Piece Description

What are the consequences when humans start playing with life? The human imagination has always dreamed up fantastic creatures, but now biotechnology is making it easier and easier for us to actually create forms of life that have never existed before. In this hour, Radio Lab looks at the uneasy marriage between biology and engineering, and asks what counts as "natural?"

Mix and Match To get us thinking about creating new life forms, we tag along with a group of kids on a visit to the American Museum of Natural History exhibit on Mythic Creatures. Curator Laurel Kendall tells us that even figments of the human imagination deserve to be a part of natural history. But what do we mean when we say something is "natural?" Sometimes nature does things that might seem unnatural, at least at first glance. Karen Keegan and her doctor Lynne Uhl tell reporter Soren Wheeler a story of disputed motherhood that might throw your idea of natural for a loop. (Hint: Karen is more than one person, kind of.) Then we enter the world of bioengineering with scientist Lee Silver from Princeton University. Silver tells us about a strange creature created by scientists back in the 80s, called a "geep," and shares a play he wrote that explores the implications of combining humans and other animals.

Genes on the Move Biology class is all about putting living things into categories, based on their differences. And creatures are different because they have different genes. But life wasn?t always like that. In this segment, Steve Strogatz, an applied mathematician at Cornell, tells us about a radical theory that says that way back at the beginning of life, 3 billion years ago, life was a big commune of gene swapping. Nigel Goldenfeld, one of the scientists who came up with this theory, says that the idea of different species, and consequently Darwinian evolution, simply didn?t apply for the first billion years of life on Earth. Then we follow the thread of an essay by Freeman Dyson called "Our Biotech Future." According to Dyson, the rise of biotechnology means that there will be an explosion of new life forms, that we will start moving genes from one creature to another. So we go to MIT, where Steven Payne and Reshma Seti prove Dyson?s point by making stinky bacteria smell nice.

Intelligent Design? Are living things really just machines made of little genetic parts? Are genes just like little software programs that we can plug into living things? That?s how synthetic biologists think about life. Brian Baynes gives us a tour of his company, Codon Devices, where they make and sell genes. Then we visit Harvard geneticist George Church, who is using synthetic genes to make bacteria that burp diesel fuel. Robert talks to biotechnology pioneer Craig Venter about just how far synthetic biology might go and about whether humans might someday be able to make a living thing... from scratch. But what happens when the new life forms we make get put into the world? Could they create as many problems as they solve? Jad and Robert, with help from Nigel Goldenfeld and Steve Strogatz, discuss what to do when faced with the the risks, and the benefits, of synthetic biology.