>>11799005I was fascinated by this for a time, was planning to do diy science, but realized the current capabilities are extremely limited. The bottleneck is in dna synthesis, it's extremely expensive and error prone. It relies on 40+ years old technology (oligosynthesis) that had minuscule improvements.
By analogy to coding, biotech is in the electromechanical relay era. Smart people could imagine the future, but anything really complex was impossible.
I suggest waiting for enzymatic dna synthesis, it should lower the synthesis cost >10x. By analogy to coding, it would be the vacuum tube era.
The biotech revolution isn't going to happen until it's possible for a garage startup to buy a dna synthesize that can synthesize 10k base pairs at a cost of <$0.001/bp. It's mostly a trial-and-error engineering because modeling is extremely poor.
Hopefully eventually, we are going to have fully biological synthesis - an organism of some type (probably yeast) that can read information in some easy way (light pulses?) and then generate some form of dna plasmids. This would make dna synthesis nearly free, and yeasts could be replicated when needed. That would be the 'transistor era'.
The alternative road is to have quantum computers that can simulate a cell - as then even a very expensive synthesis would be only a one-time endeavor - but fully biological synthesis would probably shorty arrive in such a scenario.
