Blue-Sky Thinking in Synthetic Biology

<p>Investors often see synthetic biology referred to as an industry, but that's not quite accurate. Biology touches many different industries ranging from food to chemicals, energy to health care. In the future, biological systems will be used for economic activities not typically associated with living things, such as digital data storage, manufacturing metallic nanoparticles, robotics, and perhaps even semiconductors and computing.</p> <p>7investing Lead Advisor Maxx Chatsko has always defined synthetic biology as a way of thinking. It's about applying an engineering mindset to biology. After all, the primary goal of synthetic biology is to precisely engineer living things and achieve a predictable, reproducible outcome. These outcomes are unbounded by economic constructs such as sectors and industries or goods and services.</p> <p>Semantics and linguistics aside, there are foundational questions that need to be asked before synthetic biology can live up to its potential. How can scientists precisely engineer living things and observe a reproducible outcome? What foundational tools and technology layers are needed to enable synthetic biology? If these critical pieces of infrastructure don't exist, then who or what should be tasked with building them?</p> <p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhessel/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Andrew Hessel</a> is often the one doing the asking. Increasingly, he's been doing a lot of the answering, too.</p> <p>Hessel is hands down the best blue-sky thinker in synthetic biology. He completed his undergraduate (cellular, molecular, and microbial biology) and graduate (bacterial genomics) work at the University of Calgary. He's been fascinated with the amazing potential to program biology ever since starting his career as a scientist at Amgen over two decades ago.</p> <p>More recently, Hessel served on the faculty at Singularity University, led the synthetic biology division at Autodesk, founded Humane Genomics to engineer oncolytic viruses for personalized cancer trea