Getting to the Future of Engineered Biology
A rather interesting article from Edge, which looks at how we might get from where we are today in biotechnology to the future we'd all like to see. It's very much along the lines of earlier discussions at Fight Aging! on open source biotech and the cost of infrastructure as they relate to progress and research communities: "How can I make biology easy to engineer? ... Going back hundreds of years, people had imagined that you could always design and build or make life, but nobody could really do that much about it. ... Now, 30 years after the initial successes of biotechnology, it has only realized really one of the early promises. ... Nevertheless, biotechnology exists, it's a huge positive contributor to our health and economy and the human condition generally, and now it's 2008. And so the question is, can we realize the initial promise of biotechnology? Or, forget that question, how do we make biology easy to engineer, so that anything we might want to manufacture out of the living world is something that we can pull off? ... Are we going to ever get to the point where it's not an exclusive technology, it's not a technology that requires experts? Are we ever going to get to the point where we can make many component integrated systems?"