My new commentary, "Laying the foundations for a bio-economy", will be appearing in a upcoming issue of Systems and Synthetic Biology. The piece is freely available online as both text and PDF. Thanks to Springer for supporting the Open Access option. Here are the abstract, the first two paragraphs, and the last two paragraphs:
Abstract Biologicaltechnologies are becoming an important part of the economy.
Biotechnology already contributes at least 1% of US GDP, with revenues
growing as much as 20% annually. The introduction of composable
biological parts will enable an engineering discipline similar to the
ones that resulted in modern aviation and information technology. As
the sophistication of biological engineering increases, it will provide
new goods and services at lower costs and higher efficiencies. Broad
access to foundational engineering technologies is seen by some as a
threat to physical and economic security. However, regulation of access
will serve to suppress the innovation required to produce new vaccines
and other countermeasures as well as limiting general economic growth.
Welcome
to the Paleobiotic Age. Just as today we look back somewhat wistfully
on our quaint Paleolithic--literally "old stone"--ancestors, so will our
descendants see the present age as that of "old biology", inhabited by
Paleobiotic Man. The technologies we use to manipulate biological
systems are experiencing dramatic improvement, and as a result are driving change throughout human economies.
In
order to understand the impact of our growing economic dependence on
biological technologies it is worth taking a moment to consider the
meaning of economy. "Economy" is variously thought of as, "the
management of the resources of a country, especially with a view to its
productivity" and "the disposition or regulation of the parts or
functions of any organic whole; an organized system or method" Amid a constantly increasing demand for resources, we look to
technology to improve the productivity of labor, to improve the
efficiency of industrial process and energy production, and to improve
the yield of agriculture. Very tritely, we look to technological
innovation within our economy to provide more stuff at lower cost.
Biological technologies are increasingly playing that role.
...
In this, the Paleobiotic Age, our society is only just
beginning to struggle with all the social and technical questions that
arise from a fundamental transformation of the economy. History holds
many lessons for those of us involved in creating new tools and new
organisms and in trying to safely integrate these new technologies into
an already complex socio-economic system. Alas, history also fails to
provide examples of any technological system as powerful as rational
engineering of biology. We have precious little guidance concerning how
our socio-economic system might be changed in the Neobiotic Age to
come. We can only attempt to minimize our mistakes and rapidly correct
those we and others do make.
The coming bio-economy will be
based on fundamentally less expensive and more distributed technologies
than those that shaped the course of the 20th Century. Our choices
about how to structure the system around biological technologies will
determine the pace and effectiveness of innovation. As with the rest of
the natural and human built world, the development of this system is
decidedly in human hands. To paraphrase Stewart Brand: We are as engineers, and we'd better get good at it in a hurry.