In December 2023, American regulators approved a medicine called Casgevy, the first therapy to treat a genetic disease by editing a patient's own DNA. It rested on a laboratory technique that didn't exist two decades earlier, and it pointed to something larger than a single cure: biology had become a technology that can be engineered, deliberately, to a specification. It's a capability that has led to biology's inclusion in a very select list.
The list is the set of civilization-level technologies, the handful of capabilities so foundational that whole societies come to depend on them. Economists have kept a similar tally for years under the name "general-purpose technologies," and for two centuries it ran to steam, electricity, the internal combustion engine and, more recently, information technology.
