THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
573
are capable of understanding in some depth how human intelligence
works, which would give us the knowledge to overcome human dys–
function and also to expand human ability and human creativity. There
are many intriguing examples of machines amplifying our creativity.
Ultimately, we will be able to be more expressive and more human.
James Collins:
One thing that excites me is moving more and more into
the life sciences, particularly cell and molecular biology. At present, we
actually understand little within the biological sciences. We have pre–
sented success stories, and any time you can develop a technology on the
basis of some understanding and / or modify function, you demonstrate
you understand at least something. It's very disturbing on one hand–
given what we hope to get from medicine-to see a doctor. But as a sci–
entist, it's very exciting, and it's going to take a long time to go from
understanding how a single cell works to how groups of cells work, let
alone many billions and trillions of cells.
Dick Lanham:
I am a physician from New York and would like to ask
Dr. Collins about his exciting work. The potential applicability of your
systems on a theoretical systemic basis no doubt is legion. Have you
done any mixing of systems to see what effect they might have? Might
that evolve into something even superior to what you've imagined?
James Collins:
Basically, the question is, have we tried to utilize evolu–
tion to design a system that has a better function? Within the arena of
biology, there is a technique referred to as directed evolution where sci–
entists will actually introduce mutations or changes in some aspect of a
cell or organism and push the organism toward a desired function. A
company called Maxygen on the west coast is designing drugs utilizing
these principles. We are interested in seeing whether we can utilize those
principles in the context of our biological machines to improve their
functions. Could we, for instance, design a genetic toggle switch that is
faster in the way it switches? We can do this computationally. The chal–
lenge now is how to do so in a real biological lab. I learned that these
experiments are very hard and very slow.
