When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.