



The power of life is evident to anyone who’s ever grown a plant, held a newly born child or watching as yeast, rises and ferments dough, enriching the nutritional value of the bread being made. Life, is real nanotechnology, it builds from the atomic level and it’s self replicating. What often seems to get missed in discussions of nanotechnology, is that we have the power and tools to deliver on many of these technologies now, through biotech.



Ericsson recently released a white paper which charted out the exponential rise in cell phone ownership and usage, they calculated that there were currently about a billion smart phones in use and this number would accelerate to five billion within the next five years. For the first time in history, the majority of humanity will have access to not just to the world’s knowledge but also incredible computational power



Life sciences, like information technology, doesn’t exist in a silo, Moore’s law, will have just as much impact in Life Sciences, as it has had on the smart phone in your pocket. In fact, the pace of technological improvement in genome sequencing has smoked Moore’s law (more than a x2 reduction every two years) the catch is, you’re not seeing it just yet in the consumer sphere!



There are a number of factors which have slowed the trickle out of new technologies in the life sciences to consumers, from regulations (23andMe’s recent issues with the FDA) through to a more sluggish entrepreneurial ecosystem dominated mostly by large, slow moving companies.



In addition, biotechnology is rapidly evolving past the dominant focus of just medical applications, from companies like Novozyme, who are building billion dollar revenue businesses by redesigning our toothpastes and detergents, to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta who are, despite the protests of mis-informed anti-GMO protesters, feeding the world with new, higher yielding and less pesticide intensive crops.



We’ve also seen a new trend, that many that read biocoder or are part of the growing biohacker movement are familiar with, the consumerization of the life sciences. There are now dozens of DIYBio/Biohacker labs, where anyone, with some training and safety guidance, can reprogram cells and create novel genetically engineered machines. These new citizen scientists can also step around the antiquated grant funding mechanisms and the fairly conservative biotech venture capital funds and appeal to the crowd for funding, sites like Experiment.com, Crowdtilt, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, have all been critical in fueling this small but growing trend.



I’ve personally watched as well read novices and many professionals have come into the lab (at Berkeley Biolabs) and applied the art and craft of science, translating scientific protocols into repeatable experiments that may have significant commercial impact, creating novel proteins, biobattery’s and potential crops. With investors like Ycombinator, SOS ventures and Breakthrough labs regularly cutting checks in the biotech space to accelerate novel, often consumer facing biotechnologies, we’re likely to see an exponential rise in the applications of life sciences to the major problems of humanity and once solved, that seed, can literally be planted and multiplied by the millions, better than any purely man made technology.