Introducing Biofutures Instantiated
Engineering biology and the salmon of doubt
Many people face an existential crisis at the end of their PhD. They graduate into a liminal moment where a world of opportunity awaits and overchoice crowds out sensibility. This Substack is written on the proposition that I’d rather have an existential crisis in public than in private. It’s far better to share the sharp edge of madness than stew in it alone.
Over the coming posts I intend to explore:
What is the bioeconomy and why does it matter?
What are the words, stories and tools required for us to imagine new and inclusive biofutures that enable opportunity for all who share in the global biome?
What is the biomanufacturing revolution, who is it for, who is it against?
Are there novel opportunities, risks, benefits or challenges that come with the biofutures now available for us to breathe into being?
And maybe, on the side, I’ll throw in some personal musings about research, innovation, expertise, and geopolitics. Let’s call it zen driving and the art of synthetic biology.
In short, this substack is for those who want one part biomanufacturing, two parts Douglas Adams references, four and half parts engineering biology, and a half part existential crisis mixed together with some animal spirits and great power rivalry.1
This is Biofutures Instantiated, where I ask, what is this thing called life anyway?
Over the coming months I will be writing across three themes. We’ll explore the new and old verticals that make up the engineering biology endeavour. I’ll give you TL;DRs on some of the reports, policies and publications that speak of the biofutures open to instantiation. I’ll throw in some reflections on cyber-biological convergence and why it’s important to look over the horizon and behind the caravan. Artificial Intelligence Supremacy is just as important as the Great Wine Blight.
The bioinformational world currently being instantiated is the most transformative event in human civilisation since the invention of agriculture. The printing press and its large language model children cannot evolve on their own. Meanwhile, today’s biotechnologies are born of flickers of genius emergent from 3.5 billion years of organising photons into information substrates. These substrates are magisterial in their complexity, energy efficiency and task mastery. The biotechnologies we are developing today, as advanced as they are, are but a minute impression on life’s highly efficient methods for hacking the quantum-biological boundary. We have so much to learn and there’s no hitchhiker’s guide, just the embodied biological intelligence and the beautiful ways of being across the many and varied species that populate this planet.
Things to be aware of:
I don’t intend the TL;DRs to be either short or summaries.
The other two BioFutures substacks2 I found never got past their first post, so I fully expect to be eaten in the next seven days by a bear, a cassowary, or a hybrid cassobeary.
While I promise to undertake every effort imaginable to ensure my assessments of the future have precision-guided levels of accuracy, it is indeed the future and therefore inherently unknowable. Please do not rely on anything I say for any purpose whatsoever.
One final note, I'm located in Sydney, Australia, and some Austral-centrism may creep in. To the extent that my writing is infected by parochialisms, I will seek to anchor on a regional focus and a global outlook. Sometimes, though, I may just crank out an Australian focused opinion. Venting can be good for the spleen.
If we cannot imagine a future is possible we cannot act in ways that might bring it into being. Now is the time to imagine new biological futures for this planet. There are many who write, speak and act with this purpose in mind. I hope you will join me on my journey into what life is and what it could become.
Thom Dixon completed a multidisciplinary thesis in synthetic biology and international relations at Macquarie University and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.
He was Vice President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs NSW from 2017-2024, and has presented to policy-practitioner communities around the world on synthetic biology and cyber-biological convergence .
Biofutures Instantiated is an exploration of the expanding biological boundaries that constrain the art of the possible.
I’ll also include a schooner of David Foster Wallace style footnotes to really bring the flavour notes out of each newsletter for those who like to scroll.
The two other Substacks are BioFuture and BioFutures, I have broken with tradition and gone with a lower case ‘f’ which I hope helps me avert the ever vigilant gaze of the solitary and occasionally mournful cassobeary.