Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and in this episode, General Partner on the Biofund, Vijay and I talk all about the field of synthetic biology with Jim Collins, Professor of Bioengineering at MIT and one of the pioneers of the discipline of synthetic biology.

We talk about what engineering and designing biology really looks like when instead of engineering electrons, you engineering toggle switches for genes, including the scientific story behind the creation

of that very first gene toggle on and off switch. We also talk about the disciplinary differences

and synergies between how biologists and engineers see the world, what the engineering

and design principles, techniques,

or approaches that work best when applied to science, how that looks different when building a

company in the space and thinking about, for example, platforms versus products, and even how

it's changing education in the field all the way down to middle school. So let's start at the

very beginning. How did the field first begin to emerge?

What's the sort of founding story behind SynBio?

You know, the very beginning really was the island of misfit toys.

So if you go back to the 1990s,

the dominant story was the genome effort.

And what's interesting is the biomedical engineers did not play a major role in the genome effort.

In biomedical engineering departments, the curriculum, the research interest, more or less

stopped at the tissue level and was only beginning to get interested in the cellular level.

In the late 90s, however, as the genome effort was really picking up speed and beginning to produce

these parts lists for different organisms, the leaders of the genome ever began turning to the

engineers and increasingly to physicists to figure out, help them figure out how these parts put

together.

Can you explain what the missing information specifically was?

So the sequencing would lead you to the ability to annotate the genome, to identify

...