November11, 2019
◼ DEBRIEF
One of the leaders in the buzzy synthetic biology space is Ginkgo
Bioworks, a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in
investment and a valuation of $4.2 billion. CEO Jason Kelly spoke
to Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber about how his
disruptive technology could change the world, from the cell on up.“The most exciting thing
for me is that I just started
to sound less crazy”
Jason
Kelly
Chief Executive
Ginkgo
Bioworks Inc.Photograph by
Tony Luong47JOELWEBER:It’sbeenafewyearssinceItookabiologyclass.
Remindme,whatissyntheticbiology?
JASONKELLY:Thinkofacell.It’skindoflikealittle
machine that runs ondigital code, very similarto a
computer, except in this case the code—instead of zeros
and ones, it’s A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s. The cell reads that code,
and it does all the things that a cell does in our body—or a
bird’s body or bacteria in a river. They’re all running on that
digital code. We can read that code with DNA sequenc-
ing and can write that code with DNA synthesis or DNA
printing. If you can read and write that code, and you have
a machine that’ll run it, that’s programming. So synthetic
biology is programming cells like we program computers,
by changing the DNA code inside them.
What are you doing at Ginkgo Bioworks?
We’re essentially a platform that allows cell programmers
to program cells to do different things. We have partnerships
with Bayer in agriculture, for example—a $100 million joint
venture to program microbes that would produce fertilizer
for crops. That’s an example of what you would program a
cell to do. We’re sort of like cell programmers for hire. Our
job is to make the cell do what our customers want.
We bought a 100,000-square-foot facility in Boston. It’s
lots of robots essentially doing work similar to what I did
in my Ph.D. If you get a Ph.D. in bioengineering at MIT, it’s
basically five years of moving liquids around a bench. We’ve
taken that kind of physical activity and moved it onto robots
to bring the cost down with automation.
What was an early application?
Our first customers were in the fragrance industry. You
get mint oil from mint leaves. We would take the genes from
mint by reading the DNA code of the mint plant, find the partof it that encodes the mint flavor, print out the code from
the mint plant, redesign it a little bit, move it into brewer’s
yeast—like you use to make beer. And then when you brew
it up, instead of beer coming out, mint oil comes out. It’s a
lower cost, a more stable supply. Our job was to produce
that yeast for our partner, and then they would sell the mint
oil and we would get a royalty.
What do you do with all that mint oil?
Mint is one of the biggest flavor ingredients out there.
There’s a whole industry that does flavor and fragrance pro-
duction; New Jersey is sort of the center of that world.
Where has your business gone since those first customers?
Things like food ingredients. Enzymes for making things
like cheese. I’ll give you a little more detail on this partner-
ship with Bayer as a good example. So Bayer came to us
and they wanted to work on the problem of nitrogen fer-
tilizer. The way you get it today—I’m a chemical engineer,
andthisistheprideofchemicalengineering—isyoupull
atmospheric gas through a big chemical plant. You burn nat-
ural gas. Globally, 4% of greenhouse gases goes to making
ammonia, nitrogen fertilizer.
You put it on a field: Half goes to the crops, half goes in
the river; we all get to eat. You’ve got a local environmen-
tal problem; you’ve also got a global greenhouse gas prob-
lem. But otherwise we don’t produce enough food, right?
This is true for most crops, except for soybeans and
other legumes, because they have microbes in their roots
that run that same chemical engineering process. They pull
nitrogen out of the air, and they make fertilizer for the plant
for free. You use way less fertilizer for those crops.
Remember crop rotation? That’s what that was, rotating
through crops that fertilized themselves. But corn, wheat,