You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. So you might recall an article in Barns last year. Tim. It was about synthetic biology possibly being the next big thing and proponents of it saying, quote, the totally addressable market being over a trillion dollars. That's at least recording UH to the reports. What does it look like? When do we get there? And how do we get there? Amy
Webb is the CEO of the Future Today Institute. She's also a Professor of Strategic Foresight at the n y U Stern School of Business. She's the co author of the new book with Andrew Hessel, The Genesis Machine, Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. She joins us on the phone from New York. Amy, how are you? I'm great, Tim, Thanks for having me in case anyone missed that Baron's article from last year. Let's start by defining synthetic biology. What is it? You
got it? So? Synthetic biology is an emerging area of science that effectively involves redesigning organism terms to have useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities UM. And it can range from you know, messenger RNA up to new types of organisms and even resurrecting a Holy mammoth. Believe it or not, it is pretty remarkable. And if you think about things that could be transformative right in
our world, UM, this is one of those things. Where are we though, in this process where it really starts to impact our world? I did come across and reading in tim and I am reading in and preparing for this segment about you know, investors dollar, investor dollars and investor attention increasingly looking at this space. That's right. I mean, in the last decade, investors have put around twenty six billion dollars by my account into synthetic biblegy startups UM.
And depending on who you talk to, the current products that are that are in UM being created right now, they can generate anywhere from a trillion to around four million dollars over the next decade. I say the however, noting that we are on a very long trajectory with this technology. So I want to drive home the point that this is the beginning. UM. We are nowhere near even the middle of all of this. So right now, investment is really going into the infrastructure and the company
is building out the processes and the tools. It's way too early to start investing in products, right so we've got to think what in maybe a ten year, twenty year timeframe, perhaps even longer. But I do want to do you like in it? Is it akin to some other transformative innovation or technology that we've seen over the
last hundred years. Absolutely, So I think that the best way to think about this, believe it or not, is the early days of the telephone um and and when Alexander Bell went on stage upstate New York at Chickering Hall and and debuted this new crazy device he had made in a wooden box um, nobody believed him. It was so shocking to people to hear this voice come out of the other other end that they flooded the stage and demanded to see behind the curtain, assuming that
somebody was back there. When they realized it was new technology, you know, it was absolutely earth chattering. But it still took a little bit of time to get from that
demonstration on the stage to transatlantic you know wires. That being said, within the first couple of decades, Uh, there were telephones, there were lines, you know, drawn, there were the beginnings of satellites being thought about, and all of these years later, there's actually no way to put a true valuation on what that telephone spawn, which includes, you know, satellite technology, internet technology, TikTok, you know, the ability for us to do what we're doing right now. Um often
goals goals. Being a couple of other economists, UH said that the only real way to measure the impact of all of this is to do it in the reverse, to start taking things away. I think we're gonna look back at this moment in time and the chickering hall stage of synthetic biology, and in the mid future, it's going to be hard to figure out what the actual valuation is. Similarly, and I think it's going to happen
at a pretty obviously a much faster clip. So the add of the telephone, Yeah, that's I mean, that's fascinating considering you know, dial up wasn't even that long ago, and the greater history of of the telephone, and look what we're doing today through uh through the internet. Amy.
I'm wondering about investor exposure here, and we only have about thirty seconds left but what does our audience need to know about where they can actually get in on the like get in early when it comes to synthetic biology. We have thirty seconds. Then we're going to come back with you for more time. You got it. There are some e t s out there, Black Rock or Capital Management,
some others Franklin Templeton. Their e t s are are they exist, They're performing better than expected, although I'm not specifically giving investment advice. Um, you know, and there are I p O deals happening all the time. The median UH size of synthetic biology i p o s is rising. Um,
It's valued about twice as much year over year. So I think it's a matter of just poking around and seeing what looks safe and comfortable, and peop will poke a little further in terms of, you know, the catch words or the developments or the established companies that that need to be on investors radar when it comes to the development of the synthetic biological space. We're gonna come back with Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute and continue talking about her book The Genesis Machine. I
want to get back to our guests. Still speaking with Amy Webb. She's the CEO of the Future Today Institute, Professor of Strategic Foresight at the n y U Stern School of Business. Her new book The Genesis Machine, Our Quest to Reright Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. So, Amy, we've been talking with you about you know, this is a developing thing. This is um got a little bit of a long trek before it really really plays out. And having said that, there are some E t F
and some investment vehicles for folks to play it. But I do think about I always think about when this kind of trend is happening, what are the established companies and also the catchwords, you know, for the development of synthetic biology that you think our audience should be aware of. Right, So again, I think that the thing to bear in mind is not just to focus on the products or the end outputs of all of this, but also the companies that are building all the infrastructure, and there are
a lot of them. Um Twist Biosciences is an incredible company, and I should note also I don't have any investments in any of these companies. Um with is is led by an incredibly smart team of people. They're building you know, sort of the their the picks and shovels right there, building the infrastructure that everybody else relies on can go. Bioworks is another really smart company. UMOD talks about a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And she's right, you know, it's they're they're very smart.
They're also very mission and purpose driven, which I think is gonna help them out the further out into time this goes. They're really thinking through next order impacts, which I think is super smart. UM. But you know, you can also take a look at outside of the United States, companies like b g I. Uh it costs about fourteen million dollars to create to to sequence a high quality
draft of a human genome. UM that price dropped to twenties around four thousand dollars, and now b g I can sequence a genome for for about a hundred bucks. That's less than the price of a pair of Nike year Jordan's UM. So, so there there are a lot of different companies in the space. Hey, Amy, I'm wondering about helping us understand what you know, if we think about it from like we talked about earlier, the evolution of the telephone too, you know, TikTok and what we
do on our phones. Now, what happens during our lifetimes? What's it realistic way for us to think about what type of developments we see in the synthetic biology space in the next years. Well, I can, I can bring us even closer to the present day. Before the break you you were talking about the Super Bowl. You know, Americans later on one point four or five billion chicken wings, which is a lot of chicken wings. It creates a lot of problems for their environment, and it's it's not
so great for the chickens. There's a company called to Eat just Um and they are already producing cellular based chicken. So this is not stuff made out of soy. This is chicken meat that started out as a stem cell I was put into a bioreactor with amino acids and all the other goodies that that that meat required to grow as it would inside of an egg. Um and and the output of that is edible meat that never had hormones or antibiotics or any of the other stuff
that you might find on a commercial farm. Have you tried I have tried it. How is it? And it's great? Uh tastes like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken. Well, chicken doesn't really taste like chicken though, you know, I mean like it's modernay chickens, the overprocessed yeah, and those wings right taste like buffalo sauce, right, Yeah, but it isn't.
But it is interesting you talk about lab grown food, like we keep talking about plant based being a solution, but most people would argue that it isn't necessarily a solution when it comes to the impact on climate change and just the ability to feed the world and where you know, we've we've done some segments on our air that looks at kind of lab grown food and I think it was it was it in pursuits? Was there something there was Bloomberg Business Week in pursuits about lab
grown feet food. I mean, is that what you're thinking, and that's where this potentially goes. Well, yeah, the price has dropped pretty significantly since we first started talking about this, when monstrous mass strict meats, which I think was made
that jointern't show key thousand dollar hamburger patty. You know, we've we've come a long way, and I think you know, it's highly probable that sometime in the next five to six years the freshest sushi you will ever eat is going to come out of a bioreactor in Lincoln, Nebraska rather than from a fisherman, uh, you know, off the coast of Japan. Which is pretty exciting because it reduces our reliance on the cold chain it brings it shortens
the supply chains pretty drastically. It's better for the environment. You can scale it. I mean, a small country like Singapore could reduce its reliance on and they eat a ton of chicken. It could reduce their reliance on importing from my company other countries, right, they could produce what they need on the island. So I guess one thing. Anytime I hear a lab being introduced into a process, my parents always like, you know, close to you know,
we had our own little gardens. Picture string beans and a lettuce, and you know that your lab. We did not have a lab. It was as you pick it and you put in your mouth or wash it, but in your mouth. So I do wonder about, Okay, what's the nervousness or the concerns of the anxiety we need to have about this, especially when you start to think about genomics, synthetic biology involved in I don't know babies and were were's the things that we need to be
concerned about here? Yeah, I mean they're listen, there are I don't There are a lot of risks, so I'm not going to sugarcoat it. UM. I would say that the first and foremost one of the biggest risks has to do with misinformation. We are barely getting out of this pandemic with people being able to talk about messenger RNA and we just didn't have the vocabulary three pandemic to have that conversation. You know, this stuff is going
to make messenger RNA UM looks pretty basic. So we're going to have to figure out a way to come to the table and have reasonable conversations so that we don't immediately catastrophize the really terrific science that's in the process of being born. Now, aside from that, we do have some serious challenges. One of those, weirdly enough, has to do with I p UM. We don't really have regulatory frameworks that both incentivize the research and the end products.
It's sometimes bring murky who's in charge UM and and there are some questions around I p and if you write source code for new forms of life, but it's a it's a live thing, like who who gets the I P for that? UM? And if we've decided to perform a genetic surgery using embryos and and altering their code, you know, does that sequence in some way become owned by the company that performed that genetic surgery. I know this stuff sounds like the Star Trek future that in reality,
we're already seeing those problems today. And I've got one quick example. One of the smartest researchers in the space is Craig Entor and UM. They've been working on minimum viable genomes. So when when researchers do this, they tend to digitally water mark and it's just a way of noting what's we're getting, like what what what nature did
versus what UM human researchers did. Very short, they embedded a bacteria with a quote from James Joyce work a portrait of an artist of the young man UM it's to live, to err, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. And turns out the Joyce the state is super litigious and they're not happy that that that their work got embedded into a bacteria without written permission. But there's no way to send a cease and desist to a bacterium that is oh my god, space law. What
about you know, synthetic biology. Synthetic biology law exactly. You definitely picked our interest. Um so much on Amy, Thank you so much, Amy Webb. She's CEO and founder of the Future Today Institute. Our book check it out, The Genesis Machine. All right, what today for Tim Stanebeck, the whole Blomberg Business Week team. I'm Carol Master. I have a good and safe evening.