Information About Technology

SAN FRANCISCO--The best route for green technologies to have their own Moore's Law of rapid technological progress is by harnessing the steady advances in IT and, increasingly, synthetic biology, investors said here today.
Combining different engineering disciplines can breathe new life into decades-old technology and help solve environmental and energy challenges, according to speakers at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference.
Moore's Law has led to a steady increase in computing power for decades, but that rate of progress is now being matched in the life sciences, said Steve Jurvetson, managing director at venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, during a keynote talk here. It's at the point where genetic engineers can rapidly create custom-made versions of micro-organisms, such as e.coli bacteria, by studying organism genomes and assembling bits of DNA, he said.
"You can take e.coli and treat them like Lego blocks. It's just like building code into a living organism," he said.
Genetic engineering has been greatly sped up by the steady increase in computing power. Genomatica, for example, uses computer-intensive modeling tools to understand the metabolic pathways of e.coli and then rearranges them to make a desired chemical from sugar, rather than oil.