Human and agricultural work is held back somewhat. Golden rice was actually rather simple but the biologists took 14 years of safety testing before it was deployed. Several million people went blind in the meantime. This was completely avoidable. GMO rice is not going to take over the world and should not require 14 years of “safety testing”. The precautionary principle gives people brain worms. Not the fun genetically modified kind of brainworms either.
Regulation in general holds back a lot of progress in biology. During the pandemic, the FDA suspended the rules and suddenly we had extremely rapid innovation. When they suspended the rules, I thought that was ridiculous. If we know the rules are wrong and broken, then we should get rid of the rules, not have a temporary suspension.
With the excess regulation, you also end up increasing the cost of getting drugs or other things to market and as a result you cut off the lower end of the market. This increases the costs and then investors need to get even higher returns in order to recoup investment.
There is a competitive market for investment yield and regulation sort of shapes the kind of yields that you can get in biotech. As a result, money flowing into biotech innovation is pretty constrained, even if the money is available and people are theoretically interested in funding these kinds of things.
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2019/07/the-federal-death-agency-fda/
There is definitely a bizarre social taboo surrounding the pursuit of some of these projects. Another constraint is that even if someone is doing the work, they can’t exactly be public especially in germline because the privacy of the child is of utmost importance.
Researchers in academia are mostly focused on grants for curing various diseases because that’s what appeals to the appetite of federal funding agencies and the philanthropic organizations. The academic biologists tend to be extremely sensitive to public opinion because the public controls much of the federal funding. As a result, they have felt the burn from the anti-GMO people and the attempts at stopping embryonic stem cell research. They absolutely do not want further prohibitions on research and they worry about people outside of academia doing things that cause a backlash on federal funding of researchers.
Thankfully, you don’t need to do this work inside of academia.
Focusing on diseases will never lead to extremely cheap interventions; there’s simply not enough sick people with the same problem. Nobody really focuses on enhancements. As a result, costs are going to remain high because the market for a specific disease can be incredibly small. Meanwhile the market for general broad spectrum mass market enhancement has a potential population of almost 8 billion people.
I also think that biologists don’t paint that interesting of a future. They usually talk about curing diseases but don’t have any vision beyond that point. What are we going to do after we cure all diseases? The silicon people have visions of computronium painting the universe. The biologists don’t really promote visions of a flourishing biosphere across the entire cosmos or some other moral vision for progress.
There’s some good news though. Since not everyone is working on the ambitious projects, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit available. I think there’s enough people working on curing all diseases or ending aging/anti-aging/longevity. Other ambitious projects include intelligence/memory enhancement, protein engineering, molecular nanotechnology, the complete control over cellular morphological form, brain preservation, brain uploading, cryonic preservation and resuscitation, etc. (I will also note here that longevity is getting lots of attention, but not as much for young people or germline; older people in my opinion might already be aged and that might be irreversible with technology in the next 30-50 years for all I know). I think we should be very excited about the future and work on really hard, important technologies. I think sometimes people might get complacent because it’s hard to realize that just several hundred generations ago we were all completely destitute and barely picking ourselves up out of the mud. We aren’t that far from where we came from. We absolutely must accelerate.