Jason Kelly - Chief Executive Ginkgo Bioworks Inc.

One of the leaders in the buzzy synthetic biology space is Ginkgo Bioworks, a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and a valuation of $4.2 billion. CEO Jason Kelly spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber about how his disruptive technology could change the world, from the cell on up.

- Joel Webe

“The most exciting thing for me is that I just started to sound less crazy”

JOEL WEBER: It’s been a few years since I took a biology class. Remind me, what is synthetic biology?

JASON KELLY: Think of a cell. It’s kind of like a little machine that runs on digital code, very similar to a computer, except in this case the code—instead of zeros and ones, it’s A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s. The cell reads that code, and it does all the things that a cell does in our body—or a bird’s body or bacteria in a river. They’re all running on that digital code. We can read that code with DNA sequencing and can write that code with DNA synthesis or DNA printing. If you can read and write that code, and you have a machine that’ll run it, that’s programming. So synthetic biology is programming cells like we program computers, by changing the DNA code inside them.

What are you doing at Ginkgo Bioworks?

We’re essentially a platform that allows cell programmers to program cells to do different things. We have partnerships with Bayer in agriculture, for example—a $100 million joint venture to program microbes that would produce fertilizer for crops. That’s an example of what you would program a cell to do. We’re sort of like cell programmers for hire. Our job is to make the cell do what our customers want.

We bought a 100,000-square-foot facility in Boston. It’s lots of robots essentially doing work similar to what I did in my Ph.D. If you get a Ph.D. in bioengineering at MIT, it’s basically five years of moving liquids around a bench. We’ve taken that kind of physical activity and moved it onto robots to bring the cost down with automation.

What was an early application?