A breathtaking scientific revolution is taking place - biotechnology has been progressing at stunning speed, giving us the tools to eventually gain control over biology. On the one hand, it is solving the deadliest diseases, while also creating viruses more dangerous than nuclear bombs, able to devastate humanity. What is going on? Biotechnology is increasingly everywhere - the cotton in our clothes, the vegetables we eat, our pets. Humans are manipulating living things - we use bacteria to produce insulin, connect prosthetics directly with our brains, and make industrial enzymes to produce paper. Gene therapy is creating cures to previously untreatable diseases, while we are working on food crops resistant to climate change.

Our mastery over biology has been speeding up so much that within weeks of the first Covid 19 case, the unknown coronavirus was broken down in laboratories and analysed. Scientists generated a copy of its genetic material to create a vaccine that was ready for testing months after the pandemic began - something unthinkable a decade ago.

Where is all this sudden progress coming from? Well, it’s complicated, but in a nutshell: really expensive things got cheap and knowledge of how to do impressive things spread freely. The Human Genome Project, starting in 1990, was the first major attempt to read human DNA in its entirety. 13 years and $3 billion later, it was complete. By then, the cost of decoding a human genome had fallen to about $100 million. Today, it is 100,000 times cheaper, costing only about $1000.

How is that possible? Converting DNA into computer data and then studying it used to be a super tedious process, taking expert humans around 3 years of manual work. Today, it takes about two weeks and is almost completely automated. Biotechnology has gone from something restricted to the best and well-funded laboratories staffed by the world’s top experts, to something affordable enough for hundreds of thousands of people to casually work on.

What has sped up the process even more is that information in the field is shared widely and freely. Cutting-edge discoveries now take just about a year to be copied in laboratories around the world, a few years for anyone with a biology background to work out, and a bit over a decade for high school students to experiment with them in schools.

Imagine that your local computer repair shop could build a pristine Iphone 11 with just the parts lying around, and that teenagers are asked to build a new Iphone 5 for homework - not a crappy homemade version, the real thing. This is what is going on right now in biotechnology - a true revolution. We are adding knowledge at unprecedented rates, while things get ever faster and cheaper to do.

This speed means we can expect even more wonderful things for humanity - lifesaving treatments, miracle crops, and solutions to problems we can’t even imagine right now. But unfortunately, progress cuts both ways. What can be used for good can also be used for bad, by accident or on purpose. For all the good biotech will do for us, in the near future it could also easily kill many millions of people, in the worst case, hundreds of millions - worse than any nuclear bomb.

The world just witnessed how fast the novel coronavirus spread - we still do not know for sure if it came from nature or was the result of an accidental leak from a lab working with corona viruses, that’s still subject to scientific debate. In the end, at least 7 million people died. And this was still a relatively mild virus that didn’t cause serious disease in most of those infected. But that might change in the future.

Wherever the last pandemic came from, the next one might very well be our own fault - in a sense, many things going on in biotechnology could lead to this. Most of all, how easy it is to work with dangerous viruses - thousands of scientists can simply order the genetic data of infectious virus samples online to experiment with them. Assembling an artificial virus in 2023 costs as much as a new car, including all the lab equipment. At the same time, virus hunters are searching for potentially deadly pandemics in nature, such as wild bats or monkeys. When a biologist discovers a new virus, they usually publish its genetic data to the public, and other labs go further and make viruses more dangerous by combining and mutating them. These results are shared freely, and the tools of biotechnology are becoming cheaper and easier to use, leading to the possibility of a `superbug’ being created.

Experts have proposed three steps to prevent this:

  1. Treating dangerous virus genetic data as an `infohazard’, meaning that not just anyone should be able to order dangerous DNA online and those who do should be tracked.
  2. Detecting the danger by becoming aware of which viruses are present among us and are spreading explosively between humans.
  3. Destroying any pandemic threat before it has a chance to take over. We can use new biotechnology tools such as nanofilters and specialized UV lamps to pull dangers out of the air and kill viruses before they spread. Additionally, we need to speed up the process of developing new vaccines. If we do these three things, we can avoid a catastrophic pandemic in the future. Biotechnology has the potential to be both good and bad, but if used correctly, we can use it to control biology and triumph over pandemics and diseases. To help with this cause, 80,000 Hours has created a BioRisk Career Guide to help people find careers that can tackle some of humanity’s greatest problems.

Kurzgesagt also learned a lesson, after they posted a fake evolutionary tree on social media and received thousands of messages from people telling them how wrong it was. They decided to take it seriously and spent hundreds of hours researching and creating a new visualization of the relationships between species. This led them to create a poster and Merch, which has sold over half a million copies. They are grateful to the people who challenged them and supported their weird ideas, as it has enabled them to continue to release their videos for free and spark curiosity in people all around the world.