The revolution in biology is here, now

Installation view of The Livings Hy-Fi, the winning project of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1s 2014 Young Architects Program. Photograph by Kris Graves.

The products discussed at BioFabricate arent what I thought theyd be. Ive been asked plenty of times (and Ive asked plenty of times), whats the killer product for synthetic biology? BioFabricate convinced me that thats the wrong question. We may never have some kind of biological iPod. That isnt the right way to think.

What I saw, instead, was real products that you might never notice.Bricks made from sand that are held together by microbes designed to excrete the binder.Bricks and packing material made from fungus (mycelium).Plastic excreted by bacteriathat consume waste methane from sewage plants. You wouldnt know, or care, whether your plastic Lego blocks are made from petroleum or from bacteria, but theres a huge ecological difference. You wouldnt know, or care, what goes into the bricks used in the new school, but the construction boom in Dubai has made a desert city one of the worlds largest importers of sand. Wind-blown desert sand isnt useful for industrial brickmaking, but the microbes have no problem making bricks from it. And you may not care whether packing materials are made of styrofoam or fungus, but I despise the bag of packing peanuts sitting in my basement waiting to be recycled. You can throw the fungal packing material into the garden, and it will decompose into fertilizer in a couple of days.

Another big insight was that the raw material for biological products is frequently waste. The microbes that make plastic use methane released by sewage plants and farms; the fungi used in bricks and packing material feed on corn stalks. Humans arent very good at recycling; nature does nothing but recycle. What if excess methane could be used productively? The economics of waste removal could change completely.

We cant be naive about the environmental impact of our actions. Weve seen a couple decades of greenwashing, in which almost anything can be labelled green, regardless of whether it was environmentally harmful or not. Jenn van der Meer (@reason_street) spoke about the need to look at a products entire lifecycle: how its made, how its delivered, how its used, how its disposed of. Corn-based biofuel sounds good, but it is an ecological disaster. Will the products discussed at BioFabricate fare better? Its certainly possible that theres an ecological drawback to, say, fungal packing material that we havent yet investigated. The attendees agreement that a total assessment of a products lifecycle, from creation to disposal, was striking. I cant imagine that agreement in any other industry.

We wont do justice to the potential of biology until the tools reach the point where you dont need a PhD to do interesting work.

Several people spoke about their work as collaboration with biomaterial. This is a unique and exciting perspective. In computing, we write programs that make computers do things. If the program doesnt do what we want, weve made a mistake. We driving the process: the machine always does what its told. In electronics, we assemble parts that, again, do what we want (or not); they have no will of their own. We make things out of metal and concrete by bending and pouring. The metal never decides how to be bent, and the concrete never decides how to pour. Biology is fundamentally different. Biology has been creating and building for billions of years. Its creativity is quite distinct from human creativity; it has evolved extraordinarily efficient systems. So, its an act of hubris to talk about designing biological systems. We need to collaborate with biological systems and enable them to design themselves. We need to let them teach us what they are able to do, and build around that. Otherwise, fungus is just a bunch of mushrooms. Maybe tasty, but not a building material.

Finally, I cant ignore the tools. Tim Gardner ofRiffynstarted the day, followed by Microsoft Research and Autodesk. The revolution in biology is pre-conditioned on a revolution in tools. Can we design tools that make it as easy to work with biological systems as with software, or even physical (electronic or mechanical) systems? The tools revolution is in full swing, whether its programming languages and design tools for experiments (Antha,Riffyn), new programming languages and design tools for the DNA itself (under way at Microsoft and Autodesk), or tools to automatedata collectionandexperimentation. We wont do justice to the potential of biology until the tools reach the point where you dont need a PhD to do interesting work.

I have made the mistake of seeing the biological revolution as something yet to come, something we see glimpses of, but thats still in the future. Thats wrong. Its here, now. And it will be evenly distributed. After all, biology is very good at distribution.

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The revolution in biology is here, now