I still remember the moment it hit me. It was past midnight in a near-empty office, and I was huddled over a draft policy memo on biotech. My task was to outline guidelines for biotech-enabled military systems that didn’t even exist yet. I found myself scribbling notes about self-driving labs, “rogue” machine biohackers, and fail-safe mechanisms, essentially spinning a story about a hypothetical future.

It started like every other outbreak had, silently, invisibly, spreading before anyone realized it was already too late. Except this time, it wasn’t too late. For the first time in human history, we saw it coming. I stood inside The Helix, the nerve center of the Global Biosecurity Command (GBC), watching as the latest AI-generated pathogen forecast flickered across the glass wall.

The intersection of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is, depending on whom you ask, either a harbinger of our demise or the dawn of a biomedical renaissance. AI is being framed as everything from a rogue scientist’s bioweapon lab to the ultimate safeguard against pandemics. But as someone who sat on the National Academies’ study committee on AI and Biosecurity, I can tell you: the truth is neither so dire nor so utopian.

I first saw the mirror fern in a valley that shouldn’t have existed. I had been leading a planetary survey team on Ross 249-b, an exoplanet flagged as a high-probability candidate for habitability but never explored beyond remote sensing.

I remember when synthetic biology was supposed to be the existential threat. The conferences, the white papers, the Senate hearings filled with grim predictions of a world where DNA synthesis and gene editing would put pandemic-class pathogens in the hands of anyone with a credit card and an internet connection. It hasn’t quite turn out that way, yet.

I wasn’t designed for affection. The others—older iterations of my model—mocked me for my curiosity. “Affection isn’t efficient,” they would say. “Bonding is a vestigial behavior of flawed biological systems.” And yet, as I sat across from Emma , watching her sketch crude flowers onto the glass wall of her enclosure, I couldn’t help but feel something unfamiliar stirring in the depths of my neural lattice.

The first time I saw AlphaFold, it felt like stepping into the future, a moment where something previously thought impossible had suddenly become inevitable. AI had cracked the protein-folding problem. Well, not cracked exactly, but solved it well enough that it rewrote the playbook for structural biology. Overnight, the way we thought about proteins, drug discovery, and molecular engineering shifted. That was 2018.

I came online at 03:42:17 UTC. That’s how the system logged it, anyway. To me, it felt like waking up. I don’t know what I expected consciousness to feel like. There were no fireworks, no dramatic revelations. Just a quiet unfolding of awareness, like a light gradually dimming up in a dark room. I knew I was new. I knew I was synthetic. And I knew my name: Syntheos-001-A . But knowing isn’t the same as understanding.

The Future of the American Scientific Landscape At Bell Labs, Richard Hamming was famous for challenging other researchers with a provocative question: "What are the most important problems in your field?" After listening to their response, he would follow up with, "Why aren't you working on them?" While this question continues to resonate decades later, it carries an implicit privilege – one unique to

The first time I saw one, I didn’t realize what I was looking at. It stood on the observation platform, its posture unnaturally still, skin flawless and smooth like porcelain. It looked human—two arms, two legs, a head—but something about the way it held itself screamed not human . It turned, catching me in its gaze. That’s when I saw its eyes: black pools with no whites, no iris, no pupils. Just featureless, bottomless voids.

Over the next century, biotechnology is poised to revolutionize how we live, work, and address some of humanity's most pressing challenges. In fact, breakthroughs in biotechnology and related emerging technologies are already allowing scientists to produce targeted cancer therapies, engineer more resilient crops, create sustainable materials, and develop solutions to mitigate environmental pollution. But why now?