Is Ginkgo’s synthetic-biology story worth $15 billion?
Jason Kelly has promised a manufacturing revolution with DNA. Just don’t ask him to make any products.
By Antonio Regalado
August 24, 2021
The Boston genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks and its CEO, Jason Kelly, have been spectacularly successful selling a story: that synthetic biology will transform the manufacture of physical products. What computers did for information, Kelly says, biology will do for the physical world. Instead of making a chemical from petroleum, why not have Ginkgo’s multi-floor “foundry” in Boston’s seaport design a yeast cell to manufacture it instead from a broth of sugar water?
I first saw Kelly, a boyish figure in a tight sport coat and sneakers, give his pitch a few years back. It was the same talk he’d been giving successfully in Silicon Valley for years. One slide featured a photo of an Apple computer, an iPhone, a camera, and a metal watch on a gray desk decorated with a potted plant and a black swivel lamp. “What’s the most complicated device on this table?” Kelly asked....
...Of course, it’s the house plant. The point is that biology can make just about anything. Think of its incredibly sophisticated miniature machines, like the swirling flagellum that helps a bacterium swim. In Ginkgo’s hands biology would become programmable, revolutionary, and insanely lucrative, just like those famous tech products in the slide. “This is a much more powerful manufacturing platform than any of those other things,” Kelly said....