It's easy to say that biology is a technology, but 🤷♀️ talk is cheap. Let's discuss real examples. What does biology as technology mean in the real world?
Technologies develop over time. Let's broadly consider biology as technology in three groups:
Ancient Biotech - we generally take these for granted and don't see them as tech anymore
Current Biotech - these tend to be the most intuitive
Future Biotech - where shit gets weird and I get excited
Naturally, these are not mutually exclusive. So let’s take a look at some examples of each type, and what it looks like as we build biology as a technology.
Ancient Biotech = So obvious we’re blind to it
What makes us blind to biology as technology? The fact that it is the context in which humans evolved.
I generally dislike the whole "how would a fish know it's in water" paradigm, but the premise is accurate: we don't pay attention to the default. Because humans evolved in biological ecosystems, our tools and resources have often sourced from biology. Let's start at a really basic point.
Food → Domestication of Animals → Crops
Eating food itself may not be biotechnology, but changing and altering the evolution of lifeforms so we can eat them more easily most certainly is. When humans first domesticated animals we were taking and implementing our knowledge of heredity and lifecycles to create beneficial outcomes for humans. In turn, this control and standardization created a baselayer for civilization.
The same goes for agriculture. After publishing “Biology is the future of all technology” my colleague and friend, Pedro Sanchez de Lozada, commented that the domestication of animals and using them for transportation was a form of biotech (1). There's truth to that - breeding is a crude form of genetic engineering.
It remains true that controlling the lifecycle of plants and animals has been a biological technology pivotal to human development. It is a form of controlling biology for our desired outcomes, and one that persists through today.
🏗 Building materials
Caves are great, but controlling the size, shape, and distribution of our housing has been fundamental to the development of civilization and the evolution of society. We build out of lots of materials, but I'd like to direct your attention to the use of lumbar and other plant-derived materials. If you've traveled to the tropics, you've seen thatch structures, and countless barns have been raised from wood. Archeologists may prefer stone structures, but for the rest of us, plant-derived building materials are more than sufficient for our lifespans and can be sourced sustainably(2) (though, admittedly, many are failing to do so).
🍻Cerveza, Cervaja, Bier, Bira...Beer!
You know what makes beer...beer? Yeast (3).
That's right, your favorite way to end a long day, fuel for yard work, and sustenance for watching sports was made by biology. It's easy to take brewing beer for granted - we've been doing it for so long we assume it must be simple. In some ways it is - you mix the right ingredients, wait a few weeks, and behold! Beer!
But this process only seems simple because the yeast are doing the heavy lifting. Those microbes are going through, molecule by molecule, and converting the molecules in the grains into pleasing taste profiles and alcohol.
Current Biotech = Biology + Technology
💉Biological Pharmaceuticals
Well, I have to admit, there's a reason that the word biotech brings to mind pharmaceuticals. Although the majority of pharmaceuticals on the market today are technologies that we developed to fix biology, there are notable exceptions.
The aptly named category of pharmaceuticals called biologics are those which are produced biologically. These drugs have enabled incredible breakthroughs in treatment for many disease areas, especially autoimmune diseases.
The discovery of insulin 100 years ago really kicked off this category. The race between Genentech and Eli Lilly (4) to develop scalable manufacturing of insulin 50 years ago truly laid the groundwork for today's biomanufacturing. It was so ahead of its time that it was categorized with other drugs for decades, and only last year was formally reassigned into the biologics category.
🍔 Better tasting meat alternatives
A vegetarian burger that tastes like real meat? Many called it "impossible" and from this, a great brand was born. One of the most critical molecules for a beef hamburger is the iron-binding molecule, heme. Heme is part of the distinctive taste of red meat and is responsible for the characteristic color change we're accustomed to seeing as beef cooks.
Neither do yeast, but we're getting pretty good at engineering yeast to produce the molecules that we want (see the insulin example above). Scientists at Impossible Foods figured out that they could engineer yeast to produce a heme molecule for inclusion in their burgers.
If you're concerned that this changes the vegetarian status of Impossible burgers - I have good news for you. Rather than using the DNA sequence for the heme molecule from a cow, or other animal, they instead use the DNA sequence for leghemoglobin. Leghemoglobin has almost identical properties as the molecule in animals but instead is naturally produced in the roots of soy plants.
Future Biotech = The next generation
The opportunity space here is vast, including replacing existing solutions, engineered improvements of biology, and applications not yet conceived. Here are a couple of examples of how to make the future into today's reality.
🐛🧵Scalable Silk
Silk today is made by harvesting the cocoons of the larvae of the silkworm. As you might guess, this is an expensive and labor-intensive process, resulting in silk’s status as a luxury material.
This is what makes the work of Bolt Threads so interesting - they've developed a technique for scalable manufacture of the silk proteins that are traditionally produced by the silkworm larvae. This approach can change how we use silk as a species and is a much more efficient use of resources to produce it for a classic "win-win" scenario (Silk isn't their only target, they have a mycelium-derived leather scheduled to hit the market this year!)
🥩🍤 Eco-friendly Meats
Despite the progress made in the alternative meat industry, I can't buy a steak at the grocery store without a cow being involved. The reason has to do with manufacturing at scale. To make a steak, you need several different types of mammalian cells to be grown in a precise arrangement - in the steak world, this is what is called marbleization. This is a challenge to do in a petri dish, and much much harder to scale.
This hasn't stopped companies around the world from working on solving this problem for beef, pork, and even seafood. There are too many companies to list here, but some that have gained well-deserved attention for their progress include Memphis Meats, Blue Nalu, Shiok Meats, and Mzansi Meat. No doubt, this is a technical challenge that will be overcome and when it is, expect to see an explosion in unrelated biotechnologies (5).
🌱🌳 Climate-saving trees
Climate change is driven by a massive redistribution of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans. Plants take carbon from the air and use it as a building material for growth. What if we engineered plants to do this more quickly, or to grow in a way that slows the decomposition (which returns the carbon back to the air)? This is a question being explored by the startup Living Carbon. Solid science + market demand = great business.
Where next?
The cost of R&D puts pressure on new biotech to both enable something new to the market, and to be able to enter the market through a segment with a willingness to pay a premium price. This is largely because of the costs to develop the manufacturing techniques required for mass scale.
As manufacturing techniques are developed, we can expect to see an explosion of other consumer goods that are more traditionally viewed as commodities. Think - more robust options for single-use items that are compostable, hybrid computational devices, custom-grown organs for transplant, even illumination for your yard that doesn't require plastic or solar panels.
The market opportunities are vast, we just have to think outside of the silicon box.
(1) He also made an interesting further point - the techniques we used to use animals as transport involved many that today some would no longer consider ethical. Working animals are often treated poorly, and the act of breeding itself is contextual: what we call breeding in animals is called eugenics in humans.
(2) An interesting exploration of sustainable lumbar.
(3) The original German purity laws for beer (ironically) specify water, barley, and hops and exclude yeast. Why such an oversight? At this time beer production was reliant on capturing wild yeast from the ambient air, rather than adding it as a measured ingredient, which is the more common practice today.
(5) The challenge of manufacturing that is faced by these food companies is a critical challenge that limits today's biotech applications. Consumer demand is pushing food companies to the front of the pack, allowing them to be the first winners of these manufacturing developments - but certainly not the last.