The second reason has to do with risks, and there’s a lot of them. In the book, we identify nine risks, and they aren’t insignificant. I just want to highlight a few because I think they’re really important.

In the future, the most worrying data security breaches could actually involve our DNA. This means that, in this biological era that we’re entering, it could be a major information security problem—there are easy ways to scrape somebody’s genetic code.

That could have widespread implications if that person is a politician or if that person is the CEO of a big company. Bio-cybersecurity is another important emerging problem on a much grander level. Another important risk is, we think that synthetic biology, because it promises so much, could actually lead to new geopolitical conflicts.

We think the next war could be a biological one, and we’re going to have to prepare for what’s coming. I’m not necessarily talking about biological weapons, but rather consolidating power and resources.

The third reason why it’s important right now to be thinking about all of this, and the reason that we wrote the book, actually has to do with solutions. It’s hard to get people to change.

We just saw at COP26, the big climate-change conference, that world leaders are just not going to act fast enough to mitigate the climate crisis, especially when what we’re asking countries to do is to stop contributing to their economy by scaling back some of their manufacturing or having to change it.

We’re going to have to develop alternatives. In this case, synthetic biology gives us optionality. There are other ways, in addition to reducing CO₂ through regulation, to potentially solve this problem.

There are also other ways for us to grow our food. The reason that we wrote the book now is because we still have a little bit of time to sort through these questions. We’ve got ethical questions. We definitely have risks. There’s a lot of money flowing into this space, and, ultimately, we’re going to have to make personal choices going forward. We should do that when we’re informed, not under duress.

Why were you interested in this topic?

I was interested in health for a variety of different reasons, but one of those reasons had to do with a string of miscarriages that I had. It just seemed strange to me that in this age of artificial intelligence, birth and getting pregnant was really left up to happenstance and hope. I got really interested in this and started doing additional research.

I heard Andrew’s name. He’s a microbiologist. Turns out we had a friend in common who introduced us. Together, we realized that we could take this book that I had in progress on synthetic biology but make a much deeper exploration of it and unlock some of our perspectives and research for a much wider community.

What if?

In this book we created five scenarios as a way of helping make all of this research and all of this information much more real to people, so that they could envision what the future could look like, and so that it related back to them. These scenarios, which are written a little bit like speculative fiction, are, in fact, rooted in research, and models, and data, and science.

[Here are the first two of five scenarios.]

Scenario one: Creating your bespoke child

The first scenario has to do with a fertility center set in the future. We started with a prompt: How could synthetic biology influence how we create children in the future?

Some of the questions we had included things like “If you could select the genes for your offspring, what would you select? What would you not select? And why? What would the reasons for that be? If you selected a few things, could that create an imbalance in another place? What would that process even look like? What would an actual trip to a futuristic fertility center be like?”

This first scenario is intended to give you a very visceral understanding of how this technology could be applied to completely change how we think of [parenthood] and what the construct of a family looks like.

Scenario two: Canceling aging

I’m a big Chicago Cubs fan. They won the 2016 World Series with David Ross, who’s a catcher who was born around the same time that I was, and whose knees should absolutely not have been working during the Series.

All of this got me thinking. As much as I would love for that 2016 World Series–winning Chicago Cubs team to play forever, what would it be like if they actually could play for a very long period of time?

That’s where we started, but that got us thinking: If people are able to live much longer, much healthier lives, how does that change the future of work? How does that change the relationship between a CEO and an executive team, or a CEO and a board of directors? How does that start to shape what a board of directors might be doing? If you’re a family company, how does that shift the decisions that you make? What does succession planning look like in a world in which people can live much longer than they do today?