How will basic industrial manufacturing processes be changed?
New manufacturing processes will not use the vats typical of a chemical plant. Instead, the manufacturing basis for materials will be microbial. Life sciences teach us that if you have one good organic substance, it can reproduce itself endlessly and reproduce those products. All you have to do is keep feeding it. You don’t have to keep making it again and again and again. We already know how to produce plastic precursors with yeast and bacteria or plants. So we can grow these materials as we manufacture them. What is the connection between nanotechnology and biotechnology? The fundamental architecture of matter is an atom and a molecule. Something as large as a forest is made of very tiny substances, hooked together. Life and materials sciences are teaching us that we can arrange atoms in precise locations, to self-assemble and form units in small to very large sizes—replicating the manufacturing processes of nature. The fact that forests grow and that bacteria proliferate shows you t
