Executive Summary (Continued)

Looking ahead, ongoing improvements in the performance of key enabling technologies, including DNA sequencing and synthesis, are likely to deliver significant further increases in productivity and reductions in cost over the next decade. Intensifying global competition among companies and countries providing sequencing and synthesis services, coupled with abundant technological innovation, is driving the rapid diffusion of new technology. In turn, the overall market for these services is growing rapidly and is likely to continue to expand at rates as high as 10—20% annually. These trends will have significant direct economic impacts within the biotechnology industry itself and across the economy at large.

The implications of these trends for the U.S. economy are explored in Section 3. The combinatorial engineering approaches that have transformed the fields of electrical engineering and software design are now being leveraged to accelerate biological engineering. Already, these techniques are being utilized to produce high value products for a variety of commercial purposes, and the range of potential applications is huge. However, the continuing “buildout” of these technologies will be shaped in large measure by an array of outstanding legal, ethical, economic, social, regulatory and political questions and issues that have yet to be resolved.

The ways in which these perplexing questions are addressed by governments and societies around the world will have a significant affect on the future impact of biological engineering on the economy and the earth’s living systems.

Figure 1-2: An Inflection Point for Biological Technology

New enabling technologies, especially in sequencing and synthesis, coupled with the development of new approaches to biological engineering, have defined an inflection point in advance of biotechnological capabilities, and could mark the beginning of a new technology revolution in the economy at large. 

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