Why Biotech will eat the world: my central thesis and north-star for taking part in history
I’ve been fortunate in my career to drink deeply from the wellspring of science, spending time in brief research roles spanning wireless communications, nuclear fusion, and accelerator engineering, before making the jump to join the BioEngineering team at Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2019. Before I started the zig-zag journey through research and engineering which landed me in biotech, and ultimately founding my startup Eta, I actually thought I was going to be a sociologist, before going back to school to pursue a degree in Engineering Physics at UBC.
Indeed my first degree was a first-class honors BA in Sociology from McGill University, which I received in 2011, submitting an undergraduate thesis on a network-analysis of job market mobility. Ah, Sociology! I absolutely loved the subject — the intuitive blend of economics, psychology, philosophy, distilled into a grand narrative of how societies rise and fall, the predictors of their success, the evolution of institutions and the dynamic interplay between grass-roots social movements and the inexorable march of technological progress.
The gift of the “Sociological Imagination”, as C. Wright Mills put it, is to step back from the day-to-day of one’s own life and look at the big picture that everyone contributes to, consciously or not, with their every action. It’s the imagination to believe that reality is a social construction, as Berger and Luckmann would say; that Goffman echoes Shakespeare in that all the social world’s a stage, and every player struts his hour upon it.
For all the literary merits of these great thinkers of society, there’s one thing they can never really escape — physics. Physics is the ultimate boundary condition on social reality, as captured by economics. You can’t socially construct yourself a ham sandwich, or a better mousetrap, or a car that gets 200 mpg on a two-stroke engine. Unfortunately, for all the explanatory breadth of sociology in painting a compelling tapestry that weaves our individual thoughts, dreams and desires into the macro social forces that play out on the political world stage, at the end of the day the biggest thing that changes society is our relationship to physical reality. And by that I really mean, technology.
Although Marx is a four-letter word these days, he got one thing right — advances in technology are the determinants of large social upheavals that touch upon nearly every facet of life, and, that this process really cannot be reversed. ‘Revolutions are messy,’ in the words of one of my McGill Professors, because they drastically upset established social structures and permanently change ‘the order of things’, as Michel Foucault would say.
The most recent revolution in society should be abundantly clear — the digital information and internet transformation of almost every aspect of our social, economic, and terrifyingly, political lives. As Carlota Perez argues, the antecedents of each technological revolution are found in the mature fruits of the previous one — for example, radio communications and transistor electronics paving the way for the age of the internet. The cycle of investment is well known — from early adoption, to gold-rush, to speculative mania, as investment returns become anchored in the unreasonably high expectations of a new technology exhausting the lowest-hanging fruits of hitherto untapped problem spaces. The dot-com bubble had a whole lot in common with Canal Mania some 200 years previously, but the infrastructure developed by both ended up serving its purpose in enabling the next generation of disruptive innovation.
This Schumpeterian dynamic of creative destruction is isn’t going anywhere soon. The situation we should recognize is that, if anything, the coronavirus pandemic has simply accelerated the digital transformation already underway. The question becomes this: what new untapped problem spaces will the mature fruits of digital IT make readily available? Tech stacks like NLP, ML/AI, IoT, distributed computing, and so forth?
Here’s my central thesis: the most disruptive and game-changing technological development for the next few decades will be the advent of biotechnology for its ability to drastically reduce the material and energy cost of producing physical goods.
The highest-value application of biological production is molecules that are otherwise impossible to produce by organic chemistry, either because of dynamic folding problems or accessing the search space is too costly, though these molecules have incredibly high value as therapeutics for human disease. We are wetware, so it starts there.
But if we want to look further up the branches of the tree, beyond the lowest hanging fruits, we can start to think of bigger problems facing our species. Where are we in history? The most pressing problems facing humanity are that of increasing resource scarcity for satisfaction of material needs — water, energy, and land use all placing increasingly detrimental environmental burdens that threaten our cities, our ways of life, our physical safety and sully the pale blue dot we leave to our children.
We can’t escape the physics of the situation we find ourselves in — we need to drastically revolutionize the material facts of our existence or face resource collapse. Simply put, we make stuff the hard way — we extract vast quantities of aggregate material in the form of ore or plant products, refine this in bulk quantities to separate and purify the desired material, then re-combine purified products in mixed format. That cellphone is made of hundreds of different unique compounds and elements that were all painstakingly extracted, purified, and recombined, a process that externalizes massive amounts of entropy no matter how you slice it.
Digital / IT freed us from the limitations of hard-copy information storage and retrieval, and pushed information usage into a much more elegant storage format — electronic bits and bytes. Similarly, biotech has the potential to up-end how we produce material goods. Living systems ingest aggregate goods, refine and digest in mixed format, distribute the raw factors of production throughout the ‘living economy’ of your body, to be used in mostly decentralized production and consumption. The elegance and complexity of the finished product is far beyond anything we can manufacture ourselves — compare the complexity of a beetle to an aircraft carrier: you can’t assemble a beetle one component at a time and have a functioning healthy bug. Similarly, you can’t contain the instructions to build an aircraft carrier in a single document. Somehow, living systems are able to transform raw aggregate materials into highly complex, dynamic entities with a breathtakingly elegant and compact instruction set in the form of DNA and the proteins that it can transcribe into. Nanotech and the promise of molecular computers already exists, we just happened to be written in the same language. The problem now is for us to decode and learn to speak it.
If Biotech is ‘the next big thing’ then where do we start? History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes — to understand a useful starting point, we might ask ourselves what kinds of problems have been solved by the mature fruits of the last generation of innovation and technological revolution, and see how those might be applied to accelerate and enable us to ‘paddle into the wave’ with enough speed to actually catch it. That is the starting point for my own personal journey, and why I founded Eta Bio: that I might situate myself in the broader narrative of how society, the economy, and technology are constantly re-inventing itself; an attempt to not just witness history but to play a small part in building the future we’re all bound to live in.
