The technology could help address these needs by upgrading the fuel value of our current energy resources and by providing new means for the bioconversion of raw materials to refined products -- not to mention offering the possibility of entirely new biomass-based energy sources.
We have thus seen only the dawn of what is surely a biological revolution, and its practical and economic applications are unquestionably destined for dramatic growth. Health-related biotechnology is already a multibillion-dollar success story, and it is still far from reaching its potential; other applications are likely to beget similar successes in the coming decades. The insights, the technologies, and the infrastructure that are already emerging from the genome project, together with advances in fields such as computational and structural biology, will become our most important tools in addressing a variety of human problems and needs.
The biosciences research community is now embarked on a program whose boldness, even audacity, has prompted comparisons with such visionary efforts as the @Apollo space program and the @Manhattan Project. That life scientists should conceive such an ambitious project is not remarkable; what is surprising -- at least at first blush -- is that the project should trace its roots to the Department of Energy.
For close to a half-century, the DOE and its governmental predecessors have been charged with pursuing a deeper understanding of the potential health risks posed by energy use and by energy-production technologies -- with special interest focused on the effects of radiation on humans. Indeed, it is fair to say that most of what we know today about radiological health hazards stems from studies supported by these government agencies. Among these investigations are long-standing studies of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as any number of experimental studies using animals, cells in culture, and nonliving systems. Much has been learned, especially about the consequences of exposure to high doses of radiation. On the other hand, many questions remain unanswered; in particular, we have much to learn about how low doses produce their insidious effects. When present merely in low but significant amounts, toxic agents such as radiation or mutagenic chemicals wreak havoc in the most subtle ways, altering the genetic instructions in our cells only slightly. The consequences can be heritable mutations too slight to produce discernible effects in a generation or two but, in their persistence and irreversibility, deeply troublesome nonetheless.
Until recently, science offered little hope for detecting these tiny changes to the DNA that encodes our genetic program until they were well entrenched in the code. Needed was a tool that could detect a change in one base pair among, perhaps, as many as a hundred million.
