Future Ben

I presented a talk to the NYU Biotechnology club today, Metabiotechnology: or Why Biotech Sucks Right Now. Attendance was low but the crowd was more bemused than offended at the title. Often as you put a presentation together your thesis develops. And feedback from your audience is even better for that purpose. Drew and Dusan were particularly helpful but I was surprised at what did and did not resonate.

I will try to post the talk if I can figure out how to get powerpoint into wordpress. Basicly my thesis is that the current hegemony of Biotechnology is Biobusiness. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a free market the system is monolithic and there are huge needs that are very poorly served. The most prevalent being the needs of developing nations.

As I was preparing and during the presentation I realized that it was worse than that. The science supporting Biotechnology is often undermined by profit motivation. My case study on this was the “Green Revolution.” Initially plant breeding and ecological management through pesticides and herbicides seemed like a good idea. It has become pretty clear in the past 20 years that this is not the case and that there are much more sound and sustainable practices. Yet people with access to all of the data pointing to the failings of previous generation technology continue use ultimately damaging methods. In fact they have subjugated Biotechnology to continue even farther down this destructive path. (Hence the subtitle.)

So the evils of greedy corporations aren’t all that new, as several people pointed out. But what surprised me was the audience response to my proposal. If Biotechnology is currently monolithic and profit motivated then the weaknesses of that system opens up the possibility of Biotechnology that is dynamic and either need, OR profit motivated.

Maybe I didn’t express that clearly enough, but I got a lot of knee jerk capitalism. “Technology has to have a product,” or “that system works a lot better than government funding.” Both true statements, but not in anyway an argument against need motivated Biotech. And I acknowledge that there are government grants to encourage people to develop need based technologies, but there has to be something more, something new.

I am glad I used the agriculture case study because the great weakness of current agriculture is that it is monoculture based. And that is exactly the problem with Biotechnology and Big Pharma. Sure there are a lot of little Biotech companies, but they are all playing the same game. Especially since they all presumably follow the FDA rulebook. A true disruptive Biotechnology would bypass this whole system. Is paradigm shift old enough to be retro? It sounds stupid, but there were very intelligent people in the audience who couldn’t imagine that there could be an alternative to our current system.

If you equate it to other paradigms, Biotechnology is ready for it’s own version of the personal computer, model T, cotton gin. I think sequencing was the equivalent to the printing press or early computer. Biotech is fortunate in that it can take all of the lessons from the electronic and information technology fields. Open source, distributed systems and other meta-technologies. The question is, what will that technology be? If history is any teacher we won’t know until it becomes pervasive.