I think the biology revolution will look less like the computing (1940s-2010s) or transportation (1890s-1970s) revolutions and more like the chemistry revolution (1800s-1950s). It will be less iterating on one process and more years of seemingly stagnant progress while people tinker with the last big thing until the next big thing roars out of the gates. Iteration will be brief and seemingly unimpressive. The only real progress will be, that which was expensive and hard will become cheap, but unlike compute that won't necessarily be the driver of progress.

For instance early genetic testing revealed a huge number of disorders that could be linked to single genes that changed the game for how a certain sub-population has kids and treatment for a handful of disorders. Then it turned out a lot of stuff was multigenic or only very partially genetic and progress has stalled. As genetic testing has gotten cheaper we have learned more, but actual usable insights are rare.

Or take lab grown insulin from 1980s, it was a huge deal, everyone worked on similar technologies and knock ins and for a handful of disorders it was a complete game changer that petered out medically speaking. It saw a weird second life in farming and GMOs for a time that helped improve processes but didn't really move the needle in a big way. Then as it got cheaper, and new more efficient tools emergedm it reexploded as the field of biologicals, which have been great drugs since the mid-2000s. And as the technology gets really cheap we are seeing products like lab meats, Impossible leading the charge there, emerge.

Now we are on CRISPR, RNA-sequencing, CAR-T, and tissue engineering all of which, when they hit will have massive impact, but then slow down for a bit until the next big thing revs up.

This parallels chemistry where the theories of thermodynamics and gas laws emerged, sped everything forward, then petered out. Then organic chemistry emerged using a lot of the ideas developed by the previous field, sped everything forward for a while then slowed down. Then inorganic and solid state chemistry etc. But there was never a 18 month doubling it was more like a 10 year lull followed by 1000x in 5 years, if you were counting for example, the number of compounds developed. You could smooth the curve and pretend it was like compute but it's not. We'll just look back in 20ish years, or even look back today at the 1950s, and say 'wow there is a lot of stuff in our life that was based on biological research where did that come from'. Just like someone in the 1940s would look back and be like 'wow where did all this plastic/metal fab come from'.