Biotechnology Quotes

‎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.

This can only be an urgent call at this late hour.

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.

I am not familiar with your personal lives, except to know you are scientists representing Iran.

  “Bad news. The Egyptians have left Bogotá on one of six American Airlines’ flights. Steve, I lost them.

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.

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.

   “I have good news. The plan is a go. We can begin the project to get the nuclear energy discovery.

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?

  “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,

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!

Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.

Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.

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!

Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology

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

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.

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.

Escape is very difficult to negotiate, underwater.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To do this, we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening—

The world needs psychological singularity, that is oneness among humans, not some pompous biotechnological singularity.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

An important early test of donor interest in sponsoring a GM DT crop project for Africa was provided in 2004-05, when Monsanto took the initiative and offered to share its newly discovered DT traits for humanitarian purposes.

In the South Wollo zone of northeastern Ethiopia, 80 percent of rural farming households earn less than $50 per year, and periodic drought is one reason they remain trapped in deep poverty.

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.

In a world badly divided between rich and poor, the policy preferences and regulatory standards of the rich tend to prevail, sometimes to the disadvantage of the poor.

Lest anyone think the writers of Human Dignity in the Biotech Century are overly paranoid, consider that nbic (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science) director Mihail Roco, in the U.S. government report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, wrote,

4IR is marked by emerging technological breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, AI, blockchain, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and autonomous vehicles.

Pick just one trend that you consider unstoppable—5G, sensor technology, big data, AI, blockchain, quantum computing, nanotechnology, robotics, 3D printing, biotechnology, synthetic biology, renewable energy, augmented reality, virtual reality, satellite technology, genomics, gene editing, online education, etc.—and research how it is already impacting your industry.

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.

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

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

Thanks to our new biotechnologies, we now have the power to change the evolutionary trajectories of species that seem destined to disappear, to rescue and revitalize ecosystems that are threatened by the ever-expanding human footprint or that are struggling to adapt to our planet’s changing climate. We could, for example, transfer the domestic ferret’s resistance to Sylvatic plague to black-footed ferrets that are facing extinction across their native range because of the introduced disease. Or we could transfer heat-tolerance between coral populations that are suffering as the oceans warm, or immunize white-footed mice against Lyme disease so that they can no longer pass the disease to humans. We may even eventually bring something back. Not a mammoth or a passenger pigeon, but instead some trait or function or aspect of an extinct species that can, in its re-establishment, restore some missing ecosystem function and allow other species to thrive in today’s altered world.

Wall Street’s “promiscuous imagination,” as biotechnology writer Robert Teitleman called it, had long since grown impatient with stories like his, and the shortage of real investors at the Vista had proven that.

The wise use AI to design prosthetics, savages for transhumanism.

7. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 8.Jane’s Military Publications. CHAPTER 16 BIOTECHNOLOGY

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.

Diane Parks, Theranos’s chief commercial officer, had twenty-five years of experience at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies

Indeed, Dr. Robert Wood has recently argued, based on the leaked and controversial Majestic Documents, that a good portion of the science of biowarfare has derived from a secret study of alien biology and viruses.[369] Whatever the truth on this matter, black world advances in biotechnology are probably substantial, and there will probably be greater pressure applied on that black world to share

The 2011 Chinese National Patent Development Strategy highlighted seven industries to focus on in the coming decade: biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, broadband infrastructure, high-end semiconductors, energy conservation, alternative energy, and clean-energy vehicles. In 2017, it added artificial intelligence to the list.

Robert Freitas estimates that eliminating a specific list comprising 50 percent of medically preventable conditions would extend human life expectancy to over 150 years.39 By preventing 90 percent of medical problems, life expectancy grows to over five hundred years. At 99 percent, we’d be over one thousand years. We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death. As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.

But the science-fiction writers and the scientists had both started from the premise that humanity was rational and consistent. As if it didn’t consist of several billions of lazy, frivolous individuals who were easily distracted, but was some kind of beehive, endowed with collective reason and a unified will. As if, when it set about conquering space, it had really intended to take the task seriously and not abandon it halfway when the game got boring, turning its attention to electronics and then moving on to biotechnology, without ever achieving any really impressive results in anything. Except, perhaps, for nuclear physics.

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.

Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have.

P2 - We are well on the way in a number of areas. Both billionaires and big Pharma are getting increasingly interested and money is starting to pour into research because it is clear we can see the light at the end of the tunnel which to investors equates to return on investment. Numerous factors will drive things forward and interest and awareness is increasing rapidly among both scientists, researchers and the general population as well as wealthy philanthropists. The greatest driving force of all is that the baby boomers are aging and this will place increasing demands on healthcare systems. Keep in mind that the average person costs more in medical expenditure in the last year of their life than all the other years put together. Also, the number of workers is declining in most developed countries which means that we need to keep the existing population working and productive as long as possible. Below are a list which are basically all technologies potentially leading to radical life extension with number 5 highlighted which I assume might well be possible in the second half of the century: 1. Biotechnology - e.g stem cell therapies, enhanced autophagy, pharmaceuticals, immunotherapies, etc 2. Nanotechnology - Methods of repairing the body at a cellular and molecular level such as nanobots. 3. Robotics - This could lead to the replacement of increasing numbers of body parts and tends to go hand in hand with AI and whole brain emulation. It can be argued that this is not life extension and that it is a path toward becoming a Cyborg but I don’t share that view because even today we don’t view a quadriplegic as less human if he has four bionic limbs and this will hold true as our technology progresses. 4. Gene Therapies - These could be classified under the first category but I prefer to look at it separately as it could impact the function of the body in very dramatic ways which would suppress genes that negatively impact us and enhance genes which increase our tendency toward longer and healthier lives. 5. Whole brain emulation and mindscaping - This is in effect mind transfer to a non biological host although it could equally apply to uploading the brain to a new biological brain created via tissue engineering this has the drawback that if the original brain continues to exist the second brain would have a separate existence in other words whilst you are identical at the time of upload increasing divergence over time will be inevitable but it means the consciousness could never die provided it is appropriately backed up. So what is the chance of success with any of these? My answer is that in order for us to fail to achieve radical life extension by the middle of the century requires that all of the above technologies must also fail to progress which simply won't happen and considering the current rate of development which is accelerating exponentially and then factoring in that only one or two of the above are needed to achieve life extension (although the end results would differ greatly) frankly I can’t see how we can fail to make enough progress within 10-20 years to add at least 20 to 30 years to current life expectancy from which point progress will rapidly accelerate due to increased funding turning aging at the very least into a manageable albeit a chronic incurable condition until the turn of the 22nd century. We must also factor in that there is also a possibility that we could find a faster route if a few more technologies like CRISPR were to be developed. Were that to happen things could move forward very rapidly. In the short term I'm confident that we will achieve significant positive results within a year or two in research on mice and that the knowledge acquired will then be transferred to humans within around a decade. According to ADG, a dystopian version of the post-aging world like in the film 'In Time' not plausible in the real world: "If you CAREFULLY watch just the first

Egyptian scientist Ismail Serageldin spoke for many appalled scientists when he responded, “I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want two to three million children a year to go blind and one million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way Golden Rice was created?

Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do. Little by little, the accountants are catching up. A team of experts collaborating with the consulting and accounting firm of Deloitte published research that sorts companies into four broad categories based on their chief economic activity: asset builders, service providers, technology creators, and network orchestrators. Asset builders develop physical assets that they use to deliver physical goods; companies like Ford and Walmart are examples. Service providers employ workers who provide services to customers; companies like UnitedHealthcare and Accenture are examples. Technology creators develop and sell forms of intellectual property, such as software and biotechnology; Microsoft and Amgen are examples. And network orchestrators develop networks in which people and companies create value together—in effect, platform businesses. The research suggests that, of the four, network orchestrators are by far the most efficient value creators. On average, they enjoy a market multiplier (based on the relationship between a firm’s market valuation and its price-to-earnings ratio) of 8.2, as compared with 4.8 for technology creators, 2.6 for service providers, and 2.0 for asset builders.16 It’s only a slight simplification to say that that quantitative difference represents the value produced by network effects.

With biotechnology risks, we can still be subject to a pandemic such as COVID-19, which caused nearly seven million deaths in the world through 2023,

Now, there is a way for you to get the best of both worlds, and that’s by using niche topics to answer universal questions. For example, an article titled, “How To Be A Better Writer” answers two of our three questions. You know who this article is going to be for, and you know what it’s going to be about. Unfortunately, the PROMISE is a little weak. What does being a “better writer” really mean? What benefits do you receive by becoming a better writer? Why should someone want to become a “better writer” in the first place? Here is where you have a decision to make. You can either make your PROMISE answer a niche question or a broad question—and depending on which you pick will dramatically change the size of your potential Audience. (It will also change the content of the piece.) For example: “How To Be A Better Writer Today, So You Can Start Writing Best-Selling Books Tomorrow” would be a title with a big PROMISE for aspiring authors. If you have no interest in becoming a best-selling author, you probably won’t want to read this piece of writing. It’s more specific, and will resonate more clearly with your target reader, but it won’t reach as many different types of readers. This is the pro/con. “How To Become A Better Writer, Journal More Often, And Live A More Present Life,” on the other hand, has a completely different PROMISE. The question it’s answering is dramatically bigger (“How can I live a more present life?”). The Curiosity Gap here is saying that by becoming a better writer, and using writing as a habit, you can live a more present life. This technique of tying niche topics to universal questions is a powerful way of tapping into new audiences and expanding your reach outside of your particular industry or category. Here are a few more examples: “The Future Of The Biotechnology Industry” is niche (and vague), and can be expanded by changing it to “How The Future Of Biotechnology Is Going To Make All Of Us Happier, Healthier, And Live Longer.” “The Girl Who Ran Away” is good, but it can be clarified and expanded by changing it to, “The Girl Who Ran Away: Family, Loss, And The Power Of Forgiving Those Who Hurt You Most.” “7 Tips For Becoming Smarter” is clear, but a bigger PROMISE can help it reach more people. “7 Tips For Becoming Smarter, Achieving Chess-Master Memory, And Becoming The Most Interesting Person In The Room” To recap: Bigger Questions attract Bigger Audiences Niche Questions attract Niche Audiences Wider Audiences benefit from simple, universal language Niche Audiences benefit from ultra-specific, niche language Titles that only answer 1 of the 3 questions are weak. Titles that answer 2 of the 3 questions are good. Titles that answer all 3 of the questions are exceptional

For a sad soul like him, she was like heavy rainfall on dry desert and her flowery perfume- it removed all chances of sensibility

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.

Cette compulsion à produire semble bien avoir amené le reste de la vie sur Terre au bord de l'anéantissement. Selon O'Brien, la conscience aliénante des hommes a inventé des 'principes de continuité' compensatoires tels que Dieu, l'Etat, l'Histoire et aujourd'hui les Sciences et la Technologie pour tenter de surmonter sa fracture empirique vis à vis du processus vital et du 'temps naturel'. La gynécologie moderne, la fécondation in vitro, la maternité de substitution et les recherches en biotechnologies imitent les capacités génératrices des femmes pour pouvoir porter le pouvoir des hommes au plus haut. Les corps des habitantes des pays en voie de développement sont envahis et exploités pour étendre les frontières eurocentrées.

Molecular biologist Harvey Bialy, the editor of the Nature Biotechnology journal, observed that the subtle backdrop of racial and sexual bigotry and bullying are the distinguishing attributes of AIDS research:

The true marvel of technology lies not in its complexity but in its ability to simplify the complex.

As technology evolves, let ethics stand as its guiding compass; setting its direction and boundaries.