Hey everyone, welcome back to Bionic Bug podcast! You’re listening to episode 6. This is your host Natasha Bajema, fiction author, futurist, and national security expert.
Before we get started, a quick reminder. The views expressed on this podcast are my own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
Professional and personal updates:
I just got back from traveling to Destin, Florida for work where I had the opportunity to teach special operators about the national security implications at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. I was hoping for once that my presentation about what’s coming in the next ten years might not render the students into a state of shock. Turns out they were as concerned about our ability as a government to manage emerging threats as my other audiences. Unlike our agile adversaries, government institutions are burdened by hierarchy and bureaucracy.
This brings me to my next professional update. I just released an article titled “The Future of Defense Innovation: Removing the Silos between the Warfighters and Innovators.” In the article, I explore the challenges of defense innovation under the current defense acquisition system, reviews current transformations underway, and examines the model of SOFWERX as a way to leverage cutting-edge technologies in order to remove the silos between innovators and warfighters.
With $2 million in funding to start-up its operations, SOFWERX was created in September 2015 to address this critical gap in U.S. Special Operation Command's (SOCOM) ability to leverage cutting-edge technologies. SOFWERX was founded as a public-private organization, its headquarters originally housed in a red brick building, an old cigar factory located in downtown Tampa in the historic Ybor City neighborhood. Run by the Doolittle Institute, also known as DefenseWerx, SOFWERX was created under a Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA) and enjoys status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.I had to the opportunity to visit SOFWERX last March and one of the issues that came up in discussion was their size. The organization has no plans to grow beyond the size of around 25 people to keep the structure agile and flat. Studies show that once an organization exceeds this number, it become hierarchical and bureaucratic, which is the opposite of what you’re going for when you want to stimulate innovation and creativity.
My cover for Genomic Data, Book 3 of the Lara Kingsley Series is finished. As promised, I’m providing a sneak preview here.
Let’s talk tech. Before I talk about the news headlines for the week, I should note that you can follow the headlines that catch my attention in real-time on Twitter. My handle is @wmdgirl.
My first headline for the week is from Wired Magazine on May 3: “Biology will be the Next Great Computing Platform.”
What does this mean? We are in the midst of a technological revolution in the life sciences called “synthetic biology”, which involves applying engineering principles to biology to make new living organisms, leverage living organisms to do new things, or create entirely new living organisms. Essentially, scientists are making life from scratch. Marc Goodman, author of the bestselling nonfiction book Future Crimes, modern biology has become a branch of information technology.
Dramatic reductions in the cost of computing power and data storage has enabled this revolution. We are now able to cheaply sequence genomes.
Sequencing refers to the reading of the DNA code that makes up the genome, or the instructions for a living organism. A DNA sequence is made up of four letters (G’s, C’s, T’s and A’s). A genome consists of a certain number of base pairs that form two long DNA strands, a spiral structure called a double helix.
The cost of sequencing the first full human genome was around $3 billion. Now, it costs about $1,
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