2008 US Presidential Candidates' Positions on Biological Technologies

Biological technologies constitute a rapidly growing portion of the US economy.  When you add together drugs, plants, and industrial products, genetically modified organisms now contribute about $130 billion, or ~1%, to the US Gross Domestic Product, with sector revenues growing at 15-20% per year.

Given our reliance on new biological technologies to provide innovations in health care, food production, biofuels, materials, and myriad other areas, the policy preferences of the next President will have a profound impact on the future of the bio-economy.  What follows is a non-partisan, though highly biased (in favor of biological technologies), look at the positions that are easily accessible on the web.

Unfortunately, the candidate with the best explicit proposals just dropped out.  Science and technology receive far too little attention from the two supposed nominees, and neither have agreed to participate in a science-only debate, such as the one proposed by ScienceDebate2008.

Where do they stand?

Senator McCain's campaign web site contains very little in the way of specifics about the role of science and technology in driving the economy.  Here is his "Issues" page.  Spread through the sections on Healthcare, Climate Change, and the Space Program, there are brief mentions of the need to provide funding for innovation, and to keep regulation minimal.  But no specific policy proposals.  The AAAS "Candidates Compared" page on McCain has substantially more detail his positions than his actual web site, but it is still pretty minimal if you are looking for a guide to his eventual policy positions.  All in all, quite disheartening.

Grade in Biological Technologies: C, but only with today's rampant grade inflation.

Senator Obama's Technology page has improved a bit since the last time I checked it out.  Previously, based on the text, "technology" was synonymous with communications and the Internet.  Now, in addition to a broadly worded proposals on communications tech and education, the Senator now has a few paragraphs addressing funding for technologies to mitigate climate change and reforming immigration and the patent system.  On the Healthcare page, he expresses his enthusiasm for "Advancing the Biomedical Research Field" and promises to increase funding.  Hurrah.  At the bottom of the Healthcare and Environment pages there are reasonably detailed policy summaries available as PDFs.

Grade in Biological Technologies: B, but only because based on the language in the policy summaries I can imagine he is willing to listen.

Alas, the policy positions relevant to biological technologies of the lately departed (from the race) Senator Clinton are much more detailed and coherent than the two putative nominees.  The most specific proposal for biological technologies in the Clinton "Innovation Agenda" is this (even though it substantially underestimates the contribution to the US economy):

Increase investment in the non-health applications of biotechnology in order to fuel 21st century industry.The NIH dominates federal investments in biology and the life sciences, and there are only a few programs exploring non-health applications of biotech. And although biotechnology is a $50 billion industry, it is still in its infancy-and that is particularly true where the non-health applications are concerned. An example of non-health biotech is the creation of bacteria that can remove toxins from the environment, such as heavy metals or radioactive contaminants. Insights from biotechnology can accelerate growth in a large number of other fields-not unlike the way 20th century developments in the chemicals industry drove growth in oil and gas refining, pulp and paper, building materials, and pharmaceuticals. The NIH will have to work with other agencies to explore these non-health applications.

It is true that in this quotation nowhere present are the words "metabolic engineering", "synthetic biology", or "metagenomics", but in my reading of the text those fields are how we get to meaningful results from "non-health applications".

The Agenda also calls for, "Requiring that federal research agencies set aside at least 8% of their research budgets for discretionary funding of high-risk research."   This sounds great, and I am in favor of it, but I wonder if there are enough talented program managers out there to handle the load.

Finally, the Agenda calls for, "Increasing the NIH budget by 50% over 5 years and aim to double it over 10 years."  While I would like to cheer for this, the NIH has not been the paragon of innovation over the last couple of decades, with the vast majority of funding going to established investigators rather than young people.  Even with an increase in funding, I don't see the NIH investing in synthetic biology any time soon.

Grade in Biological Technologies: A, and head of the class, but not "+" because while she addressed many of the relevant I am afraid the Senator didn't use the actual key words on the checklist.  That's how you grade essays, after all.

But, of course, even if she is as much of a policy wonk as her husband, Senator Clinton did not write the essay.  Somebody else did, and we can only hope that Obama or McCain 1) immediately picks up whomever was responsible for Clinton's excellent policy positions, and 2) listens to that person...

The First Meeting of DIYbio.org

Jason Bobe has posted a write -up of a recent meeting of would-be do-it-yourself biological engineers in Cambridge, MA.  See DIYbio.org.

Here's the first paragraph:

In the packed back-room of Asgard's Irish Pub in Cambridge, a diversecrowd of 25+ enthusiasts gathered to discuss the next big thing in biology: amateurs. Mackenzie (Mac) Cowell led-off the night with an overview of recent history in biological engineering, and asked the question: Can molecular biology or biotechnology be a hobby? Will advancements in synthetic biology be the tipping point that enables DIYers and garagistas to make meaningful contributions to the biological sciences, outside of traditional institutions? Can DIYbio.org be the Homebrew Computer Club of biology?

Farming and Economies of Scale

Biological technologies constitute a rapidly growing portion of the U.S. GDP, about 1%, or $150 billion, as of early 2008.  If biological processes continue to displace chemical processes in industry, we might expect all of industry to look more like biology.  While most industrial chemistry is carried out in large facilities, throughout the living world big organisms are rare.  Yes, we have a few examples of gigantic trees and charismatic megafauna, but very few creatures are larger than about a meter.  The vast majority of biomass on Earth consists of microbes.

Physics and economics both dictate that some kinds of industrial processes are best implemented at scale.  Anything involving large amounts of heat, particularly when there are large masses of water involved, generally benefits from increased scale because energy can be more easily contained and recycled.  Energy is more easily contained with small surface to volume ratios; big vessels and pipes loose less heat.  Similarly, benefits of scale can be found in big pipes have less fluid resistance and are easier to pump things through.

Biology tends to do things smaller.  Thus when I muse about the possibility of distributed biological manufacturing, particularly the potential of distributed biofuel production, I am inspired by the fact that biological processing tends to be networked or mobile.  Ecosystems are full of material transport and exchange, a large part of which is mediated by animals that wander around eating in one place and crapping in another.

As transportation costs increase with the price of oil, moving both food and manufactured goods around will be ever more expensive.  At some point, we should expect food to be cheaper when grown locally and transported shorter distances.

According to an Op-Ed in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, we are well past the point where small farms are more economical than large ones.  In "Change We Can Stomach", Dan Barber writes that:

...Small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in theUnited States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.

Mr. Brown doesn't cite any sources for these numbers, but it is something I will be looking into as my book finally gets wrapped up.  It is generally asserted by economists that 1) large farms are a better use of land, and require less labor per unit output, than small farms, and 2) labor has a higher value in cities when employed in manufacturing.

But cows are cheap and mobile, and if biological technology ever gets to the point of using cows to produce industrial products, then the economies of scale could be radically shifted.  I am put in mind of a short story by David Brin in which not only cows are used as biomanufacturing platforms, but people are, too.  Here's to hoping that is some years off.

"Scenarios for the future of synthetic biology"

It is always tempting to extend technological trends to predict grand futures.  Yet predictions usually fail, either because one can never have sufficient information about the state of the world or simply because of surprise.  One method to address the inherent uncertainty in understanding future events is to explicitly delineate one's ignorance through the use of scenarios.  While I am no expert in developing scenarios, I  have always found my experiences with the Global Business Network and Bio-era in developing stories to be extremely useful in identifying what I don't know.

Bio-era has recently published a feature commentary in Industrial Biotechnology, "Scenarios for the future of synthetic biology" (for PDFs, follow the link).  Here is a brief excerpt:

The rapid evolution of biological engineering raises challenging questions about the future economic, social, and environmental consequences of the use of this technology.  Considering these broad issues requires an explicit acknowledgement of uncertainty: We can imagine many possible futures, but we cannot predict how events will actually unfold. Formal scenarios can provide a useful, structured basis for considering plausible future circumstances—enabling us to more easily identify key implications and any choices or policy considerations we might need to take either now or in the future.

Efforts at technology forecasting have, at best, a poor record.  Early predictions of the future of the computer industry envisioned the need for only a handful of large computers to meet all conceivable computing needs. In 1980, the US government and other analysts foresaw a boom in synthetic fuels that never materialized. Scientists and governments over several decades vastly underestimated the difficulty of developing practical fusion reactors. Early assessments of the cost of sequencing the human genome turned out to be too high by almost an order of magnitude. In each of these cases, significant economic and policy decisions were premised on predictions of the future that proved to be far off the mark.

...Each of the four stories presented here represents a plausible path to an uncertain future.  They are not predictions about the future, nor should they be understood as more plausible than other possible futures. Our modest hope, is that they might usefully serve to provoke consideration of the complex implications that accompany the introduction and diffusion of powerful new technologies that will inevitably lead to far-reaching policy decisions made under conditions of fundamental uncertainty.

"Scenarios for the future of synthetic biology", Stephen Aldrich, James Newcomb, Robert Carlson.  Industrial Biotechnology.  March 1, 2008, 4(1): 39-49.  doi:10.1089/ind.2008.039.

efuel100 Web Site Goes Live -- Buy Yours NOW!

I just received a tip that the web site is now up for the small-scale fermentation and distillation machine I mentioned last week (see "A Step Toward Distributed Biofuel Production?").  The efuel100 Microfueler supposedly takes a mixture of sugar, yeast, and nutrients and returns pure ethanol in a few days.  According to the site, you can also distill waste alcoholic beverages -- this ought to catch the attention of the guys at Gizmodo.

If anybody reading this plunks down the ~$10K for a Microfueler, followed by paying for all the razorblades proprietary feedstock, let me know how it works out.  I am definitely curious to see if the electricity costs to run the fermenter/distiller are as low as claimed.

A Step Toward Distributed Biofuel Production?

Sunday's New York Times caries an article by Michael Fitzgerald, "Home Brew for the Car, Not the Beer Cup", that describes a potential step toward garage production of biofuels, specifically ethanol.

(Update: I wrote to Mr. Fitzgerald in the hopes of getting more information, and he responded with this:

The company currently has only this placeholder site with a form on it:  www.efuel100.com.

It intends to announce its product May 8th, at which time it says it will have more information available.

So we will just have to wait to find out more.)

I have speculated for the last year or so about the feasibility and utility of distributed microbial production of biofuels.  Petroleum refineries and shipping infrastructure are big for a reason; due to both physics and economics it only makes sense to build big, expensive projects.  In contrast, once you have a bug that turns sugar or cellulose into fuel, the production process could in principle look a lot more like brewing beer.

Companies like Amyris are working on building bugs that can churn out a variety of fuels, and they are aiming for production capacity on a scale that is smaller than Big Oil.  Thus far, however, most of these companies seem to be aiming for hundreds of millions of liters rather than a few liters of production capacity (see my previous post "Amyris Launches Cane-to-Biofuels Partnership").  New technology may lead to rethinking this approach.

To give some context, here is a short excerpt from my recent article in Systems and Synthetic Biology, "Laying the foundations for a bio-economy" (see the original for references):

The economic considerations of scaling up direct microbial production of biofuels are fundamentally and radically different than those of traditional petroleum production and refining. The costs associated with finding a new oil field and bringing it into full production are considerable, but are so variable, depending on location, quality, and local government stability, that they are a poor metric of the average required investment. A very straightforward measure of the cost of increasing supplies of gasoline and diesel is the fractional cost of adding refining capacity, presently somewhere between US$ 1 and 10 billion for a new petro-cracking plant, plus the five or so years it takes for construction and tuning the facility for maximum throughput. Even increasing the capacity of working facility is expensive. Shell recently announced a US$ 7 billion investment to roughly double the capacity of a single, existing refinery.          

In contrast, the incremental cost of doubling direct microbial production of a biofuel is more akin to that incurred in setting up a brewery, or at worst case a pharmaceutical grade cell culture facility. This puts the cost between US$ 10,000 and 100,000,000, depending on size and ultimate complexity. Facilities designed to produce ethanol by traditional fermentation and distillation can cost as much as US$ 400 million.

Pinning down the exact future cost of a microbial biofuel production facility is presently an exercise in educated speculation. But, for both physical and economic reasons, costs are more likely to be on the low end of the range suggested above.

This is particularly true for a fuel like butanol. While distilling or filtering alcohol from the fermented mix would reduce the palatability of beer, it is absolutely required to produce fuel grade ethanol. However, unlike ethanol, butanol has only a limited miscibility in water and therefore does not require as much energy to separate. If an organism can be built to withstand the ∼8% concentration at which butanol begins to phase-separate, the fuel could simply be pumped or skimmed off the top of the tank in a continuous process. Costs will fall even further as production eventually moves from alcohols to hydrocarbon biofuels that are completely immiscible in water. Moreover, beer brewing presently occurs at scales from garages bottling of a few liters at a time to commercial operations running fermenters processing thousands to many millions of liters per year. Thus, once in possession of the relevant strain of microbe, increasing production of a biofuel may well be feasible at many scales, thereby potentially matched closely to changes in demand. Because of this flexibility, there is no obvious lower bound on the scale at which bio-production is economically and technically viable.

The scalability of microbial production of biofuels depends in part on which materials are used as feedstocks, where those materials come from, and how they are delivered to the site of production. Petroleum products are a primary feedstock of today's economy, both as a raw material for fabrication and for the energy they contain. Bio-production could provide fuel and materials from a very broad range of feedstocks. There is no obvious fundamental barrier to connecting the metabolic pathways that Amyris and other companies have built to produce fuels to the metabolic pathways constructed to digest cellulose for ethanol production, or to the pathways from organisms that digest sewage. Eventually, these biological components will inevitably be enhanced by the addition of photosynthetic pathways. Conversion of municipal waste to liquid biofuels would provide a valuable and important commodity in areas of dense human population, exactly where it is needed most. Thus microbial production of biofuels could very well be the first recognizable implementation of distributed biological manufacturing.    

The NYT reports that a company called E-Fuel has developed a refrigerator-sized box that turns yeast and sugar into ethanol.  This home fermentation and distillation unit is described as having a variety of technological improvements, such as semi-permeable membrane filters, that reduce the cost of separating ethanol from water.  The price point for the E-Fuel 100 Microfueler is suggested to be $9995, though few other details are given.

Regular readers will recall that I am not particularly enthusiastic about ethanol, but -- assuming it is real -- the Mircrofueler might be an interesting step forward because it ought to work for higher chain alcohols such as butanol.  The physics is fairly straightforward: there is an increase in enthalpy from mixing alcohol and water, which is in principle the only energy you have to add back to the system to separate them.  In practice, however, the only way to achieve this separation is to heat up the mixture, which requires considerably more energy because water has such a large specific heat.  Any technology that helps reduce the energy cost of separating alcohol from water could substantially lower production costs.

E-Fuel might therefore have a way to help Amyris, or LS9, or even BP lower the costs of separating fuels from aqueous production mixtures, and to do so with a box that could sit in consumers' garages.  This raises all sorts of questions about where the bug comes from, whether for the purposes of cost those bugs are consumables, and where the revenue stream comes from in the long term.  I suspect the answer, long term, is that the feedstock and the hardware are the only way to make money.

For example, let's say the University of Alberta 2007 iGEM team (the "Butanerds"), who continue to work on their project, are successful in building a bug that can crank out butanol from sugar.  That bug will be full of Biobrick parts, which at present sit in the public domain.  Acquiring a working circuit made of Biobrick parts will always be substantially less expensive than building a proprietary circuit.  In other words, if a bunch of (talented) undergraduates manage to get their "open source" biofuel production bug working, then it isn't clear that anybody else will be able to charge for a bug that does the same thing -- unless, of course, a proprietary bug is much more efficient or has other advantages.  But how long would the relevant genetic circuits even stay proprietary?  DNA sequencing is cheap, and DNA synthesis is cheap, so reproducing those circuits is going to be easy.  Nobody is going to get anywhere with "biosecurity through obscurity".

Either way, you then still need some sort of box that houses the bugs during fermentation or synthesis of fuels, and also serves to separate the fuel from the soup in which the bugs grow; enter the Microfueler.

So on the one hand we have a new piece of hardware that supposedly will allow the user to produce fuel at home from sugar (or, perhaps, starch, cellulose, and waste), and on the other hand we are starting to see efforts to build organisms that produce a variety of fuels that might be processed by that hardware.

Here is what I really want to know: How long will it be before we see a partnership between E-Fuel and a company (or an iGEM team) to put butanol (or other fuel molecule) "biorefinery" in your garage?  It could even be a company other than E-Fuel, because they are unlikely to have a corner on the technology necessary to build the relevant hardware.  Or perhaps there will even be an open-source "microbiofueler/biomicrofueler" emerging from a garage or university project?

Distributed biological manufacturing, here we come.

Amyris Launches Cane-to-Biofuels Partnership

I just received word that Amyris has now officially announced a partnership to use Brazilian sugar cane to produce biofuels.  Amyris and Crystalsev are aiming to hit the market with cane-derived biodiesel in 2010.  This deal has been in the works for a while; the press release is here.

Amyris now has access to large amounts of sugar, as well as substantial fermentation capacity, and they need to get their bugs up to snuff for producing large volumes of fuel.  Based on what I have seen in my travels, I expect they will get there.  In principle, the market will be the ultimate judge of the accomplishment, with consumers in the role of jury.  But the market, at present, is also skewed by subsidies and tariffs that place Brazilian products at a disadvantage compared to less efficient domestic production.  It is yet unclear whether the new biofuel will be subject to the same uneven playing field facing Brazilian ethanol.

(Update:  Since this post seems to be getting lots of traffic, I will point those interested to a couple of my earlier posts on the role of Amyris and synthetic biology in producing biofuels: "The Intersection of Biofuels and Synthetic Biology", and "The Need for Fuels Produced Using Synthetic Biology".)

Re-Inventing The Food Chain (or "On Food Prices, In Vitro Meat, and GM Livestock Feed")

Given the price of grain, and a dislike of genetically modified crops, Europe might soon be eating meat grown in a vat.  Stay with me:

The press is full of noise about the price of food.  Whatever the real impact of biofuels production on food prices -- which is probably very hard to pin down quantitatively -- the grain surplus we have enjoyed for decades is now over and demand exceeds supply.  This condition is probably permanent, and in order to keep the economy running we need to figure out how to get more production out of limited arable land.  This in turn raises the issue of improving yields and overall harvest through the use of genetically modified crops.  GM crops are widely grown and consumed in the Americas, but have met with governmental and consumer resistance elsewhere.

The general embrace by U.S. farmers of GM crops, and contemporaneous rejection of those crops by European consumers, produces interesting complexities within markets.  While the European region is presently a net food exporter, much of the feed for European livestock and poultry comes from the Americas.  Yet the strict safety testing and labeling requirements for food or feed containing GM plants amounts to a European zero-tolerance policy for importation of GM products.  While GM sugar beets and some varieties of GM corn may be officially approved for sale in Europe, consumers appear to avoid products with the GM label.

This policy has fascinating secondary consequences, namely that it is on track to force dramatic reductions in European livestock production due to increasing fractions of GM feed grains.  In an article in the October 2007 issue of Nature Biotechnology, "Europe's anti-GM stance to presage animal feed shortage?" (the full text of which you can find online here, PDF here), Peter Mitchell writes:

...If a solution isn't found, European farmers will be forced into wholesale slaughter of their livestock rather than have the animals starve. Europe will then have to import huge quantities of animal products from elsewhere—ironically, most of it from animals raised on the very same GM feeds that Europe has not approved.

Mitchell cites a report from the European commission that production of meat could fall by between 1 and 44 percent over the next two years, depending on actual supplies of non-GM feed.  Changes in attitude that produce a marketing environment friendlier to GM products may alleviate this problem.  Yet consumer resistance to GM products in Europe is both deep and broad.  Even in the face of economic hardship, brought on by reduced food exports and increased domestic prices, consumers and interest groups may take many years to change their minds.

The New York Times reports that pressure is growing in Europe to change policies on GM crops.  According to an article by Andrew Pollack in the 21 April, NYT:

In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month demanding that “all resistance” to such crops “be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production.”

Despite these pressures, Pollack writes that, "Since the beginning of the year France has banned the planting of genetically modified corn while Germany has enacted a law allowing for foods to be labeled as “G.M. free.”"

So, in a world with declining GM-free feedstocks, where is Europe going to get GM-free meat?  The science fiction vision of meat grown in vats could be economically relevant sooner than one might think.

Earlier this month at Wired News, Alexis Madrigal wrote about the recent In Vitro Meat Symposium in Norway.  A report was presented that claimed, "Meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros)" -- more or less competitive with current European beef prices."  Madrigal reports that according to Jason Matheny at Johns Hopkins University, "The general consensus is that minced meat or ground meat products -- sausage, chicken nuggets, hamburgers -- those are within technical reach.  We have the technology to make those things at scale with existing technology."  Matheny is the founder of New Harvest, a non-profit working on producing meat substitutes.

Madrigal's story carried a skeptical tone, and suggested that commercialized in vitro meat was probably many years away.  I have been wondering whether the market would, um, serve up cultured meat sooner than that, and this week brought an interesting surprise.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) just announced a US$ 1 million prize for, "The first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices."  It may not be long before PETA writes that check.

If it is already possible to produce "meat-like products" at prices competitive with those in Europe today, then continued increases in the price of products grown on the hoof or claw should make in vitro meat even more attractive economically.  The feedstocks for meat cells grown in culture would be fairly basic, just sugars and amino acids, and possibly some lipids.  These in turn can be produced by plants, yeast, and bacteria.  In principle, a co-culture of non-GM animal cells and hacked/engineered microbes that serve as feeder cells could provide a fairly high-efficiency conversion of sunlight to meat.  That might not pass muster in Europe, but it would probably sell like hotcakes Big Macs in other countries.  And how could you tell the difference?

Pushing further down this road, how long will it be before an iGEM team produces a circuit that facilitates the differentiation and culture of stem cells from fowl, fish, and mammals to produce a better burger?  I suppose an intermediary step is to hack filamentous E. coli so that it grows to have the texture of muscle tissue for minced meat.  Those clever undergrads have already made coli smell like bananas and mint, so why not add a few more metabolic products: "Yum! Tastes just like chicken!"  Or lamb.  Or yak.  Yuck. You could even enjoy a nice "coliburger" ("bactoburger"?) that intentionally contained bacteria and not have to worry about kidney and liver damage.  (Oh, yes, this is waaaay more fun than finishing the last chapter of my book.)

Just as long as our in vitro meat isn't actually made of people (see 1:34:29).  Can't wait for the t-shirt.

Catching up on the News - Big Biotech Investment by India

Now that my book is nearing completion, I can start looking around a bit more.  I missed this last November -- according to a news brief in Nature, India is planning to seriously boost its expenditures on biotech:

For the first time, Indiahas appointed a biologist as head of its largest research agency. The announcement coincides with the unveiling of a national strategy for biotechnology, supported by a 65-billion-rupee (US$1.6-billion) commitment over the next 5 years.

Samir Brahmachari, former director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi, is the new chief of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The CSIR manages 41 labs with a staff of more than 18,000 scientists and has been without a permanent director since December 2006.

The strategy approved by the cabinet on 14 November calls for one-third of the government's research budget to be spent on biotechnology — a 450% increase over the previous 5 years — in partnership with private-sector funding. The plan will create 50 biotech 'centres of excellence' by 2012.

                                                                                   

"Laying the foundations for a bio-economy"

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.