Biodesic 2011 Bioeconomy Update: U.S. Revenues from Genetically Modified Systems Now $300 Billion, or Greater than 2% of GDP.

Biodesic has released a short Technical Report on the size of U.S. Bioeconomy.  The Biodesic 2011 Bioeconomy Update (PDF) walks the reader through changes in revenues from GM crops, biologics, and industrial biotech.  The Technical Report updates the figures and analysis published in, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life.

I continue to be surprised by the misreporting in major publications of revenues from GM crops.  Based on USDA statistics and average crop prices, the three main GM crops in the U.S. (corn, soy, and cotton) brought in farm scale revenues of $100 billion in 2010.  As I noted in 2009 in Nature Biotechnology, many news outlets continue to report the $5.5 billion in revenues from U.S. GM seed sales as total sector revenues.

With U.S. biologics revenues of $75 billion, and industrial biotech revenues of $115 billion, total U.S. 2010 revenues from genetically modified systems were $300 billion, or the equivalent of more than 2% of GDP. 

Globally, biotech investment continues to accelerate, as do revenues (see table below).  China and India have made domestic biotech a priority for producing jobs and economic growth and as an independent source of fuels, food, and materials.  Malaysia has recently reported biotech constituted 2.5% of its 2010 GDP, up from zero in 2005.  Pakistan's biotech economy presently consists entirely of GM cotton, which the USDA estimates to now be 100% of the annual drop, and which until 2010 was entirely illegal.

Read more in the Biodesic 2011 Bioeconomy Update.

Country	2010 Biotech Revenues	2010 Est. Growth	2020 Target Biotech Revenues
Malaysia	2.5%	25%	10%
China	2.5%	20%	5-8%
United States	>2%	10-15%	NA
India	0.24-0.40%	20%	1.6% (2015)
Pakistan	1.6%	<5%	NA
Europe	<1.0%	5%	NA

Table 1.

Biotech Revenues as Share of GDP. Source: Biodesic 2011 Bioeconomy Update.

Staying Sober about Science

The latest issue of The Hastings Center Report carries an essay of mine, "Staying Sober about Science" (free access after registration), about my thoughts on New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (PDF) from The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Here is the first paragraph:

Biology, we are frequently told, is the science of the twenty-first century. Authority informs us that moving genes from one organism to another will provide new drugs, extend both the quantity and quality of life, and feed and fuel the world while reducing water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Authority also informs that novel genes will escape from genetically modified crops, thereby leading to herbicide-resistant weeds; that genetically modified crops are an evil privatization of the gene pool that will with certainty lead to the economic ruin of small farmers around the world; and that economic growth derived from biological technologies will cause more harm than good. In other words, we are told that biological technologies will provide benefits and will come with costs--with tales of both costs and benefits occasionally inflated--like every other technology humans have developed and deployed over all of recorded history.

And here are a couple of other selected bits:

Overall, in my opinion, the report is well considered. One must commend President Obama for showing leadership in so rapidly addressing what is seen in some quarters as a highly contentious issue. However, as noted by the commission itself, much of the hubbub is due to hype by both the press and certain parties interested in amplifying the importance of the Venter Institute's accomplishments. Certain scientists want to drive a stake into the heart of vitalism, and perhaps to undermine religious positions concerning the origin of life, while "civil society" groups stoke fears about Frankenstein and want a moratorium on research in synthetic biology. Notably, even when invited to comment by the commission, religious groups had little to say on the matter.

The commission avoided the trap of proscribing from on high the future course of a technology still emerging from the muck. Yet I cannot help the feeling that the report implicitly assumes that the technology can be guided or somehow controlled, as does most of the public discourse on synthetic biology. The broader history of technology, and of its regulation or restriction, suggests that directing its development would be no easy task.8 Often technologies that are encouraged and supported are also stunted, while technologies that face restriction or prohibition become widespread and indispensable.

...The commission's stance favors continued research in synthetic biology precisely because the threats of enormous societal and economic costs are vague and unsubstantiated. Moreover, there are practical implications of continued research that are critical to preparing for future challenges. The commission notes that "undue restriction may not only inhibit the distribution of new benefits, but it may also be counterproductive to security and safety by preventing researchers from developing effective safeguards."12 Continued pursuit of knowledge and capability is critical to our physical and economic security, an argument I have been attempting to inject into the conversation in Washington, D.C., for a decade. The commission firmly embraced a concept woven into the founding fabric of the United States. In the inaugural State of the Union Address in 1790, George Washington told Congress "there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of publick happiness."13

The pursuit of knowledge is every bit as important a foundation of the republic as explicit acknowledgment of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Science, literature, art, and technology have played obvious roles in the cultural, economic, and political development of the United States. More broadly, science and engineering are inextricably linked with human progress from a history of living in dirt, disease, and hunger to . . . today. One must of course acknowledge that today's world is imperfect; dirt, disease, and hunger remain part of the human experience. But these ills will always be part of the human experience. Overall, the pursuit of knowledge has vastly improved the human condition. Without scientific inquiry, technological development, and the economic incentive to refine innovations into useful and desirable products, we would still be scrabbling in the dirt, beset by countless diseases, often hungry, slowly losing our teeth.

There's more here.

References:

8. R. Carlson, Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

12. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, New Directions, 5.

13. G. Washington, "The First State of the Union Address," January 8, 1790, http://ahp.gatech.edu/first_state_union_1790.html.

It is the End of the World as We Know it, and I feel Strangely Ambivalent: Synthetic Biology 5.0

Synthetic Biology 5.0 has come and gone.  I expected, as in previous years, to be busy liveblogging amid the excitement.  I tweeted some during the proceedings (here is Eric Ma's summary of #synbio5 tweets), but this is my first post about the meeting, and probably the last one.  I mostly just listened, took a few notes, and was delighted to see the progress being made.  I was not nearly as amped up about the proceedings as in previous years, and I am still trying to figure out why. 

Here are a couple of reasons I have sorted out so far.  It was the end of the beginning of synthetic biology.  The meeting was full of science and engineering.  And that's about all.  There were a few VC's and other investors sniffing around, but not nearly so many as in previous years; those who did show up kept a lower profile.  There were also fewer obvious government officials, no obvious spooks, no obvious law enforcement officers, nor any self-identified Weapons of Mass Destruction Coordinators.  And I only encountered a couple of reporters, though there must have been more.  I skipped 3.0 in Zurich, but at 1.0 at MIT, 2.0 at Berkeley (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and 4.0 in Hong Kong (part 1), there was much more buzz.  Synthetic Biology 5.0 was much shorter on hype than prior gatherings. 

There was substantially more data this year than previously.  And there was substantially less modeling.  All in all, Synthetic Biology is substantially more ... substantial.  It was like a normal scientific meeting.  About science.  No stunts from "civil society" groups looking for their next fear bullet point for fundraising.  No government officials proclaiming SB as the economic future of their city/state/country.  Just science.

What a relief.

And that science was nothing to sneeze at.  There were great talks for 3 days.  Here are a couple of things that caught my eye.

Jef Boeke from Johns Hopkins presented his plans to build synthetic yeast chromosomes.  I first heard this idea more than ten years ago from Ron Davis at Stanford, so it isn't brand new.  I did notice, however, that Boeke having all his synthetic chromosomes made in China.  Over the longer term this means China is getting a boost in building out future biomanufacturing platforms.  If the project works, that is.

As tweeted, Jack Newman from Amyris gave an update on commercialization of artemisinin; it should be on the market by the end of the year, which should be in time to help avert an expected shortfall in production from wormwood.  Fantastic.

Pam Silver and her various students and post-docs showed off a variety of interesting results.  First, Faisal Aldaye showed in vivo DNA scaffolds used to channel metabolic reactions, resulting in substantial increases in yield.  Second, Pam Silver showed the use of those scaffolds to generate twice as much sucrose from hacked cyanobacteria per unit of biomass as from sugar cane.  If that result holds up, and if the various issues related to the cost of bioreactors used to culture photosynthetic organisms are worked out, then Pam's lab has just made an enormous step forward in bringing about distributed biological manufacturing.

This is the sort of advance that makes me feel more sanguine about the future of MIcrobrewing the Bioeconomy.  It will take some years before the volume of Amyris' Biofene, or Gevo's bio-PET, or Blue Marble's bio-butyric acid begins to impact the oil industry.  But it is clear to me now as never before that the petroleum industry is vulnerable from the top of the barrel -- the high value, low volume compounds that are used to build the world around us in the form of petrochemicals.  Biology can now be used to make all those compounds, too, directly from sugar, cellulose, and sunlight, without the tens of billions of dollars in capital required to run an oil company (see The New Biofactories). 

So SB 5.0 was the end of the world as we know it.  Synthetic biology is now just another field of human endeavor, thankfully producing results and also thankfully suffering reduced hype.  I can see how the pieces are starting to fit together to provide for sustainable manufacturing and energy production, though it will be some years before biological technologies are used this way at scale.  Perhaps this is less in-your-face exciting for the attendees, the press, and the public, and that may be part of the reason for my ambivalence.  I fell asleep several times during the proceedings, which has never happened to me at SB X.0, even when overseas and jetlagged.  I have never before thought of achieving boredom as constituting progress.

New Cost Curves

Sitting here at Synthetic Biology 5.0, it's time to update the DNA synthesis and sequencing cost curves. (Here is some prior commentary on why these curves are slow, are fast, and have the shape they do.) Here you go:

Osama bin Laden and PCR

By now everybody has heard that bin Laden is dead.  R.I.H.

When I heard President Obama say last night that bin Laden's identity had been confirmed by DNA analysis (here's a post from Scientific American about how this might be done), I started mulling over what you might put in place to pull off this analysis quickly.

First, you need DNA.  US forces had OBL's, and everyone is reporting they compared his DNA to his sisters.  How?  If I really wanted to be certain, I would sequence some of her DNA and then prepare PCR primers based on that information.

Second, you need to check the suspect sequence.  There is certainly at least one of Idaho Technology's JBAIDS real-time PCR systems in theater.  Could be on the ground in Afghanistan, could be on an aircraft carrier or assault ship.  I doubt they flew one in and did the test in the air, but that is certainly possible.  (Side note, if you click through to the JBAIDS site, the photo totally makes the instrument look smaller than it is.  The box in real life is waaay bigger than a laptop.  "Man-portable RT-PCR" they say.  I say not by me.)

It probably took longer to fly the body out and get a sample to the PCR machine than it did to actually process the DNA and certify identity by RT-PCR.

So I have only one question: Who got the contract for high purity bin Laden-specific DNA primers?

Myriad's Lawyers Want to Patent the Periodic Table

Interesting arguments today before a Federal Appeals Court concerning the "BRCA 1/2" patents.  Recall first that the U.S. Government has filed an amicus brief supporting the trial judge's ruling that naturally-occurring genes cannot be patented (see "Big Gene Patent (Busting) News???" and "Surprise Outbreak of Common Sense in Washington DC").

The Appellate Court is going to decide whether two genes (BRCA 1 and 2), in which mutations are correlated with breast cancer, can be patented.  Myriad Genetics and its lawyers say yes, the ACLU and several groups representing patients, scientists, and clinicians say no.  So did the trial judge.  The basic argument is about whether a naturally-occurring gene sequence that is used in a diagnostic test can be considered an invention.

Nature's The Great Beyond blog has a bit of reporting from yesterday's proceedings.  There is a passage from the blog post I think is worth exploring a bit further for the way the litigants and the judges are talking about the nature of DNA and the nature of elements such as lithium:

Both the lawyers and the judges repeatedly compared the case to efforts to extract a valuable mineral from the ground.

"Why isn't the ingenuity [that justifies patentability] the process of extracting [the mineral]" rather than in the mineral itself, [Judge Kimberly Moore] asked [defendent's attorney Greg] Castanias. "God made it. Man didn't make it."

Castanias retorted: "What we have here are new tools [that are] the products of molecular biologists. They are not the products of nature. They are not the products of God."

If that's the case, [Judge William Bryson] pushed Castanias, are you saying that isolation of pure lithium is properly an invention?

"Yes," the lawyer replied.

That is extraordinary.  Castanias' assertion is contrary to more than a century of U.S. case law and administrative rulings by the USPTO.  Products of nature are explicitly excluded in laws, rulings, and administrative decisions from coverage by patents.  Castanias wants the Appellate Court to rule that the elements in the periodic table, along with any other naturally-occurring substance, are in fact patentable.

The mind boggles.  Following Castanias' reasoning pure oxygen, pure water, and pure gold could all be patented because some process was employed for purification.  If this sort of argument held sway, you could even patent the moon because you require a human invention to go visit and nab a piece of it.  Yes, yes, I know that other inconvenient case law would get in the way of patenting a celestial body, which really doesn't make any sense anyway.  But that is the point.  The trial judge in this case was actually the first to issue a ruling that patents on naturally-occurring genetic sequences are prohibited by law (see "Big Gene Patent (Busting) News???").

This argument revolves in part around the nature of DNA.  Here is another excerpt from the Nature blog post:

Chris Hansen, a staff attorney with the ACLU, told the judges: "Myriad's entire business is built on the proposal that isolated DNA and [naturally occurring] DNA are identical." They don't write to patients with their test results, saying: "You've got a mutation in your isolated DNA but I have no idea what's going on in your body," he said.

Judge William Bryson countered that the act of isolating DNA involves breaking covalent bonds, thus creating a product that does not exist in nature.

"With respect, your honor, I think not," Hansen replied. "DNA is DNA."

But Greg Castanias, a lawyer with the Jones Day firm in Washington DC who represented the defendants, begged to differ. "Isolated DNA does not exist in nature," and wouldn't exist at all without human ingenuity, he said. The entire biotechnology industry, he added, is built on interpreting existing law to say that DNA isolation is sufficient to show the human invention that is required for a patent.

I found the language quoted to be quite interesting.  The notion that "isolated DNA does not exist in nature" is based on the defendants' definition of "isolated DNA".  Judge Sweet spent three pages of his original decision dealing with Myriad's assertions about "isolated DNA", but it is hard to know from the Nature blog post whether this was part of yesterday's conversation.  Here is Judge Sweet's definition (p. 92 of his decision): "Isolated DNA is therefore construed to refer to a segment of DNA nucleotides existing separate from other cellular components normally associated with native DNA, including proteins and other DNA sequences comprising the remainder of the genome, and includes both DNA originating from a cell as well as DNA synthesized through chemical or heterologous biological means".

This is quite close to Myriad's definition of "isolated DNA", but Judge Sweet still found that because the isolated DNA is the same sequence, and therefore conveys the same information, as the sequence in vivo, it cannot be patented because it is a product of nature.

Incidentally, the definition of isolated DNA given above appears to include DNA that is free in the environment.  Free DNA is found in marine and terrestrial environments.  That DNA can be taken up by other organisms via horizontal gene transfer, which means that free DNA is perfectly funtional.  Here, for example, is an interesting little study looking at the uptake of free DNA by aquatic bacteria.

The point being that humans did not invent DNA that is "separate from other cellular components".  Humans may have invented processes to concentrate and purify DNA, or to extract DNA from complex structures, but that does not mean that isolated DNA is itself a human invention.

Video from "Preserving National Security: The Growing Role of the Life Sciences"

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at an event run by the UPMC Center for Biosecurity, Preserving National Security: The Growing Role of the Life Sciences.  Here is the video of my presentation, followed by Roger Breeze, with an introduction by Gigi Gronvall.  There is a short panel discussion at the end of the clip.  Video of the rest of the meeting is also online, along with a conference report (PDF).

An Engineered Bug that Produces Isobutanol from Cellulose

This morning, Tom Murray at The Hastings Center pointed me to a new paper from James Liao's lab at UCLA demonstrating the first engineered bug that produces isobutanol from cellulose.  Wendy Higashide, et al, ported the artificial butanol synthesis pathway from the group's earlier work in E. coli (see this previous post) into Clostridium cellulolyticum.  Here is the article.

Recall that butanol is a much better biofuel than is ethanol.  Butanol is also not hygoscopic (doesn't suck up water), which means it can be blended at any point in the distribution chain, whereas ethanol must be trucked/barged/piped in dedicated infrastructure until just upstream of a gas station in order to avoid pulling contaminating water into the fuel stream.  Butanol has a long history of use as a transportation fuel, and has been demonstrated to be a drop in replacement for gasoline in existing engines.  See, for example, the work of the 2007 iGEM team from Alberta, and my earlier post "A Step Toward Distributed Biofuel Production?"  One advantage of making butanol instead of ethanol is that butanol spontaneously phase separates from water (i.e., it floats to the top of the tank) at concentrations above about 7.5% by volume, which substantially reduces the energy required to separate the molecule for use as a fuel.

The press release accompanying the Higashide paper describes the work as a "proof of concept".  The team attempted to insert the butanol synthesis pathway into a Clostridum strain isolated from decaying grass -- a strain that naturally consumes cellulose.  Unfortunately, this Clostridium strain is not as well characterized as your average lab strain of coli, nor does it have anywhere near the same number of bells, knobs, and whistles for controlling the inserted metabolic genes.  The short summary of the paper is that the team managed to produce 660 mg of butanol per liter of culture.  This is only about 0.07% by volume, or ~100 times below the concentration at which butanol phase separates from water.  The team lays out a number of potential routes to improving this yield, including better characterization of the host organism, or simply moving to a better characterized organism.

So, a nice proof of principle.  This is exactly the sort of technological transformation I discuss in my book.  But this proof of concept is not anywhere near being economically useful or viable.  Nonetheless, this progress demonstrates the opportunities ahead in relying on biology for more of our industrial production.

Garage Innovation and Recreational Drugs

(12 July, 2012: Updated with a few comments on recent US efforts to ban synthetic drugs.)

When a carpenter turns to chemistry to pay the rent, you can be certain innovation has been democratized.  As told by Jeanne Whalen in The Wall Street Journal, chemo-entrepreneur David Llewellyn found it an easy transition to begin making recreational drugs when his construction business tanked.  Llewellyn specializes in making "legal high" drugs for sale in Europe, always ready to move onto the next compound when authorities ban whatever he has been selling.  And he intends to keep operating that way: "Everything we sell is legal. I don't want to go to jail for 14 years."  This story has interesting implications for anyone interested in the future of synthetic biology, and in particular those who feel that regulating access to tools, skills, and materials will lead to a safer world.  But I will get to that later.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.  And to the spotlight.

Mr. Llewellyn looks to academic literature for inspiration for the next drug, and the WSJ named Purdue chemist David Nichols' papers as the source of several such drugs.  The WSJ article led Nichols to pen an essay for the 6 January issue of Nature entitled "Legal highs: the dark side of medicinal chemistry".  He writes: "Although some of my results have been, shall we say, abused, one cannot know where research ultimately will lead. I strive to find positive things, and when my research is used for negative ends it upsets me."  The essay constitutes a bit of soul searching, with an unspoken conclusion that he is doing the best he can to try to make the world a better place.  Here is NPR's version of a subsequent AP story on Professor Nichols.

Underlying the Professor's discomfort is that simple fact that science, as a method and as information, is value neutral.  By this I mean that regardless of what prompted a particular line of research (which might, in fact, be motivated by particular values), the resulting information is neither good nor bad.  It is just information.  That said, obviously that information will be used by humans for both good and bad ends.  This is about as close as I can get to a statement of fundamental human nature.  Humans will do good things and they will do bad things -- just as we always have -- with "good" and "bad" of course being highly contingent definitions.

The world we live in is dirty, full of disease and despair, and some people have no problem contributing to the mess.  It is very easy to sometimes forget this when working within a university.  But Science (with a capital "S", please) is just another human institution, inhabiting that same dirty world.  Anyone who does anything that hurts another person in today's world is likely using some bit of science or technology invented by somebody who was attempting to improve the world.  Pointing a finger at Professor Nichols as the source of information used to manufacture drugs that cause harm is like pointing a finger at whomever invented the screwdriver as the source of suicide bombers, or like pointing a finger at Isaac Newton as the source of ballistic missiles.  Academic publishing makes it easy to trace Professor Nichols by his research, and thus to point a finger at him, but that completely misses the point and is a distraction.

Laboratory-Adept Entrepreneurs: Just Trying to Pay the Rent

For his own part in this story, David Llewellyn is self-cast as a bit of a underdog trying to make an interesting living while keeping just this side of today's definition of "good".  From Ms. Whalen's WSJ article:

Mr. Llewellyn is part of a wave of laboratory-adept European entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs. They pose a stiff challenge for European law-enforcement, which is struggling to keep up with all the new concoctions. Last year, 24 new "psychoactive substances" were identified in Europe, almost double the number reported in 2008, according to the Lisbon-based European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, or EMCDDA.

As he scurries to stay ahead of the law, authorities have put speed bumps, not roadblocks, in his path. Mr. Llewellyn says Belgian customs officials recently raided one of his storehouses and seized his chemicals, threatening to use environmental laws to shut him down. And he says he may have to move one of his production labs from the Netherlands because authorities there are planning to outlaw the use of certain lab equipment without a professional license.

...Other than that, however, Mr. Llewellyn's business is cruising along largely unimpeded. He and eight employees make drugs in a pair of "underground" labs--one in Holland and a new, $190,000 lab in Scotland.

If you are inclined to believe that it should be easy to solve problems through regulation or licensing, the very existence of Mr. Llewellyn's operation might give you pause.  If the Belgian authorities threaten to shut him down with environmental laws, it isn't going to be that hard to get them to go away because so many other "legitimate" businesses somehow manage to comply with those same environmental laws even while using the same raw materials -- and the "legitimate" companies are probably managing this with much lower profit margins.  Or perhaps governments could attempt to impose license restrictions on anyone using a particular material or laboratory instrument, but then of course they would be imposing those costs on all such users, "legitimate" or otherwise.  Finally, you might hope to directly stop Mr. Llewellyn from making or selling his wares.  And then you would fail outright, because there are so many potential compounds of interest that the regulations would have to restrict making anything that might someday be found to possibly cause harm to humans.  And that would shut down the entire chemical industry, and thus the entire economy.

(Update: Wired is reporting that a ban on certain synthetic drugs signed into law by President Obama in June of 2012 has already been made obsolete -- within a few weeks -- by new compounds not covered by the law.  Senator Charles Schummer called the law "the final nail in the coffin for the legal sale of bath salts."  Not so much, I guess.)

Trouble for a Nose

Mr. Llewellyn describes Nopaine, a chemical derivative of Ritalin, as "every bit as good as cocaine. You can freebase it. You can snort it like crack."

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Llewellyn's product guarantees, or of his marketing copy, he might be right.  Nopaine might be as "good" as cocaine.  Or it might, as is the concern of Professor Nichols, cause death, liver cancer, or other long-term damage.  But Mr. Llewellyn can make it to market with a synthetic compound created in his "underground lab" without having to find out whether it is good or bad.

Whether you like it or not, innovation of this sort is here to stay.  It may be hard these days to buy a chemistry set for your kid that is in any way interesting, but it is demonstrably easy to incorporate and get one's mitts on enough information and raw materials to synthesize compounds new to science.  And even if this becomes hard in any particular country, the general problem of widely accessible information and infrastructure is here to stay.       

Many of the "legal highs" evidently come from China, as must some of the raw materials used by Mr. Llewellyn and his ilk.  Ms. Whalen's earlier article "Designer Drugs Baffle Europe", from July of 2010, notes that in China "lax control of chemicals makes it easier for manufacturers to obtain the raw ingredients."  Her later article suggests that China is attempting to control the manufacture and sale of some new compounds, but I am not sure I have much confidence in that effort.  If it becomes too annoying (and it will never be more than annoying for those interested in making and selling drugs) to operate in China, or somewhere in Eastern Europe, they will pick up and move elsewhere.  And they will still have access to international markets wherever they go.  Our policy may be to fight them, to chase them away, but we will never fully prevail.

Which brings us back to definitions of "good" and "bad".  "Bad" Mr. Llewellyn isn't acting alone; he has "bad" customers.  Their aggregate demand supports the market.  (Oh, and wait a moment -- what Mr. Llewellyn is doing is actually legal, so therefore it is "good"?)  Unless governments somehow come up with a way to keep people from imbibing "bad" substances, defined as "bad" on any given day, the demand for those substances isn't going away.

Chemistry Today, Biology Tomorrow

There was a time when synthetic chemistry was not so easy.  And then some time passed, and now today we can order novel psychoactive drugs over the Internet.  Or make them ourselves.

Today it is hard to build a genetic circuit that does exactly what you want.  Synthetic biology is in its infancy.  Yet it is already possible to outfit a lab in your garage (at least in the US) that is sufficient to do all kinds of interesting things.  And if you don't have room in your garage, then you can stroll down to the corner DNA hackspace.  (Update: Genspace's Dan Grushkin wrote in to observe that I have unintentionally juxtaposed drug production and Genspace in an unfortunate way, which was of course not my intent at all.  Note that I did this to myself, too, as one of the former examples was my own garage lab.)  Access to tools doesn't make molecular biology easy, but it does give you the opportunity to learn, and perhaps to innovate.

And thus people will innovate with biological tools and information just as they have with everything else.  That innovation will be "good", and it will be "bad".  Regulation will not be a panacea for biological technologies, and will not necessarily make the world a safer place, just as regulation fails in the case of chemistry.  As I argued last month in Garage Innovation in The Scientist, restriction of access will always produce perverse incentives when there is an "attempt to control tools and skills in the context of a market in which consumers are willing to pay prices that support use of those tools and skills".

I am reminded of my experience last year at a warm-up meeting for the 2011 Review Conference for the Biological Weapons Convention.  At one point in the discussion, one delegate asserted that "garage or DIYBio is only a problem in the US.  In our country it is illegal to do such things."

I wonder if this delegate knows whether or not a chemo-entrepreneur has an "underground lab" next door?

"Garage Innovation" in The Scientist

My column in this month's The Scientist is now available online.  "Garage Innovation" was written based on my presentation to the Presidential Commission on for the Study of Bioethical Issues and my experience over the last few years navigating discussions on regulating biological technologies.

I had to write the piece without having access to the Commission's recommendations, and relying instead on press reports of what Commission members said about the draft.  Now that I have perused the report (BIG PDF), I mostly like what I see.  Here is the relevant press release.  I'll have something more on the report after I have a chance to sit down and fully digest it.