Tag Archives: green economy

Note: Jeff Conant is the former Communications Director for Global Justice Ecology Project

–The GJEP Team

By Jeff Conant, source: Earth Island Journal

In 1971, a microbiologist named Ananda Chakrabarty patented a bacteria genetically engineered to degrade and destroy crude oil. The next year scientists created the first synthesized gene, a bit of yeast RNA ushered into existence virtually from scratch. These discoveries, among others, raised the curtain on the science of biotechnology. Forty years later, in 2010, biologist Craig Venter, already known as a key figure behind the mapping of the human genome, announced his creation of a microbe that earned the name Synthia: “the first self-replicating species on the planet whose parent was a computer.” Between Chakrabarty’s oil-eating microbe and the birth of Venter’s Synthia, a wave of gene therapies, pharmaceuticals, genetically engineered crops, and manufactured biofuels have transformed science, medicine, industry, and quite possibly, global ecology.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, genetically engineered crops account for 88 percent of the corn, 93 percent of the soy, and 94 percent of the cotton, grown in the US (by acreage). In 2011, the first commercial flight powered by algae took off from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. During the recent United Nations Earth Summit in Brazil, Amyris Inc., one of the leading companies in the emergent field of synthetic biology, flew a sugarcane-powered airplane over Rio de Janeiro. The same company, with a healthy infusion of cash from the Gates Foundation, is on the verge of releasing a malaria drug that, the company says, will be cheaper and more effective than any on the market today. The drug mimics the action of artemisia, an ancient Chinese herb. But rather than being extracted from a plant, Amyris’ drug will be manufactured within the cellular membranes of a fully synthetic strain of yeast.

The eminent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said: “Our planet has always been in the Age of Bacteria.” But scientists’ rapidly accelerating ability to harness microbes and turn them into what the field of synthetic biology calls “platforms for industrial production” is entirely without precedent. We are witnessing a revolution in the biological sciences of a speed and scale that is dazzling to some, and more than a little frightening to others.

“If you want to change the world in some big way that’s where you should start – biological molecules,” Bill Gates toldWired magazine in 2010. The microchip revolution has transformed the globe, and men like Gates made a fortune in the process. Unlike microchips, however, microbes are alive, and the implications of tinkering with them are almost entirely unknown.

In April, the Obama administration published a report called the “National Bioeconomy Blueprint” to assess and promote “economic activity fueled by research and innovation in the biological sciences.” Annual revenues from the bioeconomy in 2010, the report announces, totaled $176 billion.

“The growth of today’s US bioeconomy,” the report says, “is due in large part to three foundational technologies: Genetic engineering, DNA sequencing, and automated high-throughput manipulations of biomolecules.” In a certain kind of translation, that means writing genetic code, printing it in vitro, and employing robotic assembly lines to insert it into living microbes. Translated further into simple English, it means inventing and breeding living things that have never before existed in nature.

To read the rest of the article, go to Earth Island Journal