A Cell from Scratch
As scientists race to discover the secrets held in the building block of life, the stakes grow higher for synthetic biology
As the 1960s had the Space Race, Drew Endy says – “humanity getting up for the first time out of the gravity well of the Earth” – the 2020s will have the Life Race, the decade in which the scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology learn how to design, build from scratch and operate a cell. The goal is to re-create the basic building block of all living organisms from non-living parts.
“I think that could happen as soon as 1,000 days,” Endy predicts.
He’s being interviewed on an investing podcast, in the weeks last summer leading to the IPO for Ginkgo Bioworks ($DNA), a biotech company based in Boston. Ginkgo’s co-founders Jason Kelly and Barry Canton were once Endy’s PhD students at MIT (Reshma Shetty, Tom Knight, and Austin Che are also co-founders), and Endy owns shares of Ginkgo by way of acquisition, but he’s on the show in his role as synthetic biology pioneer – and an affable, very fast-thinking conversationalist with ready historical and contextual knowledge of syn bio and where the field may be heading and intersecting. He’s optimistic.
He affirms his prediction in person a few weeks later, when the curatorial team for Emergence: A Genealogy meets with him at Stanford University, under a tree some yards away from the bioengineering building where he teaches and runs a research lab.
Build a cell from scratch. Design it to do what you want, something it wouldn’t do on its own, and, when it works as you intended, understand precisely why. We (“we”) aren’t there yet, but we’re close. A thousand days, give or take; possibly fewer by now. It will be a monumental achievement.
A February 2022 article in the New Yorker detailed recent progress on the development of JCVI-syn3A, the “minimal” cell, one of syn bio’s leading efforts. The minimal cell “contains only what’s necessary for life,” the author, James Somers, writes. “It’s the cellular equivalent of a stock car onto which new components can be bolted.”
Syn3A’s genome is modeled on that of Mycoplasma, a bacterium with the smallest known genome of any free-living organism. Since the early 2000s, the project scientists constructing the minimal cell – led by John Glass, at the J. Craig Venter Institute, in San Diego – have identified a third of 149 “mystery genes,” genes with unknown functions. That leaves about a hundred still to be solved. Lots of secrets in those genes.
“Dozens of research groups from around the world are now using the minimal cell in their labs,” Somers writes. “Some are exploring its basic functions, while others are trying to add new capabilities, such as artificial photosynthesis, to the base model.”
The “engine bolted to some wheels,” stock-car aspect of syn3A is foundational to the entire field of syn bio. Modularity was baked in from the start, all of 19 years ago, when Tom Knight invented BioBrick plasmids, the most widely used standardized DNA parts, which led to the first International Genetically Engineered Machine) (iGem) Competition the following year. The iGem competition and community helped to establish the syn bio industry at large. More than 7,000 people are expected to attend this year’s world expo, the Grand Jamboree, in October, in Paris.
The potential applications sprawl in every direction of 21st-century human activity, including but not limited to climate remediation, biomanufacturing, precision medicine, space exploration, and so on and so forth. Syn bio makes it possible to grow things where those things would otherwise not grow. Grow carbon dioxide-eating bacteria and generate carbon-neutral jet fuel. Grow food on Mars and sustain human life in space – or on un-arable lands on Earth, which also are growing. Grow your own insulin. Grow a woolly mammoth. Grow bulletproof skin.
Local problems solved by local solutions, enabled by distributed information transfer – which could, in theory, be open-source or free.
In a situation like syn bio now – when a rapidly evolving science does not long precede the development of applications but nearly follows, races, chases, and scrambles to keep up – a variety of stakeholders get a simultaneous shot at telling the story of syn bio. Scientists, researchers, advertisers, policymakers, artists, constituents, consumers, media figures, and influencers of all stripes will be making appeals to your truth, and it stands to reason that the opportunities for disinformation will be rife. The burgeoning global bioeconomy is already valued at many trillions of dollars.
It calls for the development of a certain citizen bio-literacy. Metaphors are a good start. They’re sticky. They’re building blocks. Synthetic biology is a teenager. The minimal cell is a stock car to design and test mods on.
Syn bio literacy is important not because biotech will save/destroy the world, though it might. Not because somebody’s out to get you and your DNA, though they may be. Syn bio literacy allows you to fully imagine the possibilities immediately ahead, and to build on that understanding and fully imagine what’s at the horizon and beyond, or what you think should be, critically analyzing a whole shebang of possible futures, and then, like other scientists, making your best guess. (Annie Fischer, 2022)