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  • Inside this advanced foundry, biologists, software engineers, and a fleet of automated

  • robots are working side by side to crank up the speed of nature.

  • Theyre taking synthetic DNA, remixing it and programming microorganisms, turning these

  • living samples into mini-factories that could one day pump out new foods, fuels, and medicines.

  • Every piece of DNA here is barcoded and cataloged in what’s considered the world’s largest

  • genetically engineered strain bank.

  • This biological assembly line is at the heart of an emerging field that's raising billions

  • of dollars and attracting a ton of attention: synthetic biology.

  • We are surrounded by biology.

  • It's personal care products, it's the clothes we wear in the form of cotton and hemp.. it's

  • the houses we live in, it's gasoline, it's medicine.

  • And because biology is in everything, if we have the power to engineer biology, we have

  • the power to affect every single aspect of our life.

  • Nature’s had billions of years of trial and error to engineer biology and select its

  • best designs.

  • But we only just figured out how to read the source code 50 years ago.

  • Because every living thing - you, me, this exotic bird, that oozing amoeba - are built

  • from a unique set of instructions that come down to just four letters.

  • It's the DNA that designs what the microorganism does, it's the DNA that decides what the organism

  • looks like, how it acts, if it will grow or if it will not grow, it all comes down to

  • DNA.

  • But thanks to a few technology curves, we can now read, write, cut, and paste DNA faster

  • and cheaper than ever, creating a whole new set of instructions beyond what nature intended.

  • Synthetic biology is defined not by tools, but by intent.

  • The vast majority of biologists in the world are looking to understand something more about

  • nature.

  • And discover some secrets of nature as an end in of itself.

  • And that's a profoundly empowering pursuit.

  • What we're trying to do in synthetic biology instead is, engineer nature to do something

  • that we want it to.

  • So synthesize a vitamin.

  • Or detect something in the environment.

  • Or make a food product that you don't normally make.

  • If youve ordered an Impossible Whopper at Burger King, youve taken a bite of an

  • engineered food product.

  • "The "meat flavor" comes from heme, an iron containing molecule from a special soybean

  • protein, that was isolated from fermented yeast.

  • Tasty.

  • The goal, and the intention, is purely different.

  • It's to elicit a function, and create a product, create an item, create a cellular machine.

  • Thinking of cells as programmable machines is a convergence of biology, engineering,

  • and computing.

  • It sees the building blocks of life that form cells and then tissues and so on - as parts

  • that can be re-assembled, programmed, and standardized.

  • Just like transistors and logic gates inside a computer chip.

  • A computer understands zeros and ones.

  • That's the code.

  • You can see biology in very much the same way, where DNA is a code.

  • And if you can work with that, you can encode your organism.

  • This all sounds like theyre making GMOs, and you’d be right to make that association.

  • Synthetic biology does leverage genetic engineering as a tool in its toolkit.

  • But instead of engineering wheat by adding or tweaking a specific gene to make it more

  • drought resistant for instance, synthetic biology has the potential to turn that it

  • into something totally different.

  • You can create code that does not exist anywhere in nature.

  • You can make up your complete own code.

  • Josh and Jaide both work at Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology start-up that’s kicking

  • this concept into high gear.

  • They have unconventional titles, like organism engineer and head of design, and give much

  • of the lab benchwork to the robots, freeing up their time for designing and tweaking.

  • It's like taking a tour through the visitor's center at Jurassic Park, just swap the dino

  • blood for e.coli.

  • We did a rough count the other day, and realized that we have worked in over 50 organisms,

  • or so, in the last year.

  • Some organisms are really good at making proteins.

  • Some are really good at making fatty hydro-phobic molecules.

  • Some are good at making drugs and vitamins.

  • Some are really easy, genetically, to manipulate.

  • And so, rather than reinvent that in some organism, we want to make use of that.

  • Once you pick an organism you want to run with, how exactly do you engineer it to do

  • what you want?

  • At Ginkgo, it’s a classic engineering cycle: design - build - test.

  • I lead a group of computational biologists, and data scientists that is designing the

  • experiments, designing the DNA's, designing the organisms and the genotypes to support

  • the various organism engineering programs.

  • I work with the foundry to make sure that the overall vision of the organism engineering

  • gets fulfilled.

  • So step one is identify the DNA that you need, and have the DNA synthesized.

  • High throughput DNA synthesis means that we can actually design DNA in a computer.

  • And then actually have a machine make it, without us having physically stitched together

  • all of these different pieces of DNA in the lab.

  • So that's changed our ability to write DNA, and create DNA, really, really profoundly.

  • As a graduate student, when I was doing an experiment, I was always thinking about the

  • ten or the 20 samples, that I could physically handle on my own.

  • And fit into an apparatus to answer a question I cared about.

  • Here we can do things at scale.

  • We will design a library of a thousand or 5,000 genes, and then we can take those and

  • screen those all in one go, find the best candidates, and then use those to build the

  • best possible pathway.

  • After we've put a nice pathway together, we will start improving the strains.

  • We have protein engineers, so if we need to modify our proteins to become more efficient

  • or be more specific.

  • We can use them for that task, we have data scientists, we have experts in machine learning

  • and artificial intelligence.

  • Our foundry is basically an automated laboratory.

  • We have different platforms of technologies put together to be able to do everything from

  • generating the DNA, to putting it into strains, to growing them in fermenters and testing

  • how they would potentially look at in industrial scales.

  • Every piece of DNA ever made every container, every reagent, everything has a barcode.

  • For every strain we make, we generate a lot of data.

  • All that data will be put into our database that has been designed by our software engineers.

  • Right now, rough order of magnitude, I think we're doing millions of operations per month.

  • But even with this operational efficiency and rapid prototyping, biology is still a

  • messy science and theyre constantly going back to the drawing board.

  • For me, this makes it really fun.

  • A good experiment is something that tells you you were wrong.

  • And that's a moment when you learn something new, and when you change the plan.

  • So, we do it all the time.

  • Because there is so much knowledge we don't have, it's very much a numbers game.

  • The more we can test, the higher probability we have of success, and the more things we

  • test, the more knowledge we accumulate.

  • And all that knowledge can be reused for future projects.

  • It's a grand vision: seeing biology as a symbiotic manufacturing technology and rewiring organisms

  • to do what we want them to do.

  • This could be applied to so many problems that the potential seems limitless.

  • We started out many, many years ago, actually working in flavors and fragrances.

  • Which it seems like a little frivolous, but there's a lot of interesting biology there.

  • A lot of flavors and fragrances are extracted from really rare plants, that only grow in

  • specific climates.

  • Or plants that are growing extinct.

  • And if we can actually bring those out of luxury markets.

  • And make those sustainably.

  • Then those environments, those biomes, can actually thrive and survive.

  • We're trying to engineer bacteria to sense and to respond to treat complex diseases.

  • Some of the things I'm most excited about now, actually, are agriculture.

  • A lot of people don't realize it.

  • But about 3% of the world's carbon budget is spent making chemical fertilizer every

  • year.

  • So we started a joint venture to develop organisms that can both fix nitrogen, so basically fertilize

  • soil.

  • And form symbioses with grain crops.

  • We try to make biology easier to engineer, to create solutions that will help ensure

  • a sustainable future, not to destroy it.

  • Yet with this new venture comes the opposite side of the coin: the risks.

  • There’s still a lot we don’t understand about fundamental biology, and while nothing’s

  • left the lab yet for Ginkgo, scientists are tinkering with life’s building blocks and

  • rewriting its code right now.

  • What would our world look like with more synthetic organisms and products in circulation?

  • And with the pace and cost of these technologies becoming more accessible than ever, what’s

  • the risk of someone turning a synthetic organism into a dangerous pathogen?

  • These are open questions and challenges ahead, and will take a mix of policy experts, scientists,

  • and government leaders to figure out as the field speeds forward, one gene tweak at a

  • time.

Inside this advanced foundry, biologists, software engineers, and a fleet of automated

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