Chapter 14

Sometimes revolutions appear in hindsight, the outcome of upheaval you didn't see coming, the result of change nobody managed to trumpet and claim credit for.  There is currently a revolution well underway, progressing quietly amid the cataloging of parts and the sequencing of bases.  We are only now beginning to understand the power at our fingertips.

Recall that products derived from modified genomes are already the equivalent of at least 1% of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with an absolute monetary value that is growing at 15-20% per year.  In the period 2006-7, the monetary value of industrial and agricultural applications of biotech surpassed that of healthcare applications.  This in itself might constitute a revolution, demonstrating a growing demand for products made using biological technologies, products that must have demonstrably useful and reliable behaviors in order to compete in the marketplace.

The connection of biological technologies with markets is crucial, because without demand there will be no investment that enables conversion of inventions into innovations. In a world in which products are made via biological manufacturing, the diffusion of innovation will almost certainly be entangled with novel economic and political structures.

What kind of political and economic technology will influence, or be influenced by, ongoing upheaval in the development and application of biological technologies? This question points the way to thinking very broadly about revolutions.  Examining revolutions within specific historical contexts helps elucidate both the various contributing factors and whether the participants knew what was happening at the time.  Among the best studied revolutions are the military sort, which serves as an interesting place to start thinking about current events.  


Any treatment of the future of biological technologies would be incomplete without examining potential military applications.  It would be naïve to expect that militaries around the world would not be interested in employing new biological technologies, because military organizations always exploit the new to gain advantage over adversaries.  It is also the case that for biological technologies in particular, it behooves all observers to closely examine just how military and security organizations invest in deploying biology, and to what ends.

The first military application that most people imagine for biology is the use of pathogens as weapons.  Weaponization of biological technologies, and their use to develop new pathogens simply to study their properties, are, for me, by far the most frightening prospects of the coming decade.  We should distinguish, however, weaponization or biodefense applications from the use of biological technologies in support and production.

Certain military uses of biological technologies could serve several beneficial ends. The general present concern about bioterrorism has led to an important investment in new detection instrumentation; these could eventually see civilian applications for diagnostics in healthcare and as engineering tools for biological systems.

Stepping even further away from either weapons or countermeasures, military adoption of biological technologies in logistical and procurement transformations could save substantial sums of money and dramatically reduce the environmental impact of military operations.  The biological production of aviation fuel would simply bring military uses of biological technologies in line with the rest of the economy.  Within the US Department of Defense (DoD), the Air Force is the largest consumer of fuel, and every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil raises annual costs by $60 million[1].  Military aircraft in all service branches account for 73% of DoD fuel use, and each dollar increase in the price of oil raises overall costs $130 million[2]. Price fluctuations are, obviously, extremely expensive for the DoD and are hard to incorporate into planning.  Thus the prospect of a jet fuel replacement produced biologically at the equivalent of $50, as described in previous chapters, would represent both a multi-billion dollar savings for military operations and a dramatic improvement in the stability of projected costs.  Similarly, if it were a country in its own right, the Department of Defense would rank 36th in total fuel use among nations worldwide[3], which makes the DoD a large emitter of greenhouse gases; a carbon-neutral fuel supply would substantially reduce the consequent environmental load.

A significant military investment in biological technologies would, in effect, bring an enormous financial lever to bear on developing infrastructure and economies of scale.  The history of computers and aviation make clear the important historical role of military research funding and procurement to guarantee investment in production, thereby giving whole new industries a firm footing.

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For more, see Biology is Technology (Amazon).  At the time of this posting, the hardback edition is sold out, the Kindle edition is available, and the paperback is on the way.

1.    Bennett, D., Environmental defense, in The Boston Globe. 2007: Boston.
2.    See the "Oil and the military" page from the Lugar Energy Initiative: http://lugar.senate.gov/energy/security/military.cfm
3.    See "US military oil pains", Sohbet Karbuz, Published on 17 Feb 2007 by Energy Bulletin, http://www.energybulletin.net/26194.html