“Voices of Biotech Research”
Nature Biotechnology asked a selection of faculty about the most exciting frontier in their field and the most needed technologies for advancing knowledge and applications.
What will be the most important areas of research in biotech over the coming years? Which technologies will be most important to advance knowledge and applications in these areas? Nature Biotechnology reached out to a set of faculty doing outstanding work in research areas representative of the journal’s remit and asked them to contribute their vision of where their fields are going.
Elizabeth Henaff: The individual microbiome manifests the continuum between organism and environment. The next frontier of biotechnology is putting biological metrics, such as metagenomics, in the hands of the designers who create our built environments: architects and city planners. How can the discipline of design, an inherently human-centered practice, learn from the field of metagenomics? These metrics help us contextualize human health and well-being within the multispecies ecosystems we inhabit. Design for humans will become design for the more-than-human. The key will be to focus on relational and radical inclusion, with biotechnological interfaces designed for collaborative survival across scales and species.
