Natural compounds produced by the world’s microbes were once the go-to source of molecules for the drug industry before the chemistry dried up and big pharma went packing. Now, researchers hope that advances in genomics will bring companies back into the fold. Daniel Grushkin visits one startup hoping to accelerate the process.
In the fall of 2005, Karls Monzon’s childhood friend and neighbor Onelio Diaz approached him with a proposal. Diaz worked as a security guard for Brink’s at Miami International Airport. Every day, he explained, a Lufthansa jet from Frankfurt landed at the airport carrying bricks of $50 and $100 bills in bags. The shipments were from Germany’s second-largest bank, Commerzbank, and averaged between $80 million and $100 million per flight.
This October, five major seed companies came together to sign the first part of an agreement called the Generic Event Marketability and Access Agreement (GEMAA). Facilitated by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) of Washington, DC, and the American Seed Trade Association of Alexandria, Virginia, the accord is a legally binding contract that covers expirations of single-gene patents, and aims to ensure global access to genetically modified (GM) crops, even once they go off patent.
In the theaterlike darkness of the international Center of Photography in New York City, black-and-white ghosts of New England’s mid-19th-century Boston Brahmins stared out from behind the glass-and-rosewood frames. These were the works of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, the Rembrandts of daguerreotypy—the first practical form of photography. A demure bride in white silk crepe fingered her ribbons; the stern and haughty statesman Daniel Webster glared from behind his brow. When the “Young America” exhibit opened in 2005, its 150-year-old images captured American icons at a time when the nation was transitioning from adolescence into a world power. “Each picture glows on the wall like a stone in a mood ring,” the New York Times raved in its review.
Yet after a month on exhibit, the silver plate–bound images began to degrade. White spots overtook half the portrait of a woman in a curtain-length skirt. Iridescent halos formed on abolitionist Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. Other images blistered. By the end of the two-and-a-half-month show, 25 daguerreotypes had been damaged, five of them critically.
— Podcast: Get with the (gene) program
Synthetic biology has historically relied on bacteria as a testing ground for engineering cell behavior through genetic signals. But a small group of researchers have their sights set on redesigning mammalian cells, which have more complex genetic machinery. Daniel Grushkin meets the scientists aiming to reprogram our bodies’ cells for a new generation of tailor-made treatments.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart in the ’90s version of Star Trek, used to walk up to a cabinet on the USS Enterprise and say, “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” A steaming cup would magically materialize, as Chris Anderson recalls in Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. The cabinet was called the Replicator, and it produced food along with the dishes, napkins, and silverware.
Amyris’s breakthroughs in bioengineering—and its plans to make biofuels from Brazilian sugarcane—promised to transform how the world’s businesses produce energy, cosmetics, and medicine. Then reality (and Wall Street) got in the way.
The climb up the steel steps is dizzying—like ascending the tower of a European church, except the steps lead to a platform bolted to the side of a gleaming new chemical plant. Here in Brazil, under a brilliant blue sky, Eduardo Loosli, the plant manager, pauses to explain a vision of the future. “I used to manage a Molson Coors beer manufacturing plant, and it’s not all that different,” he says, leaning on a railing and surveying the scene around us. Directly below is a cityscape of huge stainless-steel tanks. Out beyond the tanks, and stretching far into the distance, are dense greenfields of sugarcane.
Pinning down exactly what Ridley Scott’s larger-than-lifePrometheusmeans may be impossible. But it’s safe to say that the movie – the 3-D quasi-prequel to Scott’s seminal technoscience-horror fable, Alien – is self-consciously a myth for our scientific era.
In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’état in Guatemala that was more ruse than revolution. Agents transmitted fake newscasts of a right-wing uprising, dropped smoke bombs on Guatemala City, and sent a 39-year-old ex-colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas to invade the country with a band of 400 mercenaries. That the operation succeeded in ousting Guatemala’s democratically elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz, was a surprise. That the CIA itself had been manipulated was a catastrophe.
in 1994 Howarth Bouis stood before potential donors at a conference in Maryland and unveiled his plan for combating malnutrition in the developing world. Bouis, an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), envisioned impoverished farmers in Africa and South Asia growing staple crops that are enriched in key nutrients like iron, zinc, and vitamin A. His presentation had the audience hooked—until he said he would accomplish the feat via old-fashioned plant breeding techniques.
The greatest invention of the Information Age began with a betrayal. Around Christmas 1947, physicist William Shockley holed himself up in a Chicago hotel room. He feverishly filled pages he would later glue into his official notebook at Bell Laboratories, then the most important innovation hub in the U.S. The pages contained the design for something called a junction transistor—a grain-sized sandwich of silicon and germanium that would miniaturize the circuitry in telephone systems, radios, and televisions, and ultimately pave the way for computers. Shockley secretly planned to upstage his teammates at the lab, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, who had already invented a more primitive transistor but had shown it only to a small group of directors. At a Bell conference a month later, Shockley leapt out of his seat and announced his invention. Bardeen and Brattain sat in the audience, dumbfounded.
As Europe increasingly becomes a genetically modified (GM)-free zone, countries in Asia and South America are embracing the technol- ogy. Even African states are beginning to come around. Only five days before last year’s vote in the European Parliament to give individual member countries the right to ban GM crops on the grounds of environmental and health concerns, Kenya became the fourth African country to approve the import and produc- tion of GM crops.
Last year, when the United States military debuted footage of an iridescent drone the size and shape of a hummingbird buzzing around a parking lot, the media throated a collective hooah!Time magazine even devoted a cover to it. Meanwhile, with no fanfare at all—despite the enormous potential to reshape modern warfare—the military issued a request for scientists to find ways to design microbes that could produce explosives for weapons. Imagine a vat of genetically engineered yeast that produces chemicals for bombs and missiles instead of beer.
The helicopter took off, the wooden city of Ketchikan slowly receded, and the mountainous rain forest approached. It was an unseasonably warm day in February 2007. Through circles of moisture on the windows the passengers watched the choppy gray ocean off the southern Alaska coast roll by underneath. In the back seat, Jim McKenzie, a 45-year-old Canadian entrepreneur with a swoop of salt-and-pepper hair, tried to relax as he stared out the window with the eyes of an excited 12-year-old. On the green edge of the horizon was the mountain he’d bought the mineral rights to, sight unseen.
