Ep. 46: John Cumbers on Synthetic Biology ("Synbio") - The Language of Life, Computational Biology & the Quest to Genetically Engineer the Organic World

Today is the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, and the 20th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome.

A perfect day to talk to John Cumbers.

John is a molecular biologist. He is the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta which promotes synthetic biology to build a more sustainable universe.

This episode is a primer on "synbio", the scientific breakthroughs and commercial applications of reading, sequencing and editing DNA to engineer the built world around us by manipulating the organic process of biology.

In 2012, the discovery of CRISPR technologies led to rapid progress into a field that has now $10bn in annual investment and unicorn startups such as Ginko Bioworks.

The applications range from food production to materials made from microbes, space travel and human health - anything biological to organize the built world.

We discuss potential regulatory challenges of synbio, the bad public perception of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) - while some regulatory challenges reduce adoption in places such as the European Union, non-human facing applications face few regulatory bottlenecks. Of course, human-facing applications have the same limitations as healthcare or pharmaceutical and face strong bottlenecks.

Does synbio need a network state? There are certainly unsolved challenges, such as the application of synbio to food production in places that need it the most - something currently not possible because of unit economics.

Synbio is certainly a nascent field with tremendous potential.

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