The next revolution in biology isn’t reading life’s code — it’s writing it

For most of human history, we could only imagine what made us who we are. Then, just over two decades ago, the Human Genome Project — the international scientific effort to decode the three billion letters of human DNA — changed everything. 

Critics at the time called it too expensive, too ambitious, too abstract. And they weren’t wrong. It was the largest biology project ever proposed, and scientists hadn’t even managed to sequence the smallest bacterial genome yet. But the organizers knew that big plans — moonshots — inspire people and attract funding. 

Today, nearly every advance in modern medicine rests on its foundation. The project transformed biology into an information science, spawning ancestry testing, virus tracking, precision cancer therapies, the first personalized medicines, and more. 

Now, a new generation of scientists wants to take the next step: not just reading the code of life, but writing it. That’s the mission behind the Human Genome Project-write (HGP-write) and SynHG, the Synthetic Human Genome Initiative. 

HGP-write, a nonprofit I cofounded in 2016, is building the technological, ethical, and social infrastructure for large-scale genome writing. SynHG, a UK-led academic consortium announced in 2025, is focused on engineering, developing the pipelines and tools needed to construct chromosomes from scratch. Although different teams, they share the same audacious goal: to one day build a complete and functional human genome. Together, they’re helping to launch the next great revolution in biology, one that I believe will far surpass the impact of the original Human Genome Project (which I’ll call HGP-read from now on). 

Sequencing let us read the book of life, our instruction manual. Synthesis will allow us to write new chapters, if not entirely new books. 

Why write a human genome? 

When HGP-read finished in 2003, it had taken 13 years and more than $3 billion to sequence a single human genome (or sequence about 92% of one, since the technology to close all the gaps didn’t exist at the time — the whole genome wouldn’t come until April 2022). Today, sequencing a person’s DNA costs a few hundred dollars and takes a few hours. Few technologies have become so inexpensive and powerful so quickly. 

The advancement of sequencing technology has made Moore’s Law — the idea that computer processing power doubles while costs fall roughly every two years — seem like a slow crawl. This breathtaking drop in price and time has spawned entire industries, millions of jobs, and hundreds of billions in economic value. But the fact that sequencing is not yet a consumer technology, in every home, like TVs and phones, suggests we’re still nowhere close to the financial or technological bottom yet. 

Writing DNA holds even greater promise — the potential to cure any disease. DNA synthesis already underpins the engineering of new proteins, vaccines, and CRISPR-based therapies in the clinic. Writing the human genome in its entirety could enable correcting any genetic condition, regardless of its complexity. And writing small genomes could power a modern Cambrian explosion of new creatures of all shapes and sizes. 

Synthetic genomics is not new. In fact, the first synthetic genome was built over two decades ago. In 2002, scientists at Stony Brook University in New York, led by Eckard Wimmer, constructed the poliovirus genome entirely from digital sequence data. In 2010, J. Craig Venter’s team created the first synthetic cell — a living organism whose DNA contained hidden “watermarks,” including quotes from James Joyce and physicist Richard Feynman, a web address, and the researchers’ own names. By 2019, Jason Chin’s group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology re-engineered E. coli with a fully synthetic four-million-base genome. And in 2025, Jef Boeke and his international consortium of yeast scientists completed the ten-megabase yeast genome, a giant milestone on the path to writing larger, more complex genomes like our own. 

Whole genome synthesis is not speculative science; it’s a branch of genetic engineering that has been quietly simmering away under the radar, growing cheaper and more sophisticated in recent years.

Like AI systems before GPTs arrived in late 2022, most people remain entirely unaware that DNA writing can be done at all, let alone that thousands of labs and companies around the world are using it. 

While human genome-writing efforts won’t lead to designer babies or supersoldiers anytime soon, they do force society to confront an undeniable fact: Like amateur gods, we are beginning to author living organisms. We aren’t very good at it yet. The genomes that we’ve written are small and uncomplicated, and mostly lightly edited copies of what nature has produced. 

The bigger question is whether we’ll proactively organize as a species to do this engineering responsibly or wait on the sidelines until commercial, military, or geopolitical forces compel us to face reality and establish some rules of the road. 

Writing drives creation, understanding, and security 

Both HGP-write and SynHG are aiming to make genome-scale synthesis possible, affordable, and, importantly, safe. This is a grand challenge. Moving from short DNA fragments to entire chromosomes or genomes demands new instruments, enzymes, software, and standards — a completely new “synthetic biology stack.” It also requires that we create effective biosecurity systems, as some of the smallest genomes to engineer, those of viruses, are potentially the most dangerous. 

All this won’t be cheap to develop, but it will pay dividends long before a human genome is written. 

Every incremental advance in writing technology will accelerate progress across the entire spectrum of life science, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals, and from materials science to planetary defense; DNA synthesis is, after all, the foundational tool for engineering biology and biomanufacturing. Meanwhile, improved biodetection and biodefense technologies, accelerated by genome writing efforts, will enhance global health while better protecting us from the next outbreak or pandemic. 

Writing complete genomes is powerful. Editing existing DNA lets us tweak code, but changes must be verified by whole genome sequencing, considering that off-target changes are common. Building a genome from scratch means that software tools similar to word processors can be used to easily search and replace strings of letters, or cut and paste code blocks. Genetic engineering becomes a lot like software engineering. It empowers scientists to explore transformative questions like, “What happens if we remove ancient viral remnants from human DNA?” or “Can we program this cell so that it won’t age?”

Increasingly, it will be AI-based tools that do this coding, just as we’re seeing in computer software. This is already happening. Almost all protein engineering is now done with AI tools. And recently, the California-based Arc Institute combined its Evo AI tools with genome synthesis to make dozens of novel PhiX174 bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. The success of this experiment suggests that, in the near future, defeating a deadly superbug could be as simple as sending a document to an inkjet printer. 

As megabase-scale synthesis becomes available — a stepping stone to the gigabase synthesis needed for human genome synthesis — we’ll be able to design virtually any single-celled organism from scratch. All of microbiology becomes as much engineering as science. These “designer” microbes could transform biomanufacturing, producing medicines, fuels, and materials with unprecedented efficiency. 

Just as the transistor ignited the digital revolution, fast, inexpensive, and scalable genome design and synthesis will ignite a biological one. Life becomes a platform technology, a programmable medium for solving the world’s most challenging problems. 

The scientific dividends here will be profound. Cellular genomes are spaghetti code, with functions all intermingled and scattered through the chromosomes without rational organization, the only filter being that it works. Constructing complete synthetic organisms is the only way to untangle all the various functions evolution mixed together over billions of years. Starting fresh, scientists will be able to illuminate the mysteries of metabolism, development, and perhaps even consciousness in ways that editing genes cannot support. As the physicist Richard Feynman famously noted, you can’t truly understand what you can’t create. 

The world needs another biological moonshot 

But any project that aims to create life must confront serious ethical questions: What kinds of genomes should we build? Are any off limits? Who decides? How do we prevent biological weapons from being developed? 

Both HGP-write and SynHG recognize that the same tools that can cure or create life can also be misused to cause suffering and death. That’s why transparency, open science, and public dialogue are central to their missions. They want to ensure that the decisions about life’s code are a shared global responsibility, not the province of any single corporation or nation.

In this sense, genome writing is as much about governance as genetics. It’s about learning how to collaborate safely on planetary-scale, potentially planet-changing technology. And, in the short term, if history is any guide, a little friendly rivalry between teams will only accelerate progress. The US effort got an early start out of the gate, but the UK has quietly taken the lead with steady, consistent progress – and a “care-full” mandate that prizes responsibility as much as speed. But this is a race where, like sequencing, no matter who crosses the line first, all humanity wins. 

We could all use something big to cheer for — something that reminds us this planet is our home, not just a launchpad to the Moon or Mars. It’s been nearly 25 years since the world last united around a biology-based moonshot. The first Human Genome Project inspired a generation to see life as code that could be read and understood. Writing the human genome can inspire the next generation to see DNA as something that can be composed, unlocking possibilities that evolution has never explored. 

The question is no longer whether we can write a human genome, but whether we can do it wisely — and for everyone’s benefit.