Fig 1. Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City. Nov. 2033. Imagined with NanoBanana AI

Just two decades ago, brewing beer was the exclusive privilege of large corporations. It required millions of dollars in infrastructure: giant industrial fermenters, integrated supply chains, teams of specialized engineers. The barriers to entry were insurmountable for most.

Today, hundreds of microbreweries operate in small spaces with compact bioreactors, developing high-quality products with unique flavor profiles that large breweries could never replicate. Biomanufacturing has been decentralized. Technical, economic, and knowledge barriers have fallen. And this process created new markets.

This is one of the best examples of biotechnology democratization in action.

What if this effect extends to other industries? Can you imagine futures in which small, local biofactories synthesize textile fibers, cosmetics, specialized foods, fuels, and biomaterials? Futures where bio-manufacturing capacity is as distributed as craft beer production is today?

This is not a science fiction exercise. It’s an invitation to recognize the historical moment we’re living in.

We’re seeing an unprecedented technological convergence. Biology, artificial intelligence, and automation are becoming a single integrated system that is redefining what’s possible.

We’ve gone from reading the code of life to writing it. Gene editing allows us to modify DNA with surgical precision. Nucleic acid synthesis capacity is growing exponentially. Artificial intelligence is opening the door to the design of completely new proteins. And precision fermentation enables us to produce biomaterials at increasingly accessible scales.

Biomanufacturing is no longer the exclusive domain of industrial giants. Bioreactors are becoming more compact and affordable, technical knowledge is being democratized through open communities and training programs, and supply chains for biotechnological inputs are expanding globally.

For the first time in human history, we have the tools to biologize the future: to replace the extractivist productive matrix inherited from the industrial revolution with a new biosynthetic and decentralized economy, where local players co-design solutions with nature.

The question is not whether we have the technology. The question is: do we have the vision?

Fig 2. Amazonian Bioprospection Laboratory. May. 2035. Imagined with NanoBanana AI

A Paradox We Must Resolve

Here emerges a painful paradox, especially for those of us living in Latin America and the Global South: 60% of terrestrial life inhabits our ecosystems. As the planet’s most biodiverse region, we should be the protagonists of the biotechnological revolution. And yet, we are spectators.

While the Global North designs and builds the applications of the future, we continue depending on extractivist models from the past century. We export raw biodiversity and import processed technology. We perpetuate a colonial dynamic disguised as global trade.

To resolve this paradox, we need a change in our vision. We’ve lost the capacity to imagine our own models of biotechnological development. We’ve accepted that progress must look like the Global North defines it: infinite growth, scalability at all costs, domination of nature, and industrial concentration. But there’s another possibility.

Our Invisible Superpower

In the Global South, we can develop new narratives and visions for the biofutures we want through our unique relationship with nature.

We need a shift in perspective: stop seeing biodiversity as “natural resources” to extract and begin seeing it as a biological library to read, learn from, and draw inspiration from, where each genome can provide solutions to complex problems.

In Latin America, biodiversity is part of our history, our gastronomy, our medicine, and our worldview. Ancestral cultures have understood for millennia what modern science is only beginning to rediscover: that real prosperity doesn’t come from dominating nature, but from co-evolving with it.

Corn wasn’t aggressively domesticated; it co-evolved over thousands of years with communities that understood reciprocity. Quinoa, amaranth, cassava, cacao: each of these foods is evidence of a symbiotic relationship between humans and ecosystems.

This wisdom goes beyond romantic nostalgia. Modern biotechnology allows us to learn from these biological designs proven over millions of years and adapt them to solve our contemporary challenges. This is a strategic advantage.

And now, with the democratization of biomanufacturing, we have an opportunity to design biotechnology with its own identity: “low cost + high tech” solutions rooted in our biodiversity, produced locally in community-based bio-factories, adapted to our contexts, designed for our realities. Not to replicate Global North models, but to propose regenerative, circular, decentralized, and community-based alternatives.

Fig 3. Biomanufacturing District in Buenos Aires. Feb. 2034. Imagined with NanoBanana AI

What Does It Mean to Biologize the Future?

Biologizing the future means abandoning the obsession with controlling nature and learning to co-design and co-evolve with it.

It means that instead of extracting oil to make plastics in industrial megaplants, small local bio-factories cultivate bacteria that produce biodegradable biomaterials adapted to specific needs.

It means that instead of synthesizing textile fibers with polluting chemical processes, communities can biosynthesize them through precision fermentation in decentralized facilities.

It means designing regenerative cities where buildings are living structures that capture CO₂, purify water, and generate oxygen, growing in symbiosis with ecosystems instead of destroying them with endless concrete slabs.

It means unleashing biotechnology’s potential to build new development models that are regenerative, circular, resilient, and crucially, decentralized.

Biologizing the future is a proposal for systemic transformation and a new way of understanding progress.

The Moment is Now

It’s important to call out to the next generations, but we must also act now. Technology will continue advancing faster than our capacity to assimilate it. The climate and social crisis demand action. And the Global South has the historic opportunity to lead this transition toward a decentralized bioeconomy.

To seize this window of opportunity, we need to start with something radical:

We need to recover our capacity to imagine.

We need to ask ourselves: What does a community bio-factory in the Amazon look like, producing biomaterials from forest waste? What happens when heirloom corn varieties meet responsible genome editing? What would our cities look like if small urban bioreactors produced food, biomaterials, vaccines, and medicines in a local and distributed way?

Does it sound ridiculous?

Jim Dator suggests that any idea that can be truly useful about the future must seem ridiculous. Let’s turn science fiction into reality.

The future is not in silicon, it’s in DNA.

But before biologizing the future, we must first reimagine it.

And to reimagine, we need new narratives. We need stories that show us what’s possible. We need to build infrastructure that allows us to dream big.

In the coming days, I’ll share why narratives are the missing piece of the biotechnological revolution, and how we can build them from the Global South.

Because we cannot build what we cannot imagine.

References and Inspiration

Gonzalez P. y Garrido J. (2025). Un Futuro Vivo. El Gato y La Caja

Boston Consulting Group y Hello Tomorrow (2021). Nature Co-Design: A revolution in the making.

Hessel A. (2025). The next revolution in biology isn’t reading life’s code — it’s writing it. Big Think.