[koeng]

For anyone interested in biology's slow advance, I'd highly recommend checking out the 2003 study that coined the term "Synthetic Biology"[0].

TL;DR is that we've known that dropping costs and scaling collaboration is how to make biotech better for many years now. This time span is also a testament to how hard it actually is.

As someone who works in synthetic biology on tools, I think a major problem is that the incentives are wrong for making the field better (they're stuck in a local maximum). The incentives of pharma + selling to academics doesn't really select for lower prices or increased collaboration.

[0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/38455