Biological sciences projections into the future

"Science has made the transition to engineering many times throughout history. This is the transition that biologists are making now. We know how to insert genes into microbes fairly reliably, but too much depends on technique, just as you had to have a special knack to get that cat’s whisker to work right. We have some notion of what genes can be moved from one microbe to another and how the microbe’s properties will change, but we’re far from being able to order parts that will reliably do what we want. In many ways, it appears to be a much more difficult problem in biology: a gene that works in one organism may have no effect, or only a limited effect, in another."  In O'Reilly Radar this week. 

We still need an explosion of large-scale biological thinking that grabs the pubic in the way books like Asimov’s “Foundation” and Herbert’s “Dune” did.