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Following up on my post of several weeks ago (iGEM 2011: First Thoughts), here is a bit more on last year's Jamboree.  I remain very, very impressed by what the teams did this year.  And I think that watching iGEM from here on out will provide a sneak peak of the future of biological technologies.

I think the biggest change from last year is the choice of applications, which I will describe below.  And related to the choice of applications is change of approach to follow a more complete design philosophy.  I'll get to the shift in design sensibility further on in the post.

The University of Washington: Make it or Break it

I described previously the nuts and bolts of the University of Washington's Grand Prize winning projects.  But, to understand the change in approach (or perhaps change in scope?) this project represents, you also have to understand a few details about problems in the real world.  And that is really the crux of the matter -- teams this year took on real world problems as never before, and may have produced real world solutions.

Recall that one of the UW projects was the design of an enzyme that digests gluten, with the goal of using that enzyme to treat gluten intolerance.  Candidate enzymes were identified through examining the literature, with the aim of finding something that works at low pH.  The team chose a particular starter molecule, and then used the "video game" Foldit to re-design the active site in silico so that it would chew up gluten (here is a very nice Youtube video on the Foldit story from Nature).  They then experimentally tested many of the potential improvements.  The team wound up with an enzyme that in a test tube is ~800 times better than one already in clinical trials.  While the new enzyme would of course itself face lengthy clinical trials, the team's achievement could have an enormous impact on people who suffer from celiac disease, among many other ailments.

From a story in last week's NYT Magazine ("Should We All Go Gluten-Free?"), here are some eye-opening stats on celiac disease, which can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to dramatic weight loss:

• Prior to 2003, prevalence in the US was thought to be just 1 in 10,000: widespread testing revealed the actual rate was 1 in 133.
• Current estimates are that 18 million Americans have some sort of gluten intolerance, which is about 5.8% of the population.
• Young people were 5x more likely to have the disease by the 1990s than in the 1950s based on looking at old blood samples.
• Prevalence is increasing not just in US, but also worldwide.

In other words, celiac disease is a serious metabolic issue that for some reason is affecting ever larger parts of the global population.  And as a summer project a team of undergraduates may have produced a (partial) treatment for the disease.  That eventual treatment would probably require tens of millions of dollars of further investment and testing before it reaches the market.  However, the market for gluten-free foods, as estimated in the Times, is north of $6 billion and growing rapidly.  So there is plenty of market potential to drive investment based on the iGEM project.

The other UW project is a demonstration of using E. coli to directly produce diesel fuel from sugar.  The undergraduates first reproduced work published last year from LS9 in which E. coli was modified to produce alkanes (components of diesel fuel -- here is the Science paper by Schirmer et al).  Briefly, the UW team produced biobricks -- the standard format used in iGEM -- of two genes that turn fatty acids into alkanes.  Those genes were assembled into a functional "Petrobrick".  The team then identified and added a novel gene to E. coli that builds fatty acids from 3 carbon seeds (rather than the native coli system that builds on 2 carbon seeds).  The resulting fatty acids then served as substrates for the Petrobrick, resulting in what appears to be the first report anywhere of even-chain alkane synthesis.  All three genes were packaged up into the "FabBrick", which contains all the components needed to let E. coli process sugar into a facsimile of diesel fuel.

The undergraduates managed to substantially increase the alkane yield by massaging the culture conditions, but the final yield is a long way from being useful to produce fuel at volume.  But again, not bad for a summer project.  This is a nice step toward turning first sugar, then eventually cellulose, directly into liquid fuels with little or no purification or post-processing required.  It is, potentially, also a step toward "Microbrewing the Bioeconomy".  For the skeptics in the peanut gallery, I will be the first to acknowledge that we are probably a long way from seeing people economically brew up diesel in their garage from sugar.  But, really, we are just getting started.  Just a couple of years ago people thought I was all wet forecasting that iGEM teams would contribute to technology useful for distributed biological manufacturing of fuels.  Now they are doing it.  For their summer projects.  Just wait a few more years.

Finally -- yes, there's more -- the UW team worked out ways to improve the cloning efficiency of so-called Gibson cloning.  They also packaged up as biobricks all the components necessary to produce magnetosomes in E. coli.  The last two projects didn't make it quite as far as the first two, but still made it further than many others I have seen in the last 5 years.

Before moving on, here is a thought about the mechanics of participating in iGEM.  I think the UW wiki is the about best I have seen.   I like very much the straightforward presentation of hypothesis, experiments, and results.  It was very easy to understand what they wanted to do, and how far they got.  Here is the "Advice to Future iGEM Teams" I posted a few years ago.  Aspiring iGEM teams should take note of the 2011 UW wiki -- clarity of communication is part of your job.

Lyon-INSA-ENS: Cobalt Buster

The team from Lyon took on a very small problem: cleaning up cooling water from nuclear reactors using genetically modified bacteria.  This was a nicely conceived project that involved identifying a problem, talking to stakeholders, and trying to provide a solution.  As I understand it, there are ongoing discussions with various sponsors about funding a start-up to build prototypes.  It isn't obvious that the approach is truly workable as a real world solution -- many questions remain -- but the progress already demonstrated indicates that dismissing this project would be premature.

Before continuing, I pause to reflect on the scope of Cobalt Buster.  One does wonder about the eventual pitch to regulators and the public: "Dear Europe, we are going to combine genetically modified organisms and radiation to solve a nuclear waste disposal problem!"  As the team writes on its Human Practices page: "In one project, we succeed to gather Nuclear Energy and GMOs. (emphasis in original)"  They then acknowledge the need to "focus on communication".  Indeed.

Here is the problem they were trying to solve: radioactive Cobalt (Co) is a contaminant emitted during maintenance of nuclear reactors.  The Co is typically cleaned up with ion exchange resins, which are both expensive and when used up must be appropriately disposed of as nuclear waste.  By inserting a Co importer pump into E. coli, the Lyon team hopes to use bacteria to concentrate the Co and thereby clean up reactor cooling water.  That sounds cool, but the bonus here is that modelling of the system suggests that using E. coli as a biofilter in this way would result in substantially less waste.  The team reports that they expect 8000kg of ion exchange resins could be replaced with 4kg of modified bacteria.  That factor of 2000 in volume reduction would have a serious impact on disposal costs.  And the modified bug appears to work in the lab (with nonradioactive Cobalt), so this story is not just marketing.

The Lyons team also inserted a Co sensor into their E. coli strain.  The sensor then drove expression of a protein that forms amyloid fibers, causing the coli in turn to form a biofilm.  This biofilm would stabilize the biofilter in the presence of Co.  The filter would only be used for a few hours before being replaced, which would not give the strain enough time to lose this circuit via selection.

Imperial College London: Auxin

Last, but certainly not least, is the very well thought through Imperial College project to combat soil erosion by encouraging plant root growth.  I saved this one for last because, for me, the project beautifully reflects the team's intent to carefully consider the real-world implications of their work.  There are certainly skeptics out there who will frown on the extension of iGEM into plants, and who feel the project would never make it into the field due to the many regulatory barriers in Europe.  I think the skeptics are completely missing the point.

To begin, a summary of the project: the Imperial team's idea was to use bacteria as a soil treatment, applied in any number of ways, that would be a cost-effective means of boosting soil stability through root growth.  The team designed a system in which genetically modified bacteria would be attracted to plant roots, would then take up residence in those roots, and would subsequently produce a hormone that encourages root growth.

The Auxin system was conceived to combine existing components in very interesting ways.  Naturally-occurring bacteria have already been shown to infiltrate plant roots, and other soil-dwelling bacteria produce the same growth hormone that encourages root proliferation.

Finally, the team designed and built a novel (and very clever) system for preventing leakage of transgenes through horizontal gene transfer.  On the plasmid containing the root growth genes, the team also included genes that produce proteins toxic to bacteria.  But in the chromosome, they included an anti-toxin gene.  Thus if the plasmid were to leak out and be taken up by a bacterium without the anti-toxin gene, any gene expression from the plasmid would kill the recipient cell.

The team got many of these pieces working independently, but didn't quite get the whole system working together in time for the international finals.  I encourage those interested to have a look at the wiki, which is really very good.

The Shift to Thinking About Design

As impressive as Imperial's technical results were, I was also struck by the integration of "human practices" into the design process.  The team spoke to farmers, economists, Greenpeace -- the list goes on -- as part of both defining the problem and attempting to finesse a solution given the difficulty of fielding GMOs throughout the UK and Europe.  And these conversations very clearly impacted the rest of the team's activities.

One of the frustrations felt by iGEM teams and judges alike is that "human practices" has often felt like something tacked on to the science for the sake of placating potential critics.  There is something to that, as the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) components of large federal projects such as The Human Genome Project and SynBERC appear to have been tacked on for just that reason.  Turning "human practices" into an appendix on the body of science is certainly not the wisest way to go forward, for reasons I'll get to in a moment, nor is it politically savvy in the long term.  But if the community is honest about it, tacking on ELSI to get funding has been a successful short-term political hack.

The Auxin project, along with a few other events during the finals, helped crystallize for me the disconnect between thinking about "human practices" as a mere appendix while spouting off about how synthetic biology will be the core of a new industrial revolution, as some of us tend to do.  Previous technological revolutions have taught us the importance of design, of thinking the whole project through at the outset in order to get as much right as possible, and to minimize the stuff we get wrong.  We should be bringing that focus on design to synthetic biology now.

I got started down this line of thought during a very thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Megan Palmer, the Deputy Director for Practices at SynBERC.  (Apologies to you, Megan, if I step your toes in what follows -- I just wanted to get these thoughts on the page before heading out the door for the holidays.)  The gist of my chat with Megan was that the focus on safety and security as something else, as an activity separate from the engineering work of SB, is leading us astray.  The next morning, I happened to pass Pete Carr and Mac Cowell having a chat just as one of them was saying, "The name human practices sucks. We should really change the name."  And then my brain finally -- amidst the jet lag and 2.5 days of frenetic activity serving as a judge for iGEM -- put the pieces together.  The name does suck.  And the reason it sucks is that it doesn't really mean anything.

What the names "human practices" and "ELSI" are trying to get at is the notion that we shouldn't stumble into developing and using a powerful technology without considering the consequences.  In other fields, whether you are thinking about building a chair, a shoe, a building, an airplane, or a car, in addition to the shape you usually spend a great deal of time thinking about where the materials come from, how much the object costs to make, how it will be used, who will use it, and increasingly how it will be recycled at end of use.  That process is called design, and we should be practicing it as an integral part of manipulating biological systems.

When I first started as a judge for iGEM, I was confused by the kind of projects that wound up receiving the most recognition.  The prizes were going to nice projects, sure, but those projects were missing something from my perspective.  I seem to recall protesting at some point in that first year that "there is an E in iGEM, and it stands for Engineering."  I think part of that frustration was the pool of judges was dominated for many years by professors funded by the NIH, NRC, or the Welcome Trust, for example -- scientists who were looking for scientific results they liked to grace the pages of Science or Nature -- rather than engineers, hackers, or designers who were looking for examples of, you know, engineering.

My point is not that the process of science is deficient, nor that all lessons from engineering are good -- especially as for years my own work has fallen somewhere in between science and engineering.  Rather, I want to suggest that, given the potential impact of all the science and engineering effort going into manipulating biological systems, everyone involved should be engaging in design.  It isn't just about the data, nor just about shiny objects.  We are engaged in sorting out how to improve the human condition, which includes everything from uncovering nature's secrets to producing better fuels and drugs.  And it is imperative that as we improve the human condition we do not diminish the condition of the rest of the life on this planet, as we require that life to thrive in order that we may thrive.

Which brings me back to design.  It is clear that not every experiment in every lab that might move a gene from one organism to another must consider the fate of the planet as part of the experimental design.  Many such experiments have no chance of impacting anything outside the test tube in which they are performed.  But the practice of manipulating biological systems should be done in the context of thinking carefully about what we are doing -- much more carefully than we have been, generally speaking.  Many fields of human endeavor can contribute to this practice.  There is a good reason that ELSI has "ethical", "legal", and "social" in it.

There have been a few other steps toward the inclusion of design in iGEM over the years.  Perhaps the best example is the work designers James King and Daisy Ginsburg did with the 2009 Grand Prize Winning team from Cambridge (see iGEM 2009: Got Poo?).  That was lovely work, and was cleverly presented in the "Scatalog".  You might argue that the winners over the years have had increasingly polished presentations, and you might worry that style is edging out substance.  But I don't think that is happening.  The steps taken this year by Imperial, Lyon, and Washington toward solving real-world problems were quite substantive, even if those steps are just the beginning of a long path to get solutions into people's hands.  That is the way innovation works in the real world.

A Tweet and blog post from Christina Cacioppo about technological diffusion led me to dig out a relevant slide and text from my book.  Ms. Cacioppo, reflecting on a talk she just saw, asks "Are we really to believe there was no "new" technology diffusion between 1950 and 1990? I thought this was the US's Golden Age of Growth. (Should we include penicillin, nuclear power, or desktop computers on this chart?)".  There is such data out there, but it can be obscure.

As it happens, thanks to my work with bio-era, I am familiar with a 1997 Forbes piece by Peter Brimlow that explores what he called "The Silent Boom".  Have a look at the text (the accompanying chart is not available online), but basically the idea is that keeping track of the cost of a technology is less informative than tracking actual market penetration, which is sometimes called "technological diffusion".  The time between the introduction of a technology and widespread adoption is a "diffusion lag".  The interesting thing for me is that there appears to be a wide distribution of diffusion lags; that is, some technologies hit the market fast (which can still mean decades) while others can take many more decades.  There really isn't enough data to say anything concrete about how diffusion lags are changing over time, but I am willing to speculate that not only are the lags getting shorter (more rapid market adoption), but that the pace of adoption is getting faster (steeper slope).  Here is the version of the chart I use in my talks, followed by a snippet of related text from my book (I am sure there is a better data set out there, but I have not yet stumbled over it):


And from pg 60 of Biology is Technology:

Diffusion lags in acceptance appear frequently in the adoption of new technologies over the last several centuries. After the demonstration of electric motors, it took nearly two decades for penetration in U.S. manufacturing to reach 5% and another two decades to reach 50%. The time scale for market penetration is often decades[6] (see Figure 5.6). There is, however, anecdotal evidence that adoption of technologies may be speeding up; "Prices for electricity and motor vehicles fell tenfold over approximately seven decades following their introduction. Prices for computers have fallen nearly twice as rapidly, declining ten-fold over 35 years."[4]

Regardless of the time scale, technologies that offer fundamentally new ways of providing services or goods tend to crop up within contexts set by preceding revolutions. The interactions between the new and old can create unexpected dynamics, a topic I will return to in the final chapter. More directly relevant here is that looking at any given technology may not give sufficient clues as to the likely rate of market penetration. For example, while the VCR was invented in 1952, adoption remained minimal for several decades. Then, in the late 1970's the percentage of ownership soared. The key underlying change was not that consumers suddenly decided to spend more time in front of the television, but rather that a key component of VCRs, integrated circuits, themselves only a few decades old at the time, started falling spectacularly in price. That same price dynamic has helped push the role of integrated circuits into the background of our perception, and the technology now serves as a foundation for other "independent" technologies ranging from mobile phones, to computers, to media devices.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at an event run by the UPMC Center for Biosecurity, Preserving National Security: The Growing Role of the Life Sciences.  Here is the video of my presentation, followed by Roger Breeze, with an introduction by Gigi Gronvall.  There is a short panel discussion at the end of the clip.  Video of the rest of the meeting is also online, along with a conference report (PDF).

I just finished addressing a meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan -- Synthetic Biology and its Dual Use.  I was scheduled to give my talk via two-way video teleconference that turned out to be ... one-way.  So rather than being able to interact with my audience, I had to simply page through my presentation on my end and hope they were still listening.  I was basically practicing my talk, except there was a live video connection to the other side of the world.  Very strange.

When a carpenter turns to chemistry to pay the rent, you can be certain innovation has been democratized.  As told by Jeanne Whalen in The Wall Street Journal, chemo-entrepreneur David Llewellyn found it an easy transition to begin making recreational drugs when his construction business tanked.  Llewellyn specializes in making "legal high" drugs for sale in Europe, always ready to move onto the next compound when authorities ban whatever he has been selling.  And he intends to keep operating that way: "Everything we sell is legal. I don't want to go to jail for 14 years."  This story has interesting implications for anyone interested in the future of synthetic biology, and in particular those who feel that regulating access to tools, skills, and materials will lead to a safer world.  But I will get to that later.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.  And to the spotlight.

Mr. Llewellyn looks to academic literature for inspiration for the next drug, and the WSJ named Purdue chemist David Nichols' papers as the source of several such drugs.  The WSJ article led Nichols to pen an essay for the 6 January issue of Nature entitled "Legal highs: the dark side of medicinal chemistry".  He writes: "Although some of my results have been, shall we say, abused, one cannot know where research ultimately will lead. I strive to find positive things, and when my research is used for negative ends it upsets me."  The essay constitutes a bit of soul searching, with an unspoken conclusion that he is doing the best he can to try to make the world a better place.  Here is NPR's version of a subsequent AP story on Professor Nichols.

Underlying the Professor's discomfort is that simple fact that science, as a method and as information, is value neutral.  By this I mean that regardless of what prompted a particular line of research (which might, in fact, be motivated by particular values), the resulting information is neither good nor bad.  It is just information.  That said, obviously that information will be used by humans for both good and bad ends.  This is about as close as I can get to a statement of fundamental human nature.  Humans will do good things and they will do bad things -- just as we always have -- with "good" and "bad" of course being highly contingent definitions.

The world we live in is dirty, full of disease and despair, and some people have no problem contributing to the mess.  It is very easy to sometimes forget this when working within a university.  But Science (with a capital "S", please) is just another human institution, inhabiting that same dirty world.  Anyone who does anything that hurts another person in today's world is likely using some bit of science or technology invented by somebody who was attempting to improve the world.  Pointing a finger at Professor Nichols as the source of information used to manufacture drugs that cause harm is like pointing a finger at whomever invented the screwdriver as the source of suicide bombers, or like pointing a finger at Isaac Newton as the source of ballistic missiles.  Academic publishing makes it easy to trace Professor Nichols by his research, and thus to point a finger at him, but that completely misses the point and is a distraction.

Laboratory-Adept Entrepreneurs: Just Trying to Pay the Rent

For his own part in this story, David Llewellyn is self-cast as a bit of a underdog trying to make an interesting living while keeping just this side of today's definition of "good".  From Ms. Whalen's WSJ article:

Mr. Llewellyn is part of a wave of laboratory-adept European entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs. They pose a stiff challenge for European law-enforcement, which is struggling to keep up with all the new concoctions. Last year, 24 new "psychoactive substances" were identified in Europe, almost double the number reported in 2008, according to the Lisbon-based European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, or EMCDDA.

As he scurries to stay ahead of the law, authorities have put speed bumps, not roadblocks, in his path. Mr. Llewellyn says Belgian customs officials recently raided one of his storehouses and seized his chemicals, threatening to use environmental laws to shut him down. And he says he may have to move one of his production labs from the Netherlands because authorities there are planning to outlaw the use of certain lab equipment without a professional license.

...Other than that, however, Mr. Llewellyn's business is cruising along largely unimpeded. He and eight employees make drugs in a pair of "underground" labs--one in Holland and a new, $190,000 lab in Scotland.

If you are inclined to believe that it should be easy to solve problems through regulation or licensing, the very existence of Mr. Llewellyn's operation might give you pause.  If the Belgian authorities threaten to shut him down with environmental laws, it isn't going to be that hard to get them to go away because so many other "legitimate" businesses somehow manage to comply with those same environmental laws even while using the same raw materials -- and the "legitimate" companies are probably managing this with much lower profit margins.  Or perhaps governments could attempt to impose license restrictions on anyone using a particular material or laboratory instrument, but then of course they would be imposing those costs on all such users, "legitimate" or otherwise.  Finally, you might hope to directly stop Mr. Llewellyn from making or selling his wares.  And then you would fail outright, because there are so many potential compounds of interest that the regulations would have to restrict making anything that might someday be found to possibly cause harm to humans.  And that would shut down the entire chemical industry, and thus the entire economy.

Trouble for a Nose

Mr. Llewellyn describes Nopaine, a chemical derivative of Ritalin, as "every bit as good as cocaine. You can freebase it. You can snort it like crack."

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Llewellyn's product guarantees, or of his marketing copy, he might be right.  Nopaine might be as "good" as cocaine.  Or it might, as is the concern of Professor Nichols, cause death, liver cancer, or other long-term damage.  But Mr. Llewellyn can make it to market with a synthetic compound created in his "underground lab" without having to find out whether it is good or bad.

Whether you like it or not, innovation of this sort is here to stay.  It may be hard these days to buy a chemistry set for your kid that is in any way interesting, but it is demonstrably easy to incorporate and get one's mitts on enough information and raw materials to synthesize compounds new to science.  And even if this becomes hard in any particular country, the general problem of widely accessible information and infrastructure is here to stay.       

Many of the "legal highs" evidently come from China, as must some of the raw materials used by Mr. Llewellyn and his ilk.  Ms. Whalen's earlier article "Designer Drugs Baffle Europe", from July of 2010, notes that in China "lax control of chemicals makes it easier for manufacturers to obtain the raw ingredients."  Her later article suggests that China is attempting to control the manufacture and sale of some new compounds, but I am not sure I have much confidence in that effort.  If it becomes too annoying (and it will never be more than annoying for those interested in making and selling drugs) to operate in China, or somewhere in Eastern Europe, they will pick up and move elsewhere.  And they will still have access to international markets wherever they go.  Our policy may be to fight them, to chase them away, but we will never fully prevail.

Which brings us back to definitions of "good" and "bad".  "Bad" Mr. Llewellyn isn't acting alone; he has "bad" customers.  Their aggregate demand supports the market.  (Oh, and wait a moment -- what Mr. Llewellyn is doing is actually legal, so therefore it is "good"?)  Unless governments somehow come up with a way to keep people from imbibing "bad" substances, defined as "bad" on any given day, the demand for those substances isn't going away.

Chemistry Today, Biology Tomorrow

There was a time when synthetic chemistry was not so easy.  And then some time passed, and now today we can order novel psychoactive drugs over the Internet.  Or make them ourselves.

Today it is hard to build a genetic circuit that does exactly what you want.  Synthetic biology is in its infancy.  Yet it is already possible to outfit a lab in your garage (at least in the US) that is sufficient to do all kinds of interesting things.  And if you don't have room in your garage, then you can stroll down to the corner DNA hackspace.  (Update: Genspace's Dan Grushkin wrote in to observe that I have unintentionally juxtaposed drug production and Genspace in an unfortunate way, which was of course not my intent at all.  Note that I did this to myself, too, as one of the former examples was my own garage lab.)  Access to tools doesn't make molecular biology easy, but it does give you the opportunity to learn, and perhaps to innovate.

And thus people will innovate with biological tools and information just as they have with everything else.  That innovation will be "good", and it will be "bad".  Regulation will not be a panacea for biological technologies, and will not necessarily make the world a safer place, just as regulation fails in the case of chemistry.  As I argued last month in Garage Innovation in The Scientist, restriction of access will always produce perverse incentives when there is an "attempt to control tools and skills in the context of a market in which consumers are willing to pay prices that support use of those tools and skills".

I am reminded of my experience last year at a warm-up meeting for the 2011 Review Conference for the Biological Weapons Convention.  At one point in the discussion, one delegate asserted that "garage or DIYBio is only a problem in the US.  In our country it is illegal to do such things."

I wonder if this delegate knows whether or not a chemo-entrepreneur has an "underground lab" next door?

The Economist has just posted my invited comments on their current debate: "This house believes the development of computing was the most significant technological advance of the 20th century."

As with the last time I was invited to be a "guest speaker" (just one of the oddities of horning an Oxford-style debate into an online shoe), I have difficulty coloring between the lines.  Here are the first couple of graphs of today's contribution:

The development of computing--broadly construed--was indeed the most significant technological advance of the 20th century. New technologies, however, never crop up by themselves, but are instead part of the woven web of human endeavour. There is always more to a given technology than meets the eye.

We often oversimplify "computing" and think only of software or algorithms used to manipulate information. That information comes in units of bits, and our ability to store and crunch those bits has certainly changed our economies and societies over the past century. But those bits reside on a disk, or in a memory circuit, and the crunching of bits is done by silicon chips. Those disks, circuits and chips had to improve so that computing could advance.

Progress in building computers during the mid-20th century required first an understanding of materials and how they interact; from this knowledge, which initially lived on paper and in the minds of scientists and engineers, were built the first computer chips. As those chips increased in complexity, so did the computational power they conferred on computer designers. That computational power was used to design more powerful chips, creating a feedback loop. By the end of the century, new chips and software packages could only be designed using computers, and their complex behaviour could only be understood with the aid of computers.

The development of computing, therefore, required not just development of software but also of the ability to build the physical infrastructure that runs software and stores information. In other words, our improving ability to control atoms in the service of building computers was crucial to advancing the technology we call "computing". Advances in controlling atoms have naturally been extended to other areas of human enterprise. Computer-aided design and manufacturing have radically changed our ability to transform ideas into objects. Our manufactured world--which includes cars, aircraft, medicines, food, music, phones and even shoes--now arrives at our doorsteps as a consequence of this increase in computational power.

I go on to observe that computation is already having an effect on food through increased corn yields courtesy of gene sequencing and expression analysis.

Like so:

Click through to read the rest.

On my head, that is.  Not in, alas, but on.  That's the way it goes, some days.  But at least I am pressing forward.  Or the idea on my head is.  That is what the sign says, anyway. 

Week before last, I spent an enjoyable couple of days at The Economist's Ideas Economy: Human Potential 2010.  I'll post the video when it is available.

Among the most interesting things I heard: Richard Florida says that the "creative sector" has never been above 5% unemployment, and that sector now constitutes 30% of the US workforce.  Here is his presentation:



I also had the chance to meet Vivek Wadhwa (very smart fellow), whose recent fascinating blog post on whether job creation comes from big companies or startups I have been pondering for weeks.  Here is a snippet from the post: "Startups aren't just an important contributor to job growth: they're the only thing. Without startups, there would be no net job growth in the U.S. economy. From 1977 to 2005, existing companies were net job destroyers, losing 1 million net jobs per year. In contrast, new businesses in their first year added an average of 3 million jobs annually."

Biodesic has assembled several alpha test units of the next LavaAmp hardware revision.  We've replaced the original thin film heaters (which I screen printed by hand -- not fun solvents) with a new design.  Here is a photo, with my battered iPhone for scale.  Next up is switching from the aluminum case to something injection molded, and sorting out the sample loop design and manufacturing.

This morning's biosecurity update from the Partnership for Global Security carried a mess of links I hadn't seen, including a story at the BBC entitled "Tech Know: Life hacking with 3D printing and DIY DNA kits".  The embedded video has an interesting clip on a printed stainless steel Mobius strip with freely moving rings that can run around the perimeter -- interlinked complex shapes.  Neat.  (Not a new thing in plastics, but I hadn't seen it in metal before.)

Cambridge's James Brown gets the honor of introducing the Beeb's audience to synthetic biology, biobricks, and engineering methods for biological systems.  The 3D-printed DremelFuge gets a photo and a significant mention.  I explicitly pointed to this sort of application of 3D printing in my book, though it is happening even faster than I had imagined.  Shapeways is now printing all sorts of interesting materials, though the resolution of most 3D printers and processes still doesn't make them useful for the sorts of objects I want to print.  That said, there is clear improvement over time.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes before you can print mixed media functional objects, say something like a zero-dead volume, positive displacement membrane pump.  Or better yet an entire pump block.  (Which is usually milled from a piece of stainless steel -- see where this is going?)  That gets you the most annoying bit of kit needed for a DNA synthesizer.  At which point you can forget any regulations limiting access to DNA of any sequence.