Biotechnology Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Biotechnology. Here they are! All 100 of them:

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
Actually, we’re with the United States Army stationed in Germany. My friend Paul comes here about every two to three weeks to visit his Dutch girlfriend.
Karl Braungart (Lost Identity (Remmich/Miller, #1))
This can only be an urgent call at this late hour.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
I am not familiar with your personal lives, except to know you are scientists representing Iran.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
  “Bad news. The Egyptians have left Bogotá on one of six American Airlines’ flights. Steve, I lost them.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
It wasn’t until I noticed two of the words on the sheet printed on a folder label. Sure enough, it was Williams’ study titled ‘Nuclear Waste Management.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
I had a separate meeting with Directors Montgomery and Black. We discussed terrorists infiltrating the country. As you know, there are ten scientists from the Middle East taking part in the biotechnology project. I don’t want to take any chances about one or more of them being part of a terrorist group. We don’t need this lab center and people incinerated.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
   “I have good news. The plan is a go. We can begin the project to get the nuclear energy discovery.
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
If you think this Dr. Williams’ files contain what we want, you need to find a way to confiscate the entire file. You must go to a copy store, scan the documents, and save them to a USB. Can you arrange to get this information after hours, make the copies, and return it to where you found it?
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
  “Yes, well, I thought you should see it. The cover page is in Arabic scribblin’, but the next hundred-plus pages are in five sections, and in English. I can’t for the life of me figure out what to make of it. This appears to be more American, and it seems to be a kind of scientific material. Have a look at it and let me know what to tell the boys in Z-land,
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
Biotechnology isn’t just accelerating at the speed of Moore’s law, it’s accelerating at five times the speed of Moore’s law—doubling in power and halving in price every four months!
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
Stewart Brand
Organic agriculture = Seed Sovereignty + Biological Integrity + Food Security Whereas, Food biotechnology = Food security (at the cost of seed sovereignty and biological integrity) The choice is on us!
Royal Raj S
Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology
Ryan Bethencourt
Healthcare is shifting from diagnosis to prevention and augmentation, blurring the line between human and technology.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future. That
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
There is unspeakable yet entirely preventable suffering in this world. The job of journalists and writers engaged with global issues is to articulate the unspeakable and give voice to solutions. -- K. Lee Lerner
K. Lee Lerner (Infectious Diseases: In Context)
Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre. It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible—because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations—voters, inventors, scientists—with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades.
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
Escape is very difficult to negotiate, underwater.
Darion D'Anjou (Genetika (Akva rium, #1))
However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year 2100 or 2200. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, ‘What would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology?’ Yet there are no good answers to the question, ‘What would beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology?’ All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service? In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Such an AI might also be able to produce a detailed blueprint for how to bootstrap from existing technology (such as biotechnology and protein engineering) to the constructor capabilities needed for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing that would allow inexpensive fabrication of a much wider range of nanomechanical structures.
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe—biotechnology and nanotechnology—are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.
Ralph Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future)
Everywhere I went in Africa it was the same story. Foreign-funded NGOs, supported mainly by donors in Europe, were delaying or blocking the development not just of biotechnology but of modern agriculture generally across the continent.
Mark Lynas (Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong On GMOs)
The liberal political system was shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries, and television sets. It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
While disputes about overpopulation, racial equality, pesticides, resource limits, nuclear power, biotechnology, and global warming may appear to be about different subjects, they are ultimately but different faces of the same conflict: a fundamental debate over the worth of humankind.
Robert Zubrin (Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism)
The world needs psychological singularity, that is oneness among humans, not some pompous biotechnological singularity.
Abhijit Naskar (Fabric of Humanity)
The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening—
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
To do this, we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms. These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph, and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons. The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and the Mahdi’s Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
Homo Sapiens Loses Control Can humans go on running the world and giving it meaning? How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten humanism? Who might inherit humankind, and what new religion might replace humanism?
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
The liberal political system has been shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries and television sets. It finds it difficult to deal with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
The important thing is that we do not throw the genetically modified baby out with the bathwater. We spend so much time discussing the ethics of using our emerging scientific capabilities that we sometimes forget that NOT using them has ethical implications of its own. … Biotechnology is not the only solution to what ails animals, but it’s a weapon we now have in our arsenal, one set of strategies for boosting animal health and welfare. If we reject it out of hand, we lose the good along with the bad.
Emily Anthes (Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts)
In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
Throughout world history, the greatest killers have not been wars but plagues and epidemics. Unfortunately, it is possible that nations have kept secret stockpiles of deadly diseases, such as smallpox, which could be weaponized using biotechnology to create havoc.
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
We are consequently left with the task of creating an updated story for the world. Just as the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the novel ideologies of the twentieth century, so the coming revolutions in biotechnology and information technology are likely to require fresh visions. The next decades might therefore be characterised by intense soul-searching and by formulating new social and political models. Could liberalism reinvent itself yet again, just as it did in the wake of the 1930s and 1960s crises, emerging as more attractive than ever before?
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology. Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential. Since the 1990s the internet has changed the world probably more than any other factor, yet the internet revolution was directed by engineers more than by political parties. Did you ever vote about the internet? The democratic system is still struggling to understand what hit it, and it is unequipped to deal with the next shocks, such as the rise of AI and the blockchain revolution.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.
Freeman Dyson (The Scientist as Rebel)
now liberalism is in trouble. So where are we heading? This question is particularly poignant because liberalism is losing credibility exactly when the twin revolutions in information technology and biotechnology confront us with the biggest challenges our species has ever encountered. The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Perhaps most important, artificial intelligence and biotechnology are giving humanity the power to reshape and reengineer life. Very soon somebody will have to decide how to use this power—based on some implicit or explicit story about the meaning of life. Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less so, and investors are the least patient of all.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
medical indicators, monitor our health conditions on our phones, and share the data with doctors and researchers. Doudna added that the pandemic had accelerated the convergence of science with other fields. “The engagement of non-scientists in our work will help achieve an incredibly interesting biotechnology revolution,” she predicted. This was molecular biology’s moment.
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
This is the portrait of the future customers—connected yet distracted. A survey by the National Center for Biotechnological Information shows that the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. This can be attributed to the massive and overwhelming volume of messages that constantly bombard our connected mobile devices and demand instant attention.
Philip Kotler (Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital)
For the vast majority of us who reside in the troubled middle, there are no easy answers to the ethical dilemmas that biotechnology can pose. As biotechnology moves forward, we’ll have to carefully evaluate each application on its own terms, trying to balance what’s in the best interests of an individual animal with what’s good for its species as a whole, for humanity, and for the world we all share.
Emily Anthes (Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts)
in 2010, foreign students received more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.’s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure is closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America’s potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future—all rest on its immigration policies.
Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)
Sir Winston Churchill rightly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” How we work has changed forever. How we make medicines for patients is changing, and for the better. We are pushing barriers, testing conventional wisdom and the “way things have always been done.” We are adopting digital technologies and sharing data in ways never imagined to this crisis. We are finding new ways to innovate, with increased speed and efficiency.
Jeremy M. Levin (Biotechnology in the Time of COVID-19: Commentaries from the Front Line)
Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
This may sound overambitious, but Homo sapiens cannot wait. Philosophy, religion and science are all running out of time. People have debated the meaning of life for thousands of years. We cannot continue this debate indefinitely. The looming ecological crisis, the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of new disruptive technologies will not allow it. Perhaps most importantly, artificial intelligence and biotechnology are giving humanity the power to reshape and re-engineer life.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...
Vandana Shiva (Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology)
But what about the dangers inherent in human nature itself? Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future. That doesn’t mean we will go back to twentieth-century-style dictatorships. Authoritarian regimes seem to be equally overwhelmed by the pace of technological development and the speed and volume of the data flow. In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times. Columbus
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
So in the struggle against natural calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, the scales are tipping in humanity’s favour. But what about the dangers inherent in human nature itself? Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it. Breaking
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
We think that the promotion of happiness is what science aims for, but as the man says, the reality of the world we live in is veiled by misleading ideas. You only have to read a newspaper to see that science has its own agenda. When it does serve humanity’s real interests, it does so more or less by accident. I mean, scientists and their apologists have this presumption of service built into all their rhetoric, but if you examine it, it’s meaningless. They tell us, ‘Science is performed for the welfare of the human species.’ But when you question a particular development—for example, some particularly gruesome ‘breakthrough’ in biotechnology—when you ask, ‘Can this really be good for us?’ they shut you up with ‘Of course it’s good for us. It has to be because it’s science, and what science does is good for us.
Wade Rowland (Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church)
Whatever changes await us in the future, they are likely to involve a fraternal struggle within a single civilization rather than a clash between alien civilizations. The big challenges of the twenty-first century will be global in nature. What will happen when climate change triggers ecological catastrophes? What will happen when computers outperform humans in more and more tasks, and replace them in an increasing number of jobs? What will happen when biotechnology enables us to upgrade humans and extend life spans? No doubt we will have huge arguments and bitter conflicts over these questions. But these arguments and conflicts are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent. Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
It's not the machines you need to fear. It's the people. Other people. The augmented men and women that will come afterwards. The children who use this technology you are creating will not care what it does to your norms and traditions. They will utilize this gift to its fullest potential and leave you begging in the dust. They will break your hearts, murder the natural world, and endanger their own souls. You will rue the day that you created us.
Dave Pryor
As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people's deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between your self and their marketing experts? To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account - they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that's hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book. The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose. The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here. I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.
W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves)
Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France. By 1910, you would be allied with France and your enemy would be Germany. By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan. By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said ‘no war for ten years.’ Nine years later World War II had begun. By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age had dawned, and a ‘police action’ was underway in Korea. Ten years later the political focus was on the ‘missile gap,’ the strategic paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few people had heard of Vietnam. By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf region. By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our ‘hollow forces’ and a ‘window of vulnerability,’ and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the internet. Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting. All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly. Lin Wells
Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?
David Zindell (Splendor)
Blue Heron Biotechnology,
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Despite the inherent difficulty of philosophy its value should not be underestimated. As recent discoveries in genetics and biotechnology have shown, it is impossible to know what to do with scientific discoveries without reflecting on what sort of a society we want to live in and what duties we owe each other, our descendants and the environment. Answers to all these questions depend on what conception we have of ourselves as human beings and what we think that means for the best way to live. None of these issues are questions for science or for art, but for philosophy.
Philip Stokes (Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers)
Europe has learned to grow more food per hectare and use fewer chemicals in the process. The American choices in biotechnology are causing it to fall behind Europe in productivity and sustainability.
Mark Schapiro (Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply)
A civilized society should mean non-judgmental communication - it should mean warm interconnection - it should mean shared psychology - it should mean a true psychological singularity. The world needs psychological singularity, that is oneness among humans, not some pompous biotechnological singularity.
Abhijit Naskar (Fabric of Humanity)
If we are indeed bringing famine, plague and war under control, what will replace them at the top of the human agenda? Like firefighters in a world without fire, so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?
Yuval Noah Harari
Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
It was an undercover project for bioweapons, spearheaded by Cpt. Matthew Chambers, now an infamous household name associated with an emerging national scandal—Biogate, as dubbed by the media. Such a project would violate a worldwide ban—signed years ago by the United States—against biotechnological warfare.
Scott Spotson (The Strange Life of Brandon Chambers)
I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time. I think it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach. Given that the world is still loaded with nuclear weapons and that biotechnology is opening a Pandora’s box of new weaponry, you can imagine our tribalistic impulses ushering in a truly dark age.
Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment)
eight exponentially growing fields were chosen as the core of SU’s curriculum: biotechnology and bioinformatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; and nanomaterials and nanotechnology. Each of these has the potential to affect billions of people, solve grand challenges, and reinvent industries.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Low-cost fuels, high-performing vaccines, and ultrayield agriculture are just three of the reasons that the exponential growth of biotechnology is critical to creating a world of abundance.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
To see the future of science, take a peek inside a lab at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, where a robot by the name of Adam is hard at work figuring out which genes encode which enzymes in yeast. Adam has a model of yeast metabolism and general knowledge of genes and proteins. It makes hypotheses, designs experiments to test them, physically carries them out, analyzes the results, and comes up with new hypotheses until it’s satisfied. Today, human scientists still independently check Adam’s conclusions before they believe them, but tomorrow they’ll leave it to robot scientists to check each other’s hypotheses.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
Peter Singer put it when discussing the use of biotechnology in food, “It is a mistake to place any moral value on what is natural. I mean many things are natural, including racism, sexism, war, and all sorts of diseases that we try to fight all the time. So the argument about [genetically engineered] food being unnatural and therefore wrong oversimplifies this debate.”14
Jayson Lusk (Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World)
Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.
Hannah Landecker (Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies)
we proposed eighteen great ideas of science that we felt framed virtually all discoveries of the natural world and all advances in technology. We could not have foreseen many of the remarkable developments of the past two decades—nanotechnology archaea, LEDs, cloning, dark energy, ancient microbial fossils and deep microbial life, evidence for oceans of water on Mars and lakes of methane on Titan, ribozymes, carbon nanotubes, extrasolar planets, and so much more. But all of these unanticipated findings fit into the existing framework of science. The core concepts of science have not changed, and we are unable to point to any fundamentally new scientific principle that has emerged during the 1990s or 2000s. Accordingly, while every chapter has been significantly updated, we have added only a single new chapter on the explosion of advances in biotechnology. We conclude that the experience of the past two decades underscores the value of the great ideas approach to achieving scientific literacy.
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions. It was both descriptive and prescriptive – it offered an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits in production leads to fast economic growth. But capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill. Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Pharmacy The Institute is approved by AICTE & Pharmacy Council of India and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. Courses Offered: Bachelor in Pharmacy A Bachelor of Pharmacy (Abbreviated B Pharma) is a graduate education degree in the field of pharmacy. The degree is the basic condition for practicing in many countries as a pharmacist and it is about developing necessary skills for counseling patients about understanding and using the properties of medicines. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) is an undergraduate degree course in the field of Pharmacy education. The students those are interested in the medical field (except to become a doctor) can choose this course after the completion of class 12th. After the completion of this degree, the students can practice as a Pharmacist. Pharmacists can work in a range of industries related to the prescription, manufacture & provision of medicines. The duration of this course is 4 years. The B.Pharm is one of the popular job oriented course among the science students after class 12th. In this course the students study about the drugs and medicines, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry etc. This course provides a large no. of job opportunities in both the public and private sector. There are various career options available for the science students after the completion of B.Pharm degree. The students can go for higher studies in the Pharmacy i.e. Master of Pharmacy (M.Pharm). This field is one of the evergreen fields in the medical sector, with the increasing demand of Pharma professional every year. B.Pharm programme covers the syllabus including biochemical science & health care. The Pharmacy Courses are approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) & Pharmacy Council of India (PCI). B.Pharma – Bachelor in Pharmacy Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility Passed 10+2 examination with Physics and Chemistry as compulsory subjects along with any one of the Mathematics/ Biotechnology/ Biology. Obtained at least 47% marks in the above subjects taken together. Lateral Entry to Second Year: Candidate must have passed Diploma in Pharmacy course of a minimum duration of 2 years or more from Haryana Board of Technical Education or its equivalent with at least 50% marks in aggregate of all semesters/ years.
swamidevidyal
The wise use AI to design prosthetics, savages for transhumanism.
Abhijit Naskar (Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None)
I can not hide anything in my mind, Choices of mine (Ecology as central dogma) Nalanda University(SEES - Ecology), Yenepoya research center (MSc Bioscience), South Asian University(MSc Biotechnology), Amet University(MSc Marine Biotechnology), Tamil University(MSc Environmental and Herbal Science), SRM Delhi -NCR campus (MSc Environmental Science), Finally Kalasalingam (MSc/ Mtech - Anything is fine since it is my college and I know everything about it). No More plans, I contemplated very hardly and thought about every possible pros and cons with International touch as well. No other courses or colleges are suitable for me, I contemplated very very hardly and deeply, This is my final list, That is all
Ganapathy K Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
All problems and solution are in ecology and environmental science, Biotechnology is to create something new with ethics, all other science (Including everything) are correlated with ecology and environmental science. Spiritualism is your choice but ecology and environmental studies deal with all aspects and dimensions of life on universe and beyond. I don't have to watch those movie, read my comments on social media, my quotes and my actions so far you will find the answers but if you are not satisfied then better to go in your own way. I may watch it if I am bored. Thanks
Ganapathy K
Whatever I talk some people may get confused but environmental people will never get confused because my language is made in that manner. Environment and Biotechnology, Now you can understand me.
Ganapathy K
Both as a young man and more recently, he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.
John Markoff (Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand)
Investment Strategy We invest along two primary strategies: venture creation and private equity. Venture Creation: Building sustainable companies around innovative products we acquire from life sciences companies and institutions Private Equity: Privatizing and creating value for undervalued public pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies
Syridex Bio
Syridex Bio was founded on the belief that everyone deserves the opportunity to live a healthy life. For too long, deep inequities have persisted across our pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical systems. Despite increased public attention on the problem in recent years, progress remains far too slow. At Syridex Bio, we are addressing this gap in the market by strategically investing in therapies that treat diseases disproportionately affecting underserved communities. By financing the development of drugs and treatments addressing the world’s greatest health disparities, we are convinced that we can accelerate health equity globally and achieve strong financial returns for our investors.
Syridex Bio
Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
There is a reason this all happened in the United States. As Akash Tewari, a biotechnology analyst with Jefferies, puts it, “If we didn’t have the U.S. system, we wouldn’t have the vaccines.
Joe Nocera (The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind)
The true marvel of technology lies not in its complexity but in its ability to simplify the complex.
Aloo Denish Obiero
As technology evolves, let ethics stand as its guiding compass; setting its direction and boundaries.
Aloo Denish Obiero
Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service? In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Even in purely economic terms, the opportunity costs of extinction are going to prove enormous. Research on jus small numbers of wild species has yielded major advances in the quality of human life -- an abundance of pharmaceuticals, new biotechnology, and advances in agriculture. If there were no fungi of the right kind, there would be no antibiotics. Without wild plants with edible stems, frukit and seeds available for selective breeding, there would be no cities, and no civilization. No wolves, no dogs. No wild fowl, no chickens. No horses and camelids, no overland journeys except by hand-pulled vehicles and backpacks. No forests to purify water and pay it out gradually, no agriculture except with less productive dryland crops. No wild vegetation and phytoplankton, not enough air to breathe. Without nature, finally, no people.
Edward O. Wilson
If these civilizing potentials were to be generalized, then the homeotechnological era would be distinguished by the fact that in it spaces of leeway for errancy become narrower while spaces of leeway for gratification and positive association grow. Advanced biotechnology and nootechnology groom a refined, cooperative subject who plays with himself, who is formed in association with complex texts and hyper-complex contexts. Here emerges the matrix of a humanism after humanism. Domination must tend in the direction of ceasing because, as crudeness, it makes itself impossible. In the interconnected, inter-intelligently condensed world masters and violators only still have chances for success that last little more than a moment, while cooperators, promoters, and enrichers—at least in their contexts—find more numerous, more adequate, more sustainable connections. After the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century a more extensive dissolution of the remnants of domination looms for the twenty-first or twenty-second—no one will believe that this can happen without intense conflicts. One cannot rule out the possibility that reactionary domination will once again band together with the mass ressentiments of losers to form a new mode of fascism. The ingredients for this are above all present in the mass culture of the United States of America. But like their rise, the foundering of such reactions is foreseeable.
Peter Sloterdijk (Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger)
An article published in the magazine Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry in 2009 reported that drinking diluted apple everyday for as short as 3 months decreases abdominal fat, waist circumference and the level of blood triglycerides. It has been proven that high levels of blood triglycerides and abdominal fat are related to high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack. The malic acid content of apple cider vinegar helps unclog each artery in the body. The beta-carotene in apple cider vinegar also helps fat to be metabolized for energy.
Steven Cumberland (Coconut Oil And Apple Cider Vinegar: The Quick & Easy Guide To A Healthier You (Natural Health Cures, Natural Remedies))
Our focus, however, should not be on the differences among our sectors, but rather on supporting and promoting the entire innovation economy — from tech to bio to clean energy to health care and beyond. In fact, in its recent Impact 2020 report, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council highlighted the interrelationship of these vital sectors working together, combining cutting-edge biomedical research with new information technology tools for capturing and integrating data, conducting sophisticated analytics, and enhancing personal connectivity. Massachusetts is a national and world leader in the growing field of life science information technology.
Anonymous
William Cline has projected that because of climate change the total agricultural capacity of Africa (excluding Egypt) will decline by roughly 19 percent between now and 2080 (Cline 2007). These projected climate change effects make the development of crops better able to tolerate drought an even more obvious imperative in Africa.
Robert Paarlberg (Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa)
The number of genetic engineers currently working on DT traits continues to grow, but given the high regulatory costs of bringing any entirely new GM crop to the market, the first commercialized version of an engineered DT crop will almost certainly come from one of the three big biotechnology companies now in pursuit of this objective in the United States: Syngenta, DuPont/Pioneer, and Monsanto.
Robert Paarlberg (Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa)