synthesis

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 diverse crowd 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 the United 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.