Midway through The Matrix, Cypher feasts on an enormous steak, well aware that his reality is not real, part of a digital program telling his brain that the steak is a construction and that it is "juicy and delicious". Two decades after the movie made its first appearance, something unexpected arises: The future of reality will not only be virtual but also synthetic(合成的). Cypher's future meal will be a physical one, synthesized from animal cells.
And the synthesis goes beyond dinner. Starting with components from the natural world, scientists are learning to engineer microorganisms and build biocomputing systems. However, biology has a tendency to evolve in unexpected ways.
Synthesized meat is one case in point. The driving forces behind the meat movement are practical. It has been estimated that cultured(培育的) meat would require 7 to 45 percent less energy and produce 78 to 96 percent less greenhouse gas than conventional animals farmed for consumption. But once we're able to synthesize meat, theoretically, we'll have the capability to culture meat from any animal, even those we'd never consider eating today, like dolphins or chimpanzees, which will pose a new regulatory challenge for us.
Using synthetic biology, we can even edit and rewrite life, the technology of which are already in use. In 2021, scientists in some countries announced they had grown monkey embryos injected with human stem cells. Here comes the situation worth considering: such a monkey-human hybrid will demonstrate qualities that are somewhere between humans, on which experimentation isn't allowed, and animals, which are often raised specifically for research. How will we decide when an animal becomes too human?
Depending on where you stand, the synthetic realities land somewhere between "really exciting" and "critically concerning". As individuals, we undertake a shared responsibility to make good choices about this coming synthetic technology.
