Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine would not have scaled without Ginkgo Bioworks. Reshma Shetty, co-founder and COO of Ginkgo – slated to go public via SPAC acquisition at a reported $15 billion valuation – explains how biotech innovation can build a better future now. Ginkgo's platform already serves industries from food and agriculture, to materials, to healthcare. Shetty acknowledges that engineering genes is a high stakes pursuit, and says Ginkgo is trying to pair the ambition of Silicon Valley with a "higher level of care" than consumer tech companies like social media have demonstrated. The key, Shetty says, is creating an unstable equilibrium – propelling progress but not at the expense of principles.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone, it's Bob. Today we're re-releasing an episode with Ginko Biowork's co-founder |
| 0:05.9 | Reschmachetti recorded in 2021. President Biden recently announced a new phase in the war on cancer, |
| 0:13.6 | what he calls a cancer moonshot where biotech will play a key role. The centerpiece is a new |
| 0:19.0 | agency modeled on DARPA called the Advanced Research |
| 0:22.2 | Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which is being headed by an executive from Ginko |
| 0:27.6 | Bioworks. This episode explains what synthetic biology is, the impact it's already had in fighting |
| 0:34.3 | COVID-19, and the breadth of innovation it's enabling, not just in health care, |
| 0:39.1 | but across multiple industries. Since the episode was recorded, Ginko Biowworks has become a public |
| 0:44.9 | company, and though its share price has suffered with a broader market in 2022, it remains a |
| 0:50.5 | multi-billion dollar enterprise. Rush Machete's lasting lessons go beyond science to |
| 0:56.0 | insights about how scaling doesn't necessarily need to follow a Silicon Valley formula. |
| 1:01.7 | There's a lot to unpack. Let's get to it. This pandemic was going to define how people thought |
| 1:08.8 | about biotechnology for the rest of their lives. |
| 1:12.7 | Biotechnology could either be something that people were afraid of, or it could be thought of |
| 1:17.3 | as something that helps provide the tools for fighting back. |
| 1:22.4 | Our mission at Ginko is to make biology easier to engineer. |
| 1:25.1 | We, in the next decade, can have huge beneficial impacts |
| 1:29.3 | to our food supply and how we grow and make our food, to our health and how we treat disease, |
| 1:35.3 | to our environment, to how we treat multi-drug resistant infections. Let's go make this happen. Let's |
| 1:41.3 | show the world what's possible with biology. |
| 1:49.0 | When the pandemic came to Boston in March of 2020, it really hit home for us. |
| 1:52.8 | Nobody had actually stood up MRNA vaccine manufacturing at scale. And so we launched a set of programs around MRNA vaccine manufacturing, |
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