Notes from the 2005 Pop!Tech Conference, Camden, Maine

Norman Packard

Working to create life. Responsible for much of what we think of as chaos theory. Applied complex nonlinear dynamics to things like financial systems. A few years ago he turned his attention to the creation of completely synthetic living cells.

What is life and "living technology"?

What is life? Requirements: self-maintenance, self-reproductions, evolvability. This is what life needs. But what about flame? Turbulence? Stars? These would seem to fit the definition. I find that they are fair game. But we must look at evolvability-does not necessarily mean change. Means that there is some sort of inheritance and selection going on. Hasn't been seen in these other things. What about societies and ecosystems? This might be true-they might be alive by our criteria.

Life is amazing technology. Even simplest life forms are very complex. Look at E. Coli. Keep them fat and happy, they'll reproduce forever-it's like getting the factory along with the organism. It keeps making itself. We're a long ways from engineering the technology that does the basic tricks that life knows how to do.

Living technology is technology that is defined and enhanced by its life-like properties. Examples are synthetic biology, ecological engineering , social engineering, the internet.

Synthetic biology refers to the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems, and the redesign of existing natural systems.

Distinguish between top-down an bottom-up. Top down uses mechanisms from existing life. It starts from biology. E.g. someone uses gene transcription to make new genes and new proteins. Bottom-up builds something from scratch. It starts from chemistry. We'll be talking about bottom up.

Note PopSci article about this: Life Built to Order, Feb. 2005

Why would you bother with the bottom up approach? One reason is to get an understanding of the difference between living and non-living, , another reason is to rationalize the engineering of them. Most importantly, we can engineer functionalities that don't exist in the natural world.

These three requirement for life map into three elements needed for a cell: container (cell wall), metabolism, and informational component (gives evolvability-equiv. of DNA in living cells).

PACE. Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution. Rasmussen (of PopSci profile) is working on the metabolism component. Others working on DNA Oligomers, vesicles, and microfluidic life support.

At ProtoLife, company I'm working at, we're focusing on the container. We're creating a membrane based on lipids. Once we understand the membrane, we're working on problem of integration of various components. This is the greatest problem of engineering an artificial cell. Each component has been well-studied in and of itself. But putting them together in concert in a way that allows object to reproduce is not understood at all.

How are we making containers? We use an evolutionary approach-a genetic algorithm to search space of structures. It's driven by target functionality. It's messy, but messiness gives algorithm the elbow room to search the space of spaces.

Cell division is a complicated process. It's not easy to find vesicles that divide before your very eyes. That's where the frontier is.

Intermediate applications of artificial cells: Designer vesicles for drug delivery, long term: biomedical: smart drug delivery, diagnostic tools, energy (program to produce h2, for instance), do carbon sequestration, environmental remediation.

How is the science we're going different? Make distinction between modern science, which is strong (e.g. Galileo, Newton, Einstein). Characteristics: there is a natural law, and from the laws you can derive what nature is going to do. Create static orbits for dynamical systems. Examples: movement of planets, design of cars, computers, bombs.

We're doing post-modern science, which is weak. E.g. Darwin. It's an unruly natural law. You can write it down, but there are phenomena which you can't derive from it. There are emergent properties, and new laws at the emergent levels. For example, chaos, turbulence, life, consciousness.

Life is at the edge between derivable phenomena and non-derivable phenomena. Between strong and weak science. This means that we must give up our requirements of engineering every detail-we must just live with the uncertainty that comes with this.

This means it takes science down a notch as an intellectual phenomena, but it is possible to still derive pieces of phenomena in this new world, but it is a patchwork. We do have a rich problem domain, though. And I'm having fun working on it.

As for the safety issue, there's no evidence that non-DNA based life is more dangerous than DNA-based life. In fact, it's probably significantly less dangerous, because DNA-based life can interact with other DNA-based life.

It's nothing new that a powerful new technology carries with it both positive and negative potential. Two points: These synthetic life forms are going to exist. We can't legislate them away. They already exist, and they will advance. We want to put the mastery of these techniques in hands that you trust. Not only techniques to develop these technologies but to react and control with these technologies.