YouSaid · the spoken record

Reshma Shetty

lines on the record: 24
first: 2022-10-20
most recent: 2022-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We built a 500 person organization that's entirely focused on this goal of making biology easier an engineer. And I would say that from my perspective, the opportunity we have in front of us, both via the SPAC transaction and the additional resources that that's bringing to the table, as well as just the opening the COVID-19 pandemic has provided and raising everyone's consciousness about the importance of biotechnology. I think we in the next decade can have huge beneficial impacts to our food supply and how we grow and make our food to our health and how we treat disease, to our environment, and how we clean up the messes we've made in the past, to how we treat multidrug-resistant infections. There's just so many opportunities here for biology. And to me, the critical thing for Ginkgo is let's go make this happen. Let's show the world what's possible with biology.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Offer is a very rapid response defense. That is our best protection against these types of things. Whether the threats are natural or engineered. And so running fast, investing in biosecurities, I think an important thing for every nation to be thinking about. And in particular, I think COVID has shown us that biosecurity is not just important in its own right, it's also ends up becoming fundamental to the economy itself.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the interesting thing about biology is that it's everywhere, right? And the tools for engineering biology are pretty ubiquitous. So there are labs all over the world who have access to molecules. As you build the tools for engineering biology, how do you build in biosecurity along the way? It's not an easy question and it's not an easy thing to do. But I think one of the answers is that the very tools that we are building to make biology easier to engineer are also the same tools that you can use to respond to biosecurity issues. And that's what we've seen with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a public health crisis, and there are a set of tools that biotechnology can offer to provide different layers of protection. Our testing is coming from the enzymes that we're able to make, PCR tools for detecting these viruses, right? Our therapeutics are coming from the antibodies we can engineer to help treat viral infections. Our vaccines are coming from mRNAs and other types of technologies that we've been investing in developing for decades now. So it's very clear to me that the best security we can”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think in this country we actually do have a long history of companies investing in long-term research. We have the Bell Labs, you know, IBM research. We do have a history of that. But I think you're right that in more recent years, that type of long-term focus has been left primarily to academic labs and government labs. And to be clear, they play a super important role. The reason we started Ginkgo is we felt that there were a set of problems and a set of things that we could do in a company setting that we couldn't do in an academic lab. So we can assemble a large team of people that are a mix of software engineers, automation engineers, chemists, biologists, geneticists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, you name it, and all work on a common problem together, right? And so I think there are certain problems that really lend themselves to being done in a company where you can marshal a big set of resources in a huge diverse team of people towards.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, we're gonna place an order for 10 times the amount of DNA over the next year and just figure out how we're gonna use it, right? And there was no expressed customer need for that, but we knew that both to advance the technology and to change the scale at which we were engineering biology, we needed to make that investment. And that sort of forward-leaning bet led to the development of a bunch of technologies. And we were able to then in subsequent years drive that to 100 megabases of synthetic DNA and even beyond today. Those types of bets are sometimes, they're not justified if you pencil them out, if they're not justified by any sort of financial model, but they're leaps of faith that you make to help drive the technology forward.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the challenges with biology in general is that you can only iterate as fast as the life cycle of an organism, right? You have to grow it, it has to replicate. And so while there are certainly some parts of our platform where we can iterate very, very fast, there are also others where it just takes time and long-term investment. One of the things we think about a lot is how do we strike the right balance between short-term wins and those long-term investments that other companies might not have the patience for. And so sometimes we certainly have found that some of the biggest frontiers and new advances that we've made come from just a first principles blind faith bet on the future. As an example of this, several years ago, we actually made a commitment to buy at the time 10 megabases of synthetic DNA. And at the time, I think the biggest consumer of synthetic DNA was probably a tenth of that, maybe less. And so we said,”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are surrounding them, I think is candidly a little bit naive. And so you need to strike the right balance, enabling focus on the mission, but also enabling people to bring their full selves to work and talk about the issues that affect them and their day-to-day lives and candidly even their work at Ginko.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of companies are sort of struggling with how do you handle workplace discussions of controversial topics, right? So whether it's politics, religion, social justice issues, diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? And again, I think a lot of companies tend to relax into one of two steady states. Either they say, hey, we're going to follow the Coinbase and Basecamp model. We're just going to forbid any non-work-related discussion at work because at work, people should be focused on work and we don't want to have the distraction of these other conversations. On the other hand, other companies end up in a different steady state where they say, hey, we believe in free speech. Anybody should be able to say whatever they want. We're trying to be thoughtful about these issues. How do you achieve that unstable equilibrium in which people can focus on the mission, right? Because the idea that companies can somehow remain completely divorced from the political issues or the social justice issues.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that is a possibility, right? I think usually with the applications that folks want, it's not so black and white of, oh, yes, we should do this or no, we shouldn't. It's more that we need to think about the implications of what's going to happen and think about how do we hopefully ensure that these technologies are used overwhelmingly for constructive purposes. So it's more about shades of gray.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the science, but we're also painting the picture of what this technology can do, where it can go, so that we can capture people's imaginations and help them see and realize that future opportunity.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what is an unstable equilibrium in physics? Unstable equilibrium basically means the position of an object is a point where if it deviates a little bit on either side away from that position that's in, it'll move further away from the position. And so I think a lot of companies tend to end up in steady states that are not optimal. So as an example, a lot of technology companies, they end up in one of two steady states. They tend to be a small, very scrupulous, careful company where they never overstate what the technology can do. They're super rigorous. They're careful, but they never manage to grow to a state where they're really impacting the entire world. On the other hand, there's an equally comfortable steady state that companies can end up in, whether high growth, they're super flashy, they're making all these big promises, selling a big dream, but they don't have the science and engineering to back it up. And so the question is, how do we at Ginkgo achieve an unstable equilibrium in where we are being careful and rigorous and scrupulous?”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the things we find is that these are not easy questions to answer, right? And so oftentimes what we're trying to do when we build a culture at Ginkgo is sort of build what we think of as unstable equilibriums, trying to strike the right balance between ambition and care or the right balance between exploring the full potential of biotechnology, but also being thoughtful about where it gets deployed.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our mission at Gingo is to make biology easier to engineer. And so we want to be able to make these technologies accessible and available to improve human life. But if you're going to make these technologies more accessible, if you're going to open up the application space, you need to think about what applications are you going after. And you need to think about who stands to benefit and who doesn't. And so we don't pretend to have all the answers, but I think we realize that in the past, people sort of pretend or believe that the technology itself can be value neutral, that you can just be a platform company and not be an arbiter of who gets to use or develop your platform. We don't feel that way about our platform for engineering biology. We're building a platform for cell programming, and the people who develop and use that platform have a huge”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, when you are working with as fundamental a technology as biology, it really requires a lot of care. Thinking about the implications of this technology, how it gets adopted, who it benefits, and bringing a level of quality and rigor to the work is super important. And so when we think about building a company in Boston around biotechnology, I think there are a lot of really great lessons that we can adopt from Silicon Valley Technology companies, but we also have to do things a little bit differently just because the technology we're working with is so important. This is not social media. This is not advertising. This is your life, right? This is our community. This is our food supply. This is our environment.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's been a mix of adoption of existing technologies as well as new technology development. So mRNA vaccines, for example, folks have been working on those technologies for a long time now. But COVID really brought the need for those on a worldwide scale into stark relief. So that's obviously a massive adoption that's happened. If you want to be able to make these mRNA vaccines at a scale that you can administer two doses to every single person on the planet, obviously you need a ton of technological advancement on the manufacturing side. So I would say the adoption has actually driven the technology investments and development. I think what the pandemic has brought home for people is one, biology is really important. It's core to our lives. It's core to our health. It's core to our food. It's core to our environment. And it's also brought home just how powerful these technologies really are.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we essentially almost did like a lean startup hypothesis building and figuring out if there was something we could do over the course of the next three months. And some ideas fell by the wayside, but others really took flight. And the two in particular that really had legs for us was around mRNA vaccine manufacturing. And then the second was actually around K through 12 testing.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some sense, a moral obligation to figure out how we might be useful in pandemic response. And so, yeah, we launched essentially a bunch of experimental programs to see how we might be useful. We realized that mRNA vaccines, like the ones that Pfizer and Moderna worked on, were going to be potentially a very interesting solution. But we also knew that they were going to be manufactured for the very first time. So assuming you found a vaccine that worked, nobody had actually stood up mRNA vaccine manufacturing at scale. And we knew a lot about how to make some of the precursor components for mRNA vaccines. We knew a lot about how to make some of the enzymes that are needed in mRNA vaccine manufacturing. And so we launched a set of programs actually around mRNA vaccine manufacturing, including our collaboration with Moderna, to help try to drive down the cost and drive up the scale, importantly, of mRNA vaccine manufacturing for the world. And those are programs we continue to work on today.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the pandemic came to Boston in March of 2020, it really hit home for us. And what struck us here at Ginkgo was that, hey, biology was suddenly having this dramatic impact on everybody's lives and that this pandemic was going to define how people thought about biotechnology for the rest of their lives. Biotechnology could either be something that people were afraid of, or it could be thought of as something that helps provide the tools for fighting back. And we realized that in order to have an effective pandemic response, it was going to need to be a multi-pronged approach. We're going to need to be able to test and isolate people who have COVID. We needed to be able to find therapeutics to treat people who are already sick, and we needed to be able to come up with vaccines to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. And so although we weren't very active in infectious disease at the time, we felt like we had...”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers come to us and they might fall into one of a couple different categories. So some of them are super sophisticated about cell programming, right? They might have capabilities in-house and they already know, hey, I want to make this molecule at this level of production and I want it to cost this much in my commercial scale production process. Other customers are much less sophisticated about cell programming. They're more like, hey, this is my business and I have this set of problems. And I was thinking that maybe biotechnology might be useful. Is there any relevance to any part of my business? And we talk about it. Maybe they're having supply chain problems. Maybe they need a new functionality and new material. Maybe they really want to drop their cost of goods.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to write code, you want to be able to edit that code, you want to be able to compile it into actual DNA that you put into cells, and then you want to be able to see how those cells work and debug when things go wrong.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, here at Ginkgo, we essentially program cells, you know, much the way you program a computer, right? So it's sort of hard to believe, but at its core, biology is fundamentally digital. It's made up of A's, T's, G's, and C's. That's the DNA of your cells, the food you eat, the microbes in your environment. They all have genomes made up of A's, T's, G's, and C's. And if you change the order of those ATs, G's, and C's, rewrite them, edit them, flip a base here or there, then you can introduce whole new functionality into the cell, change its behavior. And much like you would write a computer program. And so at Ginkgo, we've basically been working for the last over 10 years now to make the process of editing DNA, rewriting DNA easier. In some sense, you can think of what Ginkgo does as building like the editor, compiler, and debugger for biology. So you want to be able to”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's right. Yeah. You know, I first started in the field back in 2002 when I was a first year graduate student at MIT. And there I met Tom Knight, who later became my co-founder. And he really inspired me with his vision of being able to program cells the way you program computers and fell in love with it. Fortunately, I was a naive grad student and had no idea how hard this was going to be, but you know, that's what makes it fun.”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to drive down the cost and drive up the scale importantly. The technology we're working with is so important. This is not social media. This is not advertising. This is your life, right? This is our community. This is our food supply. This is our environment”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This pandemic was going to define how people thought about biotechnology for the rest of their lives. Biotechnology could either be something that people were afraid of, or it could be thought of as something that helps provide the tools for fighting back. Our mission at Gingo is to make biology easier to engineer. in the next decade can have huge beneficial impacts to our food supply and how we grow and make our food to our health and how we treat disease, to our environment, to how we treat multidrug resistant infections. Let's go make this happen. Let's show the world what's possible with biology. When the pandemic came to Boston in March of 2020, it really hit home for us. Nobody had actually stood up mRNA vaccine manufacturing at scale. And so we launched a set of programs around mRNA vaccine manufacturing, including our collaboration with Moderna to help”
2022-10-20 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT