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The 2020s Will Be the Decade of the Bioeconomy
The assistant director for biotechnology at the Defense Department on why the U.S. needs to go all-in on the next scientific revolution
Alexander Titus currently serves as the assistant director for biotechnology in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering with the U.S. Department of Defense and was previously a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and a data scientist at Amazon and In-Q-Tel. The views expressed here are his alone and do not represent those of the DoD or the U.S. Government.
I spend my time focused on leveraging biotechnology for the public good, and I’m ecstatic about what we’ll see in the coming years. Biotechnology is advancing at an unprecedented rate, and engineered biology, commonly referred to as synthetic biology (SynBio), is taking the world by storm. The past 12 months have seen a major focus on the bioeconomy—the economy based on biology and biotechnology—which promises to be integral to the next decade of growth and opportunity. It’s hard to imagine that artificial intelligence has only been in resurgence since 2012 — less than 10 years. But just as A.I. impacts the digital world, biotechnology impacts the physical world, and over the next decade, we’ll see innovations that rival, or even outpace, A.I.
Biotechnology in the bioeconomy
For thousands of years, we’ve had physical solutions to our problems. I have a heavy rock that needs to get from point A to point B, so I push it, pull it, or roll it. Then, during the industrial revolution, we developed industrial synthetic chemistry. For the last 100 to 150 years, we have combined physical and chemical technologies to accelerate the economy and the quality of life for people around the world.
Now we’re in a new industrial revolution, bringing the bioeconomy to the forefront of technology and economic growth, where we’re combining biotechnology with chemical and physical technologies to revolutionize the world.
