Do you expect scientists will be able to use similar tools to engineer human cells in the future?

Oh, sure. They could build replacement organs. They could take a stem cell from a person and engineer it to go down a particular path and differentiate into a liver or a kidney or something like that. It's going to be an important area.

Why do you enjoy this work?

I'm an engineer at heart, and I like to be able to manipulate things and to predict a priori what kind of effect it's going to have on the cell. So it's this aspect of being able to design, build your design, and then see how close the result is to the original prediction.


You've helped set up an information-sharing system that the researchers call open-source biology. What is the goal?

It's really taking a lesson from the high-tech industry. They share the patents on the low-level stuff or they don't patent them at all—they just give them away as open source and patent only the high-level stuff, the big stuff. The pharmaceutical industry and the biotech industry patent everything and hold those patents exclusively so that no one else can use those patents. When it takes a billion dollars to develop a drug, you need some assurance that you're going to be able to keep your intellectual property for a while and pay that back. I fully appreciate that. But if you're going to develop drugs for the developing world, you can't afford to pay those royalties. And so we say: "Look, nobody's really going to make any serious money off of these small components. The money is in the big applications. So let's make a lot of small components and have them available as open source to everyone." People can still patent the big applications—a lot of integrated components—but let's at least have the components available as open source so everybody gets equal access, and that will further the field of engineering biology.

Does that kind of openness create a risk that someone might use synthetic biology to create a biological weapon?

If I wanted to do evil and do harm, I probably would not choose biology to do it. It's damn complicated. Anyone sophisticated enough to know how to use these biological components that we're making freely available would have been able to do it anyway, to some extent. And by making these components available, we will also help those people who are trying to detect evildoers using biology. A lot of people have been thinking about this. Do we need to regulate the industry? Do we need to have a professional licensing organization so we license people essentially to be synthetic biologists? If we choose to regulate the industry, we have to be willing to pay the price for that, which means there won't be cheap antimalarial drugs developed and there won't be potential biofuels developed and other drugs for other diseases and cleaning up the environment and all the things that come from this area.

What would you say to people who think you're playing God, tampering with nature?

It's easy to say those kinds of things when you don't have malaria. It's quite another thing when you're ill and don't have the means to come by effective, safe drugs. I was raised on a farm. When I grew up, we didn't have genetically engineered crops. We had hybrids, but those were achieved in the traditional way of just crossing corn, and we used a tremendous number of pesticides on the crops. I mean, this is nasty pollution, right? Roundup Ready corn, for instance, has been genetically engineered to allow farmers to apply far fewer herbicides to the fields. In many ways, it's so much better for the environment. If we use it in the right way, we can actually make the world a better place. It's the same thing with the kind of chemistry we're trying to do. If we can do this chemistry inside the cell in a vat filled with a medium that you can drink, that's so much better for the environment than using a lot of harmful chemicals that could be spilled.

What are your plans for getting your synthetic artemisinin into mass production and out to the people who need it?

We hope that we can launch this in late 2009 or early 2010. That's a really aggressive timescale, but we are working so hard on this. You know, the really nice thing about getting funding from the Gates Foundation is that once they decide to do something, they put a lot of resources into it and do it right. We have a lot of very smart people working on it, and I'll tell you, they are extremely motivated because it's just the greatest project to be working on. If all goes well, their work will be used in the field to save lives in a very short time.

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