There’s one company in particular whose origin story is important to know: Genentech. It’s a broad theme you’ll find in biology generally: we’re much better at borrowing life’s tools that already exist than we are at building brand new ones.
#TWIST BIOSCIENCE HOW TO#
We’re very good at Copy-Pasting DNA, but actually writing brand new DNA sequences is harder.Ĭopy-pasting existing DNA sequences that we already have is something we’ve more or less figured out: cells already know how to do it, and we know how to hijack cell machinery to do that work for us. Specifically, it depends on whether you have some already. How do you make DNA? The answer is, it depends. So before introducing them properly, I want to take you through a primer (pun absolutely intended, IYKYK) of how we create this stuff.
In a rather literal sense, Twist is a DNA manufacturing company. Today, I’m going to tell you all about them. Emily Leproust, Twist isn’t a traditional biotech success story – it’s the beginning of a new kind of founder-led, product-oriented bio companies that look much more like tech startups than they do life sciences bets. In that sense, they are a manufacturing company.
#TWIST BIOSCIENCE CODE#
And they produce outputs – sequences of DNA, called oligonucleotides, whose code gets compiled by cells into molecular products and molecular work. They start with inputs – the A, C, T and G chemical letters that make up the base-4 code for life on earth. It’s one of my favourite companies in the world.
I’m going to tell you about the platform behind them, a factory for building the DNA strands upon which all of life science is subsequently abstracted.
That’s why today, I’m not going to tell you about Ginkgo Bioworks, as awesome a company as they may be. Today we catch occasional glimpses, like this bioengineered fireproofing material for airplane wings, reminding us: “There’s no reason we can’t build a better version of anything, with the right tools and the right founders.” And the arms race is on to build those tools. There’s no ceiling to how well-crafted the world’s information and communication streams can be logically arranged that’s why we say that “Software is eating the world.” If the solarpunks have their way, the next thirty years will show us the same thing is true for physical stuff, materials, fuel, and all kinds of work that can one day be bioengineered.
#TWIST BIOSCIENCE SOFTWARE#
The past thirty years of software have conditioned us to think about value creation through the lens of the infinite leverage of logic. The movement has a name: synthetic biology. It’s the idea that we’re going to build the future by growing living things. ART BY ヤツデ, FROM HTTPS://Last Friday, when Ginkgo Bioworks went public through a SPAC merger, was a joyful day for the synthetic biology community and for an ideological movement that you can best describe as “ Solarpunk aesthetic.” In contrast to today’s parade of software IPOs, which are usually great companies but not particularly radical in the grand scheme of things, Ginkgo Bioworks and the Solarpunks have an actually wild and fascinating vision of the future that could be.
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