The 2020s: DNA as a Programming Language

(This is Part II of a three-part series on technology in the 2020s, for publication while I’m on vacation with my best friend of 44 years.)

CRISPR is an Apple II with Visicalc.

It will take a generation to turn DNA into a programming language, just as it took a generation to get from the Apple II and Netware to the iPhone and cloud-based Internet.

But in 1979 the future of my generation was set in stone. Most of my Rice classmates wound up in the technology world, either as programmers, engineers, executives or (like me) just observers. Few of us were in any of those roles then. It happened gradually, as we saw opportunities and took them.

If you were in the computing field in 1979 and you stayed the course, you’ve probably had a pretty good life. The same is true for the worlds of biology and biochemistry today. This is where your kids are heading, whether they know it or not.

Mine know it.

My son is a biochemist, my daughter an environmental scientist. They’re just starting to learn their place in this new world. He’s a Ph.D student, practicing his “wet work” but already conversant in computer programming with the languages of the cloud. She’s getting her Master’s in Europe and is anxious for her professional life to begin. It will next year.

My kids are blessed with two skills that are vital in this coming age. They love learning and can explain what they’re doing in English.

People love to say that English majors have no future in the new paradigm. They’re more important than ever. So are other liberal arts majors. Who else is going to turn complex, raw scientific material into trillion-dollar corporations? Who else is going to explain it? Who else is going to organize it? Who else is going to teach it?

Many of our kids will be busy in the lab, or behind a desk near one, like Google engineers. They won’t have time to run the companies that emerge from their work.

But Steve Jobs was not an engineer. Bill Gates was not an engineer. Once you create a business designed to do what you love, you’re no longer doing it. You’re in business.

Now that the forms are settled, what will the results be?

They’re unpredictable.

We can make crops more resilient to climate change, although putting more of them in high-performance greenhouses, like those the Netherlands already has operating, would be low-hanging fruit.

Things like Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger are like Pong. Our diets are going to change, but I think the resulting food will be delicious.

There’s a lot that must be done with insect DNA, both to limit the spread of disease and the creatures carrying disease. More people have died from mosquito bites than from war, and we’re now in a war against nature, or at least nature as it existed before the Industrial Revolution.

There should be genetic solutions available to most human disease over the next 10 years, at least chronic conditions, at least for those whose cases aren’t yet acute.

Can we solve the problem of aging? Let’s see if we can.

But survival of our species is more important. We must find ways to power this planet, to re-terraform it, using the tools of biological science. It’s going to take an enormous political and social lift to start making progress, and it’s these changes that will cause the most conflict. I don’t know what it will take for Americans to wake up. Maybe when Miami disappears, or New York and Houston become uninhabitable, the survivors will recognize the urgency.

There is work for everyone in this new world. Whether it’s in finding, creating, and selling solutions to our problems, advocating for policies that allow those solutions to come into play, fighting for the international cooperation necessary to save the world, or working out the details as they pertain to cities and current farmland, there’s an enormous generational lift coming for my kids and for yours.

The Greatest Generation didn’t win World War II.

The Greatest Generation is only now starting its work.