#100 The Age of DNA: Ginkgo Bioworks Co-Founder Jason Kelly

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Jason Kelly, Lynn Tomman, Tom Knight
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Genentech
3. 10:00 – 15:00: mRNA Vaccines, Tom Knight

Notable quotes from "#100 The Age of DNA: Ginkgo Bioworks Co-Founder Jason Kelly"

• Careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone I'm Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be…

  about Lynn Tomman · at 0:16

• Us doing grad school together and then the fifth founder was a Prof professor at MIT Tom Knight and Tom was really the inspiration for starting g tom was a computer science…

  about Tom Knight · at 1:25

• From one organism to another and the very first products of this were developed by a company called Genentech and the first product they came out with was human insulin my…

  about Genentech · at 8:00

• Did it is incredible so some of the earliest product of Biotech you mentioned was insulin the MRNA vaccines or other products what is the range of products that now exist from…

  about mRNA Vaccines · at 11:45

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Tom Knight — Person · 2 mentions · first at 1:30
• Lynn Tomman — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:21
• Jason Kelly — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:29
  Tomman hi everyone I'm Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Jason Kelly Jason's one of the founders of gko bioworks gko is an R&D company which uses…

Companies & orgs

• Ginkgo Bioworks — Company · 5 mentions
• Genentech — Company · 1 mention · first at 8:03
• Bayer Crop Science — Company · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

• mRNA Vaccines — Concept · 1 mention · first at 11:51
• CRISPR — Concept · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone I'm Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Jason Kelly Jason's one of the founders of gko bioworks gko is an R&D company which uses genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create new products for their clients they want to program sales as easily as we program computers their work spans diverse markets from food to Pharmaceuticals and I'm excited to find out more about biotech and what the next generation of innovation looks like many believe that it will rol uiz both products and

1:02 Manufacturing and that it will be as revolutionary as the internet welcome Jason and thanks so much for our conversation today yeah thanks for having me on Lyn my pleasure Jason what inspired you and your co-founders to start Geno we met actually as grad students at MIT we were doing our phds in bioengineering and there were four of us doing grad school together and then the fifth founder was a Prof professor at MIT Tom Knight and Tom was really the inspiration for starting g tom was a computer science professor at MIT so not biology starting in the early 1970s so I have like a great black and white photo of Tom with his master's thesis which was this refrigerator sized mini computer so he had gone from programming mainframes to these mini computers and then he was a computer architect and so when computers went to chips he taught the semiconductor design course at MIT for many years died in the wool

2:01 electrical engineer computer scientist mid1 1990s Tom has this Insight that DNA the atc's and G's inside your cells is fundamentally digital code and we can read that code with DNA sequencing like genomics Human Genome Project and we can write that code with DNA synthesis DNA printing Tom was like well if you can read and write code and you have a machine that'll run it which is sort of how we saw a cell oh that's programming and so he moved he shifted from computer science electrical engineering and started growing cells in his lab in the computer science building at MIT and sort of scaring his computer science colleagues and really shifted his focus and he came to it with an engineers's mentality that was really the beginnings of what today as gko this idea that well if we approach DNA as code and and think of it as something that can be programmed maybe we can make some progress on using cells to address some

2:55 of the big problems in the world so you're programming cells how do you do that I'll give you an example right bacteria would have like call it like a three million letter genome so what is a genome well a genome is just all the DNA that encodes for that organism give you a sense of scale like a human genome's like three billion letters of DNA okay so bacteria much smaller three million just one cell and if you wanted to make that bacteria do something new basically what you need to do is find a spot in its genome where you can open up the genome and put in some new DNA and so if you've heard of something like crisper for example you might have heard of like crisper is a new technology that's basically a way to find a certain location in a genome like a a g CCC aa oh I just found that site let me open the genome there and so you open it and then you put in new DNA code so if you wanted for example we have projects to

3:50 make animal-free meat proteins so things like milk proteins and egg proteins except without cows or chickens you might put in 10,000 letters of new DNA code and then when you grow that cell up it'll start to make that protein from the animal so think of it almost like putting new code on your phone or something it gives it a new capability and it'll start to run that code so you start with an idea of what code you want to change and from there it's basically trial and error yeah what we'll do at Geno our business model is think of it like an Amazon web services companies come to us with an idea for what they want to sell to do and our job will be to ultimately design the Genome of that cell to make it do what the customer wants and you're correct we'll try many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of genetic designs to do it we don't ever write a DNA code just out of our head you're really pulling from nature

4:46 you're learning how biology does this by going out and reading the code in nature and then finding the parts that'll be useful for this project putting them together and moving them into a yeast or bacteria or a single cell alien host depending on what the customer wants us to do and then you take those cells or that bacteria and what do you do with them I'll give you an example of the animal free meat in that case the customer would run a facility think like a brewery what is a brewery right it's a big metal tank and you put in yeast cells you add sugar and water basically like food and liquid for the cells and they start growing and as they grow in the case of a brewer's yeast they'll turn that sugar into ethanol all and they'll also make like a bunch of flavor components and all the things you think of when you drink a good beer what our customer would do in the animal free meat space is they'd have that similar

5:39 yeast except now it would have the DNA code for a meat protein and so when it grows up in that tank it actually produces in this case A protein that makes blood red called hemoglobin it makes that protein then you add that back into a plant-based veggie burger and suddenly it smells right tastes right Cooks right that sort of in ingredient is one of the things that's making these sort of animal-free burgers taste so good nowadays and so that's an example of a project in the food space we believe just like you'd have only one or two operating systems to serve many different apps in computers or you have Amazon web services in aert or run many different types of websites we believe you can really have these kind of large platforms to enable you to program cells for any application that's the idea but when you're talking about this as a platform you're not publicly Rel releasing all of the codes for other

6:32 people to use you're more like a consulting firm that has a platform to do Consulting you're doing R&D under contract to different companies 100% right the only caveat is when we do these projects for customers we'll retain some reuse rights on the data and learnings and genetic code so that we can make it available to Future customers that is one of the core ideas behind the company is we want to get better as we get bigger and so one of the ways we do that is what you just brought up we have this learning and data that we can share across projects as long as you're on our platform with multiple customers and then the other way we do it is the actual way we do that programming of the cell requires a lot of lab work my background getting a PhD in bioengineering at MIT it's like five years of moving liquids around by hand on a lab bench it's a bit tedious so what we've done is we've moved a lot

7:27 of that onto Robotics and Automation and once you do that you get a scale economic think like making cars or semiconductor chips the more of it you do the lower the cost per unit that's what we've been seeing we call it our Foundry that's the other way we improve with scale is like more automation can we take a step back what is synthetic biology and biotech biotech really got started in 1978 there was to fellas Herbert Boyer who developed the original technology for basically cutting and pasting a gene from one organism to another and the very first products of this were developed by a company called Genentech and the first product they came out with was human insulin my dad's a type 1 diabetic actually and prior to Genentech human insulin you got insulin from pigs it wasn't perfect it wasn't human protein it had side effects and so what Genentech did was they took the actual Gene for human insulin cut it pasted it

8:24 into eoli bacteria and then they grew it up in a tank and produced human insulin so that was the very first biotech drug but Lynn the key is like it was cut and paste so you couldn't make changes easily to that particular protein design so it took a lot longer for other types of drugs to come out eventually you got things like growth factor like EO and things like that what synthetic biology is is building on that to say I don't want to just cut and paste something I want to be able to design a new piece of DNA the core technology is called DNA printing you go on your computer this is God's truth you go ATC GGG you hit what you want you hit print and out of our Labs here or companies like twist biosciences in California you get that piece of DNA Built For You chemically a t c g g and then they ship it to you and then you install it like I said earlier into the Genome of a cell and you can

9:19 get a whatever Gene you want from whatever organism you want that's synthetic biologies this larger scale ability to design in particular using DNA printing to do that and what is the range that that can be used for even if you just look at Geno customers I mentioned we're doing stuff in animal free meat we also just announced an expansion of a partnership with a bear crop science this is the big a company biggest ad company in the world the project we've been working on with them to give you a specific example is in the area of nitrogen fertilizer production and then there's tons of work in Pharmaceuticals as the other big category where you're seeing like a lot of activity those are some of the biggest commercial opportunities are really in those categories how about drugs are the covid vaccines from fiser bio entech and madna using a similar process yeah so if you listen to like Stefan bonsel at madna talk he'll

10:12 explain how they have the ability I think he said it took two or three days for them to come up with the design for the vaccine once they knew the sequence of covid-19 so H how how did they do that and the idea is well once you knew the Genome of the virus you could identify the particulars of the spike protein and things like that you had a sense of what it looked like and then you could essentially design the way the MRNA vaccine works it basically takes like a little fragment of the Corona virus and shows it to your immune system and then your immune system turns on and you're ready in the event that the covid-19 virus shows up to take it out so that ability to essentially treat the virus as code required DNA sequencing and then the ability to design an mRNA vaccine which is not a small molecule it's not like aspirin or whatever it is literally a piece of RNA code that's being used to turn on your immune system

11:06 I think there's actually an interesting point here we think of it as if the vaccine companies are the ones that sort of get us out of covid it's not exactly accurate at the end of the day what's getting us out of this is our immune system and what the MRNA vaccine allows you to do is talk to your immune system in a language it understands you can now for the first time really talk directly with the biology of your body in the language of mRNA and DNA and so what we did was we basically went and begged we're like hey immune system here's a message please get us out of this and it did it is incredible so some of the earliest product of Biotech you mentioned was insulin the MRNA vaccines or other products what is the range of products that now exist from from biotech and synthetic biology I'll tell you the current big commercial ones but then I'll tell you some fun ones big commercial categories are Therapeutics

12:07 that's the dominant like you just said all your protein basically your protein based drugs so antibodies things like insulin now you're seeing all this genomic medicines with mRNA and Gene therapies I think that whole category is just going to get bigger and bigger that'll keep growing biotech today makes up I want to say it's about half of new therapeutic drugs going into trials and then in agriculture you've historically seen a lot in GM crops and these have largely focused on things that are useful to the farmer increasing yield and pest tolerance and things like that I think you will see coming up a lot of activity in agriculture around reducing the carbon footprint of a and so things like the nitrogen fertilizer project we talked about a minute ago but also direct carbon capture today there's not a market for this but I think you see a pressure coming and so you are seeing the big ad companies in fact we

12:58 mentioned bear we're going to be working on a project in this category to say hey can we actually do more carbon capture by engineering either the bacteria or the plants themselves to capture more carbon so I think you'll see that as the growth area in a but that's the other big category and then you see like a lot of fun stuff we have projects in the flavor and fragrance industry for example to make scents that you would normally extract from Plants being able to make those less expensively or more renewably we work in the Cannabis industry so I think one of the things land that's coming is we saw this with computers like back when Tom Knight my co-founder started in computers in the 60s like main frames you know what they were used for the military launching missiles like all these ridiculously expensive things because the cost of compute was unbelievable but as they improved nowadays what do we use

13:47 computers for sending cat pictures you know right like whatever we want right that's what's I think people should start wrapping their heads around for synthetic biology and designing cells is as the cost Falls you're going to see people Express themselves with Biology you're going to see artists and designers coming into biotech and you're going to see new consumer products like a glowing patonia that are biotech products that's a thing I think people have to start thinking about I think it's really exciting and it makes the technology more approachable also if I asked you what do you dream of accomplishing at gko what is your big dream so really our mission our mission at the company is to make biology easier to engineer and we want to make that so that ultimately as many people as possible have the ability to design biology to let humans flourish and do amazing things that's our Dream many

14:37 people I can go out here because they have a certain application in mind they really want to work on carbon fixation or cancer or whatever it might be and we have our customers all have those interests but we as a company don't do that right we're a platform our business model is like think like an app store we get a royalty on when people develop those applications we get a piece of the value of their application but we are eles are judged by how well we enable others to design biology and so that's what I dream of right is that we've made it easy to do someday but aren't you more like a consulting firm that does work under contract for clients yes this is a really good question ly yeah so at the moment a customer comes to us they ask for a sell to do something it is kind of similar to like a Consulting Arrangement like okay we have a team of scientists whose job it is to do that and they have access

15:29 to our platform our Robotics and our data to deliver that to the customer someday I would like the customer to just directly use our platform so that your scientist just like today your computer programmers use Amazon web services but the technology maturity is not there yet to have that work but someday I would love to have that work and that was by the way the history of Amazon web services right originally only the Amazon Engineers were using it and then they basically built the interface clean enough like bezos's famous was like the software teams will only talk with apis from now on at Amazon to force a level of standardization between the services and the teams who are developing the website well once that was clean enough that team developing a website didn't have to be in Seattle anymore they could be anywhere and so suddenly the cloud computing was born as a real industry that we would like to get there but

16:21 today as you say it's only our scientists using it but I hope to change that in the future okay so you would like to create eventually I'd like it to be your kids today anyone can get on the web and design a website and do that you know like eventually that's where I'd like it to get it should be that anyone could design biology someday so your dream then is essentially to create the standardized tools that anybody could use you got it okay that's exciting Jason before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with is there anything else you'd like to touch upon that I haven't already asked you what should I have asked you that I do did not one thing we think about a fair bit on the RIS topic is the people that are building the platform there's been a long history on the technology side of the backgrounds of the people building a technology getting embedded in that technology so

17:13 specifically like the first heart valves being too small for women's Hearts the original Kodak film didn't resolve black people well right because it the picture of what they used to do while the film was a white family so you have this history of people having not being able to see around the corner on things they haven't experienced and so one of the things we're big on at gko is a strong worker ownership culture in the company everyone's a shareholder here we have super voting shares for the employees and we want to have people at the company who come from backgrounds that might have been negatively impacted by biotechnology previously you know the global South has had a hard time in biotech and agriculture as we just talked about like with infectious disease and covid I think military applications of Biotech are going to be a thing coming up we want to have veterans at the company and

17:58 underrepresented minorities groups they're on the short end of the stick on many technological changes and so we do try to make sure we have a diverse set of folks actually building the technology to help us see around those Corners that ends up being quite important I believe in the long run for the tech absolutely what are the three takeaways I think from my standpoint we're sort of entering the DNA age right like if you think of like the last century as as at least the last half of the last century is the electronics age reading and writing DNA and the pervasiveness of biology in our lives I think it will mean that this ends up being more transformative than Electronics was because Electronics is the world of information so all those computers what did they really impact media Finance Telecom like the information Industries what didn't they impact hamburgers building materials all these things the physical world and so

18:49 biology is like computer you can program you can make it do new things but it doesn't move information it moves atoms so I actually think it's going to to the average person have a bigger impact than computing that's number one number two I think Jurassic Park is Right biology is wondrous and you have to approach it with humility so as people as more people get the ability to design biology approach it with humility but be respectful of how powerful it is and then the third if we're successful and we do make this available broadly you know if you look at kids they're born with wonder about biology they really are like you cannot stop a kid from being obsessed by I have a 10-year-old seven like dinosaur Obsessed the zoo the whole thing right and then we teach them that's not important we're like no no no no no the computers are important let me teach you how this machine works we push them away from that fundamental like

19:42 obvious wonder they have for biology don't do that don't do that anymore the kids who grow up this generation and preserve that Wonder they're the bioengineers of the future they're going to own the next Century so make sure your kids are keeping that love for biology Jason this has been great thank you thanks Lynn if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaways dcom

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "#100 The Age of DNA: Ginkgo Bioworks Co-Founder Jason Kelly"?

In order: 0:00 Jason Kelly, Lynn Tomman, Tom Knight; 5:00 Genentech; 10:00 mRNA Vaccines, Tom Knight.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Ginkgo Bioworks, Tom Knight, Lynn Tomman, Jason Kelly, Genentech, mRNA Vaccines. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#100 The Age of DNA: Ginkgo Bioworks Co-Founder Jason Kelly"?

The episode runs 20 min; the transcript is about 3,896 words in 23 timestamped sections.

More from 3 Takeaways

• All analyzed episodes
• Books mentioned on 3 Takeaways
• People mentioned on 3 Takeaways
• Topics mentioned on 3 Takeaways