I was a younger and less-experienced analyst a few years ago, and with a biology backgroound it was inevitable that I would be excited about synthetic biology. This culminated with a visit to a synthetic biology conference in 2019. In the years since, several companies and ideas that I came across at the conference have failed to make much of an impact. Obviously, this is to be expected of any young industry, and there are companies and concepts that presented at the conference and that seem to be doing well. Others keep popping up, but I’m not sure how they’re faring operationally. However, seeing these stories unfold, and having followed (and been disappointed with some) additional ones along the way, I got started thinking:
What if synthetic biology has a dirty little secret and it’s not all it was made out to be?
Energy efficiency: A (big) dirty secret
One of the main selling points for synthetic biology is the ability to replace synthetic chemicals with fermented ones; to harness the power of biology and to create new materials from biological feedstocks and engineered microbial strains. However, this doesn’t actually make all that much sense, because once you start making chemicals like plastics and biofuels in bioreactors (rather than fossil hydrocarbons), you’re really just increasing your total energy usage because the reactor is energetically expensive to run and to operate (not to speak of the engineering and R&D that went into making it possible). So, even if the end-products are biological, the overall energy budget of the fermentation might actually have increased. The sustainability gains might therefore not be as great as initially thought. The only thing we got rid of was the fossil feedstock, but we burned that while transforming biological feedstock to product, so the net gain will still be negative.
There might be no better example of these dynamics than the cultivated meat industry. Less so with companies using vegetable feedstocks without too much bioprocessing, because here the biggest challenges would be operational, not scientific. Instead I’m thinking more of the companies that hope to grow cells in bioreactors and to turn these into bio-nuggets.
Bio-nuggets are a nice idea, but once you start thinking about it in more detail, you realise that it’s going to be extremely energetically expensive: Mammal, bird, and fish cells are much slower-growing than yeast or bacteria, and they tolerate bioreactor conditions much less well than their free-living counterparts. You’d need to put very large amounts of energy (both direct and embodied) into the reactors to yield even a small scoop of bio-sludge at the bottom. The pharmaceutical industry has been trying to improve bioreactor yields for years, without making much progress. To try to make food out of these inefficient processes once fossil fuels are starting to become limiting because of net-zero commitments feels a bit out of place.
Additionally, there is an incomprehensive machine-loving logic to the entire endeavour, where part of the marketing message from cultivated-meat companies is that animals are ‘so inefficient at turning feed into meat’, partially because of energy losses in the form of metabolic heat and partially because of their tendency to turn feed into more organs than just meat. ‘Why grow a cow, including bones and horns, when all you want is the steak?’ Or so the logic goes. But this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how animals work, and we’re really paying dearly for this insight with every company that tries to grow steak in a vat.
The dirty secret of the cultivated meat industry is that animals are actually quite efficient at turning feed into meat! Much more so than any bioreactor can ever hope to be.
Misapplied logic conceals the real problem
The bioreactor is applying linear machine logic to a complex biological problem of how to convert energy into biomass. This is a problem at least half a billion years old. Animals and plants found the solution to this problem by creating complex bodies with specialisations that exceed the capabilities of single-celled organisms. Instead of growing one cell by another, they grew one body after another. The cellular collective (in the form of a body or other multicellular structure) turned out to be more efficient than each cell fending for itself. We see this logic at work in economies all the time: The reason why people come together to form companies, and companies, economies, is because the collective is much more efficient than the parts working individually. To think that meat grown in a vat is more energetically efficient than growing the meat as an animal is to apply machine-level thinking to biological organisms. It doesn’t work.
I’m left wondering if a similar problem to this is what’s plaguing the synthetic biology industry: That the entire industry is really just a large science project without any real justification for its existence. Because of the energetic inefficiency of fermentation, maybe it doesn’t make sense to apply it to anything other than high-value end products like biological drugs (like antibodies) or the odd commodity protein (assuming that the yield can be gotten high enough)? Sure, genetic and strain engineering can help to optimise the yield somewhat, but there is often a tradeoff between yield and volume, where cells that convert biomass into product at a high efficiency might not be so good at growing, reducing the final volume of product achieved. Synthetic biology is really a grand experiment to explore biothermodynamic limits, and I don’t think we’re anywhere ready to do this at anything other than the very small (and expensive and inefficient) scale, no matter how much money investors keep pouring into it.
Bioreactors are, even in the best conditions, always going to be very energetically expensive and inefficient. They’re machines, and machines are not optimised or organised the way complex systems like organisms are, so they’re always going to be operationally inferiror. If we want to grow meat, we have good alternatives to do so in the form of animals—the problems with animal agriculture aside. Same if we want to grow biological products like rose oil or enzymes. Roses are the most energy-efficient means we have for making rose oil, so why throw a bioreactor into the mix? Some enzymes can be expressed at high yield by yeast and bacteria, and this is really what the synthetic biology industry is limited to anyway.
Instead, the problems that synthetic biology purport to solve have much more energy-efficient (but harder) solutions. If animal agriculture is limiting because of its environmental impact, we simply have to eat less meat. (All the cynics on Twitter who say there are too many people on the planet are right.) If this infringes on someone’s ‘personal freedoms’, well, that sucks, but there’s not much that we can do about it right now. It’s better to start working on people’s expectations on responsibilities and freedoms than finding a technological solution to everything.
Harder problems than energy-efficiency are before us
In the long term, global populations are likely near peak. By 2100, it’s likely that we reach ‘peak human’ and that the global population will go down from there, to perhaps stabilise around 2 billion people. Less so if we have to depend completely on biomass for our energy needs, in which case we’ll probably bottom out at 0.5 – 1 billion—the global population before the Industrial Revolution. Any level of population above this will have to be fuelled by non-solar sources like fossil or nuclear fuels. Countries like China and Japan are leading the way in the population decline as people don’t have the time, money, or inclination to have children. Europe and the US are not far behind. Emerging markets will take a bit longer to stabilise. Once we’re at 2 billion people again, we can eat all the meat that we want—with the exception that industrial agriculture won’t be feasible without fossil fuels. We’ll have to go back to living off the land like our ancestors did for millennia. This will require quite significant changes to our way of life.
The challenge will be how to manage these lifestyle changes and to make sure that we keep all that is good. We have so much information and knowledge today that we didn’t have 200 years ago, and we need to find ways of making use of this information in the best way. Increasingly, the emphasis will have to be on better data, rather than more data. (So Big Data will be no more. Good riddance, it won’t be missed.) Instead of killing time and civilisation on TikTok, we might want to spend our last fossil fuels on improving education. Instead of propping up megapolises (where nobody is happy anyway), we might want to prepare for a mass return to the land and solar-powered agriculture. There are likely to be innovations yet to happen in this area, but we’re better off investing in educating people about the benefits of coppicing than we are in spending money and fuel on space travel. That’s for the next Industrial Revolution, even if that’s going to be centuries (if not millennia) from now.
Fossil fuels were a natural gift that we have (increasingly) spent. What we have around us right now is what we chose to do with them. Everything—from the computer that I’m typing this on to the food in my fridge—was made from fossil fuels. They’re impossible to escape. But some things were better investments than others.
The mentality of the coming decades should really be one of asking ‘does this trend or innovation represent fuel well-spent?’.
Fighting to retain an acceptable level of return on investment
Increasingly, the return on investment of our current technological paradigms (most recently financialisation and IT) is going down. We need to learn to see the declining ROI on innovation as a signal that it’s time to stop investing. If a company can’t generate positive FCF and a positive ROIC, we shouldn’t be putting money into it because it’s money that’s going to be destroyed. The same logic applies to technological innovation. If we lament that ‘the return on pharmaceutical R&D is going down’, well, that sucks, but investing in innovation to set even more money on fire isn’t going to help solve the problem of money being on fire in the first place. The only thing that helps is to invest in a truly new technological paradigm. (And you know those by looking at whatever people are not investing in or caring about right now.)
There is lots of exciting technological innovation yet to happen, but nobody really cares. Most of the ‘forecasting’ that we do involves extrapolating on current trends and running them into infinity. That’s how we ended up thinking that cultivated meat was a good idea, or that spending money on pharmaceutical R&D within the current paradigm would somehow help with the ROI problem.
Instead, we should look to what people more intelligent than us are saying. And they’re saying things such as that the real computer revolution never happened, because computers (when first imagined and built) were meant to augment our silly little human intellects with real computing power, not lead to us to being hypnotised by some bouncy decolletage on TikTok or shouting at each other on Twitter.
The energy we lose on TikTok and waste on Twitter is energy that we could be spending to help make our current civilisation more mature. But that’s going to require hard choices and restrictions of personal freedoms because it’s going to require the lot of us to grow up and to do hard things; the sort of things that we don’t want to do. Like cutting off investment into areas that are yielding below some threshold level of ROI. And that will also require us to stop paying for Netflix and buying junk from IKEA and of pretending that finance is a way of changing the world (because it isn’t). Instead, we should see inflation as paying debts that are long overdue and incurred on us collectively, and to think small and to empower more local connections. We need to learn how to slow down and to settle and to make do with less stuff. (Yes, I know that this is hard.)
To mature as a society we are going to need to do lots of hard things. Better starting now, even if we are starting small.
The best things are usually pretty boring and small
I don’t think synthetic biology is going to be the future except in very limited cases. I also don’t think the Internet is a force of good, or that markets are very good at allocating capital. I think a lot of the lessons that we need to learn have been learned over and over over the aeons. That the most meaningful things are pretty simple, like home and family, and jobs that allow us to manipulate real things and to build homes that will last for generations. I don’t think anyone will make much money from investing in that. But maybe money and capital gains is just imaginary anyway. Obviously, there will always be some bright spark or another who needs capital for building what could be a great business, but let’s leave the business-building to them. The rest of us should probably just sit quietly and get on with our own lives. The system will be much more efficient that way.