Alright, so I got the no-brainer out of the way. I identified a critical technology that’s been allowed to languish for sixty years. Now let me look at actual innovation.
Probably the most powerful new technology is the current ability we have to modify the living genome. This is the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology. With this set of tools or techniques we can replace genes inside of living organisms and even produce gene lines that include or exclude traits that biology identifies for these changes. This kind of control over the machinery of life is unprecedented. Currently it is being used to create treatments for everything from genetic diseases to cancer. In the future once the risks have been measured it may be used to edit the genes of human embryos to eliminate disease. And obviously, as much as the idea is currently denounced by medical ethicists, in the future it will be used eugenically. In some future time, in the same way as we currently inoculate our children against measles and chicken pox, we will modify our children’s genes against cancer and other diseases. And after that we will alter their genetic code to make them more intelligent and longer lived. And finally, after that we’ll use this technology for trivial purposes like making them taller and better looking.
And these things will happen because they can happen and because some of them will make human life better and happier. Of course, sometime far in the future we may regret tampering with our DNA. But the same can be said for all of the changes that man’s ascent out of the jungle have created. These will be just the most premeditated.
And this CRISPR technology can also be used to modify all the other plants, animals and microbes that share the planet with us. Imagine designing an insect whose only reason for existing is eating ticks so that they won’t have a chance to bite humans and spread disease. Or how about a robber fly that is designed to eat specific mosquitoes that transmit malaria or even just live in my backyard in Dunwich? Or how about a caterpillar whose favorite food is poison ivy? And these are just parlor tricks. The plant side is where the real benefits accrue. Currently we have to plant grain every year. This is expensive and fraught with problems. What if corn and wheat and rice weren’t annuals but perennials. What if we could chop the tops off of these plants and leave the root and the stem to grow again next year? What if all plants could fix nitrogen from the air and thus reduce their need for fertilizers? What if we could come up with microorganisms that attack the pathogens that cause tree blights like the ones that have decimated chestnut, elm and ash trees? We can build living things that do a lot of the things we currently use chemistry to do. And they’ll be a lot better at it. Pesticides and herbicides can be biological. We can even design creatures that excrete octane (well, maybe something a little less volatile). Now that’s a trick I’d like to see come to fruition.
Anyway, you get the idea. Biology is the next frontier. But what will the third post in this series be about?