Our Biotech Future

"Our Biotech Future" is an essay by the physicist Freeman Dyson, published in The New York Review of Books on July 19, 2007. Dyson argues that biotechnology will become a domestic technology, as computers did, and predicts that "the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years" at least as much as the domestication of computers dominated the fifty before.^[1]

Dyson, then 83, begins with a comparison. Biology, he says, now outweighs physics in budgets and workforce, and it is about to go the way computing went, from large and expensive machines run by institutions, as John von Neumann pictured them, to small personal ones. Public distrust of companies such as Monsanto makes the personal path the more attractive one. He cites his 1999 book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, which had made a similar case.^[1]

The new biology starts with hobbyists. Kits will let people breed roses and orchids and then design creatures of their own, and he pictures a generation "raised from childhood with biotech toys and games". The final step, he writes, "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." Such a game has a winner: "The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur." He admits the dangers and lists five questions that he leaves for later generations to answer.^[1]

Two articles by the microbiologist Carl Woese supply the history: "A New Biology for a New Century" and, written with a physicist, "Biology's Next Revolution". Woese's work on the tree of life and on genes that pass between unrelated organisms leads Dyson to call the Darwinian era of separate species an "interlude" between two eras of gene sharing, the second of which began with genetic engineering. He carries Woese's view of organisms as patterns of organization over to snowflakes and hurricanes. The essay closes with "green technology": engineered crops and trees and microbes that could recycle waste and make fuel and materials, and that he expects to ease rural poverty and the flight to the cities.^[1]

Dyson had made the comparison with computers three years before. In a lecture at Cornell University in October 2004, "The Predictable and the Unpredictable: How to Tell the Difference", he said, according to The Cornell Daily Sun, that von Neumann "failed to foresee the final domestication of computers as toys for three-year-olds", and he suggested that biotechnology would travel the same road, with biotech games as its last stage.^[2]

Page 14 of the December 2022 scientific and technical overview of Molecular Reality Corporation prints a pull quotation over Dyson's name: "As soon as computers became toys, when kids could come home and play with them, then the industry really took off. And that has to happen with biotech." The overview does not say where the words were recorded.^[3] The text beside it says that the planned hardware will be "marketed more as a 'molecular PC' than a gaming console" and that, "just as with PCs, 'experigaming' will be a major application"; the same page ends with a mock advertisement for a $99 "MOLECULAR AQUARIUM®" (see Sea-Monkeys).^[3] Experigaming, the company's word for experiments played as games, is first recorded there.

The motto "advanced scientific instruments disguised as toys" is recorded from August 2024, and the company's name for the movement behind it is Biopopulism.^[4]

• Ideas and influences of Molecular Reality Corporation
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation