Volume 1, Issue 3 
3rd Quarter, 2006


How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 6 of 15

The biotechnology revolution, now underway, is very profound.  The old paradigm was not to understand how biology worked, it was called drug discovery, which meant we would just find something that happens to work. For example, we discover something that lowers blood pressure, yet we have no idea why it works or how it works. Invariably, it would work to some extent, but have lots of side effects taht we did not understand. We did not have effective models of the information processes underlying biology. We still do nt have them in full, but we are making exponential progress in gaining them. We are gaining the means of actually reprogramming our biology. We have these little software programs inside us: 23,000 of them called genes. They were written, that is to say evolved, tens of thousands of years ago. 

How much software do you use that you have not updated in the last 20 months let alone 20,000 years? One such “software program” called the fat insulin receptor gene says hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well. That was a great program 20,000 years ago. Calories were few and far between. It was very good to hold onto them. We would like to reprogram that now. We have a new technology called RNA interference, which can turn genes off. Little RNA fragments in a RNAi medication go into the cell, latch onto the messenger RNA expressing a gene, and deactivate it; thereby turning off that gene, and this works very well. 

What would happen if you turned off the fat insulin receptor gene in the fat cells? This was done at the Joslin Diabetes Center in mice. These mice ate ravenously and remained slim, and got the health benefits of being slim. They did not get diabetes or heart disease. They lived 20% longer. They got the health benefits of caloric restriction without the restriction. There are five pharmaceutical companies rushing to bring that to the human market. 

At the recent Time Life Conference on the Future of Life from the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of DNA, all of us speakers were asked, what would the next 50 years bring. Every speaker except Bill Joy and myself used the last 50 years as a model for the next 50 years, which is not valid. Even Watson himself said that in 50 years, we will have drugs that allow you to eat as much as you want and remain slim. I said Jim, "We have already done that in animals. Of course the FDA will slow it down, but it's not going to be 50 years; it will be in the next 5 to 10 years." 

Image 10 shows that we went from $10 to 2 cents in the cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA from 1990 to 2004. This graph represents a doubling every year of the amount of genomic data we've been collecting. 

Kurzweil Image
Image 10: DNA Sequencing Cost

The Genome Project was not a mainstream project when it was announced in 1990. Mainstream scientists said we just had our best PhD students, the most advanced equipment, and around the world, we have collected one ten-thousandth of the human genome. There is no way that we are going to do this in 15 years; it will be a hundred years at least. Yes, they'll speed it up. Ten years later, the skeptics were still going strong saying "I told you this wasn't going to work." I mean, here we are 10 years in a 15 year project and you’ve finished 2% of the project. Yet it is the last several doublings that go from 1% to 100% and the project was indeed done on time. This has continued now through the proteome. We have not yet reversed engineered biology, but we are making progress at an exponential rate.

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