Life Sciences are Foundational to a Sustainable Future
As I outlined in my post last week, we are on a species-wide trajectory out of the fossil age and into a solar age. Bringing about this transition, however, requires a massive reorientation of technological and social infrastructure. Making our systems of production more circular, sustainable, and resilient requires a different set of approaches. We can no longer burn oil to heat our homes, nor can we continue putting disposable plastic into everything. Fortunately, there is an area of science perfectly optimized to meet this need – the life sciences.
Biology is the medium by which solar power is used by the Earth. Through trophic processes, energy from the sun's light is fixed by bacteria, plankton, and plants and fed through food webs to animate all life on Earth. Without these organisms, all that energy would dissipate, and Earth would be another colorless rock floating through space.
A key component of the solar age is restoring circularity to our society. Instead of creating a product, using it, and throwing it away, waste from the system should be fed into another process. Life and ecosystems are foundationally circular. As one organism dies, its carbon and nitrogen are taken up by another and again made available to the system. That's why our production practices followed this circularity as early human societies climbed out of the wilderness.
The processes of biology and ecology, and the technologies we develop out of them, are optimized for circularity. These processes can be adopted into technologies and industrial methods that are thus renewable. Take bioplastics. Instead of degrading into microplastics that will scourge ecosystems for centuries, they break down (under the right conditions) into carbon, water, and compost. The chemicals of life made available to life once again. As we reorient our society back to circularity, the life sciences are optimized due to the principles of biology to help drive this transition.
Many of the technologies that life sciences can bring into the world focus on materials that replace those currently produced through petrochemistry. Things like plastics and polymers, adhesives and coatings, and precursor chemicals and catalysts used in industrial processes can all be created from biological sources. These alternatives likely produce fewer dangerous pollutants and have lower emissions. Additionally, they don't require the extraction of nonrenewable fossil fuels to produce. Hempcrete, a type of insulation made from the stalks of hemp plants, is an excellent example of an alternative biotechnology in the early stages of commercialization.
Aside from the development of chemicals and materials, there are multiple other ways that new biotechnologies can help humanity. Bioremediation, which is the planting of fungi or plant species that draw dangerous chemicals out of the soil, is a rapidly growing industry and field of research that seeks to restore landscapes that our fossil economy has destroyed. Closed-loop farming systems, where the nutrients produced on the farm are recycled back into the system through the utilization of trees and grasses, capture nutrients as they run off the field. Reapplying these materials as mulch is an alternative or complement to the fossil fuel-driven production of synthetic fertilizers.
Of course, simply applying a biological solution to a technological problem does not inherently make the system circular. As we develop and commercialize biological technologies, we must be intentional about their implementation. The organic food industry acts as a cautionary tale. Initially, the idea behind organic systems was that the farm would be a closed loop where little to no inputs are needed, and few outputs are lost. While organic systems don't utilize many fossil fuel-driven inputs (aside from machinery), they have simply substituted those inputs for other products, such as sulfur being sprayed just as often as synthetic fungicides. This process is still linear, and most big organic farms and companies still function within this paradigm.
Building a life science ecosystem
Scientific funding is critical to helping the life sciences meet these needs. As it stands, most of our biological funding goes to medical research, and much of the rest is invested in genetic biotechnology. While this is incredibly important, we must also carve out funding priorities that emphasize other biotechnologies and processes, such as those outlined above, to help usher us into the solar age.
Additionally, biology needs to integrate more into fields such as materials science or industrial chemistry. These are areas where some incredible alternatives and solutions can be developed using the processes of life. However, there is little interaction between engineers and biologists, which is a shame because both fields can learn so much from one another. By building opportunities for multidisciplinary interactions between these two research fields, society would be so much better off
We also need to emphasize these concepts in our education. Those being trained in biology need to understand how it can be applied to industry. We also need biology majors who don't want just to become doctors or study wildlife. Obviously, these are incredibly important, but to see these solutions developed, we need to diversify and massively increase the biology workforce's size. College programs that expose undergraduates to some of these applications would go a long way in setting this groundwork.
Finally, we need to establish an innovation pipeline that gets these technologies out of the lab, off the journal pages, and into startups. Whenever I've come across cool applications of biology to develop alternatives for existing technologies, it's always in a small pilot study. Very rarely do we see these promising results scaled up. I would bet investment funds dedicated to driving these technologies to their full potential would find massive success. Existing companies that are not dedicating some of their research funds to developing alternatives to their products will be left in the dust once this transition truly gets off the ground.
As stated previously, we need to prevent these technologies from simply following the linear template. In the 1970s, during an energy crisis driven by petroleum-based geopolitical squabbles, biofuels were pitched as a solution to the problem. The United States was promised energy independence, withdrawal from the Middle East, and the establishment of a set of fuels that would wean us off of oil forever. Fast forward to today, where every calorie of corn that goes into ethanol production takes ten calories of oil to produce from fertilizer and machinery. Policy and infrastructure will have to be optimized to ensure that these technologies are developed and implemented in a manner that actually achieves circularity. We need bioproducts that are renewable, recyclable, durable, and repairable. Only then can life deliver us to a true solar future.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening too
Barred Owls Blur Lines Between Invasive Species and Refugees: An illuminating piece about the changing nature of the movement of species.
Scavengers Reign: A beautifully intense sci-fi following the remaining humans of a cargo ship that crash-landed on a planet teeming with strange, and dangerous, life.