- Startups in the field are attracting more funding, including Impossible Foods, which uses bioengineered additives as part of its alternative meat. The company last month picked up another $200 million in funding, valuing it at $4 billion.
- A McKinsey report from earlier this year estimated the entire bioeconomy could have a direct global economic impact of up to $4 trillion over the next 10–20 years.
- The difference between the past few centuries of breeding plants and animals and today's synthetic biology is the control scientists are increasingly able to maintain over the messy stuff of life, thanks to advances in sequencing genes and, increasingly, synthesizing them.
- They can make deliberate, precise edits to DNA through new tools like CRISPR or even create genetic matter in entirely new combinations.
- Yet synthetic biology's practical value is just as important, if not more so, than its pure scientific value. Instead of imposing ourselves on nature, as humans have done since the Industrial Revolution, we can harness it and shape it to our own ends.
- "We don't discover bridges or buildings," Vijay Pande, a general partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on biotech, told me in an interview earlier this year. "We understand them and we design them — which is where we're going with biology."
- "We can grow materials that create better products for the planet and better products for the bottom line," Gavin McIntyre, a co-founder of the biomaterials company Ecovative Design, at a SynBioBeta panel on Tuesday.
- But that is changing — both DNA sequencing and synthesis are now accelerating faster than computing power.
- Add machine learning to the mix, and the speed will only increase. In a paper published in Nature Communications last week, researchers found algorithms were able to predict how changes in a cell's DNA would affect its behavior and make recommendations for future biological engineering cycles.
- That could accelerate everything from the discovery of new drugs to the development of lab-grown meat, as computers help synthetic biologists truly program life like their counterparts already program computers.
- Synthetic biologists also have to overcome an ingrained public suspicion of modifying nature.
- A global Pew Research survey released this week found larger shares of the public believe genetically modified foods are unsafe to eat than those who believe they are safe to eat.