The Consequence of Playing God

The specific chapter in Steven Kotlers' New York Times bestselling book, co-written with Andrew Hessel and Marc Goodman (pp 219-247 paperback).

Andrew Hessel is founder of Genome Project-write and publicly shares ideas on human cloning and bio-banking. In 2017, Hessel co-founded Humane Genomics, Inc. which uses synthetic virus engineering to target cancer cells.

Hessel also shared other futurist ideas about life underground, human cloning and bio-banking.

Marc Goodman like Hessel, is a futurist. He works for the FBI and Interpol as a global security advisor and authored NYT and 2015 WSJ bestseller Future Crimes.

Hacking the President's DNA was published in The Atlantic in November 2012. It later was inserted years later in Kotler's book Tomorrowland in 2015.

Download the pdf to read the full transcript, a small section pp 3-4 is below.

"Technically, this chapter is about the upstart field of synthetic biology - a technology with both incredible and dangerous implications. But before we get to those dangers, it's worth pausing to consider what's really going on here.

It's about humans who have the audacity to change the nature of reality.

In 2008, casual DNA design competitions with small prizes arose; then, in 2011, with the launch of GE's $100 million Cancer challenge, the field moved onto serious contests.

By early 2015, as personalized gene therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine's bleeding edge, viral design sites began to appear where people could upload information about their disease, and virologists could post designs for a customised cure.

Samantha, a sophomore political science major at Harvard University, received the package. Thinking it contained a new, synthetic psychedelic, she slipped the tab into her left nostril and walked over to her closet. By the time Samantha had finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve and a few strands of DNA had crossed into the cells of her nasal mucosa.

Some party drug - all she got was the flu. Later that evening, Samantha had a slight fever and was shedding billions of virus particles. These particles would continue to spread around campus in an exponentially growing chain reaction that was - other than the mild fever and some sneezing - absolutely harmless.

This would change when the virus crossed paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, a sequence that would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that were not so benign.

This second sequence would trigger a fast acting neuro-degenerative disease that produced memory loss, extreme paranoia, eventually death. The only person in the world with this sequence was the President of the United States, who was scheduled to speak at Harvards Kennedy School later that week.