Our understanding of the heavens and of our place in the universe changed with the invention of the telescope. Our understanding of the world invisible to the naked eye and of our place in the biosphere was transformed with the invention of the microscope. A new technology is unfolding in our times whose significance arguably exceeds that of the microscope and the telescope put together. Most people have never heard of it, while it is quietly transforming our lives and possibly life itself.
To give a comprehensible description of this technology will require some background. So, humour me while we wander around collecting seemingly unrelated facts. We will put them all together, I promise.
Most people know that molecules are tiny, but few realise quite how tiny. A nanometre is one millionth of a millimetre, the smallest marking on a child’s scale. That is the relevant scale when we want to talk about molecules. To put this in perspective, a photon of visible light is about 200 nanometres in diameter. A DNA double helix which is one of the giants of the molecular world is 2 nanometres in thickness, about 100 times smaller. This means microscopes have a really hard time looking at molecules.
Life works at the molecular scale. All life is made up of cells. Each cell is an astonishing city-scale ballet in which molecules are both dancers and choreographers.This ballet is responsible for coordinating the self-assembly of cells into the manifold bounty of nature, butterflies, whales, and coconut trees. Disease works at the molecular scale too. Doctors, unfortunately, are a billion times too big to directly witness and debug the molecular ballet.
The new technology will make this molecular ballet legible at the human scale. Just as we took inspiration from the flight of birds to come up with aeroplanes, we will take inspiration from cells to engineer systems that can exquisitely choreograph trillions of molecules. It will allow us to cure disease by debugging the choreography. Beyond healthcare, it will allow us to direct the molecular ballet to grow matter the way an apple grows on a tree: with exquisite placement of individual molecules, over the span of trillions of molecules. This emerging engineering discipline, taking the best ideas of living cells, and adapting them to human needs, I will call Algorithmic Biology.
This new technology is not fully birthed. Even in its limited avatar, it has had a profound effect upon the world. Biotechnology has unlocked the production of insulin and monoclonal antibodies. Genomics is helping identify which treatment will work for an individual cancer, molecular diagnostics is enabling testing for diseases, or understanding how drugs work. These applications foreshadow the coming new technology.
A key metric tracking our progress towards Algorithmic Biology is the size of the molecular choreographies we are able to accomplish. How to achieve molecular choreographies has been studied in a field of research known as molecular computing. The current state of the art allows around 10^3 different molecular species to be simultaneously choreographed. We need a Moore’s law driving the size of such choreographies upward. A factor of 10 increase every two years is not inconceivable.
To drive such a Moore’s law requires an industrial-scale effort to scale up molecular choreographies. An industrial-scale effort requires industrial-scale investment. One way to find the money is to find ways where building slightly larger choreographies immediately delivers commercially-valuable benefits which can be fuelled back into the scale-up.
Indeed, healthcare can greatly benefit from even slight improvements in our ability to prescribe and achieve desired molecular behaviour programmable at scale. Molecular testing is plagued by challenges in cost, accuracy, and the scale of information it can deliver. Molecular computing-based solutions are already improving multiplexing ability, as well as bringing new scale efficiencies.
Today, we witness many new emerging startups who see from a molecular computing point of view is helping us modularise the design of complex assays. Traditionally considered a very challenging domain, experienced and well-funded teams struggle for multiple years to debug an assay. With a molecular computing approach, we see them being able to rephrase concerns about signal and noise into a more abstract algorithmic framework, and deal with them in a modular fashion to accelerate assay development.
When the processes undergirding life become legible to humans and to our computers, we will witness a dramatic transformation to our physical world. There will also be a philosophical reckoning. Look at the night sky once through a telescope, and you will forever look at the night sky differently. One glance at a commonplace object through a microscope and the commonplace is lifted to a wonderland. How will we view ourselves relative to the universe after we witness, comprehend, control, and abstract this molecular ballet? Only time will tell.