Ginkgo Bioworks, Future of Biotechnology, ML, & codebase -Jake Wintermute – Learning with Lowell 178 – YouTube
Interview links
https://www.learningwithlowell.com/ginkgo-bioworks-future-of-biotechnology-ml-codebase-jake-wintermute-learning-with-lowell-178/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHG42wxNmg
Summary
The video is an episode of the “Learn with Lowell” show, where Lowell speaks with Jake Wintermute, a developer evangelist at Ginkgo Bioworks, about biotechnology, machine learning, and Ginkgo’s platform. They discuss the importance of values in the biotech industry and the parallels between the software and biotech industries in terms of intellectual property. They also touch on the cultured meat industry and the values-driven community around it.
Transcript:
(00:00) welcome to learn with law I’m Lowell Australian entrepreneur startup advisor and your host for the show every week we discover and speak with expert scientists leaders and artists today we’re joined with Jake wintermute developer evangelist at Ginkgo bioworks his mission is to grow biotech ecosystems to diversify the bioeconomy and to provide education documentation support for developers bringing new projects to ginkgo’s platform Please Subscribe it’s quick painless and tells Google Gods this is a show with Merit
(00:24) let’s stay curious learn about Jake and giggle bioworks on this episode of learn with all the show so that’d be fun to just hear a general update on how your cult children of meat is going it’s going great thanks for asking it’s good yeah we’re uh yeah it’s everything that I’ve hoped for uh the the the meat the meat space has taken over the world uh we’re uh we’re everywhere you know everywhere you go people are made of meat and uh that we call that a success that’s a factual statement that all
(00:57) these things are not uh incorrect the world is full of people who are full of meat at least for the foreseeable future um yeah I thought that was really uh you gave a really great talk at New Harvest I don’t know if anyone uh listening it was tuning into it but it’s uh you you can communicate a very like authentic crashing interest to build something that can help out a lot of other people there’s this saying that um the world is made better by people who grow trees who shade they won’t enjoy now at the same time you do get to
(01:25) Tinker and play with what you’re building too but like the idea behind at least what I’m gathering for what you’re working on is really to get other people to start you know living in the shade and Building Things and innovating with biotechnology yeah that’s right I love I love that about New Harvest I think it’s um it’s a really impressive community so this is the this is this is this this is the cultured meat uh sort of Industry meet up it happens every year um oh well pandemic I know it’s sad it’s a
(01:58) sad song yeah it’s really it’s it’s a really it’s really interesting as a sort of Gathering Place they’re I think they’re they’re having a lot of success in shaping the the culture of the of the cultivated meat industry there’s a lot of just Mutual support a lot of openness uh it’s a very values driven uh industry and I you know it didn’t have to be that way right I think there’s also um there’s a lot of money on the line uh frankly when it comes to cultivated meat if that was going to be
(02:32) successful um and you could imagine a much more a much more closed a much more competitive uh industry but the the you know the reality of like a lot of people who want to work in that space and they want to solve that problem um you know they’re not uh they’re they’re they’re they’re very values driven it’s very values driven people and I think it’s important to keep that at the at the center um of that industry yeah because it’s hard because it’s a really hard game right it’s not yeah
(03:04) it’s not gonna it’s not gonna be easy um and I think you know people people who are working in that space they they need that those values to sustain them especially in the biotechnology space there’s a I was listening to a person give an argument that a lot of the innovation in the last 15 years was because the patents ran out from the 70s and 80s of like gen Tech and stuff so then people can start iterating on it great I don’t think there was any basis for from the 70s and 80s for like crispr
(03:28) and stuff like that so I don’t think entirely like that idea entirely encapsulates a lot of the Innovation that’s happened in the last 20 years but it would be interesting to see like to what percent is it just like pants are now opening up and things people can just go wild with new ideas again for yeah I so that is I think that’s that’s an interesting question um I don’t know the answer I you know like certainly like IP still very important for for the Biotech Industry um it’s uh underlies a lot of a lot of business
(03:59) models I do I often think about how IP played out in in programming and in and in computer code uh because there was a there was a time when uh computer programs were very hard to write very expensive uh to develop um had very specialized applications uh and they were they were controlled by by a kind of an IP there was a really strong incentive in the early days uh to make sure that you had you know total total control of all of the IP that was coming out of your computer code uh and what happened in that industry
(04:42) was that it like it just it just got too easy it just got too easy too fast people were writing uh too much code too many different ways to solve problems uh you know if you’re gonna I could you’re gonna patent a for Loop and somebody will just write a uh you know a loop with a different structure that solves exactly the same problem and there’s so there was there they’re just stop being value uh in trying to protect uh specific designs uh in software and instead what happened in software was that the the
(05:16) value came from uh doing it the fastest doing it the best and building a building a product that people actually wanted and that that became the differentiator in in software and the sort of holding the intellectual property around solving a problem in a particular way became much less important so it seems to me inevitable that bio is eventually is is going to go the same way uh there’s no reason to believe right there’s no reason to believe that uh a particular drug is always going to cost billions of dollars and decades uh in in
(06:00) development time to to produce it is going to get faster uh and it is going to get cheaper and eventually it’s going to be fast enough and cheap enough that um uh it will it will stop making sense uh to build your moat around exclusively IP yeah how is your work right now um helping to accelerate that um that future yeah that’s so that’s a good question so how do we get there is that that’s this is the question right how do we how do we get to this future where biology is as easy as computer code right and I
(06:33) think it’s I think it’s important to sort of as I um get excited about the possibilities right I think like it’s important to like reality check right like we’re not we’re not there we’re not there yet right biology is still very hard still very hard tech development times are still pretty slow very expensive um there’s a lot of uh you know a lot of regulations and and with good reason to make sure that we’re doing things safely uh and so on right so that just to just to like establish
(07:08) the Baseline I don’t want to I don’t want to make any crazy promises about about biology turning into software tomorrow um but I do think that where I work at at Ginkgo bioworks I do think that we we see the path to make biology easier to engineer and to do it uh consistently uh following a kind of a kind of a Moore’s Law scaling right I do I think that we’ve we’ve sort of locked in the feedback loops that we need to lock in in order to turn biology into a discipline that gets easier every year and gets gets
(07:53) exponentially easier and cheaper every year right so I do I think that I think that is a sort of it’s a big deal right you really you sort of you can’t understate the power of these these kind of feedback loops in developing technology and I do think that we’ve got it at gingo bioworks and how we’ve got it is so first of all it’s scale it’s found Foundry scale and Foundry integration so that’s like that’s classic economics right so if you do bioengineering um it’s very expensive but if you do more
(08:25) of it then the unit costs go down per operation right like that’s just that’s the Industrial Revolution everybody knows that it’s been been true for a really long time but if you so if you can build a Foundry at scale you can bring your unit costs down in order to make that work you need to serve many many different customers right so it’s not you can’t justify building a scaled up economical version of The Foundry for just a couple of projects right you have to you have to think about doing hundreds of
(09:01) biological projects in order to reach that scale which brings down those unit costs um and so in in and so in Ginkgo we do that by working with Developers so we think of ourselves where the where the organism company we engineer the strains we transfer those strains we license those strains to our customers and the customers are the ones who take those strains and use them to build products right so this is an important innovation in the ginkgo business model where uh we don’t we don’t have to make be good at making all of the
(09:34) products because our customers do that and so that enables this scale it enables this feedback loop that makes biology easier to engineer the last part of the formula is the is the code base we call it the code base so this is this is just the accumulated know-how uh and the data that comes from running a lot of these bioengineering projects so it’s kind of it’s It’s common sense it seems kind of obvious that as you put in the Reps in a particular technology you get you get better at it but a lot
(10:08) of Biotech companies are built as kind of one-offs right they say I’m going to build that’s platform I’m going to create this one one product and then I’ll shut it down because my products my product’s done and that’s what my that’s what my company does so at at Ginkgo we accumulate this code base we get better at the cell engineering with every every new project that we do and that’s part of this flywheel flywheel that’s going to make biology easier to engineer and that’s eventually
(10:34) it’s going to get us to the world uh where biology is is is easy enough uh to engineer that it is it’s something that can be a part of every uh part of every economy part of every uh every country something that could be solving problems everywhere in the world how um is it just computational in terms of the code base and as you can tell by my podcast learning with law I like to learn so I’m just curious how do you build that reinforcement model is it just bioinformatics or is there machine learning in there on a high level I
(11:06) don’t expect you to give me the algorithm on a high level um I so yeah it’s a good it’s a good question right it’s it’s a um it’s an abstract concept right it’s so what is a code base it is uh it’s accumulated biological data yeah um and it’s accumulated uh process engineering know-how right so it’s not it’s sort of it’s not really one thing and it’s not really one category of data uh but it is sort of it is uh everything you learn about what works in a in a
(11:43) particular uh type of bioengineering project and what doesn’t work uh is creates something that you can you can build on uh to reuse in a new in a new project yeah is it um is it like muscle memory I’m just trying to like if I was a startup I’ll try to replicate some type of feature like this to have my own type of platform how would I go about doing it using yours as a reference it seems very similar to Chad GTP but like chat TV you know lets people I think play with a little bit more but at the same time uh people open
(12:16) source and try and figure out how they do that I don’t know if anyone’s open source and tried like reverse engineering how git go bioworks does their database uh portion of it but I’m I’m curious just like how they go about learning it if you can’t answer that’s fine but I’m teaching myself machine learning so like how things learn is like even more on my mind right now how do you learn is it just the results is it like how the like how you do the data as well like uh do the experiment and
(12:40) then the success of the experiment and then you keep all that you keep all the tracking and then you you learn off of that as well like what all what all types of things would you want to hold on certainly that’s part of it right like that like like yes right like that that’s one thing that you can do right like that’s yeah absolutely right we classic machine learning classic machine learning that is that is a um something that you can apply in biology uh to solve a particular biological problem right so you can say okay I’ve
(13:08) got over here I have a bunch of enzymes right and I have a bunch of different sequences for these enzymes a bunch of different designs that’s that’s input uh for uh for for a machine learning model and then over here I have I have performance data right so how how well did those enzymes work uh you know how were they were they stable did they express at a high level were they specific right so everything that I everything that I want to know about performance um and absolutely and you yes you train that as a in a machine learning model
(13:42) and it will and it helps you make better enzymes right so that’s that like totally totally can happens it happens in biology so now that’s that’s within the context of one of a one particular yeah project yeah that makes sense um is it all within the building of this type of platform is it all the experience and knowledge generated from what you do in-house and license I don’t get the results from it or is there anything like which PT I always get the gpp part messed up um uh is there any element of like uh
(14:18) learning off of what’s published or publicly available as well yeah well we never I mean there yes there’s they’re they’re publicly available sequence repositories um those are those are very valuable absolutely right you can go into genbank for example and you find a lot of um a lot of sequence data in there that you can that you can use to um to train an algorithm yeah absolutely yeah that’s interesting and so as a tech evangelist how do you fit into the ecosystem of Ginkgo bioworks like yeah so I I mean this is I’m doing this
(14:56) right like this so this is this is what I do this is my job it so okay I get people excited I want to get people so get people excited absolutely uh I want to uh uh I want to make uh ginkgo’s platform more approachable I want to make it easier for developers uh and so that means uh I do a lot of listening uh talk to people who are in the very early stages of building out a biotech company um not sure exactly you know what their Tech stack is going to look like a lot of them think oh you know maybe I’m
(15:29) gonna uh I wanna create my own lab right I’m gonna hire my own post docs get my own laboratory machines and I’m going to build out my technology that way right that’s uh that’s the old model right that’s the that’s the classic Model still still a very popular model for early stage biotech um talk to them about what they what they want to do and try to align ginkgo’s offering with with the technologies that they’re that they’re trying to develop right so the sort of the idea here is that now
(16:03) instead of if you’re if you’re starting an early stage biotech company instead of doing it yourself doing it with your own hands getting your own lab uh instead you can uh develop on ginkgo’s platform right so you think about us as like uh as an operating system right upon upon which uh uh your your biological r d project can run right you don’t uh you a good programmer a very talented programmer is capable of coding their own operating system they can but why would you why would you do it right that’s it it’s to in many
(16:46) cases it’s a solved problem and sort of Reinventing the wheel of putting in all of that infrastructure um is not necessary but to kind to extend that the sort of programming metaphor a little bit further uh if you are going to build your app on top of an operating system uh you benefit from a rich ecosystem of of documentation for how that operating system works right so you know you’ve got you know the input and output functions uh you know there whatever there’s a Discord server where you can you can answer you
(17:26) know very technical questions about how to run apps on that operating system you know how it performs um there are other people who have coded with it before you can take classes uh you can become a certified developer right so they’re so they’re they’re all these things that that Tech platform companies do to make it to make themselves easier to use for software Developers so the next so the question is what is that what does that look like for Bio right what is what is this sort of comparable Suite of of documentation and resources
(18:00) that a biological developer needs in order to make it very easy for them to use an existing uh platform like ginkgo’s instead of going and trying to reinvent the wheel uh for their uh for their Tech stack makes sense um do you have any like uh there’s more like a minute question but I’m always curious like what allowed one group to be successful while other ones didn’t uh ginkgo’s been one on my radar and I’ve been keeping an eye on it for some time now but there was definitely other people that tried doing what they were
(18:30) doing as someone on the inside what do you think you know you get to see a lot more than anyone else gets to do I think from what I’m hearing the the focus on making it easy for people to develop it’s very much like an apple type Focus as well which allows them to be successful so it seems like one of those criteria that uh probably gave you guys an edge over maybe other people who were trying to build something similar but what do you think uh from an inside perspective that allowed you guys to have the edge
(18:52) all right when you know other people and probably even now you know get funny and whatnot to do something similar yeah that’s a really good question I so I think I’ll give you okay I have two answers I have two answers I have one that’s maybe a little bit more fun and one that’s less fun but is maybe as closer to the truth right okay so I think the the like the the fun answer the clever answer in my opinion is that uh it was a really good idea for Ginkgo to become the organism company and to focus on the organism as the
(19:31) product and not be the Product Company not try to take all of those organisms and carry them Downstream and use them to develop all of the possible products that you can make with Biology I think that was a that was a really good idea to focus on on the organism as the product um and the reason is because biology is really big there’s so much that biology can do that it’s really not possible for one company to get good on the product side and bringing all of those different products to market right so if you’re gonna oh you’re gonna
(20:16) you’re gonna bring a pharmaceutical to Market and you’re going to bring an agricultural Strain To market and you’re going to bring food flavoring to Market uh you know and it’s um they’re just they’re just completely different markets right they’re just they’re it’s just they’re completely different Industries um and so being good at all of those things it’s impossible for any for any one company there’s a temptation to want to own the full stack right to want to have to be like oh wow you know
(20:49) biology I can do this really here’s this really cool thing with Biology I want to do all of it I want to capture all of the value I’m going to make I’m going to make a biofuel and then I’m and I’m also going to process the biofuel and I’m also going to sell the biofuel uh or uh I’m gonna I I’m gonna develop a you know a cell therapy right and I’m going and I’m going to take that cell therapy you know all the way through clinical trials um and that’s and conventionally that’s how
(21:17) that’s how biology has always worked right you’ve you’ve you’ve you’ve sort of focused your Tech around one one vertical and the idea was that you wanted to you you sort of you carry that product as far as you can uh in order to capture the most value so that’s the that’s what Ginkgo I think is very smart about that right so we actually we can actually be good at all of the synthetic biology at all of the cell engineering uh we can be good at all of it and there’s a lot of internal Synergy so
(21:48) when you get when you get good at one kind of cell engineering that carries over to being good at lots of other different kinds of cell engineering even kinds that have totally different find Patrol applications in the real world right so that so that works specializing as the organism company Works doing all trying to do all the products that doesn’t work that’s a fun answer yes uh the boring answer is it’s just execution right it’s just execution it’s just really Tech is just really really
(22:24) hard and you just have to get a million things right and work your ass off all the time uh uh and there’s just no there’s just no easy there’s just no way around it right it’s just it makes sense no no not a fun story right but a lot of a lot of hard work by a lot of people over a long time um was there a point of execution that you thought was quite ingenious oh I see it all the time I see I see ingenious execution happening all the time that’s why I love my job uh I love my I love I love
(23:00) um being being close um to the to the technology and just being able to see just all of the really cool uh stuff that’s happening um yeah I absolutely love it I absolutely love it now a lot of times I can’t talk about it right yeah a lot of times I can’t talk about it and that’s not fun and it’s but that’s also there I think this is a it’s something that I think about right it’s something it’s something that I think about in this job because on the one hand like yeah no you can’t talk about everything
(23:32) like we this is we like we’re working in biotech right like customers they come they come onto the platform they their IP is very valuable to them uh you know they’re they’re entitled to privacy and so on also we have IP that’s an important part of our business model um and that’s all true on the other hand uh you know if you’re a platform company people have to know what you can do right people have in order to in order to use you effectively right so there’s a there’s there’s a certain amount of of
(24:04) communication uh that is you just can’t you just can’t escape it right so there’s there’s I think that that’s an interesting tension um that we’re that that we’re we’re working through and I’m I’m I’m I’m hoping to to sort of to get to a place where we can really have a sort of a a Sandbox right or or um a a a space for for Developers where you can people can sort of ideate freely and not worry too much about that that’s the sort of Ip restrictions and the proprietary data that is
(24:47) um uh you know still a very important part of the biotech ecosystem so how would um how would that even work because I I wonder the same thing all the time like how do you have there’s a what is it called it’s not gitlab is it gitlab there’s a tech startup there’s Tech business it’s not startup it’s like billion dollar company I think it’s not being a startup at that point the uh that it’s they have a it’s all open source uh open source and then they monetize like premium features so like
(25:18) if you just want to come in and like plug in and not pay anything like manage it like self-host it essentially um you can just run off and do that but if you want like more premium services that uh they have the expertise in doing it then you can you know work with them to do it um I don’t know how that would work in the biotech space I don’t know if anyone’s doing something like that yeah it is it’s a hard question and I I don’t know some some things that I’m I think about though are uh maybe there’s like a
(25:42) there’s like a front end and back end uh distinction that is that is relevant here so um think about uh like I’m like a um like a microprocessor right think about it think of think about a computer chip that is uh extremely expensive to to make to design and create piece of tech it is for a very broad Market of developers and they all they all need to know everything about how to use it right if you want to sell computer chips uh you need a very rich documentation on you could say on the front end right
(26:28) if you like about how how to use the computer chip right what what are what what are what are the input and output features uh of a computer chip you don’t have to tell people how to make a computer chip factory yeah the design the architecture of the computer chip factory that can stay secret right you don’t you don’t you don’t have to tell people what your factory looks like in order for people to use the chips effectively uh and so we’re not used to that in biology right we don’t we don’t we don’t
(27:02) tend to make that sort of input and output uh distinction in biology but it really but you see it everywhere in Tech right like there’s ever there everything everything in software everything in Hardware uh there’s the documentation for how to use it it’s completely different from the documentation on how it’s made and it works beautifully in Tech right and so if maybe there’s an analogy to that um in in biology where you can have a you can have a service with total Clarity total transparency
(27:35) about how to use the service what it can do um while still uh you know keeping some uh uh keeping the back end proprietary that makes a lot of sense um so you see you work a lot of different biotech teams essentially that are going to be using your platform gigglebox platform um to to build their products is there a product that you haven’t seen that you’ve been waiting for someone to come up with like I don’t I watch The Talk where you’re talking about um how you really excited about antibiotics but um
(28:10) I don’t know maybe I’m sure you maybe get antibiotic people in there but is there something that you haven’t seen yet that would be like well that’d be neat I’m waiting for this and anyone Step Up oh man all that of course yeah all the time biology is biology is so big you know it’s funny that it’s like we actually we have like we have so many programs running now that it’s I don’t even uh I had like I don’t even like I don’t know I don’t know them all right I don’t know I don’t
(28:35) know them all and I could be like I had I like posted on on the on on the internal slack the other day I was like oh hey here’s a neat idea maybe maybe we should uh you know and and sure enough you’re like yeah we’re already doing that right it’s already happening um so that’s like that’s that’s a funny thing but yeah it absolutely happens um it happens all the time I mean like in I guess like in like in a big big picture right or like like a long long term thinking um I would love to see more
(29:04) uh more synthetic biology in um in plants for example um that’s not something that we do all our farming like molecular farming or something or just broad like kind of like using I like I want to use I want to do I want to engineer actual plans right I want to engineer trees right like I want to engineer I want to have Avatar world yeah I want to make Avatar world that’s what I want somebody somebody bring me Avatar world uh as a project and I’m I’m I’m into it uh I know I think that um yeah I don’t I think that I think
(29:44) that sounds fun I like I like sort of I like new organisms I like non-traditional organisms I like sort of non-traditional models model systems um I think cultured cultured wood is really fun uh so the idea that you can grow you could grow plant cells in culture and then turn them into uh you know free form uh wooden objects uh I think that’s a that’s uh that’s a really inspiring uh concept and and I think in general I’m interested in in sort of moving biology away from traditional organisms and traditional model systems
(30:32) into the the sort of real world uh if you like right like there’s there’s so much biology out there where you wish you could be like oh like here’s a real like this is a here’s a a berry right oh here’s a wild berry but it’s poisonous uh let me I just wanted let me just let me just knock out some of those genes that make the poison and now I have a real bearing right and like that’s such an easy easy concept except the fact that nobody knows how to work with this particular plant or this this particular organism
(31:06) right so I think that’s uh that’s like something that it inspires me is um thinking about sort of like just like next gen uh uh projects but like honestly for now like there’s there’s still a lot of work to do in uh in like the relatively Easy Tech of you know growing growing microbes in culture uh to make uh to make bio products now I remember from one of your talks they said E coli was your favorite but it sounds like you’re moving away from that or at the very least excited about um building or working with some other
(31:45) things I haven’t I haven’t heard too much about um using plants in that way outside of like uh molecular farming where they use it they’re like engineer the plant to and this is like if there’s like engineering like corn to be bigger corn I’m not talking about that I’m talking like like using it I assume something like yeast or E coli where you can engineer the plant organism to do like some type of function or to build some type of molecule yeah that’s right that’s that like so
(32:13) that’s that’s sort of that’s where the industry is today right like that’s that’s that’s right and and which is like it’s that’s hard enough right like it’s not uh but uh yeah absolutely right there so the idea of focusing on a particular protein a particular enzyme a particular molecule um maybe um you know doing some doing some metabolic engineering uh on a strain uh on a live stream uh you know so that it uh maybe it has a beneficial effect on the microbiome um the scope of projects that are
(32:54) you know ready to go today yeah this may be a dumb question and I just don’t I have not read about it at all how would you make plants do what yeast and uh E coli can do because I think one of the benefits of E coli for instance it’s just like everything’s been ripped out but its ability to do what we want it’s very like used system and we’ve like brought it as small as possible to do what we want it to do depending on what you’re doing how would you do that with plants um I think people so people sometimes
(33:20) refer to that as uh domestication you know the the process of taking um a microbe that um hasn’t really been used very much in the lab uh and uh and and you know finding the right conditions to make it work in the lab or uh or evolving it or genetically modifying it to make it easier to use in the lab um in the case of plants I mean so you can either you could either focus on cell culture techniques so a lot of a lot of plants can be propagated in cell culture so you can take you can you know you can you can take a cutting
(34:03) and and from that isolates themselves and then and then grow those cells in a test tube just like like you would an E coli or a yeast for example um and you know genetically modify them or or study them in a test tube and then go back to to to cultivate a full live plant from those from those cells so some some some plants are amenable to that to that kind of handling um in others there’s there’s no like there’s no easy way uh uh to do it right so I think there’s like if you wanted to think about
(34:44) like what is that what is that what does that world look like you know where we’re where we’re doing sort of we’re doing a you know a lot of a lot of engineering work and plants I don’t know I don’t know right maybe there’s like maybe there’s maybe maybe we need like robotic systems for for for cultivating like actual plants right and that’s sort of that’s much harder to you need a much more sophisticated robotics to grow a plant that has a is big and has a lot of 3D structure versus
(35:12) you know a test tube that you can just kind of Squirt and move around um but uh I don’t it’s I don’t know it’s cool it’s it’s it’s it’s cool to think about right that what is is there is there is there is there a plant Foundry um in the future yeah something that’d be that’ll be making itself amenable to to engineering so it sounds like it’s the protocol itself well finding the right organism that can be domesticated uh and then developing a protocol that allows it to
(35:43) have the high success rate for people to engineer upon it is like what would you what would you need to do to have that be equivalent to like Easter or E coli yeah that’s right and that so that’s something that I think about I think there’s a real like there’s like a product Focus thinking that I think is really useful when when you’re looking at a new microbe right so it’s sort of it’s it’s there’s the like the questions that it that a a typical scientist would act would ask right which are things like
(36:14) can I grow it in a test tube is it safe is it easy to to genetically engineer you know is it easy do I understand it well is there a lot of data on it right so like all of all all of those scientific considerations but then there’s also product Focus considerations which are uh what does this do something that that nothing else can do and that people want uh and is it is it sort of versatile enough that I can that I can offer that to a hundred Developers right and that’s the sort of like the the like a ginkgo perspective
(36:57) on on an organism like that is that it’s really right it’s like it is it’s not enough that it’s just amenable to use and it’s even not I mean maybe it’s enough that it does something really really cool that nothing else can do but then does it do a hundred different things that are really cool that nothing else can do um and like that’s a good that’s a good platform organism right that’s a that’s a good Foundry organism does that make sense is um is it pop is it possible like turtles
(37:30) all the way down where someone uses uh uh like uh Ginkgo bioworks as a turtle and then on the top of that Turtle uh they have their own platform technology that they’re building and then someone has a platform technology that they build off of that platform protector so how many turtles do you think of platform technology could you make starting with ankle fireworks at the center or at the bottom hmm before it’s just like it’s just like a straight line on top of a platform yeah hmm I don’t know that’s I don’t know that’s
(38:03) that’s an interesting that’s an interesting question I don’t have a good say to it I I so I guess one thing that I would say is that I I think it’s I think it’s important um when you’re when you’re structuring r d for biology um you have to be humble uh about how biological r d is very very hard to do and that really constrains your options when you are when you want to organize it effectively so and which is to say that like Laboratories have existed for a really long time and they exist for a reason and the reason
(38:58) is that they are they allow sort of human experts to to centralize and coordinate a lot of really complicated functions that are very difficult to to to to to to sort of modularize uh uh and and um and separate so in that sense there’s a lot about biology is is different from software where like like a uh you know you can you can you can you can split up code Farm it out to 100 different servers they’ll all execute it independently and then bring it all bring all of those functions back together and then and reintegrate them
(39:49) centrally and and computer code will sort of will do that for you right so you can you can which gives you a lot of flexibility in how you how you design your code right like you can centralize it you can you can distribute it you can build it up in layers um in in biology there’s all there’s often there’s a lot less flexibility in that in that sense so which is to say that like if you know the The Foundry The Foundry works as well as it does because we’re able to centralize and integrate a lot of really complex processes that
(40:23) they just need to be centralized and integrated and if you wanted and if you wanted to you you you couldn’t split them up and send them to a hundred different Mini foundries uh it just wouldn’t work biology biology just doesn’t let you do that right and so in that sense there’s a there’s there’s there’s um um maybe there’s it’s like it’s useful to think about it sort of a front-end and a back-end distinction I think that the sort of that like the organism is the product is is the right way to think
(41:03) about it and so like if there were if there were a Foundry that was going to be sort of if there were a platform that was that was built on top of Ginkgo the the organism is the is the sort of is the channel right or the is the point of contact between what Ginkgo does and what ginkgo’s users do the organism is this is the sort of right point of contact and sort of other other biological things that you could imagine doing you know using The Foundry are our best sort of left inside The Foundry because they are they just have to be
(41:42) built in a certain way to work well hmm so it sounds like there’s one Turtle like one main turtle and it’s the organism that is basically the how big the shell can be in terms of what it’s one Turtle yeah so that you what what you want is a you want a really big turtle that lots of people have lots of that lots of people can ride on yeah uh I was talking to someone the other day and uh they’re talking about how they there’s a bunch of different ingredient companies that are doing B2B essentially in the solid space and uh so
(42:13) you have like one for this type of protein this one for this type of protein one for this type of protein it’s like well what if you just had like uh you know give you an organism and then you know feed it have it create different types of protein and one giant Foundry uh place and so then that’d be that’d be two turtles because then you could just output uh the proteins to different people who would then use those to make products and and um like Tyson’s Chicken and stuff like that so I think you can get one more Turtle
(42:38) possible I see I think I see what you’re getting at I think I I see what you’re getting at and I like it and I do I think that that’s that is right and that’s it there’s this is an interesting part of my job so how I would I would sort of rephrase that and I would say that it’s uh because Ginkgo exists uh biotech companies should be structured differently they should be they should be built differently in in the early stages they should have so they should have different technology deliverables that
(43:10) they that they prioritize in order to to take advantage of the fact that ginkgo’s Foundry lets you lets you Multiplex efficiently right and I think I think a protein space is is a sort of is a really good example of that whereas uh you know once upon a time if you’re if you’ve made a bioproduct company and your bio product was a protein that was it you want you focused on that one protein right and that made sense made sense to focus on one protein because it was really hard it was really expensive took a really long time you
(43:42) had to do it really well um but because Ginkgo exists you don’t have to do that anymore you don’t have to restrain you don’t have to constrain yourself to thinking about one protein maybe it’s better to think about 50 similar proteins right uh engineer uh cell lines to make all of them right now some of them aren’t going to work well that’s that’s that’s biology um but some some of them are going to work really well right and because of the economics of scale because of the economics of integration uh
(44:20) testing all of them is is just going to be more efficient it’s going to be more more efficient use of r d uh time and money than having 50 different companies each each one uh chasing one individual Target right so this is I think I think I think it’s a really good example of a of a sort of a ginkgo powered uh company and now if and then if right now but if you were going to build that company it would also it’s also important to keep in mind that you want to be good at you know at turning all of those proteins into
(44:52) products right so you wouldn’t just pick 50 50 random proteins right you would pick you would pick 50 proteins that had you know similar applications or a similar Market or that you thought that you could build a company that would be really good at um getting all of those proteins to to a customer who wanted them yeah that’s interesting I I’ve been I’ve been wondering when there’s going to be like consolidation because there’s so many uh so much specialization going on and it sounds like people aren’t really making
(45:23) use of Ginkgo fireworks in this all like space then or I don’t know maybe they have other factors that are limiting them but um I’ve been wondering when is there going to be some type of consolidation so we have like a McDonald’s where instead of just getting like a burger you can get like a whole cell egg sweet of you know sell egg potato fries so so like soda you know you can do sell like uh you know coffee I don’t see like you could just go into a place and you could have like a little small microbrewery behind the glass like
(45:47) kind of like Subway so you can see your food being made like not all of it of course but like just a little sample uh I’ve been waiting I’ve been wondering like who’s gonna bring that all together because right now it’s just like I’m gonna I’m gonna have this protein I’m Gonna Fill that need I’m gonna have this protein fill I need I’ve been wondering like how’s the consolidation gonna work and then can people do like this Turtle thing that we’re talking about which for
(46:06) The Listener sound a little eccentric um but you know exciting times I think I don’t know I haven’t seen anyone really move in that direction uh I keep suggesting people do stuff like that as well build in the midwest uh it’s so much cheaper out here gingle by works could be 12 times the size but at the same time I don’t think uh uh costs are a constraint in the Boston area I think you get all the talent stuff um for I do but I do I think so like what you’re talking about is I think it’s it’s going to be a big part of the
(46:31) bio economy yeah right but it’s going to be a big part of the bio product bio economy on the product side right so the like the Midwest absolutely right like any anywhere there’s farming anywhere there’s agriculture anywhere there’s biology there’s going to be bioproducts so they’re they’re definitely should be bioproducts companies and they should be based in the Midwest and they should take advantage of all the competitive advantages that the Midwest has in the bio product space right so it’s like get your you
(47:01) know I don’t know whatever your agricultural byproducts or your your you know your Dairy waste streams or um people in the midwest know better than I do right like that’s kind of that’s kind of the point right but I know that there’s I know that there’s a lot of opportunities there and so and absolutely the bio economy should be located there right and so but what so what that’s going to look like it’ll be there’ll be a there’ll be a Midwest based developer that can recognize those opportunities
(47:32) they say right so they they know a really a particular product really well right so they say I know I know something that here’s something that the dairy industry needs right or here’s something that the here’s something that the AG industry needs or here’s something that uh I don’t know what midwesterners like a Rancher dressing right to have a really good ranch dressing recipe how dare you that is gonna sell in the midwest right I’m in a bio produced ranch dressing and only it has to be done in the midwest
(48:02) because only I know my customers um huge upper right huge opportunities so those all of those can exist right and so what but what they’re they’re gonna be they’re going to use ginkgo’s platform right so they’re gonna they’re they’re gonna come to Ginkgo and they’re gonna say ginkgo I need this I need I need an organism that makes me ranch dressing that makes me um uh uh you know that turns uh agricultural or you know Dairy waste uh into a cosmetic uh I need an organism that um you know replenishes the soil on a in
(48:39) a particular type of farming operation right or or whatever it is and and so and and Ginkgo is going to be the organism company that that provides the the sort of the enabling biotech but it’s going to be though it’s going to be the midwesterners who who may end up making those products and they’re gonna capture most of the value from those from those organisms right because that’s where the that’s on the on the on the product side um that’s where you you just you need this sort of distributed bio economy
(49:12) where where where everybody can be building to the to the to the strengths of their particular region and their particular industry yeah I think the chip metaphors is really apt given how like everyone’s trying to re restart and do stuff like that to counteract uh like you know Taiwan and China given like there’s only one there’s like one uh Corporation in Thailand not Thailand uh Holland that makes us like can make the um a specific machine that you need to make chips and so then people buy from them
(49:42) but then the software to make the chips is from America and uh then putting it together is really like like 60 in Taiwan it’s a um granted like that’s a very limited because it’s just chips like we’re talking like some uh much more complex in terms of like the different things you can do though chips are extremely complex as well anyone who’s doing chips out there I don’t mean to just you know despair despair you um but it’s also a unique opportunity nowadays with uh that because for uh
(50:05) coming back to America in terms of those types of things um I love to learn I’m curious what do you um what are you learning right now it could be work like it could not be work related I just want to like pick your head in terms of uh what are you learning about what am I learning about oh man I don’t know if that’s grammatically correct what do you what are you currently learning what am I currently learning about let’s see I am I get I get so like big picture is uh I’m learning a lot about business
(50:37) and about marketing uh I’m a I’m a scientist by training um you know I came into this job uh not a lot of Industry experience um and um that’s that’s the that’s like been this the steepest learning curve for me is the the sort of like as a scientist right you like you sort of you you really Center the tech right and you really you think that it’s like okay I’m just I’m gonna invent this really perfect piece of tech and then that’s it I’m gonna I’m gonna I’ve got
(51:10) it right now I’m I’m rich right I’ll just give it whatever I don’t know I’ll sell it to some company or whatever who they’ll turn it right turns out right and especially in biology the business side the product side really really hard extremely extremely uh uh part a lot of hard work very requires a lot of um planning and focus right it’s not there’s sort of nothing automatic about how a piece of biology gets gets turned into something that that people actually want uh and so I’m learning a lot about how
(51:42) that that that part of the process works these days is there a specific aspect of marketing ourselves that you’re currently having troubles with or they’re current um chewing through I can get basically recommendations or someone or someone listening could help maybe more questions um I’m interested in I’m interested in hot in in sort of high-tech marketing I’m interested in um uh making making con Concepts accessible to people who are very smart uh I’m interested in uh sort of how how
(52:21) to how to convince people who are uh who are very smart and very good at what they do that uh you know that I have something to offer them right that there’s that there’s that there’s actually a there’s a another way to approach their their problem that um uh maybe wasn’t available uh in the past and and to sort of do that without um belittling them right or or or or disrespecting their intelligence right because I do I think that that’s that sort of uh happens a lot right like what we’re offering is a it’s a it’s a
(52:57) it’s a big deal right like it’s a it’s a pretty it’s a pretty disruptive reality um the like the the truth is that a lot of the old way of doing biotech r d is is obsolete or it’s going obsolete really fast and I want to make sure that I can I sort of get get that message to people who need to hear it um but in a way that is that is that is sort of empowering to them right it makes it and makes it makes it clear that there’s like a there’s a real opportunity here um to do biotech in in a in a new way
(53:36) um that is going to be a sort of a new a new tool in your in your r d uh Arsenal and not not not so not something that means like you know you’re not as as good at genetic engineering as I am yeah it sounds uh similar to some some people in the Midwest and their thoughts on uh autonomous cars it’s like why do I need a Thomas car I drive so well um but I think there’s a the the elements of doing that in well actually a quick question is and do you do you still self using the knowledge and like like let’s say I was a a
(54:13) customer like we’re talking this way in terms of point of friction or is it like making content so they can like documentation so that they can understand themselves like is are you looking to learn so you can make better written content or is it so when you meet have these business meetings you can better understand what they need and like potentially facilitate that need with Google bywords yeah I think that so that that’s a good question so like the normally the the way this business is done is face-to-face meetings
(54:43) right like that’s that’s right I have a book for you then that’s how that’s how it happens it’s a lot of the it’s a lot of that and so we and we have we have really really good business development people uh who who can take those meetings and Technical Business Development people all right and so and that’s a lot of work um now I’d like to make that easier uh I’d like to make that faster right it’s that that’s that that it’s a very um like the pipeline yeah yeah yeah right it’s a very it’s a
(55:16) very high touch right a very very human expertise focused process um and I think we can I think we can simplify it I think we can make it happen faster with other with with these other resources with with documentation with content um that is gonna that that sort of simplifies how we communicate our offering um so that it doesn’t have to be done in you know many hours of face-to-face business meetings so I think that’s that’s a possibility I also think that it’s I think that there’s something sort
(55:48) of magical about about technical documentation I think that if you if you if you do it right then it’s like not only not only do you just describe what you can do what your what Your Tech what your platform is capable of but you empower the people who read that documentation to use it in surprising ways right so I think that’s that’s the sort of that’s like that’s the that’s the enabling layer right and so if you like to go back to uh like the chip documentation for example right or like
(56:26) an operating system documented the people who build they don’t know all of the applications that are going to come out yeah of that of that software and like you know 99 of the value that is Created from those from those Tech platforms is created by developers doing things that the platform you know Engineers never thought about never thought was possible I understand I follow you yeah and so like that’s like that that’s that’s like a that’s that’s exciting right like that’s a real it’s a whole nother layer
(57:01) of like of of creating value yeah I think a book you would enjoy is never split the difference every scientist I recommend it to uh says to change her to live I’m not I don’t know if I’m allowed to reference the individual examples but uh it helps a lot is what I’ll say and if you read it and you hate it I’ll I’ll give you money back like I’ll literally uh I think you’ll like it a lot of the stuff that you’ve been talking like how you speak and how you formulate your questions now uh you’re like you got the
(57:29) foundation there I think it’ll just give you like the extra Edge to like get the most out of those meetings um I don’t know how you guys do onboarding new people but uh one thing that I’ve always liked to do I have like documentation when I onboard people so they can just like read in 10 minutes what some people would spend a day to explain something to someone something to someone and so uh one thing that I have them do when they’re like through the process they understand the component or whatever they’re gonna be
(57:50) working on is I have them uh rewrite the documentation was there anything that was not clear or whatever so everyone who comes in is like refining the documentation and making even more clear as everything goes on I don’t think about Works does that but uh additionally or alternatively I think that if you just like let a bunch of like college kids edit with like igem and said like hey here’s your you get like a free pilot up thing whatever to make your igem competition uh protein and then you have them read
(58:16) it and then um just let them let them be if they have questions they’ll hoard you with the questions then you can refine the documentation based off their questions so like your crowdsourcing the pain points of of a confusion yes absolutely right like that’s like that’s that’s the dream right that’s the that’s the Dr like for every for every tech company the idea of you know community crowd-sourced you know self documentation right like that’s an engine right like that’s a really uh that’s how you know you’ve
(58:48) you’ve made it uh as a platform technology when you have a community of people who are who are not only like not only like improving your documentation and like and like actively telling you what they want from you uh but also also training each other uh absolutely absolutely right like yeah huge huge win huge win dream dream scenario for me for me and my job is to build a community like that yeah it sounds like uh igem and stuff like that would be an easy you know take the documentation hand it to him to see how
(59:22) they get confused but um I don’t know those are just my thoughts never split the difference check it out let me know anyone listening in if you have ideas on how to help let um throw me away as well what are some books you recommend people check out doesn’t have to be related to this stuff uh that could be whatever you think people would enjoy reading basically this Saturday the way I think about it you can subject anyone to some books to read and they must read okay I do books to read set here let me I’m going to wheel
(59:47) myself back to my bookshelf here I’ll grab a couple of examples where is it for people watching there is a I mean for people listening he there’s a behind him there’s like the like a the ginkgo biworks blue and a bookshelf and so he’s literally grabbing books just for people listening in so you can get like a play-by-play the room there’s a red couch and there’s some really nice uh our pieces on the wall because that’s David goodsell that one that’s the one that looks like a cell
(1:00:21) I’m a big fan uh all right so here’s a couple that I just I just pulled from my shelf this is a feeling for the organism uh this is a biography of Barbara McClintock by Evelyn Fox Keller uh Barbara McClintock uh biologist uh responsible for uh discovering uh jumping jeans transposons so these are pieces of DNA that have the ability to um cut themselves out of a genome and and and move themselves around and they’re very important in biology they’re um they were discovered in the context of of corn and these sort of
(1:01:02) these sort of multi-colored corn where you know we I probably you’ve seen these in the midwest I don’t know uh where you have corners and each kernel is a different color uh and they’re in there this is uh transposons and so she was um she was a a real Pioneer in sort of holistic or sort of non-reductionist science and that that’s the I think an important thesis of this a feeling for for the organism um she she sort of she refused to oversimplify the the problems that she was facing even though that meant that
(1:01:46) for a long time she wasn’t able to give satisfying explanations to the scientists around her who uh you know who were who were sort of only thought only reductionist thinking was was good enough to count as science and of course also didn’t respect her because she was a woman of course right and but she but like but it it like but it worked out right it was she she found a new a new language a new level of complexity in in in biology and she and we ended up getting the Nobel Prize uh for that discovery
(1:02:25) um and then another one I have just on my shelf this is gromac grow magazine uh love this this is this is published by Ginkgo published by gingo uh you can get these for free if you go to grow grow by ginkgo.com this one is the Futures issue I love free things um they’re like they’re beautifully published um so these are they’re these are like how can I say it this is these this is this is these are these are they’re sort of they’re speculative uh they’re meant to be inspirational uh there’s just
(1:02:56) different pieces of writing uh philosophy people thinking about the future people thinking about the meaning of science um it’s really you know it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s pure inspiration right it’s not this is not it’s not marketing right or if it’s marketing it’s marketing because it’s awesome and then hopefully you’ll people will read it and they’ll think that that that Ginkgo is awesome too yeah it sounds like the synthago has a newsletter for their genetic engineering
(1:03:25) it sounds like that and paper format which I like synthago’s uh newsletters because they like show you how to do stuff and it sounds kind of like that in terms of inspiring you to build things um all right so I know we’re coming to the end so I wanna uh so that there’s some personal questions um where where do you think you’re where do you think you’ll go when you die oh yeah that’s a transition I was like oh God should I leave with the other question first um I’m not gonna die you kidding me I’m not
(1:03:59) gonna die you reject the the hoe the rejected my plan is to just not die okay so if but I’m saying tomorrow you get hit by a car where do you think you’d go do you think there’s something you go to or is it just Fade to Black I’m not the right that can happen you can just get hit by cars oh no oh I wasn’t planning on that at all oh no oh this is terrible um I don’t know I guess I so I don’t know I don’t know what happens and I’m I’m I I uh I guess I’m happy I’m maybe I’m
(1:04:39) comfortable not knowing relatively comfortable you don’t have any like existential dread or wonder about it oh it’s kind of like before you read I have lots of okay absolutely absolutely but I think but that’s but I’m I I’m I’m uh I’m I’m I love my existential dread you know I’m uh I welcome it it’s uh I’m okay with having that be part of the part of the fun so there’s there’s two doors in front of you one you get to understand something the other one you don’t have to
(1:05:11) understand and things will just continue on sounds like you’ll go with the as long as things work out you’re fine not understanding uh I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t think I like I don’t like that uh I don’t like that metaphor for the for the situation because they’re because there are two doors and they’re can’t and there can’t be two doors right and the and the the part of the part of what makes the the sort of unknowable questions Inspire so much Wonder is uh that they is that is is that is that
(1:05:42) they’re unknowable and that the option of knowing them is is not there right there’s that with that other door uh can never exist and I and so I I don’t know so I think I like um damn I don’t know you’re blowing my mind here I’ll uh I’ll I’ll sit with that I’ll have to sit with that yeah well I was just thinking like okay how would we test if there’s an afterlife well we could like shock paddle you and like you die and then bring you back but I don’t know I think that seems very yeah like there’s a
(1:06:15) movie about like what was it uh like the Keith movie from the 80s the flatliners yeah there’s a new one they they redid it it’s like a horror movie they brought it back awesome yeah I think it looks like yeah you’ll enjoy the yeah you’ll enjoy the other questions so um there is uh there’s a murder that happens and three people did the murder they did other things besides murder but I don’t want to go there and uh but when when the people when the cops showed up they grabbed four people one guy just
(1:06:41) happened to me walking by he didn’t do it but three people are guilty of the four you’re the judge and you have to you have to decide on the sentence for all of them and you can’t individualize the sentence and it’s only the information I just gave you but like God has whispered in your ear and said three are guilty one is not the CR the punishment for this crime at the time is you you hang everyone for murder like if you if you commit murder you you get hung I guess is the term um what crime do you what what sentence
(1:07:06) do you give the four people knowing that you have to give it universally that’s of that so that’s a fun question I do I think that I have an answer to that question but I don’t how much time do I have uh I mean I I don’t have a blocker my wife will come home and yell at me you don’t have a blocker okay so I to that I’ve actually been thinking about that kind of of of of of moral question recently because uh it connects to another idea that is interesting to me which is this this idea of reductionism in science
(1:07:44) which is one which is you know what what I mentioned in this in this sort of feeling of the organism book so there is a there’s a a critique of that kind of of moral reasoning that is called uh the ethics of care the ethics of care and if you can I guess I I don’t have time to uh I guess it’ll disrupt the flow if I Google it but it’s there’s the I think it’s developed by um philosophers and all sort of paraphrase it as best I can maybe maybe getting it wrong but the the idea here is that sort of once upon
(1:08:26) a time there were moral philosophers who tried to create an ethical an ethical philosophy that was reductionist that was that was built up from simple ethical principles and they thought that that was the sort of the best thing that you could do in ethics was to articulate ethical principles and then live your life according to those precise ethical principles like it was in mathematics right like it right so in this case right they would say okay well three three versions of three times Justice is better or worse than one Injustice and
(1:09:16) right and so I’ll I’ll have some ethical principle that I will follow that will tell me what’s what’s right or not in this situation I think so care takes a different approach and says well you know actually this is life is not a math problem and not only is life not a math problem life is never a math problem and it can never be a math problem and so therefore uh attempting to describe perfect and clear ethical principles for living life is a is a Fool’s errant it can never happen ethical actual ethical decisions are
(1:09:56) always made in the real world and in the real world there are always infinite specific parameters right so there always are there’s all they’re always there’s a there’s context there’s always a very rich context of possibilities that are that are going to influence the outcome of any particular question so in the real world we would we would always there would always be Quest things that we could ask like uh you know like who are these people where they’re mitigating circumstances for the crime
(1:10:31) was the trial fair is the information accurate uh why can’t we just change the law so that we don’t have to uh convict three of them uh and in the real world all of those all of those possibilities exist and so because ethical decisions are always made in the real world we don’t have to have a reductionist ethics so that’s my that’s my that’s my non-answer that’s that’s a that’s a logic leading up to your answer but you still have to give an answer you you like for instance you don’t have to
(1:11:08) I’m saying like the the you have to give one sentence right and the typical sentence for murder is you get hung but you can give them whatever sentence you feel is appropriate you can set them all free if you want but this is the but this is the beauty of it is that I don’t have to give an answer because it’s not real you don’t you don’t want to play and answer the question well you do I don’t have to play I don’t have ethics is not a game right ethics is ethics has happened I think this is what happens in the real
(1:11:36) world so you you wouldn’t you just would leave them there standing a murder not justist you just walk away from your job I don’t exist right they’re not they do exist where they exist she’ll Point them point at them in uh the example existing in an example yeah it doesn’t sound like the real world to me yeah I mean how do you learn if not from abstract Concepts how do you learn if not from The Real World yep I mean like I mean you can have the real world but you also can just like it’s like a
(1:12:13) thought experiment but it’s a thought experiment it’s true but it’s but it’s a I’m I’m uh I respond to a thought experiment with a sort of rival thought experiment uh and the the sort of all I think I don’t know I think I think I think it’s an interesting critique of the way that we think about ethics um but okay well I’ll answer a question um I would if I only knew three out of four of them were guilty yep I would let them go it’s interesting I would let them go yes I would unless the crime was like
(1:13:03) really really bad when they murdered someone if someone you loved was yeah but there’s murder and then there’s murder you know what I’m saying you know what I’m saying it’s first degree murder regardless that gets you hung but if I were I guess it would depend on how it would depend on how scared that I I was that they were they were gonna they would they would they would hurt someone else if I let them go that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s probably what would affect my
(1:13:28) decision the most okay that’s an interesting answer um I know we talked about a variety of topics today um with the remaining time is there do you have any advice for people who want to get into synthetic biology or biotechnology has a career um I think my the simple advice is that you do it by doing it right you just uh the way that you get into something is by his by is by doing it so you just you sort of involve yourself um in any kind of in biological research or synthetic biology work uh that you can find
(1:14:08) sweet and like igem or anything is there anyone any spot it was a great choice item is a great choice it’s very very accessible there’s I dream teams in a lot of places definitely recommend igem thank you for joining us today with the learn with little show check us out learnwithall.com anywhere podcast can be found subscribe tell me what you thought of this episode check us out on YouTube in particular it’s a new thing I’m doing uh timestamps and links are in the show notes thank you for coming and I hope
(1:14:32) everyone every one of you found some today that you’re curious about to learn more about and you’ll go out and be curious and learn something new thank you and have a great rest of your day