We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 13 Apr 2026 · 225pp · 76,418 words
a guidebook for the age when human intelligence becomes networked with machine intelligence. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler show us how exponential technologies—AI, robotics, synthetic biology, and beyond—don’t just give us new tools, they give us new leverage to solve problems at societal scale. This book is essential for
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the Old Testament’s ten miracle categories, the results are—well, see for yourself. But be prepared. This is a very long list. Creation Miracles Synthetic biology and genetic engineering create new forms of life or modify existing ones. 3D printing brings matter into being layer by layer, building something from nothing
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one wave in a roiling sea of exponential change. In this one, we meet entrepreneurs who are surfing the full swell—blending AI with robotics, synthetic biology, and other converging technologies to tackle grand challenges. These tales are evidence for abundance at scale, which also makes them tales of the miraculous, and
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revive extinct species using advanced tools like CRISPR and somatic nuclear transfer. Responsibilities include genome editing, reintroduction planning, and ecological monitoring. Must have experience in synthetic biology and a passion for rewriting the story of life. Species Restoration Specialist Location: Arctic Rewilding Center, Siberia Description: Seeking conservationists to assist in the reintroduction
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us the ability to reconstruct the genomes of ancient animals. That’s when Harvard geneticist George Church, who many credit with pioneering the field of synthetic biology, proposed rewilding the arctic tundra with de-extincted woolly mammoth hybrids—the region’s original keystone species—to restore grasslands, preserve permafrost, and slow climate
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with successful exits in multiple domains, Lamm heard about Church’s work in genomics and called him up to discuss the intersection of software and synthetic biology, believing this convergence hid the next tech revolution. “That conversation lasted about ten minutes,” explains Lamm. “Then I asked George what else he was working
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evolution designed for anti-fragility, and in our survival-of-the-speediest world, it’s our compass. We built tools of mythic power: AI, robotics, synthetic biology, planetary-scale networks. Yet we’re steering them with software tuned to life on the savanna. Logic helps, but lateral thinking, those strange intuitive leaps
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laughter that comes from people who’ve known each other a long time. There wasn’t much talk about the future. Not the singularity. Not synthetic biology. No one argued about accelerating AI or the ethics of data. Instead, our friends Keith Ferrazzi and Eric Pulier led us through an impromptu rendition
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strong, accelerating evolution in hospitals and feedlots alike. The result: infections that no longer respond to standard treatments. Rapid DNA-based diagnostics, phage therapies, and synthetic biology are now racing to restore our advantage, but the bacteria are still evolving faster than the system regulating them. Chart 37Rapid Increase in Plastic Pollution
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Welcome to the engine room of the age of abundance: Charts that showcase the technologies transforming every sector, from AI and robotics to renewable energy, synthetic biology, and quantum computing. Appendix C is where possibility meets proof, illustrating how technology is not evolving linearly but accelerating exponentially, driving down costs, boosting performance
The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words
Avatar Censuses Secondary and Posthumous Avatars Conclusion 10 Alternative Biologies Biology as Technology The Rise of Machines Complexity The Science of Complexity Synthetic Biology – Complex Embodied Technology Top-Down Synthetic Biology Bottom-Up Synthetic Biology Protocells Artificial Biology From Proposition to Reality Future Venice Artificial Biology and Human Enhancement Part III Human Enhancement: The Cognitive Sphere
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that govern biological and cellular functions, from principles that are already well characterized in large and well-mapped non-biological systems such as the Internet. Synthetic Biology – Complex Embodied Technology Living systems are complex and operate according to the world of systems thinking as opposed to Cartesian reality. They possess fundamental properties
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in their environment. They are also able to deal with unpredictability, the converse of this being that living technologies may also behave in unpredictable ways. Synthetic biology embodies the principles of complex systems using real-world technologies that can connect with ecology as flexible chemical networks. It is a new kind of
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advantage of developing complex systems is that they participate in a problem-solving process to meet ongoing challenges rather than searching for a preconceived outcome. Synthetic biology can be created using direct top-down interventions where existing systems are modified through instrumentation or using bottom-up approaches that engage with chemical self
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-assembly. Top-Down Synthetic Biology Synthetic biology is often equated with the genetic modification of biological systems as a top-down design practice. Genes are found in a membrane-bound region in
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gene sequences can be mixed and matched to suit the intended application. Venter’s remarkable achievements have heralded a new era in the potential of synthetic biology to rewrite the code of nature and ultimately create new genetic species. In practice, genetic engineering is not as precise as the theory suggests, as
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genetically modified organisms are also heavily regulated owing to concerns about their unknown impact on natural systems, should they contaminate a local environment. Bottom-Up Synthetic Biology The astonishing feats of molecular biology in the second half of the twentieth century have downstaged scientific advances in a broader field of investigation that
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appearance. Just like the Traube Cell, Leduc’s system also seemed to be governed by the movement of water molecules. Leduc also coined the term “synthetic biology” in 1911 and proposed that this field of study would provide insights into the origins of life and cell organization. Over the twentieth century, research
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environmental waste toxins like cyanide and converting them into harmless thiocyanide that can be absorbed into the natural ecological system. Protocell technologies may also support synthetic biology in achieving some of its environmental goals, such as assisting extremophile bacteria to perform under extreme conditions by providing a slow-release system of inorganic
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carbon dioxide from the water into an insoluble form using local minerals. Drawing by GMJ. Protocell technology working in combination with top-down forms of synthetic biology could offer a new kind of approach to shape these natural processes to improve environmental conditions (Hanczyc and Ikegami 2009) and positively impact on human
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health. So a project to sustainably reclaim the city of Venice was proposed by using protocell technology and synthetic biology to grow an artificial limestone reef underneath it and stop the city sinking into the soft mud on which its foundations are built, in a
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Using Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science with Living Technology.” Artificial Life (MIT Press) 16, pp. 1–15. Armstrong, Rachel and Spiller, Neill (2011) “Synthetic Biology: Living Quarters.” Nature 467 (October 21, 2010), pp. 916–918. Hanczyc Martin and Ikegami, Takashi (2009) “Protocells as Smart Agents for Architectural Design.” Technoetic Arts
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/30, pp. 9386–9391. Leduc, Stéphane (1907) Les Bases physiques de la vie. Paris. Schmidt, Marcus, Mahmutoglu, Ismail, Porcar, Manuel, Armstrong, Rachel, et al. (2010) Synthetic Biology Applications in Environmental Biotechnology: Assessing Potential Economic, Environmental and Ethical Ramifications. TARPOL Project Report. Traube, Moritz (1867) Archiv für Anatomie Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, pp
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, Michael Schilling, Alfons self-organization Sententia, Wrye Shapiro, Michael Silver, Lee simulation singularity Stelarc Sterling, Bruce Stock, Gregory substrate independent minds superhuman superintelligence superlongevity symbiogenesis synthetic biology techno-organic Technological Singularity, see singularity technoprogressive Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre telematic therapeutic, see therapy therapy Tipler, Frank tradeoffs transcend transcendence transcendent transgender transgenderism, see
Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature
by Ben Mezrich · 3 Jul 2017
handful of years. But the work could now be done in a fraction of the time. Church had also ventured into the new world of synthetic biology, in which scientists could sequence and then tailor simple life-forms such as bacteria to perform amazing, and sometimes useful, tasks. Bacteria could be programmed
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to glow like Christmas lights, to feed on waste, or even to act as biological fuel. Along with working in multiplex sequencing and synthetic biology, Church had launched another potentially world-changing venture in 2006: the Personal Genome Project. The PGP intended to take the Human Genome Project a step
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job at a start-up in Cambridge called Warp Drive. Warp Drive, one of the many companies that Church had cofounded, was focused on applying synthetic biology to organisms mined from nature for medicinal uses. The company scoured isolated places like the Amazon and the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), then
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material from a frozen carcass, they were going to create the material in a dish and implant it within a living elephant cell. It was synthetic biology, which Quinn did every day at Warp Drive. Unfortunately, that real-world experience hadn’t been enough to get him into graduate school; without the
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to the German magazine Der Spiegel back in January. The interviewer had taken note of a passage in Church’s most recent book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, which had laid out the idea of de-extinction and the science that would allow them to revive the Woolly
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. coli, and Quinn was playing God with a freaking Woolly Mammoth. Sure, it was probably pure fantasy. Walton had met Quinn only once, at a synthetic biology conference in a convention center outside Boston. The kid had struck him as whip smart and superambitious, but he didn’t even have a Ph
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5, 2015. Sfgate.com. Brown, Katrina. “Mammoth Jurassic Park may be under development in Northern Alberta.” March 27, 2014. Imgism.com. Church, George. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. April 2014. Hachette Book Group. Cyranoski, David. “Cloning Comeback.” January 14, 2014. Nature. Dean, Josh. “For 100,000, You Can
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social life of, 57–61 stepbrothers of, 36–37 surprise party for, 221–26 synthesizing human cells and, 244–45 synthesizing stem cells and, 224 synthetic biology and, 75, 79, 257 synthetic uterus and, 226–27 TEDx Talk and, 149 Venus flytrap project of, 38 Warp Drive and, 146, 149, 174 wife
Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined--And Redefined--Nature
by Beth Shapiro · 15 Dec 2021 · 338pp · 105,112 words
wasn’t. THE LAST DECADE HAS SEEN DEVELOPMENT OF POWERFUL BIOTECHNOLOGIES that are at the same time astonishing, encouraging, and pretty scary. Cloning, genome editing, synthetic biology, gene drives—these are words and phrases that promise a different kind of future, but is it a welcome future? On the one hand, technological
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too imprecise to take advantage of this information. A new family of technologies loosely referred to as genetic engineering, and a new field of research—synthetic biology—that takes advantage of genetic engineering technologies, can improve our experimental precision. Using genetic engineering technologies, dog breeders could repair a disease-causing mutation without
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sacrificing breed-specific traits, and cattle breeders could move disease resistance between breeds without also introducing phenotypes that are locally maladaptive. Synthetic biology also expands our experimental horizons. We can move traits that evolved in one species into a different species—one with which it would never naturally
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rodenticides are worth the rewards. The Island Conservation team agrees but is also looking toward the future, where it sees a new, safer solution in synthetic biology. It’s joined forces with an international team of scientists and nonprofit organizations to form the Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents program. The program’s
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is to engineer rats that cannot reproduce by inserting a mutation into their DNA that makes them sterile. As an approach to invasive species management, synthetic biology promises to be more efficient than manual removal and both more humane and safer for the environment than poisoning. It also, however, pushes us deeper
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to the precipice of another major transformation in our relationships with the plants and animals around us. Less clear was how far people working in synthetic biology believe we are from that cliff’s edge. Today’s motivations for using new technologies are the same as those that drove our ancestors: to
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A GMO? It is not an understatement that genetic engineering is a contentious topic in agriculture. Some people are decidedly against using the tools of synthetic biology to modify food crops and animals, citing the “unnaturalness” of the process and its consequent unpredictable riskiness. Others view genetic engineering as nothing more than
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genes that make them immune to papaya ringspot virus. And these are just a few examples of real transgenic organisms. During the early days of synthetic biology, most genetically engineered organisms—even those for which the intended end product was something that could be generated using traditional breeding—were at least a
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, and some diabetics who’d reacted poorly to animal insulin improved when they switched to the human version produced by recombinant organisms. The era of synthetic biology had begun. RECOMBINANT PLANTS Although the medical industry was first to embrace recombinant DNA technology for its commercialization potential, the agricultural industry was not far
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for cultivation and consumption by people and animals. In 2019, the Philippines approved Golden Rice for consumption. While most organisms produced using the tools of synthetic biology are not engineered to solve humanitarian crises, many still have potential for considerable impact. In Uganda, a genetically modified banana that is both enriched in
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in the European Union. These changes hint that the present impasse may not last forever. A path to wider public acceptance of the tools of synthetic biology may also come from outside the agricultural realm, as similar technologies begin to restore ecosystem health and save species from extinction. If and when that
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mammoth cells—cells from Asian elephants—that can be grown in the lab and transformed from nearly mammoth to entirely mammoth using the tools of synthetic biology. To that end, Church initiated a program to use CRISPR to alter the DNA in Asian elephant cells a little bit at a time until
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narrow down the list of candidate genes—genes that may cause immunity to plague. Then scientists will walk through this list, using the tools of synthetic biology to alter the genome one candidate gene at a time, testing the efficacy of each edit until something works. Ultimately, this process will create a
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& Restore, a nonprofit whose goal is to support biotechnological solutions in conservation, received a permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to explore using synthetic biology to save black-footed ferrets from extinction. In collaboration with the San Diego Zoo, ViaGen, and several academic partners, Revive & Restore assessed whether the cell
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, in a threatened species. I predict that, as genomic resources for endangered species become more widely available, synthetic biology will become increasingly important in conservation. We certainly have no shortage of problems to solve. Can synthetic biology transfer resistance to white-nose syndrome from European to American bats? Or help the world’s coral
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literally planting the seeds of the next, and to my mind extremely welcome, technological revolution in conservation. THE TREE THAT REFUSED TO DIE Despite that synthetic biology is being adopted more slowly in the conservation world than in the ag world, conservationists do get to claim one remarkable success story. And not
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ecosystem of the nutritional and structural benefits of a tree that never entirely disappeared. The success of the American chestnut tree demonstrates the power of synthetic biology to help species adapt and survive, even if that means drawing evolutionary innovations from across the tree of life. But what if the conservation problem
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. Instead, he needed something scalable, preferably vertically. The solution, fortunately, had already been invented, the model in fact coming from the very first product of synthetic biology: human insulin. Yeasts are tiny protein factories. Yeasts are fast-growing, single-celled organisms that are easy to keep alive and, unlike bacteria, can make
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tweaking. Free from most evolutionary constraints, we could have mixed and matched modified, synthetic fragrance molecules to create a smell to satisfy any craving. With synthetic biology, we no longer have to remain within the bounds of what we can imagine. And this makes it hard to predict what new tools or
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, while they grew slowly, nonetheless eventually reached a normal not-so-apartment-friendly size. Future engineered pet breeds will probably be better versions of themselves. Synthetic biology will allow us to maximize the traits for which each breed was initially selected—hypoallergenicity, hunting prowess, exceptional olfaction—but without the sloppiness of breeding
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not convinced. If they can make labs and spaniels better at sniffing out cancers, though, I’ll be 100 percent on board. The tools of synthetic biology will also be used to make our pets healthier and to improve our relationships with them. Once scientists have figured out which mutations cause Dalmatians
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can use these data to create, for example, cats that don’t express allergens in their saliva and golden retrievers that don’t shed. With synthetic biology, however, we need not be limited to traits that already exist. What new pets might we create once we reach outside our traditional selective breeding
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microplastics that stick around for hundreds of years. Mulching film made of PHAs will instead biodegrade. Microbial production of PHAs also presents new opportunities for synthetic biology. Today, bacteria produce PHAs on industrial scales by metabolizing sugars and vegetable oils. But as scientists learn more about what regulates and constrains these microbial
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processes. Who knows, microbial engineers may even discover how to harness the energy released when these microbes break the bonds that hold synthetic polymers together. Synthetic biology could literally turn one era’s trash into another era’s treasure. SAVE OUR SOILS Today’s pollution problem may have been an inevitable consequence
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waste, both organic and inorganic, that has to go somewhere. Plastic pollution is part of the problem but certainly not the only environmental challenge that synthetic biology could be harnessed to solve. The global industrialization of goods production and agriculture have polluted our planet’s air and water and degraded arable land
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pesticides exacerbates the problem by changing the mineral composition and pH of the soil and destabilizing the community of microorganisms that maintain healthy soil ecosystems. Synthetic biology has already improved crop production and slowed the deterioration of land under cultivation. Genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant plants reduce the need for tilling by allowing
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like urban rooftop gardens or, perhaps, gardens grown in a human colony on Mars. Our domesticated animals, too, will increasingly benefit from the tools of synthetic biology, and not only from improvements to the nutritional content of their feed. Genetic engineering will, I am hopeful, eventually be allowed to both improve animal
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swine fever, cattle that can’t get mad cow disease, and chickens that can’t transmit bird flu either to one another or to people. Synthetic biology can also create domesticated plants and animals that combat environmental pollution and climate change. Although the Canadian Enviropig project officially ended in 2012, frozen Enviropig
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remains slowed by regulatory hurdles, significant progress is being made with plants. Scientists from the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, for example, are using synthetic biology to optimize plants’ abilities to capture and store carbon by increasing production of suberin, a decay-resistant, carbon-rich protein found in plant roots. The
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develop methods to deploy these biotechnologies on farms and in forests, we as a global society will become increasingly accustomed to using the tools of synthetic biology to shape our world. Our paradoxical relationship with genetic engineering will be resolved out of necessity. We can’t both maintain the comfortable randomness of
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and the fate of other species, perhaps far into the future. We can choose to take advantage of our technologies as they develop, to use synthetic biology to make even more with less, to protect wild species and wild spaces, and to do so in a sustainable way. Or we can reject
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand · 15 Mar 2009 · 422pp · 113,525 words
year, and agricultural biotech by 10 percent a year. Out of nowhere has come a whole new field called synthetic biology. Wikipedia describes it in application terms:Engineers view biology as a technology. Synthetic Biology includes the broad redefinition and expansion of biotechnology, with the ultimate goals of being able to design and build
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to join the “synbio” party, ban it, or keep ignoring it. In 2007 Jim Thomas, from the anti-GE group ETC, wrote a survey of synthetic biology titled “Extreme Genetic Engineering.” It is well researched, fair, inclusive, and only moderately alarmist. It does conclude: “In keeping with the Precautionary Principle, ETC Group
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they meet up with the homies who’ve been keeping it real for a billion years or so. One benefit of the anticipated importance of synthetic biology is a growing profusion of eclectic organizations and meetings designed to include all potential stakeholders and players right from the start—bioethicists, environmental activists, biosecurity
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, and investors, along with the bioscientists and bioengineers. Great names the organizations have, too—SYNBIOSAFE (in Europe), SynBERC (Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center), International Consortium for Polynucleotide Synthesis, and the Industry Association of Synthetic Biology. The extensive public discussion called for by the ETC group is in fact happening. In 2008, for example, Drew
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Endy invited ETC’s Jim Thomas to publicly debate with him about synthetic biology, and I got to stage the event in San Francisco. “I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer,” said Endy. “Powerful technology
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in an unjust world is likely to exacerbate the injustice,” said Thomas. At about the same time, a New York Times reporter visiting the Synthetic Biology Working Group at MIT noticed on their to-do list: “Grow a house.” Now is the time to ask: What are the most environmentally useful
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things that synthetic biology could do for human food production? Do we make ever finer adjustments to existing agriculture, create new crop plants, start over with algal vats, reinvent
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Long-term Thinking I run for Long Now in San Francisco. We had one such debate on the Greening of nuclear power and another on synthetic biology. Whichever debater goes first holds forth for fifteen minutes and then is interviewed for ten minutes by the second debater, who has to conclude by
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the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis, assembly, and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology.” Decades ago I suspect that environmentalists would have risen up in outrage and alarm against technology like Venter’s, but I have found them surprisingly
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noncommittal about synthetic biology, even while they continue to complain about transgenic crops. While the uproar about nuclear power persists (though it is fading into a more primary focus
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farming and pest control and plant toxicity and precautionary principle and precision of recombinant DNA research and religion and second generation of stories related to synthetic biology and violence and Genetic Glass Ceilings (Gressel) genetic inertia genetic use restriction technology (GURT) gene transfer genome, human geoengineering asteroid deflection and biochar and carbon
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Content of the Atmosphere” (Conservation Foundation) Inconvenient Truth, An Independent India genetic engineering and Green Revolution and nuclear power and slums and Industry Association of Synthetic Biology informal economy infrastructure insect resistance insulin integral fast reactors integrated pest management intelligent design Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA
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subaks submergence tolerance subscription farms subsistence farming sugar beets Sullivan, Nicholas Sunstein, Cass SunUp papayas Swaminathan, Monkombu Sambasivan Sweden sweet potatoes Switzerland SynBERC SYNBIOSAFE Syngenta synthetic biology Synthetic Biology Working Group Synthetic Genomics Taverne, Dick taxonomy Tending the Wild (Anderson) “Ten Ways We Get the Odds Wrong,” “terminator” gene terraces terra preta soil Tetlock
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 16 Oct 2017 · 398pp · 105,032 words
Could Be Any of Your Stuff? 6. ROBOTIC CONSTRUCTION: Build Me a Rumpus Room, Metal Servant! 7. AUGMENTED REALITY: An Alternative to Fixing Reality 8. SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: Kind of Like Frankenstein, Except the Monster Spends the Whole Book Dutifully Making Medicine and Industrial Inputs SECTION 3 You, Soonish 9. PRECISION MEDICINE: Everything
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fecal matter. “Re-pooping,” if you will. They’re working on that. And the project (run by Clemson University’s Dr. Mark Blenner) is titled “Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel” (emphasis added). Happily, as far as we know
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and schizophrenic episodes. We remain a bit skeptical but entirely satisfied as we imagine what was done to those starry-eyed young college students. 8. Synthetic Biology Kind of Like Frankenstein, Except the Monster Spends the Whole Book Dutifully Making Medicine and Industrial Inputs We humans have been tinkering with biology for
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be able to alter human DNA, perhaps even in currently living humans. We are going beyond the realm of natural biology, into what is called synthetic biology. To understand how all this might happen, you need to know a little about DNA. Let’s do a quick rundown. DNA In all multicellular
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a chunk that says to make a certain chemical—can’t we change that chunk of code to something else? This is the promise of synthetic biology. If you can create new pieces of DNA and insert them where you like into an organism, you can create biology that never would have
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help kill off their own kind. Or even just general purpose organisms awaiting our instructions. It’s life, made to order. Where Are We Now? Synthetic biology as we currently know it began in the 1970s. The early methods were complex and cumbersome. Still, a lot of what we take for granted
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. In any case, malaria is already developing resistance to artemisinin-based drugs in some regions. Thanks a lot, evolution. So what if we could use synthetic biology to stop people from getting malaria in the first place? The mosquitoes that carry malaria and transmit it to humans often become resistant to pesticides
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might have fewer kids, you ginger-nosed freak, but all of them will have the selfish gene. So gene drives mean that you can impose synthetic biology on an entire wild population. Dr. George Church of Harvard and others were able to put multiple gene drives for malaria resistance into mosquitoes. That
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’s like a nightlight that runs on poison. Potentially, a technique like this could be used to find and monitor toxic environments. Thanks to advanced synthetic biology, you can already write bacterial programs that are more complex than just “Glow if you detect toxins.” A major hurdle for this field is that
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. Yellow could mean lead. Basically, if you come upon a mysterious cove where nature enrobes herself in prismatic illumination, don’t drink the water. Generalizing Synthetic Biology All these things are neat, but they’re also really hard. There have been ways to modify genetics directly since the 1970s, but the methods
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of us who aren’t quite as excited by a secretive genius creating a proprietary form of life, there is also a grassroots approach to synthetic biology. A competition called iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) happens annually, and pits students (including high school students!) against one another to see who can create
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to by people who did not participate in iGEM as well. In other words—open-source biology Legos. You can order these parts and do synthetic biology research if you have the equipment, which is becoming increasingly available at “biohacker” spaces. So your neighbor could be the next person to solve our
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was “information wants to be free.” That sounds nice, but it’s a problem if the information is how to make smallpox from scratch. Ultimately, synthetic biology should give humans the power to have organisms made to order. As that technology becomes cheap, the ability to bring back diseases for which we
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mostly gone.* This disease may have killed half a billion people in the twentieth century, and most living people have no immunity to it. If synthetic biology became easy, what would stop a rogue biologist (or just an angry geek) from bringing it back? Scarier still is the possibility that a disease
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we discuss using CRISPR-Cas9 to fix genetic disorders in human beings. Most of us are cool with the idea of using the techniques of synthetic biology to cure diseases in adults, but some scientists are also proposing using CRISPR-Cas9 to cure diseases in human embryos, making changes that would be
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of bioengineers, you might appreciate that GMOs can also give us greater access to medicines and clean fuel. As we learn more, the line between synthetic biology and nanotechnology becomes meaningless. We are pursuing smaller and smaller machines, and biology just happens to have had an extra four billion years to learn
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can make 172. The number of possible proteins it could make includes many that have never been made in nature. This is the promise of synthetic biology—not just changes to life as we know it, but the creation of life as we might imagine it. Nota Bene on De-extinction Somewhere
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from going extinct. This is what I see as the power of this approach. We don’t have cold-adapted elephants, but we could use synthetic biology to make them. In that way we could replace this missing component of this ecosystem and reestablish these rich grasslands that used to live in
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DNA from them, but it would have been something that lived contemporaneously with dinosaurs and was the ancestor of all living birds. We could use synthetic biology to gradually swap out modern bird (living dinosaur) genome pieces with this ancestral computationally inferred bird (dinosaur).” Well, we didn’t spend our childhoods dreaming
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chapter doing here in the graveyard? In an earlier version of this book, mirror organisms were going to be a subsection in our chapter on synthetic biology. After some reading, we were a little confused and we had some doubts about the utility of mirror organisms. Making entirely new types of beings
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. Science, April 10, 2014. sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/cost-skyrockets-united-states-share-iter-fusion-project. Church, George M., and Regis, Ed. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Clayton, T. A., Baker, D., Lindon, J. C., Everett, J. R., and Nicholson, J. K
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, 1987. nytimes.com/1987/08/16/magazine/in-the-trenches-of-science.html. Glieder, A., Kubicek, C. P., Mattanovich, D., Wilhschi, B., and Sauer, M. Synthetic Biology. New York: Springer, 2015. Glover, Asha. “NRC’s ‘All or Nothing’ Licensing Process Doesn’t Work, Former Commissioner Says.” Morning Consult.com, April 29, 2016
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into the Future: The History and Technology of Rocket Planes. New York: Springer, 2012. ———. Space Tethers and Space Elevators. New York: Copernicus, 2009. Peplow, Mark. “Synthetic Biology’s First Malaria Drug Meets Market Resistance: Nature News & Comment.” Nature 530, no. 7591 (2016):389–90. Perez, Sarah. “Recognizr: Facial Recognition Coming to Android
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52, supp. 3 (2011):s253–s258. Polka, Jessica K., and Silver, Pamela A. “A Tunable Protein Piston That Breaks Membranes to Release Encapsulated Cargo.” ACS Synthetic Biology 5, no. 4 (2016):303–11. Post, Hannah. “Reusability: The Key to Making Human Life Multi-Planetary.” SpaceX. June 10, 2015. spacex.com/news/2013
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–55, 268–69 medicine, 221 augmented reality in, 179, 185–86 bioprinting and, see bioprinting origami robots in, 106–7 programmable matter in, 127–28 synthetic biology in, 198–207 see also precision medicine Meetup.com, 175, 179 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 289–90, 291 Meissner effect, 326 meltdown, 91–92 memory, 220, 304
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swarm bots, 119–20, 121–22 SWARMORPH project, 113–15 swarm robots, 149–53 switchgrass, 209–10 Switzerland, 22n SYMBRION, 115 Syn 3.0, 215 synthetic biology, 190–225 benefits of, 220–21 concerns about, 216–19 environmental monitoring by, 210–12 fuel production by, 208–10 generalizing of, 212–14 grassroots
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approach to, 216 “Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel” project, 160 synthetic materials, 101–2 syphilis, 230n
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper · 15 Jan 2020 · 285pp · 86,858 words
silicon and wires and superconductors; we can use the same approach, but with living matter, and engineer a living organism. This is the goal of synthetic biology: to produce a set of engineering and design rules, and to create microscopic ‘off-the-shelf’ modules for different components of the cell, that will
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fewer genes, and to at least know the function of more of them. It is a taste of the difficulty of the whole field of synthetic biology: everything is much more complicated than you imagine. $ $ $ A BACTERIUM IS ONE THING, but what we’d prefer to create is a complex cell. Bacteria
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human happiness than any organism on the planet, through baking, brewing and wine making,’ says Ian Paulsen, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology in Sydney, Australia. ‘It is truly a work-horse organism. It’s safe, we eat it, no problem, it’s not a pathogen, and we
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mouse or human cell lines for personalised medicine and drug development. Paul Freemont, at Imperial College London, is one of the world’s leaders in synthetic biology. He’s already had the same umbrella idea we promoted for bringing together researchers in artificial intelligence, launching the Global Biofoundries Alliance in 2019. A
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brings together some 27 international institutions, including from the UK, US, Japan, Singapore, China, Australia, Denmark and Canada, with the aim of accelerating research in synthetic biology. We should add our own investment to the Alliance to further accelerate their work, at the same time making it all open-access and shareable
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IS THIS POTENTIAL that has proponents claiming that in this century we will start to get real control over the fundamentals of biology, and that synthetic biology is the field that will make the most profound changes to the way we live. To do this, we will need to define the set
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yeast. The aim is to soften up the public for having synthetic organisms as part of our lives, and to show that the concepts of synthetic biology are marketable, especially for high-value products such as fragrance. The making of the beer itself can easily become more efficient, too. Flowers from the
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daily lives, from running shoes and clothing to sunglasses, lipstick and aspirin. We need to make these things without using oil, and the tools of synthetic biology will allow us to. I think that along the way the ultimate questions will start to dissolve. When Venter’s group took a synthetic genome
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should take great care to protect existing life on the planet: that is the core reason we’re embarking on the path laid out by synthetic biology. As we become able to build life forms, we will start to see that life is not something that is conveyed by a vital force
Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter · 16 Oct 2013 · 285pp · 78,180 words
-century, made by a range of extraordinarily gifted individuals in laboratories throughout the world. I will provide an overview of these developments in molecular and synthetic biology, in part to pay tribute to this epic enterprise, in part to acknowledge the contributions made by key leading scientists. My aim is not to
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offer a comprehensive history of synthetic biology but to shed a little light on the power of that extraordinarily cooperative venture we call science. DNA, as digitized information, is not only accumulating
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dawn of an era of biological design. Humankind is about to enter a new phase of evolution. 2 Chemical Synthesis as Proof This type of synthetic biology, a grand challenge to create artificial life, also challenges our definition-theory of life. If life is nothing more than a self-sustaining chemical system
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the inherited blood condition beta-thalassemia. Genetic engineering has today evolved to be more commonly known as synthetic biology. The distinction between molecular biology and synthetic biology is blurred, and in most uses there is no actual distinction. “Synthetic biology” just sounds sexier, and in the same way, “systems biology” has replaced physiology, and some good
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of code,6 and over the decades engineers have developed smart debugging programs to aid in finding faults. Vladimir Noskov, a staff scientist in the Synthetic Biology & Bioenergy Group at the JCVI, Maryland, was our resident yeast guru. Noskov had graduated from St. Petersburg State University, Russia, and then went on to
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suggested that the synthesis of living cells become a national goal for America.15 Over the past few years we have seen the rise of synthetic biology, an emerging phase of research in molecular biology. The field represents a marked shift away from the reductionist experimentation that, over the decades, has been
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life, learning which components are crucial, which are not, and teasing apart how they work together. This will be a boon for the field of synthetic biology by expanding the range of biological constituents, software subroutines, and circuits that we can develop. 10 Life by Design A new variety raised by man
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ability to grow and reproduce.11 The future of biological research will be based to a great extent on the combination of computer science and synthetic biology. We can get a fascinating view of this future from a series of contests that culminate in a remarkable event that takes place each year
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with a delay, or counters, where an event triggers the production of a protein, which in turn activates another protein generator. In this way, the synthetic-biology student can construct a hierarchy, starting with parts and moving to devices and then systems. As a result of their work, we now have cellular
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resveratrol, a chemical found in wine that is thought by some to have health benefits. The competition is very aware of the societal aspects of synthetic biology and the need to have non-scientists understand and accept their attempts to tinker with the machinery of life. The competitors are deeply involved, as
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can recognize a particular sequence. With just six fingers, you can target any particular gene. This important piece of biological machinery has been adapted for synthetic biology by Boston University biomedical engineers Ahmad S. Khalil and James J. Collins. They have created novel zinc-finger designs that are intended to bind with
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addition of new functions to proteins and making cells resistant to viral infections. But most important of all, a systematic exploration of the potential of synthetic biology will deepen our understanding of fundamental biology. With such capabilities, we can expand our knowledge of biology thousands of times faster than is possible today
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, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and the Department of Homeland Security. Reports on synthetic biology have been issued by many bodies, such as the U.S. Department of Energy and the NSABB. Public consultations have been sponsored, as well, not
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together at the OECD/U.S. National Academies/UK Royal Society Symposium, in July 2009, and considered the opportunities, threats, and wider questions posed by synthetic biology, such as what it means to be human. From any perspective, the discussions concerning precisely what it means to create synthetic life have been long
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equally to our efforts to alter the basic machinery of life by substituting “synthetic life form” for “robot.” Emerging technologies, whether in robotics or in synthetic biology, can be a double-edged sword. Today there is much debate about “dual-use” technologies—as, for instance, in a study published in 2012 by
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to discuss the conundrum that powerful technology cuts both ways. But it is important not to lose sight of the opportunities that this research presents. Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population, such as food security, sustainable energy, and health. Over time, research in
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synthetic biology may lead to new products that will produce clean energy and help quell pollution; help us grow crops on more marginal land; and provide more
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programmed cells to self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage. Clearly, this apparently limitless potential raises many unsettling questions, not least because synthetic biology frees the design of life from the shackles of evolution and opens up new vistas for life. It is crucial that we invest in underpinning
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technologies, science, education, and policy in order to ensure the safe and efficient development of synthetic biology. Opportunities for public debate and discussion on this topic must be sponsored, and the lay public must engage with the relevant issues. I hope that
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nothing we have encountered before. The political, societal, and scientific backdrop is continually evolving and has shifted a great deal since the days of Asilomar. Synthetic biology also relies on the skills of scientists who have little experience in biology, such as mathematicians and electrical engineers. As shown by the efforts of
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working synthetic genome, when the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a report in December 201040 entitled New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies. This document opened with a letter from President Barack Obama that emphasized how vital it was that, as a society, we consider
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and responsibility, democratic deliberation, and justice and fairness. If those principles were diligently used to illuminate and guide public-policy choices as we advanced with synthetic biology, the commission concluded, we could be confident that the technology could be developed in a responsible and ethical manner. Among its recommendations to the president
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, the commission said that the government should undertake a coordinated evaluation of public funding for synthetic-biology research, including studies on techniques for risk assessment and risk reduction and on ethical and social issues, so as to reveal noticeable gaps, if one
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self-regulation, it also urged it to be vigilant about the possibilities of do-it-yourself synthetic biology being carried out in what it called “noninstitutional settings.” One problem facing anyone who casts a critical eye over synthetic biology is that the field is evolving so quickly. For that reason, assessments of the technology
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reference virus, co-infection in eggs with standard backbone viruses, and isolation and purification of the vaccine seeds. By taking advantage of major advancements in synthetic biology and cell-based manufacturing, and by introducing the exciting concept of digital-to-biological conversion, we and Novartis have produced better quality vaccines in fewer
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more rapid future pandemic responses but a more reliable supply of pandemic influenza vaccines. While vaccines are the best means of prevention against pandemics, and synthetic biology has helped us to make them more effective, we are now facing another major threat from infection, as one of humankind’s most important weapons
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. “Ethical considerations in synthesizing a minimal genome.” Science 286, no. 5447 (December 10, 1999): pp. 2087–90. 20. George Church and Ed Regis. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012), p. 9. 21. Cho, et. al, “Ethical Considerations in Synthesizing a Minimal Genome.” 22. Kenneth
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Mail, June 3, 2010. www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1279988/Artificial-life-created-Craig-Venter—wipe-humanity.html. 8. New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, Washington D.C., December 2010. www.bioethics.gov. 9. “Vatican greets development of first
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(2001): pp. 751–55. 31. Geoff Baldwin, Travis Bayer, Robert Dickinson, Tom Ellis, Paul S. Freemont, Richard I. Kitney, Karen Polizzi, and Guy-Bart Stan. Synthetic Biology: A Primer (London: Imperial College Press, 2012), p. 142. 32. Mansi Srivastava, Oleg Simakov, Jarrod Chapman, Bryony Fahey, Marie E. A. Gauthier, Therese Mitros, Gemma
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. Fero, Harley H. McAdams, and Lucy Shapiro. “The essential genome of a bacterium.” Molecular Systems Biology 7 (2011): article number 528. 12. Baldwin, et. al, Synthetic Biology. 13. T. S. Gardner, C. R. Cantor, and J. J. Collins. “Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli.” Nature 403, no. 6767 (January
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Jeff Hasty. “A synchronized quorum of genetic clocks.” Nature 463 (January 21, 2010): pp. 326–30. 16. See www.clothocad.org. 17. Baldwin, et. al, Synthetic Biology, p. 121. 18. Karmella A. Haynes, Marian L. Broderick, Adam D. Brown, Trevor L. Butner, James O. Dickson, W. Lance Harden, Lane H. Heard, Eric
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(2008). doi:10.1186/1754-1611-2-8. 19. Parasight, Imperial College London. http://2010.igem.org/Team:Imperial_College_London. 20. Baldwin, et. al, Synthetic Biology, p. 121. 21. Laura Adam, Michael Kozar, Gaelle Letort, Olivier Mirat, Arunima Srivastava, Tyler Stewart, Mandy L Wilson, and Jean Peccoud. “Strengths and limitations of
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–14. 27. Ahmad S. Khalil, Timothy K. Lu, Caleb J. Bashor, Cherie L. Ramirez, Nora C. Pyenson, J. Keith Joung, and James J. Collins. “A synthetic biology framework for programming eukaryotic transcription functions.” Cell 150, no. 3 (August 3, 2012): pp. 647–58. 28. Ibid. 29. Synthetic Genomics: Options for Governance accessible
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online at www.synbiosafe.eu/uploads///pdf/Synthetic%20Genomics%20Options%20for%20Governance.pdf. 30. See “Playing democs games to explore synthetic biology,” Edinethics, at www.edinethics.co.uk/synbio/synbio%20democs%20report.pdf; and Nuffield Council on Bioethics at www.nuffieldbioethics.org/emerging-biotechnologies. 31. “Bridging science
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Research in an Age of Terrorism: Confronting the ‘Dual Use’ Dilemma (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004). 37. Wohlsen, Biopunk. 38. Baldwin, et. al, Synthetic Biology, p. 139. 39. There are many formulations. See Kenneth R. Foster, Paolo Vecchia, and Michael H. Repacholi. “Science and the precautionary principle.” Science 288, no
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. 5468 (2000): pp. 979–81. 40. www.bioethics.gov/sites/default/files/news/PCSBI-Synthetic-Biology-Report-12.16.10.pdf. 41. Isaac Asimov. “Introduction.” In The Rest of the Robots (New York: Doubleday, 1964). Chapter 11 1. Arthur Conan Doyle
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, 157–9 natural, 155 See also climate change; temperature environmentalists, 128 epigenetics, 18 ethics, 151–9 five guiding principles, 156 New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies, 156 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, 156 review board for synthetic life, 79, 151 and science, 80–2 Evans
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: In the Light of New Knowledge (Le Dantec), 11 Nature’s Robots, 37 Neanderthal genome, 87 New Atlantis (Bacon), 10 New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies, 156–8 The New York Times, 128 Newton, Isaac, epigraph, 179 Nirenberg, Marshall Warren, 30–1, 49, 61, 135, 165 nitrogen as
Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code
by Matthew Cobb · 6 Jul 2015 · 608pp · 150,324 words
to manipulate the genetic code to create organisms containing new genes, including genes from other species.4 New terms have been coined – biotechnology, genetic engineering, synthetic biology – but they all ultimately describe the use of genetic manipulation to alter living organisms.5 Many drugs, including hormones, are now produced by harnessing the
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the indirect evidence of the existence of dark matter and dark energy would be required for this hypothesis to be taken seriously. * The potential for synthetic biology is enormous. Scientists are already able to integrate unnatural amino acids into proteins, for example by manipulating enzymatic machinery associated with an ‘amber’ stop codon
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authors made clear that their aim is to create a system in which unnatural base pairs will code for unnatural amino acids. The possibilities for synthetic biology – using living cells to produce new molecules – are almost endless. It is inevitable that these astonishing developments in our ability to manipulate the essential elements
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a pristine environment. In this respect, as others, science and technology pose questions; they do not necessarily provide the answers. * Despite the optimism that surrounds synthetic biology and genetic engineering, ever since the first appearance of these techniques in the 1970s scientists have consistently expressed concern about the potential dangers. With the
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53, 59–60 biosecurity 280–1, 285 biotechnology DNA fingerprinting as 231 fermentation as 268 genetically modified organisms 269–71, 284 regulation of 284–5 synthetic biology 277 Birney, Ewan 242, 247, 271 bits (binary digits) 27, 78 Blair, Tony 233 ‘blender experiments’ 68 Boivin, André on DNA leading to RNA 71
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deamination 290 methylation 256–8 see also pyrimidines D D-2 section, NRDC 21, 27, 77 Dancoff, Sydney 81, 85 dangers regulation and 284–5 synthetic biology and genetic engineering 279–80, 284 of using metaphors 313 xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs) 275, 285 Darwin, Charles 138, 216, 260 data storage using DNA
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, Walter 3–4, 60 Svedberg, Theodor ‘The’ 39 symbiotic origin, mitochondria 224 Symons, Robert 279 Symposium on submicroscopical morphology in protoplasm 96–7 syncytin 245 synthetic biology 277–9, 313–14 ‘synthetic genetics’ 275 systematic invention phase 309–10 systems biology 307 Szathmáry, Eörs 299 Szilárd, Leo acknowledged by Monod and Jacob
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe · 6 Dec 2016 · 254pp · 76,064 words
Engineered Machine, or iGEM, competition.14 Most of the researchers were still working on their degrees. iGEM isn’t your traditional science fair, but then, synthetic biology—creating new genetic sequences to program living things with new properties and functions, like new forms of chocolate or a yeast that produces an antimalarial
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MIT scientist who helped start iGEM. “Science won’t work that way in the future, and synthetic biology doesn’t operate that way now.15 Having emerged in the era of open-source software and Wikileaks, synthetic biology is becoming an exercise in radical collaboration between students, professors, and a legion of citizen scientists
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who call themselves biohackers. Emergence has made its way into the lab. As far as disciplines go, synthetic biology is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to impact humanity in ways we can scarcely imagine. Molecular computers could pick up where
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predict the future of a scientific field,” says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard and MIT. Church is often criticized for hyping the field of synthetic biology—he has promoted the idea of “de-extincting” the Neanderthal and the woolly mammoth17—but in person he seems less a provocateur than a realist
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. Asked whether some of the more outlandish ideas around synthetic biology were far-fetched, he shrugged and pointed out that no one could have predicted the emergence of an easy, high-speed technology that would allow
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biohacking labs springing up around the world are called. “The science is moving very quickly,” says Church, who pioneered many of the techniques employed in synthetic biology. “Many wonders might come to pass well within our lifetimes.… Or,” he says with a mordant smile, “some bored thirteen-year-old could engineer a
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a transition to new ways of generating discoveries or promoting innovation. Call it citizen science or crowdsourcing or open innovation, but what the rise of synthetic biology shows is that soon we’ll simply call it standard operating procedure. The triumph of emergence—expertise and knowledge emerging out of distributed networks like
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collaborators from this era, Drew Endy and Ron Weiss, would go on to make crucial contributions to the development of synthetic biology. (That is why Knight is sometimes called the “father of synthetic biology.”) Like Knight, Endy and Weiss were drawn to the intoxicating prospect of applying the principles of programming to genetics, and
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’s fair to say we were rank amateurs at this point,” Knight says with a laugh. “But we were learning fast.” As the millennium dawned, synthetic biology was an engineering discipline in theory more than practice. A small but growing number of computer scientists, engineers, and physicists were recognizing the revolutionary applications
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engineering. With LEGOs, you don’t have to be an architect to express a unique vision of the intersection between form and space. And while synthetic biology remains in its infancy, it already bears the unmistakable imprint of this egalitarian vision. Knight, Endy, and Rettberg didn’t so much “create” or “launch
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conditions by which it might grow organically, fed by people and ideas they couldn’t begin to anticipate. Far more than any field before it, synthetic biology has been the product of emergence. This isn’t unexpected, says David Sun Kong, a promising young scientist who participated in some of the first
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. “The pioneers were civil engineers, computer scientists, and electrical engineers.” The pioneers might not appreciate the analogy, but just as with individual slime mold cells, synthetic biology is the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. By lowering the bar of entry and emulating the context of play, Knight
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all. What Knight, Weiss, and Endy were proposing was much more than genetic engineering, which involves making fairly minor tweaks to a cell’s DNA. Synthetic biology, as it was now called, involved building sequences of DNA from scratch. The biologists thought they were amateurs and the engineers thought they were nuts
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a lack of parts. The previous year he had written a paper proposing a system of BioBricks—LEGO-like parts that could be used in synthetic biology.15 But he and Endy were still fine-tuning the proposed standard, and “it had very little uptake at that point.” He pauses. “Which was
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when a couple of computer nerds get hold of a cell culture and a benchtop laboratory, you’re not far from the truth. In fact, synthetic biology didn’t come from a biologist at all. As Knight says, “Everything interesting happens because one field has crashed into another.” Fittingly enough, around the
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build a house or a dinosaur or a banana. Yet the lack of standards—the fact that every researcher who had begun to dabble in synthetic biology was, in a sense, using a screw of a different thread—was slowing the growth of the nascent discipline. “A field only progresses when it
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playful curricula in January, as part of the Independent Activities Period (IAP).20 So in January 2003, Knight and his colleagues hosted a course in synthetic biology. “We taught them how to design biological systems. The idea was, we would build systems that exhibited ‘oscillatory behavior,’ like a bacteria that turned on
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, eventually contributing tens of millions of dollars to Google’s bottom line.5 This approach isn’t limited to organizations in manufacturing or software development. Synthetic biology applies practice over theory to engineering living cells. Educational systems that allow children to engage in active learning, using tools like Scratch to learn the
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same group of young synthetic biologists whose tuberculosis detection kit we profiled in chapter one, conducted a study of the effects of gender diversity on synthetic biology projects. Their first discovery was hardly encouraging—only 37 percent of synthetic biologists were women, a number consistent with related scientific disciplines. But when they
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.genome.gov/11006943. 20 “MIT Independent Activities Period (IAP),” http://web.mit.edu/iap/. 21 “iGEM 2004—The 2004 Synthetic Biology Competition—SBC04,” http://2004.igem.org/index.cgi. 22 Anselm Levskaya et al., “Synthetic Biology: Engineering Escherichia Coli to See Light,” Nature 438, no. 7067 (November 24, 2005): 441–42, doi:10.1038
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What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson · 17 Sep 2024 · 588pp · 160,825 words
Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson · 2 Jan 2005 · 541pp · 146,445 words
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier · 6 May 2013 · 510pp · 120,048 words
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk · 22 Jan 2014 · 337pp · 101,281 words
The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle · 4 Sep 2019 · 374pp · 111,284 words
No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika · 12 May 2015 · 389pp · 87,758 words
The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett · 20 Aug 2014 · 267pp · 82,580 words
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
by Bregman, Rutger · 9 Mar 2025 · 181pp · 72,663 words
The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman · 1 Jan 2013 · 514pp · 152,903 words
Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science
by Ian Sample · 1 Jan 2010 · 310pp · 89,838 words
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall · 19 Mar 2019 · 393pp · 115,217 words
A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
by Adrian Hon · 5 Oct 2020 · 340pp · 101,675 words
From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll · 15 Jan 2010 · 634pp · 185,116 words
The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna · 5 Feb 2019 · 496pp · 131,938 words
Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings · 2 Oct 2013 · 326pp · 97,089 words
When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance · 8 May 2023 · 558pp · 175,965 words
Growth: A Reckoning
by Daniel Susskind · 16 Apr 2024 · 358pp · 109,930 words
WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly · 9 Oct 2017 · 561pp · 157,589 words
The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 5 Oct 2020 · 583pp · 182,990 words
Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al · 11 Apr 2022 · 300pp · 81,293 words
Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi · 28 Dec 2017
You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between
by Lee Gutkind · 13 Aug 2012 · 347pp · 90,234 words
In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee · 10 Mar 2025 · 393pp · 146,371 words
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab · 7 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words
Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap
by Graham Allison · 29 May 2017 · 518pp · 128,324 words
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham · 27 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words
The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent
by Vivek Wadhwa · 1 Oct 2012 · 103pp · 24,033 words
Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
by Melanie Swan · 22 Jan 2014 · 271pp · 52,814 words
The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani · 20 Feb 2024 · 262pp · 69,328 words
The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone · 18 Feb 2020 · 304pp · 80,143 words
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh · 14 Apr 2018 · 286pp · 87,401 words
Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig · 15 Nov 2004 · 297pp · 103,910 words
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell · 2 May 2022 · 411pp · 119,022 words