SUZANNE BENN: Just a few questions about, your very interesting area of research.
When you were last here, you pointed out to us that climate change and
associated emissions was not just an environmental issue but an economic issue.
Could you just, briefly recap on that relationship for us please?
MICHAEL MOLITOR: greenhouse gas emissions are the largest source of waste that humans
produce on the planet by far – about 50 billion metric tonnes per year and growing.
If you have that amount of waste it’s a measure of inefficiency and also a measure
of economic inefficiency. It’s very hard to scale an economic activity
with that level of waste. So the point I made was that it’s not possible to scale up our
energy use using fossil fuels because the technology that we use, and the approach to using
it, is way too inefficient.
SUZANNE BENN: So your overall proposition is that if we use resources more productively
then we can address problems such as climate change but also perhaps other issues to do
with high rates of population growth, it’s this concept that synthetic biology, for example,
can be a real game changer.
MICHAEL MOLITOR: Synthetic biology is the ability to read and write DNA code. That allows
you to make synthetic genes, synthetic chromosomes, including entirely new synthetic organisms.
Now that’s interesting, because you can create organisms to do a lot of very interesting things
So the point I made about resource productivity
and the inability of fossil fuels to scale, you can correct those because the efficiency
gains that you get from moving to a biological platform are so much better that you can address
those resource productivity challenges. So synthetic biology is the ability to create
synthetic life at all levels of organisation.
SUZANNE BENN: In sum, how would you say that it relates to sustainability.
MICHAEL MOLITOR: We are unsustainable because one of the things we do is we produce a lot
of waste, and we’re inefficient with the way that we use capital, energy and natural resources.
Synthetic biology affords us the opportunity of being significantly more efficient,
and by definition significantly more sustainable. If you look at Uber and Skype and other examples
of companies that have disrupted large sectors, their ability to do so is largely a function
of the incumbent industries being incredibly inefficient – they’re inefficient with
capital, they don’t use technology well, so two guys like WhatsApp can create a company
worth $21 billion, with network effects, and disrupt very very large existing industries.
If you think about synthetic biology – I’ll give you one example, milk production. We
‘grow’ cows, we feed them plant protein, they convert that plant protein and animal
protein and into milk. But they’re extremely inefficient at doing it. They use a lot of
water, and huge fossil fuel inputs. What if you could genetically engineer yeast to ferment
milk proteins significantly cheaper than growing cows and with a nutritional value of the milk proteins
is significantly higher than a cow. So if you think about bulk chemicals, if you
think about medicine, if you think about energy, if you think about food, these are all areas
that witness huge levels of inefficiency, all capable of being disrupted, but on a scale
much larger than what Uber and Skype are doing to the existing incumbents.
SUZANNE BENN: What do you think the implications are for Australian business?
With synthetic biology, one of the areas that’s being followed quite closely is the ability
to genetically modify microbes that secrete fuel directly. We’ve been investing a huge
amount of money in getting genetic modification of plants so they can produce more plant oils
and more plant sugars to put them in a billion-dollar refinery to make fuel the old, traditional
way. That’s not very efficient. It’s not capital
efficient, because you’d have to build thousands more of these very large, inefficient refineries.
With synthetic biology you can genetically engineer a microbe and instead of getting
the microbe to produce more oil, you can get it to actually secrete fuel. In fact, there
are three or four companies that are in commercial-scale production doing that today.
SUZANNE BENN: Thank you very much.
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