As I have said before, low cost biotechnology is just the latest development on a story that is 9000 years old. It's the story of our conscious relationship to nature, how we have tweaked, selected and bred animals and plants to serve our needs and please our tongues, noses and eyes. What we intend to do is just simply to bring the amateur once again to a pivotal role in solving his or her problems, to reduce the cost of the infrastructure needed for this kind of research and agricultural development so it is affordable by farmers and regular people, not only for universities and the industry.
Others have exposed this vision much better than my broken English allows me, so I selected a few articles, interviews and ideas to show how different, and richer, healthier, could be our world in the future, if we can develop the tools for cheap biotechnology and the people uses them.
The first is an article from Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists alive, and a man with an incredible imagination. The article, Our Biotech Future, describes a future where biotechnology is decentralized and common, where modifying not genes, but whole genomes, is a form of art. If you feel offended, or grossed out, I just invite you to check a dog show when you can. These furry, playful and cute creatures are very different from their ancestors, due to our selective pressure, yet they are beloved by many and familiar to billions.
I can't resist to quote Dyson:
I see a close analogy between John von Neumann’s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.
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Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.
Whether you agree or not with Dyson, the essay is interesting, thought provoking and a real eye opener on some of the possibilities of low cost biotechnology.
Another piece that I would like to show you another article, not one talking about a hypothetical future, but one talking about what people are doing now concerning DIY Biology, a close relative of low cost biotechnology. This is an interview with one of the co-founders of a communal space for amateur biologists and startups, Biocurious, Joseph Jackson (Disclaimer: Joseph is also the co-founder of LavaAmp, my own bio-startup). Joseph speaks about the success of Biocurious to raise funds for a lab., and what they expect to do in the mid term:
In sum, BioCurious aims to democratize, demystify, and domesticate biotechnology by bringing together academia, industry, and members of the public to collide and collaborate in novel ways in a non-institutional setting. Our space fills the void in the niches left unexplored by University or Corporate labs. By getting these different sectors to interact, we can beneficially disrupt the way life sciences research is done.
Even the most far fetched discoveries might prove useful for people in trouble. A case of this might well be arsenic-contaminated water from underground wells and the newly announced arsenic-tolerant microbes. If we can learn the biochemical tricks that enable these bacteria to thrive in this environment, maybe we can incorporate them to local bacteria already living in the wells, so they capture the arsenic in a way harmless to us. Since bacteria are self replicant, this could be a very economic and scalable solution, as suggested by the DIY Biologist Cathal Garvey and also by Vidyanand Nanjundiah, an evolutionary biologist from Bangalore.
It's easy to be skeptic about genetic engineering and synthetic biology ever being accepted, specially with all the hysteria surrounding GM foods, however, this is not a new situation. We get our nourishment from food, it is understandable that people are concerned about new additions to diet, and in the past, foods that we love and enjoy were accused of being poisonous, like the tomato, or even of being a creation of the devil and causing leprosy, like the potato. Eventually they were accepted as delicious food and now they are part of the diet, culture and traditions of many regions in Europe and around the world. I am confident that the same will happen eventually with GM foods grown locally, and with biotech solutions to sanitary and environmental problems. We cannot afford to ignore the power of these tools to make our lives better and be a part of the solution for many problems currently unsolved.
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