| Popis: |
Companies have been using biotechnology ever since Robert A. Swanson and Herbert Boyer founded Genentech in 1976. From its start as a way to get microorganisms to spit out drugs, the technology is now used industrially to make enzymes, biopolymers, and fuels. The technology works, but it can be cumbersome and slow. Now a new group of companies wants to take its latest iteration—synthetic biology, in which organisms are changed with DNA sequences completely designed and synthesized by humans—and breathe new life into industrial biotech. The impact on biobased chemicals and materials could be enormous if an emerging ecosystem of specialized start-ups can successfully work together. Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen have placed themselves in the center of this new ecosystem, by pursuing fast, large-scale, and highly automated approaches to make thousands of genetically engineered organisms in parallel. And that’s pretty much all they do. They don’t build factories or make |
