# Programmable Biology

**Published by:** [Ex Machina](https://paragraph.com/@exmachina/)
**Published on:** 2026-07-02
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@exmachina/programmable-biology

## Content

"Programmable biology" borrows a promise from software that living things cannot keep — that whatever we write, we can also unwrite. With code that reproduces, the defences against our mistakes have to be built before the capability arrives, which is precisely what no market will pay for. This is a link-enhanced version of an article that first appeared in the Mint. You can read the original here. For a full archive of all my articles, please visit my website. Today, for about $29, you can buy a petunia that glows in the dark. The Firefly Petunia, sold by synthetic biology company Light Bio, was created using genes from luminous mushrooms and emits a soft green light from its buds. After receiving approval from the US Department of Agriculture, it became the first bioluminescent plant to be sold to the public. Even though the condition of sale specifies that it is for personal use only, a petunia can grow from a cutting placed in a glass of water—which means that beyond the terms of the contract, there is nothing to keep this engineered organism from proliferating. When Code Comes Alive The Firefly Petunia was created by a process increasingly referred to as programmable biology, a phrase inspired by the software industry. Earlier this month, researchers at the Arc Institute released a system called Proto, which took this analogy further than ever before by releasing a programming language for biology. They are designing a system that allows researchers to broadly describe what they want to achieve and have an AI model translate that prompt into genetic sequences. Proto takes the idea of programmable biology to its logical extreme. It is equivalent to a programming language with a compiler that translates instructions into action. But living cells work differently from computers. Unlike software that sits where you put it on a computer, and does what it is told, code inside a living thing gets copied because organisms reproduce and mutate. And that difference matters a great deal. Consider a gene drive. Ordinarily, a gene is passed on to only about half of an organism’s offspring. As a result, an engineered trait thins out across the population and eventually disappears. A gene drive is a piece of genetic code engineered to copy itself into almost every offspring, so that a single trait spreads through the population till it becomes universal. As a result, it does not just modify an organism; it alters a species. The Thing That Cannot Be Recalled The most advanced gene drive has been aimed at malaria. Its stated objective is to halt the spread of the disease by collapsing the mosquito population. If successful, it could end a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. The technology has been proven to work in a laboratory, but has never been released because a gene drive, once let loose into the wild, cannot be recalled. And once that happens, there is no telling what unintended consequences could result. David Collingridge best described the dilemma we find ourselves in. Early in the life of a new technology, when it is still easy to implement the controls we need, we do not yet know enough about it to act. By the time we know enough, the technology has spread too far to effectively control. Programmable biology makes the Collingridge dilemma all the more acute. By the time we realise the harmful outcomes that could occur, it will be too late to undo. As dangerous as it might be, there are tremendous benefits to pursuing this research. In 2025, gene therapy tailored to a single infant corrected a mutation that no off-the-shelf drug could treat. The malaria drive, if released safely, could save more lives within a decade than any other medicine could in a century. Defences Before Capabilities If we can neither pause nor recall what we release, then our only option is to build defences in advance. This is what philosopher Nick Bostrom calls differential technological development. Instead of halting the technology, he recommends we slow progress on its dangerous aspects and accelerate research on protective features. This would let us put defences in place before the capability arrives. Kevin Esvelt, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist who invented the CRISPR gene drive, has spent a decade doing precisely this by building technologies such as self-limiting, daisy-chain drives that exhaust themselves after a few generations and SecureDNA, which screens every sequence before it is synthesised. The trouble is that the development of capability and the building of defences respond to different incentives. There are buyers for glowing flowers and bespoke cures, but the screening gate and the self-limiting design protect against a hypothetical future harm that will be spread so thin across the population that no one will notice. Markets will pay for what is needed today, but balk at investing in antidotes to dangers that may never arrive. Without government intervention, we may never build the protections we need. India’s Bio-E3 policy, which was approved in 2024, commits us to a $300 billion bio-economy built on synthetic biology and biofoundries. But while the policy describes the authoring of life in great detail, it says next to nothing about how to defend against the harms that could occur. A serious bio-economy needs rules and technology safeguards to ensure that nothing that can self-propagate gets released unless we know how to reverse it. Rather than viewing this as a constraint on innovation, we should see this as the foundation on which responsible innovation should be built. If the technology we create cannot be rolled back, we must build safeguards alongside it. And ensure that they are in place well before the capability matures—while they are still cheap and we still can. The glowing petunia might have been a novelty, but it is also the first consumer product that can’t be fully recalled. There will be others. The question is whether the rules arrive before them, or after.

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