It’s A Brave New World (And Other Biotrends)
I’ve got three words for you:
- Personalization
- Individualization
- Uniqueness
These have been at the forefront of trends for 2008; many of the trends this year tie directly into one of these. Now, perhaps more than ever, people want to express themselves in their own way. Well, I’ve got a trend for you that utilizes these three words to the absolute extreme: Biotrends.
It really wasn’t all that long ago when DNA wasn’t in our everyday vocabulary. It somewhat hit the news in the 1980’s with the discovery that it can be used for identification purposes. But it wasn’t until the early to mid 90’s that it went mainstream with FlavrSavr, OJ Simpson and Dolly. FavrSavr wasn’t a big hit, but the news that we can successfully genetically engineer food was enormous. I don’t really have to say much about OJ. And Dolly made headlines all around the world.
I remember when all three of these news stories hit. That was 12 to 14 years ago.
In the grand scheme of things, that simply wasn’t long ago. Hell, we’ve been on DNA’s tail since the 1800’s. And now? well, it’s so common that you can order home DNA paternity kits. It has spawned numerous companies looking to take things to the next level with DNA Personalization in a wide range of fields.
To start, let’s look how this meshes with another popular trend: dating sites. I sometimes like to combine trends to come up with new ideas, such as hyperlocal dating. If you take the growing ease and popularity of DNA testing and combine it with dating sites, it was only a matter of time that someone began using DNA to match people romantically. Make sure you send off your DNA to My DNA Fragrance and pick up some perfume before you go on that date!
Another emerging trend is DNA art, such as:
- Genome Quilts takes your DNA and replaces the four bases with patterns. This produces a large quilt that you can truly say is yours.
- The DNA Glowframe maps out your DNA on a backlit display for $900. DNA Art UK offers something similar. There are many companies that do something this, just search for “DNA art.”
Now THAT’s unique.
Bio technology is advancing at a rapid pace, uncovering new and amazing opportunities. With these opportunities comes great interest from Joe Consumer. By being ahead of the game, you can have the domains that will be needed by future end users as his field grows.
For instance, a family in Spain has a son with Beta Thalassaemia major, a rare hereditary disease. He is now 6, but isn’t expected to live past 10 years old. When discussing having a second child, they came to realize the new baby can provide a rare opportunity for their son in the form of bone marrow. However, because the disease ran in the family’s DNA, it was possible that the new baby would have it too and thus would not be able to help. So they had the embryo prescreened to make sure it would be immune to the disease, and it worked; the baby was born immune to this rare disease. So they took the blood from the umbilical cord and are now storing it for the older child for when they do the marrow transplant.
The part in the article that claims this is genetic engineering is inaccurate. The embryos were prescreened, not genetically engineered. The procedure is not even a huge accomplishment, medically speaking, and is becoming more and more commonplace.
It’s no longer sci-fi.
In fact, we are inching closer to Gattaca (actual genetic engineering), or, perhaps much further down the line, and more frighteningly, Brave New World.
It’s scary when you think about it.
So with our better understanding of DNA and the human genome, what else can we expect to come from this?
Well, the medical field is always a fantastic place to look so lets keep looking there:
- Kid DNA kits in case they get abducted or injured.
- Diets created specifically to alter your DNA.
- DNA supplements.
How about smart drugs? No, I don’t mean drugs that make you smart, although those may not be far behind. I mean drugs that are designed based on our understanding of how genes and proteins work. I found this fascinating article written in 2005 by Danila Medvedev, a self proclaimed transhumanist, futurologist and cryonicist, which speculates on the role that genetic engineering will have in the next 20 years of human existence. It gets a bit far fetched, but who knows? Most things today were far fetched at one point.
This overall biotrend is not limited to all things DNA. There are other ways to express yourself in an extreme, and 100% unique way.
There is a company that will take your bone cells and grow them on what is called bioglass, a sort of scaffold for the bone to grow upon. They will then shape the bone into a ring and put an inscription on it. You now have a ring made out of 100% your bone; the ultimate gift of something personally yours.
Or, on a much simpler, and far less painful, note: fingerprint art.
Biotrends, and more specifically genetics, are bursting with keywords. I’ll list some here, but these don’t even scratch the surface:
- genealogy
- anthrogenealogy
- transhuman
- bioengineering
- biotech/biotechnology
- bio product(s)
- biometry
- bioinformatics
- bioremediation
- remedial ecology
- biogeographical ancestry (BGA)
- cloning (and it’s other obvious forms that are already mainstream)
- nanotech/nanotechnology
- nanorobot(s)/nanobot(s)
- microbiology
- nucleotide(s)
- immunogenetics
- genome/genomic(s)
- genome analysis/gene analysis
- gene therapy/genetic therapy
- gene silencing
- genetic mapping
- genetic programming
- genetic modification
- genetic profiling
- viral genetics
- endocytobiology
- cytogenetics
- proteomics
- symbiosis/symbiotic(s)/symbiote
- haplotype(s)
- haplogroup(s)
- polymerase chain reaction (PCR) devices (cheap personal DNA kit)
- smart drug(s)
- augmented reality
- extended identity
- human enhancement
- artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Finally, lets combine this with yet another trend: robotics. This is where the transhuman and nanotechnology keywords come in. Will humans and robots merge in the future? Some think so. And they say it may be closer than you think.
Is This Megatrend The Biggest Of 2008? The Decade? The Future?
It seems like every single day I’m seeing stories about robots on sites like Digg, BoingBoing and Trendhunter. Many variations of robots, not just the traditional humanoid that frequents sci-fi movies and books.
Speaking of movies, over the past decade or two robots were more of a childlike glee much like pirates and ninjas are. The extent of robot info all came from movies: Johnny 5, Star Wars, Transfomers, Terminator, Robocop among many others. This isn’t a fad either, as the new movie WALL-E (Johnny 5 look alike) will likely help skyrocket robots into the top tier of mainstream once again.
But for the past year or so I’ve read many articles of non-conventional robots fulfilling actual needs and doing jobs that humans can’t, or won’t, do. Whether they be important jobs, such as Dextre on the space station, or tedious jobs for the luxurious, like the golf caddy, real robots are being put to actual use.
Doing a search for “robot” on Digg reveals that there have been over 30 articles relating to robots on the FRONT PAGE this month alone. A couple were duplicates, such as WALL-E news, but that’s still one article per day. There have been about 130 articles that made the front page so far this year.
Not convinced with just Digg? Here is a search for “robot” on BoingBoing. Gizmodo has 52 robot related posts in June. 52! Engadget has 8 this month. What do BoingBoing, Gizmodo and Engadget have in common? They are three of the top blogs on the net.
Trendhunter put together a nice list of the Top 30 robots of 2008. Some of these are absolutely amazing. Other recent news has robots exploring antarctica, being romantic interests and girlfriends, and imitating fish.
This, to me, is a megatrend.
With all this said, it’s puzzling to me that the term hasn’t moved up on the Google Trend report.
Robots are steamrolling ahead and there are gobs of opportunity for domainers to speculate in domain names, fully develop or just make mini-sites. Geodomainers have opportunity as well, with names like Geo+Robotics.com and Geo+AI.com.
Is this the biggest trend of 2008? Or even the decade? The future?
What do you think?
Both Presidential Candidates Agree On Controversial Research
This is not a political post. I want to stay away from politics, unless it’s directly related to domaining… which this is.
Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on too many things. But there is a controversial topic- one that the two parties have fought over previously- that these two upcoming candidates mostly agree on and could spell a big boom for the medical industry in many different ways.
That would be stem cells.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain support federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, each voting in favor of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005, which ultimately was vetoed.
Barring a catastrophe, we’re going to see one of these two as the next U.S. President, and you can bet that a new bill will be written for the winner to sign.
Stem cell related keywords will be big, as will the resulting medical discoveries of such research. As a domainer, keep an eye out on related breakthrough news and be hasty registering those names.