How synthetic biology can improve our health food and materials Emily Leproust
Transcriber:
You probably don’t think about it,
but every day nature
is trying to kill you.
We as humans place constant pressure
on our natural world.
And in response, nature fights back
to balance the scales.
Nature has been adapting and reacting to
the presence of human developments,
just like we’ve been adapting
and reacting to nature.
And nature is telling us
we are on an unsustainable path.
It is time to course correct.
This does not mean abandoning technology,
but it means harnessing
the power of biology itself
to reconcile the creature comforts
of human civilization
with the natural world.
Some of you may be thinking,
“but I recycle” or “I don’t eat meat”
or “I take the bus”
or “I grow my own food.”
And in fact, you may be doing
your part to live sustainably.
And if you do, good for you.
In my view, though,
it’s impossible to exclusively rely
on an individual effort
to make the changes we need.
We have to make the changes
at the global scale
to truly make a difference,
and that requires rethinking
what modern global
sustainability looks like
and a new kind of environmentalism.
To be clear, when I talk
about sustainability,
it’s not just about the environment.
While it’s an important piece,
sustainability is about much more.
Modern sustainability
is the integration of the environment,
people and the economy.
Each of them is needed to thrive.
You cannot have one without the other.
Therefore, the practice
of sustainability recognizes
that everything is connected
and requires a different approach.
So do we both individually
and collectively
change what we’re doing today?
I believe that technology and innovation,
specifically biological innovation,
is the key to answering that question.
Biological innovation will enable
harmonious coexistence with nature
for humans today
and in future generations,
while still enjoying
all of the creature comforts
we’ve come to expect.
If we do it at the global scale,
we will get back in balance with nature,
which will be great for humanity
and will also improve
the health of the planet.
So how do we do that?
The answer is synthetic biology.
Now, some of you may be thinking,
“Synthetic biology?
That sounds like an oxymoron at best
and dangerous at worst.”
How can something biological,
which is based on nature,
also be synthetic,
which implies not natural at all?
Well, synthetic biology
is the engineering of nature
to benefit society.
The core component of synthetic biology
is my favorite molecule, DNA.
DNA is the code of life on Earth.
It contains all the instructions
for animals, plants, humans, microbes,
bacteria, fungi and so much more.
By embracing the power of DNA,
we will be able to achieve
both comfort and sustainability.
Over the last millennia,
our ancestors have pursued this
in basic ways, for instance,
by improving milk production from cows
and making a wild grass called teosinte
into edible corn.
But it took thousands of years.
Over the last 70 years,
what our ancestors did in the field,
without even knowing
they were doing genetic engineering,
we started doing in laboratories.
And as a consequence,
we now have the scientific knowledge
and technological know-how
to harness the power of DNA
for the better.
A true biological revolution.
So how can DNA and synthetic biology help?
Well, we can affect change
in three critical areas:
health, food and materials.
In health, an early health
and economic success
is recombinant injectable insulin
to alleviate diabetes,
a disease that affects
463 million people worldwide.
Today, we can make insulin
from either yeast or bacteria,
instead of extracting it
from the pancreas of pigs and cows.
This allows for the massive
production of insulin
at a fraction of the cost
and without killing pigs and cows.
This means that there are no longer
any factory farms needed
to put insulin on your pharmacy shelf.
Today, using the power of genetics,
we can reduce or even eliminate
mosquito-borne diseases,
such as malaria, Zika,
and even treat dengue with gene drives.
We are doing this by harnessing
mosquitoes' own genetics to wipe them out.
It’s becoming a reality
to correct defective genes
in patients with inherited diseases,
such as severe combined immunodeficiency,
you may know it
as the bubble boy syndrome,
and sickle cell anemia.
We can diagnose disease faster
and more cost-effectively
by writing and reading DNA.
And already we can add pieces of DNA
in the cell of the immune system
to identify and kill
cancer cells in patients.
Thanks to advances like this,
in the future, even terminal cancer
will become chronic diseases.
One major change that is enabling
these incredible advances
is the ability to read
and more importantly
to write DNA at scale.
Over the last 20 years,
the price of writing one base pair of DNA
has dropped from 10 dollars to nine cents,
more than a hundredfold decrease,
drastically reducing cost and unleashing
the imagination of scientists worldwide.
This ability to write DNA at scale
also impacts food and material.
So speaking of food, DNA-based
synthetic biology techniques today
can engineer bacteria
to deliver nitrogen at the root of plants,
eliminating the need for fertilizers,
which you may or may not know
are produced from either coal
or natural gas that is extracted
from the ground.
That is a triple win:
more food, lower food cost
and no need to extract fossil fuel
from the ground to grow food.
While this may seem futuristic,
companies are working on it now,
with field-testing already underway.
We can control crop-destroying pests
using environmentally-friendly methods,
essentially using the bugs' own scent
to prevent them
from mating and laying eggs,
while also protecting
birds, bees and other animals.
These methods are expensive today,
but costs will come down.
We can protect bananas and papayas today,
two crops that are threatened
by deadly pathogens.
By engineering them
to be resistant to this pathogen,
we can ensure that commercial
scale production continues.
It is true for bananas and papaya,
but it’s also true for many other plants
that are coming under
similar attack from nature.
Third. Let’s talk about material.
Everything we touch today comes from oil
or natural gas extracted from the ground,
and that is just unsustainable.
And we can do better using fermentation.
We all know about fermentation.
You feed sugar to yeast
and it gets bigger.
Or, in France, where I come from,
we call it champagne.
Today, by using the same cells,
like yeast, algae and bacteria,
you can engineer them to ferment sugar
or other biomass to produce chemicals.
These tiny cells are the equivalent
of exceptionally efficient
manufacturing facilities.
And it’s amazing.
You can make the same chemicals
that are made from oil
and you couldn’t tell the difference.
That includes directly producing
plastic, flavor, fragrances,
sweetener and so much more.
For instance,
the production process to make blue dye
used in the fabrication of blue jeans,
is a massive polluter of the environment.
Through fermentation, you can make
the same dye much cheaper
and without the environmental impact.
That is guilt-free jeans.
Another method we use to produce chemicals
to enable our comfortable life
is to extract them from nature.
And that is also unsustainable.
For instance, squalene
is a key ingredient of moisturizer.
And I get it.
We all want bright,
beautiful hydrated skin.
But did you know that shark livers
is a major source of squalene?
Sharks are apex predators
and a critical component
of our ocean ecology.
So using sharks to make face cream
just doesn’t make sense.
Instead, we can now make squalene
by fermentation of cane sugar,
and it’s even available on Amazon.
I’m not just talking
about replacing current materials
with more sustainable ones.
We are talking
about making better chemicals
that you could never make from oil
and that will change
your life in the future.
For instance, spider silk
is an amazing material.
It’s way stronger than steel
and super light.
The problem is that you cannot
make spider silk from oil
and you cannot farm spiders.
You put a million spiders in a room.
You come back a week later,
you get one spider, they eat each other.
By using synthetic biology,
we will be able to produce spider silk
at commercial scale
and avoid spider-on-spider violence.
In the future planes
and maybe even flying cars
will be made by synthetic spider silk
instead of carbon composite material.
They’ll be stronger, lighter
and use less fuel.
So this all sounds fantastic,
but it gets better.
It also makes economic sense.
Yes, synthetic biology
will give us health,
sustainable food and sustainable material,
but it’s also a lot cheaper.
And let’s be honest, a lot of people
do not care about the environment,
but everybody loves a deal.
So we humans
get health, food and materials
at a lower cost
and nature gets sustainability for free.
And an additional bonus
is all the millions of jobs
that will be created through
this modern vision of sustainability.
These are not menial jobs.
These new jobs will be
dignified and meaningful,
and they’ll be spread globally
to ensure that humans
live more virtuously in nature.
So synthetic biology is the key
to making civilization sustainable
and will also prevent nature
from killing you too.
In conclusion, we don’t have to choose
between either human benefits or nature.
We can move towards balance
and have both in harmony.
It’s not that we could do it,
it is that we should do it.
We have a moral imperative to do so.
Thank you.