Biology for the rest of us
It’s 5:00AM in Toluca when Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the sound of her Westclox, ready for another day as a business major. She drives to her hometown’s business school, listening to the radio, wondering what her professor’s reaction will be to the 76-page final report she wrote with the help of her beloved IBM Selectric, her worn-out Chartpak stencil, her family’s encyclopedia, and Mexico City’s IBM center for some calculations. She makes a stop at a phone call station to remind her teammate to correct the finger mistake on the cardboard they made about some ultra-innovative “personal computing” devices her uncle in the US once told her about. Not much more is to be said about Sofia Sanchez. April 1st, 2024 was just another day for a normal 20-year-old in a small town in Mexico.
Thank Lick it’s April Fool’s!
“How do the current and next thing get determined?” was the question that gave birth to this piece. Whether they’d be ideas, beliefs, fonts, or technologies, I’d been deeply curious to understand the nature of trends in our world. I wanted to know if there were principles for steering the world towards a particular direction, and whether I could use those principles to change the way biotechnology changes the world.
For the past few weeks, I’ve explored J.C.R Licklider’s visionary mind, Everett Roger’s theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, René Girard’s Theory of Mimetic Desire, and the desires of GenZ influencers on Instagram. This piece is a third batch of thoughts at the intersection of culture and biology, this time focusing on how biology can influence modern culture as much as modern culture influences biology.
The Presynbiotech Era
The habitants of the terrifying alternate universe I described in the very first paragraph, are firm believers that the future is merely what hasn’t happened yet but eventually will. To them, technology equals destiny and evolution is synonymous with inexorable. What we, in this universe made happen in 30 years, they might start dreaming about in 60.
To yours and my own fortune, 5 years prior to the birth of Moore’s Law, Man-computer symbiosis was published by J.C.R Licklider (Lick for us friends). While Moore had made an accurate prediction on how far we could take computers, Lick set a clear vision and agenda for how personal computers and the intergalactic network would become the new medium of creative expression: how tech would change culture.
Lick dreamed about everything from Zoom to PayPal, Instagram, and the iPad and he led the development of early versions of them. Slightly paraphrased, one of my absolute favorite passages in the Dream Machine book answers how he did that:
Lick knew he couldn’t get it all done in one year or two years or a lifetime. By creating a community of fellow believers, however, he guaranteed that his vision would live on after him. When he arrived at ARPA in 1962, there was nothing more than a handful of uncoordinated efforts scattered across the country. By the time he left in 1964, he had forged those into a nationwide movement with direction, coherence and purpose. By putting most of the money into universities, he supported the rising generation, whose hearts and minds he won and convinced that computer science was an exciting thing to do. In 1988, that community was the one thing that he was willing to take credit for: “I think I found a lot of bright people and got them working in this area”.
Of course, we would be doomed too if the world was only full of dreamers like Lick! We need builders like Alan Kay who build them to life and artists like Steve Jobs who steal from them and bring the tech to everyone once it’s cheap enough. Call it lack of vision, bad management or timing, neither Intel nor H&P nor Xerox nor IBM capitalized on their decades of technological advantage over the garage hackers. Yet the garage hackers didn’t invent the tech alone; they more so put the puzzle together once the pieces were there. Dream, build, sell.
Today, we are living in the Presynbiotech Era. It is a time before ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence-engineered life, a time before the worlds of silicon and carbon intelligence truly fuse as one.
Oddly enough, I have not yet encountered a clear 50-year dream of the social paradigm shifts that we will create through biotechnology. If no one’s even dreaming, how will we arrive at a different future❗❓
Computers have changed the way we think. Synbio will change the way we feel. There will not only be dinosaurs, but UBERs, TikTok marketplaces and AirBnBs. We will have new kinds of enhanced humans of mixed sexes, races and talents, iPlants that act as programmable vending machines where I can buy anything from on the street, an axolotl-turtle hybrid that wakes me up in the morning and cleans my bedroom, and expresso machines that use personalized capsules that keep track of and maintain each one of my biomarkers in place. End of famine, disease, poverty and war too.
The fact that we even start thinking of a Pre-synbiotech Era means that we can start dreaming about a Synbiotech one. If you’d been waiting for a call, here you go: I’m calling YOU to share more audacious, truly crazy, dreams of a Synbiotech future, for those who look back on these dreams 50 years hence might as well be living them.
And surely, remember: had the world waited for Lick to sell iPads, you would not be reading this either. Dreams matter as much as execution and you truly can learn anything. So if you enjoy building, go for it. Real artists ship.
Today’s weirdos are tomorrow’s basics
In his Theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers defines innovation as anything that is perceived as new by someone. He categorizes the adopters of an innovation into 5 main groups, according to influential power, risk aversion and the resulting order in which they adopt: the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—A business school all-time favorite.
The graph is so good that reading the whole book won’t get you much farther than: 1) it’s early adopters (aka influencers) and not innovators who bring innovations to billions; 2) though anyone can be an influencer, the closer the better; 3) the who matters more than the what.
The theory checks as I go back to my latest purchasing and habit decisions. For example, I’d heard about the WHOOP band from Bryan Johnson, Steve from Diary of a CEO, other macro influencers and numerous YouTube ads, but I was only convinced enough to buy it until I interacted closely with a user I could relate to: a young, female, Mexican bioengineer who’d graduated from the same university where I study.
Something that Tesla has left clear too, is that innovators and early adopters can absorb the cost of being first. They are not only helping spread the technology by providing feedback and generating revenue but by modeling that desire to the early majority that relies on and admires them.
Where Rogers falls short and Girard goes deeper is in the actual dynamics between influencers and followers. What I learned from reading about the Theory of Mimetic Desire is that, in our quest for personal differentiation, we look up to people whom we can relate to, who are looked up to by people like us AND who have something we still lack.
The most obvious examples of influencers are early adopters like Bryan Johnson and Steve. The more subtle yet more powerful influencers are people like the bioengineer with the WHOOP who had something I wanted (being perceived as a healthy person) while still being relatable.
Lick’s dreams have come to life to such an extent that being an internet influencer is no longer exclusive to elites. The rise of the microinfluencer (<100k followers) is a whole case study, not only of a shift in the distribution of goods but a paradigm shift of trust from the system towards the individual (which Lick’s visions quite promoted too). I, a GenZ girl, no longer care for what Walmart might put on TV or even YouTube ads but tell me about the 20-second reel of a microinfluencer on her Sunday trip to Walmart and I’ll buy the thing just as I bought the WHOOP.
“The thing” only matters to the innovators and the early adopters, the masses only care about who is modeling it. One day you buy the story of Zuck and Thiel dropouts, the next you buy YC’s and PG’s of staying in school. Stupid TikTok trends go viral and waves of Web3, LLM and VR founders come and go. Why, then, wouldn’t we be able to make culturally viral biotechnology once it’s ready?
In all non-pharma biotech, I consider myself an early adopter (and aspiring innovator) of ideas. While all opinion leaders are early adopters, however, not all early adopters are opinion leaders. The key to innovations crossing the chasm towards the early majority is in opinion leaders (aka influencers). I think biotech in particular, needs translators: people lying at the intersection of innovators and early adopters. Translators understand the science well enough to SHOW and SELL it to an early majority of niche influencers who will take it to the masses. In the best case, they are founders with amazing products who are also great storytellers.
Idea-grown bioeconomies
People are freaking making live sales on TikTok, snacks are the new autographs, the young are heavily steering towards lifestyles of running more than drinking and subscribing more than we owning. Sustainability and diversity are on the agenda and actions of major corporations, and social media is the new search engine not only for products but for people starting communities and friendships that are URL-first and IRL-second.
Knowing stuff like Moore’s law for DNA gets you to build Ozempic. Knowing where culture is headed (and where it’s not) gets you to design the right thing in the first place so that billions 1actually use it. It gets to to understand the power of making pilots with [farmers] who are also influencers who can model your product to their followers, at scale. Replace farmers with your customer.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need less videos of adayinthelifeofanivyleaguephdstudentpipetting and more lab and startup tours of [Living Carbon], explaining step by step how they make their [superplants]. Sexy Instagram pics of that [superplant] in my nice millennial-styled home. Replace Living Carbon and superplant for 500 startups doing cool shit like that.
Though I’m mostly talking about consumer biotech here, vaccines like moderna’s, GMOs like BT maize and cotton, recombinant insulin, and algae-derived Omega-3 all needed someone to be convinced to even begin production and eventually reach massive consumption. Sometimes that someone is a policy-maker, as is the case of Mexican officials who ban GMOs.
Ideas can inspire products that grow bioeconomies. To change how biotechnology changes the world, how biotech influences our culture, I shall share my Synbiotech dreams with biotechnologists as much as I translate and show what they build to the early majority so we all can live in the future, in a different future.
“I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one” — Ayn Rand
PS: In OUR universe, at 5:00AM, a young Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the vibration of her WHOOP band, ready for an extraordinary day as a future biological technologist. She nurtures her mind by listening to the brightest minds from around the world on podcasts, and connects with friends creating the future on something called X. She wrote down this article on her beloved MacBook Air and sent it to nearly 500 hundred people via an intergalactic network. April 1st, 2024 was a new beginning in her journey to bring exceptional biology into the hands of billions ;)
Will probiotics for hangovers make sense if we’re drinking less?
Such a fun piece! Keep up the good writing, Sofia! 😊