TechBlog

Being an optimist I believe that we can ultimately solve the health care issue. But the fundamental problem facing our planet - that of climate change - is one that is far more grave. In fact, unless we tackle this head on, health care could be the least of our worries.

There has been much debate about climate change perhaps because we cannot see carbon dioxide when we exhale, or when we burn oil and coal to heat our homes, or use petrol to power our cars or fly planes. We do, however, have scientific instruments that can accurately measure what we humans produce and the increasing amount of carbon that we are adding to our environment.

The data is irrefutable - carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing in our atmosphere as a result of human activity since the earliest measurements began. We know that on the order of 4.1 billion tons of carbon are being added to and staying in our atmosphere each year. We know that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are the principal contributors to the increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere. We know that increasing CO2 concentrations has the same effect as the glass walls and roof of a greenhouse. It lets the energy from the sun easily penetrate but limits its escape, hence the term greenhouse gas.

Observational and modeling studies have confirmed the association of increasing CO2 concentrations with the change in average global temperatures over the last 120 years. Between 1906 and 2005 the average global temperature has increased 0.74 degrees C. This may not seem like very much, but it can have profound effects on the strength of storms and the survival of species including coral reefs.

Eleven of the last 12 years rank among the warmest years since 1850. While no one knows for certain the consequences of this continuing unchecked warming, some have argued it could result in catastrophic changes, such as the disruption of the Gulf Steam which keeps the UK out of the ice age or even the possibility of the Greenland ice sheet sliding into the Atlantic Ocean. Whether or not these devastating changes occur, we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One we need to stop.

The developed world including the United States, England and Europe contribute disproportionately to the environmental carbon, but the developing world is rapidly catching up. As the world population increases from 6.5 billion people to 9 billion over the next 45 years and countries like India and China continue to industrialise, some estimates indicate that we will be adding over 20 billion tons of carbon a year to the atmosphere. Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes to the global climate that could be more extreme than those observed to date. This means we can expect more climate change, more ice cap melts, rising sea levels, warmer oceans and therefore greater storms, as well as more droughts and floods, all which compromise food and fresh water production.

The increase in population coupled with climate change will tax every aspect of our lives. In a world already struggling to keep up with demand, will we be able to provide the basics of food, clean water, shelter and fuel to these new citizens of Earth? And will governments be able to cope with new emerging infections, storms, wildfires, and global conflicts?

So is there any way of avoiding these apocalyptic visions of the future coming true? Many have argued that we simply need to conserve, to alter and regress our standard of living and block the industrialisation of developing countries. In my view this is extremely naive thinking. Furthermore, even the most optimistic models on climate change show a dramatically altered planet Earth going forward even if we embrace all alternative options such as wind and solar energy, and electric cars. Our entire world economy and the ability of modern society to provide life’s basics, depend on the very industrialisation that contributes to our possible demise.

Yet, sadly, very little thinking, planning or projections about how to cope with the carbon problem and climate change have taken into account the capabilities of modern science to produce what we have long needed to help solve these global threats.

It is clear to me that we need more approaches and creative solutions. We need new disruptive ideas and technologies to solve these critical global issues. This is where, I believe, biology and genomics, come in.

Wikipedia defines a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation as “a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market.” Well known examples of disruptive innovations include: telephones replacing telegraphs, cell phones replacing land lines, automobiles replacing horses and carriages and digital photography over film. We are clearly in need of a multitude of disruptive inventions to change our approach to energy and the challenges ahead of us.

Creating new technology is something my team and I have some familiarity with. When we joined the race to sequence the human genome in 1998 we did so with a completely new and relatively untried technique. I was called many things - audacious, arrogant, rebellious, and maverick - but the most flattering would have been disruptive. Few people thought our method would work but we proved them wrong. And within two years the first draft of the human genome was laid out for all to see.

Since then the field has advanced beyond all expectation. Utilising biology we have the ability to address every area of our lives - from medical treatment, to renewable sources of fuels. Plastics, carpets, clothing, medicines, and motor oil - all of these things can be created by biological organisms, and in an environmentally sustainable manner.

The pedantic argument concerning future inventions is how can we count on new technologies that don’t yet exist? Some can look at the past and see no change for the future, while others will extrapolate forward in a liner manner. However, there are some fields where predicting and counting on exponential change has become reasonable and reliable. For example, Gordon Moore, a founder of the computer chip giant Intel, predicted that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every 2 years, a prediction that became referred to as Moore’s Law. This rough rule of exponential change has now been applied to the electronics industry as a whole and specifically to computer memory and digital cameras. There is another version, called Butter’s Law of Photonics. This law predicts that data transmission over optical fibers will double every nine months, and as a result, the cost of transmitting data decreases by half every nine months. We see the results of these predictions in ever faster, smaller and cheaper computers and faster data transmission which is probably a good thing as digital cameras with small memory cards exceed the capacity of computers on the market just barely a decade ago.

This kind of exponential growth is what has happened with our human population. It required close to 100,000 years for the human population to reach 1 billion people on Earth in 1804. In 1960 the world population passed 3 billion and now we are likely to go from 6.5 billion to 9 billion over the next 45 years. I was born in 1946 when there were only about 2.4 billion of us on the planet, today there are almost three people for each one of us in 1946 and there will soon be four.

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