It has become part of accepted wisdom to say that the 20th century was the
century of physics and the 21st century will be the century of biology.
Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology
is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size
of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is
likely to remain the biggest part of science through the 21st century.
Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic
consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human
welfare.
These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high
technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the
advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be
extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe the answer to
this question is yes.
I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives
during the next 50 years at least as much as the domestication of computers
has dominated our lives during the past 50.
I see a close analogy between the American mathematician John von Neumann’s
blinkered vision of computers as large centralised facilities and the public
perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large
pharmaceutical and agribusi-ness 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 centralised activity in the hands of
large corporations.
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path
of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee,
becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralised. The first
step in this direction was taken recently, when genetically modified
tropical fish with new and brilliant colours appeared in pet stores. For
biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become
user-friendly.
I recently spent a happy day at the Philadelphia Flower Show, the biggest
indoor flower show in the world, where flower breeders from all over the
world show off the results of their efforts. I have also visited San Diego’s
reptile show, an equally impressive event displaying the work of another set
of breeders. Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses, San Diego excels in
lizards and snakes.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled
breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who
devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the
tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. There will
be doit-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to
breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons
and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders
of dogs and cats will have their kits too.
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.
Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy
to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the
domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer
games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and
seeds rather than with images on a screen.
Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms
that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the
prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These
games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be
needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The
dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.
The domestication of biotechnology in everyday life may also be helpful in
solving practical economic and environmental problems. Once a new generation
of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our
grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem
weird and alien.
In an era of “open source” biology, the magic of genes will be available to
anyone with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for
biotechnology to move into the main-stream of economic development, to help
us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human
condition all over the earth. Biology could be a powerful tool, giving us
access to cheap and abundant solar energy.
A plant is a creature that uses the energy of sunlight to convert water and
carbon dioxide and other simple chemicals into roots and leaves and flowers.
To live, it needs to collect sunlight. But it uses sunlight with low
efficiency. The most efficient crop plants, such as sugar cane or maize,
convert about 1% of the sunlight that falls onto them into chemical energy.
Artificial solar collectors made of silicon can do much better.
Silicon solar cells can convert sunlight into electrical energy with 15%
efficiency, and electrical energy can be converted into chemical energy
without much loss. We can imagine that in the future, when we have mastered
the art of genetically engineering plants, we may breed new crop plants that
have leaves made of silicon, converting sunlight into chemical energy with
10 times the efficiency of natural plants.
These artificial crop plants would allow solar energy to be used on a massive
scale without taking up too much land. They would look like natural plants
except that their leaves would be black, the colour of silicon, instead of
green, the colour of chlorophyll.
How long will it take us to grow plants with silicon leaves? If the natural
evolution of plants had been driven by the need for high efficiency of
utilisation of sunlight, then the leaves of all plants would be black. Black
leaves would absorb sunlight more efficiently than leaves of any other
colour.
Obviously plant evolution was driven by other needs, and in particular by the
need for protection against overheating. For a plant growing in a hot
climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the sunlight
that is not used for growth. There is plenty of sunlight, and it is not
important to use it with maximum efficiency. The plants have evolved with
chlorophyll in their leaves to absorb the useful red and blue components of
sunlight and to reflect the green. That is why it is reasonable for plants
in tropical climates to be green. But this logic does not explain why plants
in cold climates where sunlight is scarce are also green.
We could imagine that in a place such as Iceland, overheating would not be a
problem, and plants with black leaves using sunlight more efficiently would
have an evolutionary advantage. For some reason which we do not understand,
natural plants with black leaves never appeared. Why not? Perhaps we shall
not understand why nature did not travel this route until we have travelled
it ourselves.
After we have explored this route to the end, when we have created new forests
of black-leaved plants that can use sunlight 10 times more efficiently than
natural plants, we shall be confronted by a new set of environmental
problems. Who shall be allowed to grow the black-leaved plants? Will
black-leaved plants remain an artificially maintained cultivar, or will they
invade and permanently change the natural ecology? What shall we do with the
silicon trash these plants leave behind them? Shall we be able to design a
whole ecology of silicon-eating microbes and fungi and earthworms to keep
the black-leaved plants in balance with the rest of nature and to recycle
their silicon?
The 21st century will bring us new tools of genetic engineering with which to
manipulate farms and forests. With the new tools will come new questions and
new responsibilities.
Rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world. The lack of jobs
and economic opportunities in villages drives millions of people to migrate
from villages into overcrowded cities, causing immense social and
environmental problems in the major cities of poor countries. The effects of
poverty are most visible in the cities, but the causes of poverty lie mostly
in the villages. What the world needs is a technology that directly attacks
the problem of rural poverty by creating wealth and jobs in the villages.
Such technology would give them a chance to survive and prosper without
uprooting themselves.
The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and cities is
one of the main themes of human history over the past 10,000 years. The
shift from villages to cities is strongly coupled with a shift from one kind
of technology to another. I find it convenient to call the two kinds of
technology green and grey.
The adjective “green” has been appropriated and abused by various political
movements, especially in Europe, so I need to explain clearly what I have in
mind when I speak of green and grey. Green technology is based on biology,
grey technology on physics and chemistry.
Roughly speaking, green technology is the technology that gave birth to
village communities 10,000 years ago, starting from the domestication of
plants and animals, the invention of agriculture, the breeding of goats and
sheep and horses and cows and pigs, the manufacture of textiles and cheese
and wine. Grey technology is the technology that gave birth to cities and
empires 5,000 years later, starting from the forging of bronze and iron, the
invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the building of ships and war
chariots, the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs. Grey technology also
produced the steel ploughs, tractors, reapers and processing plants that
made agriculture more productive and transferred much of the resulting
wealth from village-based farmers to city-based corporations.
For the first 5,000 of the 10,000 years of human civilisation, wealth and
power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second 5,000
years wealth and power belonged to cities with grey technology. Beginning
about 500 years ago, grey technology became increasingly dominant, as we
learnt to build machines that used power from wind and water and steam and
electricity. In the past 100 years, wealth and power were even more heavily
concentrated in cities as grey technology raced ahead. As cities became
richer, rural poverty deepened.
This sketch of the past 10,000 years of human history puts the problem of
rural poverty into a new perspective. If rural poverty is a consequence of
the unbalanced growth of grey technology, it is possible that a shift in the
balance back from grey to green might cause rural poverty to disappear. That
is my dream.
During the past 50 years we have seen explosive progress in scientific
understanding of the basic processes of life, and in the past 20 years this
understanding has given rise to explosive growth of green technology. The
technology allows us to breed new varieties of animals and plants as our
ancestors did 10,000 years ago, but now a hundred times faster.
It now takes us a decade instead of a millennium to create new crop plants,
such as the herbicide-resistant varieties of maize and soya bean that allow
weeds to be controlled without ploughing and greatly reduce the erosion of
topsoil by wind and rain. Guided by a precise understanding of genes and
genomes instead of by trial and error, we can within a few years modify
plants so as to give them improved yield, improved nutritive value and
improved resistance to pests and diseases.
Within a few more decades, as the continued exploration of genomes gives us
better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able
to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way
will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly
many of the things that grey technology can do, and also to do many things
that grey technology has failed to do.
Green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries and a
large part of our mining and manufacturing industries. Genetically
engineered earthworms could extract common metals such as aluminium and
titanium from clay, and genetically engineered seaweed could extract
magnesium or gold from sea water. Green technology could also achieve more
extensive recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great
benefit to the environment.
An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the
goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the
primary source of energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew
up derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree could be
engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead
of cellulose.
Before genetically modified termites and trees can be allowed to help solve
our economic and environmental problems, great arguments will rage over the
possible damage they may do. Many of the people who call themselves green
are passionately opposed to green technology. But in the end, if the
technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity to human
feelings, it is likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be
affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green
technologies of milking cows and ploughing soils and fermenting grapes were
accepted by our ancestors long ago.
I am not saying that the political acceptance of green technology will be
quick or easy. I say only that green technology has enormous promise for
preserving the balance of nature on this planet as well as for relieving
human misery. Future generations of people raised from childhood with
biotech toys and games will probably accept it more easily than we do.
Nobody can predict how long it may take to try out the new technology in a
thousand different ways and measure its costs and benefits.
What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the problem of
rural pov-erty? In the past, green technology has always been rural, based
in farms and villages rather than in cities. In the future it will pervade
cities as well as countryside, factories as well as forests. It will not be
entirely rural. But it will still have a large rural component. After all,
the cloning of Dolly the sheep occurred in a rural animal-breeding station
in Scotland, not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley.
Green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw
materials and energy. Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but
are spread more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and
technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring employment and
wealth to rural populations.
In a country like India with a large rural population, bringing wealth to the
villages means bringing jobs other than farming. Most of the villagers must
cease to be subsistence farmers and become shopkeepers or school-teachers or
bankers or engineers or poets. In the end the villages must become
gentrified, as they are today in England, with the old farm workers’
cottages converted into garages, and the few remaining farmers converted
into highly skilled professionals.
It is fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries, where a
large fraction of the world’s people live and where rural poverty is most
acute. Since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green
technology can be a great equal-iser, helping to narrow the gap between rich
and poor countries.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet describes a vision of green
technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration
from villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all
essential: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to
provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and
efficiently, the internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of
rural populations.
With all three components in place, every village in Africa could enjoy its
fair share of the blessings of civilisation.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The New York Review of
Books
Are you sure, that you are not doing the same mistake with your vision as the joke about the planing economy tells:
Instead of making several small nails, the made one big and thought it was all right because they reached the weight of the one year's production cube and could not understand that the amount was not exactly the right... Beside how to manage at the same time to reduce the growing amount of people ...
Amirouche Roos, Lindas, Sweden
I read Mr Dysons book and was inspired by it.
He is a man with a global and future view which is scientific and poetic.
However I diagree in regard to the genome and the internet.
The genome is a boom for agencies-insurance companies( calculates risk and puts more money into their pockets) and for crime detection(people behind bars). But it had done little if anything for individuals health( its intial purpose)- few if any new drugs have come from it. Describing the genome is akin to counting the number of particles in the universe and then deciding how to fly to Mars. Why is there no cure for AIDS?
The Internet is good for dating and business but with it we have given away our freedom and privacy to the Search Engines. We have endorsed a technology to montior and control us.Its not too late to go back to writing and posting letters.
Eugene Sherry, Sydney,
(Continued) Furthermore, practical issues aside, what of the moral? There are no moral implications of producing an inviable computer: if you build a computer with a CD tray that doesn't open, or with a screen that won't turn on, noone would say that you had given birth to a freak of nature. Now think of a cat or a dog with stumps for limbs, or no eyes, or which is constantly in agony. The notion that - even if it were feasible, which it is not - we would let our kids and housewives do this sort of thing is ludicrous.
Reginald Boogaloo, East Sussex, UK
In the vision of rural resurgence, how can one moderate the power and dictates of the agri-business price-setters? Would it be fair to say that rural forces will need to become more defensive and protective of their own assets? Or, will the sharks in the business of selling commodities continue to have major influence in the economic game of supply and demand?
Robert Brown, Saline, USA / Michigan
Acceptance of genetically engineered products in the home is one thing; housewives and kids using off the shelf kits to genetically engineer new lifeforms is quite another. In fact, it's preposterous, and based on a very inappropriate analogy: the computer. It was the end product (the computer and its parts) that was "domesticated", not the process that produces computer chips and disk drives. The latter remains in the hands of big business, where it is economically feasible and where there is division of labour, knowledge and skills. Similarly, pharmaceuticals were domesticated in the form of pills or creams that you can take home and self-administer: not the process that produces them. You don't find little Johnnies with bunsen burners and bubbling pots of chemical brews in their bedrooms devising new cures for the common cold. You need money and large numbers of skilled people to do this, not to mention more equipment than you'd find in a normal eight year old's bedroom.
Reginald Boogaloo, East Sussex, UK