Bio Technology

BioTechnology - One of the three pillars of the economic system which includes UnlimitedBandwidthCommunication and AutomatedIntelligence

"The novelist NealStephenson imagines materials science that enables any product to be created locally from a pipeline of elemental goo -- as easily, say as one now can print any document on an inkjet printer. So manufacturing 'labor' already shrinking in importance, practically vanishes." from Stay Tuned for the New Economy - ACM:Ubiquity at http://acm.org/ubiquity/views/l_perelman_1.html

The scientific basis of this idea is said to be due to EricDrexler and that Stephenson merely fictionalized them. For more information on Drexler's contributions, see the page EricDrexler, and also NanoTechnology.

To have any idea where biotechnology will be WithinTwentyYears, it's necessary to understand where it is now.

Biotechnology still has a long way to go. Currently, its only significant application is in genomics, the scientific breeding of plants and animals using gene-chips. Genomics holds the promise of undoing the grievous damage early humans did in their crude and thoughtless domestication practices.

Currently, we can read genomes at a rate on the order of one species a year, at immense cost. We need to improve this greatly, to the order of an individual's genome in a couple weeks, at modest cost.

Currently, we are able to write a viral chromosome. We need to improve this greatly, to eventually be able to write an entire human genome.

Currently, we can do point comparisons of tens of thousands of alleles / genes in a gene-chip. We need to radically change this, to be able to detect not only alleles but also numbers of copies of a gene and their position in chromosomes.

Currently, we have merely begun to annotate and analyze the human genome. We need to complete this and build programs that can analyze a person's genome automatically.

Many people have this mistaken impression that knowing a species' genome is at all useful. They should be disabused of this woefully misbegotten notion. DNA might be the spaghetti-code of life, but proteins are its running state. And to have any hope of understanding this code, we need to be able to inspect and debug the running state at will. Only such understanding will enable us to reverse engineer, refactor, rearchitect, redesign and re-engineer our genome.

We need to be able to take a particular cell from an organism at a particular stage in life and be able to tell its exact composition, identifying the proportion of every single protein found in that cell. We need to be able to do the same for an organelle, for randomly sampled cytoplasm.

We need to complete the Human Proteomics Project, identifying and inventoring every protein in the human body.

We need to solve a sufficiently large part of the protein folding problem.

We need to create simulations that will predict proteins' interactions.

In the past year, no significant developments have been made on the scale alluded to above.