Humans are a tool using species - our genus is defined by its use of stone tools. These levers extend our capacity and expand our ability to influence the world around us.
Broadly speaking, the scientific disciplines we have created have given us increasingly advanced toolsets for understanding and manipulating the physical world: math, physics, chemistry, and now biology.
Biotechnology is the latest advancement in our control over matter and information - it is the most complex system that we have yet explored. Its complexity has been growing since, somehow, organic matter became “life” and battled against entropy over the course of 4 billion years.
We are the lucky few - sitting atop 4 billion years of trial and error, 4 billion years of genetic diversity and biological complexity. We have just begun to etch our stone tools, to carve out the rudimentary methods for exploring this wealth of knowledge - genetic sequencing, CRISPR, DNA synthesis, protein engineering. Many of our tools are only a decade or two old, and will soon look archaic, slow, even retro, like a CRT TV or a compact disc.
With rudimentary tools, we’ve been focused on niche challenges - mostly treating and diagnosing diseases. That’s the leading edge of the field and will continue to drive the tool development process - but at the trailing edge are applications that will affect all of humanity, in food, agriculture, advanced materials, energy, and computation.
Over the course of the next few decades, our ability to build with biology will continue to grow. In the same way that electronics and software have affected every industry, biology will do the same. We are already using biotechnology to transform what it is to be living, what it is to be human.
I hope you’ll join me as I explore topics on the fringes of biotechnology and what I consider to be the last great mystery on Earth.