BY KIM BELLARD

It seems like most of my healthcare Twitter buddies are enjoying themselves at HLTH2022, so I don’t suppose it much matters what I write about, because they’ll all be too busy to read it anyway.  That’s too bad, because I was sparked by an article on one of my favorite topics: synthetic biology.  

Elliot Hershberg, a Ph.D. geneticist who describes his mission as “to accelerate the Century of Biology,” has a great article on his Substack: Atoms are local.  The key insight for me was his point that, while we’ve been recognizing the power of biology, we’ve been going about it the wrong way.  Instead of the industrialization of biology, he thinks, we should be seeking the biologization of industry.

His point:

Many people default to a mindset of industrialization. But, why naively inherit a metaphor that dominated 19th century Britain? Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform. We are keen to explore and make true future biotechnologies that enable people to more directly and freely make whatever they need where-ever they are.