EDITOR'S NOTE: This roundtable was derived from a special session during the Biofuels Digest Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference, held virtually May 3-7.
JIM LANE: Welcome to the ABLC World Stage Forum. This is a session that we have been looking forward to having for a long time. It's hard to get these three people in one place at one time. We have Frances Arnold, a professor at Caltech and Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry. She was recently nominated as the co-chair of President Biden's Council on Science and Technology. She is also well-known in our sector as a cofounder of Gevo and Provivi, and most recently of Aralez Bio. Her technology was also useful in the development of Codexis, although she was not a cofounder of that company.
George Church is also joining us. He is a professor at Harvard, cofounder of eGenesis, LS9, Gen9, Joule and others. These are companies the Digest has covered for many years.
Jay Keasling is also with us. He is CEO of JBEI [Joint BioEnergy Institute] and cofounder of Amyris and Lygos.
The topic today is Aspirations for a Fragile Planet. This title came from a remark Frances made when she was nominated as the co-chair of the President's Council on Science and Technology, when she talked about the need to create technologies for a fragile planet. We're going to explore this idea, from the standpoint that it's not just a question of invention and technology, but also a question of value, and more importantly, of values.
Frances, I thought that maybe we could start with having you just talk a little bit about what strikes you as particularly fragile about this place and time and expand on some of the things you said back then for those who didn't catch those remarks.
FRANCES ARNOLD: I'm really distressed at the state of our natural world. In my lifetime, I've watched the planet go from largely unknown and unexplored to completely overrun with human activities that have destroyed many civilizations, many populations of human beings, and even more so destroyed a very large fraction of habitats for other species. It's a beautiful planet, it's a fantastic biological world that we are watching disappear before our very eyes. I would like to see science and technology direct their skills and power towards maintaining, in a sustainable way, human well-being but also the well-being of all other species.
LANE: Jay, how does that resonate with you? You come from a small town in Nebraska, and you've been on a long journey to getting to California and doing the work that you do. Does this idea resonate with you when you think about why you chose the path you did?
JAY KEASLING: Yes, I agree with Frances completely. I think so many of our activities could be much better for the environment, much better for the planet. In some cases, the science is there but the economics or the will to do it aren't there. In many other cases, the science isn't there or hasn't delivered an economically viable solution. I think there's so much more that we can be doing, and, for me, I've tried to do that in the science I do in my laboratory, but also with the companies that I've started that have come out of the laboratory. In almost every case, those have been tied in some way to the environment.
LANE: George, I'm just turning those thoughts to you. Again, the same question: were these some of the themes on your mind as you made the choices you made and chose to work in the fields that you do?
GEORGE CHURCH: I think one of the biggest things we are faced with is carbon sequestration. A lot of the discussion around being carbon neutral or reducing our anthropogenic sources of carbon seem pathetic compared to the opportunities and risks. There's 1,400 gigatons of carbon, possibly in the form of methane, in the Arctic that could be released by any kind of positive feedback loop, which seems to be going on. That's a lot more than the 10 gigatons of human anthropogenic carbon per year. Plus, there's the opportunity of restoring some of the regions of the world that have lost their photosynthetic and sequestration capabilities, notably the edges of deserts and the Arctic. That's something they we're actively working on: the various ways of doing that.
[Former vice president Al] Gore described this as an inconvenient truth. The problem with inconvenience is that a lot of people will vote against it, no matter how many books you write. So, you have to make it more convenient. I think technology has a big role there. Technology can make amazing things free. Smallpox and rinderpest are examples of things that have affected the entire planet and now are extinct. We need to look for creative solutions like that.
LANE: Let's talk about preparing our next generation of scientists. Frances, you didn't have exactly the smoothest path, where you announced at fifteen that you were going to invent directed evolution. You went through a lot of steps along the way, and you could have gone in a lot of different directions. As you look at those post-doc years, what can be learned about how to encourage people to take the right steps and get into these fields that we maybe didn't know about twenty, thirty years ago?
ARNOLD: I can only speak from my own experience; everybody has a different path. It's very important to recognize that if everyone follows the same path, everybody's going to think alike and do alike, and that wouldn't be effective. I think my path was effective because I tried so many different things. I was everything from a taxi driver to a cocktail waitress to a mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, and biophysical researcher. I'm not particularly good at some of those professions but they gave me material I could re-combine in different ways.
I think we spend a lot of time teaching our young people to follow “the” path or choose “the” path early on instead of exploring. Science is all about exploration, taking risks, doing things that are really hard. I'm not sure we encourage that risk-taking very much.
LANE: Jay, maybe you can talk about this as well. Is the way we educate, and possibly train and force people into choices maybe too early, as Frances alluded, not creating that lifelong learning? In particular, I want to ask you about the commercial world, which is rife with “get your MBA, this is the way to do things” [mentality]. Scientists and people on the commercial side don't always talk the same language, even when they're coming from the same culture and have the same values. How do we not only bring the technologies along, but also move the companies—made up of people who have to get along and have a shared, aligned vision—forward?
KEASLING: I think that specializing too early is a mistake, and we force our young people in many ways to specialize too early. Getting a broad background, I think, is super important. Like Frances said, you get some exposure to a lot of things and can build on that. This applies to companies as well, and building companies that have people with a lot of broad backgrounds. In almost every case of the companies that I've been a part of—either that I've started or have advised—they were founded by creative people who have broad-based backgrounds and a lot of experience in the world.
A lot of VCs invest in people, and not necessarily in the idea. This is for a good reason. If the idea is wrong, good, smart people will be able to come up with a follow up that is maybe even better. One very famous VC told me not to hire a CEO right away or bring in the business people because “we're just going to have to fire them.” The sense was, get the technical stuff done right and we'll get the business going.
I don't want to put business people down—they are in many cases very bright and well-trained—but often what you need when you're starting a company is to get the technical stuff done. And I think there are now programs in business schools that are getting business folks enmeshed and ingrained in some of the technology as well so that they can be more helpful at the very early stages.
LANE: George, I'd like to turn the topic to you as you think about what Jay and Frances have said about alignment, the commercial versus technical discussion, and also about lifelong learning versus pushing people to make decisions. And could you also reflect on this “publish or perish” pressure on young academics to find a specialization and make a name for themselves in light of what Frances and Jay have said about the importance of broad-based learning and that discovery process?
CHURCH: Yes I agree. I think the three of us are inclined towards multi-disciplinary attitudes. That doesn't mean that it's right for everyone but it seems to be right for us. I haven't seen that much “publish or perish” among my students and post-docs, but I'm sure it is quite prevalent. It is good to share—I think sharing pre-prints, especially, has been an enabling force. It's not the same as a peer-reviewed paper, but even peer-reviewed papers aren't adequately peer reviewed—there aren't enough peers weighing in on it. I think it's sort of a bad system, but it's better than all the other systems.
ARNOLD: I have to agree with George. I've done a lot of thinking about the innovation system in this country compared to other systems. George and Jay's groups have been so successful because they empower young people. It's not this hierarchy that you'd find in many other places, but young researchers, when they are at their most creative, being empowered. Of course, that's frightening too, because they do have to eventually publish or they perish, but they have the opportunity to really go out and take risks. The people who go into independent careers in science and who start companies are those who have had the ability to take risks and have not had their ability to see the future beaten out of them by the educational system.
KEASLING: They're not jaded by the failures that we've had and others have had.
ARNOLD: Yes, exactly. They still have that optimism that makes great artists!
CHURCH: I kind of encourage failure if it's high-throughput failure. I would prefer to do an experiment where I have a million failures and one success than an experiment where we have a brilliant hypothesis and the outcome is entirely dependent upon that hypothesis checking out. And that's why we do so much in our libraries; the library is the perfect way to fail a million times and succeed once or twice.
KEASLING: I know a VC who said, “I don't really mind if the company dies as long as it dies young.”
ARNOLD: What's so strong about our system, though, is that people are willing to fail because they know that it won't taint them for the rest of their lives. They're young and they can go on and do something else. And the same is true in research; if you've set up a system where people help each other, then they have safety nets on other projects. So, you can set up a structure that actually encourages that important exploration capability.
LANE: Do you think we've learned something in this pandemic? That we're able to collaborate with a person seven countries away as easily as the person next door now? In other words, have we learned anything good about how to collaborate that we didn't know before the pandemic?
ARNOLD: I think we're all mighty sick of flat screens, that I have to say, but there are some advantages to being able to connect with people much easier, and for being able to get the same people on the same screen a lot easier. I think you miss some of the transfer of ideas, but there are things that make up for that, no doubt about it. I'm sure you've had that experience Jim, that you've been able to connect with more people by not having to have them all physically in the same space.
LANE: Yes, I find it's pretty good for me actually, living as a digital publisher. It's kind of a digital age. But I do miss the human interaction because people tell you different things when they're in person and the body language is harder to read on screens. Jay, what do you think have been some of the lessons learned? What did we get right and anything from this year that you hope we'll preserve?
KEASLING: Well, my carbon footprint went from ginormous due to flying to close to negative. I have solar power on the house's batteries, so it's not negative, but it's pretty small. I do miss face-to-face interactions, but I think we've learned that we can do a lot by video and maybe we were just traveling too much.
I've also noticed a sense of cooperation. I've always encouraged cooperation in my own lab, but I've sensed even more of it. In our particular case, we've got very limited time in the lab. The labs are controlled by the Department of Energy, so there's a certain number of batches and a certain number of hours. But people are helping each other through Slack and saying, “Would you take my plates up, they are ready to go,” things like that. There has been a sense of collaboration and working together to keep things moving. I think it's been really eye opening and nice to see.
LANE: George, same question to you. Are there any things from this past year in terms of collaboration that you would miss if we lost them?
CHURCH: Well, I found the old environment pretty collaborative, really. Genomics was expensive enough that you had to collaborate at some level, and we had a tendency to publish everything within a week. We credit COVID with more sharing but I think it's about the same. The ability to be in three continents in a few hours is great though. I don't think that the 2D is that limiting, I think we just haven't finished getting the technology. Before COVID, everyone was dismissive of any video conferencing. Whenever I would suggest it as an alternative to travel, the sense was it doesn't work. And now we see that it does work, but that we could do a little bit better on body language. It could be better, but I do like the freedom that comes from being able to travel at the speed of light and being able to really say “yes” to almost any invitation without worrying about where I am going to be.
LANE: Jay, do you find that you're doing more of the kind of interaction we're doing today than you were able to do in the past? Are the conversations better now than they were a year ago now that you don't have to travel a day and a half to get somewhere then a day and a half back?
KEASLING: Like George said, I don't know that they're necessarily better, but I can do a lot more of them. I have my calls with Europe in the morning, between five and nine. And in the evening I can have my calls with Asia. So I can traverse three continents in a full day and many days are that way. I don't know that it's necessarily richer, but I don't miss travel at all.
LANE: Frances, I want to build on this idea of a changing world, but I want to come back to something that's sort of a popular meme in the last six months, which is this idea of following the science. It's been bandied about in a positive way, which is a good thing. But science is a journey and sometimes it's presented like a set of conclusions that we are supposed to follow but today's truth may not be quite so true thirty years from now. What does that mean to you and how can we take those ideas and make something positive rather than treating science as something that's prescriptive?
ARNOLD: I wish I had something profound to say on this. It's a really important and interesting question. You could probably go into the history of science at length with many great examples of how ideas have been overturned over and over again. And the ideas that we have today will also be overturned and refined. Science is a process. We can change our minds, we can change our interpretations, but we need exploration and the obtaining of facts on which to build those interpretations.
Also, a lot of the things that we're interested in are very complicated, right? And so we may know something about one piece of a problem—look at climate change, for example—but not know important other pieces and how they all fit together. So, it's a process of integration. It's a process of discussion and a process of learning.
LANE: Jay, I want to ask you about something Frances touched on, which is that the science is getting more complex, and yet the world population is getting more connected. We're all talking about these ideas in very short bursts on Facebook, Twitter, etcetera. As conversation gets simplified, the science is getting more complex. If we have this idea of following the science, and a sense that science can lead, how do we do that in a world like this?
KEASLING: First of all, we have to make sure that politics doesn't shut down science, because the politicians don't like the scientific answers.
LANE: I want to broaden that beyond politics and talk about the ordinary person sharing on Twitter or Facebook who may say, “I hate GMOs, give me my Impossible Burger” without understanding that the Impossible Burger contains GMOs.
KEASLING: It's a challenge. How do you talk about some of these really complicated issues in short sound bites that might interest someone? In some cases, you have to rely on them getting interested enough that they'll dig deeper. It's sad to say that I'm not sure that all of these topics are for everyone. I would love them to be for everyone, and I'd love to get everyone excited about some of these deep scientific topics. But they're hard to cover in a sound bite, and you often get it wrong when you try to do a short sound bite. Or they don't get the full picture.
LANE: It's almost the same question: How do we communicate in a world where communication is getting more interrupted and more, let's say, short and sharp and pointed? You mentioned that, especially in genomics, you're publishing every week and it's pretty advanced material that's important for us to grasp. How do we talk amongst each other and how do we talk to those who need to know this stuff? What's the best way that you have found, through the history of genomics, to communicate what's important to those who need to know it?
CHURCH: Well, I think a way not to do it is to argue or lecture about the way things are from a scientist's perspective. I think a better way is to engage them in media that they trust or that they enjoy. So, for example, TV and movies, like Grey's Anatomy. My wife and I have worked with those screenwriters. And there was a genomics lab in Grey's Anatomy as a result. And that's something where you can have a long conversation over many episodes. We've done briefings with Congress, not so much to talk to Congress, but [so that] when they go back to their districts they can distribute what we've said to hundreds of places.
Weather map [is another example]. A bio weather map is something I've been advocating for a long time. It is a sound bite, but it's something that can be very relevant. Just like with the weather map you can decide whether you're at risk for slipping and falling on ice, with a bio weather map you decide whether you're going to take your kid to daycare or not based on the pathogen.
So, we need to connect with people in forms that they're comfortable connecting with rather than trying to convince them of things that they couldn't care less about like GMOs, evolution, and things that really don't help their life.
ARNOLD: I couldn't agree more. People are interested in what benefits them or what they're curious about. Talking about utility is great, and George, you're in a great position for this because it's saving human lives. Shows like Grey's Anatomy, those are just inherently interesting to human beings. [The question is, h]ow do we go beyond medical applications and get people interested in things like how to save biodiversity or replace pesticides. People have to be engaged by what they see as the benefits.
LANE: George, I want to come back to you in that context and ask you about a topic that engages people immediately, even though it doesn't change their lives very much: the topic of outer space. If you mention rockets to Mars, everyone wants to know about it. There might be a big future for some of the things you work on out there in the great beyond because we're a little short on repair shops and oil refineries on the outer planets. You've done some work on radiation, for example, and one of the things that is mentioned as a reason for the lack of life in outer space is that organisms cannot withstand the radiation. Do you think it is possible that organisms could evolve defenses against the radiation that you see, for instance, on Mars, so that maybe it's not a sterile planet. Where does biotech fit in with space exploration?
CHURCH: Earth's protection from radiation comes down to two relatively modest effects; one is our atmosphere, which is equivalent to about ten meters of water, and the other is our electromagnetic field, the van Allen belts and so on. Both of these could be simulated with physics alone—not cheaply, but it's still possible. Furthermore, the biological solution is quite potent. We have examples of making a radiation-sensitive organism into a radiation-resistant one—ten thousand-fold more resistant, in fact—with just four mutations. And many more mutations are certainly feasible at this point. We've designed up to 23,000 mutations in a single human cell. So, I think there are physics and biology solutions to this.
Another problem in space is low gravity. Another is osteoporosis and poor distribution of bodily fluids. This is true even in the microgravity of Mars, it's not just zero gravity and the International Space Station.
Another [problem] is that we've never actually operated an ecosystem that's completely closed with human beings. All of our ecosystems, including the ISS, submarines, and so forth, have sort of a six-month window with a lot of transport of materials, like carbon dioxide scrubbers and so forth, with the rest of the planet.
So, I think if we are going to have colonies in space, it shouldn't be our first colony. If there is a mistake or problem, it's a long trip back from Mars to Earth. We should be experimenting with such colonies on earth. We should establish a cost-effective and maybe even economically attractive solution here on Earth. We should have thousands of colonies with RVs or homes that are hermetically sealed. There is a business model that I think could get some people into it because they'd be first in line for getting off the planet, which many want to do—just like many people wanted to go to the New World when it was quite a wild place.
KEASLING: Didn't they try that once in Arizona?
CHURCH: The Biosphere was not a definitive experiment. It was far too big. What we need is thousands of independent experiments so they can compete with each other and in the marketplace. The Biosphere was so large they couldn't calculate the huge amounts of soil organisms and exchange of gases with the concrete. So, it was a nice idea but it was a $300 million [endeavor] that didn't scale well.
KEASLING: I love the idea of RVs as biospheres.
CHURCH: Yeah, I think it would be far more scalable.
LANE: Jay, you've worked on bioremediation. One of things that we're going to have to learn as we go into space—again staying on this idea of worlds beyond as a way to interest the public—is recovery and reuse. Nature is very good at reusing. Yet, we're a very wasteful culture. We're going to have to overcome that if we're going to go explore elsewhere because we need to make every molecule count. What can we learn from biotechnology and what might you work on that has applications in space?
KEASLING: Well, I think we can learn a lot from our plastics problem right now. Plastics are great, I have a whole bunch in my office here. And they last forever. But that's the challenge: they last forever. They weren't made to be degradable. People have discovered organisms that might degrade a little polyethylene or polystyrene or PET [polyethylene terephthalate], but it's very, very slow. Maybe we can improve that. But I think we have to think about the full cycle as we design the next generation of plastic. That way, if we run out of plastics in space, we can recycle them readily at the end of their life.
Materials are a fantastic area of innovation for the future. We can use biology to design new materials with new properties—in addition to the properties we're already getting from plastics, and you also have to compete economically. But it also doesn't have to be completely biology—it can be biology in conjunction with chemistry, for instance, but with the goal of making things that are renewable and recyclable.
LANE: Frances, I'd love to hear what you have to say about that, but also I want to ask you to say a little about your research over the last several years on things like organoboranes. Most people probably don't know that you can't light a Saturn Five rocket without them, so they're pretty important for space travel. But they have a lot of other applications and you're working on finding new platforms and new materials.
ARNOLD: Human chemistry has explored bonds and transformations that biology has never developed for one reason or another. One reason may be that she [nature] never cared about them. Another might be that there's no precursors for a lot of these transformations. But that doesn't mean that nature can't do it. So, I've been exploring the future of evolution and chemistry using directed evolution to make enzymes do transformations that nobody ever thought was possible. We made the first carbon-silicon bonds with genetically encoded chemistry. We made the first carbon-boron bonds using enzymes. There's whole swathes of the periodic table we can now start filling in by creating new chemistry in biological systems.
And what can we do with that? A lot of the chemistry is done today with metal catalysts that are not remotely sustainable. Platinum, iridium, rhodium, palladium—these are getting harder and harder to get, and I think the biology can do pretty much a lot of that with simple iron.
LANE: George, I want to turn that to you. One thing that's been debated in recent months and weeks has been whether it's a good idea to—in pursuit of these very hard to find metals for catalysts, etcetera—go hoovering the bottom of the ocean looking for precious metals that have sunk to the floor. And it probably is a measure of our desperation and how much we want these materials that we're willing to go and create a cloud of dust 30,000 feet below the surface of the ocean to find them. Do you share some of the thoughts that Frances had there, that we can do better through biology, and maybe that this idea that chemistry is the way to do things is increasingly a thing of the past. Or do you think it's still a demonstration of ideas and it's a long way off before these things become technologies we can count on every day?
CHURCH: I think we need to maintain a diverse portfolio, but when you say, “it's a long way away,” I would say, a long way away isn't as far as it used to be. A lot of things that we thought were six decades away, it turns out we're six years away from. For example, affordable genomes. I think the same thing is true for catalysis. A lot of the things that synthetic biology can do are things that never happened in biology but are inspired by biology and can not only happen without these rare materials that require environmental sacrifice, but they can happen at the lower temperatures as well. So, I agree that there are a variety of very commonly available metals that can be used catalytically and in biological or pseudo-biological systems at low temperatures.
LANE: Jay, I want to pick up this idea George just expressed that the future isn't as far away as we thought it might be. Fast is getting faster. George alluded to a sort of Moore's Law for environmental biology. There's obviously a Moore's law still with us in IT, and on the electronics side where the cost of processing speed still comes down by a factor of two every two or three years. And that may be with us for quite some time to come.
I wanted to ask you about that because one of the things that the three of you have in common to me, and I apologize if I get this wrong, but I think of you three as engineers—just engineers of very tiny things that are hard to see. I want to ask you, Jay, how, as the biology moves faster and our ability to discover things moves faster, are we going to keep up? What can we do on the scale-up side, on the engineering side, to keep up? It doesn't have to be a huge scale, but it has to be a commercially viable scale. One of the problems that we've seen is that these discoveries take an awfully long time to actually go from success in the lab to everyday success. Frances, you founded Gevo, and it's the darling company of the day, second only to Amyris in market value. But it took a while to get there. Jay, I was wondering if you had some thoughts about how to make that a little bit faster.
KEASLING: If you've seen one of the latest presentations from Amyris, the time from initial discovery of a molecule that they want to make to the time they get it into tanks has dropped to something like six months, which is amazing. And it's through all the technologies that have been developed in synthetic biology that this is possible. Other companies have had similar stories to tell. So, I think we're getting there.
What we're challenged by, though, is that it is still pretty expensive to do that entire process and then build the commercialization facility. Scale-up, the cost of building these facilities, especially when you're talking about the scale of biofuels, is large. And one of the big challenges companies face right now is finding people who have experience with scaling up. This used to be taught in a lot of chemical engineering departments. One of my former colleagues and Frances's former mentor was one of the people who taught this. But, because there was no funding for this kind of research from the federal government, a lot of these people either changed directions or eventually retired. And so we're not training people who are really experts in what we call unit operations and scaling up processes to large scale. One of the things that we've done at Berkeley is create a master's program for bioprocess engineering. We're not the first one, there's others around the country that are very good at this, but I think training people who know how to do it is an important aspect of getting these processes less expensive faster.
ARNOLD: Well, it turns out Jay and I are both card-carrying engineers who were brought up right at the tail end of the bioprocess engineering era. There were a number of great chemical engineers who did research to make sure that the process of engineering scale-up would not be the slow step, or the rate-limiting step. But, if you don't invest in it, it goes away. I think that will change with the current administration. There are a couple of bills going through Congress right now that would dramatically increase use-inspired research funding. We all know that scale up and industrialization of these fundamental discoveries is going to become rate-limiting, and that just can't happen. We need to put research into the next generations of these technologies.
LANE: George, I want to turn this over to you and expand a bit. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are very much in the news, and Zymergen has filed for an IPO that everyone's talking about, as well they should. But do you agree that there is hope that with these fields we might be able to do scale up a little bit more quickly and intelligently and achieve predictability that would make things faster.
CHURCH: There's been a revolution in protein design. As a teenager, I was working with molecular mechanics and that genre of protein design. The new wave is not just machine learning but large libraries that are designed—not random, but highly designed. For example, we made over a million different designs for the viral capsid AAV that's used for gene therapy and found a wide variety of tissue tropism and immune evasion. Those are both very complex systems and would be hard to do with molecular mechanics. Machine learning allows you to take very big steps. It was hard to take even four amino acid steps before, and now we can take 29 at once. So, yes, I think we're in a new era there.
It also helps that we are harvesting a huge amount for the biosphere via rapid assays. We have access to truly vast amounts of raw material for machine learning, plus the libraries that we make ourselves. That's very helpful and it's not limited to proteins. We can apply it to cellular libraries, developmental libraries, and so on.
LANE: Frances, as we start thinking about bringing things like machine learning and artificial intelligence into the mix, doing things faster and more predictably, and, as George says, start to design libraries, people have concerns about bringing artificial intelligence into something as closely related to our existence as biology. There's a lot of fear about what that might mean for us. How do you think we can create a sense that this is a safe space for discovery and that our values are not going be compromised?
ARNOLD: How the sequence of DNA relates to the function of biology is the big question of biology. What is the relationship between the DNA sequence and what you get out on the other side? Protein design is exactly that, and these complicated pattern-recognition problems are exactly what machine learning and AI are good at. So, the future of genetic engineering and design will be tremendously empowered by these technologies.
The ethics side of it comes down to whether you do a lot more good than you do harm. Any technology has the potential for harm. Every technology that we've ever developed as human beings has potential for harm. But those technologies that do a lot more good than harm are the ones that are successful. I think biotechnology is showing that benefit. Nobody complains about using genetically engineered insulin to treat their diabetes, right? They don't even think about it. When we can offer people products that will truly benefit their lives, and not just give them a tomato that will last longer in a supermarket storage bin, they will be willing to take the journey of risk that any technology entails.
LANE: Jay, where do you think the division line is? Frances rightly mentioned that a tomato that lasts longer in the bin doesn't really offer the kind of social utility that gets people to broadly embrace the science. And clearly there were no GMO protests outside the Moderna vaccine lines. Do you have a working sense of where the line between nobody cares and everyone cares would be drawn? Is there a test that you can apply to determine what would be too much of an ethics challenge?
KEASLING: It's a great question, and I don't have an answer. I would say that a lot of things have been screwed up by the wrong PR campaigns talking about technology in the wrong way. There could have been a lot of solutions that would have been very viable if they had been promoted in the right way. And I'm not saying that everything is about promotion, but it is important how you talk about these things and how you present them to the public.
I am very excited about all of the research in the food space right now. It's been forgotten for so long. MIT used to have a Department of Food Science, we called it the fruit and nuts department. And they did away with it at some point. And now there is all this great food research. It's exciting because so much of our food production is harmful to the environment. In fact, much of our food production is harmful to the environment, and if we can reverse that in any way, that would be fantastic.
LANE: George, as we begin to wrap up here, let me extend the same question to you. Jay has identified food as an area where biotechnology has opened up a lot of options and allows us to do things that we always wanted to do. What are one or two other areas that, in your mind, pass that test of having a high degree of social utility and where biotechnology has a role to play.
CHURCH: Well clearly, medicine, preventative medicine in particular, is very cost-effective and we need to be using it more. There's a lot of financial rewards for doing reactive medicine at the late stage, but preventative medicine is a tremendous opportunity for synthetic biology. I think carbon sequestration is another one. Some of the same tools you use for food but it's quite distinctive.
LANE: And Frances, we already have food, medicine and carbon sequestration. Any you would like to add?
ARNOLD: It goes along with food, but I'd add agriculture. There's so much opportunity for improvement in agriculture, like reducing pesticide and fertilizer use. So many things about the ways we grow and obtain our food are harmful to the planet. There are enormous opportunities there and that's one of the things I've been working over the last ten years.
LANE: Well, we started with the idea that it's a fragile planet and we ended on avoiding harm to the planet through biotechnology. I want to thank our three panelists, Frances Arnold, Jay Keasling, and George Church. thank you very much for joining me today and in being part of ABLC Digital.
