Ray Kurzweil - Reprogramming Biology

Hailed “a restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, Ray Kurzweil is one of the best known and most provocative thinkers on technology's future impact.

Biology is now in the early stages of an historic transition to an information science, while at the same time gaining the tools to reprogram these ancient information processes. Few of us go more than a few months without changing the software programs we use in our devices, yet the 23,000 software programs inside our bodies called genes have not changed appreciably in thousands of years (although recent research suggests that a few have changed as recently as a few hundred years ago).

Medicine used to be hit or miss. We would find something through “drug discovery” that
performed an apparently useful function such as lowering blood pressure, but lacking effective models of how these interventions worked, many of these drugs turned out to be crude tools with unanticipated side effects. We are now beginning to understand biology as the set of information processes that it fundamentally represents, and we're developing realistic models and simulations of how disease and aging processes progress. Most importantly, we are developing the tools to reprogram them.

RNA interference (RNAi), which has emerged in the last several years, is capable of turning specific genes off. By blocking the messenger RNA produced by a targeted gene, it blocks the expression of that gene. Since viral diseases, cancer, and many other types of diseases depend on gene expression at some crucial point in their life cycle, this promises to be a breakthrough technology. One example of a gene that we would like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells the fat cells to hold on to every calorie. In a study at the Joslin Diabetes Center, when that gene was blocked in the fat cells of mice, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy. They actually lived 20 percent longer, obtaining the benefit of caloric restriction without the food restriction.

Innovative means of adding new genes, called gene therapy, are also emerging that have overcome earlier problems with achieving precise placement of the modified genetic information. United Therapeutics, a company I advise, has developed a technique that modifies cells in vitro, verifies that the new genetic information has been properly inserted, replicates the modified cell millions of times, and then injects the modified cells back into the bloodstream, where they end up embedding themselves into the right tissues. This method has cured pulmonary hypertension, a fatal disease, in animals. It is now entering human trials.

We also have new means of activating and deactivating enzymes, the workhorses of biology. Pfizer’s Torcetrapib, for example, inhibits the enzyme that destroys HDL, the good cholesterol, causing HDL levels to soar. Phase II FDA trials showed that the drug was effective in halting atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks. Pfizer is spending a record $1 billion on phase III trials.

Another important line of attack is to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and introduce them into our bodies without surgery. One major benefit of this “therapeutic cloning” technique is that we will be able to create these new tissues and organs from versions of our cells that have also been made “younger” (by correcting DNA errors and extending the telomeres that influence cell senescence) – the emerging field of rejuvenation medicine. For example, we will be able to create new heart cells from your skin-derived stem cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells will get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated “young” heart with your own (corrected) DNA.

Rational drug design has been around for 20 years, but it is only recently that we have had the requisite genetic data, information models and reprogramming tools to accomplish it. While almost all drugs on the market today were created the traditional way, using drug discovery, most new drug development is applying these increasingly intelligent targeted therapies.

Scientists are also applying nanotechnology to go beyond the limitations of biology. A nanoengineered device developed at Rochester University is programmed to detect the antigens specific to cancer cells. It then latches onto the cancer cell, burrows inside, and releases toxins to destroy the cell. Another scientist cured type I diabetes with a nanoengineered device containing seven-nanometer pores that release insulin in a controlled fashion while blocking antibodies. There are hundreds of other such examples.

Our ability to understand and even reprogram the brain, although in early stages, is also accelerating. We are doubling the spatial resolution of voxels (3D volumes) in brain scanning each year and the latest generation of in-vivo scanners can image individual interneuronal connections firing in real time. Effective simulations of about two dozen brain regions have been demonstrated, and IBM has begun an ambitious effort to simulate a substantial portion of the cerebral cortex at a detailed level. There are an increasing number of neural implants to replace diseased tissue, such as an FDA- approved implant for Parkinson’s patients, the latest generation of which allows the patient to download new software into his neural implant from outside the body.

Now that biology is becoming an information technology, it is subject to what I call the “law of accelerating returns.” Information technologies, including biological ones, double their price-performance and capacity in less than a year. Sequencing DNA, for example, has come down in price by half each year from $10 per base pair in 1990 to under a penny today. The amount of genetic data we sequenced has doubled each year. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV, but we sequenced SARS in only 31 days. This rate of doubling means that we will increase the capability of these technologies by a factor of a thousand in less than a decade and a billion in 25 years.

Human life expectancy was only 37 years in 1800. Such technologies as sanitation, antibiotics, and other medical advances have more than doubled it in 200 years. Our ability to reprogram the information processes of biology will dramatically increase it again, but this progression will be much faster because of the inherent acceleration of information technology. I expect that within 15 years, we’ll be adding more than a year each year to remaining life expectancy. So my advice is: take care of yourself the old- fashioned way for a while longer and you may get to experience the remarkable century ahead.

Essay for Scientific American
Ray Kurzweil, April 2006.