When Vitalik Buterin met Drew Endy is when Blockchain met Bio

In early April, the synthetic biology and blockchain communities came together in the pop-up city of Zuzalu for the synthetic biology summit “Blockchain Meets Bio: Sustainable Biomanufacturing for Future Network States.” Gathered from all over the world on the shores of the Adriatic Sea — the political body to bring police to life – participants spent two days discussing and listening to lectures on the future of everything from science and democracy to innovation and meaningful communities.

With SynBioBeta bringing biology to the table, Zuzalu served as the heart of the blockchain community. The brainchild of EthereumETH founder Vitalik Buterin, it was built out of a “shared desire to learn, create, live longer and healthier lives, and build self-sustaining communities.” Buterin welcomed everyone to Zuzalu by emphasizing his excitement about creating a space to experiment with ideas that he and many others have thought about in theory but have not been discussed or built in practice. For him, the new city creates the opportunity for a significant enough group of people to come together around such ideas – which are actively supported by candidates in the upcoming Montenegrin parliamentary elections in their vision of the country’s future – even if they are temporary.

However transitory the city may be, the even shorter summit provided a far-reaching overview of the challenges and visions shared between the synthetic biology and blockchain communities. Everything from longevity and patient-driven research to localized manufacturing and open science, the potential for collaboration was made abundantly clear throughout the weekend’s lively conversations and panels. Synthetic biology’s commitment to and infrastructure to tackle humanity’s most pressing problems has never been clearer – from LanzaTech (led by Jennifer Holmgren) and BioMasons (led by Ginger Krieg Dosier)’s work to transform carbon emissions with microbes, to bit.bios (led by Mark) Kotter) cell reprogramming work to combat human disease and Ginkgo Bioworks’ (led by Jason Kelly) enzyme, strain and protein discovery and optimization services foundry. Even with a strong sense of synergistic resonance throughout the weekend, it was perhaps most evident during a fireside – rather seaside – chat between Vitalik Buterin and synthetic biology pioneer Drew Endy.

Endy is speaking at SynBioBeta’s annual conference at the end of May, and his talk during Zuzalu’s Saturday morning previewed his ideas around some of the most pressing concerns for synthetic biology. Kicking off the conversation from that talk, titled “All Atoms Are Local: Building Biotic Futures,” Buterin asked Endy what aspects of cryptocurrency and blockchain were the most striking as sites for collaboration with synthetic biology. Endy began his answer emphatically: “The mood is good.” More specifically, he saw questions of who controls what and how to create trust in a zero-trust world as the most important philosophical intersections, with network states possibly providing the sociopolitical infrastructure where biology can have the greatest impact. Buterin wholeheartedly agreed with this assessment, despite his self-proclaimed ignorance of synthetic biology until just the previous month, and pointed to the decentralized science movement (or “DeSci”) as an example in response. “We need to create different incentive structures to reward openness and innovation, which means strengthening many scientific fields to create that kind of social innovation,” Buterin said.

For Endy begins to think about how to achieve such lofty goals of democratizing biology – or rather, the opposite of that. “What is required to function in a democracy?” he asked Buterin and the audience. Part of Endy’s own answer rests on thinking about biological democracy instead, so that “biology as a way of growing things can give anyone anywhere the set of things needed to survive [and be] a basic option to substantiate citizenship.” This agreed quite closely with Buterin’s own opinion that reduced forms of dependence and security requirements, represented by technologies such as the blockchain, can reduce society’s fragility by enabling cheap, local production and creating more independent societies. “It is important to follow the actual power to create things that people need more practically for democratic societies and ways of living to thrive,” he said.

However, both Buterin and Endy acknowledged that independence conceptualized as such is a “double-edged sword.” Raising questions about geopolitical stability held together only by supply chain interdependence, Endy wondered whether it would “ever be sufficient to recreate mutual interdependence” by instrumentalizing network nations and decentralized autonomous communities (DAOs), in blockchain parlance, “to counter deglobalization through atoms.” Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine served as an instructive example for Buterin of not only the efforts of passivity, but also a description of “armed interdependence” as it exists in the world today. Instead, he hopes that “we will be more likely to have peace than these conflicts if instead of people being loyal to just one thing, we have a more networked world where people are more loyal to different things.”

Continued consideration of synthetic biology and blockchain in, by, and even as society grappled with questions about what kinds of biological futures would be “good” for humanity and which would be good to avoid. The immediate instinctive responses for Endy were to avoid “re-militarization with synthetic biology” and a hope for “a biotic culture that can recognize biotechnology as instinctively scary….[but allow for] fear as a gift of the chance to be brave.” For him, it’s not just bioterror and biobugs. So how can we come not only to survival benefit, but also to the beauty of nature around us, along with our creativity?” In the spirit of embracing monsters and fear, Buterin shared that the degree to which “the ball was dropped” on pandemic preparedness really “frightens” him, but out of this stems a deeper commitment to empowering communities to be part of needed solutions. “The concerns about biology are real and everyone recognizes them. But compared to the fear of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology seems pretty tame,” he said.

The two innovator-thought leaders fielded questions from the audience ranging from design and biosecurity, network states, responsibility and ideas of “the good,” taking comfort in the idea that technology doesn’t just “happen” to people, but instead that people happen to human beings. “Don’t put technology between one person and another person. If these people make different decisions, different things will happen,” Endy said, leaving the audience with deep questions about responsibility in a world where decision-making — whether distributed or not — “is hard,” as Buterin put it simply.

“It’s possible we won’t get it right, but the best we can do is create better collective decision-making capabilities and use tools that exist to keep discussions open and accessible,” the Ethereum founder concluded. With kernels of reflection and pearls of wisdom cultivated over just one short weekend, perhaps taking up the mantle of a distributed responsibility world means thinking carefully about what kind of futures each of us wants to build and then figuring out if and how to get there – at the intersection of biology, the blockchain, or whatever frontier is next.

Thanks to Aishani Aatresh for further research and reporting on this article. I am the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about – including LanzaTech, bit.bio and Ginkgo Bioworks – are sponsors of SynBioBeta Conference. For more content you can subscribe my weekly newsletter.

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