Honestly the biggest barriers to a lot of advancement right now in biology from medicine to our food supply depend squarely on getting uneducated people over their aversions to modern science. It is crazy. We are really at the “I don’t trust that locomotive/airplane/car” stage where what the public understands about the field is so far away from the state of the art and the risk considerations that have been put in place by the actual domain experts who have thought of all your concerns already. It isn’t just lay people either but government officials in charge or permitting and approvals that need the most convincing. They might be out of the field themselves for a decade or more.
The problem is there is so little optimistic futurist media, the number of optimistic movies I've seen about the future I can count on my left hand. I can't square the blame entirely on Hollywood, but it's a shame there is so little discussed about the American state-of-the-art, something I believe China does better is center technological development in discourse, I see very little talk of the modern miracles we've witnessed outside of HN