It’s a busy couple of days here at Cornell, two famous speakers in as many days! As Tiff mentioned before, tonight we’re going to see John Cleese, speaking about religon, with scenes from the Life of Brian. Yesterday I got to see Freeman Dyson give his predictions for the future of biotech. For those who don’t know, Freeman Dyson is a physicist/mathmatician, now retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dyson is a titan of physics, he did pioneering work in many fields, including quantum field theory (what I do) and the stability of matter (which he proved). He’s also written several popular books, his autobiographical “Disturbing the Universe” is perhaps the best known.

Dyson talked about biotech, and he’s clearly very optimistic about our biotech future. He told seven stories, basically predictions he’s (or others are) making (and in one case has made) about biology, and biotech. I won’t run them all down, just give you a summary of the ones that stuck out.

The first prediction sort of ran through the rest of the talk. It concerns the way we think of biotech, versus the way we think of computers. Dyson talked about John von Neumann, a mathmatician that was at Prinction when he arrived there. In the late forties, von Neumann was building a computer, based on the computers he’d worked previously (primarly the ENIAC). The computer von Neumann built was a little different though, it was the first one to have software! (Indeed, computers are sometimes refered too as “von Neumann machines” by computer scientists).

Dyson said that von Neumann correctly predicted that computers would revolutionize the way we do business and interact with information, much like it’s generally recognized that biotech will affect our world in profound ways. However, von Neumann totally failed to anticipate what Dyson called “the domestication of the computer”. That is, he never thought that computers would become game machines. That was Dyson’s big prediction, that someday, soon, we’ll see the domestication of biotech. The remainder of his talk focused on different consquences of that.

One consquence he mentioned was the efficiency of plants. Right now plants convert about 1% of the sunlight that falls on them into food energy. This contrasts very poorly with solar cells, which convert about 15% of the sunlight that falls onto them into energy. He suggested that biotech will be able to engineer a plant which would grow solar cell type leaves. This would you could reduce the amount of land needed to grow crops by ten times Or, you could grow ten times as much food as we are now, on the same amount of land. The downside is that the plants would have black leaves.

That was the theme of the talk, we have to be more far looking in our thinking about biotech. If Dyson is correct, the world in 50 years will look as different from today as 1995 looked from 1945. We shall see what comes to pass.

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