49◼ DEBRIEF Bloomberg Businessweek November 11, 2019
shouldbeproudofGMOsatGinkgo.If youhavesomething
madewitha GMO,youknowit’sbeingmadewithbiology.
If youcareaboutwhat’sinyourfood,if you’rethekindof
personthatlooksata label,youprobablycarethatthings
aremadesustainably.Well,letmetellyouwhatthemost
sustainablemanufacturingtechnologyis ontheplanet:biol-
ogy.It’stheonlylarge-scalemanufacturingwe’vehadthat’s
playedwellwiththeplanetfor3 billionyears.Andbythe
way,I meanlarge-scale.Thinkaboutjungles.Thinkabout
industrialagriculture.
Biologymakesmorephysicalgoodseveryyearthanthe
autoindustryortheoilindustry,bya mile—andcompletely
renewably.BuyingGMOsmeansbuyingintothatvisionof
beingabletomanufactureeverythingrenewably. Make
everythingwithbiology.Weshouldbeproudofit.
Ifyou’rethinkingofyourselvesasgatekeepersofyourcode,in
a sense,whatsecuritymeasuresareinplacetomakesurethat
yourcodeissafe?
Extensive.I loveJurassicPark, butit isn’tlikea person
comingin,puttingthevialsin theBarbasolcan,andsneak-
ingoff.It wouldbehackingyourservers.Atthispoint,we
canprintDNAatGinkgo.YoutypeATCGGGintoa com-
puter,youhitprint,andthatpieceofDNAcomesoutofa
machine,andweputit intoa cell.If youhadthecode,then
youcouldprintit outofyourmachineandtakeourstuff.So
we’reverycarefulaboutthedataasset.
What’sit feel like to be on the brink of something so
game-changing?
ThemostexcitingthingformeisthatI juststartedto
soundlesscrazy.Wehavethis$120milliondealin thefood
proteinspace—animalproteinswithoutanimals—thedeal
withBayer,thedealwith[F.Hoffmann-La]Roche,some
ofthebiggestnamesvalidatingthat synbio—synthetic
biology—is the technology of the future.
What would a big win look like for you?
Animal-free products. That’s a really great opportunity.
Obviously, there are things like the Impossible Burger. But
we have this spinoff company called Motif FoodWorks,
which has the $120 million investment, and it’s doing
things like making egg proteins, milk proteins, and so on.
Everything’s in Version 1. And you play that tape out, that’s
an enormous opportunity from a sustainability standpoint.
Food production is a big, big greenhouse gas emitter, from
fertilizer all the way to the cow farts. And for people of
that persuasion, it’s an animal welfare issue. If we can get
products created out of yeast fermentation or plant-based
products that people are excited about tasting, that’s very
exciting for me.
What sort of applications are there for, say, cannabis?
We have a partnership with a large Canadian company
called the Cronos Group, a $100 million deal. We’re basically
programming cells to produce cannabinoids. It’s very sim-
ilar to what we did back in the fragrance industry. You get
cannabinoids—THC, CBD, and so on—by extracting the oil
from the flower of the cannabis plant, and then that goes
into things like vaping and edible products. The process for
doing all that growing is extremely expensive and requires
big greenhouses. What we’re doing is reading the DNA of
the cannabis plant and finding the part that encodes the
cannabinoids. We then move it into brewer’s yeast, brew it
up, and instead of beer, you get CBD.
Ginkgo has five co-founders. What’s that like?
I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago and
was like, “I’ve got this cool company, we program cells,
we’ve got five founders”—and he was like, “That’s a lot of
founders.”
Four of us were in MIT grad school together, all at the
same age; Tom Knight is the exception, he’s more like a grand
statesman. He was a professor at MIT and came up through
the punch-card era of computing. I have this black-and-white
photo of Tom with his master’s thesis: a refrigerator-sized
minicomputer. In the mid-’90s, he had this realization that
cells run on code. You can read and write the code. That’s
programming. He thought, “I’m one of the world’s best devel-
opers of programming tools. Maybe I can help?” But biolo-
gists think of it differently: “Oh, if I can make a little change to
the DNA, which might take me an afternoon working by hand
to turn one A to one T in the genome, I get to understand
biology better.” Tom’s like, “That’s like a zero to a one in a
computer.” If we have to do that by hand in an afternoon, how
are you going to program anything? We need a completely
new platform for toolmaking. And so the founders have
been working together since 2002 on the same problem.
So you’ve been together 17 years now, what’s the secret of play-
ing so well as a team?
I like biology analogies—we’re now more like an organism.
Reshma Shetty is doing management. Barry Canton is our
CTO.AustinCheis a jack-of-all-tradesandhandlesa lotof
thebigthingsthatcomeup.Wegetoutofeachother’s way.
Back in that beginning, there was way more butting heads.
But by the time we hit the scale button, we had all figured
out kind of who we were. That helped enormously. We don’t
butt heads nearly as much because of that. Barry was my
roommate and married Reshma right after we started the
company. It really was kind of like Friends.
Only with $4 billion.
Yeah, a little more on the line.
What do you think your technology looks like, say, 20 years out?
By then we’ll see a big expansion in the number of people
deploying this, probably in some unexpected markets. What
gets me excited is that it’s going to be really unpredictable
what the apps are going to be. As long as we keep making
the platform better, people are going to show up and want
some apps. It’s going to be fun, I think, to see all the differ-
ent things that come out. In the future—maybe 30 years out
or something?—it’s going to be all the nonbiological stuff.
Like, we’ll be brewing iPhones?
Or at least we’ll grow you a microchip. <BW>Edited for space and clarity.