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 dogs - 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 also could 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 viruses in nature, such as in wild bats or monkeys, and cataloging the danger of the newly discovered viruses. When a virus is discovered, its genetic data is often published in journals. However, other labs go further and create more dangerous viruses by combining and mutating different viruses. The results of these experiments are also shared freely, and the tools of biotechnology are becoming increasingly cheaper and easier to access. This creates an environment in which anyone can create a weaponized virus in their backyard, and this is a scary prospect.
To prevent this from happening, experts have come up with a few bullet points. First, we need to delay the next deadly pandemic by treating dangerous virus genetic data as an infohazard. Secondly, we need to become aware of which viruses are present and are spreading rapidly between humans. Lastly, we need to build a machine that is ready to destroy any pandemic threat before it has a chance to take over. We can use new tools such as nanofilters and specialized UV lamps to remove dangers from the air we breathe and stop the spread of viruses. Additionally, we need to improve the speed of vaccine production to avoid a pandemic. Biotechnology has the potential to be both beneficial and harmful, so it is important that we use it responsibly to create a future where we are able to control our own biology and the biology of the environment around us. To further this cause, 80,000 Hours has created a career guide to help people find jobs that can help tackle the world’s greatest problems.
Kurzgesagt learned an important lesson when they posted an incorrect evolutionary tree on social media. They received thousands of messages from viewers, and decided to take their research and fact-checking process more seriously. This inspired them to design a new visualization of the relationships between species, and eventually led to the creation of a poster shop. They have now sold over half a million copies of their posters, and continue to release videos for free. They are thankful for the support of their viewers, as it allows them to continue their work.