Why All This?

Maybe I saw Blade Runner too many times. Maybe, as a Silicon Valley veteran, I've just seen how new technology can just blow away life as we know it with change -- good change. Exciting change.

Because I was a programmer in Palo Alto during the '80s and '90s. I went from a barely-networked, stand-alone LISP box in a small, elite environment of hackers who made no sense to the outside world, to the millennial crescendo of TCP/IP-driven Internet Dot.com economic hyperdrive which changed the world as we knew it, forever. Change? How about: Now you've got a networked workstation in your pocket -- tap a few buttons, and a car shows up to take you somewhere. Tap a few more, and any one of Amazon's 10,000,000 inventory items show up at your door. Tap a few more and you've instantaneously texted someone on the other side of the planet. All for less than the price of dinner for two in Manhattan. That's change. And I had a walk-on role in that war, and I know what that kind of tectonic shift feels like. 

Now I'm a venture capitalist. And I feel like it's happening again. Especially when I walk around in San Diego, and walk around shops like Illumina. And I'm excited like I was excited in 1985 Palo Alto.

Excited? Really, you ask? Maybe it's my optimism; I think more technology is better than less (when has the converse ever been the case?), the present is better than the past, and the future will be even better still.

Maybe it's just this feeling I have that the biotech boom is going to make the infotech revolution seem like a children's tea-party.

Hey -- don't people understand what's going on here? You mean we're going to harness the engines of creation -- those processes, that molecular machinery that give rise to us? -- the most sublimely complicated, productive objects in the visible universe? Come on. What could be more exciting that that? 

So, where's the cool of biotech? These protein-jockeys are going to change the world in a big way. In fact, they're beginning to change it right now, right under our noses. They're entitled to a little attitude. They deserve it. They should be celebrated as cool, in the same way we celebrated computer hackers in the early 80s. CRISPR/Cas9 is at the very least as cool and as world-changing as TCP/IP. Now Mark Zuckerberg -- the man who gave us little more than a means to stalk our ex's and know who gained weight after graduation -- is the reigning philosopher-king? At the same time that Jennifer Doudna just figured out how to cut-and-paste DNA like text in a word-processor? Really?

I remember when computers started to get cool, in the late 80's -- Mondo 2000, Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, Slashdot, etc. Hey -- I was one of the original members of the Hackers Conference. I was right there when a number of theoretical practitioners stepped in to define the scene for the rest of us -- most notably folks like Steve Jobs, Timothy Leary (veteran agent provocateur of social ferment), Ted Nelson (Cyber-Svengali deluxe, though he was my guru way back when, and believe me he was able to read the digital tea-leaves better than most anyone, in the same way as Alan Kay and Doug Englebart and Vannevar Bush...)

So the question is, who's going to be the Steve Jobs of biotech? Who's going to make it stylish and cool? Craig Venter? Lacks a certain charisma. Kary Mullis? Too much of a crank. Juan Enriques? Maybe too academic. Stewart Brand? Yes, if he lives to 110 (which I hope, because he's my hero, and I don't want to think of a world without him). Who's going to make this stuff visible, accessible, and most importantly, the stuff of dreams? -- dreamable? Who's going to make it sexy/cool to a non-biochem-geek audience? Because, just like computers making this exciting to a non-technical audience is going to make the world a better place. I just don't quite think we've found the language for it, yet. We have plenty of language for biotech scare-mongering and jeopardy narratives: franken-food, terminator seeds, #OccupyMonsanto, blah blah. Luddism and Fear Of Science live in every age.

I'm trying to work the Dream side. Not the Nightmare side.

Come with me for the ride.

Norman Borlaug: the coolest guy you've never heard of.