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Interesting post. I wonder if a completely different approach to biology as technology might emerge in the future. Applying a reductionist lens to living systems has generated ever expanding pools of data, but there is little that can be done to reduce that mess into core principles (especially if you hope to go so far as to do things like design genomes from scratch to create a particular type of organism for a specific end purpose). My guess is that social structures that nurture and refine biological technologies will emerge that use plain old trial and error (coupled with the legacy of various techniques for transgenesis that were figured out during the reductionist phase).

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I kept flashing back to "Can a biologist fix a radio?" while reading this....

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