I sometimes think about how quickly our relationship with life has shifted. In the span of a single generation, biology has gone from something we observed in textbooks and field journals to something we now design on computer screens. It’s not just that we can read DNA faster or edit it with more precision—it’s that we are beginning to treat biology as an engineering discipline, an economic foundation, and even a civilizational strategy.
That realization can feel overwhelming. But when you step back, the story of biology in the 21st century crystallizes around seven themes. I call them moonshots not because they are impossibly far away, but because, like Kennedy’s vision in 1962, they are the challenges that demand ambition, coordination, and a little bit of audacity.
Together, they define the frontier of what it means to live in the century of biology.
The podcast audio was AI-generated using Google’s NotebookLM.
What Is Life? The First Frontier
It’s remarkable that even as we engineer cells from scratch, we still can’t agree on a definition of life. Is a virus alive? What about a self-replicating chemical system? The more we poke at the boundaries, the more slippery they become.
This isn’t just philosophy—it’s a practical problem. Without a theory of life, we’re flying blind as we try to manipulate it. Physics had Newton’s laws. Chemistry had the periodic table. Biology has data, but not yet a unifying framework.
To me, this moonshot is about more than semantics. It’s about building the conceptual scaffolding that lets us design responsibly. If we understood the principles that distinguish life from non-life, we could predictably create new organisms, recognize alien biologies, and even better grasp our own place in the continuum of the living world. We are still waiting for biology’s Newtonian moment.
Moonshot 1: Defining the Fundamental Paradigms of Life
Cracking the Code: From Genotype to Phenotype
We’ve sequenced millions of genomes. We can read the letters of life with astonishing speed. And yet, we still can’t look at a genome and know what creature—or what traits—it encodes.
This gap is staggering. Imagine designing a bridge without knowing how steel bends or concrete sets. That’s what bioengineering often feels like: powerful tools in hand, but incomplete maps of causality.
The dream is a “Periodic Table of Biology”: a predictive framework that links DNA sequence to physical traits with confidence. Achieving this would transform medicine, agriculture, and conservation. We’d know exactly which genetic edits cure disease, which combinations yield climate-resilient crops, and how ecosystems adapt to stress.
Right now, we make progress in pieces—protein folding solved with AI, statistical models of disease risk—but the big picture remains elusive. Unlocking this relationship is one of the most important scientific quests of our time. It’s not just about genes. It’s about predictability in a field that has long been dominated by trial and error.
Moonshot 2: Unlocking the Genotype-to-Phenotype Relationship
Making Biology Engineerable
Walk into a cutting-edge biotech lab today, and you’ll see something that looks more like a server farm than a wet bench: robots pipetting with machine precision, cloud labs running thousands of assays remotely, AI models designing genetic circuits.
This is the essence of the third moonshot—turning biology into a reliably engineerable substrate. For too long, building with biology has been like stacking rough stones into a wall: artisanal, fragile, unpredictable. We want aqueducts, not rock piles.
The design-build-test-learn cycle is tightening, automation is accelerating, and standardization is slowly emerging. The vision is that programming a cell should one day feel as reliable as programming a computer. Of course, biology will always be more unruly than silicon (maybe), but the closer we get to predictability, the more bold ideas we can responsibly pursue.
This is not about stripping biology of its mystery. It’s about giving innovators the tools to safely unleash that mystery at scale.
Moonshot 3: Making Biology Predictably Engineerable
Scaling with Design-for-Manufacturing
Discovery is exhilarating. But translation is what changes lives. History is littered with brilliant biotech ideas that never scaled because they were too fragile, too expensive, or too slow to produce.
The fourth moonshot is about embedding manufacturability into biology from day one. It’s not enough to invent a microbe that secretes a new drug in a flask. We need to know if it can thrive in 10,000-liter tanks, withstand cheap feedstocks, and stay stable over months of production.
Design-for-manufacturing sounds mundane compared to gene editing or synthetic cells, but it’s the quiet revolution that determines whether cures reach millions or sit on a shelf. COVID-19 vaccines made this point brutally clear: invention is only half the battle. The other half is scale.
If we achieve this moonshot, the lag between lab and world shrinks dramatically. A new idea could reach billions not in decades, but in years—or less.
Moonshot 4: Scaling Biotechnology with Design-for-Manufacturing
Adaptive Biological Infrastructure
The 20th century built centralized systems: power grids, megafactories, globalized supply chains. They were efficient, but brittle. The 21st century is reminding us that resilience comes from decentralization.
The fifth moonshot envisions an “internet of biomanufacturing.” Think of containerized vaccine factories deployable anywhere, local bioreactors producing fertilizers or medicines, portable diagnostic labs, and cloud-connected biology that can adapt on demand.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now. The lesson from COVID-19 was stark: when production was concentrated in a few wealthy countries, the rest of the world waited. Distributed infrastructure flips the model. Biology made in Africa stays in Africa. Biotech tailored to local needs arises locally.
Adaptive infrastructure is about democratizing access to the tools of life. It’s about ensuring that biology isn’t confined to elite campuses, but woven into communities. Resilience in this century will mean many nodes, many voices, many sources of strength.
Moonshot 5: Designing Adaptive Biological Infrastructure for an Uncertain World
Aligning the Bioeconomy with People and Planet
The story of insulin says it all. The scientists who discovered it gave away the patent so no one would ever be denied. Today, insulin prices force patients to ration doses. That’s not a failure of science. It’s a failure of incentives.
The sixth moonshot is about realignment. It’s about designing markets, IP, and policies so that doing the right thing—curing neglected diseases, building sustainable materials, making lifesaving therapies affordable—is also the profitable thing.
Without alignment, biology risks replicating the inequities of past industries: wonder drugs priced out of reach, climate solutions ignored in favor of petrochemical profits, biotechnologies that deepen divides rather than heal them. With alignment, biotechnology could become capitalism with a conscience: curing, sustaining, and uplifting in ways that reward both innovators and humanity.
This is a governance problem as much as a technical one. But if we succeed, the century of biology could be the century when profit and purpose finally pull in the same direction.
Moonshot 6: Aligning Bioeconomy Incentives with Human and Planetary Health
Embedding Ethics, Security, and Narrative
The final moonshot is the most human. It asks us to recognize that biology isn’t just science—it’s story. Every edit, every breakthrough, every deployment writes a chapter in what it means to be human.
The CRISPR babies scandal in 2018 wasn’t just about scientific overreach. It was about a narrative leap made without consent, a story told without society’s input. It revealed what happens when innovation runs ahead of ethics.
Embedding ethics means more than review boards. It means Violet Teams probing for misuse and building safeguards into design. It means ethicists and communities shaping projects from the beginning. It means scientists becoming storytellers, not just technicians.
Because if we don’t tell the story of biology ourselves—openly, humbly, inclusively—others will. And history shows those stories, once seeded, are hard to rewrite.
This moonshot is about giving biotechnology a soul. Without it, the rest risk collapse. With it, we can ensure that the century of biology is not only powerful, but wise.
Moonshot 7: Embedding Ethics, Security, and Narrative in Biological Futures
The Century of Biology as a Unified Story
Each moonshot could stand on its own. But the truth is, they are inseparable. Foundational theory feeds predictability. Predictability enables engineering. Engineering enables scaling. Scaling demands adaptive infrastructure. Infrastructure requires aligned incentives. And all of it must be wrapped in ethics and narrative if it is to endure.
The seven moonshots form not just a research agenda, but a civilizational thesis. They ask us to treat biology as the substrate of our shared future.
If we succeed, the world of 2050 could look very different:
Doctors using predictive genome “flight simulators” to design cures tailored to you.
Communities operating local bioreactors for food and medicine.
Biotech industries that enrich both investors and the planet.
A public narrative that embraces biology as stewardship, not hubris.
These are not idle dreams. They are the possible outcomes of decisions we make today—how we prioritize research, how we design institutions, how we tell our story.
At the frontier of technology, humanity is the experiment. The seven moonshots are our experimental design. They are the guardrails, the scaffolding, the guiding stars.
The real question is not whether biology will transform this century. It already is. The question is whether we can meet that transformation with ambition, humility, and purpose.
Because ultimately, the century of biology won’t be judged only by the inventions we create. It will be judged by whether those inventions tell a story of responsibility, resilience, and renewal.
That is the opportunity before us. That is the challenge. And that is why we aim for the moon.
Cheers,
-Titus
Share this post