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VIENNA, Austria — Say this for Austen Heinz: His vision for the future will either thrill you or leave you fearing for the future of humanity. There’s not really any room in the middle.

In a pair of interviews, on and off the stage at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna today, the CEO of San Francisco-based Cambrian Genomics explained the mission of his company, which is often benignly described as “laser-printing DNA.”

So what does that mean?

“We want to make everything that is alive on the planet,” he explained. “Everything that is alive is not optimal. It can be made better.”

But he doesn’t have plans for replication: “We want to make totally new organisms that have never existed,” he said. “And replace every existing organism with a better one. It just seems obvious that eventually every human will be designed on a computer.”

Lest you think these are the ravings of a mad scientist, or the opening scene of a new sci-fi dystopian thriller, well, it’s not. Heinz is calm and rational in his view. And...