Curing cancer and cleaning our oceans? Here’s why I’m betting on biotech

Something that can cure cancer and clean our oceans? Biotech sounds too good to be true, but some things really are just like magic, writes Andrew Craig

In the last century, technology has transformed the human experience across the world and lifted several billion people out of poverty. This has been super-charged in recent decades by the arrival of the internet, smart phones, AI and machine learning, and created trillion-plus dollar companies and household names like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Tech has also been the underlying driver of US shares, having delivered an average annual return of more than 10 per cent a year for more than a century.

Biotech is next. Why? Because our biggest remaining challenges as a species concern biological systems.

We create real wealth by solving human problems – and most of our remaining problems are all about biology – whether that is curing cancer, rolling back environmental degradation or generating clean power. Biology has a huge role to play. Few people realise just how much the industry is about to give all of us. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the British author who gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously stated as one of his three laws that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

In ‘Our Future is Biotech’ I highlight a great deal of the ‘magic’ going on out there already today.

I think it is fair to say that when most people hear the word “biotech” they assume it refers to healthcare and to the development of drug therapies in the main. That is certainly a huge focus for the industry but a key point I make in the book is that this is about a great deal more than just healthcare. In healthcare the industry has already delivered “miracle cures” for several diseases, and there is a great deal more to come, and soon.

Biotech companies will solve our most intractable problems; from cancer to dementia and elderly care, as well as numerous mental health conditions including, for example, depression. All of this, and the emerging field of longevity, bring the possibility of us being able to live much longer and healthier lives. Many serious scientists believe that 70 or even 80 or 90 could soon be “the new 40” for many of us alive today.

Perhaps more important still, biotech can and will be able to roll back environmental degradation and help clean our rivers and oceans, revolutionise agriculture and clean power generation, and even super-charge the processing power of our computers with new “biological” computing. For example, we may not be too many years away from being able to store vast amounts of data without using any electricity.

When extolling the virtues of the biotechnology industry I always have three main “tangible” goals.

First, to highlight what could likely be the biggest investment of the next few decades.

Secondly, to raise awareness of the number of opportunities that should be life changing for your health, and mental health. The industry is delivering so much now to help us understand complicated areas such as the right nutrition for you personally, and the importance of things like cold exposure, breathing, sleep, movement and diet for our health, happiness and longevity. The middle third of the book is all about “biotech and you” and covers these topics in more detail.

And the third thing I really want to pass on is a sunnier disposition and a material improvement in peoples’ outlook, mood and conception of the world we live in – given just how revolutionary this stuff is going to be for our species. I’d like to think that many of the ideas laid out in the book could just, well, put a spring in your step.

Biotech means that we can all live better, safer, healthier, wealthier, happier and longer lives. 

Andrew Craig is author of ‘How to Own the World’ and new book ‘Our Future Is Biotech’, available to order now