why seasonal flu continues to torment us, and why we were so unprepared for this pandemic.
To be fair, we haven’t had a lot of time to study viruses. Their existence was only postulated in 1892 by Russian botanist Dimitri Ivanovski. Working with diseased tobacco plants and special filters, he found that bacteria-free filtrates were still infectious to healthy plants. There had to be some as-of-yet unknown infectious agent contained therein. At the time, there was no way Ivanovski could have known that these were the most diverse and plentiful biological beings on the planet.
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with viruses. My career as a biologist has been defined by the way computers and biology not only resemble one another as systems but how they’ve converged over the last 30 years of biotechnology. Viruses have a significant role in both.
It’s a common misconception that biological viruses are universally bad. In reality, the relationship between viruses and their hosts is much more complicated. We live in a vast invisible sea of viruses. Only a handful are harmful to us. This is because, for any particular virus, there will only be a few cells that have the right combination of features to be a good host. And even for those few cells that are susceptible, there’s often a trade-off—in some instances, the snippets of genetic code that can tag along with a virus genome can actually be beneficial. Our genomes are littered with viral remnants collected over billions of years of evolution.
I don’t find it coincidental that biology and computation share a set of dynamics. For example, both biological and computer viruses exploit their systems by commandeering individual units to replicate virus code across living and digital networks. Similarly, software developers write code so that computers or robots do as they’re instructed. With biology, it’s essentially the same thing, except we write DNA code and program cells. Once new programs are loaded into a cell, it will do as it’s told—become a tasty food, manufacture a drug, patch a damaged spinal cord, or grow into an animal. These two domains are becoming increasingly interconnected, digitally and physically.
This mashup of bio and digital, whether it’s a metaphor manufactured by biologists or a deeper universal law, will carry into how we treat health post-Covid. As scientists get better at programming biology, health security will inevitably come to resemble cybersecurity.
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When I was born, nothing about biology was digital or connected. Labs were essentially kitchens. Everything was done manually at the bench. Everything was recorded on paper. No genomes had been sequenced yet. No one used computers.
Biology started to digitize while I was in university. It began with data exchange over email, and accelerated quickly from there. In 1995, when I jumped from academia into the biotech industry, I felt like I was going over to the dark side. But in my own way I got to participate in the slow convergence of digital and bio by working in computational biology and IT. By 2003, I’d moved on. It turns out the business model didn’t really agree with me, and I was content to just track progress by reading papers and going to conferences.
After I left, databases and powerful software tools flooded biology, many of them freely accessible and open source; scientists sequenced genomes of tens of thousands of different organisms and millions of people; and robots became more and more relied on to do benchwork, bringing unparalleled speed, precision, and efficiency to the lab.
It was only when I joined Autodesk in 2012 that I was able to realize in my own practice just how far we had come. As their Distinguished Researcher in life science, I pulled together a small team, led by synthetic virologist Paul Jaschke, to build a virus called PhiX174 with digital tools.
Scientifically, the project wasn’t remarkable. Craig Venter’s group, which included Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, had synthesized a functional PhiX the same year I left industry. Instead, I was interested in learning if it was possible to build a virus with nothing more than a laptop and a credit card—no lab. I described our project as an attempt to “3D print” an organism with off-the-shelf systems.
Our work was ultimately successful. We demonstrated that we could design, synthesize, and boot a virus with software and robots for about $1,000 in materials.
This caught the eye of Paola Antonelli, the director of R&D at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. She acquired our synthetic PhiX as the first engineered organism in MoMA’s collection. It was displayed online as part of their Design and Violence exhibit meant to explore the complex relationship between design and the darker side of human nature. Nature’s viruses may cause suffering and harm, but not by design. This cannot be said for human-engineered viruses. It was fitting that the exhibit also showcased Stuxnet, one of the most sophisticated computer viruses of the day.
For me, our PhiX marked a transition—synthesizing viruses no longer needed deep pockets and big brains. MoMA recognized this as a cultural shift as much as a technological one. The digital infrastructure for making synthetic viruses—indeed, any synthetic organism—has only continued to improve and accelerate. In 2016, Canadian scientists made horsepox, a close cousin to smallpox, for $100,000 worth of mail-order DNA. Last year, it took less than a month for Swiss scientists to construct Covid in their lab from sequence alone—a respectable time. But flu researchers have done similar work in just 100 hours. Soon, building any virus from scratch, natural or not, will take minutes.
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It’s hard to imagine that there were no viruses in the early days of computers. We had built all this technology without fully considering how it might be exploited by the darker side of humanity. When the first viruses did appear, developers had to scramble to code a digital immune system. Since then, threats and defenses both have evolved quickly. It’s Biology 101—predator and prey. And while our cyber defenses still aren’t perfect, they work well enough to keep our electronic systems up and running nearly all of the time, even in the face of the now relentless malware attacks.
Our body has formidable defenses against foreign agents. Yet if there were ever a time to build a synthetic immune system—a technological enhancement of our body’s natural immune system, it’s now. The challenge is to take what happens within our white blood cells and extend it into the world around us. And bring technology into our bodies and cells.
What does this look like? It starts with devices and software that continuously scan for dangerous viruses in our bodies and the environment. We’re halfway there. Our business, home, and personal electronics already monitor us closely. They will gain even more sensors and capabilities for biomonitoring. Bioengineering could produce new, living devices, too—perhaps a plant with leaves, or our own skin, that continuously sparkle the colored barcode of every virus or mite it encounters.
Sensing alone is useful but not sufficient. Detected threats must be matched with the capacity to neutralize them. It’s not clear yet how to do this in a comprehensive and distributed way, but the payoffs are huge—a new era in biosecurity and public health. Outbreaks, natural or engineered, viral or cellular, would be detected and contained very close to source. Contact tracing and vaccinations, if appropriate, would be instantaneous.
I was surprised to learn this year that an early version of this immune system already exists. Immediately after the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was published on January 11, 2020, global research groups pounced on it. Within hours, they initiated the development of diagnostics, vaccines, digital clones, and more. This work started well before the full extent of the public threat was recognized, when only a few dozen people had fallen ill, and just one person had died. I would not have predicted the system to be triggered so early.
As the magnitude of the threat became clearer, money flooded into the system, and the number of participants swelled. Scientists and clinicians published directly to preprint servers, and media paywalls were torn down. Regulation was relaxed. Bottlenecks were eliminated. Although the system was put together with the scientific equivalent of duct tape, and it is sometimes hard to filter signals from noise, it’s working. I don’t think it's ever going to go away. I think the system will just get better.
I’ve been delighted to watch my community rally together to understand this new common threat, and to produce vaccines faster than ever before—mere months.
Like breaking the four minute mile, we’ve set a new standard for biotechnology, and we’ve recalibrated our expectations and needs. We can expect the acceleration we’ve witnessed this year to reach well beyond just vaccine development into other areas that can be addressed by programming biology. There’s no going back now to the way things were in 2019. Why would we? Science has made something better.
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Andrew Hessel is the president of Humane Genomics, an early-stage company developing synthetic viruses for animal and human health. He is also the co-founder and chairman of the Center of Excellence for Engineering Biology and the Genome Project-write, the international scientific effort to engineer large genomes, including the human genome. He is a former distinguished research scientist at Autodesk Life Sciences.
Cite This Essay
Hessel, Andrew. “The Age of Reinvention.” Biodesigned: Issue 5, 21 January, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].
