In the long run, there are two remaining technologies yet to mature. One is high energy quantum physics. The other is biotechnology. Biotechnology is the science of creating, modifying, and controlling DNA. We already have the ability to synthesize modest DNA strands. Unfortunately, we don't know what they do without testing. Predictive analysis is not there yet.
33,000 years ago, humans had domesticated the wolf into the dog by selective breeding of the tamer ones away from the feral (rip your face off and eat you) wolves. They've been our animal partners of the hunting camp ever since. They helped us guard our herds of goats and sheep and cattle, which we ALSO domesticated by selective breeding. Selective breeding is a kind of primitive but effective DNA engineering. When someone complains about bioengineered food being unlabelled, they'd better know we've been doing it since the Stone age.
10,300 years ago Humans found a wild grass in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria and spent several generations of selective breeding to create the most important cereal grain: wheat. In a human lifetime crop yields massively increased and agriculture with stable housing changed human life forever. For the first time we could stay in one place and have more than enough to eat. We could have crafts and increasingly complex societies. We developed our first known real civilization, Ur, thanks to Wheat created by Selective Breeding techniques and the use of civil engineering to form aqueducts and irrigation in what is now Iraq.
200 years ago, Charles Darwin took what he'd personally observed in Pigeon breeding and wrote about it, creating the hypothesis (later Theory of) Evolution. Darwin was a devoutly religious man and believed God created Evolution so his creation could change, so life would flourish everywhere. Simultaneously, the foundations of Geology were being worked out. Many sciences were moving from occult imaginings to rational science in this period of Enlightenment, a period which is technically still going on today.
Modern Biotechnology is all about the testing of nearly random DNA strands to see what they do. We don't yet have the ability to predict the exact consequence of expression via DNA, RNA, and various Proteins on different types of Cells in Human or Animal subjects/patients. This is unfortunate, however science moves forward on documented failures and successes. The trouble is, we happen to be in a contracting energy economy, with major transition ongoing. Our civilization is built on Cheap Energy, and Cheap is being replaced by Expensive. This hitch in our git-along means we don't have the resources for high paying basic science, such as that required to move Biotechnology forward. The industry is contracting until energy gets cheap enough that Basic Science, a luxury in the best of times, can be paid for again. This is a fundamental problem.
There's currently money for biotech to make renewable energy. It is being done, too. There are serious companies working with algae that produce biodiesel (fuel) as a waste product. The best ones use closed systems so production rates can be controlled rather than suffer from the typical exponential function problem. This directly helps with the Cheap Energy problem. The trouble is the best current method costs $33/gal for biodiesel. That's not Cheap Energy.
There's money for biotech to cure cancer and certain high dollar value diseases, but only if payment for said cures is sufficient to both cover costs of R&D AND big profits. Orphan drugs are worthless to the industry. So really, there isn't much money for this. This is a Luxury. Dead people have Heirs and Foundations to pay research scientists. Not curing cancer pays better than curing it.
There's money for biotech to modify crops to deal with crop diseases like Wheat Rust and the various molds that attack grain crops. There's money to create vaccines to protect chickens (worlds most popular source of protein) from avian flu. There's money to decrease dependency on external soil amendments to crops and increase their crop yield. Reducing crop costs means crops are cheaper to produce and thus sell for less money. Super-rice, super-soybeans, nitrogen fixing nodule corn, for example. Someday there will be money to recover Phosphorus from the sea bottom below the Mississippi alluvial fan. Bio-organisms to grab plastic particles out of the sea water and remove them from the food chain, stick them together and drop to the sea bottom where they stop harming the sea life. There's money in improving fish immune systems to protect them from parasites so they can be domesticated and grown for hungry city markets and restaurants by offshore barge fish farms. Biotech is already doing these things because there's money to pay for it, and big agriculture thinks beyond tomorrow or next week. They're serious businessmen with plans to stay in business year after year. Big Agriculture is the real future of Biotechnology.
A pity that the Greek and Spanish financial crises are killing investment in Luxury science like basic research in Biotech. Contraction in industries happens. Its part of the ebb and flow of economics. Biotech will recover, but the current crop of scientists are going to have to adapt their thinking to PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS over basic science, and learn to care about that over all else. They can no longer be satisfied with the slow pace of constant failure, and focus on results that pay dividends. This is where Biotech workers and researchers need to focus, and why their industry is collapsing.
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