Biodigital convergence may profoundly impact our economy, our ecosystems, and our society. Being prepared to support it, while managing its risks with care and sensitivity, will shape the way we navigate social and ethical considerations, as well as guide policy and governance conversations.

Guided by its mandate, Policy Horizons Canada (Policy Horizons) intends to start an informed and meaningful dialogue about plausible futures for biodigital convergence and the policy questions that may arise. In this initial paper, we define and explore biodigital convergence – why it is important to explore now, its characteristics, what new capabilities could arise from it, and some initial policy implications. We want to engage with a broad spectrum of partners and stakeholders on what our biodigital future might look like, how this convergence might affect sectors and industries, and how our relationships with technology, nature, and even life itself could evolve.

We welcome your comments and participation, and look forward to diving more deeply into the questions raised in this paper.

Kristel Van der Elst
Director General
Policy Horizons Canada

Summary

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canadians and policy makers began to understand that the digital age was upon us. Early movers seized opportunities, grappled with challenges, and initiated deft policies that have provided benefits for decades. We continue to see the powerful effects of digitization, and more are surely to come. But we may be on the cusp of another disruption of similar magnitude. Digital technologies and biological systems are beginning to combine and merge in ways that could be profoundly disruptive to our assumptions about society, the economy, and our bodies. We call this the biodigital convergence.

This paper sets out an initial framing to guide Policy Horizons’ upcoming foresight work.

Three ways biodigital convergence is emerging

What is biodigital convergence?

Three ways biodigital convergence is emerging

Why explore biodigital convergence now?

That year, Microsoft introduced Windows 1.0, Atari released the Atari ST home computer, and the first domain name, symbolics.com, was registered. Computing was entering the mass market, creating value across many more types of organizations and contexts than it had during the decades of giant mainframes.

Biodigital convergence is showing signs of a similar trajectory—moving away from the centralized models of pharmaceutical and industrial biotech toward widespread commercial and consumer use. These range from bioprinters that create organic tissue, to synthetic biology machines that can be programmed to create entirely new organisms. For example, Printeria is an all-in-one bioengineering device that automates the process of printing genetic circuits in bacteria. It is intended to be as easy to use as a domestic desktop printer and is projected to cost $1,500^Footnote13.

Rapid progress in biological technologies has benefited from the low-cost, broad availability, and increasing capabilities of digital processing, storage, and communication.

However, the biological realm’s own unique and special attributes are simultaneously influencing digital systems. New forms of biological capabilities are being built into digital networks as well as AI applications and computation, making them more efficient and creating new opportunities.

Biodigital convergence involves a rethinking of biology as providing both the raw materials and a mechanism for developing innovative processes to create new products, services, and ways of being.

Today’s rapid rate of change and innovation compels us to reassess our understanding and expectations about biological and digital systems. The convergence of these domains could cause systemic change across sectors and have policy implications. Governments can expect to be called upon to help manage the risks and seize the opportunities that could arise.

Good morning, biodigital

Many factors could affect how biodigital convergence technologies could impact different societies, countries, cultures, environments, and people around the globe. The following is one of many possible narratives depicting some of the innovations in a future biodigital world.

This story may sound far-fetched, however all the technologies mentioned exist in some form today. While they are not yet commercially available in the form presented here, a world where we take the interaction between biological and digital technologies for granted is already starting to emerge.

While this is a representation of technologies that could be part of a biodigital world, it does not represent the only plausible future. Rather, it is an imaginative vignette outlining the radical shifts that could take place within an optimistic biodigital future. Varying levels of access, adoption, and alternative realities could exist.

What new capabilities arise from biodigital convergence?

Biodigital convergence is opening up strikingly new ways to:

• change human beings – our bodies, minds, and behaviours
• change or create other organisms
• alter ecosystems
• sense, store, process, and transmit information
• manage biological innovation
• structure and manage production and supply chains

What are possible characteristics of the biodigital system?

The following outlines each potential characteristic of the biodigital and their potential impact.

Democratization

Until recently, cell biology and biotechnology were generally developed and produced in sterile labs and specialized factories, using expensive equipment and expertise.

Now, advances in software and hardware are removing these restrictions on biosciences and biotech production. The ability to control systems remotely and transmit instruction sets in digital form, as well as higher levels of automation, are shifting biology-based production closer to consumers.

For example, mail-order bioengineering or CRISPR kits allow biohackers to purchase and practice genetic alteration at home. A range of relatively affordable online consumer options include a 30 USD “Genetic Design Starter Kit” allowing a novice to insert a gene into a jellyfish to make it glow from the comfort of their kitchen table^Footnote50. Another CRISPR kit allows purchasers to make genome edits in bacteria that can reproduce for 159 USD^Footnote51. A third “molecular biology and genetic engineering” starter kit costs less than 170 USD^Footnote52.

The decreasing cost of genome sequencing is another example of biotech becoming more broadly available. The first whole genome sequencing (reading all 3 billion base pairs) in 2003 took 13 years and cost more than 3 billion USD. By 2016, the price had dropped to approximately 1000 USD. In July 2019, it cost 599 USD, and personal genetics company Veritas Genetics predicts that it will drop to below 200 USD by 2022^Footnote53. As a result, a consumer market for genotyping (which sequences less than 1% of the genome) has emerged to support people interested in their heritage or uncovering targeted health information, typified by services such as 23andme.com.

Decentralization

We may see more decentralized production as the capabilities of synthetic biology increase. Products that needed to be created or extracted in a specific geographical location could be produced more widely as humans get better at assembling – or growing – organic and nonorganic compounds through faster, cheaper, and customized chemical and biological processes.

This includes the ability to create food and engineer meat without the need for arable land^Footnote54. Lab-grown meat—cells that develop to produce muscle cells and cultured meat in a monitored environment—could be a game changer in decentralizing multiple industries from farming to shipping.

The Japanese biotech company Spiber has developed a genetically modified protein called Brewed Protein^Footnote55 that can be used as a textile in the fashion industry, or as a robust material in the construction and automobile industries. And biomass produced locally by algae-based bioreactors^Footnote56 capturing carbon dioxide could be transformed into products such as fuels, plastics, and cosmetics.

Geographic diffusion

Decentralization could allow economies lacking in natural resources to compete with resource-rich nations for the production of goods, using biodigital technologies to produce materials that previously needed to be imported.

Increasing interest in open-source and publicly available research could allow rapid geographic diffusion. More generally, diffusion of biodigital knowledge could proceed rapidly if there is a willingness to share information. Some researchers are allowing access to all of their data. For example, pioneering bioengineers at the University of Washington are commercializing recent breakthroughs in 3D organs. Through their company, Volumetric, they have made all the source data from their experiments on 3D-printed vascular networks freely available^Footnote57.

Scalability

Rapid scaling may be possible in both the digital and biological worlds. Data can be copied quickly, and simple biological organisms can generally replicate easily. This means an additional unit of production in both domains may be created quickly and easily.

In other words, the biodigital economy could be characterized by very low marginal production costs. Provided there is competition among providers, this characteristic could significantly reduce the cost of many biodigital goods or services for consumers.

Low marginal production costs and ease of replication also mean that innovations in the biodigital convergence economy could be highly scalable.

Customization

Biological systems are simultaneously simple and complex. As dynamic systems, they can respond in unanticipated ways, or cause multiple impacts that cannot be easily disentangled. This complexity is a feature of biological systems rather than a bug, as it means systems can be highly adaptable and varied. This suggests that there may be many pathways to obtaining desired outputs and consequently the potential for high degrees of customization.

Production approaches and devices could leverage this complexity to produce multiple customized biological outputs from single systems. For example, economies of scope allow companies developing synthetic biology to produce hundreds of different organisms and outputs with similar processes^Footnote58.

In a healthcare context, one example of biological complexity is reflected in our expanding understanding of the human microbiome – the trillions of non-human bacteria living in and on our bodies, estimated to equal or outnumber our own human cells. Our microbiome influences many different aspects of our lives, from digestion to mood to body odour. Biodigital therapies targeted at microbiomes, personalized for maximum efficiency, may emerge first.

Reliance on data

The technologies and applications featuring biodigital convergence will not be able to operate without a lot of data. For example, the field of bioinformatics uses digital tools and data analysis to understand biological systems^Footnote59, including deploying deep learning algorithms to analyze images of cells to detect patterns that humans would find impossible to discern^Footnote60. Techniques such as next-generation gene sequencing are hugely data intense, creating new challenges with sharing, archiving, integrating, and analyzing this data^Footnote61.

The global bioinformatics market is projected to grow from 7.73 billion USD in 2018 to 13.50 billion USD in 2023, at a compound annual growth rate of 14.5%^Footnote62. The rate of data growth to fuel this expansion could exceed this.

The data required is highly varied. Upstream of the production processes, data may also be an important asset in the form of genomes, phenotypes, and environmental contexts of a diverse set of humans and a wide range of unique organisms. Bioprospecting is already an important aspect of drug development, and may rise in importance – and provoke greater controversy in healthcare^Footnote63.

The full potential of biodigital convergence may therefore require a constant flow of data. Capturing, managing, sharing, and governing this data could become a resource-intensive process and a more highly developed industry in itself.

What are some initial policy questions?

Policy Horizons will explore potential implications of the biodigital convergence in an upcoming in-depth foresight study. The following section highlights some initial policy-relevant questions concerning the economic, social, ecological, geopolitical, and governance domains.

Conclusion

We could be on the cusp of a long-term biodigital transformation of our economy, society, institutions, and environment. This biodigital convergence could disrupt the way we produce and consume goods and services, relate to one another, maintain and augment our bodies, acquire and process data, make decisions, and manage our place in ecosystems.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canadians and policy makers began to understand that the digital age was upon them. Early movers seized opportunities, perceived challenges, and initiated deft policies that have provided benefits for decades. Now could be the time to make similar investments and make thoughtful decisions to guide Canada through the beginning of a biodigital convergence.

Policy Horizons looks forward to collaborating with partners and stakeholders to develop policy-relevant foresight in this area.

Acknowledgements

Policy Horizons is spearheading an area of foresight called the biodigital convergence. This scoping paper is the initial framework for a forthcoming in-depth foresight study. As this new domain emerges, we will continue to examine plausible futures for biodigital convergence and the policy questions that may arise.