Instant Genius - How AI could help us create life from scratch

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

For the last several billion years, all life on Earth has progressed according to the rules of evolution by natural selection – a step-by-step process that has given rise to the fascinating complexity and beauty of all the living things we share our planet with. But now, due to advances in our knowledge of genetics and the rise of artificial intelligence, we’re on the brink of being able to design living organisms from scratch. This new field of research is known as generative biology. In this episode, we’re joined by Adrian Woolfson, a researcher who specialises in synthetic genome design, to talk about his latest book On the Future of Species – Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence. He tells us how this fascinating area of research is bringing us closer to a genuine scientific revolution that could change the way we think about how life is created, the vast implications that this may have on human health and the health of our planet, and why we all need to be aware of this powerful new technology and its potential. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason, Goody, Commissioner Editor, the BBC Science Focus. For the last several billion years, all life on Earth has progressed, according to the rules of evolution by natural selection.

A step-by-step process that has given rise to the fascinating complexity and beauty of all of the living things we share our planet with. But now, due to advances in our knowledge of genetics and the rise of artificial intelligence, we're on the brink of being able to design living organisms from scratch. This new field of life. research is known as generative biology. In this episode we're joined by Adrian Wolfson, a researcher who specializes in synthetic genome design to talk about his latest book, on the future of species,

authoring life by means of artificial biological intelligence. He tells us how this fascinating area of research is bringing us closer to a genuine scientific revolution that could change the way we think about how life is created. The vast implicative that this may have on human health and the health of our planet, and why we all need to be aware of this powerful new technology and its potential. So Adrian, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Pleasure to be with you. So today we're talking about your new book, On the Future of Species,

authoring Life by means of artificial biological intelligence. So that's quite a bold title. You know, a lot of people will know the reference there. that you've made to Darwin in that title. But let's have a look at the overriding idea of the book. And that's that we find ourselves on the brink of something. I think it's fair to say is potentially a new area of biology. So can we just start with that overarching idea, please?

Yeah. So, Jason, over the last four billion years of life on Earth, all life has been created by a natural engineering process, which we know is evolution by natural selection. That process has no foresight, no intelligence, no design, no sensitive future. We're now at a point where we can actually author life from first principles and bring design into biology. This is a fundamental turning point in the history of humankind,

but also the history of life on earth, and it's going to change pretty much everything that we do. What developments in technology have allowed us to reach this point, Good question. And there are two components to that. One is artificial intelligence, which has enabled us to learn the basic principles of the grammar of life. And by the grammar of life, I mean the fundamental rules that determine how things are. So in the same way that a motorcot operates by a set of rules according to a set of rules, we also operate according to a set of rules and so do tortoises. and so do insects and so do elephants, right? And the challenge for us as biologists is to see if we can tease out those rules. It turns out that in the same way that mathematics was the perfect language for understanding physics and the way the planets rotate around one another in the universe,

that artificial intelligence is the perfect language for understanding these rules, and we're just beginning to comprehend them. Now, coupled with that, the ability to write genomes by reverse-engineers, this kind of grammar of life, you also need to be able to construct life at scale. And by that, I mean, build genomes. I myself have contributed to that process with my colleagues in California. We recently published a paper in nature, which really transforms our ability to build DNA at scale. So this combination of the ability to design genomes with AI and the ability to literally print

them out like pages on a laser printer together gives you this ability to design genomes. to essentially make new life and also to alter existing life. So let's move back to a couple of sort of more fundamental principles then. So you talked about the genome there, which we'll get on to it into and a bit. But a lot of things like chemicals, people talk about as being the building blocks of life. So, you know, what are they? And why are they referred to as the building blocks of life? Well, I think you're talking about two types of chemicals.

One of the neviotide basis, the ABCD, if you like, of the language of DNA. And the other is the 20-odomino acids that make up proteins together that they enable life to happen in the way that you know it. So all the information of life, the most basic kind of programs, if you like, are encoded in DNA. And then that information is translated into the structures of proteins which actually build organizations. those terms and help them to operate. And these things like kind of dictate all sorts of things like our physical appearance, the colour of our eyes, the colour of our hair, etc. Yeah, I mean, genes, you know, one must be careful not to attribute too much agency to

genes because we're a lot more than just genes. But genes are like the kind of basic starting material, if you like, the design plan. But then there's a lot that happens between having an architect's plan and building a house. and it turns out that there are all kinds of layers of additional information pasted on, if you like, to the genetic information, including development and culture, so-called genetics, the kind of chemical fingerprints on DNA that change which genes are switched on and off. And then, of course, even the bacteria that live within us can change the way genes are switched on and off. So, in fact, the information to make you the way you are is multi-layered,

but it's fair to say that your genome creates the basic parameters of what you are. So, and this is something we've been figuring out. It's not exactly when was the structure of DNA discovered it? It's in the 50s, wasn't it? Yeah, we're only talking about 70-odd years since we discovered the fundamental chemical principle of life. And yet here we are today. Instead of cataloging life and discovering new species, are actually this remarkable historic moment where all of a sudden we could contemplate making species

and with the skill that enables us to make species we can also get a much deeper understanding into our own biology, why we get ill, why we age and so on and so forth. So let's have a look at some of these new technologies then. Some of them have been around for a little bit, things like CRISPR. And this allows us to pick out these bits, these building blocks, that we were talking about and reconstruct them. So sort of how does that work? Maybe that's a bit naive, but how does that work?

Yeah, and I'm pleased you brought that up, because the way to think about CRISPR is it's literally what people call it, it's a gene editing technology, and what that means. It's a bit like, you know, I give you a manuscript that I've written, and you get out your red pen, or if you're looking, you're on a computer, you get out, you know, your markup. on the computer, you start redlining it, right? But what you're doing is making changes to a document that I've sent you.

That's fundamentally different to what I'm doing, or what the field is doing of generative biology, which is actually taking a blank page and writing completely new script. Now, that script might be referential to existing designs, existing biology, but it might also deviate from it, very, very considerably. So essentially, we're moving from being the only recently editors of life, because CRISPR itself is a pretty new technology, individual chemical letters in genomes, to a situation where we can contemplate actually writing life from a blank slate,

literally letter by letter and authoring eugenetic text. So it's a fundamental advance over editing. Editing, of course, is extremely consequential, but authorship is just a whole new ballgame. Yeah, so let's stick with the editing for a moment, if you'll indulge me. So we have sort of, there's sort of two prongs to this. One is editing, let's continue the analogy, editing the text that we already have. But before that, we have to understand what it actually means,

which is, of course, also a huge challenge. Yeah, and that's where the artificial intelligence will help. Now, you know, the language of DNA, the language of life, the generative grammar of life, whatever you want to call it, is immensely multifaceted and incredibly complex, right? And it's going to be years until we fully understand it. But I think we will eventually. I think it's a totally tractable problem. And right now, you know, we're at the kind of level of a pigeon English level of understanding.

You know, we can speak, you know, utter really, really simple. sentences and the biological analogue of that is that we can write the genomes of viruses and viruses occupy an interesting position in biology they're not quite alive but they are what we call biological entities they have genomes but they only become alive when they infect bacteria but we now know enough about the language of life to write the genomes of biological entities viruses so to use a skiing analogy, we're on the kind of ski bump, you know, where the four-year-old kids learn how to ski and do snowplows, right? We're very far away from the double diamond black runs, and that's what we mean understand the rules to make humans, the rules to make fish, the rules to make zebras,

right? But we're on the ski slopes, right? And we're like the Wright brothers, we've, you know, we've kind of bumped off the ground and we're airborne, but we're bumping back onto the ground, But we can see 747s and jet planes ahead of us in the future, and we can see a route to getting there. So just to drive this really home, researchers have already sort of written a virus. That's already happened, right? Yeah, well, one of the co-founders of my Californian company, Genero, a guy called Brian Heer, at the Ark Institute in Stavid, has actually created the first ever AI designed genome. that happens to encode a new species. It technically meets the criterion for a new species of

virus. So the first AI designed life, biological entity to be absolutely strict because a virus, as I said, isn't alive, has actually been created. So we're not talking about something that may potentially happen in the future years ahead from now. We're talking about something that's happened. And the purpose of my book in a way is to call that, moment and say to everybody, hey, you know, you might not realize it, but we have created a new species. This field is moving really fast at an exponential rate. And what we need to do is create some guardrails and we need to have a debate. And we need to make sure that this is done wisely, safely, responsibly, ethically, transparently, equitably and in a manner that benefits

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doing great things with medicine, with different things like analysing cancers and all of this sort of thing. But so how does this process, how do you think it might apply to medical treatments in the future? Yeah, well, the ability to write DNA at scale and to understand the grammar of life obviously enables you to reverse engineer complex. human diseases. Now, around 7,000 human diseases like sickle cell anemia, for example, or hemophilia-a, result from what I would call single broken genes. And in that situation, genes act like parts of a motor car that break, and you take them into the garage and you, you know, you fix them, like your clutch brakes or your brake-bags break, you fix them, right?

And, you know, roughly 7,000 human diseases more or less behave in that way. And, you know, gene editing works pretty effectively, it seems, for those diseases, although we still have a big problem with cost, and also there are some safety issues with gene therapy, but that's another conversation, right? But actually, when it comes to really complex diseases in which multiple genes affect the disease or something like longevity, you know, because the aging is almost certain program, it's much more likely that if we wanted to fix those problems, we're to think about the actual design of the human genome. It's a much more fundamental problem. Now, whether or not we would ever dare to engineer human genomes in a more comprehensive

level is another question, and one which I think lies in the future. But before we ever contemplate things like that, it may well be that there are simple fixes, relatively simple fixes, our knowledge of biology that we obtain from AI and the ability to write out genomes can be used to address complex diseases. And certainly with things like personalized cancer vaccines and gene therapy, which involves more than one gene, and regulating gene therapy and so on, you know, these abilities to use AI to kind of unpick the logic of life and of disease and to write out DNA scale will be hugely consequential. Yeah, so I'd venture that often when people are thinking about, well, biology in general, really,

and certainly technology is in the way that we're speaking about them now, but think about how they apply to directly, I should say maybe, to human beings. But of course, we're in the midst of a fairly severe climate crisis. So can this sort of technology, this sort of process, this sort of method help us in any way in that area? Yeah, I'm really pleased you mention that. And there are a number of points that I make in my book about this. The first is that part of defining that grammar book of life involves understanding all living species. So even if you don't believe we should just preserve life for its own sake,

which actually I believe we should. I think life is all species are sacred, however inconsequential, right? But even if you don't believe that, what you need to know is that even the most apparently obscure and irrelevant beetle living, being in the Amazonian jungle is likely to hold key life secrets. In my book, I call those Earth secrets, quoting Thomas Hardy, the poet. And these are secrets wrapped into its DNA, encrypted into its code, billions of years old secrets. And it's only through the unraveling of those secrets that we have any chance of defining the Scram Book of Life.

So even if, as I said, even if we don't really care much about other species, there's a utilitarian reason to preserve them. That's number one, right? Number two, currently all of our technologies generally involve chemistry, and they're generally destructive to the environment. They cause pollution, and they cause global warming. My view is that in the future, biology will become a programmable material, a bit like computer code that can be written and turned into pretty much any type of infrastructure

that we use today. So I see a future in which biology is used to build houses, except we grow houses, right? We might grow cell phones. We might use biology to store information at scale. We might biocompute using biology. We might make bioenergy and so on and so forth. So pretty much anything that isn't done with biology but that is key to our lives, I believe, could be done in a very sustainable manner using biology.

And wouldn't that be nice if everything we've done. did was sustainable and didn't destroy the planet. Yeah, so I think like we started a bit earlier on talking about this idea of building a virus. So I think anyone listening is going to say, well, it's only logical then. If we can build, we can create, we can piece together a virus. Can we piece together a living organism? Yeah, and the answer to that is yes. I mean, one of my colleagues in California, Kaihang Wang, in collaboration with Jason Chinner, Laboratory of Molecobiology at Cambridge, made an entirely synthetic E. coli genome, which is a bacterium, right? And they actually also changed its code.

And by code, I mean, the actual logic of how DNA sequences are turned into a amino acid. So they change the logic of life. So we've already built bacteria, different species of bacteria, and we're close to building the first ever entirely synthetic yeast genome. That's been done by a guy called Jeff Buker in New York, and it's actually a global consortium doing that called the SC2.0 consortium, and we anticipate that that might be completed next year. So this would be a totally synthetic form of yeast,

which could have great utility in the baking industry, and the brewing industry, and so on. Now, going from a single cell bacterium or a yeast to even, you know, a tadpole or something that's multicellular and eukaryotic like us, that means having a nucleus in a cell, is a bigger leap, right? And that's going to take longer to understand how to make a tadpole, for example, as opposed to how to make a bacterium, right? But the point is, as I said earlier, given that we can, even today, use AI to write genomes of. viruses and bacteria suggests that it's just a matter of time before our DNA linguistic abilities, if I may call them that, improve sufficiently to allow us to write more complex species. I've absolutely no doubt that that time will come.

Yeah, so we're sort of talking about something that is different from millions of years of what's called Darwinian evolution. Incremental evolution step by step, where different species eventually through these iterative process and steps fill in different niches in their ecosystems. And I think, well, a lot of people might think, well, that's worked perfectly well, for now. You know, why do we need to be fiddling with it? Yeah, that's a really good question. And first of all, just to say, you know, in the future, I think that there'll be, you know,

there'll be two authors, you know, one is evolution, and the co-author will be, life that results from the collaboration between natural and artificial intelligence. Why would you wish to do that? Well, let me give you some examples, right? So evolution was a pretty random process. As I said, it wasn't guided by design. It had no purpose. It had no direction. But by chance, it discovered some pretty interesting things. So the banana, let's say, or cows or sheep, or rubber plants, or maize, or the potato or rice. Now, all of these species have turned out to be of incredible value to humankind. You know, they sustain us, they feed us.

They're an intrinsic part of being human. Imagine humans without maize or without rice. I mean, most of the world survive, you know, on those cash crops. But imagine they hadn't ever been discovered. Well, you've got to realize that the life that exists and the life that once existed represents just the tiniest and most infinitesimal fraction of all possible life. So out there in the space of potential life, account as other species just as important and consequential and useful to us

as oranges or apples or bananas or corn or maize, waiting to be discovered, you know. So to not explore would be like living in a bed-sitting Croydon and never leaving for your entire life, right? But actually, you could have gone on the train to Manchester, taking a ferry to Calais and got the Euro start of Paris, or taking a flight to India to see the Taj Mahal. In other words, there's a whole world of possibility out there,

and it's incredibly parochial and small-minded of us to just kind of sit here in nature and not try to leverage and utilise biological possibility. Of course, you made a really, really good point there, Jason, which I'd like to just pick up on, which is about the ecosystem. So I think we have to be really, really careful about how we introduce species into the environment.

And it might be that we never do, that we kind of create a firewall between natural and artificial life. And we do know that ecosystems are incredibly fragile. We also know that when you introduce foreign species into ecosystems, they can crash them in ways that are entirely unpredictable and create havoc and destruction, right? So I think that one can fairly say that there is a world in which we create these species,

but we don't necessarily let them mingle with natural species. We find ways to firew them. That can be done genetically, most advantageously and probably most securely, and it can also be done in other ways through physical separation. But I think the safest way is to engineer artificial organisms so that they don't mingle with nature and that they don't get released. And of course there is always the risk that they might be, you know. And I think at one point to say here is that no new technology is entirely free of risk,

as we know, right? Every technology is dual use. It can be used for good and it can be used for bad, both deliberately and inadvertently. And really, if humans had been scared to use technology, they probably would never have tamed fire because fire keeps us warm and it cooks our dinner but it can burn down cities.

They may never have invented the wheel because the wheel can wheel your produce to market but it can also be used to make a war chariot or a tank, right? We may never have utilized nuclear power because of obviously the risk of nuclear warfare. And I think this technology is no different. It's no less consequential.

And again, my book is a kind of wake-up call to the public to say, hey, you know, this has happened, this is happening, be aware of it, and hey, you know, if you want to navigate this landscape, don't do it alone. Take a guidebook. You know, when you go to France, the south of France, or fighting in the Pyrenees, you don't go alone. You take a little pocket guidebook, which is both a companion and a friend and the kind of source of key information to help you navigate. your environment. And that's what my own book is. That's how I see my book, is that guidebook that you keep in your jacket pocket that you open up and helps you to navigate. In this case, not the Pyrenees or the Rhine or the Matterhorn, but the landscape of life, life's future. Thank you for listening to this episode of Vincent Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Adrian Wawson. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out this book on The Future of Species,

authoring life by means of artificial, biological intelligence. If you like to what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Insidgenius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel

at ScienceFACUS. The current issue of BBC Science FACIS magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favorite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision

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