Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. So you
Speaker 1: might recall an article in Barns last year. Tim. It
Speaker 1: was about synthetic biology possibly being the next big thing
Speaker 1: and proponents of it saying, quote, the totally addressable market
Speaker 1: being over a trillion dollars. That's at least recording UH
Speaker 1: to the reports. What does it look like? When do
Speaker 1: we get there? And how do we get there? Amy
Speaker 1: Webb is the CEO of the Future Today Institute. She's
Speaker 1: also a Professor of Strategic Foresight at the n y
Speaker 1: U Stern School of Business. She's the co author of
Speaker 1: the new book with Andrew Hessel, The Genesis Machine, Our
Speaker 1: Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.
Speaker 1: She joins us on the phone from New York. Amy,
Speaker 1: how are you? I'm great, Tim, Thanks for having me
Speaker 1: in case anyone missed that Baron's article from last year.
Speaker 1: Let's start by defining synthetic biology. What is it? You
Speaker 1: got it? So? Synthetic biology is an emerging area of
Speaker 1: science that effectively involves redesigning organism terms to have useful
Speaker 1: purposes by engineering them to have new abilities UM. And
Speaker 1: it can range from you know, messenger RNA up to
Speaker 1: new types of organisms and even resurrecting a Holy mammoth.
Speaker 1: Believe it or not, it is pretty remarkable. And if
Speaker 1: you think about things that could be transformative right in
Speaker 1: our world, UM, this is one of those things. Where
Speaker 1: are we though, in this process where it really starts
Speaker 1: to impact our world? I did come across and reading
Speaker 1: in tim and I am reading in and preparing for
Speaker 1: this segment about you know, investors dollar, investor dollars and
Speaker 1: investor attention increasingly looking at this space. That's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the last decade, investors have put around twenty six
Speaker 1: billion dollars by my account into synthetic biblegy startups UM.
Speaker 1: And depending on who you talk to, the current products
Speaker 1: that are that are in UM being created right now,
Speaker 1: they can generate anywhere from a trillion to around four
Speaker 1: million dollars over the next decade. I say the however,
Speaker 1: noting that we are on a very long trajectory with
Speaker 1: this technology. So I want to drive home the point
Speaker 1: that this is the beginning. UM. We are nowhere near
Speaker 1: even the middle of all of this. So right now,
Speaker 1: investment is really going into the infrastructure and the company
Speaker 1: is building out the processes and the tools. It's way
Speaker 1: too early to start investing in products, right so we've
Speaker 1: got to think what in maybe a ten year, twenty
Speaker 1: year timeframe, perhaps even longer. But I do want to
Speaker 1: do you like in it? Is it akin to some
Speaker 1: other transformative innovation or technology that we've seen over the
Speaker 1: last hundred years. Absolutely, So I think that the best
Speaker 1: way to think about this, believe it or not, is
Speaker 1: the early days of the telephone um and and when
Speaker 1: Alexander Bell went on stage upstate New York at Chickering
Speaker 1: Hall and and debuted this new crazy device he had
Speaker 1: made in a wooden box um, nobody believed him. It
Speaker 1: was so shocking to people to hear this voice come
Speaker 1: out of the other other end that they flooded the
Speaker 1: stage and demanded to see behind the curtain, assuming that
Speaker 1: somebody was back there. When they realized it was new technology,
Speaker 1: you know, it was absolutely earth chattering. But it still
Speaker 1: took a little bit of time to get from that
Speaker 1: demonstration on the stage to transatlantic you know wires. That
Speaker 1: being said, within the first couple of decades, Uh, there
Speaker 1: were telephones, there were lines, you know, drawn, there were
Speaker 1: the beginnings of satellites being thought about, and all of
Speaker 1: these years later, there's actually no way to put a
Speaker 1: true valuation on what that telephone spawn, which includes, you know,
Speaker 1: satellite technology, internet technology, TikTok, you know, the ability for
Speaker 1: us to do what we're doing right now. Um often
Speaker 1: goals goals. Being a couple of other economists, UH said
Speaker 1: that the only real way to measure the impact of
Speaker 1: all of this is to do it in the reverse,
Speaker 1: to start taking things away. I think we're gonna look
Speaker 1: back at this moment in time and the chickering hall
Speaker 1: stage of synthetic biology, and in the mid future, it's
Speaker 1: going to be hard to figure out what the actual
Speaker 1: valuation is. Similarly, and I think it's going to happen
Speaker 1: at a pretty obviously a much faster clip. So the
Speaker 1: add of the telephone, Yeah, that's I mean, that's fascinating
Speaker 1: considering you know, dial up wasn't even that long ago,
Speaker 1: and the greater history of of the telephone, and look
Speaker 1: what we're doing today through uh through the internet. Amy.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering about investor exposure here, and we only have
Speaker 1: about thirty seconds left but what does our audience need
Speaker 1: to know about where they can actually get in on
Speaker 1: the like get in early when it comes to synthetic biology.
Speaker 1: We have thirty seconds. Then we're going to come back
Speaker 1: with you for more time. You got it. There are
Speaker 1: some e t s out there, Black Rock or Capital Management,
Speaker 1: some others Franklin Templeton. Their e t s are are
Speaker 1: they exist, They're performing better than expected, although I'm not
Speaker 1: specifically giving investment advice. Um, you know, and there are
Speaker 1: I p O deals happening all the time. The median
Speaker 1: UH size of synthetic biology i p o s is rising. Um,
Speaker 1: It's valued about twice as much year over year. So
Speaker 1: I think it's a matter of just poking around and
Speaker 1: seeing what looks safe and comfortable, and peop will poke
Speaker 1: a little further in terms of, you know, the catch
Speaker 1: words or the developments or the established companies that that
Speaker 1: need to be on investors radar when it comes to
Speaker 1: the development of the synthetic biological space. We're gonna come
Speaker 1: back with Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute
Speaker 1: and continue talking about her book The Genesis Machine. I
Speaker 1: want to get back to our guests. Still speaking with
Speaker 1: Amy Webb. She's the CEO of the Future Today Institute,
Speaker 1: Professor of Strategic Foresight at the n y U Stern
Speaker 1: School of Business. Her new book The Genesis Machine, Our
Speaker 1: Quest to Reright Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. So, Amy,
Speaker 1: we've been talking with you about you know, this is
Speaker 1: a developing thing. This is um got a little bit
Speaker 1: of a long trek before it really really plays out.
Speaker 1: And having said that, there are some E t F
Speaker 1: and some investment vehicles for folks to play it. But
Speaker 1: I do think about I always think about when this
Speaker 1: kind of trend is happening, what are the established companies
Speaker 1: and also the catchwords, you know, for the development of
Speaker 1: synthetic biology that you think our audience should be aware of. Right,
Speaker 1: So again, I think that the thing to bear in
Speaker 1: mind is not just to focus on the products or
Speaker 1: the end outputs of all of this, but also the
Speaker 1: companies that are building all the infrastructure, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Um Twist Biosciences is an incredible company,
Speaker 1: and I should note also I don't have any investments
Speaker 1: in any of these companies. Um with is is led
Speaker 1: by an incredibly smart team of people. They're building you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the their the picks and shovels right there,
Speaker 1: building the infrastructure that everybody else relies on can go.
Speaker 1: Bioworks is another really smart company. UMOD talks about a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And she's right, you know, it's they're they're very smart.
Speaker 1: They're also very mission and purpose driven, which I think
Speaker 1: is gonna help them out the further out into time
Speaker 1: this goes. They're really thinking through next order impacts, which
Speaker 1: I think is super smart. UM. But you know, you
Speaker 1: can also take a look at outside of the United States,
Speaker 1: companies like b g I. Uh it costs about fourteen
Speaker 1: million dollars to create to to sequence a high quality
Speaker 1: draft of a human genome. UM that price dropped to
Speaker 1: twenties around four thousand dollars, and now b g I
Speaker 1: can sequence a genome for for about a hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: That's less than the price of a pair of Nike
Speaker 1: year Jordan's UM. So, so there there are a lot
Speaker 1: of different companies in the space. Hey, Amy, I'm wondering
Speaker 1: about helping us understand what you know, if we think
Speaker 1: about it from like we talked about earlier, the evolution
Speaker 1: of the telephone too, you know, TikTok and what we
Speaker 1: do on our phones. Now, what happens during our lifetimes?
Speaker 1: What's it realistic way for us to think about what
Speaker 1: type of developments we see in the synthetic biology space
Speaker 1: in the next years. Well, I can, I can bring
Speaker 1: us even closer to the present day. Before the break
Speaker 1: you you were talking about the Super Bowl. You know,
Speaker 1: Americans later on one point four or five billion chicken wings,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of chicken wings. It creates a
Speaker 1: lot of problems for their environment, and it's it's not
Speaker 1: so great for the chickens. There's a company called to
Speaker 1: Eat just Um and they are already producing cellular based chicken.
Speaker 1: So this is not stuff made out of soy. This
Speaker 1: is chicken meat that started out as a stem cell
Speaker 1: I was put into a bioreactor with amino acids and
Speaker 1: all the other goodies that that that meat required to
Speaker 1: grow as it would inside of an egg. Um and
Speaker 1: and the output of that is edible meat that never
Speaker 1: had hormones or antibiotics or any of the other stuff
Speaker 1: that you might find on a commercial farm. Have you
Speaker 1: tried I have tried it. How is it? And it's great?
Speaker 1: Uh tastes like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken. Well, chicken
Speaker 1: doesn't really taste like chicken though, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: like it's modernay chickens, the overprocessed yeah, and those wings
Speaker 1: right taste like buffalo sauce, right, Yeah, but it isn't.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting you talk about lab grown food,
Speaker 1: like we keep talking about plant based being a solution,
Speaker 1: but most people would argue that it isn't necessarily a
Speaker 1: solution when it comes to the impact on climate change
Speaker 1: and just the ability to feed the world and where
Speaker 1: you know, we've we've done some segments on our air
Speaker 1: that looks at kind of lab grown food and I
Speaker 1: think it was it was it in pursuits? Was there
Speaker 1: something there was Bloomberg Business Week in pursuits about lab
Speaker 1: grown feet food. I mean, is that what you're thinking,
Speaker 1: and that's where this potentially goes. Well, yeah, the price
Speaker 1: has dropped pretty significantly since we first started talking about this,
Speaker 1: when monstrous mass strict meats, which I think was made
Speaker 1: that jointern't show key thousand dollar hamburger patty. You know,
Speaker 1: we've we've come a long way, and I think you know,
Speaker 1: it's highly probable that sometime in the next five to
Speaker 1: six years the freshest sushi you will ever eat is
Speaker 1: going to come out of a bioreactor in Lincoln, Nebraska
Speaker 1: rather than from a fisherman, uh, you know, off the
Speaker 1: coast of Japan. Which is pretty exciting because it reduces
Speaker 1: our reliance on the cold chain it brings it shortens
Speaker 1: the supply chains pretty drastically. It's better for the environment.
Speaker 1: You can scale it. I mean, a small country like
Speaker 1: Singapore could reduce its reliance on and they eat a
Speaker 1: ton of chicken. It could reduce their reliance on importing
Speaker 1: from my company other countries, right, they could produce what
Speaker 1: they need on the island. So I guess one thing.
Speaker 1: Anytime I hear a lab being introduced into a process,
Speaker 1: my parents always like, you know, close to you know,
Speaker 1: we had our own little gardens. Picture string beans and
Speaker 1: a lettuce, and you know that your lab. We did
Speaker 1: not have a lab. It was as you pick it
Speaker 1: and you put in your mouth or wash it, but
Speaker 1: in your mouth. So I do wonder about, Okay, what's
Speaker 1: the nervousness or the concerns of the anxiety we need
Speaker 1: to have about this, especially when you start to think
Speaker 1: about genomics, synthetic biology involved in I don't know babies
Speaker 1: and were were's the things that we need to be
Speaker 1: concerned about here? Yeah, I mean they're listen, there are
Speaker 1: I don't There are a lot of risks, so I'm
Speaker 1: not going to sugarcoat it. UM. I would say that
Speaker 1: the first and foremost one of the biggest risks has
Speaker 1: to do with misinformation. We are barely getting out of
Speaker 1: this pandemic with people being able to talk about messenger
Speaker 1: RNA and we just didn't have the vocabulary three pandemic
Speaker 1: to have that conversation. You know, this stuff is going
Speaker 1: to make messenger RNA UM looks pretty basic. So we're
Speaker 1: going to have to figure out a way to come
Speaker 1: to the table and have reasonable conversations so that we
Speaker 1: don't immediately catastrophize the really terrific science that's in the
Speaker 1: process of being born. Now, aside from that, we do
Speaker 1: have some serious challenges. One of those, weirdly enough, has
Speaker 1: to do with I p UM. We don't really have
Speaker 1: regulatory frameworks that both incentivize the research and the end products.
Speaker 1: It's sometimes bring murky who's in charge UM and and
Speaker 1: there are some questions around I p and if you
Speaker 1: write source code for new forms of life, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's a live thing, like who who gets the
Speaker 1: I P for that? UM? And if we've decided to
Speaker 1: perform a genetic surgery using embryos and and altering their code,
Speaker 1: you know, does that sequence in some way become owned
Speaker 1: by the company that performed that genetic surgery. I know
Speaker 1: this stuff sounds like the Star Trek future that in reality,
Speaker 1: we're already seeing those problems today. And I've got one
Speaker 1: quick example. One of the smartest researchers in the space
Speaker 1: is Craig Entor and UM. They've been working on minimum
Speaker 1: viable genomes. So when when researchers do this, they tend
Speaker 1: to digitally water mark and it's just a way of
Speaker 1: noting what's we're getting, like what what what nature did
Speaker 1: versus what UM human researchers did. Very short, they embedded
Speaker 1: a bacteria with a quote from James Joyce work a
Speaker 1: portrait of an artist of the young man UM it's
Speaker 1: to live, to err, to triumph, to recreate life out
Speaker 1: of life. And turns out the Joyce the state is
Speaker 1: super litigious and they're not happy that that that their
Speaker 1: work got embedded into a bacteria without written permission. But
Speaker 1: there's no way to send a cease and desist to
Speaker 1: a bacterium that is oh my god, space law. What
Speaker 1: about you know, synthetic biology. Synthetic biology law exactly. You
Speaker 1: definitely picked our interest. Um so much on Amy, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Amy Webb. She's CEO and founder of
Speaker 1: the Future Today Institute. Our book check it out, The
Speaker 1: Genesis Machine. All right, what today for Tim Stanebeck, the
Speaker 1: whole Blomberg Business Week team. I'm Carol Master. I have
Speaker 1: a good and safe evening.