Synthetic biology, for example, was employed to accelerate the production of Covid-19 vaccines. The product developers, which include organizations from tiny start-ups to pharma giants, are developing products and new manufacturing processes with synthetic biology across the spectrum of industry. Ginkgo Bioworks, which recently went public, has an all-in-one biofoundry that others can use to make synthetic biology products - much as Amazon supplies cloud computing services to many companies.

The tool makers include well-established suppliers to synthetic biology companies and others, like the gene sequencers Illumina and Pacific Biosciences, as well as DNA synthesizers, which are younger companies like Twist Bioscience and Codex DNA.

The industry, broadly, is divided into tools makers and product developers. In 2015, the total raised was $1 billion. Synthetic biology companies raised $9 billion from venture capitalists and initial public offerings worldwide in the first half of this year, more than the amount raised all last year, according to SynBioBeta, an industry newsletter. The money flowing in is still the clearest sign of commercial optimism. And no one makes the case more persuasively than Mr. But in the search for the proverbial next big thing over the next 20 years, synthetic biology is a prime candidate.

That idyllic future is decades off, if it is possible at all. “The potential is for civilization-scale flourishing, a world of abundance not scarcity, supporting a growing global population without destroying the planet.” “Biology and engineering are coming together in profound ways,” Mr. Synthetic biology, proponents say, holds the promise of reprogramming biology to be more powerful and then mass-producing the turbocharged cells to increase food production, fight disease, generate energy, purify water and devour carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The aim is to make such programming and production faster, cheaper and more reliable, more an engineering discipline with reusable parts and automation and less an artisanal craft, as biology has been. The underlying technologies for synthetic biology - gene sequencing and DNA synthesis - are on similar trends.Īs in computing, biological information is coded in DNA, so it can be programmed - with the goal of redesigning organisms for useful purposes. The optimism behind synthetic biology assumes that biology can now largely follow the trajectory of computing, where progress was made possible by the continuous improvement in microchips, with performance doubling and price dropping in half every year or two for decades.

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