This Is the Future of Medicine | Origins: The Journey of Humankind
The collective wisdom of all of humankind led to the medical advancements that made us modern. We're attacking the things that harm us on a microscopic level. We're finding new ways of preventing disease every day. The question is, how far can we go? What seems to be fantasy and sci-fi in the world of health and the human body is actually just right around the corner. Imagine having your own personal catalog of replacement tissue sitting on a shelf.
We can tweak a skin cell and turn it into a brain cell and rebuild your body parts. That's the horizon, and it's not far away. It's not 50 years away; it's going on right now. This lab is to genetics what the printing press was to written work. Here in this lab, we synthesized DNA. A lot of people have heard about the Human Genome Project, where DNA was coded, but here what we're doing is actually building pieces of DNA.
The DNA code in every cell is not only a source of information—for example, your eye color, your hair color, height—but it's also sort of control of different processes in your body. Things like regenerating cells at different speeds in different parts of your body. It's an incredible, incredible technology. Our overarching goal is making DNA ubiquitous, to make it available to everyone.
The things that we're working on right now we know can be game-changing: better, more specific drugs, personalized drugs. We're enabling a lot of different types of projects, but I always like to think about the people that are studying cancer. There's been a lot of cancer in my family. Cancer is a very dynamic disease, but if you can accelerate research, then you can actually create a designer therapy for a specific tumor. The faster you can do that, the earlier you can intervene, and that's everything in cancer.
In the world of synthetic biology, it's either going to be the thing that saves humanity or the thing that kills humanity. So, we're part of an organization that self-polices in the industry. We have different protocols to ensure that none of us will design and build something harmful to humanity. I think as we think about medicine, this is the next revolution in medicine: this is the ability to really create personalized medicine. It's an opportunity to help humankind.