Walk down Drydock Avenue in the old industrial waterfront of Boston and you’ll be reminded that the city remains a significant industrial port. Trucks rattle past the working dry dock. A FedEx shipping container terminal looms to the south while the Coastal Cement Corporation anchors the street. Inside building number 27, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly and his four cofounders are working on a different industrial vision—one in which biology is at the core. This quintet of modern-day Frankensteins design, modify and manufacture organisms to make existing industrial processes cheaper and entirely new processes possible.
It’s heady stuff. Fertilizing corn usually requires spraying acres of farmland with a stew of nasty chemicals. Ginkgo is working on bioengineered, environmentally friendly coatings for corn seeds that will fertilize themselves. Today, most biotech drugs are nonliving proteins. Ginkgo is working on creating living creatures, genetically programmed to seek and destroy disease, that would be ingested whole. Fake meat tastes gross. Ginkgo promises to make it taste better.