Biogeek Revolution

The revolution is upon us, well, any minute now. With people like Craig Venter in the news and all the noise about human cloning, biotechnology is increasingly in the public eye. After all, everybody has been talking about the human genome project, the roller coaster ride of biotech stocks (and the companies themselves). Genentech went public back in1981? And that was 20 years ago. However most people still haven't caught on to what this will really mean to us in our everyday lives. Occasionally those of us that are shackled to the bench get a chance to daydream about what will happen when the contents of the microfuge tube in front of us is turned loose on the world. A new drug? A cure for cancer? A wonder crop that will feed the starving people of the world? A new technology that will allow us to grow computers? Regeneration of nerves and joints so that victims of accidents and disease can live normal lives again? How far off do these changes lie? How much will our daily lives be affected by the coming revolution?

Jargon continued

Clone-by-phone: Rather than do it yourself, call up a complete stranger and ask them for their plasmid. This actually used to work in academia and even industry sometimes. Of course now even your E-mail is monitored by lawyers who want your mom to sign a confidentiality agreement.

top ten reasons continued

All right, that all the further we got. What turned you into a biogeek? Send us your top ten list ! We will pick our favorites and feature the creator on this very site!

For our inaugural book review we will look at the recent work of business author and Vanderbuilt University professor in the Owen Graduate School of Management Dr. Richard W. Oliver. In The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials author Richard W. Oliver gives us his view of when and how these changes will occur. Oliver compares the progress of the biotechnology age with the changes that have been brought about by both information age (computers and the internet) and the industrial age. Each age goes through a lag-log-plateau growth curve, just like your favorite culture of E. coli. With the industrial age lasting hundreds of years and the information age covering the last fifty years we are now approaching the inflection point of the biotech age. Oliver’s message is that the biotech age will accelerate faster than any previous age and the resulting effects will penetrate our lives on a scale never seen before. Once biotechnology hits the log phase our world will experience a period of radical changes over a ten to 20 years.

OK, duh. For the biogeek shackled to the bench, some of the predictions about the coming technologies are not overly impressive. But it is hard to keep track of all the new developments outside your own field. Even to the jaded biogeek, the scope of the changes the way they will affect us does provide some food for thought. The coming biotech age is a interesting insight into the economic changes that are approaching as well as the view of biogeek culture as seen from the business perspective. The book also contains plenty of graphs to support the authors view and lots of sidebar anecdotes from the lives of scientist that have been pivotal in the advancing biotech age.