- It's been 250 years
since the start of the Industrial Revolution,
and the impact on society has been tremendous.
But the impact on our planet has been devastating.
- We have a limited window
where we can sort of reverse course
and if we miss it,
that's not gonna be good for any of us.
- What if we could naturally breakdown chemicals
polluting our water,
or sustainably eliminate waste crowding our landfills?
What if I told you a transformative technology,
synthetic biology,
could help solve many of the major industrial
and ecological problems our society faces today?
- We are at a point right now
where we can stand on the shoulders of science giants.
- And one of those giants is Ginkgo Bioworks,
a company determined to propel the field to new heights.
- If we put our minds to it, I think there's a good chance
that we can use biology to solve
really, some otherwise pretty intractable problems
that we have right now.
- If I sort of think about the world at large,
like, a lot of our problems stem
from the way we make stuff today.
And so, what biology is fundamentally really good at,
it's good at making stuff.
- In a nutshell, synthetic biology
is cracking the code to nature's language, DNA,
and using it to grow new things.
Let's break that down a little more:
- Inside of every living thing, there are cells,
and essentially in every cell there's a blueprint,
an instruction manual,
and that's its DNA.
- If we can understand how DNA instructs cells,
we can copy or rewrite that DNA to do new things.
Grow meat in a lab,
engineer crops that need less water,
even develop organisms that break down harmful chemicals
polluting our land, air, and water.
But there's one major problem—
- We don't really understand, in detail, how cells work,
but we're getting a lot closer to that.
- This is Tom,
a synthetic biologist and computer engineer
known as the ‘godfather of synthetic biology.’
And this is Tom's office.
Anyways, back to DNA.
Just like software code instructs a computer what to do,
DNA instructs cells what to do.
DNA is composed of four letters:
A, C, G and T.
And those four letters are strung together
in infinite combinations that make up all of nature.
- We're taking apart these complicated biological systems
and we're putting them together in different ways
that nature really isn't doing on its own.
- Sounds simple, right?
Well, DNA code combinations are endless,
and in the past, doing things by hand
made our ability to program cells very, very slow.
- The lab before looks like people in white lab coats
writing things down and trying to keep track
of the mistakes that they made.
- You could spend weeks to months on a set of experiments
and at the end of that,
you may or may not have a working engineered cell.
That was a core limiter in synthetic biology,
our tools weren't very good.
- So Reshma, an MIT graduate student,
and some classmates decided to start a company.
Their idea? Build a lab that would use robotics,
automation, and machine learning
to accelerate the process of programming cells
and experimenting at scale.
The result? Ginkgo Bioworks.
- It was the very first time somebody had really sat down
with kind of an engineering mindset and saying,
“Okay, we need a standard way of doing this.”
- So you might be asking, how does it work?
- When we program a cell,
there are essentially four stages to the process:
Design, build, test and learn.
This facility here is where we can sequence DNA
and verify our biological designs.
- The first step starts
with writing DNA code on a computer
using information pulled from nature.
The DNA is then printed and put into a cell
to test out how it works.
- And so this facility is designed
to be able to do that at very large scale,
and to do many different samples in a pre-automated way.
So, that gives you a lot of information
about what cell designs worked and what didn't,
and that information about what worked and what didn't work
is hugely valuable for that fourth step in the cycle
called ‘learn.’
- A large fraction of them will fail.
And so that's why being able to perform thousands
or even millions of experiments at a time
really is critical.
- Because our mission is to make biology easier to engineer,
there was no one application
that sort of was the overall motivator.
And so one of the things we're really interested in
here at Ginkgo,
is opening up our platform to more and more companies
who are interested in leveraging the tools of biology
to solve their problems.
Everything from food
to agriculture
to personal care
to environmental remediation to biopharmas.
- And one of those companies is Allonnia.
- If there were no humans on our planet today,
within about 500 years, nature would heal itself.
- Allonnia is harnessing synthetic biology
to tackle major environmental challenges,
utilizing tools that already exist in nature.
- Ginkgo is an incredible catalyst
for the work that we're doing.
One example of this is we're working on a biosensor,
and this biosensor is meant to detect a contaminant.
And so, through the power of their codebase
and their foundry,
Ginkgo was able to start with testing one trillion constructs
to get to a protein that will detect this compound.
That's part of the Ginkgo story,
which is enabling the acceleration and volume
of what you can do and what you can test
and what's possible.
That development and innovation
really opens up a whole new frontier for solving problems
that are not possible in the chemical and mechanical world.
- The fact is the things that you can pull off with biology
are unlike any other engineering discipline.
There's no other area where there's just so much to do,
and so the idea is that we are trying
to make our platform available to everyone
who has an application of interest.
- What I tell people sometimes is, you know,
“You can be almost guaranteed that in five years
you'll look back, and nothing will have changed.”
And in 10 years, you'll look back and say,
“Oh my God! Everything has changed.”
- The problems that we have are solvable.
There is a world that legacy waste can be remediated,
and that our climate will support a healthy population.
- Reshma and her co-founders are determined
to make Ginkgo's platform available
to any aspiring cell developer or entrepreneur
who are interested in reprogramming biology
to help solve problems both big and small.
- The fact is you only have one life.
The most precious thing you have is your life energy,
and what you choose to pour into it.
For the first time, we can start to see the path there
on how to design biology more systematically
and address some of the problems we're facing
and create a better world.