August 2006 Archives

I have yet to see the print version, but evidently I make an appearance in tomorrow's Economist in a Special Report on Synthetic Biology.  (Thanks for the heads-up, Bill.)  I wasn't actually interviewed for the piece, but I've no objections to the text.  There is an accompanying piece that forecasts the coming "Bedroom Biotech", a phrase they seem to prefer to "Garage Biology".  Personally, I prefer to keep my DNA bashing to the garage rather than the bedroom.  Well, okay, most but not all of my DNA bashing.

The story contains a figure showing data from 2002 on productivity changes in DNA sequencing and synthesis, redrawn from my 2003 paper, "The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies", labeling them "Carlson Curves" once again.  Oh well.  The original paper was published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (PDF from TMSI, html version at Kurzweilai.net).  It isn't so much that I disavow the name "Carlson Curve" as I want to assert that quantitatively predicting the course of biological technologies is a questionable thing to do.  As Moore made clear in his paper, what became his law is driven by the financing of expensive chip fabs -- banks require a certain payment schedule before they will loan another billion dollars for a new fab -- whereas biology is cheap and progress is much more likely to be governed by basic science and the total number of people participating in the endeavor.

Newer versions of figures from the 2003 paper, as well as additional metrics of progress in biological technologies, will be available in December with the release of "Genome Synthesis & Design Futures: Implications for the US Economy", written with my colleagues at Bio Economic Research Associates (bio-era), and funded by bio-era and the Department of Energy.

To close the circle, I should explain that the "Carlson Curves" were an attempt to figure out how fast biology is changing, an effort prompted by an essay I wrote for the inaugural Shell/Economist Writing Prize, "The World in 2050."  (Here is a PDF of the original essay, which was published in 2001 as "Open Source Biology and its Impact on Industry.")  I received a silver prize, rather than gold, and was always slightly miffed that The Economist only published the first place essay, but I suppose I can't complain about the outcome. 

In an earlier post I mentioned briefly that I am concerned plans to grow crops for producing domestic biofuels do not adequately consider how much water this project will require.  I am all for domestic production of biofuels, and have a small project going to examine the possibilities.  But in my experience the people who have already launched businesses to this end, and the venture capitalists who funded them, all evince surprise at the notion water should be part of the engineering model for fuel production.

It seems I'm not the only one thinking along these lines, as Reuters today is reporting that, "biofuels could worsen water shortages".  The International Water Management Institute has just release a report that claims, "Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 percent increase in water use for agriculture on rainfed and irrigated lands."

The Western US is already stretched for water supplies; we mine aquifers for water faster that it can be replaced and declining yearly snow packs are producing drought conditions in cities accustomed to profligate summer water usage.  Some improvement could be made in the way we transport and use water, by switching to drip irrigation and lining canals and irrigation ditches to prevent leakage, for example.  But, given the yields from soy or canola, producing sufficient plant matter to replace any significant fraction of petroleum fuels with biofuels could easily require as much water as we already use to grow food crops.  I'm not nearly as bullish on algae for biodiesel now, although we might still figure out how to make it work.

I don't see any sign of the IWMI report online yet, and I quail at reading something compiled by 700 people.  But I will probably have a look when it is available.  This is exactly the sort of thing we have to figure out if we are to produce carbon neutral biofuels at scale.