Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.

Ginkgo Datapoints is hiring! Join the Functional Genomics team and help build the premier data generation platform powering the AI x Bio revolution. Learn more and apply here: https://lnkd.in/d2CYFZ4t

We're hiring here at DARPA! A "Program Manager" is effectively an intrapreneur and we're going after Synthetic Biology #SynBio super hard. Please fwd to interested people! https://buff.ly/40LGnjF

CNAS welcomed Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, Douglas Friedman, CEO of BioMADE, and Jessica Dymond, vice president of technology at In-Q-Tel, for a conversation on Vivek Chilukuri and Hannah Kelley's recent report, "Biopower: Securing American Leadership in Biotechnology" https://lnkd.in/ehNqCxbN Senator Todd Young, chair of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB), delivered keynote remarks on transforming the report's recommendations into actionable policy and ensuring the U.S. can continue to be the world leader in biotechnology. The conversation was moderated by Alison Snyder, managing editor at Axios.

After 51 videos and the deepest of dives into Ginkgo Bioworks foundry, the Foundry Theory series is officially wrapped. What have we learned? What did it all mean? And what's happening to the orange couch? https://lnkd.in/d47Re-G4 My clearest takeaway is that biology remains hard. This fundamental hardness makes the possibilities of biotechnology quite difficult to express (and to sell).  After 51 episodes, I feel I've barely scratched the surface of what Ginkgo is capable of. If you want to see all the effort in one place: foundrytheory.substack.com My most surprising lesson is that the hardness of biology causes the most friction at the layer of human-human communication. Single human brains, with time and deep thought, can often grasp a biological problem pretty well. Like Yuri Lazebnik wrote in "Can a biologist fix a radio?" (which I quote often in the series) biology "requires geniuses." But geniuses, as well as regular people, have trouble moving what they know to other brains. The knowledge transfer problem narrows the scope of projects to the capacity of one brain, keeps work physically siloed and generally fucks up the otherwise extraordinary power of teamwork. Ginkgo's mission, to make biology easier to engineer, is the right mission because it puts the focus on the experience of the human scientist. A problem feels "easy" when we can understand it quickly and turn that understanding into action. We do need better tools - lab automation, software, gene editors, etc. But the bottleneck isn't the raw performance numbers on those tools so much as their ease of use. Synthetic biology's historical obsession with "standardized parts" can seem silly from a sheer technical perspective: non-standard DNA sequences function just as well. But from a human perspective it is everything: we need standard parts so that you and I can talk about them. I'm so grateful to Ginkgo for giving me the chance to do this series and to all the humans there I've had the pleasure of talking with. The big orange couch lives on in my home office. If anyone wants to hang out and talk synbio - my dms are open.

This week! The Foundry Theory series finale after 51 episodes. What have we learned from a year studying the people and technologies at Ginkgo that make biology easier to engineer? https://hubs.la/Q035FGBS0

We're excited to announced Ginkgo's 2025 Ferment Series, an evolution of our flagship annual conference dedicated to advancing our mission of making biology easier to engineer. Learn more: https://hubs.la/Q035yW5-0 And sign up for updates: https://hubs.la/Q035yW460

Our timing was impeccable!  A week after we announced RFP-01 to connect with entrepreneurs who want to help tackle the challenges of scaling our data infrastructure, the Deep Seek announcement poured gasoline on the fire - AI will be ubiquitous, it will not be confined to a specific geography, and the resource demands will be enormous. We’re calling for creative thinkers to join Ferment in solving these challenges with biotechnology. Apply to our RFP to co-build a company at the intersection of biotechnology and compute infrastructure by February 14. https://lnkd.in/e36wn6dV

Excited to speak about securing US leadership in biotech tomorrow with a great group at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in DC tomorrow! You can sign up for the livestream below.

I'm late to the party, but very excited about Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.'s recently announced project with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at my alma mater, University of Wisconsin-Madison! Ginkgo Automation will deploy an anaerobic-capable, flexible laboratory automation system for a diverse set of investigators at GLBRC aiming to more efficiently discover and optimize the synthesis of biofuels and bioproducts from plant biomass, through lab automation. More here! https://lnkd.in/eGa_7SEr

Join us in the Boston Seaport this Thursday evening (Feb 6) for Engineering Biology Club! Meet people building tools for building biology: automation, software, wetware and more. Register here https://hubs.la/Q035chj60