"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  Biological technologies 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.          

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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.          

Comments

[Maverick]

I believe in the bright future of synthetic biology too. But the question is when will that happen.... and I am also interested in how this may change the structure of the Chinese outsourcing industries. Will it still be the factory that produces the cheapest goods or locations really don't matter?

[Rob Carlson]

Thanks for stopping by. I have always tried to refrain from making specific predictions about how fast things are going to change, and when we will reach certain milestones. The technology is simply too complex, and there are too many contributing factors to make forecasting any dates a reasonable thing to do.

The greatest risk, actually, is in being too pessimistic about the pace of change. For example, sequencing technologies are just one tool in the toolbox, but they may well be moving faster than the estimates I have published over the years. Improvements in sequencing don't immediately help build new organisms or circuits faster, but more sequence information does provide more parts for including in synthetic constructs. So through metagenomics we could soon have many new parts to play with, even though it is still laborious to assemble a circuit that does something interesting or useful.

With respect to scale and the location of production, China still wins in some areas. I recently heard that the Bejing sequencing center has costs that are substantially lower than in the US. They are reportedly using 454 pyrosequencing instruments, thereby combining high-throughput sequencing tech with cheap labor. In the long term, with respect to producing materials and fuels, it really depends on how much technology gets stuffed into organisms. If your bug produces a fuel that floats on water, it isn't clear that you need large scale processing to economically turn sugar into gasoline. We may wind up with microbrewed fuel and "bud-fuel", just as today we have Budweiser and a plethora of niche options.

Time will tell.