Startup That Builds Biological Parts

Austen Heinz (aka Broken Science) writes, "Why am I the only one calling bullshit here?"

There are several obvious answers to Mr. Heinz's question:

For example, Mr. Heinz could be the only person who understands what should be happening and cares enough to speak out about other's apparent stupidity.

Or, Mr. Heinz could be wrong.

Let's examine Mr. Heinz's comment, "Not this weaksauce approach put together by a bunch of underachieving grad students." In reality, all the newly-minted PhD founders of Ginkgo BioWorks have seen their successful MIT dissertations translate into well-received, peer-reviewed primary research publications (e.g., PMID 19298678, 18612302, and 18410688). Mr. Heinz, not having any readily apparent track record of academic publishing, may be unfamiliar with the latency in the scholarly publishing process, and might look forward to reading still more research from the Gingko team's tenure at MIT.

Next, let's consider Mr. Heinz's broad (and unsupported) claim that, "Biobricks are fundamentally flawed...". Not surprisingly (to any serious researcher), useful and direct criticism of the BioBricks approach can be found in the published research record of the Ginkgo founders (and other researchers who are actually working on exploring the ideas underlying standard biological parts). For example, Dr. Jason Kelly writes, "Today, most BioBrick parts are directly derived from natural DNA sequences with only slight modifications to support at least one physical assembly standard, and many parts remain to be characterized. For example, fewer than 50 out of over 500 transcriptional promoters now available via the Registry have been characterized. Making matters worse, for the 50 characterized promoters, the methods of characterization are disparate and the resulting data incomparable." Serious researchers require some minimum level of scholarship and mutual respect in order to sustain serious responses to criticism. Although obviously energetic and bright, Mr. Heinz shows no evidence or ability to rise to such a level of discourse.

Third, while it may seem obvious that improvements to DNA synthesis are important, Mr. Heinz and others might do well to consider that improvements to DNA fragment assembly methods are also important. For example, de novo synthesis of the "top 1000" DNA parts would cost ~$1,000,000 today. If the cost of gene synthesis drops by a factor of 100, the cost of synthesis will still be $10,000. Thus, combining existing and newly synthesized genetic material via automated assembly methods will likely remain important for the foreseeable future (i.e., 10+ years). A more interesting technical conversation might focus on whether (or when) bulk liquid-based approaches might be complemented or replaced with microfluidic approaches, or with recombination-based in vivo assembly methods.

It may also be interesting to consider how past predictions that the restriction enzyme business (e.g., NEB) would dry up with the advent of PCR turned out to be 100% wrong (i.e., the business for restriction enzymes increased because more people had access to and wanted to work with DNA).

With best wishes, Drew