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Executive Summary (Continued)

This shift could be comparable in scope to the information technology revolution and other great eras in the history of technology. A set of new breakthroughs and developments at academic research centers and a small number of private companies could open the door to a surprisingly rapid buildout of biological technologies with the power to revolutionize many sectors of the economy.

By analyzing these developments in the context of historical patterns of technology development in the economy, we draw the following conclusions:

  • From an economic perspective, the real impact of technology revolutions often lags by several decades behind the emergence of fundamental enabling technologies.
  • If the new approaches to biological engineering now being explored are successful in creating systems of easily combined biological parts, the potential for serial innovation and a rapid buildout of useful technologies is high.
  • The buildout of biological technology will require overcoming formidable technical challenges, including understanding and managing highly complex biological systems, controlling the evolution of these systems, and mastering feedbacks and interactive effects across many different scales.
  • The biological engineering revolution, like all technology revolutions before it, will be shaped as much by social and economic adaptations to technology as by the technology itself.
  • The macroeconomic effects of technology revolutions—often measured in terms of productivity improvements, effects on balance of trade, or other such metrics—appear late in the cycle of buildout and diffusion.
  • The strong U.S. synthetic biology cluster could be a long-term driver of competitive advantage for the biotech sector and the U.S. economy in general.

Section 4 explores three industry segments that are in the vanguard of applying these emerging technologies:

  • In the chemicals sector, increasingly powerful tools and methods for metabolic pathway engineering could open the door to production of a wide variety of chemical products, including chemicals currently extracted from natural sources, pharmaceutical products and pharmaceutical intermediates, and new biodegradable plastics and other materials. These new technologies could enable the penetration rate for biological production processes to reach 15–20% of the global chemicals industry by 2015.
  • Genome engineering and design technologies also promise to play important roles in the development of new energy production and conversion methods. The near-term contributions from these technologies are likely to be significant in accelerating the growth of the liquid biofuels industry, which could increase from $22 billion in revenues globally in 2006 to as much as $150 billion by 2020. In the longer term, bio-based innovations in the energy sector could include new processes for photobiological hydrogen production and other new energy conversion systems and pathways.
  • In the vaccines market, synthetic vaccines could account for as much as one-third of the global vaccine market, taking into consideration the rapid growth of markets for novel and therapeutic vaccines and the penetration of synthetic vaccine production technologies into conventional vaccine categories. A fast-response synthetic vaccine against influenza could have tremendous value in reducing the impact of a pandemic.

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