Podcast: Tracking the rapid rise of human-enhancing biotech with Siddhartha Mukherjee

Imagine being able to have a communication, a real communication, with the simulacrum of someone who's passed away. That technology is not a Black Mirror episode anymore.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and we have spent a lot of time on this show talking about artificial intelligence and what it means for machines to become more human, but what about the opposite? What happens in a world where humans start becoming more like machines?

It sounds like a Black Mirror episode, and there's nothing wrong with that, but things like gene editing with CRISPR technology and prosthetic limbs powered by AI, or human organs grown in Petri dishes, are now medical realities. Technology that would've been the stuff of science fiction just a decade ago is now helping to eradicate disease, improve the lives of people with disabilities, and transform our understanding of human life itself.

Like all new technologies, there are risks along with these benefits, including the potential for misuse, the privacy implications, and much broader ethical questions. How do we balance the transformative potential of these new tools without changing the nature of what it means for us to be human? My guest today, Siddhartha Mukherjee. He's a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose new book, Song of the Cell, explores the science, history and technology behind what he calls the new humans. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Sidd Mukherjee, so nice to have you on the show.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

It's been a while we've been talking about this. Your new book is The Song of the Cell, and I liked the subtitle ... I always like subtitles, they're substantive ... An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. That excites me, the idea of the new human. What's a new human?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

In the book, in the particularities of the book, the new human is a human being that we have altered in some way, in the book for medical benefit, and in the future potentially for enhancement. I use the word new human provocatively, saying in some ways, of course, there are people walking around downstairs who have had a bone marrow transplant. That person is a chimera, because their blood is made out of someone else's blood, but their body, the rest of their body, is made out of their old body, their shell, and then there's the blood that's someone else's blood. In another time, maybe 50, 100, 200 years ago, that person would be considered an impossibility. I'll give you another example, and I'll walk you through more and more troublesome examples. A baby conceived through IVF.

Ian Bremmer:

In vitro fertilization?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Yes, in vitro fertilization. We take this now for granted. There are hundreds of thousands of babies born through in vitro fertilization. In 200 years ago, 400 years ago, before that entire process happened or was conceived ...

Ian Bremmer:

As it were.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

... as it were, that person would be considered a new human, a human being brought to life in a Petri dish, literally, and then transferred into a woman's body. That person would be a new human.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, but so far, you and I are good.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

We're like, "Okay, this makes sense to us. We're okay with it."

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

You're saying we're not going to, in short order.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Right. I'll walk you through the next step. The next step is we are now beginning, and there are people again walking around amongst us, who have electrodes implanted into their brain, to stimulate certain parts of their brain so that they could not suffer from, for instance, the movement disorder of Parkinson's disease. They're half human. They're human, but they have electrodes stimulating their brain.

Next step onwards, there are people who have electrodes into their brain stimulating a particular area so that they won't suffer from debilitating depression. By this time, I'm now thinking that's a little bit farther than what I had imagined where we would be in 2023.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that really different from taking Prozac?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Functionally it's not different, but if you think about it, I would say philosophically it's a little bit different from taking Prozac in the sense that you have an electrode in your brain. Potentially you could have electrodes in different parts of your brain, stimulating different parts of your brain as we learn more about these parts, doing different things to you. Already we've crossed some kind of threshold, of electrode stimulation into the brain.

Then we go on to the next step, which is genetically-altered cells inserted into humans. My group, broadly speaking, is among the first to do a bone marrow transplant. We've transplanted about 12 people so far with a genetically-altered bone marrow. Other people have done this too, but we've done this with CRISPR and we are among the first to do this.

Ian Bremmer:

CRISPR, which is the gene-altering technology, which allows you to do that with specificity.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Right, exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

What are you specifically altering the bone marrow to do?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

We're altering the bone marrow to make it possible for these patients who have leukemia to be able to get a therapy. In other words, this is a very interesting, very, I would say, somewhat radical idea that we started off in the lab with, in which we make the bone marrow immune or resistant to a certain therapy, and thereby ...

Ian Bremmer:

Allowing the people to benefit from the therapy.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Exactly. Allowing the people to benefit from the therapy, but their bone marrow remains clean.

Ian Bremmer:

You said one thing so far that piqued my interest particularly. You said, "We are significantly farther right now than I would have expected."

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Flying cars, we're not. People have been talking about it for decades. We ain't there. Why is it? You've been in this science and you've been at the cutting edge of the science for decades now, so why has it exceeded your expectations?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Several tools came upon us which were unexpected. CRISPR is absolutely one of them. Just to go back a little bit to explain what CRISPR is, CRISPR is a bacterial system by which you can make very specific alterations in the DNA, in genomes, which you couldn't do before. If you imagine your genome as a series of letters, it's written in four letters, A, C, T, and G. Your genome would be 3 billion plus 3 billion, so 3 billion letters, right?

If you were to imagine it as a book, it would be a giant encyclopedia. In fact, it would be about 60 full sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Imagine this entire room is your genome. That's the library. It's your genome. Before CRISPR came around, it was very difficult to say, "I want you to go to Page 75 of Volume 60 of Set 74, and change one word in it."

Ian Bremmer:

Especially since there're only 60 sets. I mean, those 14 aren't even there yet, but yes, that's right. I'm with you metaphorically.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

What CRISPR allows you to do ... and this is what's amazing and bizarre about it ... is that it allows you in the first instance ... and it keeps moving, the CRISPR world keeps moving very quickly ... but in the first instance, what it allowed us to do was to go to Page 74 in Volume 16 in Set 60 and take one word and rub it out or erase it, leaving virtually everything untouched. Then, more technologies came around so that now it was not just rubbing or erasing one word. You could actually change the word. You could change, as I said, verbal to herbal if you wanted to. That technology I would say is groundbreaking, and it really shook our worlds.

Ian Bremmer:

Because in principle, you can now customize a human being.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

In principle, you can customize the genomes, as I said, in small ways. People say, "Oh, we're going to make new human beings that are customizable to the Nth degree, blue eyes, taller, whatever, et cetera." Those are almost impossible things to do, and that's because most of those traits are encoded not by one, but by hundreds if not thousands of genes. That puts a natural limit, because with CRISPR, you can only go so far. That's one thing that happened.

The second thing that's happening very, very quickly is we're making synthetic genomes that are longer and longer and longer. Now, if you make a synthetic genome that's longer and longer and longer, very soon you're going to get to a place where you can put a really, really long piece of an entirely chemically synthesized piece of DNA. You don't need CRISPR for that. You can basically write a code. I hadn't expected the speed at which that's happened either. Now you can go up to thousands, tens of thousands, and very soon we'll be able to go up to millions, of completely freshly written code, just like you would type into a computer.

Ian Bremmer:

If we're very limited in how many things we can change in human beings because of the complexity of the human genome, is it radically easier right now to make much more dramatic changes for lower orders of life?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Lower orders of life actually have just as complex genomes. They're just as long. This is one of the great mysteries. In fact, wheat has more base pairs in its genome than humans do. We don't know exactly why. There are lots of speculations. Flies have very complex genomes, so it's not as if lower-order beings can be changed more easily. However, the ethics around changing the genomes of lower-order beings is very different.

Last week, for instance, there was a chicken that was born which was made resistant to the bird flu. In fact, that was one change. The change was almost good enough, but what happened is that the flu then mutated, just like Covid did when that happened. The influenza virus mutated, and then could then infect the chickens. They had to take out three genes, and now the cells became almost completely resistant to even the mutations that the influenza had.

I talked about CRISPR, I talked about synthetic genomes. Number three is we are now doing more and more bionic things. I talked about electrodes, so we are doing bionic things. We're extending our hands, our brains, using bionics, and where bionics comes in, of course AI comes. The minute you have bionics, you have AI, because artificial intelligence in principle allows you to do very much superior bionics.

Ian Bremmer:

We can optimize a prosthetic leg, for instance, to work more effectively than a real one?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

That's right. We can optimize potentially a prosthetic electrical device that would sit on your brain to work much, much more effectively because there's a learning algorithm inside it, which wasn't there before. I said there were four things. The fourth has been around for a while, but it's been cloning, so Dolly the sheep. It's moved along in time, and now all of a sudden we are cloning lower animals like sheep much, much more effectively.

What I'm trying to say is now combine all of these four pieces. These pieces are sort of sitting right now in different silos, but imagine a combination of all four of these or some combination of these three things, applied to a real human, and that's what I mean by the new human. That's the speed at which I had not expected these four pieces to come together. Again, to name them, CRISPR, synthetic biology, prosthetic biology with AI, and cloning of individuals. That's what is moving. This nexus has been moving faster than I have ever seen.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. Given all of that, has this changed your view of where the human is, where the soul sits?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

To be totally honest, I mean, I do think. Everyone thinks about the soul. I think about the soul, but it seems to me that the idea of the soul is also changing. It has to, because the idea of the human is changing. Who you are is changing. I'll give you another example. It's a very interesting idea.

People who underwent either prosthetic surgery or had great response to antidepressants will often come and say, "Oh, now I feel like the person that I am." Then you have to ask yourself, well, wait a second. For 50 years, let's say, you were having a mood disorder, severe, recalcitrant depression. You take a medicine enough, or you have an electrode put into your body, and all of a sudden you say, "I'm now me." Then you have to ask, "Well, what were you for those last 50 years? Why were you not you?"

The idea of the malleability of the brain is becoming much, much more obvious. Again, I'm not speaking as a neuroscientist. I'm just speaking very generally as I watch these developments. Now, if the brain is this malleable and if the sense of self is this malleable, if the sense of the capacity to alter the self ... in other words, we take babies born through in-vitro fertilization, as just like fifty or a hundred years ago, in fact, when Edwards and Steptoe used science to have the first baby born, there were death threats to them. Someone sent them a vial of blood in protest. It was mock blood, but it was in protest. Now, of course, our society has moved on and accepted all of these changes.

The bottom line is if the self is this malleable, if the brain is this malleable, if personhood is this malleable, then I suspect that the definition of the soul needs to change. I suspect that what's going to happen is that we're going to start saying that there is no such thing as a kind of central soul. It's an epiphenomenon of what the brain and the body does together, and because it's an epiphenomenon ... because it lies as a phenomenon above the brain and the body ... we should probably think about changing what the definition of the soul is.

Ian Bremmer:

I do notice that every time you've spoken about changes that you think are principally transitory or transformational, you're focusing on the brain.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

I am mostly speaking about the brain, but I'm also speaking about the rest of the body. I work with the rest of the body. I don't work mostly with the brain.

Ian Bremmer:

What are we doing right now that strikes you as ethically problematic?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Other humans have done things that have been considered ethically very problematic. In China there was ... now we have accepted the fact this was a rogue project.

Ian Bremmer:

The AIDS-resistant-

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

That's correct. That's correct. In China, He Jainkui, a scientist, without getting proper informed consent, without really consulting the scientific community, went ahead and essentially made a CRISPR-based alteration to two babies. That I think is ethically very problematic, and that has created in its wake many, many other people who are now going through what they consider the appropriate channels, but are still making, potentially, CRISPR alternatives.

Ian Bremmer:

Are there types of technologies and capabilities that exist right now, irrespective of consent, assuming we have consent, that it strikes you as we might not want to open that bottle right now?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Well, if we're going to talk about that, we've got to talk about AI. People say it's an existential threat, AI is an existential threat. What is the existential threat? Let me offer it to you, and maybe you can offer some back. Number one, I think it's an existential threat in the informational sphere, particularly in the political informational sphere. Your area, less my area, but I think as you probably know, it's likely 2024 will be the first election cycle where AI bots of various sort will throw information at us at a speed ...

Ian Bremmer:

They'll become actors.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

They'll become actors. That's right. That's one. The second one I think is think there is a biological and a chemical threat. We can start doing things with AI, building organisms, building molecules that didn't exist before, with properties that didn't exist before. Now, some of those will be very beneficial, hopefully, medicines that we make, but equally some of them will be problematic, because you could make things that are poisonous, toxic.

You can make organisms that are poisonous and toxic, and you can make them faster with AI than you could with other mechanisms, because the system learns. It learns how to make the molecules that don't have properties that human beings would like, so that's the second one.

The third one, I think, is privacy. My daughter calls me, and by listening to her voice, I'm confident it's my daughter calling me. In five years, I could imagine that that's going to be a problem.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, in two.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Exactly, or two years.

Ian Bremmer:

In two years.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

There's a whole bunch of cryptography-related things which I think are deep problems.

Ian Bremmer:

Because of quantum?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Because of quantum and AI. In other words, everything. There's a lot of cryptography in our lives. We think that there isn't.

Ian Bremmer:

We think our data is secure.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

In reality, it isn't, given this technology.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Given what's happening, given the galloping nature of technology.

Ian Bremmer:

I accept all of that. I'm wondering which are the developments in your field, that when you see these technologies, you say to yourself, "I'm not sure that people like me should be applying those technologies to human beings."

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Two I talked about. Number one is the enhanced capacity with AI to develop molecules that may be toxic or may unleash biological warfare, biological toxicity, et cetera. These I think are potential problems. We could do them before. We can do them in hyperspeed now. Number two is going back to the same idea. Number two is CRISPR, using CRISPR inappropriately on either various organisms, again, for defense or biological reasons, and number three is cloning, cloning of certainly lower organisms and potentially of higher organisms, because again, these are all moving at hyperspeed.

Ian Bremmer:

Cloning of lower organisms is problematic for what reason?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Well, you can create an organism which has altered properties. Those altered properties could be beneficial in the short run, but could for instance, overtake ... by gene drive, we'll talk about what that means ... but could overtake other organisms. That may be great in the short run, but there may be unintended consequences.

We don't understand biology well enough to be able to say, "Oh, I'm going to make a new kind of crop, and this new kind of crop is going to be so beneficial for humans." All of a sudden what happens ... and this has happened over and over again in history ... all of a sudden what happens is that that crop becomes a monoculture and eliminates, for instance, a previous crop which was disease-resistant. People are making seed banks for this reason.

Ian Bremmer:

You're seeing real-time experimentation on the ecosystem?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

The ecosystem is a great example of a system that we understand only so much, and doing experiments with the ecosystem affects everyone. That's one very concrete example of how what you might consider a lower organism experiment goes very wrong and could go very wrong, and so needs to be, again, deeply regulated.

Ian Bremmer:

We've spoken a lot now about the technologies themselves, the concerns of the technologies. I want to end by talking about the opportunities. If we think about the next five years, what are some things that you think an average human being will be able to experience that they cannot right now?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

A whole host of new medicines. The capacity of some of these new systems that we're developing is so high that we're spitting out molecules with properties that we didn't even know existed. I mean, we are making them. I suspect that we will have a whole host of new medicines, a great opportunity.

I suspect that some diseases which were very difficult to cure before will, with a combination of gene therapy and with new medicines, be curable. We are already seeing that. Diseases like spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disease but debilitating, used to, basically it was almost certainly deadly. A single injection or a couple of injections of one drug has completely reversed that. These children are now walking and will probably continue to walk for the rest of their lives, so a huge change there.

I think that we will also see more prosthetics, and these are opportunities. We will arm ourselves with much wider system of information, again enhanced with digital and AI tools, which will expand our capacities. Those are the opportunities. We will become smarter. We will become hopefully more disease resistant. We will have larger memory banks, and we will have the capacity to interact in the virtual sphere in a way we cannot just simply interact in the real sphere.

Ian Bremmer:

As we see human beings becoming more digitally interactive, including directly with chips being implanted inside human beings, what does that look like in a few years' time? What are the capabilities that people may have, good or bad, that they don't have now?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

I think I'll talk about the good. As I said, imagine someone who has been paralyzed by a stroke. Imagine someone who can't speak because they have Lou Gehrig's disease, and all of a sudden with these capabilities, they're able to do that. Actually, there are already programs that exist. I'll give you one great example.

There is an incredible algorithm, AI-driven algorithm, that essentially acts as a LIDAR. Just like dolphins have sonars, this is an algorithm by which you can put on a headset and that headset, by sending out sound or light in every direction, can signal to a person who's lost their eyesight, can signal what the real world around them looks like through their ears.

Their ears become their eyes, and it's amazing. I saw a video of a marathoner running a marathon with this device. People with strokes, people with paralysis, people with movement disorders, people with anything that requires prosthetics.

Number two, I think our memory is limited. Our memory of our social interactions is limited. Now imagine that multiplied by N-fold.

Ian Bremmer:

How does that happen?

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Well, you can start. It's already happening. The simple example right now is how much memory do you store in real life versus your iPhone?

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, sure. I understand.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Imagine that multiplied by 10,000-fold. Imagine that multiplied by 100,000-fold. Imagine ... and this was a conversation I was having yesterday. Imagine being able to have a communication, a real communication, with the simulacrum of someone who's passed away. In my case, with my father who passed away.

Ian Bremmer:

Black Mirror has had that episode.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

I know, but that's no longer a Black Mirror episode. It is becoming and will become a reality, and these are not fantastic. I'm not making up technologies. These are technologies that are one hand's reach away, and the question is do we reach or do we not reach. I talked about the problems, but these are enormous opportunities.

I would love to be able to have some kind of communication, which it sounds like through a shaman, but I would love to be able to once in a while ask my father, who passed away, a question about my life, and get an answer that he would likely give. That would be very helpful to me, I think, as I grow older. That technology is not a Black Mirror episode anymore. That technology is, I would say, one and a half hand's reach away. Should we go there? I don't know.

Ian Bremmer:

Sidd Mukherjee, thanks for joining us today.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Why don't you check us out at Gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter? It's called GZERO Daily.

Speaker 3:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our lead sponsor, Prologis. Prologis helps businesses across the globe scale their supply chains with an expansive portfolio of logistics real estate, and the only end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today. Learn more at prologis.com.

This podcast is also brought to you by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment, presenting I.S.S. When war breaks out on Earth between the US and Russia, astronauts aboard the International Space Station fight each other for control. This sci-fi thriller is only in theaters January 19th.

GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Global Reboot, a podcast from Foreign Policy Magazine, was created as countries and economies emerged from the pandemic and called for a reboot. On each episode, host and foreign policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal asks some of the smartest thinkers and doers around to push for solutions to the world's greatest problems, from resetting the U.S.-China relationship to dealing with the rise of AI and preserving our oceans. Find Global Reboot, in partnership with the Doha Forum, wherever you get your podcasts.