Consider the following premise for a science fiction story:
As humans moved beyond the stone age, they gradually started developing and using tools. Fire was discovered, and added considerably to their ability to defend themselves, and make life comfortable. Over time, people added more and more sophisticated tools to their toolboxes, and started to change and adapt the environment to their convenience, albeit in a crude and clumsy fashion.
All around us were strange artifacts, mechanisms of incredible power and complexity, that worked on their own, that repaired themselves, and that were oddly beautiful, remarkably effective, and even sometimes dangerous. But because these mechanisms had always been around, humanity rarely thought about them: they were just part of the landscape. Whenever they could be adapted or used, humanity would use them, but usually without much thought about why they were there, or how they worked.
Occasionally a more philosophical human would theorize about how these non-human artifacts came to be. Some of the more superstitious theorized that these alien works were the result of gods or varying names and natures, and cults arose to worship them – but the central mystery – how and why these artifacts worked, how they were invented, and what their purpose was – was never really addressed.
Eventually, though, humanity accumulated enough knowledge of physics, chemistry, and related sciences that they started to get glimmerings of how these alien machines worked. And once they started to think about how these devices worked, and had enough of their own, hard-won knowledge to consider the workings of these machines, it suddenly dawned on them that rather than invent new ways of doing things from scratch, if they could figure out the how these alien machines worked, they could start using these powerful, intricate, and enormously well-articulated devices for humanity’s own purposes.
And thus was born biotechnology. Only this is not the premise for a science fiction story, but a different way of looking at humanity’s technological development.
If you think of living things of the three biological domains – plants, animals, and bacteria – they are machines of extraordinary complexity and power, that make incredible use of energy, are self-replicating, and self-repairing. They are powerful creations.
And, to avoid going into deep and controversial theological waters, let me say that I am not going to comment on who the ‘inventor’ of these machines is or was. I may, at some stage, write about whether it was God, Nature, or Cosmic Accident that created such machines, but this is not that discussion.
Instead, I want to focus on why biotechnology will be big. Biots – living organisms of all types – are, as I’ve said, machines of extraordinary power and complexity. The field of biotechnology involves decoding the ‘instruction book’ of how biots work so humanity can employ these machines for our own ends. (And, again, I have no intention to get into the ethics or the theology of doing so in this account. I’m aware that these are legitimate, even urgent, issues for discussion, but that is not the subject of this article, either.)
Come back to my science fiction analogy. If we found a broad array of powerful, alien machines that could do things we found difficult to do, then it would make a lot of sense for us to figure out how to work these machines, and then adapt their techniques to get things done, rather than to start from scratch, and invent our own techniques. In effect, biotechnology is the ability to figure out how Nature (for lack of a better term) does things, and then use Her machines to do things we want done.
For the natural machines in the world around us represent literally billions of years of trial-and-error, of debugging and perfecting systems, and of adaptation, and have resulted in small, compact, renewable, effective mechanisms for doing an enormous range of things, from manufacturing tremendously complex chemicals, including natural pharmaceuticals, to creating strong, light structures that can be used as building materials, to storing and releasing energy.
Biotechnology, then, is a far more efficient way to learn from what has already been done, and is already known to work, than it would be for us to start from scratch, invent, test, debug, and prefect new mechanisms. Biotechnology gives us the keys to an incredible array of solutions to problems that are very important to us.
And that’s why biotech will be big.
This is the first of three consecutive articles on biotechnology. This one is an introduction. The two that will follow in the next couple of weeks are drawn from a keynote presentation I made at the World Congress on Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Orlando, Florida on April 22nd, 2005.
© Copyright, IF Research, May, 2005.
by futurist Richard Worzel.
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