Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS 
Feature

Our Biotech Future
By Freeman Dyson
1.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth 
century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century 
will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century 
are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than 
physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the 
workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is 
likely to remain the biggest part of science through the 
twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, 
as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical 
implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication 
of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to 
triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and 
digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to 
biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. 
Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that 
the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during 
the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of 
computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann's blinkered vision 
of computers as large centralized facilities and the public 
perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large 
pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The 
public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for 
poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von 
Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen 
bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering 
will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a 
centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it 
follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von 
Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather 
than big and centralized. The first step in this direction was 
already taken recently, when genetically modified tropical fish 
with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet stores. For 
biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become 
user-friendly. I recently spent a happy day at the Philadelphia 
Flower Show, the biggest indoor flower show in the world, where 
flower breeders from all over the world show off the results of 
their efforts. I have also visited the Reptile Show in San Diego, 
an equally impressive show displaying the work of another set of 
breeders. Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses, San Diego 
excels in lizards and snakes. The main problem for a grandparent 
visiting the reptile show with a grandchild is to get the 
grandchild out of the building without actually buying a snake.
Marymount Manhattan College Writing Center

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated 
and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and 
professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine 
what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become 
accessible to these people. There will be do-it-yourself kits for 
gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties 
of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots 
and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of 
dogs and cats will have their kits too.

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of 
housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of 
new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the 
big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace 
those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. 
Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as 
creative as painting or sculpture.

Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many 
will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and 
flora. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be 
biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to 
kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than 
with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an 
intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The 
winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or 
the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be 
messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be needed 
to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. 
The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.

If domestication of biotechnology is the wave of the future, five 
important questions need to be answered. First, can it be stopped? 
Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either 
impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits that our 
society must impose on it? Fourth, how should the limits be 
decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally and 
internationally? I do not attempt to answer these questions here. I 
leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.
2.

A New Biology for a New Century

Carl Woese is the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial 
taxonomy, the classification and understanding of microbes. He 
explored the ancestry of microbes by tracing the similarities and 
differences between their genomes. He discovered the large-scale 
structure of the tree of life, with all living creatures descended 
from three primordial branches. Before Woese, the tree of life had 
two main branches called prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the 
prokaryotes composed of cells without nuclei and the eukaryotes 
composed of cells with nuclei. All kinds of plants and animals, 
including humans, belonged to the eukaryote branch. The prokaryote 
branch contained only microbes. Woese discovered, by studying the 
anatomy of microbes in detail, that there are two fundamentally 
different kinds of prokaryotes, which he called bacteria and 
archea. So he constructed a new tree of life with three branches, 
bacteria, archea, and eukaryotes. Most of the well-known microbes 
are bacteria. The archea were at first supposed to be rare and 
confined to extreme environments such as hot springs, but they are 
now known to be abundant and widely distributed over the planet. 
Woese recently published two provocative and illuminating articles 
with the titles "A New Biology for a New Century" and (together 
with Nigel Goldenfeld) "Biology's Next Revolution."[*]

Woese's main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as 
it has been practiced for the last hundred years, with its 
assumption that biological processes can be understood by studying 
genes and molecules. What is needed instead is a new synthetic 
biology based on emergent patterns of organization. Aside from his 
main theme, he raises another important question. When did 
Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means 
evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for 
survival of noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that 
Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When 
we compare genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, we find 
evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one 
lineage to another. In early times, horizontal gene transfer, the 
sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It 
becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time.

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be 
taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a 
golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was 
universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a 
community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic 
information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes 
invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. 
Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in 
metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most 
efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new 
chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of 
different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a 
single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium 
happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in 
efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion 
years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. 
Its offspring became the first species of bacteria?and the first 
species of any kind?reserving their intellectual property for their 
own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria 
continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of 
the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years 
later, another cell separated itself from the community and became 
the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell 
separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so 
it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life 
was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. 
It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The 
basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the 
few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and 
changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial 
evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, 
once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, 
Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct 
so that new species can replace them.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It 
was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. 
The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between 
species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, 
Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since 
that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as 
the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not 
Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more 
than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a 
thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a 
new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. 
And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are 
reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene 
transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, 
blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into 
the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no 
longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended 
from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the 
evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the 
good old days before separate species and intellectual property 
were invented.

I would like to borrow Carl Woese's vision of the future of biology 
and extend it to the whole of science. Here is his metaphor for the 
future of science:

    Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick 
into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the 
eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it 
reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! 
Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow?patterns in an 
energy flow.... It is becoming increasingly clear that to 
understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see 
them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, 
dynamic organization.

This picture of living creatures, as patterns of organization 
rather than collections of molecules, applies not only to bees and 
bacteria, butterflies and rain forests, but also to sand dunes and 
snowflakes, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The nonliving universe is 
as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also 
dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood. 
The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of 
the twentieth century will continue to be important in the 
twenty-first century, but they will not be dominant. The big 
problems, the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of 
life, the nature of human consciousness, and the evolution of the 
earth's climate, cannot be understood by reducing them to 
elementary particles and molecules. New ways of thinking and new 
ways of organizing large databases will be needed.
3.

Green Technology

The domestication of biotechnology in everyday life may also be 
helpful in solving practical economic and environmental problems. 
Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with 
biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, 
biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien. In the era of 
Open Source biology, the magic of genes will be available to anyone 
with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for 
biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, 
to help us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate 
the human condition all over the earth. Open Source biology could 
be a powerful tool, giving us access to cheap and abundant solar 
energy.

A plant is a creature that uses the energy of sunlight to convert 
water and carbon dioxide and other simple chemicals into roots and 
leaves and flowers. To live, it needs to collect sunlight. But it 
uses sunlight with low efficiency. The most efficient crop plants, 
such as sugarcane or maize, convert about 1 percent of the sunlight 
that falls onto them into chemical energy. Artificial solar 
collectors made of silicon can do much better. Silicon solar cells 
can convert sunlight into electrical energy with 15 percent 
efficiency, and electrical energy can be converted into chemical 
energy without much loss. We can imagine that in the future, when 
we have mastered the art of genetically engineering plants, we may 
breed new crop plants that have leaves made of silicon, converting 
sunlight into chemical energy with ten times the efficiency of 
natural plants. These artificial crop plants would reduce the area 
of land needed for biomass production by a factor of ten. They 
would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without 
taking up too much land. They would look like natural plants except 
that their leaves would be black, the color of silicon, instead of 
green, the color of chlorophyll. The question I am asking is, how 
long will it take us to grow plants with silicon leaves?

If the natural evolution of plants had been driven by the need for 
high efficiency of utilization of sunlight, then the leaves of all 
plants would have been black. Black leaves would absorb sunlight 
more efficiently than leaves of any other color. Obviously plant 
evolution was driven by other needs, and in particular by the need 
for protection against overheating. For a plant growing in a hot 
climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the 
sunlight that is not used for growth. There is plenty of sunlight, 
and it is not important to use it with maximum efficiency. The 
plants have evolved with chlorophyll in their leaves to absorb the 
useful red and blue components of sunlight and to reflect the 
green. That is why it is reasonable for plants in tropical climates 
to be green. But this logic does not explain why plants in cold 
climates where sunlight is scarce are also green. We could imagine 
that in a place like Iceland, overheating would not be a problem, 
and plants with black leaves using sunlight more efficiently would 
have an evolutionary advantage. For some reason which we do not 
understand, natural plants with black leaves never appeared. Why 
not? Perhaps we shall not understand why nature did not travel this 
route until we have traveled it ourselves.

After we have explored this route to the end, when we have created 
new forests of black-leaved plants that can use sunlight ten times 
more efficiently than natural plants, we shall be confronted by a 
new set of environmental problems. Who shall be allowed to grow the 
black-leaved plants? Will black-leaved plants remain an 
artificially maintained cultivar, or will they invade and 
permanently change the natural ecology? What shall we do with the 
silicon trash that these plants leave behind them? Shall we be able 
to design a whole ecology of silicon-eating microbes and fungi and 
earthworms to keep the black-leaved plants in balance with the rest 
of nature and to recycle their silicon? The twenty-first century 
will bring us powerful new tools of genetic engineering with which 
to manipulate our farms and forests. With the new tools will come 
new questions and new responsibilities.

Rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world. The 
lack of jobs and economic opportunities in villages drives millions 
of people to migrate from villages into overcrowded cities. The 
continuing migration causes immense social and environmental 
problems in the major cities of poor countries. The effects of 
poverty are most visible in the cities, but the causes of poverty 
lie mostly in the villages. What the world needs is a technology 
that directly attacks the problem of rural poverty by creating 
wealth and jobs in the villages. A technology that creates 
industries and careers in villages would give the villagers a 
practical alternative to migration. It would give them a chance to 
survive and prosper without uprooting themselves.

The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and 
cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last ten 
thousand years. The shift from villages to cities is strongly 
coupled with a shift from one kind of technology to another. I find 
it convenient to call the two kinds of technology green and gray. 
The adjective "green" has been appropriated and abused by various 
political movements, especially in Europe, so I need to explain 
clearly what I have in mind when I speak of green and gray. Green 
technology is based on biology, gray technology on physics and 
chemistry.

Roughly speaking, green technology is the technology that gave 
birth to village communities ten thousand years ago, starting from 
the domestication of plants and animals, the invention of 
agriculture, the breeding of goats and sheep and horses and cows 
and pigs, the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine. Gray 
technology is the technology that gave birth to cities and empires 
five thousand years later, starting from the forging of bronze and 
iron, the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the 
building of ships and war chariots, the manufacture of swords and 
guns and bombs. Gray technology also produced the steel plows, 
tractors, reapers, and processing plants that made agriculture more 
productive and transferred much of the resulting wealth from 
village-based farmers to city-based corporations.

For the first five of the ten thousand years of human civilization, 
wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and 
for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to 
cities with gray technology. Beginning about five hundred years 
ago, gray technology became increasingly dominant, as we learned to 
build machines that used power from wind and water and steam and 
electricity. In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even 
more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead. 
As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.

This sketch of the last ten thousand years of human history puts 
the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective. If rural 
poverty is a consequence of the unbalanced growth of gray 
technology, it is possible that a shift in the balance back from 
gray to green might cause rural poverty to disappear. That is my 
dream. During the last fifty years we have seen explosive progress 
in the scientific understanding of the basic processes of life, and 
in the last twenty years this new understanding has given rise to 
explosive growth of green technology. The new green technology 
allows us to breed new varieties of animals and plants as our 
ancestors did ten thousand years ago, but now a hundred times 
faster. It now takes us a decade instead of a millennium to create 
new crop plants, such as the herbicide-resistant varieties of maize 
and soybean that allow weeds to be controlled without plowing and 
greatly reduce the erosion of topsoil by wind and rain. Guided by a 
precise understanding of genes and genomes instead of by trial and 
error, we can within a few years modify plants so as to give them 
improved yield, improved nutritive value, and improved resistance 
to pests and diseases.

Within a few more decades, as the continued exploring of genomes 
gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, 
we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants 
according to our needs. The way will then be open for green 
technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things 
that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray 
technology has failed to do. Green technology could replace most of 
our existing chemical industries and a large part of our mining and 
manufacturing industries. Genetically engineered earthworms could 
extract common metals such as aluminum and titanium from clay, and 
genetically engineered seaweed could extract magnesium or gold from 
seawater. Green technology could also achieve more extensive 
recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great 
benefit to the environment. An economic system based on green 
technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, 
using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of 
energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew up 
derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree 
could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into 
liquid fuels instead of cellulose.

Before genetically modified termites and trees can be allowed to 
help solve our economic and environmental problems, great arguments 
will rage over the possible damage they may do. Many of the people 
who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green 
technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed 
carefully and deployed with sensitivity to human feelings, it is 
likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by 
it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies 
of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting grapes were 
accepted by our ancestors long ago. I am not saying that the 
political acceptance of green technology will be quick or easy. I 
say only that green technology has enormous promise for preserving 
the balance of nature on this planet as well as for relieving human 
misery. Future generations of people raised from childhood with 
biotech toys and games will probably accept it more easily than we 
do. Nobody can predict how long it may take to try out the new 
technology in a thousand different ways and measure its costs and 
benefits.

What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the 
problem of rural poverty? In the past, green technology has always 
been rural, based in farms and villages rather than in cities. In 
the future it will pervade cities as well as countryside, factories 
as well as forests. It will not be entirely rural. But it will 
still have a large rural component. After all, the cloning of Dolly 
occurred in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland, not in an 
urban laboratory in Silicon Valley. Green technology will use land 
and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy. 
Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but are spread 
more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and 
technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring 
employment and wealth to rural populations.

In a country like India with a large rural population, bringing 
wealth to the villages means bringing jobs other than farming. Most 
of the villagers must cease to be subsistance farmers and become 
shopkeepers or schoolteachers or bankers or engineers or poets. In 
the end the villages must become gentrified, as they are today in 
England, with the old farm workers' cottages converted into 
garages, and the few remaining farmers converted into highly 
skilled professionals. It is fortunate that sunlight is most 
abundant in tropical countries, where a large fraction of the 
world's people live and where rural poverty is most acute. Since 
sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green 
technology can be a great equalizer, helping to narrow the gap 
between rich and poor countries.

My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a 
vision of green technology enriching villages all over the world 
and halting the migration from villages to megacities. The three 
components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide 
energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can 
convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the 
Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural 
populations. With all three components in place, every village in 
Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization. 
People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move 
from villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by 
economic necessity.
Notes

[*] See Carl Woese, "A New Biology for a New Century," in 
Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004 
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.68.2.173-186.2004); and Nigel 
Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, "Biology's Next Revolution," Nature, 
January 25, 2007. A slightly expanded version of the Nature article 
is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0702015v1.