Biosecurity

Incoming: The Bio Revolution Is Nearer Than You Think

Yet the big revolution of the 21st century will not be in information and cyber. It will be in biology, and it will profoundly affect both day-to-day life and national security. Recently, Time magazine’s cover featured an adorable baby with the headline “This baby could live to be 142 years old.” Responsible scientists are discussing the possibility of 200-year life spans. The cost of sequencing the human genome—the key to precision-guided medicine and genomic manipulation—is falling like a brick out of the sky, as is the cost of editing human DNA. The military is experimenting with a wide array of human performance-enhancing biological technologies. Dramatic advances in synthetic crops, energy produced from biomass and new types of livestock are widely predicted.