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Preparing for the Biobased Economy: Part I
May 2005

What follows is a portion of a keynote presentation I gave at the World Congress on Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Orlando, Florida, in April, 2005. Because of its length, I’ve split this presentation into two parts. This was the opening of the presentation; the balance will follow in a subsequent article.


Imagine for a moment that we have gathered here again here in Orlando in the year 2025. This time, though, I’ve been asked to do a retrospective of where we’ve come from. And, of course, I’ll be 74 years old – barely in my prime!


Looking back on the last 20 years, it’s clear that the biosciences are changing the world even faster than we had expected back in 2005. Rich country economies have experienced a new Industrial Revolution, every bit as dramatic as that of the 18th and 19th centuries, only this time the effects are spreading worldwide in years or even months instead of decades.


Food production has been transformed. Today’s plants are hardier, require less water, having acquired some of the genetic characteristics of succulents, and are producing their own fertilizers, and the ability to fend off most pests by themselves. Not only that, but most food plants and livestock are customized to specific sets of consumers, and individual farmers specialize in targeted niche markets. Biotech has largely been credited with saving the family farm, as it is now possible to grow small quantities of specialized crops earmarked for tiny groups of consumers. The mass customization that infected industrial manufacturing in the 2000s has moved into the food industry, driven by our growing knowledge of individual sensitivities, and our expanding awareness of the environmental triggers to genetically-linked diseases and conditions. As a result, consumers choose or avoid foods that can help or harm them, and the cliché ‘Eat right for your genotype’ has become as hated and satirized as ‘Have a nice day.’


Industrial farming, on the other hand, is now big business, with agribusiness conglomerates filling the prairies and plains with plants producing feedstock for plastics and nanotech monofilaments and materials, plants and livestock for pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and ethanol for both car gas tanks and hydrogen production on a rapidly expanding scale.


The American Congress is, as usual, Ground Zero for lobbying battles over farm subsidies. Now, though, farmers are actively opposed by those oil companies and electric utilities who have chosen to drag their feet and resist change, as well as traditional manufacturers and chemical companies, all of which are seeing their livelihoods overwhelmed by biology.


The practice of health management has likewise been transformed. Life expectancy has been pushed back into the 90s for those who take care of themselves with a custom-tailored diet of properly balanced nutriceuticals; cures for chronic conditions like diabetes or Crohn’s; early detection and ‘silver bullet’ cures or treatments for most acute diseases like cancer; nanotechnology mechanisms that physically attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and lifestyle drugs that reduce body fat by calibrated amounts. Pharmaceutical companies can no longer rely on producing ‘blockbuster’ drugs because it’s clear that the vast majority of drugs have different effects on different people, requiring genetic screening before any drug is prescribed for a given individual, regardless of disease.


Moreover, vigorous good health now extends well into the late 80s, fostered by the ability to repair and rebuild bones and teeth, restore the elasticity of lenses and retinas, regenerate the meniscus in knees and disks in bad backs, and replace hips and other joints with materials that are stronger and more durable than natural bone and ligaments. Organ replacement from your own genome now looks tantalizingly close, but isn’t here yet. There’s even talk of extending life span indefinitely, and early trials look promising. This, of course, is generating enormous controversy. Some argue that since only the rich can afford such treatments, they should be banned until they are universally available. Others argue that postponing death indefinitely is the ultimate form of environmental degradation.


Industry has changed radically as well. The initial spur was the demands and expectations of consumers, starting in Europe, and then spreading to North America, for greener products and energy from renewable resources. This consumer demand was quickly picked up by Wall Street and financial markets worldwide, as fund managers built on public sentiment to develop and promote ‘green’ investment funds, providing additional funding that allowed the biotech sector to blossom. But while companies initially reacted because of consumer pressure, today they are eagerly, almost desperately reducing waste and embracing renewable sources of energy and raw materials. They’re doing this not because they’ve suddenly become eco-fanatics, but because it’s now obvious that reducing waste increases profits, and renewable resources are cheaper than fossil resources. Therefore, it is the profit motive and the desire to survive, that is pushing companies today, not just public relations. Governments, meanwhile, have spurred the trend with tradable credits not only for greenhouse gases, but for reclaiming and removing heavy metals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides from water supplies, landfills, and toxic dumps. Much of this has come as a result of demands from voters to deal with what are being called ‘micropollutants’: the vast numbers of chemicals produced by industrial society since the middle of the 20th Century, and which are now known to have deleterious effects on one genotype or another. As knowledge of individual genetic sensitivities has grown, so has the chorus of demands for legislators to act.


Meanwhile, industrial biotech is eroding traditional manufacturing practices as well. A steadily rising percentage of the electricity used by manufacturers is coming from fuel cells powered by ethanol, which is both reducing costs, and lowering the environmental impact of their operations. Likewise, distribution systems are using ethanol, such as that produced by Iogen from straw, or biodiesel made from soybeans as the fastest, lowest cost ways to reduce the environmental impact of motor vehicles. This was one of the significant changes that allowed many rich country signatories to approach the carbon-dioxide reductions mandated by the Kyoto Accord.


Traditional products, especially those made from petroleum feedstocks, are increasingly made from bio-based products instead, including: seat foam and resin panels for cars from soybeans; spider’s silk polymers, used in everything from bullet-proof vests to surgical silk, from genetically-tailored bacteria and silkworms; polymers for clothing, fabrics, and polylactide plastics made from genetically-tailored plants; concrete reinforcement, which now increasingly uses flax straw instead of steel; biopolyesters, such as those developed by Metabolix, which are used for adhesives and resin coatings and moldings, as well as biodegradable packaging; and injection molded plastics pioneered by the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, which use flax fibers for reinforcement instead of non-biodegradable fiberglass.


And biotechnology has crossed over into nanotechnology as well. Following the lead of Oregon State University, manufacturers now build a broad range of products, from flexible computer screens, cheap solar cells, and water filtration systems, to ‘silver bullet’ vehicles that deliver drugs directly to cancerous cells, dramatically increasing the delivered dosage. Oregon started by inducing diatoms, the microscopic creatures that build silica shells from sea water, to absorb other materials, including silicon, germanium, titanium, and gallium. The diatoms then integrate these materials into nano-scale tubules that are then harvested for industrial use. This process is energy efficient, absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and produces less expensive and more durable end products than we could create ourselves. (Source: National Geographic website)


Likewise, big pharmaceutical companies, after an initial reluctance to commit to biotech, are now piling into the sector. Of course, the use of biotechnology in pharmaceuticals stretches all the way back to the 1980s with the work of Genentech in producing human insulin from genetically engineered bacteria, and Amgen’s production of Epogen as a treatment for anemia. By the 2000s, Genentech was producing Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody – which also pioneered the now-familiar concept of screening drugs for genetic applicability. Following the pioneering work by the French firm, Meristem, in producing lipase in GM corn, and Quebec's Medicago’s production of recombinant proteins in GM alfalfa, many health management compounds are being grown in the ground or in a vat at a small fraction of the cost of older, more traditional techniques.


Today, the large number of health management products made via biotech include human proteins from potatoes, hoof-and-mouth vaccines from alfalfa, skin-growth hormones from tobacco, plus human albumin, hemoglobin, interferon, and vaccines for hepatitis-B, cholera, and diarrhea from baker’s yeast. Likewise, new pharmaceuticals are emerging from biotech boutiques and multinationals alike, including an epidermal growth factor inhibitor for lung cancer; monoclonal antibodies that target asthma, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus; the therapeutic vaccines which have been so important in jump-starting the immune system in our continuing fight with the AIDS pandemic; antisense products as treatments for cancer and heart disease; and gene therapies for cancer, cystic fibrosis and heart disease. (Source: phrma.org)


Meanwhile, everyone that uses or makes chemicals is experiencing the same kind of revolution that the pharmaceutical companies did in the 2000s – small companies using superior techniques and new technologies carve out niches by creating new, more effective chemicals and chemical processes, and are either bought out by large multinationals, or take over steadily rising amounts of market share. Three dimensional modeling, computer simulations, and genetic algorithm analysis of chemical processes has made it possible to accurately prescribe the creation of new compounds, and fabricate them with speeds that would not have been believed even five years ago – and the pace of change is still accelerating.


In fact, the pace of change has become so rapid now that managing change occupies the waking (and sleeping) hours of most corporations. It’s only the really good ones that are succeeding, and they’re doing it through a combination of treating their people well (and thereby distributing the process of thought and information absorption), and innovating, which all companies espouse, but few actually practice. As far back as the early 2000s, Dupont estimated that genetically-engineered organisms could develop into a $500 billion a year industry, Mackenzie Consulting had extrapolated that biotechnology would grow to a $230 billion a year industry by 2010 – and both have now been proven to be conservative in their estimates.


But if this sounds like utopia, it is anything but, for nothing comes for free. There are persistent rumblings of a trade war as China and India are making enormous inroads into the biotech industries. Meanwhile, there’s growing acrimony over stolen intellectual property and corporate espionage is widespread, with the result that the number of patents are stagnant or even dropping, intellectual property litigation is soaring, and companies are regressing to trade secrets. The green revolution has made it impossible for rich country farmers to grow commodity crops like wheat or corn any more, and agricultural surpluses are a global curse, provoking ever-greater trade disputes between governments. And as utilities see their revenue bases eroded by stand-alone electricity generation, the electric power grids of all nations are becoming unreliable, increasing the number and severity of blackouts. In the long run, this will accelerate the use of fuel cells to generate electricity for individual buildings, but in the meanwhile it is threatening economic growth.


Environmentalists are unhappy as well, because it turns out that stopping the growth of carbon emissions was not enough, and global climate change continues. Moreover, there are now serious concerns that escaping hydrogen is cooling the upper atmosphere, and (indirectly) destroying the ozone layer. At ground level, the increased use of hydrogen is affecting climate by trapping heat. It seems that hydrogen advocates forgot that water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.


The world has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, and biotechnology is now a pivotal factor in the economy and daily life. Some of the changes are clearly for the better – but there is, as always, a cost for every benefit.


by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.
© Copyright, IF Research, May 2005.

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