Engineering biology vs engineering drones

After I set my LinkedIn tagline to “making biology easier to engineer”, I received some questions: How can you be sure that what you work on will lead to new medicines, useful enzymes that replace polluting chemical processes, or new healthier crops that require fewer pesticides? How can you be sure they won’t be misused to cause harm: new pandemic pathogens, unhealthy foods, or reduced genetic privacy (when I was building a covid testing lab)? These concerns mostly came from non-scientist acquaintances, but are very fair - I would have the same questions for someone who works in an area that I’ve seen worrisome news stories about. Drones, for example.

I think the real answer is to assess on a case-by-case basis, job-by-job. What makes this pretty easy is that on the whole, almost every scientist I know got started in the field because they want to improve human and planetary well-being. In particular, few people take science jobs in industry for ‘personal glory’, and seem even more caring about their impact than you might hear from the scientists in the public sphere. My experience with every company I’ve worked for has been that the individuals there want to build transformative technology that can create more health and abundance in the world.

Biotech vs drones

This makes me wonder, why I am so confident that in biotech the people are working toward the greater good, vs in another industry, like drone technology, I’m less confident. I think the answer comes down to two things: incentives, and the predictability of unintended consequences. I think the biotech industry is set up to be more successful on both fronts.

Incentives

While ChatGPT cannot tell me the exact sizes of the markets for drones, for offensive, defensive, and civilian use, it will admit that the market for offensive use is “significant”. By contrast, the market for offensive biotechnology is “not openly acknowledged or quantified”. That type of use would be classified as bioterrorism or biological warfare, which is mostly avoided through international agreements, and frankly cultural stigma. The incentives are strongly against this type of work, and a company would likely lose their most talented scientists if they decided to dabble in this realm.

Unintended consequences

I imagine that the early drone builders just wanted to make cool flying robots. Maybe they didn’t put much thought into their use as offensive weapons, but I also think at the time that probably just seemed like a crazy idea - drones were expensive, why would you blow one up? Nobody was using remote-controlled cars that way. Vs in biology, it’s easier to see earlier in development that a technology could be used another way. An enzyme that breaks down a toxin can probably also make that toxin. You either store personally identifying genetic data, or if you want to avoid privacy issues, you don’t. At Ginkgo, we had many many conversations about dual-use technology (dual use for civilian/military, or for defensive/offensive weapons). A “caring committee” assessed every new program, particularly related to our work for governments. In one memorable meeting Tom Knight spoke up to say (I’m paraphrasing): although the internet has been used to harm people, he has absolutely no regrets about helping to build the internet. I think everyone would agree, and would thank him deeply, because obviously humans have benefited enormously from the information, and the education and economic opportunities that the internet provides. The benefits far outweigh the harms. This is the fundamental answer for me on biotech as well: I acknowledge that some of the technologies we build to engineer biology will be used to build bioweapons. But I believe the benefits we will see in human health, agriculture, materials, climate - will make us all look back happily with no regrets.