The Spread of Life

To an astrophysicist, "everything" is the universe.What could we possibly do to change that "everything"? People like to say that a scientific idea changed the universe when Copernicus suggested that the sun, not earth, is at the center. People regard the invention on the Internet as a development that changed the world. The list is long.

But which "world" did these ideas change? Well, yes they are all about us, home sapiens, a recently evolved branch on the tree of life, with roots in a biochemistry that somehow, four billion years ago, took hold on planet earth. And yes, home sapiens has created amazing things: airplanes, antibiotics, phones, computers, but none of these will change the orbits of the stars.

And so it was, until now.There is a game-changing scientific development that transcends all in human history. It is already underway, and it even has a name: synthetic biology. People take "synthetic biology" to mean different things. Most often, its reduced to synthetic genomes, redesigning the genomes or organisms to make them act in new ways - such as microbes that produce fuel or pharmaceutical products.

I take synthetic biology to mean creating new trees of life, as opposed to engineering new branches to the existing tree. IN my view,  synthetic biology is about engineering an alternative biochemistry, "seeding" an alternative tree that then evolves on its own. In that alternative, the life is as natural as any life we know. I shall let others describe it and explain how they will do it. One thing is sure: biologists will use synthesis the same way chemists do today -- routinely.

But there is more! It is the interplanetary reach of synthetic biology that will make it a new phenomenon in the cosmos we know. Life is a planetary phenomenon  that can transform a planet. The development of synthetic biology appears to be a stage in life's evolution whereby some of its forms can leave the host planet and adopt to other environments, potentially transforming other planets and eventually the galaxy.

by Dimitar Sasselov

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